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Commonwealth Essays and Studies

31.1 | 2008ResurgenceChristine Lorre (dir.)

Electronic versionURL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/8977DOI: 10.4000/ces.8977ISSN: 2534-6695

PublisherSEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth)

Printed versionDate of publication: 1 September 2008ISSN: 2270-0633

Electronic referenceChristine Lorre (dir.), Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 31.1 | 2008, “Resurgence” [Online], Onlinesince 30 December 2021, connection on 12 April 2022. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/8977; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.8977

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INTRODUCTION TO THE PUBLICATION

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31.1 (“Resurgence”) adopted the topic of the 48th SAEScongress in Orléans in May 2008 where Jane Urquhart was guest of honour. A workshopwas devoted to her writing, as reflected in the section on cultural resurgence and therole of symbolic objects in this process in Canadian literature. The issue also exploresthe resurgence of history and the metamorphoses it leads to, and the impact of theresurgence of the past on artistic creation.

Commonwealth

essays and Studies

Vol. 31, n°1, autumn 2008

Resurgence

Marta DVORAK, Foreword ............................................................................. 3Christine LORRE, Introduction ...................................................................... 4

SIGNS OF RESURGENCE

Catherine LANONE and Claire OMHOVÈRE, Mourning / Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic Aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (1986) ........................................................... 8Marta DVORAK, Resurgences of the Extra-Textual and Metatextual in Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers ........................................................................... 22Corinne BIGOT, “And now another story resurfaced”: Re-Emerging Voices, Stories and Secrets in Alice Munro’s “Family Furnishings” .............................. 28

HISTORY, RESURGENCE, METAMORPHOSIS

Kerry-Jane WALLART, Einstein, Evelyn Waugh and the Wapisiana Indians: Ventriloquism and Eclipses in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale .......... 36Richard SAMIN, Nongqawuse Resurrected: Legend and History in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness ................................................................ 48Fiona McCANN, “The past a repast”: Past and Present in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera .............................. 59

RESURGENCE IN ARTISTIC CREATION

Sandra SAAYMAN, The Resurgence of Prison Imagery in Breyten Breytenbach’s A Veil of Footsteps ..................................................... 69Mélanie JOSEPH-VILAIN, The Hangman’s Game: Karen King-Aribisala’s “Diary of Creation” ........................................................................................ 80Patricia DONATIEN-YSSA, Resurgence and Creative Resistance in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night .................................................................... 93Kathleen GYSSELS, Scarlet Ibises and the Poetics of Relation: Perse, Walcott and Glissant .................................................................................... 103

REVIEWS

Andrew MONNICKENDAM, Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. Ed. by Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann. ............... 117Daria TUNCA, Translating and Publishing African Language(s) and Literature(s): Examples from Nigeria, Ghana and Germany. By Tomi Adeaga. 119Theo D’HAEN, Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Ed. by Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen. ..................... 121Timothy WEISS, Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies. Ed. by Igor Maver ........................................................................................ 123

Contributors ................................................................................................ 125

Foreword

In the spring of 2008, the international community lost two great Caribbean writers and intellectuals, Aimé Césaire and E.A. Markham, who both marked their century and have left us with a deep sense of bereavement. In turn, in July 2008, one of the leading European academics who pioneered in engaging with and promoting postcolonial literatures passed away. Hena Maes-Jelinek, a scholar specialized in Caribbean writing, whose book on Wilson Harris we reviewed in our previous issue, will always be remembered with gratitude as one of the founding members of the international Association for Commonwealth Languages and Literatures and its European branch, as well as co-founder and co-editor of the Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English series.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31.1 is a theme issue based on the SAES Congress in Orléans, France, and we gratefully acknowledge the support of the SAES, whose funding has contributed to bringing this issue to press.

Marta DVORAK

Introduction

He was keen to note the survivals that are the key to so much that has now disappeared but that once existed.

Jane Urquhart, A Map of Glass, 93.

Je te suis, imprimée en mon ancestrale cornée blanche ; monte lécheur de cielet le grand trou noir où je voulais me noyer l’autre lunec’est là que je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfique de la nuit en son immobile verrition !1

Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 65.

The epigraph taken from Jane Urquhart’s novel epitomizes what her fiction is about. Since the past keeps resurging in her protagonists’ lives, they end up paying careful attention to traces of lives once lived,

to remnants of a vivid history that is reimagined in her stories. Urquhart was guest of honour at the 48th SAES congress in Orléans in May 2008, the theme for which was “resurgence,” and a panel was devoted to her work in the “New Literatures” workshop. In a congenial exchange with the audience, she mentioned how her writing is often triggered by actual objects from the past—for example The Whirlpool stems from a brooch that had been passed down along with stories about her husband’s family. Similarly inspiring was the cluttered kitchen table that Urquhart remembers from her days as a young writer, mother, and homemaker; she would find that “every single object on the table was pregnant with meaning.” She also evoked how, earlier in life, as a young reader in Canada, she experienced the feeling of being “starved for books that reflected our own lives.” Moving from the object to the book in her novels, Urquhart has brought into light untold stories from the Canadian past—in the present.

Aimé Césaire’s poetry is full of allusions to stagnant, dirty, lifeless water, suggesting how the water of life has been drained from the lives of so many colonized Caribbeans. But as the second epigraph above taken from the ending of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal shows, Césaire’s poetry is also a call to look up rather than down, to draw on the history of colonization to find the strength to struggle against the oppressor, to revitalize all that stagnant water and turn it into the source of a fresh language of one’s own. Césaire’s long life, which ended on 17 April 2008, not long before the congress which this issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies results from, roughly spans the twentieth century and its upheavals,

1. “I follow you, imprinted on my ancestral cornea / rise sky-licker / and the great black hole where I wanted to drown a moon ago / This is where I now want to fish the night’s malevolent tongue in its immobile revolution.” (Césaire, Notebook 135)

Introduction 5

from colonization to decolonization and the postcolonial era. Césaire saw it all, and in his 1955 Discours sur le colonialisme he bears witness to his times, well beyond the limited horizon of the French colony he was born in. His death has made us look back and ponder.

Urquhart and Césaire stand at the two ends of the spectrum of the (post)colonial experience: from settler colonies like Canada, where the culture of the colony was more or less eagerly embraced, to occupied colonies, via plantation colonies, where the relationships between colonizer and colonized were oppressive and violent. These two writers also belong to different generations, genders, languages, and histories. However, the diversity and range of experiences they embody is also part of the experience of postcolonialism, and a sign that postcolonial issues resurge in the present in ways in which differences often collide, creating new patterns. Curiously, the recent presidential election in the United States, that other former British colony, also epitomizes the process of resurgence as it is approached here. It caused the resurfacing of old wounds inherited from the communal past, it involves redefining the country’s links to the rest of the world (which instantly turned the new president into an icon), and it looks ahead at another, better future.

The essays contained in this issue deal with the process of resurgence in that part of the English-speaking world known as the Commonwealth, and the various consequences this process entails. The first section of the issue focuses on cultural resurgence and the role of symbolic objects in that process in Canada, with articles on the fiction of Jane Urquhart and Alice Munro. The second section addresses the recurrent motif of the resurgence of history and the metamorphoses this leads to; it examines the work of writers from Guyana and Africa (South Africa and Zimbabwe), and raises the questions of the cultural survival of native Indians, and the heritage of violence in Africa. Finally, the third section gathers articles that look at works in which the resurgence of the past has an influence on artistic creation, for writers hailing from South Africa, Nigeria (born in Guyana), Trinidad (of Indian ancestry) and the Caribbean at large. Through these articles taken together, the trope of water recurs, in its association with the surfacing of the subconscious. Literary and cultural resurgence is also at work, in particular through intertextuality (including oral traditions), but also through emblematic objects. Finally, the metamorphoses prompted by resurgence lead to creativity and the emergence of new forms that subsume struggle and catharsis.

* * *

In the first section, the authors of the first essay propose a reading of Jane Urquhart’s novel as a confirmation of Canadian literature’s coming-of-age. Objects play a key role in the process of cultural resurgence in Urquhart’s fiction in general. In The Whirlpool, objects, language and books pertaining to an imported culture resurface in Niagara Falls, while bodies float back to the surface

Commonwealth 31.16

of the whirlpool that epitomizes the turmoil of emigration. Urquhart’s tone mixes both fondness and irony towards Browning and Victorian culture in general, in a way that acknowledges that cultural inheritance as part of Canada’s culture, but also implies that the colonial nostalgia of old for things British has receded. This is what Catherine Lanone and Claire Omhovère argue in “Mourning / Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic Aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (1986).” Urquhart’s novel thus echoes Margaret Atwood’s vision in her poem “The Immigrants”: “as they step on shore / the old countries recede” (Atwood 66). Marta Dvorak, in “Resurgences of the Extra-textual and Metatextual in Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers,” relies on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of postmodernism to examine a double process which is at work in The Stone Carvers: that of objects mentioned which are sites of resurgence in the narrative, and that of Urquhart putting back the Book in the World, through her use and foregrounding of language. In “Family Furnishings,” by Alice Munro, the furniture of the title is the overbearing object that triggers a shift in the narrative, signalling through a powerful silent revelation the resurgence of a past that was repressed in the stories people tell. This double process of secret and resurgence is what Corinne Bigot examines closely in “‘And now another story surfaced’: Re-emerging Voices, Stories and Secrets in Alice Munro’s ‘Family Furnishings’.”

In the second section, the resurgence of history in the present leads to adaptations and metamorphoses that may variously serve to alleviate pain or to cast light on still complex contemporary situations. The title of Kerry-Jane Wallart’s article, “Einstein, Evelyn Waugh and the Wapisiana Indians: Ventriloquism and Eclipses in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale,” hints at the collision between European views and Indian beliefs that took place under colonialism, when science and mythology collided. It resulted in the repression of Indian culture, without it being entirely defeated by European rationalism. Yet the resurgence of repressed Guyanese Indian voices, myths and languages, in the forms of scraps and fragments, is perhaps to be read as a sign of loss rather than retrieval and revival. In The Heart of Redness, the South African writer Zakes Mda “resurrects” past quarrels in order to point at new ways of addressing contemporary issues, writes Richard Samin in “Nongqawuse Resurrected: Legend and History in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness.” The resurgence of the past is a way not to forget what happened in colonial times, but the past is also maintained at a distance: ancestral values and historical events, such as the Cattle Killing ordered by prophetess Nongqawuse, are transformed to suit modern times. In her last two novels, the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera addressed the motif of the resurgence of repressed memory, both individual and collective, in terms of the pain caused by this process. This is what Fiona McCann analyzes in “‘The past a repast’: Past and Present in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera.” The complexity of Zimbabwe’s difficult past is represented in the layers of memory in the characters’ minds, and the weight of the past is a source of disillusionment, confusion and violence in the present.

Introduction 7

The third section underscores how certain writers foreground the impact of the resurgence of the past through their artistic creativity. This is the case with the South African writer and visual artist Breyten Breytenbach in his latest novel, which Sandra Saayman offers an intimate reading of in “The Resurgence of Prison Imagery in Breyten Breytenbach’s A Veil of Footsteps.” Alternately taking a broad view of the narrative and focusing on specific episodes such as “The Catastrophe,” Saayman shows how various evocations of prison life and interrogation create a disturbing impression of open or underlying violence on the reader. Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, in “The Hangman’s Game: Karen King-Aribisala’s ‘Diary of Creation’,” analyzes the subversive effect of various forms of resurgence, ranging from remembered fairy tales and nursery rhymes to a rewriting of the slave narrative. They challenge conventional forms of narrative, creating a complex web of interconnections between past and present, between life and art, and giving rise to a new form which Linda Hutcheon called historiographic metafiction. In “Resurgence and Creative Resistance in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Patricia Donatien-Yssa studies how Mootoo shifts from graphic depiction of violence to forms of self-recreation in order to deal with the wounds and traumas of history, be it personal or collective. In “Scarlet Ibises and the Poetics of Relation: Perse, Walcott and Glissant,” Kathleen Gyssels examines how certain tropes, inherited mainly from Saint-John Perse, reappear in Derek Walcott’s and Edouard Glissant’s poetry and writing: birds, as in Aimé Césaire’s poetry, become a symbol for resistance and survival, as expressed in images of flying or diving. Gyssels reads this shared creativity, which is often downplayed by poetic and personal rivalry, as a sign of what Glissant called the “Poetics of Relation” in the Caribbean. From Urquhart to Césaire and his Caribbean fellow-poets, these proceedings thus reflect our interpretation of processes of resurgence through the diversity of the postcolonial situation.

Christine LORREUniversité Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle

Guest editor

Works cited

Atwood, Margaret. “The Immigrants,” The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), in Eating Fire. Selected Poetry 1965-1995, London: Virago, 1998: 66-67.

Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris: Présence africaine, 1955.—. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Paris: Présence africaine, 1983, 1st ed. 1939. Notebook

of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard, Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1995.

Urquhart, Jane. A Map of Glass, 2005, London: Bloomsbury, 2006.

mourning/mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s

The Whirlpool (1986)

This paper deals with the way in which Jane Urquhart negotiates cultural heritage in The Whirlpool, testing diffident forms of generic affiliation inherited from the British tradition, most prominently the Gothic novel and Romantic poetry. Urquhart’s mourning of a British aesthetics must be distinguished from its repudiation, or deconstruction, in other writings of the same period. In The Whirlpool, the resurgence of romantic motifs leads to burlesque reconfigurations which question the stability of the relation between language and context. By choosing Robert Browning as a literary reference, and opting for the whirlpool, rather than Niagara Falls, as the location of her novel, Urquhart articulates both a post-Romantic and a post-colonial ethos. While the eponymous whirlpool becomes a metaphor of intertextuality, certain objects become metonymies of hegemonic domination, whether Imperial or gendered. The vortex may be considered as a metatextual emblem of postcolonial literature, not flowing straight ahead but breaking with conformity and continuity, circling round with its “floaters,” the floating signifiers of cultural inheritance, and seeking a way out, its own direction, sideways.

In a special issue of Cercles devoted to the remanence of Romanticism in contemporary poetry, Joanny Moulin elaborates on the distinction between “high” Romanticism and the “downstream, post-romantic rumination”

best exemplified in the later works of Tennyson and Browning (Moulin 3). The affinity of Romanticism with water imagery is indeed so persuasive that figurative language frequently seeps into critical accounts, introducing some of its fluidity into the categories of literary history. Given the prominence of water in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool,1 a work in which the Niagara River serves less as setting than as primum mobile, the notion of resurgence offers another suggestive analogy to apprehend the complex intertextual dynamics, the intermittent yet persistent process, through which the novel taps into the fund of British Romanticism. In a postcolonial context, however, issues of literary transmission are often fraught with more than an anxiety of influence. Since Edward Said’s pioneering work in the late seventies, links between Romanticism, the constitution of orientalism, and the cultural sway of British imperialism have been thoroughly analysed. So,

1. All references to The Whirlpool will appear directly in the text preceded by the abbreviation W.

Mourning / Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic Aesthetics 9

when Jane Urquhart has a group of characters realize that they are “never going to find Wordsworth’s daffodils [t]here” while gazing at a wall of “unvaried spruce, up to their hips in snow” (W 69), one has little trouble recognizing in the anecdote a rather customary dig at a legacy which, for many postcolonial writers, has thwarted the emergence of a Canadian sense of place.2 In this respect, Marlene Goldman’s article “Translating the Sublime” is typical of the initial response met by a novel primarily viewed as a reflection on the experience of postcolonial dislocation and the challenge of translating an imported aesthetics into local terms.

But Urquhart, who began her career as a poet, introduces a subtle shift as she negotiates cultural heritage; she only deals with the sublime, as it were, at one remove. In fact, not only does she refuse to actually depict the arch-famous Niagara Falls—or the spectacular but broken suspension bridge—she chooses not to summon the authority of the flamboyant Romantic rebels, though her characters do quote Wordsworth and Shelley. Instead, the novel’s main narrative is contained within the narrow compass of a prelude and an epilogue devoted to the last days of Robert Browning—thus the novel opens in December 1889 in Venice, loops back in time to June 1889 in Canada, returns to December and death in Venice, turning the frame into a fluid circle which holds the novel in its magnetic pull. The author’s choice of Browning—a Victorian late-comer, little more than a follower by T. S. Eliot’s standards—is an intriguing one.

The individual storylines combined in the novel’s main section rarely stray from the third person. Except in the excerpts from Fleda’s diary, the narrative does not lapse into the first person, and neither does it tend towards anything comparable with Browning’s dramatic monologues. With each short chapter involving a change in focalization, The Whirlpool relies on a kaleidoscopic vision for its effect much more than on a plurality of voices. The novel’s spatial unity is dislocated into several perspectives envisioning Niagara Falls as borderland, destination, home and, finally and most problematically, as landscape. The juxtaposition of diverging, sometimes incompatible, points of view is a well-known characteristic of the historiographical fiction of the 1980s, when Canadian postmodernists engaged in a rewriting of master-narratives that led to a twofold reassessment of the past and its relevance to the present. In The Whirlpool, however, Jane Urquhart’s reworking of the romantic intertext is rather more ambivalent than the counter-discursive attacks of her postmodern contemporaries.

The prelude’s description of the squalid, putrid city where Browning wanders aimlessly, voices from his past intruding into his unravelling mind, is a case in point, suggesting the dialogic but problematic force of literary influences. It

2. W. H. New notes that “the Caribbean antipathy to ‘Daffodils’ is practically endemic,” and goes on to cite an impressive list of works going back to V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1960 [New 88]). Similar colonial resentment can be found in Canadian letters, from Isabella Valency Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie (Bentley 178) to the long list of absences informing Robert Kroetsch’s “Seed Catalogue.”

Commonwealth 31.110

is only in the epilogue, with visions of Shelley’s drowned body resurging into his consciousness, that the dying Browning finally grasps the impact of his predecessor’s art over his own writing:

And now Browning understood. It was Shelley’s absence he had carried with him all these years until it had passed beyond his understanding. Soft star. Shelley’s emotions so absent from the old poet’s life, his work, leaving him unanswered, speaking through the mouths of others, until he had to turn away from Shelley altogether in anger and disgust. The drowned spirit had outdistanced him wherever he sought it. Lone and sunny idleness of heaven. The anger, the disgust, the evaporation. Suntreader, soft star. The formless form he never possessed and was never possessed by. (W 236; italics in the text)

Urquhart’s recreation of the scene displaces Harold Bloom’s agonistic model of literary influence into an anxiety of dereliction—not a reactive defence against predecessors but a creative response to abandonment, a searching for direction. In this respect, it is significant that the legal acceptation dereliction should refer to “an accretion of dry land gained by the gradual receding of the sea or a by a river changing its course.” The term may therefore be applied to the geological history of the Niagara River and the subsequent formation of the whirlpool. As David McDougal, the novel’s historian, informs his rapt audience:

“There used to be another river here, you see [...] then the ice age came along and filled it up with rocks and soil.”“So there used to be a fork in the river here, then, am I right? And now some of the water still wants to go that route. But, of course, it can’t because there is nowhere to go so it turns back on itself.” (W 103)

The coincidence between the novel’s topography and the ornate literary frame in which it is set is so boldly artificial that it calls for critical attention. Carefully tracing the influence of Browning’s poetry on Urquhart’s novel would, of course, be perfectly valid for scholars interested in the remanence of nineteenth-century poetry. In this case, the emphasis would be placed on the rhetoric of creation, and interpretation would be author-oriented. But for those concerned with the resurgence of a Romantic aesthetics, the investigation veers towards a poetics of reception reorienting interpretation towards the reader. That is the reason why this paper will not address the figure of Browning in The Whirlpool in terms of stylistic emulation, but rather analyze its inscription as a way of articulating both a post-romantic and a post-colonial ethos.

Outside: A Contextual Frame

The eponymous whirlpool thus becomes a metaphor for intertextuality. For Browning specialist Bernard Brugière, Urquhart’s recreation of Browning’s end is


entirely convincing, full of accurate, moving echoes3—but also, we might add, tongue-in-cheek echoes. For Browning’s last days in Venice are indeed portrayed in decidedly bathetic terms: “How had it all happened? He had placed himself in the centre of some of the world’s most exotic scenery and had then lived his life with the regularity of a copy clerk.” (W 10-11) The same mildly ironic tone is sustained throughout the opening. Browning wearing a down-to-earth night-cap longs for Shelleyan impulse and sympathy.

A dreary, droning Italian duke in period costume forces the door to the old poet’s memory in a scene which doubly alludes to Browning’s invention of the dramatic monologue and to his four-volume masterpiece, The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), set in seventeenth-century Italy (W 12). The depiction of the city is equally self-conscious in the numerous indications that point to the artificiality of the composition:

Empty Gothic and Renaissance palaces floated on either side of him like soiled pink dreams. Like sunsets with dirty faces, he mused, and then, pleased with the phrase, he reached into his jacket for his notebook, ink pot and pen. [...] Every change in the atmosphere seemed an emotional response to something that had gone before. The light, too, harsh and metallic, not at all like the golden Venice of summer. There was something broken about all of it, torn. The sky, for instance, was like a damaged canvas. Pleased again by his own metaphorical thoughts, Browning considered reaching for the notebook. But the cold forced him to reject the idea before it had fully formed in his mind. (W 8, emphasis added)

Even more than the contrived contrasts between “soiled” and “pink,” “sunset” and “dirty,” the recurring painterly similes make the structural function of the prelude rather explicit. Venice is seen as a mouldy monument to a heritage which, in Browning’s own fin de siècle, already referred to a past splendour preserved for the enjoyment of rich and idle tourists.4 The realistic view is troubled by its ironic diffraction into a set of imperfect copies. It is not so much a city that is on display as an aesthetics which should create spontaneous delight but merely prompts postures of mimicry. Such an elaborately-wrought frame signals to the readers that they are being ushered into a field of representation informed by tensions between what is seen and ways of seeing it.

The prelude thus signals Urquhart’s awareness of, and shift from, not simply Romantic but Victorian obsessive motifs. From Ophelia to mermaids, nineteenth-century British literature and painting were haunted by hybrid figures of dangerous femininity, associating women with water in lethal fluidity. Urquhart chooses to provocatively replace the stereotype of the drowned female body, an icon of self-destructive fallen femininity, with a male drowned body,

3. We are grateful for the insights about Browning’s work Bernard Brugière kindly gave us (private letter, 29 January 2008).

4. Or course, both Urquhart and her readers necessarily read Browning’s Venice through the additional filter of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1913).

Commonwealth 31.112

first Shelley’s body which swims round the whirlpool of Browning’s memory, in the eerily flooded, Titanic-like palaces of Venice—“He wavered for a few minutes near its crenellated peak before moving in a slow spiral along its edges to its base.” (W 237)—then the beautiful but useless body of Patrick, the would-be Shelleyan poet and Canadian artist: “The young man was beautiful [...]. The drowning had hardly affected him.” (W 232)

Patrick is a poet and authentic copy clerk from Ottawa, who came to his uncle’s farm in Niagara County to recover from pneumonia. The reader is not told whether Patrick caught his chest infection looking for daffodils in snow banks. But the poet’s obsession with landscape and his efforts to adjust the diction of the British Romantics to the geography of the Gatineau Hills recall similar endeavours in the production of the Confederation poets, for instance Charles G. D. Roberts or Archibald Lampman.5 Although none of Patrick’s poems is cited verbatim, we know from Major David McDougal that they feature a liberal quantity of pine trees, a staple of Confederation poetry (W 119). The Major admires Patrick’s verse for its national sentiment, an allegiance he wishes he could stimulate in his wife, Fleda. But the young woman is still very much attached to the old country’s tradition: “No English poet,” she protests, “would spend a lot of time worrying about pine trees.” (W 119) She does, however, during the pensive hours she spends at the desk her husband constructed on the acre where the couple’s new house will soon be erected, on the plateau overlooking the whirlpool: “It is wonderful to sit there and read Browning … feeling as close to him as if he were a friend about to drop in for tea,” Fleda muses (W 35). The young woman’s response to the local vegetation similarly jumbles places and distances in her aspiration to connect the acre with the Mediterranean settings the Romantic poets have taught her to value:

I feel sometimes that my own special group of cedars is trying desperately to become cosmopolitan, to resemble their Italian cousin, the cyprus, and it makes me glad since I believe it to be unlikely that I would ever be fortunate enough to travel to that enchanted land. Perhaps I should speak to the Scotch pines about umbrella pines in hopes they might take the suggestion. The Haunted Poplars, on the other hand, look strange with their new leaves just beginning. They seem much less haunted at this stage and do not produce, yet, the curious sound of a long dead court lady’s skirts moving across a parquet floor. (W 35)

5. “[Patrick] hated the cold, but clung to the concept of landscape and so he stubbornly persisted. With numb fingers he recorded his observations in his notebooks waiting sometimes months until he moulded them into poems. Some of them had been published in one small magazine or another south of the border, and finally in a slim collection he had paid for himself.” (W 69) Mentioning the notebook and the numbing cold creates an explicit convergence between Patrick’s attitude and Browning’s in Venice. A good selection of Confederation poetry is available on the website of the University of Toronto Library: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1191.html.


Fleda’s characterization, her determination to adapt her cultural baggage to her exotic circumstances and the incongruities that cannot fail to result, create a second convergence between frame and main narrative. Like Browning searching for the perfect destination in Asolo and Venice, she is engaged in the process of adapting to a place that will let her in. Adaptation suggests an organic process, a growing and shrinking to fit in, but also a willingness to be affected by one’s surroundings, both of which require more malleability from the dweller than from the tourist whose integrity is rarely permanently challenged.

This may account for the ironic textual mirror effects. Fleda reads Browning’s long poem The Ring and the Book, a title which connotes romance, but which actually tells the tale of the trial of a husband who murdered his wife for money. It is hard to understand why David puts his wife’s exhilarating longing for lines of flight down to too much Browning, and no wonder that he should ascribe to Browning the angel with beating wings, an expression which, as Fleda points out, actually refers to Shelley. But paradoxically, Browning who hardly ever mentions landscape may well become a better textbook than sheer Romanticism. Patrick, for instance, is lost in the Romantic fallacy; his whirlpool remains abstract, an obsession, a “vacuum,” a “neutrality” (W 222). He loves the female figure in his landscape, but hates her voice, her flesh, her actuality: “I don’t want to be this close, Fleda. I want the distance.” (W 181) He is, to borrow the terms used by Browning in his essay on Shelley, a “subjective” poet, all landscape, and not an “objective” poet, putting people in the foreground (Browning 448). The sublime merely means sexual sublimation; denying the woman flesh, Patrick’s relationship to the landscape he wishes to swim and penetrate is ultimately colonial—“Why do you always have to conquer something because it’s there,” wonders Fleda (W 118). Browning’s taste for the grotesque may therefore be more suitable to the reality of landscape, his irony may be a method which has to be transposed, appropriated, but which may well be more rewarding, in the end, than sublime subjectivity.

Inside: Intertext as a Haunting

Urquhart’s text draws the reader’s attention to echoes, especially in the dialogue between Patrick and Maud’s autistic son, where they laugh and play and dwindle dialogue to gerunds, a sing-song of “talking,” “walking,” “stalking,” “gawking,” “shocking,” “blocking,” “knocking” (W 187-188), not quite a Deleuzian stutter, the becoming other of language, but a way of articulating the inarticulate, the resurgence of the flotsam and jetsam of lives and language, of experience and cultural inheritance, not as a significant whole, but as a whirlpool of sound. One might add to the list the implicit shift from “drowning” to “Browning”—a significant case of paronomasia, which corresponds to the partial breakthrough of characters like Fleda and Maud, as opposed to Patrick’s suicidal quest.

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Like Urquhart’s Browning or Fleda, the character of Maud raises the question of intertext as a haunting. The return of echoes might lead the reader to expect spectral, or even Gothic resurgence, but just as she strays from Romantic intertextuality, Urquhart carefully and humorously distances herself from the Gothic. Maud’s husband Charles is a Victorian entomologist with a vengeance, collecting spiders but also letting them roam freely in his own house, so that the upper story is a cave of webs (no wonder that Dickens’s Great Expectations should stand on a shelf ). The text is less spectral than gendered: Maud is a latter-day Lady-of-Shalott, trapped in a spider’s web.6 But when she dares kill a daddy-long-legs, she becomes pregnant, as if like a certain kind of female spiders she had managed to overcome her mate’s domination.

Charles’ death by disease forces Maud to become a female undertaker, to take the business of death into her own hands. Neither a visitor nor a newcomer, Maud Grady thus deals with permanence in ways that conjoin the literal with the figurative. She spends her two years of mourning attending to her customers’ sorrows, taking orders for funerals, dressing the deceased before the wake and the burial. In addition, the town has entrusted the young widow with the care of the bodies that find their way across the Niagara rapids into the whirlpool after an accidental drowning or, more often than not, a suicide. Maud’s ledger is the ultimate destination of the anonymous “floaters” whose physical description and material possessions the book ultimately records in entries that read like poems. The lists balance words and line-breaks in accounts that capture the stark appeal of the found object and the still life to which they are metonymically, though enigmatically, related (W 95).7

Thus Maud’s life is ambivalent. Her husband’s death empowers her, but she is also trapped in a whirlpool of passivity, chronicling and collecting the relics of the dead. She is caught in her widow’s garb, the stiff armour which almost precludes walking and seeing (“It encased the female body, instead, in a suit of crumpled armour, tarnished to a dull black.” W 21-22). The repetition of the adjective “black”—black parasol, underwear, stockings ribbons, bonnet, veil, stationary—hammers home the sense of constriction. Rain makes the colour black bleed onto the skin, writing the female body with almost indelible ink, turning skin into a parchment dedicated to mourning: throughout the novel Maud scrapes her skin but cannot prevent the resurgence of blackish or greyish stains, merely “turning

6. Maud weaves the chronicle of death; she writes in her notebook and sorts out relics, much like the unknown woman who sewed the quilt depicting death and tombs, a quilt which Fleda sees in the museum (W 173). Her burial of angelic children, like dolls, also recalls the Victorian fascination for photographs of dead children (see for instance Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1872 photograph, Deathbed Study).

7. Maud’s character is clearly related to Tony Urquhart’s grandmother who inspired the section entitled “The Understaker’s Bride” in Jane Urquhart’s early collection of poems, False Shuffles (1982).


her upper torso from mottled black to spotty grey” (W 28). Maud’s mourning is institutional rather than emotional—manuscripts show how Urquhart worked on the opening lines of the novel to emphasize the commercial and colonial function of a ritual imposed upon women, creating a powerful ternary rhythm through the repetition of the adjective “secret”: “At Halstead in England, during the last half of the nineteenth century, employees at Courtauld Limited wove secret cloth on secret looms in secret factories.” (W 21) Crape is unique, because it is so stiff and so secret, embalming the woman’s body as if she should not be allowed to quite survive her husband. But it is also a tradition which is imposed upon women all over the Commonwealth, ensuring the wealth of British weavers: “[T]he whole empire could have been wrapped; a depressing parcel with a black sheen.” (W 21) The image, a dismal inversion of Christo’s Land Art, turns England into a gigantic spider secretly weaving cloth in order to wrap the female body (and colonial land) in its gloomy net.

The representation of mourning, which stands in part for colonial domination, thus calls for fresh, healthy laughter, for liberation rather than nostalgia. And it is with some deviousness, the elegiac and the ironical blending into a disquieting combination, that the narrator intimates how the bereaved may recover from a fatal separation:

After two or three months of widowhood and strange dreams, Maud decided to have an elaborate brooch made out of a lock of her husband’s hair, his dead hair; an oval frame of gold would surround two desolate hairy willows which would, in turn, flank a hairy tombstone with his initials on it. All of this was to be placed under a bubble of thin glass; a sort of transparent barrier between that tiny hairy world of graves and weeping and the one that Maud walked around in everyday. A barrier, but one that was easy enough to see through nonetheless. (W 23, emphasis added)

The shading of mourning into mocking results from the distance the narrator introduces between the facts and their account. Within the novel’s diegesis, Maud’s brooch indexes the penetration of the Victorian taste for hair jewellery into the far reaches of the Empire. But the realism of the description is undermined by the word “hair” that ceases to be descriptive with its first recurrence, and becomes decidedly grotesque in its adjectival combination with various emotions and objects. In terms of reception, the artefact is likely to arouse mixed feelings. At once hilarious—in its vague semblance to Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego8—and equally repulsive—in its insistently material corporeality—Maud’s spidery brooch leaves the reader rather uncertain as to how to value the loss it symbolizes. Such ironic reverberations entice the reader to look into the metafictional recesses of the literal anecdote. Beyond its referential function as part of a widow’s mourning

8. There are no willows in Poussin’s masterpiece which counts a group of three shepherds. But with its two trees framing an inscribed tombstone, Maud’s brooch mimics the basic composition of the painter’s comment on the transience of all things human.

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garb, the jewel may well point to a mise-en-abyme of the compositional devices through which containment and mastery over the remains of the dead may be achieved.

Aside: Mimicry

Straying from the “ironic compromise” Homi Bhabha calls “mimicry” (Bhabha 86), Urquhart drastically chooses to cut, and warp her material. The replica inside the glass bubble is perhaps the most complete and self-contained landscape to be found in The Whirlpool. Everywhere else, the narrator’s cropping of the visual field draws attention to the limits constraining the characters’ vision. Just like the American factories across the river, the Falls are confined to the periphery of narrative. They are alluded to through incidental comments on the “garish tourist attractions” surrounding their booming fame (W 46; see also 108, 164, 195, 221). As early as the first chapter, their magnitude is drastically scaled down in the depiction of “a very young couple [...] giggling over a photograph of themselves in front of a very bad reproduction of the waterfall” (W 31). The cheap print stands in implicit contrast with the life-size landscape that fascinates the characters. The Niagara whirlpool lies at the bottom of the river gorge just below “Whirlpool Heights,” the property the McDougals purchased on the plateau. Although nothing in the novel’s topography would forbid the frontal prospect, or commanding view one usually associates with picturesque sceneries, very little is done to satisfy the reader’s expectancies. Instead, the narrator insistently points out the presence of circumstances hindering the characters’ visual perception. What with the weepers that hang from her bonnet and are blown across her opaque veil, Maud endures a “partial blindness” during most of her mourning (W 28). As for Fleda, indications abound—a cloud of cigar smoke (W 32), exuberant spring foliage (W 34, 144), or even the “mesh of netting” (W 129) covering her tent’s window—suggesting that, no matter how closely she wishes to approach the landscape, impalpable but persistent barriers keep her away from it.

The effect is reinforced through frequent references to the texts which screen external space even as they mediate its appreciation as landscape. Fleda seeks solace in her compulsive reading during the uneventful days she spends on the acre, waiting for her husband to return from his study. The character’s emotional dependence on books evokes a form of colonial bovarysm manifest upon her first appearance in the novel:

Under her arm, near her heart, she cradled a copy of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning, and Patmore’s Angel in the House. She had brought the books along in order to read them in a suitable setting; a setting that she hoped was about to cause the spiritual marriage of romance and domesticity in her life. (W 30)


Although she strives to escape from her husband’s wish to turn her into both the Angel in the House and a fetishist surrogate of Laura Secord, Fleda’s choice of Whirlpool Heights for her afternoon reading is not a Deleuzian line of flight but is reminiscent of the trick the Claude-glass performed for the art amateurs of the previous century.9 In the present case, the contrivance through which aesthetic emotion is aroused is rather more elaborate because not one but several intertextual frames are imbricated in the distancing that turns indifferent space into a suitable setting (Roger 27). In this respect, Fleda’s book selection points to the cultural mise-en-abyme which causes actual space to recede infinitely through the successive framing that fashions a clump of cedars into a bucolic grove, a romantic bower and a post-Romantic shrine to Nature’s feminine profusion. Cutting her hair in a gesture of defiance which merely feeds Patrick’s fetishism, Fleda’s double exposure to the proper texts and right setting—the romantic élan slowing into post-romantic pose stiffening into colonial conformism10—produces nothing but more of the same conventions. No sooner does Patrick chance upon the pastoral scene than he becomes infatuated with the composition itself. The predictable love affair between the nymph and the bird-watcher peters out when Fleda realizes that both the conventions of romance and the poet’s expectancies force her into a rather uncomfortable space: “She looked out at her acre now from behind the walls of a bubble of glass that had grown around her.” (W 159, emphasis added) It is significant that identical terms should relate Fleda’s confinement in convention to the miniature landscape of loss encapsulated inside Maud’s brooch.11 Although the two women live in the same location, they do not inhabit place in the same way. Nowhere is the contrast sharper than in their relation to the whirlpool.

As David McDougal pointedly remarks about his wife:

“[W]hen I explain [the site’s geology] to my wife she perceives it as a metaphor or some such thing. Talks about interrupted journeys. As if the river were Ulysses or something.” [...] Patrick’s idea of the woman was beginning to solidify. She was a dreamer, living in the open, perceiving whirlpools as metaphors. How easy the landscape seemed to be for her. Awake, she watched and lived inside it. Asleep she dreamed it. Perhaps

9. “A small, portable mirror backed with dark foil, it was named for the French painter who most perfectly harmonized classical architecture, leafy groves, and distant water. If the view in the mirror approximated to this Claudian ideal, it was judged sufficiently ‘picturesque’ to be appreciated or even drawn.” (Schama 12)

10. Urquhart’s views on the evolution of Romanticism towards an increasingly formal, almost rigid aesthetics during the Victorian period is implicit in the novel’s epilogue when Browning slips into unconsciousness dreaming of a siren-like Shelley. Narratorial focus then abruptly shifts and stops on the gondola waiting to take the poet’s remains to San Michele cemetery: “All that cool white marble in exchange for the shifting sands of Lerici.” (W 237)

11. The hair motif also connects them.

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the woman was the landscape. Patrick was attracted to this idea of her. He wanted to become a part of the impression. (W 103)

In McDougal’s positivist view, his wife’s partiality for metaphor is both endearing and slightly silly. But beyond the Major’s condescension, the reference to Ulysses as the figure of displacement par excellence impresses that Fleda, as long as she stays there, cannot see the whirlpool for what it is on account of everything it stands for. The same holds for Patrick who, like Browning in Venice, is falling for an alluring image much more than for the woman it refers to. In either case, the imperfect metaphors—the river qua Ulysses or the woman qua landscape—index a crisis in a poetic language which strives but fails to configure anew the romantic encounter between man and nature.

Nowhere is this more visible than in descriptions of the whirlpool. The geological amphitheatre is primarily a site of representation where avatars of the romantic encounter circulate endlessly:

And even though the June foliage had thickened in earnest, she could see it clearly: the giant whirlpool—a cumbersome, magnificent merry-go-round on which a few large logs were seemingly permanent passengers. The awkward, ceaseless motion of going nowhere, the peace of it seen from above. (W 32, emphasis added)

Echoing the noisy attractions upriver, the metaphor of the “merry-go-round” unfurls into a simile connecting the human with the non-human. Yet the conceit’s festive connotations do not quite balance the disquieting overtones attached to the troping of nature into a machinery, the circular motion of the current being translated into an absurd, endless repetition. Metaphoric displacement introduces further slippage between semantic categories, encouraging the grotesque association of the senseless logs with inert bodies. The evocation unexpectedly becomes real when the river stunts resume their seasonal danse macabre with the rapids (W 48). The depiction of the mangled corpses is another occasion to test the shifting limit between the ghastly and the ludicrous. Far too demure to join in the carnival, Fleda refuses to go and “watch a man who killed animals kill himself inside an animal” (W 119). Yet a subtle mirth tinges the phrasing, the bouncing syntax mimicking through its redundancies the looping trajectory that takes the Mighty Moose, not towards the intensity of some kind of becoming-animal, as he’d hoped, but down the rapids, round the whirlpool and into the undertaker’s “meat wagon” (W 47).

All the novel’s characters, much like Fleda, live “with a whirlpool on [their] mind” (W 31, 174). As a result the fantasmatic Romantic communion with nature goes through a wide spectrum of generic modulations. The aesthetic covenants that regulate the valuation of geographical space as landscape lack firmness; their adequacy is constantly questioned through bathos, or undermined by the grotesque excesses that Niagara has never ceased to inspire in fiction as well as in real life. When Patrick drowns in an attempt to swim the whirlpool, what comes


to the fore is not a Shelleyan fusion with the elements but a repetition of the regressive topos of death by landscape famously identified by Margaret Atwood, stressed by the way the line fishing the body is hooked to his belt buckle, like an umbilical cord (W 226).12 But Urquhart does not follow the Canadian formula to the letter. Her poet’s body does not disappear but ultimately drifts to float along with Fleda’s birch bark reproductions in the same (literary) current:

Little white vessels departing from the shore, set adrift on a long tour of the whirlpool. Like people, just like people. A complete revolution would be a long, long life. Not many are able to go the distance. Those that do I am unsure of. Have they moved around the full circumference or have they doubled back somehow on an unknown current? [...] I have begun to mark my boats in some way, making each one different from the others. And I have begun to give them names, like real ships. “Adonais,” “Dreamhouse,” “Warrior,” “Angel.” [...] Then I launch my small craft from the shore and pick up Browning in order to read while I wait for them to return. (W 60)

Urquhart’s choice of “Adonais” is a clear nod to the elegy Shelley wrote after Keats’s death while the other names evoke other favourites of Fleda’s, from Swinburne to Patmore. The launching therefore encourages the reader to reconsider the cultural ruptures that supposedly occurred with each fresh departure to the New World, the journey taking them along more unpredictable currents, causing more unforeseen forms of resurgence than the staunch supporters of Canadian nationalism where ready to acknowledge, either among the novel’s characters, or in the literary climate that prevailed when The Whirlpool was first published. The old River Man puts Fleda’s occupation in perspective when he thoughtfully considers: “But you never really lost anything in the whirlpool forever. Eventually it came back around again. All it took was time, patience and a new hook,” (W 226) or, one feels tempted to add, a new book.13

The whirlpool may be seen as a metatextual emblem of postcolonial literature, not flowing straight ahead but breaking conformity and continuity, circling around, with its “floaters,” the floating signifiers of cultural inheritance, and seeking a way out, a new direction, its own direction sideways. Browning’s musing, as he heads home at the end of the prelude, expresses postcolonial disorientation and attempt to find its own way: “All the way back across the city he murmured, ‘Where have you been, where have you been, where did you go?’” (W 18) The ending of the novel puts an end to mourning, whether it be the ritual imposed upon women by colonial England or postcolonial cultural nostalgia. No longer enticed by landscape and poetry, Fleda simply walks away, offstage, standing on her own two feet, taking her Browning with her, leaving no

12. See Atwood’s/Survival/ and her “Death by Landscape.”13. Both Away and The Underpainter develop on a wider scale the reflection on the

artialisation of landscape initiated in The Whirlpool.

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note for her husband, ignoring the dead body of Patrick, whom she will never see and never mourn. Just as Maud had dragged her child out of his cave of silence, forcing him to face the sun by pushing his eyelids open, forcing him to speak—or scream—“sawn” (i.e. sun / son), she too is forced to undergo the Platonic process of leaving the realm of shadows and illusion to enter the painful but benevolent light of truth. In the end, the child destroys his mother’s carefully preserved relics, by re-allocating a random place to each of them, according to a configuration he has mysteriously devised. He picks up all the objects of the dead men which she had carefully preserved and labelled, and redistributes them spontaneously. Instead of Kant’s sublime, the infinite accumulation of relics referring both to the magnetic pull of the sublime attempt to transcend death by water and to its degraded correlation, Niagara Falls and the society of spectacle, what Jenny Iles calls “thanatourism,”14 the child points to mathematical infinity (a random accumulation of relics), so that things, whether buttons, watches, collars, teeth, rings or shoelaces, simply dwindle into what they really are, mere objects, nothing more. After being silenced, uttering a few words, parroting and repeating entire conversations (just as Browning in the prelude was haunted by Shelley to the point of total recall), the weird child demystifies rituals of repetition and breaks the logic of mourning, he becomes creative in his own way, turning objects into exhilarating arrangements, still lifes.15 In a way, like postcolonial literature, he may have come of age, found self-expression. When Patrick’s corpse is brought in,16 the child utters his epitaph, “man,” “swim,” but Maud, wearing a bright yellow, sunny dress, pulls him towards her, choosing life, not death. On this side of the Atlantic, far away from Browning’s island of the dead, lies, not a Shelleyan Suntreader, not a boat coffin, but the postcolonial chrysalis.

Catherine LANONE, Université de Toulouse, UTM, CAS Claire OMHOVÈRE, Université de Montpellier

14. Jenny Iles in the context of World War One calls “thanatourism” (Iles 236) a fascination with “the ever-present detritus of death” (Iles 242).

15. The autistic child descends in a way from the Wordsworthian myth of the child as seer, like the Idiot Boy in Lyrical Ballads.

16. Patrick’s mistaken idealism also recalls Conrad’s flawed idealist in Lord Jim, and Stein’s advice to follow the dream usque ad finem and immerse oneself in the destructive element.


Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Fiction, Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

—.“Death by Landscape,” in Wilderness Tips, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991: 109-129.

Bentley, D. M. R. The Gay]Grey Moose. Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry 1690-1990, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture, London / New York: Routledge, 1994.Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading (1975), New York: Oxford University Press,

1980.Browning, Robert. Robert Browning’s Poetry, James F. Loucks, ed., New York: Norton,

1979.Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim (1900), Thomas C. Moser, ed., New York: Norton, 1996.Gallet, René. “Romanticism and Postromanticism: From Wordsworth to Pater,” Cercles

12 (2005): 18-25.Goldman, Marlene. “Translating the Sublime: Jane Urqhuart’s The Whirlpool,” Canadian

Literature 150 (Autumn 1996): 23-42.Iles, Jenny. “Death, Leisure and Landscape: British Tourism to the Western Front,” in

Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose, eds., Deterritorialisations… Revisionning: Landscape and Politics, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2003: 234-243.

Kroetsch, Robert. “Seed Catalogue,” Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989: 32-51.

Moulin, Joanny. “Remanent Romanticism in Modern Poetry,” Cercles 12 (2005): 1-13.New, W. H. Grandchild of Empire. About Irony, Mainly in the Commonwealth, Vancouver,

BC: Ronsdale Press, 2003.Poussin, Nicolas. Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637-1639, oil on canvas, 185 x 121 cm, Musée du

Louvre, Paris.Roger, Alain. Court traité du paysage, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.Said, Edward. Orientalism (1978), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory, London: HaperCollins, 1995.The Collins Dictionary of the English Language, 1986.Urquhart, Jane. False Shuffles, Victoria, BC: Porcépic, 1982. —. The Whirlpool (1986), Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.—. Away, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. —. The Underpainter, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.—. The Stone Carvers (2001), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.Wordsworth, William, and S.T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798), New York:

Routledge, 1991.

Resurgences of the extra-textual and metatextual in Jane Urquhart’s

The Stone Carvers

This paper rests on and extends a previous investigation of a poetics of mutation and metamorphosis at the heart of Jane Urquhart’s oeuvre. Urquhart reconfigures the persona of the migrant, who is not only transformed or “translated,” but also transforms his or her new world by an act which in The Stone Carvers interestingly resurges as a migration in reverse. In this essay, I foreground the novel’s sites of resurgence, in which ancestral knowledges and arcane skills reappear as reconfigured correspondences between interdependent continents and cultures. I argue that the resurgences of the extra-textual world go beyond the referential dynamics of realism, and serve to relocate and reinscribe axiologies and agencies. My argument underscores Urquhart’s double exploration of migration and transmutation, which metatextually overcodes the migration across the world with the process of migration from world to book, and from story to page.

While the topoi of deracination, exile, and memory seem to predominate in Jane Urquhart’s oeuvre, the writer’s focus on the visual arts in the Governor-General’s Award-winning novel The

Underpainter (1997) led me to believe that generating the writer’s poetics is not so much an interest in uprooting, displacement, and cultural transplantation in themselves, as a fascination for mutation and metamorphosis, present in The Underpainter through the artistic practices of obviation and erasure. It is confirmed in The Stone Carvers (2001) and its opening focus on the metamorphic craft of woodcarving, “the miracle of turning wood to flesh” (SC 21), and is strongly present in the subsequent novel A Map of Glass (2005), whose artist protagonist seeks to record mutation in movement, to “mark the moment of metamorphosis when something changed from what it had been in the past (Map 11). This paper focuses on The Stone Carvers, resting on and extending a previous investigation of such a poetics, namely my article in the recently published book Reading(s) from a Distance: European Perspectives on Canadian Women’s Writing, edited by Charlotte Sturgess and Martin Kuester. Inspired by Salman Rushdie’s assertion that migration is one of the richest metaphors of our age (Rushdie 278), my previous essay explored the way Urquhart reconfigures the persona of the migrant, that borne-across human who Rushdie claims is a metaphorical being in his or her very essence (Rushdie 278) [the Greek metaphora / metapherein signifying to bear across], who is not only transformed or “translated” [the Latin translatus signifying carried over], but also transforms his or her new world by the act of dis-placement and re-placement (Rushdie 394). In an interesting twist, with the advent of World War I, the act in The Stone Carvers resurges as a mass migration

Resurgences of the Extra-Textual and Metatextual 23

in reverse. The loop is looped when the sons of the Germans, Irish, and Italians who had uprooted and transplanted themselves in colonial or post-imperial soil travelled back to Europe to fight Britain’s battle, often against their own kind.

It is a second level which this paper sets out to examine. I argue that an additional tier overcodes Urquhart’s reconfiguration—that of the transformation of ideas as writerly process. I shall address the resurgence of the idea in the image, and show how the writer enacts the migration “from the World to the Book,” allowing her readers to travel through the page, “to end up inside and also behind the writing” (Rushdie 276). I shall also demonstrate how she reverses Rushdie’s paradigm and generates the resurgence of the Book in the World.

The novel The Stone Carvers teems with resonant objects which are sites of resurgence, in which ancestral knowledges and arcane skills, and Being itself, reappear. There is the red waistcoat Klara tailors for her lover before he dies in the war, functioning as a concretization of the metaphysical notions of transformation, return, and resurrection. There are the lines, circles, and curves of the names of the dead carved in stone at the Vimy Ridge war monument, both abstraction and concretization of presence and absence, calling to mind Linda Hutcheon’s observation that “postmodernism is the process of making the product; it is absence within presence; it is dispersal that needs centering in order to be dispersal; it is the idiolect that wants to be, but knows it cannot be, the master code; it is immanence denying yet yearning for transcendence.” (Hutcheon 49, original emphases) There is notably the transmutation of sounds called out “at summer dusk from a back porch door” and all that remains of “torn faces, crushed bone, scattered limbs” (SC 275). There is particularly the torch bearer which is “everyone’s lost friend, everyone’s lost child” (SC 337) transformed into stone by carvers exclusively brought over from Italy, where the art of stone-carving has best been handed on, according to Walter Allward, the Canadian sculptor who masterminded the project.

Significantly, Giorgio, a young Italian Canadian trained in woodcarving, but unable to earn his living from an art that a New World economy has marginalized, migrates back to Europe to join the Italian carvers on the Vimy monument work site. Although he belongs to the second generation of Italian Canadians, he speaks fluent Italian, and the workers welcome him “like a lost brother” (SC 282), sheltering and feeding him until he can be hired. He and the protagonist Klara, also skilled in carving, explore on the Vimy site the elaborate maze of tunnels which the army had dug underground. The maze participates in Urquhart’s trademark strategy of synecdoche and recourse to the objective correlative. It is a network which reconfigures the correspondences between interdependent continents, elements, and cultures, calling up Homi Bhabha’s “uncanny structure of cultural difference” (Bhabha 163) which enables us “to coincide with forms of activity which are both at once ours and other”18:

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Work of Marcel Mauss, page 35, quoted in Bhabha page 163.

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Eventually Klara began to view the whole landscape, all the land given to Canada by France, the sky above, and the depths of the chalky earth below as part of an interconnecting system, one aspect of which could not survive without the other. The tunnels were like extended tangled roots reaching up to the monument above, feeding its construction by their very existence. (SC 356)

Here worlds are telescoped in sundry manners. The inscription on a wall of a boy soldier who had “scratched his name and still alive and kicking in the same roughshod manner as he might have decorated the surface of a pioneer desk in a one-room country school” (SC 356). The names of places the soldiers had chiselled into the underground rooms and passageways: Place de la Concorde, Centreton Ball Park, or Convocation Hall. These resurgences of the extra-textual world go beyond the referential dynamics of realism. They are synecdoches of our societal / global interconnecting system, and they are echoed by organic metaphors for migration and cultural cross-pollination, such as the young trees from Canadian forests which have recently been transplanted to the Vimy site. Giorgio hopes they will grow to be healthy “in a land where they were never meant to be,” just as his family had grown and finally become rooted “in a land far from the soil of their birthplace” (SC 372). The plant metaphor is mirrored by the objective correlative of the spindly wisteria taken by his family from the homeland to Canada, which hangs frail and listless, “barely leafing in the spring until one year it burst triumphantly into blossom in early June, its flowers hanging like an overstated offering of pale grapes at an emperor’s feast” (SC 373), the sign of a transformative moment in the process of familial and cultural translation. Concomitantly, when describing how the foundation of the war monument was installed, Urquhart represents hybridization through dysphoric organic metonymy. Through its framework of chaotic enumeration the chaos of the world erupts:

Body parts and clothing, bibles, family snapshots, letters, buttons, bones, and belt buckles were unearthed daily, and under the plot of earth from which the central staircase would one day rise, the fully uniformed skeletal remains of a German general were disinterred. In the seven years since the battle, several poplars had made a valiant attempt to take root on the battlefield, and some were now taller than a man. In almost every case when they were removed to make way for the road, bits of stained cloth and human hair and bones were found entangled in the roots. Once, a mine half a mile away exploded, unearthing a young oak tree and the carcass of a horse, intact, activated, it would seem, by the fractional movement of the underground growth of roots. (SC 271)

A desired amplification intensified by polysyndeton (cloth and hair and bones) is produced by the list, which translates the abstract into concrete terms, disparate, disjunctive items conjoined only by alliterative sound (buttons / bones / belt buckles). The descriptive pause obeys its function. It serves as a privileged locus of the relocations and reinscriptions of axiologies and agencies, either


consolidating or contesting. It notably provides a representation of an organic universe contaminated by human technology, commingling to a point of agency and interchangeability: the healthy tree roots clogged unnaturally by the human remnants of war in turn detonate explosions through the natural process of life and growth.

The images of the Vimy war monument are embodiments of Urquhart’s double exploration of migration and transmutation—the migration across the world, but also the migration from world to book, or even from story to page. The self-reflexive hymns to craft come to rest on a metalinguistic, or rather metaformal, contemplation of writing as formal sign or icon. Giorgio significantly begins “a love affair with the alphabet,” passionately interested in how words “occup[y] the surface of stone, the placement, the depth,” and fascinated by the magical changes affected by light and mathematical centring, primordial for the desired effect of permanence which the letters take on (SC 277). The reader is invited to think of the eleven thousand names carved on a huge stone wall surmounted by a magnificent sculpted monument not as arbitrary signifiers, but in terms of shape and texture. Through inner focalisation, the author suggests that “[e]ven on impermanent, short-lived paper, even in foreign languages you would never understand, words had a presence unlike any other presence. They carried authority in a way no other collection of lines, circles, curves, squares could.” (SC 280) The authority and permanence of shape is none the less overcoded by a metaphysical dimension evoking eternity and infinity: “‘Alpha and omega,’ he would whisper to himself when he was working. ‘Moses and the tablets.’” (SC 280)

As a corollary to her deconstruction of words to icons, shapes on a surface, Urquhart engages the receptor in a reflection on language as empty acoustic image. She does so through the othering effect of peregrinism, a foreignizing literary device consisting in interpolating elements from a foreign language, which deviates here from its common dysphoric function generating distance, so as to present the unfamiliar in a seductive light. After years spent on the road as a hobo begging for scraps, Klara’s brother Tilman returns a second time to France, where he does not speak the language, and where he is subjugated by the musicality of the names of dishes on French menus. He enumerates them sensually for Klara: Gratin de homard au porto, Truffe St-Hubert, Caneton de la belle époque, Flan de langoustines George V, Écrevisses à la crème, Bouillabaisse Marseillaise. She is receptive to “the soft cadences of the French phrases,” signifiers without a signified, whose assonances and consonances she finds “a most soothing lullaby” (SC 317). Still, one cannot fail to remark another resurgence, for the Edenic sensuousness of sounds is intensified by its association with the comforting notion of food, which in turn is consolidated by the widely-held tenet concerning the refinement of French cooking. It is furthermore enhanced by being associated with other pleasurable sensations involving not only smell but also sight and touch: “He would also describe for her the tablecloths, the napkins, the large silver-plate spoons, and the

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elegant china edged in gold leaf, things that in a thousand years, Klara would not have thought could have held his attention.” (SC 317)

Ultimately, the writer’s metalinguistic investigation does not fail to include a reflection on the power of words. She resorts notably to holophrastic textual segments in which a single word expresses a range of ideas and emotions. When the chef at the Hôtel Picardie restaurant invites the non-francophone Tilman to visit the kitchen, in lieu of conversation they bandy proper nouns back and forth, namely the names of battles which evoke for both an affect as well as a cognitive anchoring in experiential event with which they can identify. “‘Shrapnel,’ he said, knocking twice on Tilman’s wooden leg. ‘Verdun,’ he added. The Canadian understood then that this kind man carried in his body fragments of the catastrophe of the battle of Verdun […] then brought his fist down on his artificial leg. ‘Vimy Ridge,’ he said. ‘Vimy.’” (SC 325) Urquhart varies the technique of the syntagm-sentence, in a manner similar but opposite to the practice favoured by the modernists. While Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce strived to erase all signs of a referential situation along with punctuation to return to the “original” expression of unspoken thought, Urquhart on the contrary erases all but the referential sign. When Giorgio wishes to discover the identity of Klara’s lost dead lover, knowing only the village he came from, he consults the Master File which lists the missing alphabetically, next to an adjacent column indicating their home town, which he must peruse first. The reader is confronted with a series of proper nouns devoid of both propositional content and organizing principle:

Grimsby, Maple Creek, Fernie, Clinton, Lévis, Vernonville, Rimouski, Colborne, Truro, Humboldt, Walkerton, Parry Sound, Lilac, Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw. Who were the settlers who had titled these places? Could they have imagined the names they had invented would lie, as the result of an immense slaughter, in an official document on a foreign desk? Vernon, Collingwood, Val d’Or, Nanaimo, Lunenberg, Kingsville, Swift Current, Trois-Rivières, Hull, Winnipeg, Alderville. (SC 368)

Even for receptors unfamiliar with Canadian geography and unaware that the areas touched by the death of sons reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the list of acoustic images meant to call up a referent rather than a signified is nevertheless fraught with significance. Perlocutionary rather than informational, it evokes the sound poems of Bernard Heidsieck, in which chant and repetition of recognizable words, such as the names of towns, serve to privilege pure vocal or “abstract” sound at the expense of significance, yet, through accumulation and echo, simultaneously suggest and expand meaning.

Discussing her writerly strategies in my graduate seminar at the Sorbonne Nouvelle on 5 April 2005, Urquhart declared that a certain landscape, architecture, or object were usually her starting points for a novel, as could be family anecdotes or tales told. The Vimy battlefield and monument provided the catalysis for The Stone Carvers just as the glass ballroom floor buried under a burned-down hotel,


only to surface years later, triggered her subsequent book, A Map of Glass (in press at the time). When questioned, the writer asserted that she never works out a preliminary outline of events, just as “a child never determines a plot,” maintaining that “memory and childhood are the key to the way we create.” She affirmed that it is after the first draft that she “shake[s] the material [she’s] been playing with and get[s] down to work”.29 The glimpses of Urquhart shaking her material, making image and idea interact, inviting us to “travel through the page, to end up inside and also behind the writing” (Rushdie 276) is an indissociable part of the pleasure of the text. When the small Tilman has been harnessed and chained to stop him from running away from home one more time, his little sister Klara frees him and watches him walk away, “his chain trailing behind him like print on the page of the road, like the end, or the beginning of a story” (SC 71). In the same manner as this conceit, we watch Urquhart travel down the metatextual road of her pages. My analysis suggests that underlying the strong metatextual dimension which centripetally draws the focus back from the world to the word, there is a reversal of Rushdie’s paradigm. Urquhart once more loops the loop, generating the resurgence of the Book in the World in an overlapping metaphorical, metaphysical dimension. This neoplatonic strain striving to pierce eikos (appearance or reality) and generate meaning through form seems to participate in that current of postmodernism which Linda Hutcheon has identified as “immanence denying yet yearning for transcendence” (Hutcheon 49).

Marta DVORAK Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture, London / New York: Routledge, 2001.Dvorak, Marta. “Rock-a-bye Baby, or Tribal Similarities Revisited in Jane Urquhart’s

The Stone Carvers,” in Charlotte Sturgess and Martin Kuester, eds., Reading(s) from a Distance: European Perspectives on Canadian Women’s Writing, Augsburg: Vussner-Verlag, 2008: 33-40.

Heidsieck, Bernard. Respirations et brèves rencontres, Paris: Al Dante / Niok, 1999.Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London:

Routledge, 1990.Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91, London: Granta

Books, 1992.Urquhart, Jane. The Stone Carvers, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart / First Emblem

Edition, 2002.—. The Underpainter, London: Bloomsbury, 1997.—. A Map of Glass, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005. —. Talk delivered at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 5 April 2005.

2. Jane Urquhart participated in the panel at which this paper was originally presented (Orléans, May 2008), and to my delight confirmed my observations.

“and now another story surfaced”:1 Re-emerging Voices, Stories and Secrets in alice munro’s “Family

Furnishings”

Like many stories by Munro, “Family Furnishings” (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) testifies to a paradoxical relationship to the past that involves denials, rejection and appropriation. I propose to analyse the role played by two apparently unconnected embedded stories in the resurfacing motif at work in “Family Furnishings.” As both stories resurface, they bring about the return of the past, but while resurgence is made synonymous with birth and creation with the family tale, the resurfacing of the childhood tale will reveal that resurgence also means the return of the repressed. Since these two resurfacing stories will force the narrator to negotiate with the past, and its role in her life as a writer, they play an important part in the metafictional dimension of “Family Furnishings.”

The first half of “Family Furnishings” focuses on the narrator’s childhood on the family farm. The second half begins with a visit which the narrator”–who is now in her twenties– is reluctantly paying her cousin

Alfrida, a few weeks before leaving the town in which they both live. The narrator justifies her reluctance by the personal changes she has undergone. She has new friends who share her taste for literature and music. She is also about to marry, and has decided to become a writer. Thus, she repeatedly emphasizes her desire to let go of the past and break up with family members such as Alfrida. The pivotal event of the visit will be the telling of and the listening to a family story, one that the narrator was forced to listen to as a child, as it was one of her aunts’ favourite stories.

It is the first time the reader is told the story, yet I would like to argue that it surfaces and resurfaces at the same time. The narrator first sums up the story for the reader—Alfrida’s mother died when an oil lamp exploded in her hands. She then comments on her family’s tendency to dwell on it, letting her impatience surface as she remarks: “Nothing could be said about Alfrida’s mother, or Alfrida’s father and very little about Alfrida herself without that death being dragged in and tacked onto it.” (Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 109)2 A remark in brackets in which the narrator explains that the father’s leaving

1. This is a quote I have borrowed from “Open Secrets” (Munro, Open Secrets 142).2. When required for purposes of clarity, subsequent references to this book will be

abridged to Hateship.

“And now another story surfaced” 29

the family farm was considered a downward step morally if not financially, suggests a personal comment and makes it clear that we are reading the narrator’s words and hearing her voice. However, other people’s words and voices will slowly penetrate the narrative. The intrusion is barely perceptible at first but words such as “desperately” and “dreadful,” which express opinions, mark a transition into free indirect speech. The last two sentences of the paragraph show that the narrator is aware that she has incorporated her aunts’ words into her narrative: “And it was a dreadful thing for a child of Alfrida’s age, whatever. (That is—whatever she had done with herself since. )” (Hateship 109) The full stop after “whatever” playfully reproduces the women’s pregnant silence when they used to tell the story. The use of brackets for the subsequent sentence shows that the narrator is both explaining the hidden meaning of “whatever” and trying to regain control of her narrative.

The next segment, however, demonstrates her failure to do so. Something sudden, even brutal, happens as the flow of narrative is interrupted and disrupted by a large segment in italics. This is clearly spoken speech, as the use of contractions shows. Yet the fact that it is spoken speech does not justify the use of italics. Generally speaking, italics impose their visual difference on the page; they leap out. As Julien Gracq reminds us, they have often been used to signal the introduction and intrusion of an alien element into a given language or speech (Gracq 183). Italics do not so much underline a word or a sentence as disrupt the sentence or passage in which they appear (Laufer 82). Reminding us that the Italian printer who first designed the type was trying to imitate handwriting, Gérard Blanchard suggests italics were thus given a “psychological dimension” (Blanchard 38). Throughout her work, Munro has played on this dimension, using italics for the repetition of words that affected the narrator as she heard them.3 They are made to evoke the emotion that resurfaces from the narrator’s memory and to suggest that the emotion affects her again as she remembers the words. Or rather, as she hears them again. Munro repeatedly plays on the visual effect to evoke the verbal dimension. This is clearly the case here. The emphasis on the word “voices” in the subsequent segment (which reverts back to roman printing type) indicates that the passage in italics is meant to let us hear the aunts’ voices and not just their words: “The feeling was in their voices […] [t]o listen to them […] [t]heir voices were like worms slithering around in my insides.” (Hateship 110) The voices from the past were always there, in spite of the narrator’s attempts to silence them. The passage in italics signals the intrusion of these voices from the past. They surface into the narrative as they resurface in

3. An interesting example can be found in “Rich as Stink”: “‘Keep on the right side of your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s rich as stink.’ / Karin felt her face heat up, she felt the shock of those words. […] Rich as stink. It sounded hateful.” (Munro, The Love of a Good Woman 237) One of the most striking examples remains Ladner’s words in “Vandals” which endlessly repeat the acts of abuse committed against the children and that Liza hears again and again. (Munro, Open Secrets 292)

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the narrator’s memory, from the narrator’s body. They erupt from the past and disrupt the body narrative, the very shape of the italic letters evoking the worms. We also witness a conflict of voices as the italics introduce and reflect a form of disruption that goes against any suggestion of a controlling narrative voice. On the diegetic level, the use of italics to differentiate the aunts’ voices testifies to a difficult relation to the past.

In the passage following the italicized segment, the narrator claims she both hated the story and the way her aunts and mother dwelt on it. She remarks that men do not normally dwell on such stories. She then reflects that it is very fortunate her fiancé is not there. He who admires opera and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet would have hated to be forced to listen to such a squalid family tragedy: “[H]e had not time for tragedy—for the squalor of tragedy—in ordinary life.” (110) The reference to the canons is all the more striking as the narrator’s relationship to the story undergoes a dramatic change in the passage which follows. As Alfrida starts telling her tale “in her normal voice” (111), and so, in her own voice, another story surfaces:

“But you know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me.”Then she really did laugh, or make a snorting sound that was evasive and scornful.“I must have thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn’t I? She would want to see me.” This was a part of the story I had never heard. And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air available only to myself,She would want to see me.The story I wrote, with this in it, would not be written till years later, not until it had become quite unimportant to think about who had put the idea into my head in the first place. (111-112)

One phrase is forced upon us, thanks to the italics. These are the words Alfrida pronounced after the accident when she begged her grandmother to take her to the hospital to see her mother. Some thirty years later, she remembers them and repeats them. Alfrida is now aware of the words’ inadequacy. Her laugh and tone turn them into a quote, the italics underlining the irony. Yet she is probably unaware of their poignancy and of their power. We hear a voice, resurfacing from the past. It is the heartbreaking cry of a child who is about to lose her mother. And so powerful are these words that “something happens” for the narrator. The moment is clearly epiphanic. When italics are used once again for the same phrase, it is to underline that the words are not solely Alfrida’s anymore, but have become overcoded with the voice of the narrator. She repeats them to herself, tasting their power, testing their potential.


A family story depicting the “squalor of tragedy in ordinary life” will be transformed into a literary work. As the family tale is told once again, the narrator finally hears its potential, sees it as material. She understands that she can use her own heritage. This means the family furniture or furnishings that Alfrida could not get rid of are “metaphors for the cultural inheritances the narrator did not realize she was receiving” (Davey 84). This epiphanic moment marks a new beginning, the birth of a writer. Resurgence here is synonymous with creation. “Family Furnishings,” therefore, can be read as the tale of a writer who finds her own voice when she finally hears the voices from her past. In other words, when she finally listens to women’s voices telling ordinary women’s stories.

Yet “Family Furnishings” offers deeper layers of metafictional dimension than this first reading suggests. Alice Munro has said that the plot is “about what a writer does and how things turn back on a writer” (Gzowski). To understand what this implies, I will turn to the other embedded story and trace its relationship with the family tale. The opening lines plunge the reader into a charming and seemingly innocent childhood fable. It evokes the father’s and Alfrida’s childhood when they lived on adjoining farms. One day, as their favourite story goes, they were out in the fields playing with the dog when they heard hundreds of bells ringing all around them—it was the end of the First World War (Hateship 86).

The opening tale will resurface, and bring about the return of all that has been repressed and suppressed by the family, at the narrator’s father’s funeral. At the cemetery, a woman starts speaking to the narrator, using Alfrida’s name as a form of introduction. The narrator notices a resemblance and concludes the woman must be one of Alfrida’s “half-sisters” (115). However, the woman tells her she is Alfrida’s natural daughter. She had been adopted as a baby and had recently traced her birth mother. A family secret that has long remained hidden is thus uncovered. The reader is now tempted to read another meaning under the aunt’s “whatever” which the narrator explained as meaning “whatever she had done with herself since.” Knowing that Alfrida’s boyfriend was a married man, the reader has so far supposed this was what the family held against Alfrida. She now supposes the aunts may have been silently referring to her pregnancy and the birth of a child out of wedlock.

The family secret is disclosed to both the main character and the reader. Yet, as in many Munro stories, the secret that is being told is not the secret that matters most. The secret that matters will not be told by anyone, let alone the narrator. It will brutally and silently resurface as the childhood tale resurfaces. Neither the woman nor the narrator voice any remark about the identity of the woman’s father. Instead, the woman starts telling the narrator a story Alfrida told her. We recognize the opening fable. Yet it is both the same story and an altogether different one. The narrator hits on a discrepancy, or rather two details that do not fit. The characters’ ages and actions are different. In the woman’s version, her father and Alfrida were teenagers walking home from high school when they

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heard the bells. There is no escaping the discrepancy—it is almost forced upon the reader. The narrator first contradicts the woman, giving her the correct version, insisting that they were children and that they were playing with the father’s dog in the fields. Then, sharing her thoughts with the reader, the narrator reflects that, given her father’s date of birth, they could not have been children in 1918. She silently concludes:

So it was much more likely that they were walking home from high school than that they were playing in the fields, and it was odd that I had never thought of that. Maybe they had said they were in the fields, that is, walking home across the fields. Maybe they had never said “playing.” (118)

So the reader is encouraged, if not forced, to imagine what the two teenagers could have been doing in those fields, if not playing. Yet the narrator does not say anything to the woman. Instead, she utters a cliché: “Things get changed around.” (118) When the woman picks up the cliché, changing the structure from passive to active—“people change things around”—the narrator remains silent, refusing to acknowledge that her father or even she may have changed the story. The narrator also stops short of spelling out her conclusions to the reader. Having had her attention repeatedly drawn to the discrepancies, the reader understands that this woman’s father must be the narrator’s father. The silent revelation that takes place in the reader’s mind is emblematic of Munro’s art of writing secrets. As an innocent tale is told again, gaps or rents in the story are made to be seen and through them, another secret surfaces. Or rather resurfaces, emerging from the narrator’s memory, in a silent explosion, at the very moment she is burying her father, and so at a burial site. A seemingly naïve remark—“it was odd that I had never thought of that”—encourages the reader to reflect that the second secret was always there to be seen. The first pages did underline a strong complicity between the father and Alfrida, the very first words linking them into a silent embrace: “Alfrida. My father called her Freddie.” (86) They were very close when they were children; they lived in the same house for a while—they seemed more like siblings than cousins. The child, then, was born of an almost incestuous relationship. The narrator’s silence might therefore be explained by the fact that she is suddenly confronted with the unspeakable. The narrator remains silent because what she will not say is what she cannot say.

It is also what she cannot see. Here I am indebted to Héliane Ventura for having pointed out to me the positions of the two women in this scene. The narrator insists she cannot see the woman very well because the sunlight in her eyes effectively blinds her: “In October the afternoon sun was low, and it was coming straight into my eyes.” (116) We are presented with an emblematic Munrovian motif. As the narrator of “Vandals,” an earlier story, reminds us, blindness leads to both silence and inaction: “What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see.” (Munro, Open Secrets 293)


If the narrator is made blind at the very moment the truth hits her, this suggests a possible link with the first story about Alfrida’s mother’s death when a lamp exploded. Indeed, however unconnected they may have seem, the stories cannot be read separately. A remark made by Alfrida at the end of the narrator’s visit helps us create a connection between the visit and the period mentioned in the childhood tale. Looking at a honey pail displayed in a shop window, Alfrida remarks: “Your father and I used to take our lunch to school in pails just like that.” (Hateship 112) The disruptions in the order of the narrative, the goings back and forth in time, also help create a connection. The meeting in the cemetery is followed by a passage that brings us back to the day of the visit. It is preceded by a conversation between father and daughter. In this conversation, the father reminds the narrator of the story she wrote—a fact she claims to have forgotten. Thus the story is made to resurface with the conversation:

My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient, and a little angry to think of Alfrida’s objecting to something that now seemed to have so little to do with her. “It wasn’t Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. “I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character. Everybody could see that.” But as a matter of fact, there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child. (113)

There were also, if one remembers the epiphanic passage, the words Alfrida cried. So Alfrida was dispossessed of her words and tragic story by the narrator. Yet the narrator once again denies Alfrida’s role in the origins in the story. This reminds us of what her father did. Strikingly similar themes and motifs link the two stories. The stolen story is about a child who lost her mother. The meeting in the cemetery will reveal that this child was later forced to abandon her baby. Listening to the woman who is her father’s daughter, the narrator is suddenly confronted with what her father did to Alfrida: he suppressed the relationship and the existence of the child, and so Alfrida was deprived of her child for most of her life.

Finally, the narrator is confronted with a conspiracy of silence she will then share. By remaining silent, the narrator denies the woman’s claims to her father and family, and so to her roots. She will also deny Alfrida’s claim to the story. From her point of view, both these claims have to be denied. In “Family Furnishings” a writer is asserting her right4 to dispossess others of their tragic stories, emotions or even words. The narrator has to deny Alfrida’s reading of the story as hers because it endangers her own claims as a writer. The narrator claims the story is

4. The word claim is a key word in “Family Furnishings.” It first appears when the narrator mentions the family story. Speaking of her aunts’ relation to the story, she says it was “a horrible treasure to them, something our family could claim that nobody else could” (110). Dictionaries remind us that to claim means to demand something as one’s property, or to state that one should have something to which one has a right. A claim is therefore both a demand for something which one has a right to have, and a right.

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hers because she wrote it. She took possession of the story when she transformed it into a literary creation which, then, became her own.

Yet the narrator is the third person to lay claim to the story. Her aunts saw the story as a family treasure.5 So did Alfrida after the story was published. But just as Alfrida did not see that once told, her story would not belong to her anymore, the narrator did not see that once the story was published, it would be read by her readers. It would therefore belong to readers such as Alfrida. As Maurice Blanchot insisted in La part du feu, once a reader enjoys a book, sees herself in it, the writer will be dispossessed of her work (Blanchot, La part du feu 298).6 Indeed, “Family Furnishings” tells us something of the passionate and conflicting relationship that exists between writer and reader. A conflict that, according to Blanchot, is the very condition for a piece of writing to become a literary work (Blanchot, L’espace littéraire 35).7

“Family Furnishings” may also be telling us something about the art of writing short stories. In the closing lines, the narrator says that, walking away from Alfrida’s flat, she was “thinking of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories” (119). This brings us back to the conversation with her father in which she evokes the dangers of looking at her life “through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers and knitted garments of other women’s domesticity” (114).

As people back home think little of her work, she fears her life will not be considered much of an achievement compared to other women’s productions. All the more so, maybe, as she only writes short stories. This tempts us to uncover yet another layer in the metafictional dimension. The presence of the narrator’s sister at the funeral and the narrator’s refusal to acknowledge the family connection meant a quest for legitimacy was both silently made and denied. This denial tempts us to wonder whether “Family Furnishings” might not interrogate legitimacy, whether it be that of genealogy, or that of writing, more particularly in the context of genre. So “Family Furnishings” simultaneously asserts a writer’s

5. The image of the trap echoes the earlier passage in which the narrator remarked that her aunts considered the story as “a distinction that would never be let go” and a treasure (111).

6. To quote the original French: “L’auteur voit les autres s’intéresser à son oeuvre, mais l’intérêt qu’ils y portent est un intérêt autre que celui qui avait fait d’elle la pure traduction de lui-même, et cet intérêt autre change l’œuvre, la transforme en quelque chose d’autre où il ne reconnaît pas la perfection première. L’œuvre pour lui a disparu, elle devient l’œuvre des autres, l’œuvre où ils sont et où il n’est pas, un livre qui prend sa valeur d’autres livres […], qui est compris parce qu’il est leur reflet.”

7. “[L]’oeuvre est oeuvre seulement quand elle devient l’intimité ouverte de quelqu’un qui l’écrit et de quelqu’un qui la lit, l’espace violemment déployé par la contestation mutuelle du pouvoir du dire et du pouvoir d’entendre.”


right to dispossess others of their stories and voices a writer’s doubts about the legitimacy of her art when seen through eyes other than her own.

It is no surprise therefore that “Family Furnishings” explores two contradictory dimensions of resurgence at the same time. With both stories, the narrator will find she cannot get rid of her past. She will also discover there is a skeleton in the family closet, family secrets in the family furnishings neither she nor Alfrida can get rid of. It is tempting to say that the narrator’s paradoxical relation to the past is best exemplified in the fate of the squalid family story morphing into a short story. This enables us to claim that “Family Furnishings” tells the tale of an aspiring writer who learns to listen to ordinary women’s voices and to find her material in her past. Yet, we cannot ignore the fact that “Family Furnishings” leaves many things unsaid and unresolved. While some secrets are disclosed, others will remain forever unsaid. The reader feels the narrator will not act on what she discovers because she refuses to see, let alone to voice, her suspicions. So the reader is left with an intricate, bewildering, uncomforting roll of words, which will leave her remaining questions unanswered.

Corinne BIGOT Université de Paris 10 Nanterre, Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

Works cited

Blanchard, Gérard. La Lettre, Paris: Editions du gymnase typographique, 1975.Blanchot, Maurice. La part du feu, Paris: Gallimard, 1949.—. L’espace littéraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1955.Davey, Frank. “Class, ‘Family Furnishings’ and Munro’s Early Stories,” Open Letter 11-9

/ 12-1 (Fall 2003 / Winter 2004): 79-88.Delesalle, Simone. “Le roman: inclusions et étirements,” in Marie-Christine Lala and

Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, eds., Figures d’ajout, Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002: 169-84.

Gzowski, Peter. “Interview with Alice Munro,” Globe and Mail, 29 September 2001.Gracq, Julien. “D’une certaine manière de poser la voix,” in André Breton, Paris: Corti,

1946: 137-96.Laufer, Roger. “Du ponctuel au scriptural,” La langue française 45 (1980): 77-89.Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Toronto: McClelland

& Stewart, 2001: 86-120.—. Open Secrets, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.—. The Love of a Good Woman, 1998, London: Vintage, 2000.

einstein, evelyn waugh and the wapisiana Indians: Ventriloquism and eclipses in Pauline melville’s

The Ventriloquist’s Tale

This paper concerns itself with generic questions in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist Tale and links them with the peculiar postcolonial “writing back” which takes place therein. Whereas one might first assume that the author inscribes the text in a Bakhtinian lineage, it then appears that its various voices are never tamed or tied into one consistent narration. An Eliotian music is soon heard which is half-poetry and half-drama, and which aims at retrieving the ritualistic functions of language, Indian or otherwise. Eventually however, the novel turns out to be the fruit of the lies and deceptions of one single narrator in disguise, who has set out ventriloquizing the whole world into his own words.

“All Stories are Told for Revenge or Tribute”

W ith The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) Pauline Melville1 has penned a novel that churns issues of belonging and betraying, and a text that scrutinizes the possibilities of an identity for the Guyanese

Indians. It opens with Chofy McKinnon, a Wapisiana Indian who owes his surname to a free-thinking Scottish grandfather gone native in the Amazon, via Jamaica, leaving his wife and son to work in Georgetown. He travels with his aunt Wifreda who needs to have her eyes operated in the capital. There he meets Rosa, a British scholar who researches Evelyn Waugh’s trip to the Guyanas in 1933, and who becomes his lover. It so happens that the famous author had then stayed with the McKinnons and that Wifreda remembers him, although for some strange reason she proves outstandingly reluctant to discuss the matter (“She would say as little about Mr Evelyn Waugh as possible.” Melville 73). As the second and biggest part of the novel opens, we learn that she is afraid lest her

1. Pauline Melville was born in 1948 in British Guyana, the daughter of an Englishwoman and of a Guyanese father of mixed, and partly Amerindian, ancestry. The novel was published in 1997 and it won the Whitbread First Novel Award as well as an enthusiastic book review by Salman Rushdie. It came after Shape Shifter (1990), a collection of short stories which won quite a number of prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book Award, and was followed by another collection of short stories entitled The Migration of Ghosts (1998). All quotations from the novel refer to the Bloomsbury edition.

Einstein, Evelyn Waugh and the Wapisiana Indians 37

memories should unleash the dark and secret truth upon which their lives have been built: her sister Beatrice and her brother Danny once had an affair and a son into the bargain, one whom Waugh met. For the Amerindians, as Claude Lévi-Straus knew and wrote about, incest provokes eclipses and precisely, one took place in 1919 even as the two lovers had fled deep into the savannahs and far into Brazil.

In the prologue to the novel, a dazzling preliminary text, the frame-narrator to the story warns that “All stories are told for revenge or tribute” ( 9). He might allude to our postmodern situation and remind us there that “we come after,” as George Steiner states in his preface to Language and Silence.2 He may also hint at the glancing and writing back that all postcolonial literatures represent. Wifreda knows all too well that once you start telling the Amerindian version of stories, there is no stopping the flood of tales. Such return of the native repressed is congenial to postcolonial works, and The Ventriloquist’s Tale is prominently about the resurgence of Indian myths, beliefs and languages beyond the superimposition of modernity, science, Christianity and, generally speaking, colonialism. It is also a response to Evelyn Waugh’s vision of the Indian society. Irresistibly in The Ventriloquist’s Tale voices spring forth, giving vent to legends that have always been there, however dormant, testifying to the resistance of the oppressed. At all times in the novel, and as the title may well let its reader surmise, several voices are to be heard. Even as the Wapisiana can ventriloquize the cries of the animals in the Guyanese savannah in order to lure and kill them, the narrator mimics the stories and voices of the Indians living in the hinterland.3 Such polyphony is apparently in keeping with the choice of the novel, a genre studied by Mikhail Bakhtin in the light of the carnival, one which allows for chaotic narration and the plurality of viewpoints. However, it soon appears that the origin of these voices is never united in one source (or one belly, as it were and to keep the image introduced by the title); here we can hear the strains of poetical scraps that, unlike lyricism, seem to be attributable to no character in the novel, and there we witness the diffraction of enunciators that is a characteristic of the theatre. As will be shown in the second part of this paper, other generic influences threaten the novelistic ideal, one which is, after all, strongly linked with a European historical context, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which is also that of colonialism. Lastly, it seems that these confused and ventriloquized voices may all emanate from a unique point of view after all, and that the conductor of the novel need be read as a trickster, a deeply unreliable narrator. Indeed, the text foregrounds a

2. The novel is actually very much about language and silence, with one chapter specifically entitled “Silence” (Melville 225-230).

3. Guyana stands apart in the Caribbean Basin. Unlike the islands, it is starkly divided between “coastlanders” and the peoples of the hinterland, the jungle or the savannah. The latter region is a vast expanse that is not easily accessed, travelled, explored or known, even though there is permanent population there.

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chaos which, after one has taken a closer look, seems to stem from a metatextuality which pertains to the tradition of the novel as it was established by Cervantes, Sterne but also by Borges and Rushdie.

“Which Came First, the Equation or the Story?”

The Ventriloquist’s Tale pays homage to the grand tradition of novelistic storytelling. It is rife with realistic characters, anecdotes, plots and subplots, tales, stories; it unfolds as lushly as the Guyanese landscape does. It is also rife with myths. We learn why shooting a tapir provokes rain (123-124), and how moaning winds are the sound of Tamukang, the Master of Fish (a star constellation known in the Western world as the Pleiades, the Hyades and part of Orion), whenever he sets out blowing his flute (175). We are told why the sun is paler in May (184), why it preferred to have an Indian wife rather than a White or a Black one, and above all, why solar eclipses occur. There is a myth recorded by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose prose appears as an epigraph4 to the novel in a first instance of polyphony, according to which a sister and a brother had an incestuous affair, became the moon and the sun, with the sun chasing the moon until sometimes it catches up with it, provoking the well-known natural phenomenon. Such myths are fiercely fought by the Jesuit priest Father Napier, who rechristens the Amerindian settlement “Saint Ignatius” and relentlessly crisscrosses the savannah in order to eradicate what he calls superstitions. In carnivalesque fashion, European views and Indian beliefs collide, with the latter ones surging back from a subterranean past (the narrator purports, in his prologue, to “dig time’s grave,” [2]) to emerge into the present. Such resurgence of the native culture is a singularity of the Guyanas, where an important Indian population has survived the chaos of colonialism which has all but wiped out all traces of a native culture in the rest of the Caribbean. These myths rule time and space in the savannah, whereas news from the coast, religious, scientific or otherwise, reach the savannah months later (“Every six months or so, the out-of-date newspapers arrived from Georgetown, sometimes in unreadable condition.” [177]).

European newspapers, however, are never quite dismissed. In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, science is thus given pride of place: Darwin is said by the narrator’s grandmother to have first conceived his theories while surveying the Guyanas.5 The narrator mimics radio broadcasters discussing the Big Bang and one of the characters, McKinnon Senior, attempts to photograph the 1919 eclipse in order

4. “There is a myth which is known throughout the whole of the Americas from southern Brazil to the Bering Strait via Amazonia and Guiana and which establishes a direct equivalence between eclipses and incest.” (Melville np)

5. “Anyway, according to my grandmother, Charles Darwin without so much as a by-your-leave parked his behind on my ancestors and wrote the first line of Origin of Species, declaring that we were descended from monkeys. If his eyes had been in his arse he would have known better.” (Melville 3)


to confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity. The entire novel opposes the equation and the story.

Once, I remember, she particularly wanted to hear a programme about the cosmic noise picked up by radio telescopes—the faint echo of the Big Bang that has spread through the universe over the aeons. We have always been crazy about astronomy. When she returned from fishing, she came to where I lay in my hammock and I repeated the whole programme about Einstein and Hawking, in the voice of Alvar Liddell, a famed BBC announcer. “Which came first,” I wondered out loud, “the equation or the story?”“The story, of course,” she snapped, as she listened carefully to my perfect mimicking of those faint hissing sounds of the universe from the beginning of time, recorded by radio telescopes. “What people are hearing,” she said, “is the final wheeze of an enormous laugh.”The programme continued to explain how the universe expands outwards over millions of years towards infinity and then contracts back over millions of years into a singularity. (8)

The victory of the story over the equation is repeated on page 182 exactly in the same terms. Elsewhere, it is once more the eclipse which coalesces opposites as the Indian myth is rivalled by Einstein’s theory of relativity: the eclipse of 1917 was, indeed, used by physicists to show that, as Einstein was then contending, such masses as the sun could modify the trajectory of light. During an eclipse, the glitter of one star which was situated exactly behind the sun could in fact be contemplated, its light bent by the strength of the sun’s gravitational field (McKinnon reads about it in a yellowing copy of The Times two years later, right before a second eclipse), and this experiment was conducted in South America, where the light of stars is brighter than in other parts of the globe but also where there was, that very year, a conjunction of a total solar eclipse with the presence of a bright star right behind the sun. Alongside Einstein, scientists of all kinds crowd the novel. One of them, a Czech scholar and anthropologist, Wormoal, even attempts to fashion a scientific approach to mythology, trusting the resurgence of old patterns to be read anew (on his plane back to Europe, he gloats and boasts: “‘I think I know as much as it’s possible to know about the eclipse mythology in these parts.’ He patted his briefcase triumphantly and returned to reading some papers.” 351) Resurgence is then to be understood as the resistance and endurance of an Indian point of view alongside a European one. Superstitions do hold their ground, drawing the story in the direction of a tragic necessity which vanquishes rationality. Thus, when Beatrice and Danny, the incestuous sister and brother, are discovered by their sister Wifreda, Beatrice threatens her with becoming blind as a termite. At the end of the novel, Wifreda has indeed become fully and irretrievably blind (“All her adult life, she had feared that she would go blind simply because of her kinship with her brother Danny and sister Beatrice. Kinship with them was itself enough to warrant some sort of supernatural reprisal.” [72]). The (East) Indian domestics also know better than their masters

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(“Indira served coffee wearing an expression like Cassandra’s after another of her forecasts had been disbelieved.” [328]) when a dinner party at the Canadian High Commission is marred by one male guest fondling another male guest under the table, sending the avocado salad onto the dress of the American Ambassador’s wife. In any case, two perspectives collide and heteroglossia proliferates. The scientific model is all the more interesting here since Bakhtin, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, describes the reality of the novel as “the complex unity of an Einsteinian universe” (Bakhtin 16): the problem of dialogism is not so much that there are several voices competing for authority, but also that they are enunciating from various times and spaces, thus distorting further any type of linearity.

Placing her text under the sign of Evelyn Waugh, a character in the novel and an author who is renowned for such a technique, Melville confronts viewpoints that do not cancel one another out. Ambiguity thrives as characters strive to position themselves, and it sometimes veers towards the absurd. Thus, it is in the dark room of McKinnon, the freethinking photographer, that mass is celebrated by Father Napier, hinting at the collusion, or communion, of both science and religion with the obscure beliefs of the savannahs. Thus also, Chofy, the alienated modern Indian who works at the library and does not understand such silly partition between work and life, is, on his first day, sent by the librarian to talk to Rosa with whom he falls in love and has a passionate affair. At last, when Father Napier becomes mad, towards the end of the inserted story in the novel (part two), his spirit seems possessed by old Amerindian folklore: “Imitating the sun’s journey to Iken, he walked around the cage all night.” (263) The conflict between equation and story might be one opposing, on the one hand, similitude, correspondence, and congruence (as is the etymological, original sense of the word “equation”) and difference, on the other. In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, the “equivalence” identified by Lévi-Strauss becomes a story. Indeed, stories often branch out into plurality and Sister Fidelia, who was found drunk one time too many and was sent packing to Mexico, records that “Historians have raked up the story of the last solar eclipse in this region on July 16th, AD 789 when Quetzalcoatl, one of their pagan gods, headed east on a raft of serpents and had to leave Mexico because he made love to his sister” (147). It is the same story and yet another one, a variation on the theme, an echo returning with a difference—and with a vengeance. As the narrator’s grandmother says, “Truth changes. Variety remains constant.” (3) Characters in the novel are united by the bewilderment they experience in the face of the impossibility of making any sense, of following one train of thought, of choosing one theory, one story rather than any other one. Melville writes under the clear influence of baroque, or neo-baroque, authors such as Wilson Harris, a novelist she has obviously thoroughly read. We find in Melville’s novel the same webs of versions, the same repetitions with a variation, the same carnivalesque whirlwinds of voices.


“The Stupid Americans didn’t even Realise He Spoke English—Let Alone that We All Have Different Languages Anyway”

One of the many myths recounted in the course of the novel is that before man killed his first deer, provoking yet another eclipse, “we could all speak the language of plants and animals” (122). An underlying dream in The Ventriloquist’s Tale is that we retrieve such a unique language and go “back to some period before speech, as old as silence” (317). Pertaining to such a pre-saussurian and pre-babelian state, Indian languages are often the medium through which an almost forgotten idiom springs forth again, signalling a circular resurgence: “A Wapisiana chant went round and round in her head. She used to hear it as a child when somebody died, before Father Napier’s zealous frenzy had converted so many villages to Catholicism.” (236) Native languages belong to the world of “before,” but also to the rituals of poetry (“when somebody died”); chants, songs, proverbs and scraps of tales in Indian languages are confined to the realm of children and women (314, 316) and to rites of passage. These tongues represent a refusal of European idioms, of the rationality and order that supposedly go along with them, but also possibly of the genre of the novel. Often the place for rituals to intervene, Indian languages are associated in the novel to the practice of petroglyphs, one which is both graphic and linguistic, and one which draws the word towards the realm of the image.

“The Taruma call this the River of the Dead,” said Danny.The Taruma had so named the Kassikaitiu because in times of severe drought, when the waters were low, there were ancient petroglyph writings on the rocks at the base of the river. These writings were rarely visible. They were reckoned to be older than the great flood which once submerged the region. The Taruma said that it was by means of those marks, halfway between writing and drawing, that the dead were still able to speak to the living (195, my emphasis).

At one with the landscape in which it originated, the language of the Taruma appears as a poetic one, if we were to define the latter as an incantation, a link between the quick and the dead. The idea that “the dead are still able to speak to the living” notably recalls T.S. Eliot’s theory not only on tradition (Eliot, The Sacred Wood), but also on the way in which all poetry is in some way a ritualistic “Burial of the Dead.” Not incidentally, the author of The Waste Land is mentioned a few times (“On Saturdays, when I was a youngster, I had to brush the priest’s books. There were books on the shelf by Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot, I remember.” [41]). Another poem, “Ash Wednesday,” also appears in the form of the date at which Evelyn Waugh reached the McKinnon settlement (“I remember he arrived on an Ash Wednesday.” [48]); this modernist poem can be read like a prayer or an incantation of a set of dry bones to be resurrected or not. Under such a patronage and in a modernist manner, words take on a ritualistic life in Melville’s novel; they launch into a prose whose volubility tends towards verse,

Commonwealth 31.142

and through which an apparently dead world springs forth once more to the sound of a “rattling dance of bones,” echoing their Eliotian “chirping” (Eliot, Collected Poems 95) counterparts:

Then I saw that on the word were carved other words, hieroglyphics, tiny rows of them, and they were in a language I could not understand. But I became aware of the noisy and voluble existence of words, an incessant chattering from the past, and as the babble grew louder, as the throng of words grew and approached along the forest trails, the savannah tracks, the lanes and by-ways and gullies, the words, some declaiming, some whispering, were joined, first by laughter and ribald whistles, then by rude farting sounds and finally by an unmistakable clattering that could only be the rattling dance of bones. (5)

Here an introduction to poetry, the “danse macabre” is also restored to its first, medieval form, that of a theatrical performance (Corvisier). Indeed, voices sometimes lose track of signifieds in order to become a mere performance, regardless of meaning. Such is the case when Bla-Bla prays for the tempest to stabilize:

Frightened by the violence of the storm, [Bla-Bla] put his hands together and decided to pray. All he could remember was something he had learned the previous term at school that felt like a prayer. As the air grew darker and took on a bruised, greenish hue, he rattled off what he had learned out loud:“Always speak quietly and courteously,A quiet voice is a mark of refinement,If you have to interrupt anyone speakingAlways say excuse me, please.Cover your mouth with your hand when you yawn.Cover your mouth with your handAnd turn your head aside when you cough.”“Amen,” he added. (315)

His prayer is a speech-act. It outgrows the abilities of the novel to explore theatrical practices. The novel is also placed under the sign of a contemporary loss of identity, one which is often embodied in the theatre. Thus, names do not always refer to whom they should and in the prologue, the narrator asks the reader to call him Chico, which is his brother’s name (“but so what,” 1). As for the son of Beatrice and Danny, he remains “Sonny,” as anonymous as some Beckettian characters. It seems that the loss of a unique language went hand in hand with an ontological inbetweenness. Be it poetical or dramatical, there is in The Ventriloquist’s Tale a (once more) Eliotian distrust of the self and embrace of “impersonality,” an attempt at retrieving the primeval function of language, that of nursery rhyme and prayer of the dead altogether.

Remarkably, Indian languages are never quite heard, they are rather merely mentioned. There is the Wapisiana that is spoken by the McKinnons, and especially by the three girls, Beatrice, Wifreda and Alice, during their years of education at


a convent in Georgetown; the Macusi that is spoken by Chofy; the Waiwai that is spoken deeper in the jungle; and the Tamura. There is also that special brand of English, Creole, spoken in the West Indies and caught by the Irish nurse: “She suffered from melancholia and was frowned on by the other nuns who deplored her tendency to lapse into Creolese.” (143) Again, these languages are never heard, they represent a black hole in the narration. The Indians speak English now, and it is the language of the novel. It is also the reason for Bla-Bla, Chofy’s son, dying in a mine explosion provoked by Americans looking for gold.

You know what they are saying? One of the Americans saw a little boy in the area and he pointed to the danger spot and shouted: “Chofoye. Chofoye.” He said he was trying to warn him. He thought it was an Amerindian word for explosion. Bla-Bla must have misunderstood and run towards the spot because he thought his father had come home. The stupid Americans didn’t even realise he spoke English—let alone that we all have different languages anyway. (343-344)6

The ghostly presence of the Indian tongues is a source of deathly misunderstanding and Chofy’s son dies in this explosion. They are linked to mysteries not to be delved into too far.

“Ventriloquism at its Zenith”

If voices may be seen both as the expression of a Bakhtinian dialogism and the quest for poetry and drama, the resurgence of voices is ultimately presented as a construction due to the tricks of the narrator. His grandmother, for one, does not forgive him for delivering all these myths to a Western audience, so that she needs to be knocked unconscious in order for the novel to go on:

But out of the blue, things turned bad between Koko and myself. She flew into a rage when she heard I was going to write the stories down. She is a stickler for tradition. All novelty or innovation is a sign of death to her and history only to be trusted when it coincides with myth. She believes we Indians should keep ourselves to ourselves, retreating from the modern world like the contracting stars. We fought. She rubbed pepper in my eyes. I knocked her out—temporarily—with a war club. (8-9)

Such permanence of voices, which all seem to surge back from an ancient past, has to do with the talent of one single person, that is to say the boasting narrator who states as early as the prologue:

6. To understand this passage, the reader must remember another one where the meaning of “Chofoye” is explained: “It’s a Wai-Wai name meaning “rapids” or “fast-flowing waters.” If you say it out loud, you can hear it makes the sound of water exploding over rocks.” (Melville 302) Such cratylism tends to interpret the Indian languages in “natural” terms, whereas the English language would be on the side of “culture.” But precisely, what the passage tragically shows is that the “naturalness” of Indian languages is an illusion, and that the meaning of words is not as clear as it should be.

Commonwealth 31.144

To cut an endless story short, I have a genius for ventriloquism. Any diva in the Scala Opera House, Milan would kill for my vocal range. I can do any voice: jaguar, London hoodlum, bell-bird, nineteenth-century novelist, ant-eater, epic poet, a chorus of howler monkeys, urban brutalist, a tapir. The list is infinite. (8)

Indeed, the framing of the story by a prologue and an epilogue is a sure sign that he or she is “cutting an endless story short,” putting an end to collective effusion as well as to immemorial remembrance. A letter by Sister Fidelia from Mexico (146-147), a scientific article concerning “The Structural Elements of Myth” (81-83), another one about the solar eclipse of 1917 (178-181), a dialogue here and there: few are the passages that are not relayed through the invasive and tyrannical voice of the frame-narrator: “But first, I lay claim to the position of narrator in this novel. Yes, me. Rumbustious, irrepressible, adorable me.” (1) Strange repetitions occur, with one anecdote spoken freely, and then mediated by the narrator: one woman telling another one in direct speech while bathing in the river that since a couple had made love in the church built and consecrated by Father Napier, the latter had decided to build it all over again (114), a story later recorded by the narrative voice colluding and including two viewpoints at once, that of Father Napier and of the Macusi Indians: “The Macusi people found him intolerable, but puzzling, especially on the occasion when he insisted on reconsecrating the church after a young couple had spent the night there.” (151) There are two different instances here of indirect speech (“found him intolerable” and “insisted on reconsecrating”). The entire novel may be read as one massive appropriation of other voices, as it soon becomes clear as one goes that both indirect and free indirect speech prevail largely in the diegesis. The text cannot be read and heard as anything else than muffled, its voices deadened by the mediation of an all-encompassing, histrionic narrator. One effect thereof is the almost total absence of any vernacular speech, which is one of the hallmarks of Caribbean literature and is analysed as such by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back.7 In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, sentences circumvent the outcries of the language of slaves (as “vernacular” etymologically means): “Cries of ‘I goin’

7. “Perhaps the most common method of inscribing alterity by the process of appropriation is the technique of switching between two or more codes, particularly in the literatures of the Caribbean continuum. The techniques employed by the polydialectical writer include variable orthography to make dialect more accessible, double glossing and code-switching to act as an interweaving interpretative mode, and the selection of certain words which remain untranslated in the text. All these are common ways of installing cultural distinctiveness in the writing. But probably the most distinctive feature of the Caribbean novel is the narrator who ‘reports’ in standard English, but moves along the continuum of the characters.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 71) One might add here, that what is said in this passage of Caribbean literature is not necessarily true of Guyanese authors, who have to deal with languages that, unlike Creoles, (more often than not) cannot be understood by a Western audience.


break she blasted leg’ resounded through the forest.” (356) Other than that, the novel is couched in a constantly standard English. The narrative process might be an attempt at blurring the objectivity which lies at the basis of the scientific discourse. Of course, the narrator knows that, in Franz Fanon’s words, “For the native, objectivity is always directed against him” (Fanon 77). Accordingly, he knows how to give originality a wide berth. Instead, the narrator decides what, and what not, bedside tale to tell, closing the text with a selfish procrastination: “I will tell you the story of the parrot. Another time.” (Melville 357)

Still, the fears of Koko, the vigilant grandmother, might not be grounded after all since the narrator presents his version of facts as flawed, tampered with, devious and inaccurate: “In this jolly company, I always relate stories of a certain rapscallion, a character born from silence, who is driven mainly by trickery and the desire to eat meat, a character whose antics would be enough to make a corpse laugh.” (355) He accuses his origins when admitting that he is nothing else than a very unreliable narrator: “We, in this part of the world, have a special veneration for the lie and all its consequences and ramifications.” (3) Father Napier is repeatedly tricked by such tampering with the truth and seems never to get used to it (“The old man had been indulging in the customary Indian habit of trying to please him by telling him what he would like to hear. [Father Napier] had been taken in by it over and over again in his years as a missionary.” [216]). The grandmother is not so much betrayed as honoured by the narrator’s unreliability, one which is based on deceit and artifice:

Not only do we Indians know how to make ourselves attractive. We are also brilliant at divining what you would like to hear and saying it, so you can never be really sure what we think. […] Ventriloquism at its zenith. My grandmother taught me to rely daily on the pleasures of artifice and, more importantly, the tactics of warfare—surprise, deception and disguise, that art of mixing the visible with the invisible. (354)

Free indirect speech singularly applies to intertextuality, and former texts are inserted within a narrative frame which distorts their original meaning. Hallowed authors become in the novel simple carpenters, as is the case with Aristotle Crane, a character who is “contemplating the world from a stack of lumber” (51). Evelyn Waugh, a man “with pushed-up face and little pebble eyes,” trapped in his upper-class colonial prejudices, is himself a character in The Ventriloquist’s Tale. His inclusion is based on historical fact. In his travel book, Ninety-Two Days, he records spending one night in the ranch of a Mr. Christie, a religious fanatic. It inspired a cruel short story entitled “The Man Who Liked Dickens” which tells of a certain Paul Henty arriving in the Guyanas after having been cuckolded by his extravagant wife. Henty takes part in a scientific expedition, along with an anthropologist, a biologist, a surveyor, and a professor. The expedition is a disaster. All participants give up but Professor Anderson, who promptly dies of malaria, and Henty finds himself starved and all but naked, lost in the savannah.

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He is hosted by a Mr Mcmaster who has been living with the Shiriana Indians for sixty years. He is made to read the complete works of Charles Dickens by McMaster, who is illiterate. When a party of Englishmen reaches the small settlement, looking for Henty, McMaster has arranged for the latter to be lying, drunk, in a hammock at the other end of the village. He tells them that Henty has died, condemning his ‘guest’ to stay there forever.8 Evelyn Waugh wrote of his text:

I had just written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner. [...] [E]ventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savages at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them. (Gallagher 303)

In the short story, Evelyn Waugh’s intense dislike of the Guyanese wilderness is obvious, and this is manifested in his novel A Handful of Dust (where Paul Henty becomes Tom Last). The Ventriloquist’s Tale writes back, presenting Evelyn Waugh under an unsympathetic light and turning him into a snobbish Englishman.

The Entropic Alligators

As it turns out, only one photograph is ever developed after McKinnon’s dark room is wrecked. It is given to Father Napier who, in his madness and despair, takes it back to his cloister in Edinburgh. “He had one photograph which always aroused interest, showing about thirty alligators resting on the rocks alongside the Ireng River. Mists hung about them and they all had their mouths open as though in ecstasy.” (Melville 265) Such motionless ecstasy meets Rosa’s experience of the Guyanese territory:

Her failure seemed somehow typical of what happened in this country—a demonstration of the second law of thermodynamics. Everything tending towards inertia. She tried to remember the relevant laws. Something to do with entropy and disorder increasing with time. (330)

This statement cannot but echo the theories of Benitez-Rojo, who views the entire literature of the Caribbean as obeying such a law, with the world and the word growing towards chaos. Resurgence, in this novel, tends towards loss rather than retrieval: when Bla-Bla dies after an unavailing operation, Chofy understands that he has lost not only a son, but an entire continent, to the greed of the North Americans, to the curiosity of the surveyors, to the will to power of the colonisers,

8. There is, in The Ventriloquist’s Tale, just one more story inserted in the main fold of events, which has no consequence for the rest of the plot, and which may be an attempt at pacifying or even exorcising such a story, of “writing it back”: a German man appears, in a state of exhaustion and agony. He stays in the village, eats oranges that the children pick up for him, and, after about six weeks, leaves (Melville 133).


old and new, political and scholarly. The voices of an Indian culture do not so much surge back as reach us through the mediation of a narrator who is little more than an academic, but less than a native who sticks to tradition and allows the Indians to keep to themselves. He or she can do little else than transcribe these scraps, these fragments shored against ruin, to use yet another Eliotian image, before the end of a culture that is lamented but certainly not postponed.

Kerry-Jane WALLART Université Paris 9 - Dauphine

Works cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, “Theory and History of Literature” 8, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. The Caribbean and the Post-Modern Perspective, trans. James Marannis, Durham / London: Duke University Press, 1992.

Corvisier, André. Les danses macabres, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998.Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood, London: Methuen,

1920. —. Collected Poems 1909-1935, 4th ed., London: Faber, 1941. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New York: Grove,

1968, trans. of Les damnés de la terre, 1961.Gallagher, Donat. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, London: Methuen,

1983. Melville, Pauline, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, London: Bloomsbury, 1997.Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage, 1993.Steiner, George, Language and Silence, Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman.

New Haven: Yale Yale University Press, 1967.Waugh, Evelyn. “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (1933), in The Complete Short Stories,

ed. and introduced by Ann Pasternak Slater, London: Random House, 1998: 119-134.

—. Ninety-Two Days. The Account of a Tropical Journey Through British Guiana and Part of Brazil (Duckworth, 1934), New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934.

nongqawuse Resurrected: legend and history in Zakes mda’s The

Heart of Redness

Zakes Mda’s novel The Heart of Redness uses the legendary story of the amaXhosa prophetess Nongqawuse and of the Cattle Killing Movement of 1856-57, as it was handed down to posterity through historical records and literary texts, particularly H. I. E. Dhlomo’s play The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse the Liberator (1936), to establish surprising and ironic correspondences between the past and the present. By evoking this tragic episode in the lives of the amaXhosa people and its reawakening in the present, Zakes Mda seems to follow a twofold agenda: he rewrites this historic episode from the point of view of a liberated South Africa and he examines the effects which the resurgence of the divisive issues of the past has on the present. The article focuses on how, through the rewriting of history, the South African past is being negotiated and how the novel through its own mode of writing conveys the ambiguities and contradictions of post-apartheid South Africa.

T he Heart of Redness, published in 2000, is Zakes Mda’s second novel after Ways of Dying (1995). It won two literary awards: The Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa), and the Sunday Times Fiction

award. The Heart of Redness is a richly textured novel intertwining two narrative strands over a period of almost one hundred and fifty years. It is a historical, satirical and ecological novel and, like many South African novels published after the demise of apartheid and in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconcilation Commission (hereafter TRC) hearings, it delves into the colonial past of the country and examines it in the light of contemporary issues. The Heart of Redness addresses postcolonial issues of ambivalence, empowerment, and epistemology. It deals with the difficult choice a disempowered and divided community in an amaXhosa seaside village, the birthplace of a legendary prophetess, Nongqawuse, has to make in order to adapt to the complexity of a changing world. While one set of characters obdurately adheres to rigid and even absurd traditional customs for the sake of loyalty to their tragic history, the other is just as obdurately and absurdly confident that the future prosperity of their village will be secured by capitalist developers. In evoking a tragic episode in the history of the amaXhosa, the Cattle Killing Movement, Mda seems to follow a twofold agenda: he delves into a dramatic turning point in the history of South Africa from the vantage point of a country which has now formally got rid of colonial oppression, and at the same time he examines how the resurgence of past quarrels affects the present.

Nongqawuse Resurrected 49

As he vividly recalls the events surrounding Nongqawuse’s prophecies and their tragic consequences, Mda engages in a critical assessment of the possibilities of empowerment really offered to poor and marginalised rural communities in the new South Africa. In this paper I will first examine how, through the historic evocation of Nongqawuse, Mda points to the ambivalence which permeates the writing and perception of colonial times; second, I will analyse how Mda’s conception of art for development underpins his narrative choices; and last, I will analyse how his novel presents an epistemological challenge to the inadequacy of dual thinking in post-apartheid South Africa.

Mda resuscitates the legendary figure of Nongqawuse as a metaphorical operator to expose the ambivalence of her role in South African history and literature. The Heart of Redness is set during the “Wars of Dispossession” on the eastern border of the Cape colony, which brought into conflict the British authorities and the amaXhosa nation for over a century, between the end of the eighteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth century. The particular historic episode, which is the focus of the novel, is known as the Cattle Killing Movement. It took place on the frontier of the Eastern Cape in 1856-1857 and practically put an end to the autonomy of the amaXhosa as a nation. The Movement was triggered off by a young prophetess, Nongqawuse, who, after hearing the voices of two strangers, predicted that if all the amaXhosa killed their cattle and destroyed their crops, an army of ancestors would rise from the sea, chase all the white people from the land and bring back prosperity. The movement lasted ten months, spreading throughout Xhosaland, and reached a crescendo in February 1857 with dire consequences: over 40,000 people died of starvation, 400,000 head of cattle were killed and over 150,000 people sought refuge and help in the Cape Colony.

The text of The Heart of Redness alternates between two narrative strands: one is the history of the Cattle Killing Movement, and the other, which takes place four years after the first democratic elections in 1994, deals with the life of a poor marginalised amaXhosa community in the seaside village of Qolorha-by-Sea. Both temporal levels combine historic events and characters with fictional ones. But both, as David Attwell points out, are “two moments of seminal importance in the relationships that black humanity has forged with modernity at various points in history” (Attwell 3). Attwell further defines modernity as “the currently governing concept of what it means to be a subject of history” (3). This is precisely the question which lies at the core of Mda’s novel and why he has chosen to link up two key moments in the history of the amaXhosa, while sidestepping all the intermediate years of the liberation struggle. The question which underlies this compositional choice is: how can people retrieve a sense of selfhood and self-empowerment when confronted with two historically different modes of imperialism, a nation-state colonial imperialism on the one hand and a global economic and political imperialism on the other (Peeters 32)?

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The historical background of the novel is largely inspired by the work of historian Jeff Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-57 (1989), which analyses in depth the rivalry and the conflict between the followers of the prophetess, the Believers, and her opponents, the Unbelievers. The merciless colonial wars had been accompanied by cattle confiscation, destruction of crops and homesteads, and systematic land occupation by white settlers which eventually fuelled resentment and a form of amaXhosa nationalism. The arrival of missionaries and the role of amaXhosa prophets created further confusion and division. The social and political sway of the amaXhosa prophets’ discourse blurred clear-cut distinctions between the Christian faith and traditional African beliefs. Most of the prophets cited in Mda’s novel are historic figures such as Ntsikana, Nxele, Mlanjeni, Mhlakana and, of course, Ngongqawuse, his niece. All, except the last one, had been converted by, and worked with white missionaries, and had been familiarised with Christian beliefs and practices. Yet, for racial or political reasons, some of them had broken away from the European mother churches to return to their ancestral religion, often to found syncretic separatist churches. Thus Mda notes that Nxele “had preached about Mdalidephu, the god of the black man, Thixo, the god of the white man and Thixo’s son, Tayi, who was killed by the white people” (Mda, The Heart of Redness 14).1 If Mlanjeni worshipped the sun, he was nevertheless believed to be Nxele’s successor and, like him, preached against “ubuthi,” that is, against traditional witchcraft, because it polluted the land. The prophecies of Nongqawuse compounded an already tense and complex situation as it generated a dramatic rift between the Believers (or amathamba) who were convinced she spoke for the spirits, and the Unbelievers (or amagogotya), who accused her of being a fraud.

Prior to Mda’s novel, the ambivalence of Nongqawuse and her dubious heritage was imaginatively explored by a Zulu writer, Herbert I. E. Dhlomo (1903-1956), in a play entitled The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse the Liberator, published in 1935 by the mission press at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape. The play is written from the perspective of a Christian convert who sees the cattle-killing as the work of superstition and ignorance. It shows a prophetess who is assailed by doubt and uncertainty as to the real significance of her own prophecies. The sub-title “liberator” is ironically applied to the prophetess because her action facilitated the influence of Christianity among the amaXhosa and therefore “liberated” them from the “evil” of their traditions. Ambivalence is woven into Mda’s novel through another intertext, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as suggested by the title, with the difference though that, whereas Conrad’s title refers to a European reductive perception of the African continent, Mda’s “redness,” in alluding to the red ochre used to dye isiXhosa garments, implicitly and ironically refers to the way Africans designate the backwardness of country folks whose lifestyle still follows the way of tradition.

1. Subsequent references to this book will be abridged to HR.


From these different elements—the frontier wars, the spread of Christianity and the influence of amaXhosa prophets—Mda constructs an eschatological discourse which runs through his novel, ensuring the structural and thematic continuity between the two narrative levels. The myth of the Christian millennium and the return of a messiah were reinterpreted in terms of amaXhosa beliefs and practices. The idea that the dead would arise and “witches would be cast in the belly of the world” (HR 15) was first expressed by Nxele in the 1820s and taken up thirty years later by Mlanjeni. In Nongqawuse’s prophecies, the same elements of sacrifice, purification and resurrection resurface: all cattle now living must be slaughtered because they have been reared by contaminated hands, fields must not be cultivated, the whole community of the dead will arise when the time is ripe, new cattle will be brought along and people must leave their witchcraft. The theme of resurrection is thus linked to the question of how to deal with the cause of a people’s suffering and humiliation. The solution to this desperate situation was believed to be found in the intervention of supernatural forces at the cost of collective self-sacrifice. Believers in the prophecy killed their cattle and waited for the ancestors to rise out of the sea, while Unbelievers refused to kill their cattle and sought other means to fight against the British, or even forms of accommodation with them (Peeters 36). The division of the amaXhosa definitely weakened any form of resistance against colonial encroachment: they lost both their land and their political autonomy.

In Mda’s novel, these historic events are mediated through the individual experiences and perceptions of two twins, Twin, the elder, and Twin-Twin, the younger. The former was a serious and meditative person who fell in love and married a Khoikhoi woman, Qukezwa, who had prostituted herself to British soldiers so as to smuggle gun powder from them to help a joint Xhosa and Khoikhoi rebellion against the British. Twin-Twin, on the other hand, was a lover of women, had many wives and children and was a rich man. But the twins had fallen out over Nongqawuse’s prophecies: Twin sided with the Believers and his brother with the Unbelievers. Twin killed his cattle and died insane while Twin-Twin managed to save his cattle and sided with the British.

Mda intertwines this narrative of the past with a narrative of the present, using as protagonists the descendants of Twin and Twin-Twin, respectively named Zim and Bhonco. Nongqawuse is still the cause of a feud which hinges around false or distorted interpretations of both tradition and modernity. Their quarrels usually bear on trifles, but take on a more acute turn with a proposed development project for the village. Bhonco and the Unbelievers, including his daughter Xoliswa Ximiya, the secondary school’s headmistress, bring their support to a proposal by a black-empowerment consortium to build a vast tourist complex including a luxury hotel, a casino, water-sports and a roller-coaster because they believe this is the kind of development that the village needs since it will bring civilisation to it, as the narrator ironically remarks: “If it is something that brings civilisation, then it is good for Qolorha.” (HR 230) Further, the black chief executive in charge of

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the black empowerment company piloting the project explains to the villagers that “[t]he riding of the waves is a sport that civilised people do in advanced countries” (HR 231). On the opposite side, Zim and the Believers are bent on preserving their customs, modes of thought and natural environment.

Both stances are satirically presented by Mda as simulacra of progress and tradition. A simulacrum consists, as Deleuze and Guattari write, in “appropriating reality in the operation of despotic overcoding” (in Massumi 93). This despotic “overcoding” results here in the creation of artificial or irrelevant divisions in the social body which stultify any form of creativity. Action on both sides boils down to useless repetition. Zim, like his ancestor Twin, spends most of his days sitting on a hill, staring at the sea in the vain hope of seeing the arrival of the Russians who, in the days of Nongqawuse, were believed to be black because they had killed the former Cape colony governor George Cathcart during the Crimean war and who, led by departed amaXhosa generals and kings, were expected to come and liberate the amaXhosa nation: “He knows the Russians will not come. But he waits for them still in memory of those who waited in vain.” (HR 203) On the other side, Bhonco and his followers have resurrected the cult of the Unbelievers, which in the days of Nongqawuse had been “elevated to the height of a religion” (HR 4). His daughter Xoliswa has unreservedly embraced European concepts and values and is fascinated by America: “It is a fairytale country, with beautiful people. People like Dolly Parton and Eddy Murphy.” (HR 71) The profound divide harking back to the Nongqawuse myth thus generates senseless processes of deterritorialisation whereby characters seek forms of identity and models of empowerment, either in an ossified past or in an idealised foreign country. It takes another character and a movement of reterritorialisation to dispel these alienating effects and refocus on the themes of development and empowerment in post-apartheid South Africa.

Before he became famous as a novelist, Mda was a prominent playwright who wrote committed plays to raise the awareness of people during the years of struggle and, from the early 1990s on, to encourage people to participate in their own development. “Truly popular theatre,” he says, “roots itself in tradition and develops this in a positive manner” (Mda, When People Play People 46). In his vision of the theatre for development, he shows that elements of the past can be retrieved to be used in the present. The Heart of Redness can be regarded as a continuation of the theatre for development, taking the form of “fiction for development,” as one critic qualified Mda’s previous novel Ways of Dying (Mervis 10). Mda insists that “development is meaningful only if it allows for the empowerment of local communities […] to promote a spirit of self-resilience among the marginalised” (Mervis 40).

The literary theme which Mda utilises in the theatre for development and which he introduces in his novel is that of the “facilitator” or “catalyst.” Mda stipulates that the catalyst should be a person who is different from the community in “attributes such as beliefs, manners, education, and class position” (Mervis 43), but one who


should empathize with them, because it is through this contact with an external point of view that the community can reflect on its own shortcomings, debate among themselves of what should be done, and eventually come up with feasible solutions. In The Heart of Redness, the “catalyst” is embodied by Camagu. He is at first the improbable hero of this story of transformation and regeneration in a rural area he knows nothing about. He is a man in his mid-forties, an incorrigible womaniser whose identity has been shaped by long years of immersion in a western urban culture. He returns to South Africa after thirty years of exile in the United States, where he “obtained a doctoral degree and worked as a consultant in New York” (HR 31), to take part in the first democratic elections. In South Africa, he was “swept up by the enthusiasm of the time” (HR 31) and decided to stay to contribute to the development of the country. However, after four years he becomes disillusioned as he realizes that it is impossible to get a job in spite of his qualifications because, as the narrator remarks, he does not belong to the “Aristocrats of the revolution, an exclusive club that is composed of the ruling elites, their families and close friends” (HR 36) and, besides, he has not “learnt the freedom dance” (HR 31). His disillusionment stems as much from the fact that his skills and experience are not recognised as from the corruption, nepotism and violence which seem to have taken hold of the country. As a consequence, at the beginning of the novel, Camagu is ready to return to the United States where he knows his merits will be acknowledged and rewarded.

The chance encounter with a beautiful young singer with a “hauntingly fresh” voice (HR 27), at the wake of an unknown artist on the rooftop of a building in the infamous Hillbrow district of Johannesburg, entices him to abandon his project. He feels strangely attracted to the young girl but on this occasion, he is not assailed by his usual pangs of lust: what he feels is not lust; “otherwise parts of his body would be running amok” (HR 30). He thinks of her as a “spirit” who can comfort him, and it alarms him because “he has never thought of any woman like that before” (HR 30). This is why, the following morning, he finds himself pursuing her to Qolorah-by-Sea, instead of driving to the airport. He thus lands in an unknown region and an unknown community to whose welfare he will eventually commit himself. Camagu’s journey recalls the classical trope of the journey into the unknown, hence the ironical allusion of the novel’s title to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. However, Camagu’s journey, unlike Marlow’s, is not one to a hostile and threatening country but, on the contrary, one fraught with pleasant and arresting discoveries. Camagu wonders at the beauty of the landscape, concluding “that a generous artist painted the village of Qolorha-by-Sea, using splashes of lush colour” (HR 61), and is satisfied that “some people […] still wear isiXhosa costume” (HR 61). Camagu also reverses a common trope in South African literature: that of the Jim-goes-to-the-city theme, whereby a country bumpkin goes to the city and, after several encounters and ordeals, gets wise to the ways of city folk. Here, he leaves the city to settle in the country, and his romantic search for an unknown girl becomes in fact an initiation into a

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new mode of life. He becomes aware of the complexities of rural life and of his position in present-day tradition or “redness” (Woodward 180).

Camagu’s empathy for this rural community is also expressed in terms of remembrance and rediscovery. The setting stirs vague memories of his childhood in a similar landscape, and when one day he discovers a mole-snake in his bed, he suddenly remembers that it is the totem snake of his clan, the amaMpondise. His refusal to have it killed gains him the respect of the villagers: “[T]hey did not expect a man with such great education […] to have such respect for the customs of his people.” (HR 112-113) Camagu is also a Xhosa term used to address important superior persons or spirits, meaning “be gracious,” “be pacified” (Via Afrika 42). In the novel, Camagu gradually changes his identity as he tries to help people and reconcile the two contending parties of Believers and Unbelievers.

What empowers Camagu and helps him make a relevant choice, in spite of his past and of the opposition he encounters, is his holistic vision of things which, notwithstanding its idealistic undertones, in fact amounts to an artistic vision. He sees the village, its environment, the flora, the fauna, the lagoon, the valley of Nongqawuse, with the eye of an artist. What was at first a fanciful desire to follow an unknown woman finally reaches out to the entire world that virtually wraps her up, and which the quality of her voice alone had given him an intimation of: “Her voice remains hauntingly fresh. It is a freshness that cries to be echoed by the green hills, towering cliffs and deep gullies of a folktale dreamland.” (HR 27) If he gradually sheds his romantic illusions about the country, it is nevertheless his capacity to encompass a multiplicity of elements within a single act of perception and to arrange them on a single plane of immanence—landscape, woman, village, community, identity—–that underpins his will to understand the villagers and their needs, and eventually initiate a movement of reterritorialisation. Camagu’s commitment to the people of the village is correlated with his conviction that he can be useful only insofar as he manages to help them “produce a form of economic and social development that benefits them within economic, social and political realities of globalisation” (Peeters 39), that is to say, foster their own agency.

Camagu as a facilitator or catalyst transcends the deadlock created by the stultifying legacy of the Cattle Killing Movement by re-inscribing certain traditional values and cultural practices within modern strategies of development. He thus stimulates and orientates people’s energies, skills and creative capacities, especially women’s, towards the realization of an economic empowerment project which they will entirely control. He suggests that Nongqawuse Valley be declared a heritage site and turned into an eco-tourism centre in order to build a holiday camp run on a cooperative basis by all the people of the community interested in it. The connection, which is thus established between Camagu and Nongqawuse, points to the proper use of the past. Owing to his commitment to the protection of the environment and to his marriage to a young country girl named Qukezwa who, in spite of her youth and lack of education, has nevertheless helped him dispel his illusions about traditional life, Camagu appears to be the symbolical


reincarnation of Twin the ancestor who married a Khoikhoi woman also named Qukezwa. Yet unlike the true descendant of Twin, Zim, he refuses to be made powerless by the burden of the past: what is needed is a policy of collective regeneration for the present and not a sterile loyalty to the past for the sake of the ancestors’ sufferings. Thus, through Camagu’s intervention, the name of Nongqawuse, which for generations had divided the amaXhosa, becomes a signifier for transformation and reconciliation as the holiday camp he builds on the very spot where the prophetess heard the voices of strangers is named after her. It is no less ironical that the judicial decision which cancelled the former capitalist project supported by Bhonco and the Unbelievers was instigated by a white man, John Dalton, the local white trader and descendant of a former British soldier and magistrate who was directly responsible for the death of Zim’s and Bhonco’s ancestor, Xikixa. It is one of the many ironies of the novel which blurs the supposedly irreconcilable antagonisms of the past, and particularly the black-white or African-European divide.

As one critic puts it, Mda’s novel “deploys epistemological challenges to dualistic thinking” (Woodward 173). If Mda has chosen to deal with the Cattle Killing Movement, it is precisely on account of its implied ambiguities. The social and cultural heterogeneity and hybridity, which characterized colonial history, cannot be simply accounted for, especially today, in terms of dualisms which have become irrelevant. If distinctions must be established for the sake of explanation, they should be based on relevant criteria. Thus the attempted murder by Bhonco on the person of John Dalton is a case in point. Bhonco wants to kill him because he is held responsible for the failure of the development project he supported. Yet his true motivation is probably related to the old antagonism between British and amaXhosa, since Dalton’s ancestor killed Bhonco’s ancestor during a frontier war. Still, this black-white antagonism makes no sense, as John Dalton, like Camagu and Zim, is also determined to protect the traditions and the site of the amaXhosa community. M,oreover, like Bhonco and Zim, he has gone through the amaXhosa rites of initiation and has been circumcised. Despite his white appearance, Dalton’s heart “is an umXhosa heart” (HR 6).

The gist of the novel consists precisely in creating ambivalent situations which make the reader realize that rigid dualistic patterns of thinking are no longer sufficient to arrive at a clear understanding of things. The novel undermines the barriers that exist between animals and humans, the living and the dead, the wild and the tame, tradition and modernity. Bhonco’s wife’s remark— “Maybe there are indeed different ways to progress” (HR 261)— encapsulates this epistemological approach. The heterogeneity of the colonial impact on the modern world demands that one should be in a position to contemplate contradictory things at the same time. As a critic puts it, “Mda undermines, quite profoundly, with recourse to traditional beliefs, dualistic (sometimes Western) thinking about differences.” (Woodward 183)

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The recurrent motif of the split-tone song or undertone song becomes the artistic metaphor of this epistemological necessity. Overtone singing is a traditional amaXhosa practice which consists in producing several tones, combining fundamentals and melody tones, with the same voice sometimes accompanied by the sound of the umrhubbhe or mouth bow (Jacobs 3). Mda uses singing as a key theme: it is after hearing a woman at a wake in Hillbrow that Camagu follows her to Qolorha-by-the-Sea. It is also upon hearing another young woman, Qukezwa, Zim’s daughter, sing in split-tones that he falls in love with her. The split-tone song is more significantly used as a source of artistic synesthesia, conveying in vivid shapes and colours the beauty of the local environment:

Many voices come from her mouth. Deep sounds that echo like the night. Sounds that have the heaviness of a steamy summer night. Flaming sounds that crackle like a veld fire. Light sounds that float like flakes of snow on top of the Amathole Mountains. Hollow sounds like laughing mountains. Coming out all at once. (HR 175)

Complexity understood either as synesthesia or as the blurring of differences is also manifest in the narrative composition of the novel and in the subtle shifts between the collective voice of the witness-narrator and the other characters’ voices. The two narrative levels are fragmented into different temporal sections which almost imperceptibly tail off into each other, creating a seamless narrative sweep. The asterisks and blanks which regularly mark a shift from one period of time to another, or from one character to another, entirely disappear at the end of the novel, raising some confusion in the mind of the reader. The only criterion which introduces a difference at the end of the novel is the nature of the song of the two women named Qukezwa. The Qukezwa of the past “fills the valley with her many voices. She fills the wild beach with dull colours. Colours that are hazy and misty. Grey mist not white” (HR 317), while the Qukezwa of the present sings in soft pastel colours (HR 319). The mist in which the landscape is often shrouded is a recurrent trope and almost always linked to Nongqawuse’s alleged visions of the ancestors rising from the sea.

The narrator’s voice shows that he is both familiar with the amaXhosa community but also close to the white settlers. Most often, however, it articulates the collective values and judgements of the former, couched in a syntax that is meant to echo the tonality and turns of phrase of isiXhosa. It is a voice which is sufficiently detached to pass criticisms levelled at the characters involved. Besides the narrator’s voice, there is a range of individual voices which vent personal concerns with all their idiosyncrasies: lucidity or obduracy, courage or cowardice, nobleness or meanness. The advantage of this narrative configuration is that the grand historical narrative is mediated by single perceptions which convey a sense of immediacy and proximity and allow the reader to better grasp their motivations and, particularly, those of the major protagonists. Accordingly, Mda forges a style that suits this aim. He draws on the narrative tradition of folklore


and combines them with contemporary forms and issues, the result being read as a kind of magic realism.

The ghostly presence of the past thus serves as a warning against the temptation to oversimplify contemporary issues. It is meant to encourage people to ponder over them and cope with ambivalence without losing a sense of their identity. The figure of Qukezwa, the Khoikhoi woman who offered her body to British soldiers to steal gunpowder from them, is a case in point. Her action did not deter her from her commitment to the struggle, her religious beliefs and her husband, Twin. She could cope with these contradictions, maintaining them in tension. Whether in the past or in the present, Qukezwa plays the role of a mediator. In the past she initiated her husband to her own Khoikoi religion, whereas the Qukezwa of the present initiates Camagu to the beauty of the landscape, the fascinating mystery of the Valley of Nongqawuse and, above all, convinces him of the necessity to protect the environment.

The novel introduces the reader to the complexities and ambivalences generated by both colonial and postcolonial history and points to the necessity of discovering new ways of thinking the present. Throughout the novel, Camagu tries to come up with original solutions to cope with the difficulties he encounters while eschewing the facileness of dualist thinking. His project, unlike those of his protagonists, does not seek to entrench amaXhosa traditions in a kind of “nativist revivalism” and provoke a new Nongqawuse syndrome. As we have seen above, not all developmental projects necessarily benefit the people, and the legacy of liberation can be questioned insofar as it tends to maintain existing social divisions. The novel shows characters confronted, willingly or unwillingly, with ambiguities. The range of responses varies from the totally ludicrous or absurd, like Zim’s and Bhonco’s, to the more questionable, like John Dalton’s project which, under the pretext of preserving so-called Xhosa authenticity, is merely a display village offering a simulacrum of the way amaXhosa used to live in the past. Camagu’s project is a compromise between tradition and modernity, between past and present, but one which has been thought out on the basis of experience and urged by a renewed feeling of identity. The choice which is finally made is one which a critic calls “accidental activism,” in the sense that “it is tied in with and responsive to the specific contingencies and possibilities of particular places, times and people while at the same time remaining open to more global contexts and possibilities” (Peeters 41).

The Heart of Redness is best understood against a background of reconciliation and reconstruction. It is not a narrative which nostalgically longs for the past. The resurgence of the past serves a twofold purpose: first, it achieves exactly what some whites refuse to accept—to recall the unquestionable exactions committed by the colonialists and how their meddling with African affairs precipitated the downfall of an entire nation. Second, the novel recalls the past without idealising it, keeping a critical distance from it through a narrative system combining different voices, points of view and languages. It also brings into focus the plight of neglected,

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disadvantaged and marginalised communities in today’s South Africa. The satirical thrust levelled at ill-conceived development projects for the sake of modernity serves to foreground the idea that there are cultural elements of the past which are worth preserving if the new political dispensation in South Africa is to make sense. It is therefore a story of empowerment showing how people can become instrumental in their own development. The Heart of Redness also boils down to a kind of epistemological exercise which invites readers to break away from rigid dualistic patterns of thinking, in order to apprehend the complexities and ambivalences of the present. The legacy of the Nongqawuse narrative as used by Mda in his novel has a twofold purpose: it serves to remind readers that what happened in the past must never happen again and cannot be forgotten but, at the same time, the evocation of the past does not mean, as he observes, “that we must cling to [it] and wrap it around us, and live for it, and be perpetual victims who wallow in a masochistic memory of our national humiliation” (Mda, “The Role of Culture” 7).

Richard SAMIN Nancy-Université

Works cited

Attwell, David. Rewriting Modernity. Studies in Black South African Literary History, Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2005.

Dhlomo, H. I. E. The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse the Liberator, Alice: Lovedale Press, 1935.

Jacobs, J.U. “‘Singing in a Split Tone’: Hybridity in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness,” in Monti and Douthwaite, eds., Migrating the Texts: Hybridity as a Postcolonial Construct, Turin: L’Harmattan Italie, 2005: 191-225.

Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real. The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari,” Copyright 1 (1987): 90-99.

Mda, Zakes. When People Play People. Development Communication Through Theatre, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993.

—. “The Role of Culture in the Process of Reconciliation in South Africa,” seminar paper n° 9, 1994. http://www.csvr.org.za/papers/papmda.htm. Accessed 26 January 2008.

—. Ways of Dying, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1995.—. The Heart of Redness, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2000.Mervis, Margaret. “Fiction for Development. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying,” Current

Writing 10.1 (1998): 39-56.Peeters, Erik. “The Accidental Activist: Reading Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness as a

Parody of the Disappointed African Intellectual,” Postamble 3.2 (2007): 30-43.Via Afrika. Dictionary. English-Xhosa, Xhosa-English Dictionary, Cape Town: Pharos,

1998.Woodward, Wendy. “‘Jim comes from Jo’burg’: Regionalised Identities and Social

Comedy in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness,” Current Writing 1.2 (2003): 173-185.

“The past a repast”: Past and Present in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera

This article concentrates on how, in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera foregrounds the past as inevitably contaminating the present: the resurgence of repressed memory operates as a determining factor in blurring the boundaries between victim and victimiser, and between past and present. It will be seen that Vera presents the violent Zimbabwean past as influencing the present, leading to a perpetuation of violence. The “repast” which is the past is therefore not a nourishing one, but an unwholesome one, and yet there is a trace of optimism in both novels as the female victims of violence manage to attain some form of liberation or “deliverance.” The tension between Ricoeur’s “destructive forgetting” and “forgetting that preserves” will be explored with a view to exposing how Vera highlights both the negative and cathartic power of repressed memory.

B utterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, the final two novels by Yvonne Vera,1 are set respectively in Zimbabwe in the 1940s and in the early 1980s, and both novels are concerned with demonstrating how

“the full weight of the past” (Vera, Stone Virgins 172)2 overwhelms the present, leading to acts of extreme barbary but also to potential catharsis. As in all of Vera’s novels, the resurgence of repressed memory is a central preoccupation in these two texts in which past and present frequently become intermingled as a result of the narrative style, which oscillates between first and third person narrators and shifting points of view. Both novels contain scenes of violence, perpetrated against the self or another, and, in both novels, women are the victims of these acts. However, the binaries of attacker and victim, destruction and catharsis, past and present are significantly nuanced as Vera proffers a disturbingly lyrical vision of the manner in which the past weighs heavily on the present.

Butterfly Burning is set in the 1940s in a township outside Bulawayo, in which Phephelaphi, a young woman, lives with her lover, an older man named Fumbatha. Her heart set on becoming one of the first black nurses in Bulawayo, Phephelaphi is aghast when she realises she is pregnant, as this will lead to her being expelled from the training programme. She therefore carries out an abortion, revealing nothing of either the pregnancy or this act to Fumbatha. He

1. Yvonne Vera passed away in April 2005, leaving unfinished her most recent novel, Obedience.

2. Subsequent page references to Vera’s Stone Virgins will be preceded by the abbreviation SV.

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nevertheless finds out about it, leaves Phephelaphi, who is pregnant once again and who kills herself by self-immolation. The Stone Virgins, set in Matabeleland during the period preceding and succeeding Independence, is the story of two sisters who are attacked by a dissident freedom fighter: Thenjiwe is decapitated and Nonceba is raped and her lips cut off. For Sibaso, the attacker, “the past [is] a repast, the future a talisman” (SV 84) and this article will show how Vera, in both novels, guards against the danger of using the past to justify the present, as the play on the word “past” suggests. It will be shown that excessively feeding off the past results in a disillusionment with the present which can lead to violence, while the constant tension between Ricoeur’s “destructive forgetting” and “forgetting that preserves” (Ricoeur 442) is revealing of both the negative and cathartic powers of the resurgence of repressed memory. Although Ricoeur makes the distinction between “these two figures of deep, primordial forgetting” (442), the latter referring to forgetting in terms of a “reserve or resource” (440) from which memory can be activated and the former to forgetting as a form of erosion of memory, he ultimately recognises an equivocalness in them, and it is precisely this which Vera represents. On a more structural level, the constant toing and froing between different narrative voices and between flashbacks and the present contributes to the blurring of temporal boundaries in these novels and mirrors the many layers of memory which emerge.

Sibaso, the attacker in The Stone Virgins, takes refuge in the mountains after Independence and the emergence of Robert Mugabe’s construction of a new national identity. Anchored essentially in Shona culture, this new historiography refused to acknowledge the contributions and sacrifices of other ethnic groups during the liberation struggle, leading to violent confrontations in Matabeleland.3 Sheltering in a sacred cave in the mountains, Sibaso reflects on the topographies of memory:

3. A liberation struggle spanning fourteen years took place before Zimbabwe finally obtained Independence in 1980, with Robert Mugabe becoming first Prime Minister and then President. It is important to note that the two nationalist guerrilla groups who fought for Independance (ZANLA and ZIPRA) were dominated by two different ethnic groups: ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) was essentially Shona, whereas ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army) was essentially Ndebele. ZANLA was the military wing of ZANU-PF, Mugabe’s party, and ZIPRA the military wing of the opposition party ZAPU. The confrontations which took place in the five years following on from Independence were fuelled not only by political disagreements, but also by interethnic disputes. The latter were exacerbated by the mainly Shona government’s attempts to forge a national identity which acknowledged little or nothing of the ethnic diversity of the country. The government’s response to a rebellion in Matebeleland in the early 1980s was a brutal repression which cost the lives of thousands, including many civilians (Bull-Christiansen 54-58). The events of The Stone Virgins take place during this period.

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The rocks continue in their immortal strength. You are separate. Transient. Human strength rises and wanes. Even at its summit, our strength is not rock: igneous. The mind is perishable. Memory lingers, somewhere, in fragments. Such rocks; something happened, an event cataclysmic. Something happened; this is memory. You are alive; this, too, is memory. (SV 102)

The first person narrative and the use of the personal pronoun “you” create a disconcerting intimacy. An invitation is extended to share Sibaso’s enigmatic thoughts on memory. The ephemeral nature of human life is juxtaposed to the perennity of stone, and although for Sibaso memory is perhaps less ephemeral than the physical body, it is nevertheless dispersed (“Memory lingers, somewhere, in fragments”). On one level, the unity of stone is opposed to the fragmentation of memory, as Sibaso envisages it, and the use of the indefinite pronoun renders the topography of memory unclear, contrary to that of stone. On another level, the equation by Sibaso of a violent physical action producing changes in the earth’s surface with the violent upheaval during the liberation struggle suggests that the land bears the traces of the confrontations. Indeed, the repeated use of indefinite pronouns adds a mysterious dimension to this vision of memory which, for Sibaso, is yet to be discovered (“something happened”), and the fragmentation of which is reinforced by the disjointed nature of the sentences. The image of the rocks after a cataclysm enables Vera to highlight the many contradictory memories which struggle to find their place in the post-Independence period: “There is no single memory but multiple memories all battling to fill the cultural space that defines the nation.” (Vambe 106)

This particular interpretation of memory takes on its full meaning when Sibaso describes the images of the stone virgins on the walls of the sacred cave. He describes in great detail the artistic representation of these virgins who sacrifice themselves for their deceased king by accompanying him into the afterlife. After a lengthy description of these images, Sibaso touches one of them: “I place my hand over the waist of the dead woman, on an inch of bone, yet forty thousand years gather in my memory like a wild wind.” (SV 104) The power of the myth, activated by the mere act of touching the image, is revealing of the way in which Sibaso, as a way of constructing meaning for his life, hangs on to the past, to the detriment of the present. The weight of the past and the confusion it provokes in his mind re-emerge during his attack. Watching Nonceba after having raped her, he remembers the stone virgins:

He sees her dancing heels, her hands chaste dead bone, porously thin, painted on a rock. Her neck is leaning upon a raised arrow, her mind pierced by the sun. She is a woman from very far, from long ago, from the naked caves in the hills of Gulati. She does not belong here. She bears the single solitude of a flame, the shape and form of a painted memory.He thrusts her body to the ground: a dead past. (SV 78)

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The confusion felt by Sibaso is at its height in the conflation of Nonceba, whom he has just brutally raped, and “the shape and form of a painted memory.” However, the manner in which he throws Nonceba to the ground suggests that history has disappointed him, while the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of the precolonial past that these images represent reveal his discontent in the aftermath of Independence. The association of Nonceba and a “painted memory” indicates the many layers of memory at work: the original virgin, the artist’s memory of the virgin, his representation of that memory and Sibaso’s memory of that image. These layers of memory lead to an erroneous interpretation of the scene being played out in front of him, in which he is the main character, and the move from an aestheticisation of her body to defamiliarisation and then to a brutal reminder of the reality of the situation is perhaps also a reflection of the process of rejection of the ideals of the liberation struggle.

During the attack, which is narrated alternately from Nonceba’s and Sibaso’s points of view, the violation is described as being both physical and psychological: “He holds her dark bone”; “He owns her memory.” (SV 70-1) This appropriation of Nonceba’s body can also be read as an appropriation of the memory of the stone virgins, and it becomes clear that Sibaso is using the memory to inflict pain. His present disillusionment drives him to call up the memory of a precolonial past and to act it out. Memory for Sibaso is synonymous with pain: “I am a man who is set free, Sibaso, one who remembers harm,” (SV 97) and this memory of harm is inextricably linked to his disappointment and his invisibility after Independence: “Independence is the compromise to which I could not belong”; “They remember nothing. They never speak of it now; at least I do not hear of it.” (SV 97) The deictic “they” reinforces the alienation felt by Sibaso, as although it is not clear whether he is referring to the government or to the general population, this plural personal pronoun is in tension with the singular pronoun “I.” Vera presents the pain Sibaso feels at this quelling of part of the national memory and of his unacknowledged sacrifice as the pulsion driving him to commit his violent acts, and this in turn creates a degree of understanding for him, blurring the boundaries between victim and victimiser.4

In an attempt to find “an immaculate truth” (SV 84) which would help the country find “a balm for [its] own wounds” (SV 81), Sibaso reflects on different types of spider which represent, for him, different types of truth. Having described a certain spider that devours her partner during mating and then transforms him into a paste with which she entices her next partner, he continues:

4. Edna O’Brien (2003) has suggested that “Sibaso remains a phantom—more a personification of evil than a full-fledged character.” Yet it seems to me that Vera’s choice to give Sibaso a voice, the chapters narrated by him alternating with those narrated by Nonceba, is indicative of a desire to break out of the binaries of good and evil, attacker and victim, and to provide a more complex vision of the violent heritage of the liberation struggle.

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Such a spider possesses a valuable secret—the knowledge that love cannot be founded on mercy but that mercy can be founded on love. It knows the true agony of ecstacy, that violence is part of the play of opposites, and that during the war, there are two kinds of lovers, the one located in the past, and dead, the one in the future, living and more desirable. The past a repast, the future a talisman. This kind of truth also belongs to the fantasy of a continent in disarray. (SV 84)

The numerous oppositions in this passage are accentuated by the structure of the sentences, in which antithetical parallelisms can be observed, which highlight the plural nature of “this kind of truth.” Similarly, the play on words in the phrase which gives its title to this article suggests the way in which the past is taken apart, transformed and fed on blindly in order to nourish the future. This is clearly a metaphorical commentary on the way in which the liberation struggle was used by the new government to give a legitimacy to Mugabe, who then used the past to justify what is widely recognized as a genocide in Matabeleland (Ranger 206-9).

It is no coincidence that Vera chooses not to reveal whether there is any catharsis possible for Sibaso. Simultaneously portrayed as attacker and victim, his destructive and violent acts do not seem to appease him, as his act of throwing Nonceba to the ground in disgust suggests. The fusion and resurgence of different layers of collective and individual memory (precolonial, colonial and postcolonial) leads to confusion, frustration and a grotesque parody of the stone virgins’ sacrifice after which Sibaso retreats to the mountains where, we must presume, his disillusionment will continue to haunt him. What is clear, however, is the fact that the new government’s rewriting of history and the exclusion of certain aspects of contemporary Zimbabwean history is an example of the selective aspect of narrative, which, according to Ricoeur, “opens to manipulation the opportunity and the means of a clever strategy, consisting from the outset in a strategy of forgetting as much as in a strategy of remembering” (Ricoeur 85). The fact that Sibaso’s war memories remain unsanctioned by official discourse results in his own corruption of memory and leads to his acts of violence.

The central male character of Butterfly Burning, Fumbatha, experiences similar confusion (though with less devastating consequences) regarding both collective and individual memory. Although his name means “clenched fist” in Ndebele, immediately calling up the notion of resistance, Fumbatha is no resistant. He is the son of a man hanged along with seventeen others in 1896 by the British during the first chimurenga.5 Fumbatha works on a construction site in Bulawayo; his hands leave their mark on the city, through the buildings he helps construct.

5. Chimurenga, the Shona word for struggle, is frequently used to designate specific periods of resistance to colonial rule in what was previously Southern Rhodesia. What is commonly referred to as the first chimurenga took place in 1896-7 when the medium Mbuya Nehanda encouraged the indigenous population to combat British colonial rule, and the second chimurenga, which ultimately resulted in Independence, took place between 1965 and 1980.

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However, although he feels pride at his work, he wonders about its negative effects:

He has built. When he is dead, his hands will remain everywhere. He does not know if he is part of the larger harm. He does not understand it at all except the lingering hurt which needs not to be understood to be felt. Sometimes the present is so changed that the past is linked to the present only by a fragile word. To build something new, you must be prepared to destroy the past. (Vera, Butterfly Burning 25-6)6

The diglossia which is recurrent in all of Vera’s novels is evident here. While the beginning of the passage is in free indirect discourse, the narrative voice of the following sentences is more difficult to determine. It is, however, quite clear that Fumbatha has a sense that he is contributing to the evolution of the colonisers (and, by extension, to the exploitation of the indigenous population), but this feeling is not completely understood. It is expressed by periphrasis (“he is part of the larger harm”), and it is the narrator who elliptically renders explicit his feelings of guilt in relation to his father’s sacrifice. Fumbatha’s clenched fist is used in the service of the opponent, to wipe out history. Working in construction, Fumbatha is going against his father’s resistance, paradoxically “destroying” all traces of the past as he helps to construct a future in which he will be unable to partake fully. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that the residual feelings of guilt, even if they are not fully understood, reveal to what extent the past continues to exert an influence on the present, through the form of pain. It is worth noting that Phephelaphi (whose name means refuge or shelter) was originally called Sakhile by her mother, a Zulu word meaning “we have created something,” before being renamed at the age of six. This imposed change of name is significant in the light of Phephelaphi’s acts of destruction (the self-performed abortion and self-immolation) and in the light of Fumbatha’s dubious pride in his acts of construction.

Phephelaphi too is preoccupied by the past, and her response is to project herself into the future. One particular memory haunts her—that of the murder of the woman who brought her up (but who, she later learns, was not her biological mother). Gertrude was a prostitute and was killed by a jealous client as Phephelaphi looked on. Her memory of this traumatic event is hazy and focuses on the recurring image of Gertrude’s arm falling from the doorframe and her body following onto the ground. Although this continually resurfacing memory is described several times in the novel, it remains vague each time as Phephelaphi is unable to remember it fully, despite the fact that she “argue[s] with the memory of her mother” (BB 33). The choice of the verb “argue” here presupposes interaction, and it is therefore significant that the anamnesis, the act of

6. Subsequent page references to Vera’s Butterfly Burning will be preceded by the abbreviation BB.

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recollection of the memory of her mother (to be distinguished, as Ricoeur points out, from mnene, the mere presence of the memory [Ricoeur 44]), should be rendered by a synecdoche: “For days and days after that, the arm kept falling from the doorway. This to her was now the symbol of death.” (BB 34) All memories of her mother have been usurped by this image of one specific part of her body. This movement of the arm later becomes the symbol of Phephelaphi’s own death, as her metamorphosis from woman to butterfly takes place: “The fire moves over her light as a feather, smooth like oil. She has wings. She can fly. She turns her arms over and sees them burn and raises them higher above her head, easily, tossing and turning her arms up like a burning rope. She is a bird with wings spread.” (BB 150) Diglossia is again effectively used as the almost imperceptible shift from free indirect discourse to the narrator’s intervention simultaneously renders the beauty and the pain of her death: while Phephelaphi sees herself as a butterfly, the narrator reminds us of the grim reality of the situation through the simile equating her not with nature but an inanimate object on fire.

Just as Sibaso harms Nonceba and Thenjiwe because of the unbearable weight of the past and the conflation in his mind of past and present, so Phephelaphi harms herself because of a need to escape her past and to free herself from reproducing the maternal schema. Having decided to “forget what memory was there” in her past, that is to say, her mother’s prostitution and untimely violent death, she sees the year 1946 as being “fast paced and promis[ing] a sultry escape” (BB 32). Phephelaphi’s awareness of her mother’s sexuality, described at length in the novel, results in her rejection of it, symbolised by the moment when she throws out the revealing dress her mother was wearing when she died. It is no coincidence that this same chapter opens with the statement “Phephelaphi wanted to be somebody” (BB 74), and a description of her desire for more than just a reationship with the man she loves: “who could she be and how, where could she be and with what wings” (BB 78-9).

Phephelaphi, however, can only fly with her own wings (as it were) through her self-immolation, the lyrical description of which highlights the sense of freedom this act brings about. Her failure, in her eyes, to leave her past behind her by becoming a nurse, as well as her finding herself alone and pregnant, and her refusal to submit to this situation, result in her dramatic suicide. Unable to eschew her past and the present, Phephelaphi chooses to end her life, and yet, this dramatic death belies a disturbing catharsis which is also present in The Stone Virgins. The act of setting herself alight is described as an “embracing [of ] each part of herself with flame, deeply and specially” (BB 150), suggesting that Phephelaphi has at last reached a point where she has appropriated and accepted her body. Although, as Eva Hunter has pointed out, “when each [of Vera’s] protagonist[s] seizes agency most decisively, she becomes an agent of death” (Hunter 241),7 it is

7. Interestingly, in The Stone Virgins, published after Hunter’s article, Nonceba, the main female protagonist, is able to seize agency without becoming “an agent of death.”

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clear that Vera is pinpointing the limitations placed on women and highlighting attempts at overcoming “the fetters of fertility” (Hunter 240). Phephelaphi, in this respect, escapes her oppressive past and present, and the expectations placed on her both by Fumbatha and society, but her suicide precludes any possibility of real change.

Cephas Dube, the other main male protagonist of The Stone Virgins, is arguably the only character of Vera’s who manages to reconcile past and present harmoniously. Cephas, a former lover of Thenjiwe, convinces Nonceba to come and live with him in Bulawayo, where he feels he can protect her, but the past invades the present constantly:

She carries the visible scars; he shields her from the invisible ones. [...] The nature of their friendship is in the elimination of detail, of the specific, in order to free her. They cannot yet discuss matters that concern the cause of their despair. Not yet. Not together. Such thoughts remain separate, lingering in the corners of their minds. [...] Their thoughts are completely absorbed by the full weight of the past. The mind is buried in its own despair, but they survive, day to day, in their friendship. The past is so much heavier for them than the present. (SV 172)

The repetition of the adverb “yet” in this passage leaves open the possibility that Nonceba will one day be in a position to confront her memories of the past, but the periphrasis “they cannot yet discuss matters that concern the cause of their despair” suggests that that day is still far off. For the moment, the resurgent memories of the past hinder communication and weigh down the present. The weight of the past closes them off from each other, preventing real sharing, as the short disjointed negative sentences highlight.

The promise of a cathartic reconstruction of memory is presented in a different way and on a larger scale through Cephas’s work as a historian piecing together archives in order to reconstruct the history of kwoBulawayo, the precolonial stronghold of the Ndebele people, with a view to inscribing it in the national history. Vera clearly wishes to take a stand on the necessity of including in official history all aspects of the past. Maurice Vambe has pointed out that Vera contributes to the construction of a new Ndebele historiography in this novel (Mamber 104), and Dorothy Driver and Meg Samuelson have emphasised that the phrase “a new nation needs to restore the past” on the final page of the novel (SV 184), interestingly in total contradiction with Fumbatha’s thoughts on the necessity of “destroy[ing] the past” in order “to build something new” (BB 26), contains no trace of irony (Driver and Samuelson 187). The positive aspect of Cephas’s work is highlighted in the novel’s final sentence:

His task is to learn to re-create the manner in which the tenderest branches bend, meet and dry, the way the grass folds smoothly over this frame and weaves a nest, the way it protects the cool, livable places within—deliverance. (SV 184)

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The final word is significant as it suggests the potential of this reconstruction, the implication being that the finality of this reconstruction will bring about “deliverance,” the importance of which is emphasised by the typographic separation. Moreover, the final sentences are dominated by a lexical field linked to well-being, hinting thereby at the promise of fulfilment contained in this new contribution to collective memory. A feeling of harmony therefore reigns at the end of this novel dominated by acts of gratuitous violence and usurpation of memory.

Perhaps the most commented upon aspect of Vera’s fiction is her lyrical style, which often seems at odds with the violent acts related. The use in these novels, in which memory and its resurgence are central, of what Ranka Primorac has dubbed “the main ingredients of a ‘poetic’ style: the use of elliptical sentences, repetition and present tense narration” (Primorac 102), serves to mirror on both a narrative and structural level the multiple layers of memory. The predominance of present tense narration in both novels creates an immediacy between the language and the event and reinforces the influence of the past on the present. By choosing to narrate past events in the present tense, Vera renders explicit the constant presence of the past. When Nonceba remembers Sibaso’s mutilation of her face, the present tense is used, just as when Sibaso remembers his wartime experiences. In this way, the power of memory and the influence it exerts on the present is highlighted. Abrupt shifts from preterite to present abound in Butterfly Burning where the chronology is also disrupted, the implied narrator obliquely revealing in chapter four the dramatic events of the end of the novel in the conditional mode (BB 35). Just as the passages in which Sibaso and Nonceba remember their harrowing experiences are in the present tense, so the hanging of Fumbatha’s father is also recounted in the present tense, thus emphasising the significance of this memory in terms of its influence on the present. Furthermore, the occasional shifts from third to first person narratives reinforce the immediacy created by the use of the synoptic present; in particular, Vera’s choice to have alternate chapters narrated by Nonceba and Sibaso in The Stone Virgins, apart from reinforcing radically different perspectives, also heightens the tension between different individual memories, thereby cautioning against the creation of a monolithic collective memory.

In conclusion, it becomes clear on reading these novels, as Muponde and Taruvinga have pointed out, that Vera is concerned to present “multi-layered portraits” of Zimbabwe. In placing the resurgence of repressed memory at the centre of her preoccupations, she enshrines “memories of the struggle,” both individual and collective. Vera’s characters carry their past as a burden which is sometimes beyond their comprehension. The disconcertingly lyrical nature of Vera’s prose moves between flights of imagination and brutal reality, and although the historical context is central to her works, the originality of Vera’s fiction lies not in “the historian’s emphasis on dates, facts and occurrences,” but in her

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depiction of “imaginative and spiritual journeys of a colonised and oppressed people” (Muponde and Taruvinga xi). But more specifically, Vera’s elliptical, poetic prose ultimately focuses less on the past itself than on what is recoverable from it, and the exploration of fragmented memory in these and indeed all of her novels reveals the act of remembering to be both potentially empowering and destructive. Any comfortable conclusions are therefore rendered awkward, and yet Vera’s formal innovations undoubtedly offer new perspectives from which to interrogate the legacy of History.

Fiona McCANN Lycée Edouard Branly

Works cited

Bull-Christiansen, Lene. Tales of the Nation. Feminist Nationalism or Patriotic Identity? Defining National History and Identity in Zimbabwe, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004.

Driver, Dorothy and Meg Samuelson. “History’s Intimate Invasions: Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins,” in Bettina Weiss, ed., The End of Unheard Narratives: Contemporary Perspectives on Southern African Literatures, Heidelberg: Kalliope Paperbacks, 2004: 175-208.

Hunter, Eva. “Zimbabwean Nationalism and Motherhood in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning,” African Studies 59.2 (2000): 229-43.

Muponde, Robert and Mandi Taruvinga, eds. Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, Harare: Weaver Press, 2002.

O’Brien, Edna. “A Stone of the Heart,” The New Yorker. http:www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/24/030324crbo_books?currentPage=1.

Accessed 9 April 2008.Primorac, Ranka. “Iron Butterflies: Notes on Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning,” in Robert

Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga, eds., Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, Harare: Weaver Press, 2002: 101-108.

Ranger, Terence. “History Has its Ceiling. The Pressures of the Past in The Stone Virgins,” in Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga, eds., Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, Harare: Weaver Press, 2002: 203-16.

Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago / London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Vambe, Maurice. “Cultural Memory and the Politics of Remembering,” in Maurice Vambe, ed., African Oral Story-Telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English, Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2004: 100-108.

Vera, Yvonne. Butterfly Burning (1998), New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.—. The Stone Virgins, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

The Resurgence of Prison Imagery in Breyten Breytenbach’s A Veil of

Footsteps

This analysis of Breyten Breytenbach’s most recent work, A Veil of Footsteps. Memoir of a nomadic fictional character, concentrates on the manner in which the prison and its related themes of alienation and death resurge in varied and surprising manners—the intimate, almost confidential nature of the text which involves the reader in Breyten Wordfool’s world rendering the resurgence of prison imagery all the more disturbing.

In A Veil of Footsteps. Memoir of a nomadic fictional character, a work that is playful, light in tone and deceptively simple, Breyten Breytenbach offers a subtle overview of his literary and painterly oeuvre. It reads as a sensual

celebration of life and more particularly of the things that Breyten Wordfool loves in life. The reader accompanies the nomadic Wordfool on his travels, and not only spends time with him in Barcelona, New York, Paris and Dakar, but is invited into the intimate spaces that the artist inhabits: his house in the Spanish countryside, the institute he is the director of on the island of Gorée, his favourite bistrots and restaurants in the area close to his Paris studio, his working space in New York. The text is illustrated with “unprofessional photographs” (to use the author’s own words) that the nomad took with his cellphone—this is the first time that Breytenbach (who is also a painter) includes photographs taken by himself in one of his works of fiction. In spite of its subtitle, it is tempting to read A Veil of Footstep1 as a straightforward autobiography. The first interview with Breytenbach on the work, published in the Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger on 22 February 2008, largely falls into the trap of taking the text at face value. This is conveyed by the kind of questions the interviewer, Murray La Vita, asks the author. Many of his questions focus on Breytenbach’s private life, rather than on the text. La Vita wants to know more about Breytenbach’s daughter, who has been preserved from public exposure in South Africa, and about his friendship with Johannes Kerkorrel, a South African musician who committed suicide. That La Vita is often off target is conveyed by Breytenbach’s polite sidestepping of the questions and by his playful answers. To the interviewer’s final question about whether he knows Cesaria Evora, Breytenbach responds: “Deeply, deeply, she is the Ultimate Reader.” (La Vita 13; my translation of the Afrikaans)

A Veil of Footsteps is a deceptively “easy” read, which is not normally the case with Breytenbach, a notoriously “difficult” author. I had the privilege and pleasure

1. All quotations are from the South African edition of the work.

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of reading the manuscript and of discussing the work in the making with the author, right up to the publication of the book. The following analysis will take this exchange into account. After a brief presentation of the work, its apparently smooth surface texture will be examined more closely. For closer scrutiny of the overall “picture” reveals not only rough areas, but also tears in the “canvas,” dark spaces one may get lost in. My choice of applying terminology to the text that would normally be applied to painting arose spontaneously—perhaps because Breytenbach is a painter who looks at the world and describes it with a painter’s eye. This analysis focuses on the surface texture —and tensions—of the work of art: the literary text. I would like to acknowledge Liliane Louvel’s argument that one can use the techniques of painting in order to make sense of a literary text: “utiliser les techniques de la peinture pour rendre compte du texte littéraire” (Louvel 230).

The reader’s guide is a nomadic painter and writer, Breyten Wordfool, whom I shall read as a character—complex, cunning and elusive—and not as the biographical Breyten Breytenbach, however tempting such a reading may be. Though the reader may have the pleasant impression of accompanying Wordfool on his travels, into a pub in Bantry Bay, Cape Town, or a restaurant on Gorée Island, Wordfool remains elusive. He is however the reader’s only guide through the shadowy areas of the text, over the obstacles that arise unexpectedly. I shall argue that prison imagery has not resurged in such a disarming manner in Breytenbach’s writing since the works he produced during or directly following his seven and a half years in prison: “On the Noble Art of Walking in No Man’s Land” (the second part of the novel Memory of Snow and of Dust), Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel, and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. Finally, by carefully considering the terms employed by the author in a conversation, namely “stocktaking” (betsekopname in Afrikaans) and “levelling” (gelykmaak), I shall reconsider my interpretation of the work as a whole, as well as my reading of the “resurgence” of “prison imagery.”

A Diary of Words and Images

A Veil of Footsteps is, amongst other things, the carnet de voyage of an artist leading a nomadic existence. Interestingly, the narrator refers to the notion of a diary early in the text. The following conversation occurs between Breyten Wordfool and a lady sitting next to him on the train to Genoa:

It must be very difficult being a writer, she remarked; you need inspiration all the time otherwise you get blocked.But no, it is not as bad as being an undertaker, it does not wither the hands and anyway one gets around the problem by writing short diary-like entries. (Breytenbach, A Veil of Footsteps 10)2

2. Subsequent page references to Breytenbach’s A Veil of Footsteps will be preceded by the abbreviation VF.

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The descriptions of cityscapes (streets, squares, buildings, but also pavements and rubble) and landscapes (sunsets, mountains, beaches, and a baobab tree decorated with “fetishes” like “armlets of plaited grass, garment shreds, maybe a little doll” [VF 188]) are detailed. The attention paid to space, perspective, line, colour and pattern makes the reader aware that the observations are made by a painter’s eye—the carnet also brings to mind a sketchbook. The designation of the text as a carnet de voyage is however nuanced by the following quotation from the opening page, in which landscape and page become inseparable and the eye is central:

The eye instinctively deciphers the land as if it were a book telling of riddles and of dangers. Nothing belongs to me and yet I am the proprietor of a slew of stars, of that wind now, of this direction here, of these very shadows snaking along the earth. Each journey will be into the unknown but even so routes are traced the way thoughts and dreams become words and the words become tracks and the tracks turn to sand. Sand moving in a haze over your vision will be a veil of footsteps —my own, those of the ancestors, those of my companions. Birds will remember me in the sky, their flight an arrow in the soil. That’s how you read the paragraphs of my life. (VF 9)

The title of the work is taken from the above quotation; looking at the titles considered for the work will reveal more about its nature. The working title was initially Doggod, then, by August 2007, it had become Word Bird. On the Peripatetic Art of Writing an I. In a long discussion between the author and his South African publisher (which could be followed thanks to forwarded e-mails) a list of titles was considered, though the subtitle, Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character, was retained fairly early on. After the first two titles had been vetoed, the author’s new list proposals in order of preference was: The Lines Have Fallen Unto Me In Beautiful Places, Word, Bird, Wind (or Word Bird Wind or A Wind of Birds), The Middle World (or My Travels Through the Middle World), The Nomad’s Memoir (in which case the subtitle would have fallen away), Letting Go and The Open I. This was followed by a second list: The Emptied Space of the Dance, Progress Report, Paper Chase, Crossing to the Unknown, A Word Fool’s Travels through the Middle World. And a third list: A Veil of Footsteps, The Sounds of an Earth Turning Slowly, My Travels through The Middle World. The final two titles were A Veil of Footsteps. Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character and Word Bird. A Murmured Migration of Images. These possible titles convey the key interlinked themes of constant movement, writing and painting, nomadism (note that Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character was retained at the very beginning) and fiction. The landscape of language or the language of landscape is a leitmotif of A Veil of Footsteps. The “middle world” would refer to a space the nomad—the “peripatetic” writer—enters when writing. L’empreinte des pas sur la terre is the title of the French edition, published in May 2008 by Actes Sud.

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The reader is warned that the work is not a novel: “My publisher objected that all these loose ends could hardly be strung into a novel.” (VF 10) Thus the work playfully eludes definition. Consisting as it does of fragments, its structure inevitably reminds the Breytenbach scholar of Mouroir. Mirrornotes of a Novel. The two works have in common the notion of travel through landscapes or mindscapes, and the crossing of fictional or meta-fictional borders. The major theme that Mouroir works with—and defies—is enclosure. The main theme in A Veil of Footsteps is travel. The descriptions in Mouroir are characterized by the predominance of the non-colour grey; in A Veil of Footsteps colour abounds.

Fragments dealing with the same place are grouped together. Roughly, the reader accompanies Breyten Wordfool on the following itinerary: Spain – Paris – Spain – South Africa – Senegal – New York. It is place and not time that structures the work, time being dealt with in a circular manner. For example, the long third group of texts dealing with Spain has Don Espejuelo, Wordfool’s “neighbour,” as central character: the story of his wild love affair with Lola, of his old age, illness and death, forms a leitmotif but is not told in a linear manner. We learn of his death in one of the first texts, yet Wordfool and Golden Lotus leave him in his house, old and ailing (and protesting), upon their departure—the scene is described in the last of the texts of this group, which deal with Spain. It is true that Don Espejuelo is also present in the prison texts, but here the reader has the impression not of resurgence, but of postmodernist “transmigration of [a character] from one fictional universe to another,” to quote Brian McHale, with reference to Umberto Eco’s definition of “transworld identity” (McHale 57). The term “transmigration,” rather than a simple retour de personnage, would be applicable to Don Espejuelo’s case, because Don Espejuelo, the protagonist’s imaginary cellmate in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, is not the same Don Espejuelo that is referred to in Memory of Snow and of Dust, nor is he the mysterious D.E. of “Re: Certain Papers Left in my Possession” (Mouroir). In A Veil of Footsteps, Don Espejuelo is, we are told, Wordfool’s eccentric Spanish neighbour. Characters too migrate in Breytenbach’s texts.

Texture: “The principal subject is the surface”

While tidying his study in Spain, Wordfool rediscovers a postcard from the American painter, Guy Harloff, who quotes Bonnard on the “surface” of paintings, (if Wordfool is “not mistaken”): “The painting is a succession of blotches that are related and form links and end up shaping the object, the part over which the eye will wander without impediment. […] The principal subject is the surface, which has its color and its laws over and above the objects.” (VF 104) When one stands back from A Veil of Footsteps as from a painting, the overall impression (“over which the eye [wanders] without impediment”) is that of a celebratory description of the world. In “Letter to a friend,” written to a dead friend named Petit-Loup, Wordfool exclaims: “Ah yes, but the world is a beautiful place! Even


where it is ugly and polluted and exhausted, mucked up by man in a fury of desperate destruction. Ah yes, this country is beautiful.” (VF 63) In the same letter, the following sentence encapsulates the work’s tone of quiet celebration: “Beyond the indignity and the pain and the terrible deception there is still this, and only this: a sunset, a bird, a hand, a song, a drink, a kiss, a worm, a dog…” (VF 67)

The passage below, dense with visual metaphors and striking due to the rhythm created by alliteration, reads like prose poetry. Note once again the painter’s eye pointing out detail, but also the source and angle of the light:

There’s a magical moment early summer mornings when the world is awake but its inhabitants still asleep, apart maybe from a walker stumbling to work or to bed, perhaps a late stalker, they may as well be talking through their dreams. The world breathes then: it is whispering to itself. Light comes in at a low slant igniting protuberances and carving the grottos of time and space. Believe me for I have seen it—cities also take time out. Wind will shake the treetops silently. In the sea, if there’s a sea, you will see sudden spurts and spouts and spigots of water, white exclamations against the light as reminders of whale fish long since gone.After the squall a sprawl of silence once more. Then there is nothing better than to go down into Spain where swallows will tumble through the sky and the laurel toss its blooms. Olive leaves are a shivering of tiny silver fishes on their branches there. (VF 59)

Breyten Wordfool, an Unlikely Guide

The reader becomes aware, fairly early in the text, that his guide is accompanied by a shadow or double. Though we are told that Breyten Wordfool prefers to travel alone, he is always shadowed by “I” or by “Breyten Breytenbach.” In this extract of “Paris,” Wordfool is confronted by a stranger who wants to know who he is:

“Are you family of Breyten?” she inquires. (She uses the formal vous as pronoun.) I shake my head and mumble. “A friend then? You look a lot like him.” Breyten Wordfool tells her she must be mistaken and makes a show of returning to his notes. Behind my back one hears her saying something to the bird sitting alone but apparently he’s not reacting either. So she returns to shyly confront me. “What are you doing?” I answer that I’m writing, frowning my serious absorption. “What? A book?” I admit that yes, it is a book. (A book of leaving to let go of illusions, I think, and how the hell did she pick on that random name? But this I keep to myself.) (VF 40)

The shift from “Breyten Wordfool tells her” to “she returns to shyly confront me” (as opposed to Breyten Wordfool, or him) occurs almost imperceptibly. In the final line, the reader does not know whether “myself ” is “Breyten Wordfool” or “Breyten,” or “I,” Wordfool’s shadow. Although the protagonist is called “Breyten

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Wordfool” most of the time, he is introduced early in the novel as “Mister Wordbird,” but also goes under other names like “Wordprick” or “Doggod.” As always in Breytenbach’s oeuvre, the “I” is multiple, or multiplies.

It is worth taking a closer look at the name “Wordfool”: “fool” is phonetically close to the Afrikaans voël, deliberately “misspelt” as woordfoël in the collection of poetry, Die Windvanger, published by Human & Rousseau in 2007. This collection of poetry was awarded the 2008 Hertzog Prize, which is the most prestigious Afrikaans literary award in South Africa. Wordfool/foël also carries the connotations of “prick,” voël being Afrikaans slang for the male sex. On the one hand, this wordplay denigrates the protagonist; on the other, it playfully alludes to Panus (formed from “penis” plus “anus”), the protagonist of Breytenbach’s short surrealist Afrikaans novel published in 1971, Om te Vlieg. Thus the author not only takes stock of an early work, but develops the continuing leitmotif of the bird. Om te Vlieg means “to fly” and its main character is indeed obsessed with the desire to fly. The bird has been a central theme in Breytenbach’s literary and painterly oeuvre since the 1960s. In the early 1970s he sometimes signed his paintings with a small image of a bird, rather than a signature, on the back of the canvass. After his imprisonment (1975-1982), he systematically signed his paintings in this way for a few years. Even when the bird becomes a jailbird, it always carries the notions of flight, freedom and creativity. Interestingly, the Dutch edition of A Veil of Footsteps is entitled Woordvogel.

Breyten Wordfool is a Fool or jester, and a traveller. As Shaun de Waal points out in his review of Die Windvanger, Wordfoël who migrates to A Veil of Footsteps as Wordfool, is “the Fool of the Tarot, always just embarking on a journey (inner or outer),” with a patchwork “harlequin outfit” and a dog yapping at his heels (de Waal, online). The dog image or metaphor, overtly present in Breytenbach’s literary oeuvre since Dog Heart (and in his visual oeuvre since the 2001 exhibition Dancing the Dog. Paintings and Other Pornographics), is present throughout A Veil of Footsteps. As stated earlier, the work’s first working title was Doggod.

Wordfool is difficult to visualize and when he is (briefly) described, he does not resemble the biographical Breyten Breytenbach (aged sixty-nine at the date of the publication of the work, who is not balding, but whose previously black hair and beard have turned grey and who wears glasses only to read): “My blonde hair has thinned and is now fairer with white streaks, like ash really, the fire gone, and you probably never saw me with glasses. […] When I start writing the present letter I’m of middling age and build and imagination, with a slight limp due to one leg being distinctly shorter than the other.” (VF 63) The uneasiness the reader experiences in the presence of this shadowy guide is underlined by an American publisher’s request to Breytenbach to remove the Wordfool character and to replace him with the biographical Breyten Breytenbach,3 making the

text an autobiographical telling and removing its mysterious dimension, which

3. Email correspondance with the author, between 5 and 21 October 2007.


is explored in the passages evoking what is called “the middle world.” One wonders then what the publisher in question planned to do with a text like “The Catastrophe.”

Resurgence of Prison Imagery

As sometimes happens when moving closer to a painting, a closer look at A Veil of Footsteps reveals a rougher texture in spite of the smooth overall impression. It is partly the unexpected resurgence of prison imagery that spoils the surface, sometimes tearing it to reveal dark patches underneath. “The Catastrophe,” a text of one and a half pages, is situated almost in the middle of A Veil of Footsteps, a work of 300 pages. From the beginning it is clear that the text evokes a nightmare in which the cosmopolitan Breyten Wordfool’s aeroplane is forced to land in Johannesburg, not his initial destination “by any stretch of the imagination!” (VF 130). Wordfool is described as hanging onto the wing of the aeroplane, alerting the reader to the unreality of the narrative world. And then, in an arrival hall suddenly and inexplicably emptied of people, he finds himself at the immigration official’s table, face to face with “colonel Huntingdon,” the interrogator the reader knows from the autobiographical prison novel, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist:

“So you came, Dog,” the dark one says with the sepulchral voice of the security policeman. “I knew you’d do so sooner or later. I waited. Everything comes to him who knows how to wait. Even death. And now we have time.”The deserted hall is dark except for the cone of light on his table. Eternal night has folded around us. Soon now, with gestures that are scorched indelibly on that part of Breyten Wordfool which is deliriously mad, those gestures which I have tried so hard to forget remembering, soon the predator will tip back the chair on its hind legs and start cleaning his fingernails fastidiously. (VF 131)

One notes the careful accumulation of detail: the “security policeman,” or “predator,” identified above as “colonel Huntingdon,” qualified as “the dark one,” addresses the protagonist as “Dog,” in a “sepulchral voice.” The zone-, or no man’s land-quality of all arrival halls is amplified by the sudden, inexplicable emptiness in which “Hundington” and “Wordfool” face each other. Again a subtle shift from Breyten Wordfool to “I” occurs. The evocation of a “cone of light” underlines the darkness (“eternal night”) that surrounds the protagonist, emphasising a solitary “I.” It is as if the text were drained of colour, leaving only darkness and light. The cone of light in a dark hall, combined with the interrogator’s anticipated body language, announces an interminable interrogation. The helplessness of the interrogated (“prey”) is stressed—and the reader, together with the “I,” is plunged into another, frightening, dimension.

This is not the first text in A Veil of Footsteps in which a shift from reality to dream or nightmare occurs. A short text entitled “The Dream” occurs towards

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the beginning of the work (VF 27). “In the Middle of the Night” (VF 69), a dream, or an exercise in surrealist writing where the condemned characters are hybrid creatures with the heads of cats, ends with: “And then Breyten Wordbird consciously wrenches himself from the dream (I think). He doesn’t want to go deeper; it is too dark and painful there. I’m lying on my side under the sheet, knees pulled up in the foetus position.” (VF 72-73) Instant relief is offered by the next text. “It is good to be waking up,” a description of Can Ocells, Breyten Wordfool’s house in Spain, starts with: “It is good to be waking up in a familiar room when morning is already yellowing the dark crests of surrounding hilltops.” (VF 74)—returning Wordbird and “I” (and the reader) to the familiar and the reassuring. (Note again the reference to the quality of the light, the source of which is natural here.) Both “The Dream” and “In the Middle of the Night” have titles that warn the reader about the possible dreamlike character of the text. Neither, perhaps significantly, occurs in South Africa.

“The Catastrophe” is situated between the series of texts dealing with Spain and the series of texts dealing with South Africa. Between the end of the text and before the first text dealing with South Africa, an image is inserted (one of many photographs, “taken with an old mobile telephone, deliberately unprofessional,” was Breytenbach’s answer when I asked him about the picture). This image is frightening and resists analysis, partly because one cannot know what one is looking at. A ghostlike figure with an oversized head like a large cabbage and no features can be seen from just below the waist upwards. The figure is slightly off-centre, seems to be leaning forward just a little and is lit from above by an invisible source of light. In both the black-and-white print in the novel and the colour print in the manuscript, strange shapes are visible to the right and left of the figure. The sterility of the blue-green light, combined with the tube-like shapes to the right and to the left of the figure, are reminiscent of a hospital—an association that is strengthened by the impression that the figure is wrapped in bandages (hence the cabbage-like shape of the head). Instantly, a torture chamber comes to mind, followed by prison drawings from Vingermaan: condemned prisoners with sacks over their heads (stooping slightly forward), figures devoid of necks, the absence of colour in the prison drawings. And yet the image, the light, the colours (in the digital image of the original manuscript) are otherworldly—from outer-space or under the sea. This very academic analysis leads everywhere and nowhere. When asked about the picture, Breytenbach answered that it was a photograph of a mummified baboon, taken in a museum in Cairo.

Resurgence? The eighteenth-century meaning of “resurgence,” to “rise again,” comes to mind. It is the unexpectedness with which the interrogator “rises again,” or the situation of interrogation “arises again”—and the underlying threat of violence—that makes this passage so powerfully disturbing. This is reinforced by the use of the personal pronoun, “I,” and by the visual quality of the passage—the reader can indeed picture the scene. The insertion then of a real image


reinforces the power of the visual description. It also confirms the impression of otherworldliness the text leaves the reader with.

“The Catastrophe” is followed by a short series of texts dealing with South Africa. The first text of this section, “Mother City,” evokes the gangs that rule South African prisons. The description has a documentary tone from which the “I” is totally absent. It is replaced by a neutral, distant “one” and “you”: “One would tear out the heart of the victim and eat it with blood slobbering over the chin. One forced fear and respect. One was somebody. You were Number One.” (VF 133) In spite of the unbelievable violence (which is explicit, as opposed to the underlying threat of the previous passage), the reader maintains the distance of an observer. One text later, in “Mirror Note 1,” Wordfool denies and playfully rewrites the main storyline of The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist: “The reality is that I was never arrested for political activities back in 1975. It did not even happen at the City of Gold’s international airport as I pretended in later texts, but upstairs from a dingy club in Mother City. […] Here is the story and the final truth.” (VF 158) The “final truth” is an absurd story of a money smuggling racket in which “I” is a courier. The changing of hands goes wrong and as a compromise, “Breyten” accepts “political charges”: a “general ‘white-wash’ […] to be painted ‘terrorist’ in order to save some vestiges of honour!” (VF 158-159). But then the airport is mentioned in passing seven pages later, in the text “Maputo,” leading the reader in circles: “Johannesburg International Airport building, this is where he [Breyten Wordfool] had been arrested so many years ago.” (VF 166) Here, as elsewhere (the fourth and fifth, last surrealist texts deal with escape and interrogation), the references to the prison world seem to form part of the personal world that is written and re-written. The presence of these references and recurrent images (the prison, the labyrinth, search-lights, cage-like constructions, the mountain behind the prison) create patterns and an underlying tension, but do not leave the reader with the impression of a violent, unexpected resurgence of prison imagery as in “The Catastrophe.”

“Stocktaking” and “Levelling”

A Veil of Footsteps takes stock of an individual’s world and of his life. As the nomad cyclically returns to his water holes, the artist returns to a life’s production of texts and images. Early in the work, the line “In Paris there are any number of deranged humans on the street gesticulating to the people in their rooms as if to angels in an oven” (VF 40) creates a clear and deliberate echo with the lines “the hospitals of Paris are crammed with pasty people / standing at the windows making threatening gestures / like angels in the furnace,” from the first stanza of the opening poem of Breytenbach’s first collection of poetry, Die Ysterkoei moet Sweet, published in 1964.4 Echoes with the prison oeuvre have been pointed out.

4. “Bedreiging van die Siekes” is here quoted in its English translation by Denis Hirson, “Threat of the Sick,” from Breyten Breytenbach, In Africa even the Flies Are Happy.

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In some instances these echoes evoke detail, creating a zooming-in effect as is the case with the description of Giacometti drawing on a tablecloth in a restaurant (VF 36)—an image that also recurs in Mouroir. In a subtle way, Breytenbach’s life as a painter is also taken stock of. There are passing references to fellow artists, and to galleries in South Africa and Europe where Wordfool has exhibited. Particularly striking is a recognizable description of an existing etching by Breytenbach, SA angel (VF 39), this kind of description of his own pictorial oeuvre being rare in his works of fiction.

Friends are referred to, sometimes just mentioned or more precisely, remembered. Authors are mentioned, some cyclically quoted, like Federico García Lorca. But a quotation from Lorca is given no more importance than a line of graffiti quoted from a New York pavement. When I pointed this out to Breytenbach, he referred to the process of “levelling,” gelykmaak in Afrikaans. Similarly, the places that are described as favourite places and that are periodically returned to, range from churches to bistrots, to a spot on a Paris pavement, to a baobab tree. In this way, a seemingly arbitrary jogging itinerary on Gorée island becomes a personal songline.

The constant movement from the personal to the general leads to the impression that the artist is trying to represent the world as it is today to his dead friend Petit-Loup. Some of the personal images are dark; the text literally becomes drained of colour and the grey world of the prison comes to mind. But any separation between personal and collective pain—and with it the notion of the resurgence of forgotten or suppressed memories—falls apart in the texts that deal with, or attempt to deal with September 11, New York. Their titles “Burning, Burning—September Eleven,” “Measures,” “Mirror note 2,” “16 September,” “Mandela’s Visit,” “21 September. Random Thoughts. Images,” “One of these Days,” and “27 September,” give the impression that Wordfool counted the days after the terrorist attacks, while attempting to account for them with words. The list of dates also underlines the arbitrary nature of dates and their incapacity to anchor an event like the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (though it is true that the unnameable event is today referred to by its date, “September 11”). Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to analyse these texts here, their striking similarity with Mouroir must be pointed out. Here, as in Mouroir, vertical cage-like structures evoking labyrinths are created only to be destroyed or never completed, the colours of the world are inexplicably erased to be replaced by an omnipresent grey, people are buried alive and the pervading smell is that of death. About writing in New York during the days that followed the September 11 terrorist attacks, Breytenbach says: “What do you do when it is too dark to sing? You sing about the darkness. Better: you sing the darkness.”5

“Breyten Wordfool’s Black Book of Impressions” (VF 31), though intensely personal, is also universal. It defies linearity by moving forwards and backwards—

5. Email correspondance with the author, between 5 and 21 October 2007 (his emphasis).


and inwards into dreamscapes, beyond time. The places that the reader is led to explore cannot be fixed in time; therefore any reading of the “prison” as a recognizable place belonging to one individual’s past is called into question. The relevance of the term “resurgence,” too, may be questioned, for, as Breytenbach states below, “the rooms” that bring to mind the prison “may always have been there.”

On the one hand, I could claim that these spaces do not exist until and unless written into existence; on the other, it is probably so that they are there in any event. […] I am talking of songs of consciousness. Consciousness as procedure and as process, not as realization or as product—moving from depth to surface, from light to darkness. […] So, writing is travelling unfolding its own landscape—with the understanding that the landscapes and the rooms may always have been there.6

Sandra SAAYMAN Université de La Réunion

Works Cited

Breytenbach, Breyten, A Veil of Footsteps. Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2008.

—. Die Windvanger, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2007.—. Dog Heart, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1998.—. In Africa even the Flies Are Happy, London: John Calder, 1978.—. Memory of Snow and of Dust, London: Faber and Faber, 1989. —. Mouroir. Mirrornotes of a Novel, London: Faber and Faber, 1984. —. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, London: Faber and Faber, 1984.—. Om te Vlieg, Cape Town: Buren, 1971.—. Vingermaan. Tekeningen uit Pretoria, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff & Galerie Espace,

1980.de Waal, Shaun, “Catching the Wind,” Mail and Guardian (South Africa), 29 June

2007. http:www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2007/2007june/070629-wind.html.La Vita, Murray, “Tussen engele en boerpampoene,” Die Burger (South Africa), 22

February 2008: 13.Louvel, Liliane, “Le tiers pictural : l’événement entre-deux,” in A l’oeil. Des interférences

textes / images en littérature, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, collection “Interférences,” 2007: 223-243.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction, London / New York: Routledge, 1987.

6. Email correspondance with the author, between 5 and 21 October 2007 (his emphasis).

The Hangman’s Game: Karen King-aribisala’s “Diary of Creation”

Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game (2007) is an intricate novel whose unnamed narrator, a young Guyanese scholar, lives in Nigeria and is writing a novel inspired by a slave revolt in Demerara (British Guyana) in 1823. The structure of King-Aribisala’s multi-layered novel is complex. The narrative constantly shuttles back and forth between present-day Nigeria, where the narrator lives, and nineteenth-century Guyana, that is, between the narrator’s “reality” and the fiction she is writing. The narrative of what happens in the narrator’s life is interwoven with passages from Three Blind Mice, her “work in progress,” printed in a different type to make the alternation immediately clear to the reader. The events which unfold in the narrator’s “real” life therefore provide the frame for the embedded novel, so that Three Blind Mice repeatedly appears in the main diegesis. Each narrative thread reverberates onto the other, creating an intricate network of (sometimes distorting) mirrors, suggesting an interconnectedness between past and present, reality and fiction, living and writing. This paper endeavours to explore this complex relationship and to demonstrate how the protean phenomenon of resurgence informs The Hangman’s Game.

A t the beginning of The Hangman’s Game, King-Aribisala’s partly autobiographical narrator explains why she came to live in Nigeria. Her main motivation for crossing the Atlantic was to retrace the steps

of her ancestors, the better to understand the causes of the Middle Passage and its consequences on the life of her fellow Guyanese: “I wanted, desperately, to understand the reasons behind our ancestral enslavement. What better way than to get a visa to Nigeria, a country that had trafficked in slaves, and live among its peoples and discover at first hand why hands exchanged silver for the likes of me?” (King-Aribisala 10)1 For this reason, the embedded novel entitled Three Blind Mice can be read as a “neo-slave narrative,” a genre which Ashraf Rushdy famously defined as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (Rushdy 3).2 In Three Blind Mice, slavery is “revisited through a vocal kaleidoscope,” to borrow

1. All subsequent quotations refer to this edition. 2. The denomination “slave narrative” is usually restricted to “first-person contemporary

accounts of the reality of slavery as it was experienced” (Misrahi-Barak 15). In a study dedicated to the genre in the United States, H. L. Gates defines slave narratives as “only those written works published before 1865, after which time de jure slavery ceased to exist” (Gates xii).

Karen King-Aribisala’s “Diary of Creation” 81

Bénédicte Ledent’s felicitous phrase (Ledent, “Slavery Revisited”). Like traditional slave narratives, the novel-in-the-novel is mostly written in the first person, but this “first person” is not always the same speaker: all the people involved in the 1823 insurrection, masters and slaves alike, are given a say. King-Aribisala’s embedded neo-slave narrative is therefore both polyphonic and multifocal: it allows all the voices of the past to emerge into the present, and it provides a space in which both the victors and the losers of history can be heard. The “grand narrative” of history is not erased, but complemented by a multiplicity of stories. Three Blind Mice can therefore be read as a “historiographic metafiction”: such novels, Linda Hutcheon argues, acknowledge “the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today” (Hutcheon 114, sic). Such a multi-layered and subjective narrative emphasises the shortcomings of history-writing and undermines the boundary which separates history from fiction.

The result of the reinscription of history in Three Blind Mice is the emergence of unheard voices, among which, of course, the voices of the slaves, who made history but did not write it. Thus, Quamina, a runaway slave and deacon in John Smithers’ church, is one of the narrators, alongside the well-known white protagonists of the 1823 events, Pastors John Wray and John Smith—whose name is changed to Smithers in Three Blind Mice, possibly to differentiate him from Captain John Smith in the Pocahontas story, in spite of the obvious resemblances between the two men and the two stories —who prompted the slaves to revolt, and Governor Murray, who repressed the insurrection. These men do appear in the narrative, but they are represented as rather secondary characters, and the part they played in the 1823 events is clearly downplayed by King-Aribisala’s narrator, who chooses to focus on the female side of history. In Three Blind Mice, the real leaders of the insurrection are three women: Auntie Lou, the Governor’s slave, who controls her master as much as he controls the colony (“Is for nothing I is the midwife in this place. Is I who in control of this colony. I know everything going on.” [57]); her daughter, Rosita; and Mary, John Smithers’s wife. The narrative playfully undermines official history, in which Smith was deemed guilty of inciting the slaves to revolt and sentenced to be hanged for it,3 replacing it by a complex narrative web in which the public and private constantly intersect and interfere, and where men are, as the title chosen by King-Aribisala’s narrator suggests, blind and powerless. As Auntie Lou puts it: “Is Mary and Rosita and me who plan this thing what they does call revolt. Is we who do it. And no one will thank us for it. Cause is a world of men. All o’ them blind.” (King-Aribisala 55)

Yet Three Blind Mice is not a full-fledged novel; it is only one of the two narrative threads which alternate in The Hangman’s Game. The interweaving of the two storylines can be read as King-Aribisala’s way of bringing to the foreground

3. He died in Prison in Georgetown before the sentence could be carried out “while a response was on the way from London granting him a reprieve, but ordering his deportation to England” (McGowan).

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the “pivotal relationship to the present” (D’Aguiar 22) which is one of the main characteristics of neo-slave narratives:

A slave narrative becomes a prism through which the present is examined. This makes the enterprise more than historical recovery of lost and countless people [...] and converts a narrative act of recovery into a stage for asking questions not only of the contemporary but about how that return is staged in the first instance. (D’Aguiar 22)

The Hangman’s Game takes this logic one step further, since it not only stages the resurgence of the past into the present through the revisiting of the genre of the slave narrative, but it also juxtaposes Three Blind Mice with the narrator’s reality, that is, present-day Nigerian society, thus shedding light on the various power games at work in both places. Because of the narrator’s intention to unearth the roots of slavery, it would seem logical to expect an exploration of Nigeria’s past in relation to the triangular trade. However, what the narrator stages, instead, is Nigeria’s present. Surprisingly, the two parallel narrative threads depict different countries, different continents, at different times.

Yet there is no doubt about the logic at work in the novel, and in spite of the obvious contextual differences between the two storylines, the Demerara narrative thread keeps reappearing in the narrator’s life. What emerges is not a common history, but an emphasis on the permanence of the power relationships symbolised by the eponymous “hangman’s game,”4 whose solution, which is given at the end of the book, is the word “control.” History is defined as an endless cycle—or spiral—of violence. The pervasive nature of violence is reinforced by the explicit network which connects characters belonging to the two interwoven stories, so that each character in Three Blind Mice has a clearly identifiable counterpart in the “real” world: the Governor corresponds to Butcher Boy, Auntie Lou to the Deaconess, Rosita to Nurse, Quamina to the Gardener, John to the narrator’s husband, Mary to the narrator herself and Captain McTurkeyen to Dr McTurkeyen. As a consequence of this systematic pairing, the relationships between the characters within each narrative thread also find echoes in the other storyline, so that what King-Aribisala seems to be foregrounding is the resurgence of violence itself. From this perspective, The Hangman’s Game can be read as “a history of violence”:5 each story pervaded by violence, both personal and collective. The victims of public violence, women and slaves, can become oppressors in their private lives, as the parallel humiliations inflicted by Mary and her contemporary counterpart, the narrator of the novel, on Rosita and Nurse suggest. A case in point is the scene in which Mary cuts Rosita’s hair to try and make her ugly, so that John will not be tempted to look at her anymore: “Mary

4. The game is played by the narrator and Nurse. By forcing the young woman to play and (she hopes) to lose, the narrator wants to assert her power over her.

5. Here I am borrowing the polysemous title of David Cronenberg’s 2005 film, which also reflects on how personal and collective violence can reverberate onto each other.


moved closer to Rosita, still holding the scissors. Then with quiet deliberation she pointed them at Rosita’s neck. The girl screamed as the beaks of silver touched her skin, then the blades were opened and were grinding and snipping through the girl’s tresses.” (King-Aribisala 111) The violence of the scene is reinforced both by Rosita’s nakedness and by her constant pleading: “Please let me go and get Madam a drink,” “Please Madam, if I have done anything to offend you,” “Please Madam. Please let me get dressed.” (110, 111, 111 respectively)

That violence and control pervade all human relationships is clearly demonstrated by this passage. Interestingly, a “double” of the scene features in the Nigerian storyline, under the guise of a confrontation between the narrator and Nurse. The various echoes and parallels between the two scenes enable King-Aribisala to stage another kind of resurgence: that of the fictional world into the real world, the literal resurgence of characters and events from Three Blind Mice into the narrator’s reality. As has already been noted, The Hangman’s Game constantly shuttles back and forth between the narrator’s life and her novel. Three Blind Mice keeps on surfacing through the incorporation of extracts or through summaries of the passages which are not quoted directly. At some point, the narrator even pretends to be “looking over [her] notes for Part Two of Three Blind Mice” (119), which leads her to explain how the eponymous nursery rhyme informs her novel:

The revolt occurs next. The revolt, of course, is represented by the line of the nursery rhyme which reads “She cut off their tails with a carving knife.” (I use “tails” to represent certain male appendages which we shall not go into here, as well as “tales”—the stories of their lives.) The men orchestrate their own demise by pursuing freedom—the farmer’s wife—in a perverted, self-seeking way. As for the carving knife, since the farmer’s wife used it to cut off the tails of the three blind mice instead of for carving meat, I think it would be fair to say that the carving knife connotes a kind of domestic, personal savagery. All this is in keeping with the network of relationships between the men and the women in the novel, where I see quite a bit of the carving knife device at work... (121)

This metafictional comment, which reminds the reader of the fabricated nature of what s/he is reading, firmly asserts the narrator’s control over her story. Yet the narrator’s claim that she is “in control” is repeatedly challenged in the novel. From the outset, the narrator voices her concerns about her characters, because she feels that they want to control her and to reverse the normal relationship between a writer and her work:

All of them—Mary, Rosita, John, the Governor, Quamina and Auntie Lou and Captain McTurkeyen—wanted me dead, and would have gotten away with it if I had not been able to control their words, their thoughts and actions. Had I not done so I would have been dead, hanged by the neck in their hangman’s game. (8)

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Yet she also states very clearly that in spite of the various resemblances and parallels between her own life and her novel, the characters are merely fictional entities: “[T]hey are in their own world and I am in mine.” (King-Aribisala 12) However, she almost immediately starts thinking not in terms of dichotomy, but in terms of similarities, as the way she describes her relationship to Nurse testifies: “She is the main culprit in this Nigerian / Demerara drama for now, I think. I will hang her first.” (35) The “hanging” in question refers to the game played by the narrator with Nurse and reveals the hostility she feels toward the young woman. More to the point, the slash between the words “Nigerian” and “Demerara,” which respectively refer to Nigeria and Guyana, the geographical spaces involved in the two storylines, simultaneously separates the two terms and unites them, thus emblematising the dual relationship between the two storylines.

This duality explains why events from Three Blind Mice increasingly appear in the “real” world as the narrative unfolds. Although the narrator constantly asserts her need to control her characters, she cannot prevent her own creation from progressively submerging her. While on a drive around Lagos with her husband, she crosses Third Mainland Bridge, and in this liminal space par excellence, she feels “hemmed in by present and past; by country and country” (81). But this hemming in, which symbolises what she tries to do as a writer, is more ambiguous and less “neat” than might be thought: “I look at my dress and I’m still thinking of hemming. It’s supposed to be a tidying up, a neatening of the raw seams and seamy side of life. Hem. Hem.” (81) Through the various puns, she suggests that her position is far less stable than it first appears, and that the boundary which separates the two worlds between which she navigates is not impassable.

As Benedicte Ledent pointedly remarks: “The Nigerian characters do not have a name, but are just known by their occupation.”6 Ledent offers two explanations for this narrative choice:

First, it might be a will on the novelist’s part to remain discreet about the various actors on the Nigerian political scene. More interestingly, perhaps, the characters’ namelessness endows the contemporary situation with an allegorical, almost surreal atmosphere, linked to its nature as an imaginative reflection of the atrocities inherited from the slavery of the past which, as a template for the present, comes out as more concrete and possibly therefore more moving. (Ledent, “A Choice of Slaveries”)

The namelessness of the Nigerian characters seems to have another major cause. It facilitates the blurring of the boundary between them and their Demerara counterparts, so that the border becomes increasingly porous as the plot unfolds. Paradoxically, the boundary is simultaneously underlined and undermined. For instance, when soldiers come to question the narrator about her work, she denies any connection between her novel and Nigerian reality. Yet on the same page, she admits the porosity of the boundary:

6. I am grateful to Bénédicte Ledent for kindly sending me her paper before publication.


I know that Gardener and Quamina are one and the same, and I know all about that wretched Rosita-ish Nurse of a girl and how she wants to do both Mary and me in, but well... maybe my pregnancy hormones are skidaddling all over the place. Yes, that must be the reason why I’m eye-focused conscious and eye-blind unconscious, out of control and in control all at the same time. (King-Aribisala 68)

The narrator gradually feels compelled to read her own life through the prism of the fiction she is writing, to the point that this fiction literally irrupts into her life, as when she feigns discomfort at the President’s Party to prevent her husband from reacting angrily to Butcher Boy’s speech:

I really do not want him to sin. So I do a Mary thing. I lie on the floor and start reciting the nursery rhyme which floods to my head:Three blind miceThree blind miceSee how they runSee how they runThey all ran after the farmer’s wifeWho cut off their tails with a carving knifeDid you ever see such a thing in your lifeAs three blind mice? (93)

In this passage, the novel she is writing provides an element of comparison, showing how eccentric her behaviour at Butcher Boy’s party is, since Mary is perceived as slightly deranged by most of the characters in Three Blind Mice, and even as “mad as a hatter” by the Governor (163). But more to the point, the words of the nursery rhyme are said to “flood” to the narrator’s head. The use of this specific verb points to a violent and uncontrollable phenomenon of resurgence. No wonder, then, that the words which she feels compelled to recite are precisely those which she decided to use as a title for her novel. What was initially chosen as a symbol of her author-ity has come to symbolise the opposite: it reveals her loss of control, and shows that it is her novel which re-ermerges in, and even informs, her life. The effect of this reversal is reinforced by the fact that the party at the President’s mansion, which corresponds to the Governor’s birthday party in Three Blind Mice, is told after its fictional equivalent, as if the logic of life inspiring fiction was reversed and fiction created life.

This resurgence even takes an extreme form as the narrator seems to be gradually losing control over her own life and to be “plotted” by her characters—the polysemous verb “plot” is explicitly used: “Only God knows what they are plotting for me.” (41)—as if she was being written by her novel instead of writing it. The comparisons which were voluntary—“And when I drop the phone I’m thinking Quamina / Gardener thoughts.” (97)—become mere slips of the tongue: “Does Rosita, I mean, does Nurse know of this visit?” (99) The characters, and the theoretically distinct diegetic levels they belong to, literally merge with each

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other, so that the narrator thinks of “[t]hat little wretch of a Nurse, whom Mary should have poisoned when she had the chance” (130).

The extent of the resurgence of the fictional events into Nigerian reality is such that the narrator comes to believe that her words on the page create the events which occur in her life, as if, to use philosopher John Austin’s terms in How to Do Things with Words, she could “do things with words.” She even feels that, to avoid catastrophe, she has to “un-write” what she may have written: “I don’t show him a piece of paper which says: IF I HAVE WRITTEN ANYTHING ABOUT THE GOVERNOR BEING MURDERED AT DINNER, I HEREBY EXPUNGE IT.” (131) As they leave for the party, she feels relaxed thanks to the presence of this talisman, “knowing that nothing untoward will happen. I’ve taken care of that.” (131) Such a belief in the power of words makes her feel obliged to write about the past as if it gave her the ability to shape the present, as if contemporary history was literally written by herself through Three Blind Mice: “The last thing I want to do in the world is write. But write I must. [...] The Demerara insurrection failed. What would happen in Nigeria?” (138) The reader is therefore not surprised to find out that a revolt does occur in Nigeria, the result of a coup against Butcher Boy. To know what the outcome will be, the narrator has to write: “On the radio the military music continues. Still no words about the whereabouts of the President. We don’t know if he is still in power or not. It is imperative that I write all night. It is my only hope.” (142)7

This constant play on the performative power of language, which breaks the frame of the narrative, simultaneously subverts the ontological boundary between reality and fiction and reaffirms its existence. The relationship between reality and fiction in The Hangman’s Game is all the more complex as the “real” Nigeria is itself fictional, while the “fictional” facts in Three Blind Mice are based on historical events, which means that the novel does not stage the resurgence of fiction into reality, but the resurgence of fiction into (realistic, historically-based) fiction. This realization calls into question the status of the distinct narrative layers in the novel, and the process of mutual resurgence which has been described. Does the past reappear in the present or the present in the past? Is reality turned into fiction or fiction into reality? Which narrative thread is the most visible one? Which level of narration is the submerged one?

The scene in which Nurse tells the narrator that she is not Rosita is a case in point. Having read the narrator’s novel, and in particular the passage in which Mary cuts Rosita’s hair, Nurse confronts her, threatening to harm her with a pair of scissors instead of the infamous carving knife. The young woman insists that she is not in love with the narrator’s husband: “It’s in your head, Madam! And what if I did? He only has eyes for you. Can’t you see that? Are you so blind? For your

7. The outcome is finally different, since Butcher Boy dies, a grotesque death ironically inspired by “the actual politician Sani Abacha who, like Butcher Boy, died of a heart attack in the arms of prostitutes.” (Ledent, “A Choice of Slaveries.”)


information, Madam, I am not a character in your book.” (129) Nurse’s accusations culminate with the use of the adjective “blind,” which ironically echoes the title of the narrator’s novel and the carefully allegorical use she makes of blindness throughout her text, and brings the notion of control to the forefront. Further, Nurse reminds the narrator of the impermeability of the boundary between reality and fiction; but because she does it within the frame of the narrative, what she is reasserting is in fact the boundary which separates two fictions, the fictional Nigerian reality and the embedded novel. Her statement therefore also calls the reader’s attention to the fact that Nurse is merely a character in a novel. Both in the Demerara scene and in its Nigerian equivalent, the rivalry between the two women revolves around pregnancy and children. In Three Blind Mice, Mary discovers that Rosita, of whom she has been so jealous because, unlike her, she can, and does, have children, in spite of the fact that she spends most of her time away from her husband—“Two days a week and three children. God was not fair.” (29)—has in fact been “cut”: “Rosita, you are not able to bear your husband any more children are you not?” (112) This discovery is the turning point of Three Blind Mice because it seems to relieve Mary from her obsession with motherhood: she immediately asks Rosita to help her distribute leaflets which she brought from England and which expose Wilberforce’s main arguments against slavery, thus planting the first seeds of rebellion in the slaves’ minds.

In the “real” version of the scene, Nurse points her scissors at the narrator’s pregnant belly before threatening her: “Were it not for Master, I’d push these scissors right through you. You and your wretched baby.” (127) Since what triggered Nurse’s anger was the discovery of the narrator’s notes for Three Blind Mice, the question might be who, or rather what, the word “baby” refers to in this instance, the narrator’s unborn child or her novel. This ambiguity is also perceptible when the narrator herself uses the word “child”:

They want to obscurantize me. Yes, that’s it. At least I’ve got this child in me alive and kicking. Nurse will never get the word in the Hangman’s Game. She is as blind as my male characters who seek blind control over self and over other selves. So I’ll write about Auntie Lou as she sits at the graveside of John Smithers. (53)

Both of the narrator’s “pregnancies,” the physical transformation and the writing of Three Blind Mice, are therefore described as two parallel and similar processes. What is more, the vocabulary the narrator uses to refer to her novel often connotes pregnancy and motherhood; for instance, “Their stories I birthed with my own words.” (13). From the very beginning of The Hangman’s Game, then, and throughout the whole novel, the resurgence of the seven characters into the narrator’s world is already clearly shown as linked to her pregnancy: “For a time, life continues and my book does not. The characters, the seven, follow me around peopling my thoughts with so much business. But they are in their own world and I am in mine. So I think. But not for long. Very soon I am pregnant again.” (12) The way in which these sentences follow one another

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gives the impression that it is her pregnancy which destabilises and threatens the boundary between the fictional and the real world, reinforcing the connection between the baby and the novel, between procreation and creation.

An ironical, self-conscious denial appears a few pages before the end: “Of course, if I was writing a book, my baby would be born at this hour with its metaphorical, symbolic implications. She isn’t. But the novel is over and it is finished.” (180) Yet in spite of this denial, the novel (The Hangman’s Game, and not Three Blind Mice) does end with the birth of the narrator’s child. In fact, the narrator offers two alternate endings. In the first one, the child dies, like Mary’s stillborn baby, and the narrator, confronted with this painful fusion of life and death, can but cry over her loss; the words “It is finished.” (186) seem to be the concluding sentence of the novel. But “it” is not finished, and on the following page the novel continues: “Turn the page. I turn the page.” (187) Then after a blank page, the reader is given the following explanation: “That is what could have happened. My baby dead and me grieved in sorrow. And me in control. This is what happened.” (189) The reader discovers that the few previous pages were only a fake conclusion, an imaginary tragic ending in which the narrator chose to associate the notion of control with failure. Instead, if the reader obeys and turns the page, s/he can read the “real” ending: the baby is born and the hangman’s game comes to an end—the drawing of the hanged man which signals the end of the game even appears on the page. The words “it is finished,” which also conclude this version of the novel’s ending, are followed by the words “THE BEGINNING” at the bottom of the page, instead of the usual “the end.” This unexpected device is certainly meant to show that the narrator surrenders herself to her Christian faith, agreeing to lose control, to let God decide for her. As Bénédicte Ledent puts it, though, such an ending, “albeit clearly liberating to her, may be viewed by some readers as a form of proselytism on her part, thus as an ultimate instance of power taking, spiritual this time” (Ledent, “A Choice of Slaveries”).

Yet it also points to a less explicit phenomenon of resurgence. One way of shedding light on this is by looking at Nancy Huston’s Journal de la création (1990), which offers many similarities with The Hangman’s Game, and ends with a beginning as well. Huston’s book is a diary of her pregnancy, but also a reflection on “the other type of creation—that is, art—and on the possible and impossible links between the two” (Huston 12, my translation). As in The Hangman’s Game, creation and procreation go hand in hand, although the two projects differ in a major way: Huston’s diary is a theoretical exploration of the relationship between creation and procreation, between women artists’ lives and their work, while King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game is a novel, focusing on practice rather than theory.8 The last entry of the Journal de la création is written as Huston prepares to

8. It has to be noted that Huston was writing a novel while working on her “Diary.” Among the last entries is a note in which she quotes a letter from her publisher telling her that her manuscript has been accepted and congratulating her for her soon-to-be-


go to hospital to give birth to the child she was expecting when writing the diary; the final words are a playful rewriting and reversal of the famous last lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” which become:

This is the way the world beginsThis is the way the world beginsThis is the way the world beginsNot with a bang but with a whimper. (Huston 330, my translation)

The intertextual nature of Huston’s ending-beginning points to another type of resurgence which has only been mentioned in passing until now, but also plays a crucial part in The Hangman’s Game: literary resurgence. King-Aribisala’s novel is highly hypertextual,9 explicitly drawing upon a number of nursery-rhymes and fairy tales which are used as a shaping force in both narrative threads. In a passage which has already been quoted, King-Aribisala’s narrator explains that she wants “Three Blind Mice” (the nursery rhyme) to inform Three Blind Mice (her narrative). And indeed, the nursery rhyme recurs throughout the embedded novel, in all the characters’ accounts, thus creating a pattern which keeps on emerging, giving Three Blind Mice its unity and coherence in spite of the polyphonic and multifocal nature of the narrative. But the motif of the blind mice and the intertwined themes of blindness and violence are not confined to the embedded novel: they also pervade The Hangman’s Game. What is more, a number of other nursery rhymes, such as “Mary, Mary, quite Contrary” and “Ring a Ring of Roses,” or fairy tales, like “Rapunzel” and “Snow White,” also keep recurring in the novel, weaving a complex web of images and creating an obsessive and cyclical kind of writing, in which echoes and repetitions, the constant surfacing and resurfacing of certain words and themes, inform the narrative.

These fairy tales and nursery rhymes appear as variations on the same theme: they all explore femininity, conjuring up images of violence and / or fertility. For instance, Mary Smithers is often ironically compared with “Contrary Mary,” although she can only give birth to a dead child: “At school, the name Mary mocked her. The children had a rhyme: ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’ Her garden was sterile. In her womb nothing would grow.” (King-Aribisala 25) Yet, at the end of Three Blind Mice she does grow a garden and become a kind of mother, looking after orphans, which leads to a relativisation of Mary’s association with the nursery rhyme: “But those who knew her would see a woman who sang magnificats to her bed of flowers, her knees bent in supplication.

born baby, which he calls “the other work in gestation.” (Huston 328, my translation) This leads her to comment on the hackneyed nature of this “old metaphor,” which King-Aribisala seems to revitalise in her novel.

9. I am using Gérard Genette’s terminology in Palimpsestes. According to Genette, hypertextuality is the relationship between a text, which he calls the hypertext, and a previous text, which he calls the hypotext, “on which the hypertext is grafted in a way which differs from direct commentary” (Genette 13, my translation).

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They would think, the kind ones, Mary is not so contrary. Quite.” (171) Her life trajectory is thus explicitly read against the textual background of the nursery rhyme, which provides a frame of reference to interpret the evolution of her relationship to motherhood and femininity. It is no wonder that she eventually lives in a “fairy tale cottage with thatched roof and tiny sugary windows” (170), and that the final sentence of Three Blind Mice shows her with “her” children—in fact, orphans who are in her care—aptly reading them “a story”: “Before she tells the children, her children, a story, she unlooses her hair with its luxurious cascading length.” (171) The novel is thus placed under the sign of hypertextuality another and final time, all the more so as the image of the cascading hair conjures up another fairy tale which is used as a motif in Three Blind Mice: “Rapunzel.” In the Grimms’ tale, Rapunzel’s parents disobey an enchantress and steal some rapunzel from her garden. As a punishment, Rapunzel’s pregnant mother has to give up her daughter at birth. Rapunzel grows up in a tower which can be entered only by using the young woman’s hair as a rope with which to climb up. A prince falls in love with her and regularly visits her in the tower, but when she finds out about it the enchantress cuts Rapunzel’s hair. She also takes Rapunzel’s place in the tower, so that the prince, who has climbed up and discovered the substitution, leaps out in despair and is blinded by the thorns which grow at the bottom. A garden, a conflict over an unborn child, two rival women, violence inflicted upon the younger woman through the symbolic cutting of her hair, a blind(ed) man: it is not difficult to recognise some of the main components of the relationships between Mary, Rosita and John on the one hand and Nurse, the narrator and her husband-pastor on the other, so that “Rapunzel” appears as one of the major hypotexts which shape King-Aribisala’s novel.

“When this next child is born, I shall be a walking nursery rhyme with some fairy tales thrown in for good measure” (65), aptly writes the narrator. Her remark suggests an identification, a fusion, between her own body and the unchanging world / words of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and lays emphasis on the central part played by the resurgence of nursery rhymes and fairy tales in The Hangman’s Game, a narrative choice which would deserve a study to itself. Suffice it to say here that these apparently innocuous hypotexts, which are usually associated with the female world of the nursery, have, as Bénédicte Ledent puts it, “a subversive power” (Ledent, “A Choice of Slaveries”). Yet more than that, their very recurrence, their constant resurfacing, can be read as King-Aribisala’s strategy of staging the emergence of femininity, and, more specifically, of motherhood, as part of the very structure of the novel. In the process, what can be termed a feminine conception of time emerges, so that the narrator’s intention to “collapse time” (King-Aribisala 119) in Three Blind Mice can readily apply to The Hangman’s Game as a whole: in the novel, time does seem to collapse through the constant interweaving of the two storylines, in which the same set of characters, and the same obsessive patterns, borrowed from fairy tales and nursery


rhymes, reappear again and again. The male conception of history as logical and linear is therefore corrected and relativised by a feminine (hyper)text, in which events keep returning in a textualised form—not always for the best—and in which the source of the narrative is the one unchangeable, Janus-faced, physical event: (pro)creation.

As has already been pointed out, King-Aribisala’s “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon) simultaneously explores historiography and its shortcomings, and problematises the larger question of the relation between reality and text, thereby confronting “the paradoxes of fictive / historical representation, the particular / the general, and the present / the past. And this confrontation is itself contradictory, for it refuses to recuperate or dissolve each side of the dichotomy, yet it is more than willing to exploit both” (Hutcheon 106). The Hangman’s Game resorts to various metafictional strategies to foreground textuality through the incorporation of historical and fictional hypotexts, drawing on “historiographic metafiction’s parody and self-reflexivity” (Hutcheon 224) to question ontological issues—another typically postmodern strategy, if we are to believe Brian McHale, who argues that death is the primary preoccupation of all “postmodernist novels”:

Death is the one ontological boundary that we are all certain to experience, the only one we shall all inevitably have to cross. In a sense, every ontological boundary is an analogue or metaphor of death; so foregrounding ontological boundaries is a means of foregrounding death, of making death, the unthinkable, available to the imagination, if only in a displaced way. (McHale 231)

The Hangman’s Game undeniably problematises the relationship between life and death, as the “fake” ending clearly demonstrates. King-Aribisala’s manifest intention is to suggest the continuity of life into death, a trace of her Christian conception of life. However, such emphasis on death is reminiscent of the postmodern tendency to simultaneously lay bare the writing strategies within a work of fiction, “explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (Waugh 2), and interrogate and destabilise ontological boundaries. The fact that this combination of well-known postmodern strategies appears in King-Aribisala’s fiction suggests the emergence of an ontological preoccupation with the word and the world, an awareness of multiple strata of texts and meanings, an exploration of the human condition within a historical and literary context, transcending time and place. The Hangman’s Game, which could be termed Karen King-Aribisala’s “diary of creation,” may therefore also be read as a manifestation of a convergence of the postmodern and of the postcolonial. Such a convergence might ultimately suggest that resurgence, a multi-faceted and elusive phenomenon, is our contemporary Zeitgeist. As a token to the shaping power of resurgence, and to its fundamentally metamorphic nature, this theoretical analysis of King-Aribisala’s highly metafictional and hypertextual “diary of creation” will appropriately end

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with a beginning: “Once upon a time, there was a writer. Once upon a time, there was a novel.”

Mélanie JOSEPH-VILAIN Université de Bourgogne

Works cited

Austin, John. How To Do Things With Words, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

D’Aguiar, Fred. “How Wilson Harris’s Intuitive Approach to Writing Fiction Applies to Writing Novels About Slavery,” in Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed., Revisiting Slave Narratives. Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves, Montpellier: collection “Les carnets du Cerpac” 2 (2005): 21-35.

Eliot, T.S. “The Hollow Men” (1925), Collected Poems. 1909-1962, 1963, London / Boston: Faber and Faber, 1974: 87-92.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Slave’s Narrative, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes : l’écriture au second degré, Paris: Seuil, 1982.Huston, Nancy. Journal de la création, Arles: Actes Sud, 1990.Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction, London / New

York: Routledge, 1988.King-Aribisala, Karen. The Hangman’s Game, Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2007.Ledent, Bénédicte. “Slavery Revisited Through Vocal Kaleidoscopes: Polyphony in

Novels by Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips,” in Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed., Revisiting Slave Narratives. Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves, Montpellier: collection “Les carnets du Cerpac” 2 (2005): 281-293.

—. “‘A Choice of Slaveries’: Slavery and Power Dynamics in Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game,” paper delivered in London at the Fifth International Conference of Caribbean Women’s Writing, 27-28 April 2007, to be published.

McGowan, Winston. “Remembering the 1823 Demerara Slave Revolt,” Stabroek News, 12 August 2005.

http://www.landofsixpeoples.com/news403/ns4081250.htm. Accessed 1 June 2008.McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction, London / New York: Routledge, 1987.Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “Introduction,” in Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed., Revisiting Slave

Narratives. Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves, Montpellier: collection “Les carnets du Cerpac” 2 (2005): 11-18.

Rushdy, Ashraf. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London / New York: Routledge, 1984.

Resurgence and Creative Resistance in Shani mootoo’s

Cereus Blooms at Night

In Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), the theme of resurgence develops as an introspective journey that opens on an array of motifs linked to colonization—violence, order and chaos, gender, cultural identity, and memory. This paper examines how Mootoo aims at a readjustment of history by imagining a redemptive process of creative resistance consisting in the reactivation of the memory and speech of protagonists traumatized by colonial violence.

Once a year the cereus produces a giant white flower exhaling an indecent fragrance of female sexuality. Shani Mootoo, the author of Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), has undoubtedly been seduced and

convinced, when naming her novel, by the attractive and disconcerting sensuality of this tropical cactus, and by the symbolic load of this wild night-blooming plant. In her novel, this Indo-Trinidadian Canadian writer situates her narration in the prism of ambiguity, evoking, in a chaotic superposition of contradictory and crude images, the life of a mad woman, Mala, who is arrested by the police for having killed her father.

Shani Mootoo is one of the most unsettling of the new generation of Caribbean writers. This multitalented artist (she is also a video artist and painter) migrated to Canada at the age of nineteen, to flee Trinidad and the violent space of a family where life had become hellish under the assaults of an incestuous uncle. After the publication of some collections of short stories and poems, she wrote Cereus Blooms at Night, her first novel, as a cathartic deliverance, as she announces in the preliminary presentation of her work. The themes developed by Mootoo both relate her fiction to a Caribbean literature whose counter-discursive style is closely linked to the notions of memory and history, and to the denunciation of colonisation. They also situate her writing in the double movement of Caribbean and Indian female writers and scholars reclaiming voice. Indeed, like her Caribbean or diasporic “sisters”—Jamaica Kincaid, Zee Edgell, Dionne Brand or Erna Brodber—Mootoo explores the questions of women’s invisibility and voicelessness, but also of female sexuality, violence and madness, in the domestic space. Nevertheless, in a postmodern perspective, she develops these themes in a queer and deconstructive dimension which gives her novel an innovative tone.

For Mootoo, writing is a creative process whose main achievement is to deconstruct silence. Consequently, it is worth examining how, in an allegorical

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“subterranean” journey,1 she breaks the negation of memory, the individual as well as the collective, in a literary exploration of the space of the human spirit, which culminates in the resurgence of painful but salutary memories. Cereus Blooms at Night is built along a fragmented and polyvocal narration. Through the story of an Indian family, the Ramchandins, it superimposes the evocation of individual dramas and of the collective suffering endured by deported labourers during the colonial period of Trinidad. Through an inquiry led by Tyler, a male nurse whose ambiguous sexual identity places him in an interstitial space and designates him as a link between Mala’s silent universe and the rude world of Lantanacamara, Mootoo penetrates the dark waters of the memory of two unbalanced beings, Mala and her father Chandin, whose lives have been broken by the direct or indirect impact of the colonial system’s incoherent and inhumane rules.

The novel is set in Lantanacamara, a fictitious representation of Trinidad, over quite a long period during and after colonial times. In elliptical reconstitutions of the past, the harsh living conditions and race relationships inherent to the system are evoked by Cigarette Smoking Nana (Tyler’s grandmother) and Otoh (the son of Mala’s former boyfriend) who reconstitute the Ramchandins’ story. Chandin’s family lives, as if lost, in the barracks of a poverty-stricken village, where Indian people, deported from their motherland, were cast to replace the Africans after the abolition of slavery. With no education or decent health conditions, they stagnate in the sordid surroundings, crushed by a system that objectifies them. The “village” is described only through flashes, and these quick though totalizing visions of the Indian people’s environment, in the post-slavery colonial period, pervade the whole novel and designate the exilic debasement of this people as the ferment where the violence that will destroy the whole family originates.

This violence structures Chandin Ramchandin’s story, as it defines the history of his people, in which the genesis of the complex development of the novel can be found. In Cereus, violence unrolls, ravaging bodies and minds, destructuring them along the colonizer’s epistemic norms. Violence is Chandin’s whole story. As a young Indian boy, he is progressively metamorphosed into a monstrous, incestuous rapist, as a result of the irresponsible manipulation of a power-hungry reverend. The alcoholic, depraved man, whose dead body is found in the opening pages of the novel, is evoked in Nana’s reminiscences as a brilliant young man, educated by the North Wetlander Reverend of the village,2 Mr. Thoroughly. Chandin, who is taken away from his Indian family in his early years, becomes

1. In reference to Wilson Harris’s concept of “subterranean tradition,” which implies that binary oppositions are only apparent, because they are linked by an inextricable and complex set of roots (Harris, The Womb of Space).

2. In Cereus Blooms at Night, Mootoo creates a fictitious mapping of the world: refusing to name a real country, she situates her narration in Lantanacamara, a symbolic representation of Trinidad, an island whose colonisers come from “the Shivering Northern Wetlands” (Mootoo 38).

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the toy of the Reverend, who experiments on him an erosive education based on affective lies and ontological manipulation. The young boy is raised in a “wilful ignorance” (May 109), imposed by the Reverend, of his history, people and culture, and grows up being convinced of the superiority of the Wetlanders over the Lantanacamaran Indians. Upset by the changes that appear in his life and by the Reverend’s teaching, he is overwhelmed by silent doubts which finally disappear in a total obliteration of his own self, culture and history:

Once the Ramchandin boy left the barracks he was not inclined to return. He hardly saw his father but his mother went to church, especially to see him sitting up there in the front, looking very foreign in spite of his dark skin, all dressed up in his jacket and tie, right next to the Reverend’s wife. The few times he went back to the barracks to visit, it was evident his mother had not really converted to Christianity […]. Sometimes sacred camphor and incense used in Hindu prayers coloured the air, and always a faint cloud of pooja smoke permeated his parents’ hair and clothes […]. He was embarrassed with his parents’ reluctance to embrace the smarter-looking, smarter-acting Reverend’s religion […]. [H]e no longer visited. (Mootoo 29- 30)

Though the education given to Chandin seems refined and progressive, it constitutes a true aggression. He is the subject of a “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu 141), a very damaging intrusion in his mental development, that will finally break the young man’s sanity. Chandin’s negation of his identity and the wilful concealment of his self unbalance his psychic equilibrium and, disconcerted by the contradictions of the Reverend’s attitude, he starts a deconstruction of his individuality based on the obliteration of his true identity:

Chandin watched himself in the long mirror on the door of the armoire, and saw what he most feared: a short and darkly brown Indian-Lantanacamaran boy with blue-black hair. Without question, he resembled the other boys in his class and from the barracks in the fields. He would change, he decided once and for all, what he had the power to change. (Mootoo 34)

Chandin, after the rejections and the mental torments inflicted by the Thoroughly family,3 is no longer able to stop the power he has released, and wound after wound, obliteration after obliteration, he metamorphoses into a monster, an uncontrollable altered being who will unleash his anger on his daughter Mala. After the departure of his wife Sarah, Chandin starts abusing Mala and violence becomes his only means of expression. From then on, brutality invades the novel and Mootoo makes it her own strategy and aesthetics. The author develops an

3. Chandin, though presented by the Reverend as his son, is several times rejected by the family. They leave him behind when they leave for the Shivering Northern Wetlands. The Reverend and Madame brutally reject his love for Lavinia, his adopted sister, who is besides promised to a cousin of theirs.

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epistemology of violence through which she reveals her nonconformist vision of familial “intimacy.” In the declamation of this escalating domestic horror, the last scenes between Mala and Chandin reach a hellish dimension, a climactic point at which indecency prevails and the unspeakable takes place:

He yanked out his penis, hardened weapon-like by anger. He used his knees to pry her legs open and his feet to kick and keep them apart. With his large fat fingers he parted her buttocks as she sobbed and whispered, “Have mercy, Lord, I beg, I beg.” He rammed himself in and out of her. […] (Mootoo 222)

The psychological and physical violence that destroys Chandin and ravages Mala, is also an allegorical version of the violence inflicted on the Indian people in the colonial system: a “symbolic violence” which, according to Bourdieu’s classification, leaves them in ignorance and denial of their true selves, and sustains harsh family relationships. In keeping with the characteristics of Caribbean feminine writing, Mootoo does not explore the historical and societal questions of race and class relationships as collective and political problems, but chooses to penetrate the familial intimacy to treat the collective drama from inside, through individual stories and allegoric projections. The themes of family relationship, sexuality, and madness are central to this novel, and are the bases of a non-systemic investigation of the colonial society that refuses binary oppositions.

Chandin’s degeneracy and Mala’s madness belong to a cyclical chain of events that only non-conformity and creativity can interrupt. Mootoo explores the dialectic of sex and power through an open approach which denies systemic connections and deconstructs the equation linking masculinity and power. Contrary to Chandin who opposes no resistance to the Reverend’s diabolic scheme, Mala, the weak ill-treated girl, will try, by all possible means, to escape her fate. Under the flood of violence which overwhelms her, Mala is not able to develop any resilience, but she will oppose a psychological resistance which will take the unusual forms of a ghost heroine and of vegetal creation. Confronted with the chaos resulting from her father’s insanity, she answers by a creative reorganization of her own self, and later of her environment. Mala thus manifests her resistance, first under the form of a schizophrenic double, then by the metamorphosis of the garden, once created by her mother and aunt, into a sanctuarized place where death becomes an ally. Mootoo’s work is not only the evocation of a personal drama, but also the allegory of the rape of a nation. She uses her main character as a therapeutic double, projecting the suffering and the wounds of the community onto her. Beyond her own suffering, Mala seems to be the receptacle of collective pain. Mootoo plays with the superimposition of history and story, and the narration of Mala’s terrifying experience also becomes the narration of the collective trauma of a colonized people. In Mootoo’s fiction violence is openly described, in quasi-obscene scenes such as the extract above, in which Chandin, the incestuous violator, rapes and sodomizes his daughter. The insertion of these crude evocations responds to the necessity of exploring what


should not remain subterranean and invisible, and to reveal the whole process of horror and chaos leading to the splitting of Mala’s personality.

Narrating violence, Mootoo opens a space of counterdiscursivity where the rough materiality of the post-colonial female subject’s life conditions is openly displayed. In telling Mala’s story, Mootoo breaks the “kumbla”4 and reveals what was hidden. She opens the calabash of suffering and silence in which Mala has sheltered in order to remain alive. The unveiling of the violence imposed on women, and especially on Indian women, the “subalterns” (Spivak 120) submitted to the double ascendancy of a patriarchal and colonial system, is one of Mootoo’s main subjects, but it is also a narrative strategy which allows her to question and denounce the weight of silence in history, as well as the negation of the domestic or marginal discourse. Exploring the intimate space, the author speaks the unspeakable and reveals the processes of exclusion and subjectification. Mootoo resorts to indecency and obscenity, and in revealing what offends and shocks, she creates a harsh aesthetic language in which each word becomes a weapon that wounds as profoundly as the colonized was wounded in his flesh and mind. She refuses to endorse the unrepresentability of historical and familial violence which deactivates memory, and gives a carnal reality to the dramas of incest and colonization. In an allegorical approach of colonization, Mootoo explores the double historical and familial space where Mala’s raped body and silenced voice become the mirror of the social body and of its fissured identity.

The main protagonist endorses the terrible function of being the body on which the pain is inflicted. Beaten, raped, humiliated, and finally dehumanized by her father’s irreparable sin against her innocence, the young girl gathers in one person the silent pain of generations of women. In the loneliness of collective indifference, Mala confines herself in muteness, in an absence of speech that reveals the terrifying depth of her pain and her incapacity to confront reality. It is through the negation of her wounded memory and speech that Mala succeeds in maintaining herself alive, projecting the whole drama onto Pohpoh, her schizophrenic double, who is buried alive with the father. As Tyler reconstitutes Mala’s diffracted memory, he allows the emergence of the character of Pohpoh, a shadow heroine that Mala’s muteness had kept invisible in the first weeks of their meeting. When her father starts assaulting her, Mala, who was nicknamed Pohpoh by her parents in the happy days, soon enters a process of splitting of her personality, which asserts itself as her body and soul are submitted to daily assaults. She creates a second self, a child whom she protects as she does her sister Asha. At the climax of her trial, Pohpoh becomes a form of active resistance to

4. The kumbla is a calabash. The term, which represents women’s voicelessness in a colonial and patriarchal society, has been conceptualized and made popular by several feminist women intellectuals, in particular through Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido’s book Out of the Kumbla. The broken kumbla is a metaphor for the imaginary discourse Caribbean women developed as an expression of resistance and subversion.

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Chandin’s destructive attempts. Thanks to her dual personality, Mala resists total destruction. By this splitting process, she establishes a clear distinction between the objectified body of pain and her true self. After the father’s ritual killing (she locks him in the basement, and lets him starve to death), she also locks Pohpoh, her self-image of innocence, in a “kumbla” of oblivion, and immures herself into silence. Pohpoh then becomes the guardian of Mala’s wounded memory, whose voice Tyler will be able to hear. This deconstruction of Mala’s character is also the metaphoric representation of the effect of violence on individuals and peoples. The old, crazy, malnourished and mute creature she is when Tyler first meets her is the image of historical avoidance, and the symbol of women’s psychological mutilation. Like all the beings and all the peoples without memory, she seems to float in the dark void of oblivion and rejection of her own past, unable to project her pain out of herself. Nevertheless, though she has been humiliated and dehumanized by her father, Mala has remained one who resists. The strategic obliteration of her memory, like her schizophrenic division, can be perceived as acts of resistance and means to stay alive. Contrary to Chandin, she refuses to collapse into annihilation, and imagines survival strategies, among which a cruel but efficient way to maintain her body alive and to keep a kind of bodily memory of her past:

Her skin and bones, especially her upper arms and the back of her neck, would become chilled, unable to dry out or warm up.One such morning, a good hour before ten o’clock, she began strategizing against it. She armed herself with a bottle of bird-pepper sauce and a spoon, and lay down on the bare floor of the porch. […] She opened the bottle. She raised it toward her nostrils and tentatively sniffed the flaming red sauce. The pungency cultivated by the sunshine on the porch startled her. […] She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply from the bottle, feeling the flames leap out at her upper lip and lap into her nose. […] The cacophony in her head resounded. Insects shrieked. Mammy. Asha. Pohpoh. Lavinia. The rumbling of a buggy. (Mootoo 132)

Drinking pepper sauce is part of a strategy developed by the character to fight the indifference and the oppression of the colonial society which, through her father, tried to destroy her. At the end of the novel, after the climactic scene of the night where she is savagely and endlessly raped and sodomized by her father, but also abandoned by her lover, she locks her torturer in the basement, and enters a process of creative resistance to protect her endangered integrity. She first conceives a wall, piling up the furniture inside the house, in a chaos which is paradoxically supposed to bring order and peace to her life. But it is through the creation of her garden that she really enacts resistance. Enclosing herself in her walled garden, Mala creates a universe which guarantees her survival, but she also opens a space of subversion where all the laws and norms are reversed. Through this garden, where the giant cereus grows, Mootoo proposes an “oppositional code,” to quote Stuart Hall (Rojeck 98), a subversive aesthetic which signs her


marginal writing and creative “wandering,”5 and in which the binary oppositions between life and death, good and evil do not exist any more. In this protected territory where her memory sleeps and where her imagination is free, the heroine cultivates a “chaotic disorderly difference” (Mootoo 176), a hymn to life through a morbid intimacy with death. It is in this garden where the cereus shows its menacing spines that Mala takes refuge. Terrified by the house which is intimately related to the violated space of domesticity and to her raped body, in a subversion of the tale of Sleeping Beauty, she immures herself alive in her garden. She builds it as a projection of herself, and it acts as a metaphorical representation of her suppressed memory, her anger, and, surprisingly, her power. In this garden where she collects dead insects and inscribes herself in a world of negotiation, she learns the domestication of death, the beauty of decay, and dominates her fear.

It is also in this vegetal morbid space that Mala escapes patriarchal domination and official rhetoric; she gives way to her creative and subversive imagination, and identifies herself with the cereus. Like Mala’s body, the garden has been the theatre of dramas, but by the power of her imagination she transforms it into what Wilson Harris called “a womb of space”6 where she dreams her own story and the history of her people. The representation of Mala’s territory defies the colonial order and offers a non-hierarchical and non-conformist vision of women’s intimacy. In a highly symbolic approach, Mootoo places the cereus in a central position in the garden. “Vegetalizing” Mala, she expresses through this plant the whole process of resistance and renewal the protagonist undergoes. Apparently immured in its spiny skin, the cereus blossoms once a year by night, its sap flowing up from its roots to its ends, as life and memory will flow to Mala’s mind. Yet to escape her trauma, Mala also loses herself “in the infinity of […] human imagination” (Harris, The Womb of Space 18), and finally surrenders to madness in her perpetual exploration of the unattainable. In spite of her resistance, by protecting herself in her garden which works as a “kumbla” and prevents her from living a true existence, Mala breaks her memory and sinks into the silence in which Tyler finds her. Tyler, the main narrator of the novel, will also be for Mala the mediator between life and death, dark oblivion and light. He is the representation of the “power of truth,” a physical and mental resistance “demystifying servitude” (Hord 31), who will free Mala from her protective prison. Tyler is Mootoo’s centrepiece: he takes on several important functions in the novel and gives the narration its specificity and originality. The speleologist, who is responsible for the excavation of the whole truth, is an anti-hero, an in-between creature whose uncertain identity introduces him as a weak one, but who will nevertheless show unusual sensitivity and strength in opening the way to life and light for Mala.

5. In reference to Édouard Glissant’s “pensée de l’errance” (Glissant 63).6. For Harris, “the womb of space” connects past to present in an imaginative revisiting

of history (Harris, A Womb of Space 3).

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Tyler does a remarkable work of inquiry and reconstitution for Mala. Nursing her body, he also cures her soul and spirit. While the other nurses of the Alms House refuse to accept Mala’s shrieks, bird songs and murmurs as a language, Tyler gives her all his attention. He patiently recollects every sound, word, mumbling, shout and song, and, in a superimposition of these expressions with his own memories, succeeds in recreating the patchwork of her life. He finds the key to Mala’s broken reason, but he also allows the reader to penetrate the chaotic narration of a story shattered by madness and oblivion. As food bearer and curator, he accomplishes ritual gestures, and like Harris’s crew in Palace of the Peacock, he metaphorically goes back to the source of the drama, journeying on the dangerous and hazardous river of life, bordered by the dark forest of history. Accepting to substitute himself for Mala in her quest, he heals “the pathological and severe wound of guilt” (Harris, The Womb of Space 21) that prevented her from existing, and imprisoned her in her kumbla of suffering. He is the strength that activates the long re-emergence of Mala’s memories and reappearance of speech. He is also the mediator who bridges the gap between Mala and the real world, becoming the translator of her wounded language, of her madwoman’s speech.

The intervention of Tyler, the male nurse, is crucial, for he provokes the resurgence of a hidden memory, and in his refusal to acknowledge Mala’s non-existence, in his rejection of the ineluctability of the ravaging impact of the past, he subverts the logic of the colonized society. For Mala, Tyler explores hell, dives into the frozen and dark waters of oblivion and unconsciousness, into the cave of hidden secrets where he finds the source of her suffering. He unveils Mala’s story and exposes her wound for it to heal. But above all the narrator is the one who gives Mala’s schizophrenic discourse its full value. Allegorically, Tyler becomes the voice of the voiceless not only for Mala but also for the whole people. By collecting Mala’s pieces of memory, he also puts together the broken pieces of the memory and history of the Lantanacamarian-Indian people. The introduction of this character in the novel is certainly of high symbolic and ideological importance. The first words of the novel come from his mouth, and situate him on the verge of society. He stands up for his identity as a queer character, and his queerness and his denial of the enforced colonial order designates him as the ideal character to understand the strange old lady he meets at the Alms House. He is indeed the author’s mimetic and cathartic voice; he is the one who, through the evocation of the past, opens the floodgates of the furious and chaotic violence which kept Mala prisoner of her suffering. His queer conception of the world and of human relationships is the “miraculous weapon,” to paraphrase Aimé Césaire (Césaire 31), that will allow him to fight the mental and physical decay out of Mala, and break the annihilating logic of the colonial system. Tyler, who is neither a man nor a woman, lives on the margins of society and is unheard; as such, he understand other outcasts. Having experienced the pain imposed by difference, he has developed resilience, and is strong enough to infiltrate Mala’s


wound and become the mediator that recollects and translates her memories. He superimposes himself on Mala to achieve the process of reconstruction of her diffracted story. His endeavour for the rehabilitation of her integrity is an essential element in the cathartic process experienced by Mala.

Shani Mootoo demonstrates through her novel that, in the individual experience as well as in the “discursive pattern of historical representation” (Johnson 2), silence immures human beings in a fortress of oblivion and pain where they are condemned to a progressive sinking into the obscurity of a destructive and acculturating amnesia. Overwhelmed by the symbolic violence imposed by the reverend, Chandin is imprisoned in the coloniser’s rhetoric and in a rigid frame which prevents him from giving way to his memory, imagination and true self. He dies, a prisoner of his “crypt of trauma” (Johnson 3), long before Mala locks him in the basement, swallowed by the decay and the degradation he brought with him in the house. With the creation of these subversive characters and spaces, the author innovates, giving daring direct representations of individual and collective trauma. In a reactive and creative strategy, she unfolds, all along her novel, a whole network of symbols and metaphoric approaches of the spaces surrounding trauma, to give her narration a dimension that projects the anecdote onto a historical level. Traumatized voices give impulse to an energetic movement of resurgence of past experience, of the consciousness of oneself and of the historical continuum, breaking the silence and bringing the denied history back to the surface. In her sensitive and counter-discursive style, Mootoo depicts human existence as the weaving of peaceful and chaotic moments, dark, incisive, and bright shots whose intricate tapestry draws the portrayal of people and nations, in a chronotope shaped by imagination and subversion. Mootoo’s cathartic writing and narration of violence are articulated in a fight for revival, for a resurfacing of truth. Through this liberating mechanism, she enacts a dynamic aesthetics of trauma where violence is intimately associated with the deactivation and reactivation of memory, the validity of cultural identity, and the reconstruction of history, all of them being intimately linked to an analytic reading of a resurging past. The interaction of the three concepts of violence, memory and creation opens onto a range of perspectives among which can be found the dual perception of history, the re-imagining of the past, the poetic fabrication of a new memory, the rehabilitation of memories and imaginings around historical and individual traumas. Additionally, Mootoo’s original novel stresses how the reading of both past and present violence is crucial to an understanding of beings and societies in the contemporary social, cultural, and even aesthetic Caribbean context.

Patricia DONATIEN-YSSAUniversité des Antilles et de la Guyane


Works cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. Réponses, Paris: Seuil, 1992.Boyce Davies, Carol and Elaine Savory Fido, eds., Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women

and Literature, 1990, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994.Césaire, Aimé. Les armes miraculeuses, Paris: Gallimard, 1970.Glissant, Édouard. Traité du Tout-Monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock, London: Faber and Faber, 1960.—. The Womb of Space: The Cross-cultural Imagination, Westport, CT / London, Eng.:

Greenwood Press, 1983.Hord, Fred Lee. Reconstructing Memory: Black Literary Criticism, Chicago: Third World

Press, 1991.Johnson, Erica L. “Unforgetting Trauma: Dionne Brand’s Haunted Histories,”

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 2.1 (Spring 2004): 39-51.Kristeva, Julia. La révolution du langage poétique, Paris: Seuil, 1974.May, Vivian. “Trauma in Paradise: Wilful and Strategic Ignorance in Cereus Blooms at

Night,” Hypathia 21.3 (2006): 148-169.Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night, London: Granta Books, 1996.Rojeck, Chris. Stuart Hall, Cambridge: Polity, 2003.Spivak, Giyatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-

Sacrifice,” Wedge 7/8 (Winter / Spring 1985): 120-130.

Scarlet Ibises and the Poetics of Relation: Perse, walcott and

Glissant

Focusing on Derek Walcott’s “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” this paper argues that Walcott’s obsession with birds closely connects him to Edouard Glissant—and Saint-John Perse. Resurgent images (of birds) and ideas bind these major Caribbean poets, proving the very “Caribbeanness” that Glissant theorized as early as his first seminal essay, Le discours antillais (1981).

In an interview published in Le Monde diplomatique, entitled “The Cultural Creolization of the World,” Thirthankar Chanda asks Edouard Glissant what he means by “chaos world.” The latter answers:

When I say that our world is a chaos world, I am not saying that it is an apocalyptic world […]. The entanglements at work have made the world complex. […] [O]ur identity is going to change profoundly in contact with the Other as he will on contact with us, without either of them losing their essential nature or being diluted in a multicultural magma. (Chandra [online])

The idea of exchanging identities, of contacts between cultures and people, preoccupied Glissant in his earlier essays, in particular Caribbean Discourse, in which he speaks about a “point of entanglement” to describe Caribbean identity (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 26).1 Glissant borrows the metaphor of the rhizome from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to express the complex and hybrid change that Caribbean identity, and by extension, all identities, undergo, through a process of multiple contacts and exchanges. Starting from the image of the rhizome, I would like to disentangle some of the complex relationships between two major tenants of Caribbean literature. Not only do Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant both pay tribute to two French-speaking Caribbean poets, Aimé Césaire and Saint-John Perse, but they also use the bird imagery to point out their “double bind” regarding up / rooting, dis / location, dis / semination, and even life and death.

A first entanglement between the two poets is the affinity with Aimé Césaire, the poet and co-founder with L.G. Damas and L.S. Senghor of the Négritude movement, as well as with Saint-John Perse, the Guadeloupean-born poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. While such affinities are

1. The English translation of Le Discours antillais (1981) by Michael Dash in a selective version, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989), will be referred to as follows: (CD page number).


stressed by both writers, they themselves sometimes keep at bay what links them in their respective and impressive poetic work. While Glissant recognizes himself in the writings of Alejo Carpentier, Kamau Brathwaite, Lezama Lima, William Faulkner, and Walcott, recent work seems indicative of a distancing. Reciprocally, while Walcott must inevitably be familiar with Glissant’s verse, he never mentions him after receiving the Nobel Prize, when asked in interviews about the poetry from the region or the world poetry that left an imprint on his work and vision. In spite of what Glissant defined as a “Poetics of Relation,” by which he claims and defends a commonality and a dialogue among authors from the Caribbean, the Martinican and the Saint-Lucian bards undermine the very idea of “Caribbeanness.” The fact that critics do not deal with such discrepancies is easy to explain: one can always hide behind a “language shield” and pretend to stick to one literary tradition or linguistic region of the Caribbean. This, it seems to me, does not favor what a lot of the Caribbean authors and critics aim at: to make visible the communal Caribbean issues of identity.

Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant, both poets and playwrights, allow us to see a Poetics of Relation at work, proving that the Caribbean is, to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, the place of a “trans-national” imagination, despite the fragmentation and the variety of tongues in which that communal literature comes to express itself. Although the authors are comparable, belonging to the same post-Négritude generation, Walcott and Glissant are too rarely compared (Hambuch 2000, Bonnet 2003, Gyssels 2004). An explanation of this “balkanisation” is obviously offered by the “sound colonial education” (to paraphrase Walcott) of both writers, as underlined by Glissant who is fully aware of this main obstacle to Caribbeanness:

We know what threatens Caribbeanness: the historical balkanization of the islands, the inculcation of different and often “opposed” major languages (the quarrel between French and Anglo-American English), the umbilical cords that maintain, in a rigid or flexible way, many of the islands […]. This isolation postpones in each island the awareness of a Caribbean identity, and at the same time it separates each community from its own true identity. (CD 222)

Note the “Anglo-American English,” indicative of a certain oppression felt by the hegemony of this important world language, and the fact that neither Spanish nor Dutch is mentioned here. Only in Glissant’s latest works are Dutch and the Dutch-speaking regions occasionally mentioned, and though it is true that this literature is less visible, less translated, it is nevertheless part of the postcolonial heritage. The same ranking of the four Caribbean literatures is done by Walcott in interviews and comments during lecture tours. While in Amsterdam in May 2008, he certainly mentioned the abundance of languages, but glossed over the “minor” Caribbean literatures, for the obvious reason that Dutch-speaking Caribbean authors and critics remain largely unknown. Consequently, if both Glissant and Walcott are entangled in a huge intertextual network, and both

Scarlet Ibises and the Poetics of Relation 105

refer to and even rewrite the same classics (for example Homer), two different literary traditions, due to the imposed imperial languages, respectively English and French, have imprinted their marks upon them. For Glissant, Claudel and Segalen are extremely influential, while Conrad and T.S. Eliot,2 to name but two, left their imprint on Walcott’s mind and counter-master narratives. While to some degree their intertextual borrowing, aesthetical and ethical claims match each other, their common response to Saint-John Perse reveals the “Poetics of Relation” at work in their writings. By “Poetics of Relation,” Glissant understands this communal body of images, metaphors (space and landscape, fauna and flora), by which the Caribbean experience translates itself—the best example being the “submarine unity of the Caribbean” Glissant borrowed from Kamau Brathwaite and which he constantly refers to himself through the image of “la barque ouverte” (Glissant, Poétique de la Relation 18-19).3

Nobel Lecture: Homage to the French-Caribbean bards

On several occasions in his Nobel Prize Lecture, Walcott points out how Perse’s Anabase, translated in 1938 by T.S. Eliot, fascinates him. Both Glissant and Walcott admire Perse’s “mythic tale of exploration, conquest and empire building,” for which Perse drew on many sources (such as Xenophon, Virgil, Marco Polo, and the Christian Gospel). Both Walcott and Glissant are inspired by the epic dimension of Perse’s poetry. The latter’s childhood memories (Eloges, 1910) become an important part in Walcott’s rewrite:

[…] Hints of an epochal happinessAs ordered and infinite to the childAs the great house road to the Great HouseDown a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manesIn time to the horses

The intertextual play is definitely stressed when the poet recalls the:

orderly lifeReduced by lorgnettes day and night, […]Nannies diminished to dolls […]

And in response to Perse, Walcott remembers the mute and subaltern crew of coloured people:

[…] off at its edges, innocently excludedstood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners,

2. Glissant mentions in the same line the Christian vein of the modern epic in the work of Eliot or Claudel (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 55), but has been more influenced by Claudel than by Eliot.

3. Glissant first used this image in an article entitled “La Barque ouverte” published in 1985.


the tenants, the good Negroes down in the village,their mouths in the locked jaw of a silent scream. (Walcott, “The Star-Apple Kingdom,” Collected Poems 384)

The lines above clearly echo “Ecrit sur la porte,” the opening poem of Eloges, and express Walcott’s postcolonial comment and critic upon Perse’s worldview and, despite himself, his secretive approval of that colonial order back in the old plantation times. Even segregation between Whites and Blacks on the Caribbean “habitation” (plantation) is valorized. In his “Chant IV” of “Pour fêter une enfance” (“To Celebrate a Childhood”), in Eloges again, Perse wrote:

… how beautiful your mother was, how pale, when so tall and so languid, stooping, she straightened your heavy hat of straw or of sun lined with a double siguine leaf, and when, piercing a dream to shadows consecrated, the dazzle of muslininundated your sleep (Perse, Selected Poems 9)

Likewise, the memory of silent servants, their faces “insonores, couleur de papaye et d’ennui, qui s’arrêtaient derrière nos chaises comme des astres morts” (Perse, “Ecrit sur la porte,” Oeuvres intégrales 35) is offensive for a Caribbean author who is conscious of being a descendant of slaves. Since it is his people that has been domesticated, dominated, and deprived of its dignity during decades of slavery and British colonialism, Walcott criticizes the silencing of the “local” voices, the proper alienation of the indigenous minds. In The Star-Apple Kingdom, Walcott dismantles Perse’s Edenic universe and Adamic time, and his praise of the order of the Plantation. This “Plantation Universe,” illustrative of a well-managed farm life, is a recurrent motif in all of Walcott’s later work, particularly Omeros (1990). Nevertheless, Walcott praises Perse, a first contradiction that characterizes the Caribbean writer. Glissant too writes back to Perse with his first collection of poetry, entitled Les Indes (1955): he appreciates the trans-Atlantic embrace, which he calls “antillanité” before moving on to the concept of rhizomatic identity. To Glissant, Perse, whom he calls “the last herald of a systematic universe” (CD 226), belongs to an atavistic society, to the conquerors of an arrowlike conquest, while Martinicans and Caribbeans alike are deprived of a Genesis, what Glissant’s calls “digenèse” (see Gyssels). Parallel to this “digenèse” is Walcott’s explicit strife for the epic of the dispossessed. So both poets share the ambition to offer an epic to a people who have been doubly dispossessed—“le migrant nu” (“the stripped migrant”), as Glissant calls the Caribbean populations (CD 50; see Hammer 1997). What drives the Caribbean-born poets is to excavate the forgotten, deformed, and yet haunting history which is opposed to History. In doing so, both write for a community deprived of “origins” and certainties. Glissant wants his work to be placed in a series of great books:


[The] great founding books of communities, the Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Chansons de Geste, the Islandic Sagas, the Aeneid, or the African epics, were all books about exile and errantry. This epic literature is amazingly prophetic. It tells of the community, but through relating the community’s apparent failure or in any case its being surpassed, it tells of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root) […]. (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 15)

In his masterpiece Omeros (1990), Walcott cures himself of the wound which Césaire claims to inhabit, the very verses chosen for his tombstone from Moi, laminaire: “I inhabit a sacred wound / i inhabit imaginary ancestors / i inhabit an obscure will / i inhabit a long silence” (Césaire 83). But for Walcott, this agony is to be overcome, and the mission of the New World poet is to heal this wound. In The Muse of History, commenting upon Césaire, and paraphrasing George Lamming’s “Luxury of Despair” (Silva), Walcott defines the mission of the Caribbean poet as follows: to make deprivation and despair one’s own “luxury.” Césaire indeed remains Le Nègre inconsolé, as Roger Toumson and Simonne Henri-Valmore entitled their portrait of the co-founder of Négritude. In Walcott’s opinion, Caribbean poets should aspire to overcome desperation and desolation, but Walcott himself, and many others, are prey to the same resurgence that characterizes Césaire and his heirs. One might well defend and praise the “créolité,” and sing optimistically the opportunities of exile and uprooting, but beneath this lies very often a pessimistic, inconsolable grief. However, even though Walcott and Glissant openly praise the hybridity of the Caribbean individual and community, its rhizomatic nature manifests itself in slightly different ways: instead of the fixation on the past and the lost African mother-continent (as Kamau Brathwaite has been recommending), both Walcott and Glissant conceive of a new way of looking at the Caribbean world. Here lies their generational divide with the founders of the Négritude-movement. Both “distillate” from this insular place and history universal meaning for a global society. Moreover, by simply watching, witnessing ordinary events such as street life, the Ramleela-parade in Trinidad or wildlife in Africa, both unravel complex connections and interactions between phenomena (human and historical, natural and cultural…) to claim an identity which is entangled in terms of nationalities, ethnicities, languages.

If both poets have acknowledged publicly on several occasions how important Césaire and Perse are for their own writing, a link that is found in the intertextual echoes that have been previously analyzed, the bird image is probably the most evident connexion of both “poetics” to later work by Perse—namely his 1962 collection Oiseaux.

Scarlet Ibises

In his Nobel speech, Walcott brings to life a graceful image which leaves upon his mind the fascinating power of an epiphany:


Through the creeks of the Caroni Swamp, to catch the scarlet ibises coming home at dusk. In a performance as natural as those of the actors of the Ramleela, we watched the flocks (group of sheep, birds or goats) come in as bright as the scarlet of the boy archers, as the red flags, and cover an islet until it turned into a flowering tree, an anchored immortelle.4 The sigh of History meant nothing here. (Nobel Lecture [online])

This spectacular image of groups of ibises flying over the landscape is a “floating flag over the island,” a magnificent moment of supreme beauty, of “photogenic poverty, postcard sadnesses” (Nobel Lecture) that evokes a feeling of belonging to this specific place, replacing the real flag. If Walcott frequently refers to birds,5 one particular poem, “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” confronts us in a spectacular way with the issue of Caribbean migration and exile, and the fragmentation of language and being.6 This last poem of The Fortunate Traveller (1982) is reminiscent of Perse’s Oiseaux. Like Perse, the Caribbean poet has a “sound knowledge” of all birds found in the Caribbean, which he considers as divine because of their silent, apparently blind navigation in the firmament:

The bird, most ardent for life of all of our blood kin, lives out a singular destiny on the frontier of day. As a migrant whom the sun’s inflation haunts, he journeys by night because the days are too short for him. […] On the cross-beam of his wing is the vast balancing of a double season, and under the curve of his flight the very curvature of the earth. (Perse, Selected Poems 127)

Representing the nomadic condition of Caribbeans worldwide, Walcott seems to use birds as travellers without maps, who were deported to the “colonies,” and whose “sounds” remain undecipherable to humans. From the beginning, birds have been like Africans in the New World, encaged and enslaved, domesticated and dominated:

Then all the nations of birds lifted togetherthe huge net of the shadows of this earthin multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,stitching and crossing it. (“SPP” 464)

After a litanic series of anaphoras (“They lifted up/ the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,/ the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,/ the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill”), “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” evokes the image of a net:

the net rising soundless at night, the birds’ cries soundless, until

4. A tree with orange flowers; a shade tree for the cocoa plants in Grenada, Trinidad and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

5. Elsewhere Walcott is impressed by “[A] white dust of ibises whose cries / Have wheeled since civilization’s dawn” (Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa,” Collected Poems 17).

6. References to “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” in The Fortunate Traveller (1981), are to the Collected Poems edition, and will be abridged to (“SPP” page number).


there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,only this passage of phantasmal lightthat not the narrowest shadow dared to sever. (“SPP” 464)

This poem, often read during Christmas masses,7 offers two readings. It first challenges the notion of Eden and Paradise for the migrant (bird or human) who came to the first World, for the West Indians who flew to the cold North. European nations colonized warm countries. For Walcott, who calls European (and Russian) literature a “literature of winter” that alienates him, cold climates and cold countries are “serious” (“seriousness comes only out of a culture with four seasons” [Nobel Lecture]). He wants to write a “literature of eternal Summer.” His long and lonely winters in Boston and New York are also remembered in Omeros, where the cold temperature stands for seriousness and contempt for the “stranger” coming from Beyond, from the West Indies and Africa.

In the same way that we speak of “colonies of birds” who settle elsewhere, who migrate under some instinctive impulsion, flying to the same destination, “the wingless ones” (“SPP” 464), or humans here, seem to have settled in cities that now resemble cages of glass from which they cannot escape. Everywhere in the Caribbean archipelago, Latin-America and Africa, local populations have been deprived of their languages and their dialects, and forbidden to speak their native tongues by the colonizers. The vernaculars born during slavery are raised to the level of respected language, through the writing of the Caribbean poet. No longer a “gazouillis,” ”petit nègre” or “patois,” Creole is a praised communal language and the variety of tongues, “multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,” testifies to the cultural richness of the Caribbean.

Yet, Walcott asserts that this “season of light” was merely “phantasmal”—in other words temporary. At the same time, given the second meaning of the word phantasmal—that is to say spectral, haunting—the season of light is also shadowing (above) the poet who is conscious of his “dislocation” and “displacement.” The European idea of “settling” is an illusion, and likewise colonialism seems a delusion. Consequently the poet would like to return to that pristine moment of communion and communication: “all the nations of birds lifted together / the huge net of the shadows of this earth” (“SPP” 464). The birds (geese, ospreys, starlings…) are all European species, of old and cold countries, except the “killdeer” or “plover”—Perse’s pluvier. Like colonizers, migratory birds nest in colonies. Like colonists, birds travel many miles to enjoy the abundance of natural resources in warmer climates. Addressing the temporary nature of the

7. In the New Testament, Luke calls birds “a great company of the heavenly host,” whereas Walcott names them “phantasmal,” which is a word referring to a mental image, or an awe-inspiring, almost terrifying vision. He uses the angel-like creatures with wings to identify deep and profound human longing for peace, and to involve something theophanous, an intersecting of heaven and earth. Birds incarnate something fabulous, fantastic, far beyond the realm of the real.


colonists’ occupation of native lands, the poet mourns the disruption of native culture, the destruction of vernacular languages. This “season lasted one moment” (“SPP” 465), but seems to have had “eternal” effects on the victims of the British presence (but also French, Spanish, and Dutch) in the Caribbean. While a “short time” in modern history, it has forever “balkanized” the Caribbeans, separated the sons and daughters born in the African diaspora, unable to speak the same language. The variety of languages is consequently a fortune and a burden: Walcott prizes it and at the same time considers it as the reason for the neglect of Caribbean literature. Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s 2001 insightful essay entitled The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante demonstrates how Walcott creatively and intensively explores the interfaces of languages, both European and Caribbean, the “classic” languages intermingling with the “patois” of Saint-Lucia. Imperialism and European colonization imposed a foreign language, and language is a web that imprisons the Caribbeans, creating the gap between Franco- and Anglo-, but also Dutch- and Spanish-speaking authors and critics alike.8

A second effect of the European colonizers is that, far from being disentangled, languages, as well as the vernaculars and pidgin variations of English, form a web around the Caribbean archipelago and the Guyanas. Lack of communication, even incomprehension of other Caribbean literatures are responsible for lifting a “net rising soundless as night / the birds’ cries soundless” (“SPP” 464). The adjective “soundless” may refer to the fact that the speech and discourse of the colonized are incomprehensible to the colonizer. Second, the native population’s language is written,9 which endangers their existence even further, as the créolistes now openly admit after having published their Créolité manifesto twenty years ago (see Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant).

In the second stanza of “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” the verb “fluttering to sleep” (“SPP” 464) inscribes on the readers’ minds the very moment of sliding into the unconsciousness of sleep, of flying away in a dream to a better, warmer place. To be lifted up by the wings of sleep is also beautifully expressed by Perse. In Walcott’s poem, the image of fading away is associated with images of death: “evening,” “yellow October” and the “ember-circling chough” (“SPP” 464) suggest the end of something once great, decay and decline, but also the poet’s own measure of time, the “arrow” of time gliding over him. In addition, the image of “a mother drawing / the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes / of

8. I refer to Dash’s defence of Glissant writing back to Walcott in the enigmatic title Ormerod (2003), displaying the name of Beverly Ormerod, but also referring to Omeros by the phonetic aspect of the title alone (Dash, “Perdu dans la montagne”).

9. The different Creoles in Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and the Guyanas, as well as the Seychelles and the island of Réunion may have a system of transcription, but they are mutually incomprehensible.


a child fluttering to sleep” (“SPP” 464) may represent the suppression and near extinction of traditional beliefs and practices of fledging civilizations.

In Tout-monde, his 1993 travelogue of various countries, which links the East with the West Indies, the North and the South, Glissant experiences a form of resurgence: while travelling to Egypt, he is caught by a process of remembering, of entangled memories. In the section entitled “Assouan,” one memory gets entangled with another one, the here with the there, the now with the then:

The white birds—ibises […] remind me of those clouds of blue and black birds which at set times descend on the pool of Restinga in the island of Margarita near Venezuela. To underline these links, which refine memory, does not mean to bring down all the things in the world to the same egocentric uniformity that you decide on yourself. It means instead to enrich diversity with a crazy equivalence—which enables you to better appreciate things. (Glissant, Tout-monde 527, my translation)10

Glissant’s philosophical wanderings redefine a specific kind of resurgence: in the same way as he calls himself a “descendant of those who survived,” he concludes from the fact that this species of birds lives in Africa as well as the tropical parts of the New World, that this “crazy equivalence” illustrates the Relation. Not surprisingly, Glissant mentions the “Egyptian book of the Dead” as an example of

The very book whose function it is to consecrate an intransigent community […], qualifying its triumph with revelatory Wanderings. In both L’intention poétique and Le Discours antillais […] I approached this dimension of epic literature. (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 16)

Considering the “mystical perfection in the Voyage,” his force being the Voyage (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 17), Glissant conceives a similar pattern to make us understand the multiple relationship with the Other. Walcott, likewise, renders the ideal of a coherence and a collectivity through the epiphany of a multitude of colourful birds flying all in the same direction. In other words, both demonstrate the Poetics of Relation as understood by Glissant: “basing every community’s reason for existence on a modern form of the sacred” (Glissant, Poetics of Reation 16). In La Cohée du Lamentin (2006), Glissant evokes the white clouds of birds which symbolize the flight of time, the consciousness of aging and the eventuality of the disappearance of the small Caribbean volcanic islands:

10. “Assouan. – Les oiseaux blancs, – des ibis, – traçant leurs gammes sur les branches des arbres, me rappellent ces nuées d’oiseaux bleus et noirs qui s’abattent à heure fixe sur les bords de l’étang de La Restinga, dans l’île de la Margarita près du Vénézuela. Signaler de tels rapports, qui affinent le souvenir, ce n’est pas ramener toutes choses du monde à l’égocentrique uniformité que vous décidez en vous-même. C’est enrichir la diversité d’une folle équivalence, qui permet de mieux estimer.” (Italics in original)


Within forty years, Martinique will disappear in an unforgiving earthquake. We cannot stop toying with this idea, that is to say to die from it ahead of time. One thing is certain, 40,000 coffins have already been stocked, “that’s in case...”. […] Will we leave at least the memory of some miniature Atlantis, without any mysterious civilization, a Black Atlantis—and I acknowledge that here I am referring to and changing the title of an essay by Mr Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic? In the meantime, dozens of thousands die all over the world, taken away at regular intervals with a mechanical fatality by floods and earthquakes, we are accustomed to this, but now, when it comes to the ultimate disaster, (...). (Glissant, La Cohée 14-15, my translation)11

The idea of a culture disappearing, of a civilization devastated by new rulers is symbolized by “balans d’oiseaux” or “nuées d’oiseaux” (Glissant, Tout-monde 526), which can liberate themselves from the cage. In Egypt, scarlet and white ibises are mummified and deified, and Glissant considers the Egyptian book of the Dead the “supreme errantry” book (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 16). As worshippers of the human condition, birds are said to look from above upon the “wingless ones,” the human beings whose civilization risks becoming a relic if one clings to ideals of racial purity and cultural superiority. Both Walcott and Glissant take seriously the natural (and unnatural, tourism being a disaster in their eyes) catastrophes that endanger the beauty and ressources of the Caribbean region and threaten the region’s populations and culture. Glissant fears that one day his native island will become an open-air museum, with its remnants of rain forest, volcanoes, plantations, and beaches. Haunted and obsessed by their disappearing authentic Creole culture, both writers choose the bird image to visualize an unfortunate future from which only “fortunate travellers” can escape. In Cohée, Glissant thanks “Mr Paul Gilroy” for his beautiful title Black Atlantic (1993). It is unclear whether Glissant is aware of the fact that Gilroy might have borrowed this title from Glissant’s own pages on submarine unity and transversality in Le discours antillais (Glissant, Le discours antillais 134, 422-423), which were translated in Caribbean Discourse. Selected Essays (222-223), and which reappear in Poétique de la Relation (1990) through the image of the open boat.

It becomes evident that for Glissant as for Walcott, and I might add other fellow writers such as Guyanese novelist and critic Wilson Harris,12 the Caribbean

11. “D’ici à quarante ans, la Martinique disparaît dans un séisme sans concession. Nous ne cessons de triturer cela, c’est-à-dire d’en mourir par avance. Sûr et certain, quarante–cinq mille cercueils sont stockés déjà, c’est pour si en cas… […] Laisserions-nous au moins le souvenir d’une Atlantide en réduction, sans civilisation mystérieuse, un Black Atlantis—et je reconnais que je démarque là le titre, The Black Atlantic, d’un livre de monsieur Paul Gilroy ? En attendant, il y a ces dizaines de dizaines de milliers de morts partout dans ce monde emportés à intervalles réguliers et avec une fatalité mécanique par des tremblements et des inondations, nous y sommes habitués, mais là, pour le désastre final, (…).”

12. See the clouds of birds in Harris’s first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960).


experience remains inseparable from migration and re-settlement, and forging a diasporic identity. The idea of the destruction and disappearance of small cultures in the face of colonialism, and today worldwide globalization, is expressed in both cases through the image of swarms of birds:

Imagine the flight of thousands of birds above some lake in Africa or in the Americas. The Tanganyika or Lake Erie or one of those lakes in the South Tropics […]. Look at these swarms of birds. You imagine the spiral which they uncoil and on which the wind streams. (Glissant, “Comme l’oiseau innumérable,” La Cohée 11, my translation)13

Like Walcott’s web of birds, Glissant speaks of myriads of birds in addressing the problem of confinement and border. Both Walcott and Glissant use the legend of the “Flying Africans,” the metaphor for the “Diasporic Consciousness” (Walters 1997), to express not so much a nostalgic call back to Africa, as the survival strategy of a dying “culture,” the Creole culture of the Caribbean. The fishnet contains and imprisons the different types of “wingless-creatures,” yet it lifts them to a higher and better place; the image is like the curvature of the earth which Perse spoke of in “Oiseaux” (Perse, Selected Poems 127): directed to the sky and not to the bottom of the sea, it means a liberation from cold and inhospitable places, a “transportation” and transfer elsewhere. De-territorialized and displaced, Glissant and Walcott both yearn for the angel-like creatures. The killdeer’s screech is the pluvier, or rain messenger, from the latin “pluvia,” in the title section of Exil: “Sur des plaintes de pluviers s’en fut l’aube plaintive, s’en fut l’hyade pluvieuse à la recherche du mot pur” (Perse, Œuvres intégrales 128). The play on “pluie” and “pluvier” attests once more to the semantic richness of Perse’s verse. The same bird appears with the same connotation in Walcott’s “The Season of Phantasmal Peace.” For Césaire, birds similarly symbolize the thoughts that the master cannot bind, the emulations of the mind and the dreams which the colonizer, in spite of his terror and violence, cannot encage:

thoughts debris of sheltersdreams-limpingsdesires segments of dry stems(a combinative that exhaust itself )nothing of all this has the strength to go very farwindedare our birds falling and refallingweighed down by the excess of volcanic ash(Césaire, “Débris” 123)

13. “Imaginez le vol de milliers d’oiseaux sur un lac d’Afrique ou des Amériques. Le Tanganyka ou l’Erié ou un de ces lacs des Tropiques du Sud […]. Voyez ces balans d’oiseaux, ces essaims. Vous concevez la spirale qu’ils dénouent et sur laquelle le vent coule.”


“Relinked, (relayed), related”

In Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, a section entitled “relinked, (relayed), related” examines the “resurgences” of images, impressions, and ideas. Glissant claims that “the most harmonious analysis is the one that poetically describes flying or diving” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 174). Walcott and Glissant both consider birds as companions for the Caribbean orphan adrift at sea, for the Robinson Crusoes surviving on conversations with birds. Their graceful flight “over the highway of Felicity, over the fruit vendor’s stalls” captures Walcott’s attention and poetic imagination (Nobel Lecture). Their giving shape to some of their most preoccupying ideas about the Caribbean condition today, as well as in the past, their reflecting upon errantry and exile through the same image of dissemination of birds, illustrate the Poetics of Relation at work in their respective poetry. The place given to the “ibises” in both Walcott’s and Glissant’s poetic rendering of the future of the Caribbean, and the vulnerable and fragile birds as harbingers of a peaceful harmony and longing for the poet’s restless imagination, exactly as Césaire’s “anubis-ibis” from i, laminaria,14 lift the poet to “higher ground.”

Blending French, English and Creole vocabulary, Walcott and Glissant both write incantatory poetry which celebrates landscape and nature, Caribbean waves, and birds as one of the many “écho-mondes” heard by Glissant. The fact that Walcott does not mention Glissant a single time during his numerous interviews and talks is puzzling. The balkanisation of the Caribbean is certainly to be blamed, but it is surprising coming from a poet so respectful of diversity and so curious about the Other speaking in another language but with the same tongue. Both Glissant and Walcott are followers and critics of Perse and Césaire; both have translated, almost in similar modes and vocabularies, the Caribbean postcolonial condition with its burden of the past, its uncertain present and future, yet both have an uneven international acclaim due to the hegemony of anglophone literatures and of English as a global language in the twenty-first century. While Walcott certainly deserves the Nobel prize, it must be said that Glissant has been much more productive as a writer of novels, poetry, plays and essays in various journals and newspapers. In spite of the language being a “neutral” criterion for the attribution of the Nobel, it seems that more anglophone voices have been awarded the prestigious prize, at least in the realm of postcolonial literature. In the same way as Aimé Césaire waited in vain for this international recognition, Glissant, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in September 2008, has to reckon with the decline of one specific “nation-language,” French, despite his creative creolization of the master’s language. The convergent approaches to the same topic—exile, displacement, flight as dream and salvation, birds as messengers of the afterlife and as conservators of a threatened “small culture”—show that the

14. Césaire explores Egyptian cosmogony to address the incomprehensible messages sent by birds who witnessed the drowning of the many ancestors deported from Africa.


Poetics of Relation is at work. Despite their differences, both Glissant and Walcott express in similar ways the Caribbean condition today, and more generally the postcolonial identity. Like birds who don’t mix but live together in spite of their different “languages” and “instincts,” the rhizome, or Relation-identity, defracts itself in the non-linear dynamic of the diasporic identity that becomes the norm in the twenty-first century global world.

Kathleen M. GYSSELSAntwerp University

Works cited

Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité (1989), trans. M.B. Taleb-Khyar, In Praise of Creoleness, bilingual ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1993.

Bonnet, Véronique. “Maritime Poetics: The Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean Seas in the Work of Saint-John Perse, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott,” Journal of Caribbean Literature 2.3 (2003): 13-22.

Césaire, Aimé. Moi, laminaire, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, in Aimé Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82, Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1990.

Chanda, Tirthankar. “The Cultural Creolization of the World. Interview with Edouard Glissant,” Monde Diplomatique, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france_159/label-france_2554/label-france-issues_2555/label-france-no.-38_4204/feature-together-into-the-21st-century_4285/exchanging_4286/the-cultural-creolization-of-the-world.-interview-with-edouard-glissant_6589.html, accessed on 12 March 2008.

Dash, Michael. Caribbean Discourse. Selected Essays, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

—. “‘Perdu dans la montagne et libre sous la mer’ : la pensée glissantienne et la Caraïbe,” in Le monde caraïbe : défis et dynamiques, Christian Lerat, ed, Pessac: Maison de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 2005: 129-139.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, New York: Viking, 1987, trans. of Mille plateaux, 1980.

Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. The Flight of the Vernacular. Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and the Impress of Dante. New York / Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

Glissant, Edouard. Les Indes, Paris: Falaize, 1956, Les Indes / The Indies, trans. Dominique O’Neill, bilingual ed., Toronto: GREF, 1992.

—. Le discours antillais, Paris: Gallimard, 1981, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989.

—. “La barque ouverte,” Pπ (revue trimestrielle de poésie, Louvain) 5 (mai 1985): 72-80.

—. Poétique de la Relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

—. Tout-monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1995.—. Ormerod, Paris: Gallimard, 2003.


—. The Collected Poems of Edouard Glissant, ed. Jeff Humphries, trans. Jeff Humphries and Melissa Menolas, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

—. La Cohée du Lamentin, Paris: Gallimard, 2006.Gyssels, Kathleen. “‘Homer in the Wide Sargasso Sea’: Omeros (Walcott) and Tout-monde

(Glissant),” Pharos, Journal of the Netherlands Institute in Athens 12 (2004): 159-179.Hambuch, Doris. “‘Rester au pays natal’: Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Edouard Glissant’s

Les Indes,” in Colonizer and Colonized, Theo D’haen and Patricia Krus, eds., New York / Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000: 299-306.

Hammer, Robert. Epic of the Dispossessed. Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

Perse, Saint-John. Œuvres intégrales, Paris: Gallimard, coll. “La Pléiade,” 1972.—. Saint-John Perse. Selected Poems, trans. and ed. Mary Ann Caws, New York: Princeton

University Press, 1982.Silva, A. J. Simoes Da. The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming’s Fiction as

Decolonizing Project, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.Toumson, Roger and Simonne Henri-Valmore. Aimé Césaire, Le Nègre inconsolé, Paris

/ Fort-de-France: Syros, coll. “Vents d’ailleurs,” 1993.Walcott, Derek. “The Muse of History” (1974), reprinted in Critics on Caribbean

Literature: Readings in Literary Criticism, Edward Baugh ed., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978: 38-43.

—. Collected Poems 1948-1984 (1986), London: Faber and Faber, 1992.—. Omeros, New York: Faber and Faber, 1990.—. Nobel Lecture, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” 7 December 1992, http://

nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html.Walters, Wendy W. “‘One of these Days, Bright and Fair / Take my Wings and Cleave

the Air’: The Legend of the Flying Africans and Diasporic Consciousness,” Melus 22.3 (Fall 1997): 3-29.

Review essays

Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order, edited by Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007. Price: $114. ISBN 978904202182i76

Reviewed by Andrew Monnickendam

This volume contains the papers read at the 2003 conference organised by the Association for the Study of New Literatures in English. It is arranged into six sections: “Glocal Identities: Mapping, Itineraries,” “Consuming Globality: Performance, Difference, Desire,” “Imagining Communities: Representation, Distortion, Affiliation,” “Local Colour in Global English” and “Teaching New English Literatures and Cultures.” From this brief description, the problems that such a volume presents are clear to any reader: a large number of concepts; an ambitious range, and a subject matter, which, by its very nature, is ever-shifting. In addition, the New Literatures include “novels and plays, also films, pop music and video clips, theory, advertisements, internet websites, cartoons, and language itself ” (x). This might appear over-ambitious, but the editors sensibly limit their scope in order to “articulate the global with the local from a perspective of immersion in the actual diversity of life worlds” (xi). On a personal note, I would have preferred an introduction that dealt in greater detail with the issues involved.

The first section opens with two competent essays on Australian identities, the first by Russell West-Pavlov and the second by Anja Schwarz. They share similar interests and a common strategy, by which a literary text is foregrounded as a manifestation of what West-Pavlov pithily describes as home becoming foreign while foreign becomes home. The former concentrates on Hsu-Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo and the latter on Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded. What remains open to question is to what extent the two texts are indeed representative of the political reality they supposedly interact with. Frank Schulze-Engler’s essay on ethnicity and contemporary British fiction begins with an interesting discussion on the distinction between primordial ethnicity and instrumentalism, but the critical analysis is not sufficiently developed. The most interesting essay contribution is Mala Pandarang’s discussion of emigration, based on the cohabitation of the will to emigrate and the resistance to assimilation. Her insistence on the importance of the discourse of departure is well argued and documented.

The second section opens with two essays that should be read in partnership: both Mita Banerjee and Christine Vogt-Williams discuss Bhangra, identity problems, and refer to the same novel: Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Both share the Spenglerian belief in the decay of Western culture: for the former, it is dull and for the latter, monotonous; such an enormous generalisation requires


a lot more definition than what we are given here. Banerjee frames her argument in a series of questions whereas Vogt-Williams provides a good introduction to Bhangra and a detailed reading of the text. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak brings out the implications of Salman Rushdie’s “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” in a well-written, coherent essay, which, like the other contributions, makes great use of Jameson’s diagnosis of late capitalism. Written from a different angle, is Ulkrike Kistner’s analysis of the Love Life, a South African HIV prevention campaign. Kistner does not simply describe the campaign but delivers a perspicacious analysis of its shortcomings and incoherence. The account of the sexual value of a mobile phone (100) makes very sombre reading. She concludes that the campaign “potentially exacerbates a crisis” (102).

The third section, “Imagining Communities: Representation, Distortion,” presumably an allusion to Benedict Anderson, sees a slight dip in the quality of the volume. It is clear that individual contributors write knowledgeably on their subjects: Knopf on Native-American presence in the media; Riemenschneider on Maori films; Wieman on Lagaan; Raupach on Obeah, and Stroh on Scotland. It is clear that some of the arguments are coherent and stimulating: Wieman’s analysis of cricket and Knopf ’s account of Imagining Indians are good examples. At the same time, there is a marked tendency to retell at some length at the expense of analysis. This is particularly evident in the case of Knopf; Riemenschneider only gets going when he turns to the third film he deals with. Consequently, on several occasions, the excess of description makes some of the opinions difficult to maintain. I am not sure that either Wieman is that convincing when he puts forward the suggestion about scopophilia or that Knopf ’s arguments about dentistry and anaesthetics carry sufficient weight. On the whole, not all have heeded Stroh’s words about “simplistic binarisms” (180).

Four essays deal with networks. Khair writes well on the terminology and, more specifically, on the use and abuse of that dreaded word “universal.” His analysis of Marx and materialism is extremely helpful, though generalisations about “vulgar materialism” (201) are unnecessary. Frank Lay’s account of Livergood and the New Enlightenment starts off promisingly but fizzles out. Of greater use, is Hepp’s discussion of networks; in a volume dominated by discussion of terminology, his explanation of “container thinking” is one of the most clarifying terms. Clarity is also a virtue of O’Sullivan’s survey of children’s literature and the possibility or impossibility of an international children’s literature. Interesting though her discussion undoubtedly is, I would have preferred clearer indications about the present and future. A complete contrast is provided by the two essays which form the next section; the first by Mesthrie is on ISAE (Indian South African English) while Schröder deals with “Camfranglais.”. Instead of abstraction, we have two linguistic analyses, well put together and convincingly argued. Mesthrie’s examination of stereotypes and Schröder’s conclusion that

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Camfranglais represents a conscious effort by some Cameroonians to create a new and secret code would suggest that linguistic diversity is on the increase.

The volume closes with four essays on teaching, which, like the two previous essays, present a different panorama and a different discourse. Volkmann emphasises that his strategies “introduce students to theories of postcolonialism” (317), though perhaps of equal importance, bearing in mind that we are dealing with secondary students, is Duppé and Gantner’s emphasis on “motivational problems”(328). The essays by Hermes and Feurle are somewhat descriptive, though the latter’s account of intercultural learning is lucid.

On the whole, this thought-provoking volume will presumably attract interested readers to one or another section rather than invite them to read it through from beginning to end. Are there any general conclusions to be drawn? If that is a justifiable question, I would emphasise two. First, there is a careful if not obsessive treatment of, or perhaps it is simply respect for, terminological questions. Second, if “glocal” is the key concern, it is clearly unfair, given the format of each essay, to expect that writers can really conflate local and global; so, in the end, those essays which best define the local, Kistner’s and Pandarang’s, for example, are the most rewarding.

Translating and Publishing African Language(s) and Literature(s): Examples from Nigeria, Ghana and Germany. By Tomi Adeaga, Frankfurt / London: IKO – Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 2006. 393 pp. Price: 25.90 €. ISBN 3-88939-800-6

Reviewed by Daria Tunca

Language has been one of the most hotly debated issues in the field of African literature since the 1960s. The subject of translation has also intermittently occupied centre stage, with discussions exploring the possibilities of translating literary works from African languages into European ones, and vice versa. The questions surrounding the conversion of African texts written in English or French into other European languages have, however, received much less attention. In this regard, Tomi Adeaga’s Translating and Publishing African Language(s) and Literature(s), which focuses on the translation, publishing, and reception of Anglophone (and, to a lesser extent, Francophone) African literature in Germany, constitutes a highly original contribution to the domain of African studies.

Adeaga’s book opens with an introduction describing the context in which her research was conducted and clearly outlining the structure and aims of her work. The volume is then divided into three main sections, each of which further contains one to three chapters. The first part delineates the methodological approaches that have informed the study: on the one hand, the author provides an account of reception theory and considers its possible applications to twentieth-century African literature influenced by orality; on the other, she examines theoretical


issues more particularly related to translation studies in order to lay the foundation for her subsequent assessment of the German versions of two Ghanaian and two Nigerian novels, namely Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Kojo Laing’s Search Sweet Country, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. The second part of the book concentrates on the publishing of African literature in Germany, suggesting reasons for the industry’s relative lack of vitality and proposing possible solutions. The third part deals with the reception of this literature, and provides a close examination of the influence and legacy of the 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair, whose main theme was African writing. Adeaga convincingly advances a triple explanation for the relatively modest sales and lukewarm reception of African novels in Germany: first, the poor translations of such literary works; second, the existence of racist clichés that still shape the expectations of the German readership; and third, inadequate publishing and marketing strategies.

Adeaga’s study is based on a wealth of research. The non-academic sources she cites, including interviews with translators and publishers, are particularly enlightening, for they invariably remind one that much remains to be done in the dissemination and understanding of African literature outside the narrow circle of specialists. The author also raises a number of challenging issues concerning the translation of African literary texts into German. For example, one of her most interesting points relates to the difficulties inherent in the rendering of West African Pidgin, a linguistic code mixing English and West African languages, but which has no German equivalent. Such a case clearly emphasizes that the translator’s task is not simply one of “imitation”, but truly one of “re-creation” (53).

Paradoxically, however, the strong point of Adeaga’s study, i.e. the impressive amount of material it tackles, also tends to become its weakness. Indeed, one sometimes feels that complex subjects would have deserved more extensive treatment, or that promising textual investigations do not fulfil their true potential. For instance, Adeaga announces in the last chapter that a comparative examination of over two hundred articles and reviews written in German on African works will be undertaken, but the actual analysis turns out to be sketchier than one might have expected. One also feels that some of Adeaga’s evaluations might have benefited from greater terminological precision. In one case, the syntactic rhythm of a translated passage is commented upon favourably because “[t]he words are alive and they spring out of the quotation” (76). Such occasional impressionistic comments are, unfortunately, supplemented by a number of typographical errors, misspelled names, erroneous dates, and a puzzling use of commas that tend to mar the author’s otherwise enjoyable writing style.

Despite these reservations, Adeaga’s work is a most valuable investigation into a fascinating yet under-researched topic. The volume carefully examines the interrelatedness between the translation, publishing and reception of African literature in Germany, always with a view of seeking to remove existing stumbling

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blocks. The book may not offer all the answers it sets out to provide, but this is probably because, as Adeaga puts it herself, “[t]he complexity of translation knows no end” (323).

Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Edited by Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 102. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006. 333 pp. ISBN-10: 90-420-2014-8I; SBN-13: 978-90-420-2014-6

Reviewed by Theo D’Haen

The first thing to be said about this book is that its subtitle is a little misleading in its unspecified expansiveness; in fact, only English-language fiction features in this volume. Second, the generic expectations raised by the use of “crime fiction” are only partially satisfied, as, next to discussions of a number of works that indeed fit the popular formula marker usually associated with the genre, the volume also includes essays on such decidedly non-formula works by Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Romesh Gunesekera, and Kazuo Ishiguro. To be fair, the editors of the volume immediately indicate as much in their introduction, when they stipulate that “ultimately, the ‘postmortem’ can also imply an examination of postcolonial literature which increasingly uses elements of crime fiction for ‘social’ rather than ‘criminal’ detection” (8). To explore the state of the postcolonial nation via the figure of the detective indeed seems to be the greatest common denominator for the material here presented.

As “alibi” for their use of the term “postmortem,” Matzke and Mühleisen invoke that “a dissection of a body to determine the cause of death, the ‘postmortem’ of the postcolonial not only alludes to the investigation of the victim’s remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its contexts, or the ‘corpus’ of crime fiction labeled as ‘postcolonial’ … from a historical point of view” (8). The ensuing essays take up one or other of the possibilities just sketched. Stephen Knight, in “Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial: The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness,” performs what his title promises upon both Australian and, to a lesser extent, Welsh crime fiction. Wendy Knepper, in “Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” dissects how the novel in question, set in Sri Lanka, “perform[s] postmortems in the forensic and figurative senses of the word” (57). In “Sherlock Holmes – He Dead,” Tobias Döring gives an illuminating reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans as appropriating English Golden Age detective conventions to show up the very cultural constructedness of the society this set of conventions is usually taken to uphold. Significantly, this revelation comes about through the novel’s postcolonial aspects. Suchitra Mathur unleashes a Bhabhaesque mimicry analysis upon Satyajit Ray’s Feluda stories and concludes that “the


postcolonial transposition of Holmes to a land beyond western civilization does indeed result in a kind of ‘death’ and reincarnation, not just of the detective, but of detective fiction itself ” (108). With Katja Sarkowsky’s “Manga, Zen, and Samurai: Negotiating Exoticism and Orientalist Images in Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura Novels” we turn to contemporary American crime writing, and to how Massey over the course of her Rei Shimura series adopts and modulates popular images and representation of Japanese culture. Sarkowsky’s article is followed by a brief e-mail interview with Massey. Vera Alexander examines how Shyam Selvadurai and Romesh Gunesekera, again in novels set in Sri Lanka or its former colonial avatar Ceylon, “use crime motifs in questioning naïve dichotomies of good and evil, in criticizing oppressive social orders and in presenting borders as spaces of flexibility, insight, and innovation” (141). “Riddles in the Sands of the Kalahari: Detectives at Work in Botswana,” by Elfi Bettinger, contrasts Alexander McCall Smith’s immensely popular Precious Ramotswe series with Unity Dow’s 2002 The Screaming of the Innocent, which is also concerned with ritual child killing for purposes of witchcraft. Geoffrey V. Davis pays homage to a South African author, Wessel Ebersohn, who, under Apartheid, used the detective genre to effectively criticize the regime’s racial policies while not letting any doubt that he loved his country. A. B. Christa Schwarz argues that the African American George Schuyler in his 1935-36 serialized novella, “The Ethiopian Murder Mystery,” transposed the colonial war waged by Italy against the (then) last independent African nation, Ethiopia, into a detective story set in Manhattan, and pitting two bands of spies against each other. Xavier Pons conducts a devastating analysis of the popular Australian detective author Robert G. Barrett’s Les Norton series, which he condemns as “fiction with narrow, uncritical intellectual horizons” (252). Finally, Patricia Plummer argues that Mike Phillips in his Sam Deane novels “writes his very own version of British hard-boiled fiction, reinventing the genre as transcultural detective fiction” (258), in this particular case starring a black Caribbean-born North-London “journalist-cum-investigator” (261). An interview between Plummer and Phillips concludes the volume.

All in all, this is a valuable addition to both crime fiction and postcolonial studies, even though the volume is mainly the results of a 2004 conference, amplified with a few more contributions. There is little theory in this volume but the analyses of the primary texts are invariably worthwhile and occasionally even stimulating. Let us hope that this volume will whet the appetite for further work on postcolonial crime fiction.

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Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies. Edited by Igor Maver. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006. 186 pp. Cloth: ISBN 0-7391-1404-2; $83.00. Paper: ISBN 0-7391-1405-0; $27.95.

Reviewed by Timothy Weiss

Igor Maver’s edited collection of essays and interviews makes an important contribution to the current debate on the future of postcolonial studies. Given the proliferation and overgeneralized use of the term “post-colonial,” Maver’s collection addresses the need to review the history of the terminology and to sort out the conceptually useful from the inappropriate, contradictory, and/or obfuscating; in that task, Maver strikes an admirable balance, acknowledging the accomplishments of post-colonial studies as well as pointing out its exhausted current status. The collection contains both new critical essays and interviews with authors of fiction, poetry, and film, providing a “forum for discussion, revision, and interrogation of the current and future usage of the category of the postcolonial and the critical practice of post-colonial studies.”

In his Introduction and in the lead essay of the collection, “Post-Colonial Literatures in English ab origine ad futurum,” Maver gives an historical account of the evolution of these literatures and the theories associated with them, discussing Said, Young, Spivak, Bhabha, Dirlik, et al., and of course, The Empire Writes Back of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin. Maver catalogues the various problems that the theories face, such as overuse and loose use of the term “post-colonial,” the ambiguity of “post,” the commodification of theory and the pushing of literary texts that the theory purports to serve to the margins. “Perhaps it is only right to say that the term post-colonial shall one day be dismissed along with the generalizing concept of Commonwealth literature,” Maver remarks. He then considers some directions that post-colonial literary studies might take in the future, citing, for example, Dennis Walder, who sees that future in the expression of multiple and unstable identities (literary, national, cultural, ethnic). A greater interdisciplinary within the cultural studies and cultural translation paradigm would likewise bring new perspectives, as would transnational cultural studies combined with area and diasporic/migrant studies. In conclusion, Maver recommends that we rethink the content as well as the concept of the post-colonial, remembering the importance of openmindedness, non-exclusion, and tolerance—recommendations that ring of Edward Said.

Other critical essays follow Maver’s. In “Proteus, Gertrude, and the Post Colonial Rag,” Janice Kulyk Keefer examines Bill Aschcroft (and others’) “transformed” post-colonialism, in On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture and Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, arguing that the paradigm can no longer be salvaged; we need a new one, and not another word game. In “Reading Literatures in English without Theory,” Robert Ross observes


that, in terms of the concepts spawned by post-colonial theory, we long ago entered into the realm of the overused, the stale, and the parodic. Ross advocates returning to the literary works, rather than the theorists, for a new sense of direction. Graham Huggan considers transmutation in Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, where postcolonial discourse is shown as an ongoing process of change and renewal. In “Archaic Ambivalence: The Case of South Africa,” John C. Hawley looks at post-apartheid literature in relation to the work of that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, arguing that South African writers are indeed moving beyond the black-white bifurcations of innocence and guilt and “opening doors through trauma into unexpected vistas.”

Two essays about Australia, Anne Brewster’s “Remembering Whiteness” and Peter Pierce’s “Recolonisation and Disinheritance,” consider, in the first instance, indigenous autobiographies, and in the latter, autobiography and fiction about nineteenth-century Tasmania. J.A. Wainwright considers Native “writing-back” against colonialism in recent Canadian fiction such as Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach. William Peterson writes about Maori theatre, arguing for an appreciation and analysis of it on its own terms and pointing out the inadequacy of post-colonial theory to comprehend it. Silvia Albertazzi considers childhood memories, children’s stories, and autobiographical sketches by postcolonial writers, arguing that they show a certain tension and struggle to de-territorialize the past.

Three interviews follow the critical essays: in the first, Maver talks with the Booker Prize winning Australian author Peter Carey about how people in other countries understand his work and how he views his own identity as writer. Fukuko Kohayashi speaks with Trinh T. Minh-ha, feminist-postcolonial critic and author of film and film criticism; this is a particularly perspective interview that touches on a number of topics including categorization, clichés, silence, autobiography, feminism, and film. Finally, Maver interviews Jamaican writer Opal Palmer Adisa, who gives her views on her own identity as a writer, Jamaican/Caribbean writing, and women in Caribbean literature. Colonialism is still very much a reality for the Caribbean region, Opal Palmer Adisa remarks, and she has little use for the term “post-colonial”: “As a writer I give almost no thought or credence to the term post-colonial as I think this is true of most writers.”

This is not the last word, of course; the debate continues, and both scholars and students of literatures in English will sharpen their sense of the history of the terminology and the issues facing post-colonial studies today by reading Marver’s collection of essays and interviews.

Contributors

Corinne BIGOT teaches at Université Paris Ouest Nanterre. She completed her doctoral thesis on “The Space of Silence in Alice Munro’s Works” in 2007. She has written an article on Munro’s short stories “Nettles” and “Vandals,” which is due for publication with the Presses de l’Instant même in Montreal.

Theo D’HAEN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. He has published widely on modern literature in European languages, mainly with respect to (post)modernism, (post)colonialism, and crime writing. Recent book-length publications in English include: Contemporary American Crime Writing (2001), Configuring Romanticism (2003), How Far is America From Here? (2005), and Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing (2006). He is editor-in-chief of the European Review, the official organ of the Academia Europaea, for which he is Chair of its Literary and Theatrical Studies Section.

Patricia DONATIEN-YSSA is a senior lecturer at Université des Antilles et de la Guyane. Her field of research is Caribbean literature and art, with a particular focus on women’s writing, spirituality, art and aesthetics, and the connections between these and socio-historical and anthropological phenomena in the Caribbean. She has edited two books: Images de soi dans les sociétés post-coloniales and Art et spiritualité dans la Caraïbe et les Amériques, and has authored L’exorcisme de la blès : vaincre la souffrance dans Autobiographie de ma mère de Jamaica Kincaid, which was awarded the Frantz Fanon Prize 2008 by the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Temple University.

Marta DVORAK is Professor of Canadian and Commonwealth Literatures at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Focussing her research on modernity and cross-culturalism via rhetoric and narratology, she has authored and edited over 20 books, and has contributed chapters to the Encyclopaedia Universalis and to three of the Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Companion series. Her most recent books, Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, and Canadian Writings in Context (co-edited with W.H. New, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007) and The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s In Custody (PU de France, 2008) investigate the concomitant spaces of territory and writing, and study writing and reading practices across cultural divides.

Kathleen GYSSELS is Professor of Postcolonial Francophone Literatures at Antwerp University. She has published Filles de solitude. Essai sur les autobiographies fictives de Simone et André Schwarz-Bart, and Sages sorcières? Révision de la mauvaise mère dans Beloved (Toni Morrison), Praisesong for the Widow (Paule Marshall), et Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (Maryse Condé). A third work is in press: La Caraïbe, une communauté imaginée? Passes et impasses du comparatisme postcolonial.

Mélanie JOSEPH-VILAIN defended a doctoral thesis in 2003 on “(Af)filiation and Writing in Five Novels by André Brink: Looking on Darkness, Rumours of Rain, An Act of Terror, Imaginings of Sand and Devil’s Valley.” She is a senior lecturer at Université de Bourgogne, and has published a number of articles, mostly on South African literature. Her interests include African literature, bilingual writers and contemporary British fiction.


Catherine LANONE is a professor at Université de Toulouse 2. She is the author of several books, on E.M. Forster, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. She has also written articles on Jane Urquhart and Margaret Atwood, alongside her publications on the Brontës, Forster, Woolf, and Dickens. She is currently investigating the travel diaries of John Franklin, and the representation of Franklin’s expeditions in British and Canadian literature.

Christine LORRE is a senior lecturer at Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle. She has published articles on Carol Shields, Janet Frame, Nancy Huston, Yann Martel, Wayson Choy, Ying Chen, Amy Tan, Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee. She is currently working on short stories by women writers.

Fiona McCANN completed her PhD on the interplay between history and stories in the fiction of Yvonne Vera and Zoë Wicomb at Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2007. She has published articles on both authors and her research interests include South African, Zimbabwean, and Irish women’s writing and the field of postcolonial studies. She is Head of the International Section at Lycée Edouard Branly, Nogent-sur-Marne, where she teaches English literature.

Andrew MONNICKENDAM is Professor of English at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests are focused on two areas. The first is the Scottish historical romance of the early romantic period and particularly the figure of Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781-1857), journalist, novelist and leading liberal thinker. He has edited her historical novel, Clan-Albin (1815) for the Association of Scottish Literary Studies. The second is the literature of war and its aftermath. Recent publications include a collection of essays, edited with his colleague Aránzazu Usandizaga, entitled Back to Peace: Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period, Notre Dame UP, 2007.

Claire OMHOVÈRE is a professor at Université de Montpellier. She has published articles in French and Canadian journals on the novels of Robert Kroetsch, Jane Urquhart, Rudy Wiebe and Alistair McLeod. She is the author of Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (2007). She is currently engaged in a research project on representations of the void in Canadian literature and iconography.

Sandra SAAYMAN is a senior lecturer at Université de La Réunion. Her doctoral thesis was entitled “Texte et image : la littérature de prison de Breyten Breytenbach.” She has published several articles on Breytenbach and Coetzee.

Richard SAMIN is Professor of English and Commonwealth Literature at Université de Nancy 2. He obtained a Doctorat d’État on the works of Alex La Guma and Es’kia Mphahlele. His research interests include South African Literature in English, South African History, and Postcolonial Studies. He is a member of several research groups, and his articles have been published in numerous journals in France and abroad.

Daria TUNCA has worked as an assistant in the English Department of the University of Liège, Belgium since 2001. In early 2008, she completed a PhD thesis entitled “Style beyond Borders: Language in Recent Nigerian Fiction,” which attempted to approach the works of several Nigerian writers from a perspective including elements of stylistics, sociolinguistics and literary criticism. She edits an online bibliography of works by and

Contributors 127

about Ben Okri (http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/okri) and maintains a website on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/adichie).

Kerry-Jane WALLART wrote a doctoral thesis on Derek Walcott’s plays. She has also written several articles, not only on Walcott, but also on Wilson Harris, Fred d’Aguiar and Claude McKay. She is a senior lecturer at Université Paris 9 – Dauphine.

Timothy WEISS is a Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul (U of Massachusetts P, 1992), Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia (U of Toronto P, 2004), and English and Globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland China (co-ed. with Kwok-kan Tam; Chinese University of Hong Kong P, 2004). He is currently writing the chapter on the “Windrush Generation” for The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel and the entry on “Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian / Caribbean Diaspora” for Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction.

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