Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading [1st ed.] 9781137569332, 9781137569349

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction: Located Reading—Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace (Jenni Ramone)....Pages 1-26
Indian Partition Literature: Reading Displacement—Partition Reading Patterns, and Trauma (Jenni Ramone)....Pages 27-80
Nigeria: Nigerian Literature and/as the Market (Jenni Ramone)....Pages 81-140
Black Writing in Britain: Going Back to Move Forward—Black Consciousness Now and in the Archives (Jenni Ramone)....Pages 141-190
Cuba: Reading and Revolution—Cuban Literature and Literary Culture (Jenni Ramone)....Pages 191-238
Conclusion: Located Reading (Jenni Ramone)....Pages 239-246
Back Matter ....Pages 247-261

Citation preview

NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE

Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace Located Reading

Jenni Ramone

New Comparisons in World Literature Series Editors Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee Department of English Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK Neil Lazarus University of Warwick Coventry, UK

New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect. Editorial board Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067

Jenni Ramone

Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace Located Reading

Jenni Ramone Department of English Nottingham Trent University Nottingham, UK

New Comparisons in World Literature ISBN 978-1-137-56933-2    ISBN 978-1-137-56934-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Claudia Wiens / Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: DE7YHH This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

For Seren & Scotty, and for Eva

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for NTU’s Scholarship Projects for Undergraduate Researchers (SPUR) scheme offering bursaries for NTU students to collaborate with staff on research projects, and to Helen Puntha who ran the scheme when I was successful in securing this funding. This enabled me to work with five excellent student research assistants over a number of years (Conna Ray, Chloe Smith, Georgia Stabler, Saudatu Mohamed, Charlie Jones), most of whom undertook reading and data collection which helped me to scope and shape my project; Saudatu carried out interviews in her hometown Lagos during her summer break which are collated in the Appendix to this book and offer insight into the current book market in that city. I am also very happy to have supported and been supported by another fourteen shorter-term research assistants undertaking reading and data collection projects related to this book as part of an assessed work placement; each student offered particular insight and expressed their appreciation for new ways of reading and for research in the academy: Dinique Awuah, Sally Craydon, Malwina Cybulska, Marie Deenmamode, Maria Ghirardini, Maimuna Hussein, Ross Johnston, Piers Lally, Barbara-­ Anne Lowrie, Kate McKay, Holly Morris, Chloe Szwer, Rebecca White, Rebecca Wood. Many of these students presented conference papers at student events or at teaching events with me, and went on to undertake postgraduate study. I am thankful for friends and colleagues who have heard conference papers or had conversations with me about this book project, or have offered encouragement about draft chapters or papers, including my colleagues at NTU, in the Postcolonial Studies Association, and the Cuba vii

viii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research Forum. Thanks especially to Anna Ball, Nicole Thiara, Helen Cousins, Par Kumaraswami, Tony Kapcia, Sharon Ouditt, Rory Waterman, Sharon Monteith, and Nahem Yousaf. I am also grateful to Julian Wolfreys for an early conversation about Cuban cigar factory readers, which led me to discover the US radio series Lost and Found Sound, and to Sarah Garrod at the George Padmore Institute for her friendly help and boundless knowledge in supporting my archival visits. I am grateful to Jorge Méndez Blake who was enthusiastic about the use for the cover of this book of a photograph of his installation ‘Wall’, also known as ‘The Impact of a Book’, which depicts the impact of a book placed at the foundation of a structure, which, by its pinnacle, has disrupted the uniform pattern of the bricks irreversibly.

Contents

1 Introduction: Located Reading—Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace  1 2 Indian Partition Literature: Reading Displacement—Partition Reading Patterns, and Trauma 27 3 Nigeria: Nigerian Literature and/as the Market 81 4 Black Writing in Britain: Going Back to Move Forward—Black Consciousness Now and in the Archives141 5 Cuba: Reading and Revolution—Cuban Literature and Literary Culture191 6 Conclusion: Located Reading239 Appendix247 Index255

ix

About the Author

Jenni Ramone  is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies and co-director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her recent book publications include The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing (2017), Postcolonial Theories (2011), and Salman Rushdie and Translation (2013). Ramone specialises in global and postcolonial literatures and the literary marketplace, reading literature through frameworks of translation, spatial, and architectural theories. She is pursuing new projects on twenty-first century global literature and gender, and on literature and maternity.

xi

Abbreviations1

AME GB 2904 AME National Antiracist Movement in Education (1985–2004) otherwise known as NAME BFC GB 2904 BFC International Book Fairs of Radical Black and Third World Books CAM GB 2904 CAM Caribbean Artists Movement LRA GB 2904 LRA Personal Papers of John La Rose NAS GB 2904 NASS National Association of Supplementary Schools

1  Archival references used in Chap. 3 (and briefly in Chap. 2) refer to the George Padmore Institute and their collections. The following abbreviations are used.

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Located Reading— Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace

Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) depicts the author’s childhood encounter with the history of slavery, and her awareness of Antigua as a place in the world—as a place that has a particular relationship with the rest of the world. Kincaid insists that Antigua should understand its local identity as a former British colony battling a corrupt postcolonial government and the effects of an aggressively pursued tourism industry in order to operate more effectively in global contexts: might not knowing […] why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead these people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship, a relationship in which they are not victims all the time of every bad idea that flits across the mind of the world? (Kincaid 1988, 56–7)

Grasping their place in the world, Kincaid suggests, would enable Antiguans to resist oppression and to demand justice. In the essay, it becomes clear that Kincaid is able to recognise Antigua’s relationship with the rest of the world and to resist what is held to be common sense as a result of her reading practices—an avid reader since childhood, she notices the economic and political significance of the Antiguan library’s resources and its later neglect and disrepair, which she perceives as deliberate, motivated to deter the Antiguan people from achieving in education and art since such knowledge is considered a route towards critical thinking about © The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9_1

1

2 

J. RAMONE

the administrative system. Importantly, the marker of the library’s dereliction is its location: Why is the old building that was damaged in the famous earthquake years ago […] not repaired and the library put back in the place where it used to be? Or, why, years after The Earthquake damaged the old library building, has a new library not been built? […] if you saw the old library, situated as it was, in a big, old wooden building […] with its wide veranda, its big, always open windows, its rows and rows of shelves filled with books, its beautiful wooden tables and chairs for sitting and reading […] you would see why my heart would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in Antigua. The place where the library is now, above the dry-goods store, in the old run-down concrete building, is too small to hold all the books from the old building. (Kincaid 1988, 41–3)

Moving the library to a less-prestigious, less-accessible, less-functional location is evidence of the library’s significance and the perceived threat of an educated population. Kincaid’s essay articulates a common preoccupation in postcolonial literatures and cultures worldwide, where books and reading take a central place and are of vital importance to the shape of postcolonial society and economies. Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading began as a project to find out why postcolonial literature contains so many moments of reading, or instances of doing other things with books—holding them above to shelter from the rain, glancing at books unread on the bedside table, making use of their pages for writing materials, or when toilet paper is scarce. In postcolonial writing, such instances are more consistently found, and are more prevalent, than is generally the case. In an effort to understand why that is, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading analyses local literary communities by placing texts in their local literary marketplaces. I consider how texts are circulated through local publishing, bookselling, education, and events, in an effort to understand the place of reading in its location and to enable an analysis of market forces that inform the form and function of literature and reading in each context. Through this process, combined with close textual analysis of instances of reading in literary texts, this book asks, in four chapters, what reading means in its local literary marketplace. It asserts, through a comparative conclusion, the need to undertake located reading—that is, to read with an

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

understanding of local economic, political, and, relatedly, cultural factors—in order to perceive the impact and function of books and reading. The specific offers lessons for reinterpreting books and reading elsewhere, and for acknowledging their centrality to all aspects of collective and individual agency. The significance of books and reading has been acknowledged in a number of local contexts, including Black British magazine publishing: It is impossible to over-estimate the influence that books have on the lives of us all. They inform us when we learn at school, as they inform teachers who teach us and the lecturers who taught them. They inform the journalists who prepare the television programmes we watch at night, or the newspaper we read in the morning. They are the reference source for politicians and pundits, for leaders and those who would overthrow. Between their covers are stored much of our knowledge, our culture and our very ways of thinking. (Race Today 1973, 301)

This anonymously authored article asserting the centrality of books to the way populations understand, and operate within, the world was uncovered in an archive copy of Race Today from 1973, by Bethan Evans, a postgraduate researcher working on the Black British short story under my supervision at NTU. The magazine’s function was to elicit change in policies and practices in the UK, eradicating racism through effecting change in education, the media, and local and national politics. Despite its local focus, the sense of a globally connected influence through books and reading is implied by the reference to “leaders and those who would overthrow”, this idea also accepting the necessity of revolution in some circumstances. In all postcolonial contexts books and reading take on further significance because they are often a vital method of overturning colonial attitudes about the location which were previously imposed through the circulation of colonial literature and other books, particularly in educational settings. To date, Homi Bhabha’s essay “Signs Taken for Wonders” is the most prominent analysis of the appearance of the English book, the text, within colonial writing. Here, Bhabha argues that the appearance of literature “out of place” in colonial-period writing offers potential for undermining colonial power by strategic reading and misreading. Because of its prominence, there is merit in examining here the extent to which Bhabha’s proposal might apply to the presence of books and instances of reading in

4 

J. RAMONE

postcolonial literature. Bhabha’s essay offers close analysis of Marlow’s discovery in the wilderness of a shipping manual in Heart of Darkness, and the impact this has on the way he perceives his role in the colonial enterprise. I discuss Bhabha in some detail in this introductory chapter, in part to demonstrate that this argument only goes a very short distance towards accounting for the multiple and varied instances of reading found so frequently in postcolonial fiction. My response to Bhabha’s argument also illustrates the timeliness of engaging with the material contexts surrounding bookselling, book marketing, and book production, in local literary contexts. Homi Bhabha’s assertion of what the book means in the colonised location rests on the claim that the book is an exceptional presence in the literary text, that it announces its strangeness. Conversely, my research reveals a high frequency of instances of books and reading in postcolonial literature from all locations. In each chapter, particularly meaningful or exemplary instances are analysed in detail, while these are contextualised within a discussion of patterns emerging in texts and locations. In total, approximately 200 literary texts have been analysed, mostly from the four locations explored in chapters in this book, in the process of arriving at a theory of located reading which helps to uncover what reading means and how the function of reading is determined by its location. My analysis reveals that books and reading perform far more complex functions than Bhabha’s discussion would suggest, and that these functions are dependent on both the location’s local literary marketplace and its particular relationship with colonialism. Partly for this reason, each location addressed here has a different kind of postcolonial context, beginning with two large former British colonies, each of which was the subject of border change: India is considered up to and at the moment of independence; Nigeria is examined from the years immediately preceding independence and until the present day; in the UK a postcolonial diaspora context is the subject of enquiry; and in Cuba the neocolonial impact of global tourism is the focus of the analysis of post-Revolution-period literature in this former Spanish colony which has also been under economic imperial control by the USA in the years between Spanish imperialism and Revolution. When I first began working on this project, I had simply observed a pattern of highly significant moments in postcolonial literature which focused on books and reading, and had no set ideas about which locations might offer the most fruitful fields for analysis, nor yet whether a

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

location-based structure was the best suited to the project. In an early discussion with professors Gregory Woods and David Worrall, I was made aware of the opportunity to engage undergraduate research assistants on paid summer research internships at NTU. This, combined with my hosting of further students undertaking research assistant posts as part of assessed work placement activities, enabled me to begin mapping the locations which manifested the most surprising, repeated, or frequent instances of reading. I worked with nineteen student research assistants, each of whom provided enthusiastic insight into the texts they read, some of which are discussed in this book, while other texts were excluded on the basis of the research assistants’ analysis. While this method enabled me to move from an initial intention to address reading in postcolonial literature with an attempt at completeness to a much more logical position of reducing my scope to four specific regions, all of these temporary research assistants left the project with a new appreciation of postcolonial literature, of reading practices, and of the function of research in the academy. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) was one of the first novels that made me pause and reflect on reading as a strategy in postcolonial literature. It may be anticipated that the postcolonial novel of education would include references to reading, but in fact any predictable patterns in this category are not observable. In Annie John (1985); Nervous Conditions (1988); Crick Crack, Monkey (1970); and We Need New Names (2013), a young female protagonist responds to her colonial education with varying levels of ambivalence, ranging from passivity in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names to outright rebellion when Nyasha tears up her school books with her teeth in Nervous Conditions. Jamaica Kincaid’s coming-of-age novel Annie John, set in postcolonial Antigua, has been discussed primarily in response to the complex, physically close relationships between protagonist Annie and a series of girls and women, especially her mother (see Caton 1996; Murdoch 1990; Simmons 1998; Valens 2004). The mother-daughter relationship in particular is frequently discussed as an example of the way maternal roles are disturbed by the postcolonial condition. These female relationships are thoroughly dependent upon education, especially reading fiction and history at school, as well as reading library books, and also life-writing; a pivotal moment in Annie’s life occurs when she is asked to write an autobiographical essay. The subject of this essay is her relationship with her mother; Annie desires to convey their flawless mutual affection to her teacher and classmates despite the gradual deterioration of their trust and communication since

6 

J. RAMONE

the beginning of Annie’s adolescence. Annie’s essay is received with emotion and admiration by her audience, and is the catalyst for the renegotiation of her relationships with her peers. However, this instance of writing fictionalised autobiography (Annie alters the text to suit her idealised version of her relationship with her mother) must be understood within the context of the significance of books and reading in Annie’s story. The repeated image of “new books” (Kincaid 1997, 29, 34, 35) accompanies Annie’s anticipation and experience of starting school, the environment that is to change her ideas about her own identity and affect her relationship with her mother, and the place where she will stage the false public image of that relationship for her peers. For a time, books and reading are associated with pleasure for Annie: she uses her knowledge of literature to develop her friendships with other girls—Annie tells Gwen that she wishes she was called Enid after Enid Blyton (50) and spends time discussing the novels and poems she enjoys with her group of friends after having charmed them with her writing (79). She also tries to placate her mother with reading: “whenever I felt I was falling out of my mother’s good graces I would let her see me absorbed in these books” (55)—these particular ones are those she had been given, and had displayed on a small bookshelf. However, there are other books piled under her bed: Annie demonstrates a possessive devotion to books, saying she couldn’t “bear to part with” a book she had read, and would, as a result, feel compelled to “steal it” (55). Unlike Nila in Taslima Nasrin’s French Lover, whose comparable reliance upon books is enacted naively and candidly, Annie manipulates her love of books to influence the women around her. Having already, by this process, learned that books are associated unstraightforwardly with pleasure, it does not surprise Annie when she is first required to associate books with displeasure; her parents punish her for misdeeds at school by forbidding her from visiting the library on Saturday (81). Soon afterwards, her school punishments are also associated with reading: she is forced to copy out Books I and II of Paradise Lost (83) when her teacher discovers that she has defaced a picture of Christopher Columbus in a school history book. Writing in this book is represented as having been carried out without conscious intention: remembering her mother’s reaction to a letter informing her that Annie’s grandfather was unable to walk, Annie writes down her mother’s words—“The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up and Go” (78)—under an image of Columbus in chains. The text suggests that Annie is only unconsciously aware of the similarity of the two patriarchs in terms of the control they have exercised over people and

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

territories and the fact that this was enacted through symbolism as much as actual power, as is conveyed by their eventual frailty. Since books encompass pleasure, displeasure, and the public and private exercise of patriarchal and imperial power, it is possible to reread Annie’s relationship with her mother by focusing on the attention paid to reading in the text with reference to personal trauma and its analogue in the postcolonial condition. To support this, it is necessary only to consider two moments in the text: the first reference to reading books, which is occasioned by the death of a girl of Annie’s age—“I remembered once standing behind her in a line to take out books at the library” (10)—and one of Annie’s earliest memories with her mother: My mother had been a member of the library long before I was born. And since she took me everywhere with her when I was quite little, when she went to the library she took me along there, too. I would sit in her lap very quietly as she read books that she did not want to take home with her. I could not read the words yet, but just the way they looked on the page was interesting to me. (142–3)

Bringing these two moments together reveals the fear and frailty at the centre of their bond, and locates this within the sphere of reading, which accounts for Annie’s subsequent reliance on books and her insistence on keeping them close by for fear that she may lose something of herself once they are out of sight, as well as her fear of separation from her mother who she worries may die, like the little girl who is in her memory forever associated with the act of reading. In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) Nyasha, a teenage girl who spent her formative years growing up in the UK, reads DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her bedroom in Rhodesia, on the cusp of the country’s independence as Zimbabwe. Maiguru’s lips pursed into a tight, disapproving knot. “Oh dear”, she breathed, “that’s not very good. Nyasha, I don’t want you to read books like that.” […] “But it’s meant to be good, Mum. You know D.H. Lawrence is meant to be good”, objected Nyasha. “You mustn’t read books like that. They are no good for you”, Maiguru insisted.

8 

J. RAMONE

“But, Mum, I get so bored. I’ve read everything in the house that you say I can and there’s not much of a library at school. What’s all the fuss about anyway? It’s only a book and I’m only reading it. (74–5)

This Rhodesian teenager chooses to read a book that had until this point been banned in the UK and in this way demonstrates the incongruity of the identity of the postcolonial subject who has experienced three cultural identities: the colonial subject, the migrant, and the returned migrant. By reading a book that was censored in the UK, she rejects British regulations and restrictions over her mind. Yet, at the same time, in reading English literature in her leisure time, she rejects Rhodesian definitions of propriety. That her act of reading is so self-conscious (she is only “apparently” engrossed, after all), reveals her fragility and her need to seek guidance from those who might be in a position to install a properly postcolonial education to replace the colonial attitudes conveyed in her textbooks. Instead of providing clarity, Nyasha’s mother simply tells her that though she is familiar with the author, this book is “not suitable” for her daughter without specifying the reason, and this impasse accelerates Nyasha’s descent into resistant reading as an attempt to undermine all dominant narratives. Studying, and then eventually tearing up and rejecting books, is a method of transferring the impact of colonial subjectivity on to what the text claims is a compelling factor in postcolonial identity: reading. Similarly, in Crick Crack, Monkey by Merle Hodge, protagonist Tee reads in order to avoid the pressures exerted by three oppressive influences: Tantie and her other Trinidadian female relatives who use dialect and are comfortable with Caribbean culture and community; her grandmother who offers insight into her African heritage which, for Tee, remains obscure; and her Anglicised aunt Beatrice who is treated with hostility by Tantie. Reading, for Tee, shuts down possibility, ambiguity, and complexity, replacing it with her notion, as conveyed by her British colonial education, of what is normal: Books transported you always into the familiar solidity of chimneys and apple trees, the enviable normality of real Girls and Boys who went a-­sleighing and built snowmen, ate potatoes, not rice, went about in socks and shoes from morning until night and called things by their proper names, never saying “washicong” for plimsoll or “crapaud” when they meant a frog. Books transported you always into Reality and Rightness, which were to be found Abroad. (67)

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

Like Tambu’s brother Nhamo in Nervous Conditions, who refuses to speak Shona and does not value his family after having undertaken a colonial missionary education, Tee exhibits the alienating effects of colonial education that Fanon famously elaborated in Black Skin, White Masks. While Tee busily consumes schoolbooks about the “exotic” apple (27), going “a-sleighing” (67), and “Tim and Jim who did a jig on the mat for a fig” (28–9), her education is divorcing her from her location and cultural heritage. This is a function of reading that Merle Hodge has described as a worrying force for conservatism, and a function that she tries hard to undermine by writing fiction in a new voice, aiming to privilege Caribbean identity: “to strengthen our self-image, our resistance to foreign domination, our sense of the oneness of the Caribbean and our willingness to put our energies into the building of the Caribbean nation” (Hodge 1990, 206). Reading in Crick Crack, Monkey is generally confined to educational contexts, and only becomes uncomfortable after Tee starts to ask questions which run counter to this conservative function; having told her aunt Beatrice that she would like to see Tantie and in the process conveying to Anglophile Beatrice that she remains connected to her Caribbean identity, Tee watches her cousins Carol and Jessica reading. Their exaggeratedly relaxed postures while reading—they are “sprawled or sunk into armchairs” and simply (simultaneously) raise “one curious eyelid” before continuing reading—contrasts with Tee’s discomfort and uncertainty. While reading is conveyed as dangerous within the text, Hodge is aware of its positive power and writes as an activist, reaffirming in both of these ways the fundamental importance of reading in postcolonial contexts. NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) is conspicuous for its singular instance of reading, a throwaway reference to the canonical English literary text in a novel that follows a common pattern of the teenage girl’s migration to the USA in the postcolonial female bildungsroman. The USA, a “country-country”, the “big baboon of the world” (49) as opposed to the “rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, like Sri Lanka” (49) occupies a mythical place in Darling’s mind before she undertakes the journey alone, largely for economic reasons. Darling is a schoolgirl when she migrates from Zimbabwe to the USA, to Detroit, to live with her aunt Fostalina’s family, and the text conveys her gradually developing consciousness of her disconnection from her Zimbabwean community and culture, by focusing attention on her attendance at an American school and her friendships. She develops a sense of cultural awareness as a migrant there as a result of conversations

10 

J. RAMONE

outside the classroom. While both Darling and her Nigerian friend Marina value being able to speak in Standard (British or American) English, Kristal defends her use of Ebonics as a legitimate and empowering Black form of speech to avoid “trynna front”, “trynna sound like stupid white folk” (222). This question of language and cultural identity takes place in Marina’s mother’s car which the girls have taken without permission, on their way to the mall where they park near, and enter, Borders bookshop. This contrasts with the more common focus in many texts, especially those published in previous generations of the forms of knowledge the protagonist is forced to negotiate as a result of the reading undertaken at school (just a handful of examples include Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth). The single instance of reading in We Need New Names is in fact a compound example which involves being in a bookshop and, triggered by the smell of books that she is not there to buy, remembering reading Jane Eyre for a school report. The bookshop is a conduit in to and out of the mall— it is mentioned only when they enter and when they leave, when they “tear through Borders” (232) to the passage. Despite being the only reference to literary reading in the novel, it  is intriguing because the protagonist reflects on her lack of a meaningful encounter with the books there: The smell of new books is all around us but we don’t stop to look at anything even though I kind of want to because I don’t hate books. I haven’t read any interesting ones in a while, though, since I’m always busy with the computer and the TV. The last book I read was that Jane Eyre one, where the long, meandering sentences just bored me and that Jane just kept irritating me with her stupid decisions and the whole lame story just made me want to throw the book away. I had to force myself to keep reading because I had to write a report for English class. (225–6)

These apparently dismissive encounters with both the bookshop and with Jane Eyre reveal a number of ideas about reading books, all characterised by ambivalence: firstly, Darling’s dismissive response to Jane Eyre, one of the most significant canonical English texts, is not obviously politicised. Darling reveals herself to be a capable, educated reader confident to make a critical response to the text, appropriate to her age and educational level: both the plot with Jane’s “stupid decisions” and the language with its “meandering sentences” are described as irrelevant by Darling. Unlike

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

Nyasha and Annie John, though, who demonstrate sophisticated and (to different degrees) violent reactions to the texts that clearly demonstrate attempts to colonise their minds, her response to the text is unremarkable and resembles any high school student’s private analysis of a novel that is separated from her experience by period, location, and subject matter. By extension, her education and her engagement with literary culture are presented as ambivalent. However, the text does not associate this ambivalence surrounding literature and reading with her later awareness of her disconnection from Zimbabwe. Instead, it is her female friendships that instigate questions surrounding her identity. Darling’s two friends convey different versions of Black empowerment that inform their linguistic choices: while Marina excels in school and attributes this in part to her superior command of Standard American English and to playing by the rules, Kristal adopts a strategic “black” dialect in order to reject the requirement to conform to a white standard. Darling observes both perspectives without adopting either, while she avoids confronting her migrant status and believes her stay in America to be temporary and entirely separate from her Zimbabwean identity. When Darling speaks on the telephone with her friend Chipo in Zimbabwe, she is forced to admit the impact of migration: “Why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala, huh? Why did you just leave? If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right” (286). In We Need New Names, the bookshop is important to Darling as location, but the meaning of the text is not. The nature of this bookshop, its vastness, and its commercial focus; the wealth and leisure conveyed by its unending choices; and the coffee shop inside that the girls visit, is an important aspect of its significance. The acts of reading and book-buying are understood as thoroughly determined by American capitalism, inviting above all attention to the literary marketplaces in which these texts circulate. The postcolonial writer might, as Homi Bhabha’s “Signs Taken for Wonders” indicates, employ instances of reading in literary texts to undermine colonialism and to interrogate the assumed cultural value of colonial literature in postcolonial contexts. In his essay, Bhabha remarks upon the repeated scene in cultural writings by English colonisers in India, Africa, and the Caribbean, of the “sudden, fortuitous discovery of the English book” (Bhabha 1985, 145). The book is always received, he writes, as an emblem of colonial authority, and as evidence of colonial discipline, as indicated by its contrast with the apparent wilderness and disorder

12 

J. RAMONE

surrounding it. The book signifies more than discipline and authority, though: interestingly, it also signifies a desire for the nineteenth-century colonial representatives—the kind of ambivalent colonial desire that Robert Young describes, a repressed desire for the other that reveals itself in the overly developed fear of racial mixing through reproduction. The book seems too solid an object, something too complete and self-­ contained, to bring with it the risk of hybridity, until, as Bhabha explains, once discovered in the colony it is “repeated, translated, misread, displaced” (Bhabha 1985, 146). The discovered book at first reinforces the arguments to which colonialism clings desperately: “the word of God, truth, art creates the conditions for a beginning, a practice of history and narrative” (Bhabha 1985, 149). However, at the same moment that the inception of a colonial narrative justified by God is reinforced by this book, its incongruity to its surroundings undoes that colonial certitude and initiates “a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition” (Bhabha 1985, 149). For Marlow, the English book sustains English cultural authority (Bhabha 1985, 150), but Bhabha notes the accompanying ambivalence that the text produces: “it is in-between the edict of Englishness and the assault of the dark unruly spaces of the earth, through an act of repetition, that the colonial text emerges uncertainly” (Bhabha 1985, 153). The text is, ultimately, “a sign of difference” (Bhabha 1985, 154), the text discovered in the wilderness itself only meaningful because of its displacement from its more usual housing in the English library. Because it occurs out of place, the moment of encountering a book— which, in Bhabha’s analysis is an English text in colonial-period writing— is a moment that “disturbs the visibility of the colonial power and makes the recognition of its authority problematic” (Bhabha 1985, 159). We might expect this pattern of questioning colonial authority due to the hybrid nature of colonial contact to be repeated in later postcolonial texts where canonical European literary texts are read or otherwise encountered. Indeed, there are examples where this, to an extent, plausibly accounts for the act of reading in the text. However, the undoing of colonial authority is only one of a multitude of functions performed by the instance of reading in postcolonial literature. In an attempt to apply Bhabha’s argument to a number of postcolonial texts where reading is associated with estrangement (Taslima Nasrin’s French Lover (2001), Aisha (1983) by Ahdaf Soueif, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008)), I uncover a preponderance on literary markets, and on public places where books can be sold, borrowed, or touched.

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

Taslima Nasrin’s 2001 novel French Lover, translated into English in 2002 by Sreejata Guha, is notable for its high number of references to books and reading (fifty-four instances, some instances including multiple actions associated with books) even though the theme of the text is not directly related to education or to working with books. Taslima Nasrin is better known for her first novel, Shame (Lajja), a novel which brings together reportage and narrative to chart communal violence in Bangladesh in 1992, in response to the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Because of the book’s representation of communal violence and its perceived anti-­Muslim perspective, Nasrin was subjected to violence and exiled from Bangladesh. French Lover deals with themes of displacement but avoids violent political contexts and instead conveys the story of Nila’s migration from Bangladesh to marry in Paris, her domestic solitude, and the relationships she forms once she begins to leave her apartment, mostly in pursuit of books. From a postcolonial perspective, the text is a straightforward narrative of migration, placing particular emphasis on female heterosexual desire and on female friendships. The role of books in the text is of interest because all of Nila’s pivotal moments of emotion or self-discovery are triggered by books and reading. The fifty-four instances of reading in the text include references to reading canonical French literature and other classic texts; reading Indian literature and poetry; undefined reading as a pleasurable activity; fewer instances of reading newspapers, magazines, cookery books, or maps; and discussions of writing book reviews or other activity involving reading or writing. There are also a number of examples of looking at bookshelves in various domestic spaces, and of visiting bookshops. The trips to bookshops are among the most emotionally potent scenes in the text. Nila’s first walk in Paris with her new husband Kishan includes a trip to a bookshop that renders the rest of her experience in the city meaningless: her new marriage and the condition of migrancy fade and she can no longer hear Kishan calling her name when she enters what is described as a “sea of books” in which she willingly drowns “without trace” (36–7). The same titles that Nila had read in Bengali translation make her feel “strange” in their original French—strange, especially in the French language, referring, of course, to the stranger or foreigner that Nila has become on migration, but in this moment suggesting a kind of celebration, discovery, and willing abandonment to the new environment: “In a trance, Nila handled the books one by one, smelt them, hugged them to her heart” (36–7).

14 

J. RAMONE

Books are also a refuge for Aisha in Ahdaf Soueif’s novel of the same name (1983). Libraries are prominent locations in the text and provide two main functions: escape from school when Aisha is a child, and later, a location from which she can watch the man who will become her lover. In the twenty-seven instances of reading and books in Aisha, seven occur in libraries. Of the remaining, two are notable for their discussion of canonical English literature: Catherine Earnshaw becomes Aisha’s imaginary ally in the cold school library, but Wuthering Heights drifts out of Aisha’s consciousness to be replaced by a projected image of her adult self “aged thirty, a seductress complete with slinky black dress and long cigarette holder with a score of tall, square-jawed men at my feet” (33–4). The book also becomes antagonistic when Aisha’s parents equate Lockwood’s sleepy visions of Cathy tapping at the window with Aisha’s belief in communication with demons enabled by religious experience, believing both to be fictional and refusing to listen to her need for some genuine form of communication (169). Like French Lover, books in Aisha are substitutes for meaningful relationships, but they largely belong to the world of childhood and their power diminishes from early enchantment and hunger when Aisha first learns to read, through to distraction from unpleasant encounters with her peers at school as a teenager, finally becoming objects with which her parents deride her and exclude her from the world of adult disclosure. In French Lover, books provide Nila with a justification for asking her husband for money and for her trips out alone. They also initiate her relationships: her friendships with Sunil and Danielle, who she lives with after leaving her husband, and her attempt to strike up a friendship with a French girl of Indian origin, begin with conversations about books: about Shakespeare and Co bookshop opposite the Notre-Dame where Ulysses was first published (74), about Danielle’s reviews of books written by women (80), and about Tagore’s poetry (196). They also mark the disintegration of her relationships: both Kishan and Danielle tire of Nila’s disengagement from them and from polite social practices when she chooses to lie reading books rather than taking part in dinner party conversation or doing things they consider more appropriate, such as cooking. However, Nila’s literary knowledge attracts Benoir, her French lover; meeting him and walking around Paris together, Nila finds the location where Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises. Their literary tastes do not match, and this is emblematic in the text of their incompatibility: Benoir reads Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Ed McBain, and Elmore Leonard while Nila

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

reads Baudelaire obsessively. Nila begins to structure her relationship with Benoir, and the amount of power she is able to exercise within it, through books. When Benoir throws Fleurs Du Mal to the ground, Nila asks him twice to pick it up, saying “I feel like reading a poem and it’s urgent” (245). This urgency describes Nila’s need to regain control after being dominated in marriage and after being raped by Sunil. Even though she was attacked by Sunil after he asked her to read a poem aloud (199), books remain a source of comfort for Nila. After an argument with Benoir, he sends her Baudelaire’s poetry collection as an apology (249). However, when Benoir eventually understands that Nila is more interested in the books than in him, he tears up her books and throws them out of the window (290). Bhabha’s approach only seems to begin to uncover the functions performed by the moments of reading in these texts. And it barely begins to account for the representation of books and reading in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). The White Tiger is structured as a series of email communications, an unevenly matched attempt at dialogue between Balram Halwai, a driver who has rejected his caste origins as a sweet-seller, and the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, who is due to visit India. The text concludes when Balram kills his employer in an act that he hopes will lead to change in terms of caste, hierarchy, and access to wealth. In this context, neocolonial questions of trade and wealth distribution dominate the narrative and the instances of reading found within it. Authority in this text is financial, and wealth is predicated on the prevalence of caste-based hierarchies. English Books are multitudinous in The White Tiger, not a rare discovery. On the three occasions on which books or reading are described in the text, books are always present in vast quantities, and on two of those occasions, so are their readers. The first encounter with English books is when Balram approaches a bookstall arranged in a market in such a fashion that he describes it as a “giant pile”, a “big square” of books (204). The proprietor sits in the centre on a stack of magazines “like a priest in charge of this mandala of print”. Neither Balram nor the bookseller has any real access to the massive pile of books: the bookseller does not read English (though he announces that all his books are written in English) and Balram has no means to buy the books. Despite his distance from books—he recalls owning “a book once” as a child—Balram wants to feel something that he attributes to the books’ power, and claims that: “Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up towards you. […] It just happens, the way you get erect

16 

J. RAMONE

around girls wearing tight jeans. Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum” (204). The books are very clearly commodities in this example: they are being sold, not read, and they are referred to as “print”, a term more associated with production than engagement. In addition, their primary marketing means—their covers—are significant, and so is the highly present publisher who altered a cover at one point so that the Hitler cover resembled Harry Potter; as a result, “life was hell for a week” (204) for the bookseller who relies on the covers to differentiate the books. The same relationships between the books and their meaningful contexts can be observed in the other example of bookselling in the novel. This time, Balram visits an even bigger bookselling outlet: “the great second hand book market of Darya Ganj” (252) in Delhi. This is a vast market where books are sold from the pavements on Sunday afternoons. Balram is similarly hovering at the edge of this encounter with books, pretending “to be one of the buyers” (252) by flipping the pages. Here, busy crowds of buyers jostle for bargain books which Balram describes in some detail—not, though, in the kind of detail that a reader or anyone invested in the enjoyment or use value of literature might offer: Balram dwells on the physical condition of the books in the manner of someone who might value them (or, by extension, their readers and their context) on this basis. Balram states that there are tens of thousands of “dirty, rotting, blackened books”, and “some books are so old that they crumble when you touch them; some have silverfish feasting on them—some look like they were retrieved from a flood, or from a fire” (252). The books exist in these two examples within the sphere of production, marketing, publishers’ power, and bookselling. Their literary value is determined according to their market value, which is dependent on their physical state. Their impact on Balram is his drive towards entrepreneurship; they give him the confidence to undertake his own sales enterprise, selling whisky. The “electricity” that he feels after encountering books ultimately leads to his act of revolution: in a bloody and hasty act he kills his employer as a means to disrupt the hierarchy that dominates neocolonial India. He makes his transition from obedience to violent rebellion in part because of his ability to play a role: at Darya Ganj the bookseller believed in his pretended role of customer and shouted: “You going to buy it or read it for free?” (252). An example of mass reading occurs after Balram, disillusioned with his employer after he is revealed to be weak, and politicians after they are revealed to be corrupt, drives around the city at night. He sees hundreds

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

of men “alone or in clusters”, “under trees, shrines, intersections, on benches, squinting at newspapers, holy books, journals, Communist Party pamphlets” (221). He understands reading to be something powerful, if only as a crutch, a distraction from the daily corruptions and disappointments that he and others suffer. He asks, “What were they reading about?” before answering his own question: “the end of the world”—or, perhaps, its upheaval by small and fractured acts of violence. None of the books read in these examples refer to colonial power, and though they are frequently English books, they are not directly presented as symbolising colonial authority, ambivalent or otherwise, corrupted or not. It is possible to see hybridity as a result of the postcolonial encounter in the prevalence of English language books in India, of course, and to associate their decay with the undoing of colonial power, but this seems a dissatisfying and limited reading in the context of a book structured through the uneven (one way) digital conversation between an Indian driver and the Chinese Premier, or, between the two emerging global financial superpowers and the two biggest countries in the world in terms of population. Instead, these references to buying or reading books speak of the neocolonial financial markets that India has taken part in and of the way in which reading and selling books functions as part of the day-to-day trade that supports India’s financial status. In French Lover and Aisha, much of the reading takes place in libraries and bookshops, and books are encountered on bookshelves. Balram Halwai visits bookstalls in two of his three encounters with books. In all of these examples and many more, the local literary marketplaces and markers of the place of literature in culture such as libraries shout for attention and insist on being read through the framework of postcolonial literary economies, readerships, local literary marketplaces, and bookselling and publishing contexts. The local literary marketplace should be understood in my usage as operating in contrast with the global literary marketplace. The locations explored here—Nigeria, Cuba, India, and the UK—would be considered national rather than local in studies restricted to these locations; describing Cuba as local does not make sense from within Cuba Studies. Yet, a distinct literary marketplace operates in each of these national economies. While these may contact the global literary marketplace in discreet circumstances, they are certainly not bound by its operations. In the end, “local” indicates that the marketplaces operate distinctly from a global literary marketplace and should be considered on their own terms in order to better understand them, and their literatures.

18 

J. RAMONE

This book is concerned with both literal and figurative versions of the market and/or marketplace, and pays attention to both their symbolic function when they are locations in literary texts, and their economic functions when reading instances are determined after the publishing and bookselling contexts surrounding them. Brett Levinson has suggested that: the market is itself a way of comprehending, of knowing the globe. […] it is a ‘sense of the world’ that threatens to bring knowledge, even the need and desire for knowledge, to an end. [...] the market turns on knowledge since its direction and extension depend upon the creation of a ‘neoliberal consensus’ […] established ‘naturally’ or without negotiation—as an ‘it goes without saying’—that it (the market) is the destiny of man: inevitable and necessary. (Levinson 2004, 2)

I demonstrate in chapters on local literary marketplaces that the market has predominantly local, not global meanings, and that these are less fixed in nature than Levinson’s analysis supposes. In chapters on each location, I consider how India’s literary market was disrupted substantially when Partition interrupted lines of communication and trade, while in postRevolutionary Cuba, the market was never present in literary culture until the financial constraints of the Special Period allowed exploitative foreign publishers access to what they considered to be a lucrative and exotic Cuban literary market. In Nigeria, the market has a different symbolic meaning altogether: it is central to life, but as a place for meeting, negotiation, and reflection, and only secondarily, trade. Black Consciousness bookshops and writing in Britain operated to change the literary market in the UK, a project still underway and being led today by initiatives including writer development agencies such as Spread the Word, established in 1995 by Bernardine Evaristo and Ruth Borthwick with a commitment to mentoring and publishing writers with an emphasis on diversity; Bare Lit festival in London celebrating the work of writers of colour, which was first held in 2016, and through new bookshop ventures including Dee Creative’s crowdfunded Black Feminist Bookshop, also in London, beginning with a pop-up shop in 2019 and aiming to open as a permanent bookshop in 2020. Having said that, we might ponder whether the decision to jointly award the 2019 Man Booker Prize to Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood for The Testaments (rather than to Evaristo alone) was due to the insistence of the marketplace (or, the global publishing industry’s marketing machine) which had made significant efforts by the time of the prize judging to support

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale to the extent that her Man Booker award went “without saying”. Research on the postcolonial literary marketplace and postcolonial readers and reading is a lively field, and a number of significant works have been produced in recent years. My work is part of this field and makes a contribution to the life of the book in the locations I discuss as well as more generally by paying attention to local literary marketplaces and their position and importance in  local postcolonial and neocolonial cultures. Much published work in the field focuses on sociological analysis of global publishing and book marketing (Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) and Literature and the Creative Economy (2014); Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001)) or of bookselling (Ranka Primorac’s article “Reasons for Reading in Postcolonial Zambia” (2012)). The focus of previous scholarship is on analysing the international reception of, or readerships for (Postcolonial Audiences (2012) edited by Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson), postcolonial literature, rather than exploring the ways in which reading instances within the texts reveal reading environments and practices at specific postcolonial moments and in specific postcolonial contexts. Though it does not focus on literary marketplaces or reading within literary texts, Karin Barber’s The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (2007) asks what texts reveal about the contexts that produced them. An important distinction between my project and the kinds of readerships that have been considered previously is that I am exploring fictional readers within literary texts—reading instances within the literary text itself—as a route towards interrogating the literary marketplace and culture of local reading contexts and communities. I have discussed the field in some detail in a book chapter on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “Jumping Monkey Hill” and its representation of reading and publishing contexts (Ramone 2017), but would like to add here a brief discussion of the work of Neil Ten Kortenaar, whose Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (2011) considers the imposition of literacy as part of the colonial process, and in the process compares oral storytelling with reading for education, as expressed in literary texts. Kortenaar’s book has a very different focus from mine, exploring, in chapters focused on single texts, the way learning to read in colonised Africa “comes at a price” which is alienation in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (Kortenaar 2011, 24), and the more positive form of interiority sparked by

20 

J. RAMONE

reading in Wole Soyinka’s Ìsarà, which is set in colonial Nigerian schools, as well as the power of life-writing in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, and the reach of orality in the context of newly imposed literacy in Erna Brodber’s Myal. Kortenaar engages with some instances of reading, but more frequently perceives the impact of literacy practices aside from reading, such as the habit of sitting in light parts of a room in solitude, as such habits interfere with family life, in his study of the way literary texts represent literacy. Although the focus differs, there are some interesting contrasts that might be drawn, such as the observation that reading is a solitary practice offering entry to “a separate interior world that each person enters alone” (Kortenaar 2011, 1), which is not replicated in my findings, at least to the extent that reading empowers communal activism in postcolonial contexts. There are also parallels; education is perceived as unsatisfactory in comparison with communal storytelling in Kortenaar’s discussion of the first generation to undertake colonial education. Their “mechanical” reading is a “chore” (Kortenaar 2011, 1), which nevertheless is part of the process of acquiring the status successful education brings—in the Nigerian texts I discuss here, education is again unsatisfactory for the most recent generation who have come to understand that they will not achieve their ambitions through education alone. This book’s four chapters ask what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, focusing on periods, places, and particular publishing contexts that represent distinct local literary marketplaces. Among all of India’s vastness, its Partition borderlands are, admittedly, hardly the most neglected. However, a study of the impact of Partition on reading and the literary marketplace has not been undertaken; Chap. 1 begins to undertake that work. Chapter 1  is concerned with colonial cartography, and with pre-Partition literary culture, publishing, and book production, as a method of contextualising the relocation during Partition of an iconic bookshop, Ram Advani, and of an important research library. The chapter considers texts which employ images of maps, mapping, and of book movement to challenge gender roles through the strategic employment of books and reading. A longer case study analyses Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), exploring how the text draws on Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” as a foundational Partition story while the text represents the act of writing while confronting the remapped landscape, marked by the uncomfortable, temporary barbed wire fences that recur in the text. Following Elleke Boehmer’s work on postcolonial literature and trauma, and in response to the texts’ inherent patterns and repetitions, it seeks the means by which

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

writers write through and beyond the trauma of Partition, and finds the answer to this in the representation of books and reading within these narratives. Chapter 2 argues that in Nigerian literature the market calls for attention; the marketplace is central to the meaning of reading and the contingent position of the Nigerian author within their local literary marketplace is a repeated narrative event. While the literature of the independence generation conveys confidence in the ability of newly independent Nigerian writers and citizens to transform African literature, canonical European literature, and decolonised Nigerian society, this confidence is replaced by doubt in later generations. Business supplants education as the primary means of acquiring wealth, security, and status, and as a result books and reading lose their former prestige. This change in attitude is inseparable from the economic climate: it succeeds the oil boom and bust years, during which periods both education and publishing were severely under-resourced. This chapter considers what reading means in Nigerian literature in the light of the significance placed upon education, generations, and the market, in Nigerian literature, culture, and scholarship. Onitsha Market Literature is central to this discussion, and for this reason it is considered in the chapter, as a means of illustrating the central position of the market in Nigerian literature and literary culture. Chapter 3 contextualises instances of reading in Black Writing in Britain by citing these within the history of Black Consciousness bookshops in the UK and acknowledging the part these bookshops played in the wider Black Consciousness movement, which was led by publishers, writers, and education activists. The chapter argues that Black Consciousness remains a defining feature of Black Writing in Britain, that it is traceable in literary texts through their representations of acts of reading, but that it has adapted with the changing socioeconomic context and no longer conveys a strong sense of community activism, but is instead located in the individual. There is a discernible pattern in Black Writing published in and on the subject of Britain—consciousness is central to its function, and to the function of books and reading as they appear in literary works published from the Windrush until the present day. The final chapter, Chap. 4, considers Cuba. This chapter traces the function of reading in Cuba by exploring the representation of reading in texts from the Revolution onwards, contextualised alongside a history of Cuban literary culture. In all periods, there is an emphasis on the spaces and places where reading takes place, which is repeated in literary representations of reading. In Cuba, the literary marketplace is central to the nation’s economy, and, perhaps more

22 

J. RAMONE

than anywhere else in the world, Cuba’s literary marketplace is constructed to a distinctly local model, which operates entirely separately from the global literary market within which most nations are co-­opted. Chapter 4 employs the adapted spatial theory that I developed in an article I wrote on architecture, spatial theory, and Cuba  (Ramone 2019), employing architectural principles because of its concern with clients, commissions, and the authorship of space which enables an approach to space that is sensitive to the context of Cuba’s increasing involvement with global trade and tourism. Reading spaces are of such importance because in Cuban literature spaces of reading frequently emerge as what the texts prioritise, rather than the reading matter itself. Cuba has a neocolonial context and is undergoing the most rapid change currently; it is not a location that is conventionally addressed via postcolonial studies but forms part of a new postcolonial world. Nigeria is perhaps the most straightforward postcolonial context: claimed as a British colony in the 1885 Scramble for Africa, Nigeria was subject to British colonial influence in relation to trade, education, infrastructure, and culture, and began campaigning for independence which was eventually granted on October 1, 1960. Cuba has a more multiple layered postcolonial history, having experienced a series of colonial and neocolonial regimes (from Spain, briefly from Britain, and the USA), and, I would argue, remaining under neocolonial influence because of its steadfast reliance on global tourism. The Black British chapter enables a discussion of what is conventionally, in postcolonial thinking, referred to as a diaspora community, though the value and coherence of the term “diaspora” might be disputed. India at the moment of independence conveys the lasting trauma of colonialism. A practical reason for selecting these four locations is related to the prevalence of specific and fascinating literary marketplaces in each location: in Cuba the second-hand book markets that dominate the city’s spatial identity; in Nigeria, the Onitsha book market that was equally prominent but interesting for different reasons: publishers used the market as their sole selling outlet; in India, bookshops and libraries literally moved across the border in dramatic undertakings—however, even in this period there are further literary activities that could be considered, including the Soviet Union’s book schemes undertaken in India in the 1950s, which Sarah Brouillette discussed in an article, arguing that books were used as “tools for advancing broad projects of government and industry” in this instance and elsewhere (Brouillette 2015, 186); in Britain, the Black Consciousness bookshops made a substantial contribution to the

1 INTRODUCTION 

23

Black Consciousness movement, becoming a community hub. Like the Mangrove Restaurant that James Procter has identified as having occupied the role of “social centre” and “unofficial advice bureau” (Procter 2003, 87), Black Consciousness bookshops were far more than selling outlets. Of course, as I have demonstrated above, there are many other regions with local literary marketplaces that deserve significant attention. Because postcolonial literature frequently contains references to reading, there is far more to be explored in depth, and I hope that this book encourages others to undertake research on local literary marketplaces in postcolonial contexts. I am committed to exploring the impact of capitalist structures on literature, and this is one characteristic shared by each of the local literary contexts discussed in this text: all four contexts operate, to varying degrees, outside of global capitalism, yet inevitably feel its impact. The extent to which socialist, resistant, or politically radical principles determine these literary marketplaces forms an important strand of my discussion of the function of reading in postcolonial literature. There are, too, points of convergence between the locations. These include the Black British writer Andrew Salkey’s stay in Havana and his edited collection, Writing in Cuba Since the Revolution, as well as his Havana Journal; the prevalence of Nigerian Igbo and Yoruba language and culture underpinning the Cuban religion of Santeria; the high number of Cuban ex-slaves who were sent to Nigeria to live in 1845 and 1861; the Afrocubanismo movement in 1920s and 1930s Cuba that paralleled Black Consciousness and negritude in its aims and focus; the high number of writers who might identify or be categorised as either/both Nigerian or/and Black British.

1.1   Located Reading Understanding what reading means in the economic context of its local literary marketplace might otherwise be termed “located reading”. The “many-sited memory map of located readings” created by Robert Macfarlane’s (2017)  social media conversation conveys the benefits of reading books in their place of composition. This implies the general benefit of paying attention to location and its impact on what is read. The political significance of the word “located” is registered from time to time, sometimes in literary contexts but often in disciplines allied to literary studies: located reading is also geographically situated for Ainehi Edoro, and there are losses to be guarded against if books are read from a distant

24 

J. RAMONE

point of view which imposes a generalised “African” location on to the text as a means of (anthropological) interpretation. Her keynote delivered at an event on African Literature held in Oslo in 2017 argued for the potential for reading African writing in an un-located way, in order to avoid the tendency to anthropologise literary works from Africa rather than reading them for their aesthetic properties (Edoro 2017). This is a problem of the global literary marketplace; paying attention to the local literary marketplace instead means recognising the specific rather than imposing the so-called objective anthropological gaze. Jacob Edmond understands “located” readings to be historically, politically, or culturally contextualised but also suggests that such readings are likely to be opposed with linguistic, dislocated readings and thereby to become “cross-cultural” and even “generalising” (Edmond 2012, 174, 190). A located reading attentive to the local literary marketplace insists on a linguistic or close reading, since recognising the texts’ aesthetics is the route to understanding their place and meanings. Jessica Tinklenberg uses the phrase “located readings” politically, to identify interpretations contextualised not historically but by the reader’s subject position—for examples of located readings, she suggests disability, Black liberation, and reader-response critics, while acknowledging that all readers interpret from their “located” position (Tinklenberg 2015). Tinklenberg’s position is stated in a book review and in the discipline of Biblical Studies, a field that understands “located” to mean emerging from an ideological position, which might be informed by political or social factors (Bennett 2013). Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading observes the process of locating reading ideologically in order to resist the effects of colonialism, which is particularly direct in the Black Consciousness movement and the literatures it supports. By paying minute attention to instances of reading in literary texts which are understood as operating within their local literary marketplace, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading hopes to offer a method of “close-distant-located reading” (Kozak 2017), a method that declares the locatedness of the text and its reader while constructing a close reading which, after Moretti’s distant reading (2000), is also reliant upon a collaborative process. After all, it is the literary communities that most often emerge as reinventing their local literatures through collaborative publishing, bookselling, and literary practices which construct a flexible and resistant local literary marketplace.

1 INTRODUCTION 

25

References Adiga, Aravind. 2008. The White Tiger. London: Atlantic Books. Barber, Karin. 2007. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Thomas Andrew. 2013. Ruled, Creedal, and Located: The Theological Interpretation of John Goldingay. Horizons in Biblical Theology 35 (1). https:// doi.org/10.1163/18712207-12341244. Benwell, Bethan, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. 2012. Postcolonial Audiences. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1985. Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817.  Critical Inquiry  12 (1): 144–165. Books, Libraries and Racism. 1973. Race Today. October, 301–304. Brouillette, Sarah. 2007. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2015. US–Soviet Antagonism and the ‘Indirect Propaganda’ of Book Schemes in India in the 1950s. University of Toronto Quarterly 84 (4): 170–188. Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2013. We Need New Names. London: Chatto & Windus. Caton, Louis F. 1996. Romantic Struggles: The Bildungsroman and Mother-­ Daughter Bonding in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. MELUS 21 (3): 125–142. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 1988. Nervous Conditions. London: The Women’s Press. Edmond, Jacob. 2012. A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-­ Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. New  York: Fordham University Press. Edoro, Ainehi. 2017. How Not to Talk About African Fiction. Keynote  Kunstnernes Hus. https://trap.no/en/project/stedsfrie-lesninger. Accessed 30 August 2019. Hodge, Merle. 1990. Challenges of the Struggle for Sovereignty: Changing the World versus Writing Stories. In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, ed. Selwyn Reginald Cudjoe, 202–208. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux. Hodge, Merle. 2000 [1970]. Crick Crack, Monkey. London: Heinemann. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1997 [1985]. Annie John. London: Vintage. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1988. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kortenaar, Neil Ten. 2011. Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26 

J. RAMONE

Kozak, Claudia. 2017. Latin American Electronic Literature: When, Where, and Why. In #WomenTechLit, ed. Maria Mencia and N. Katherine Hayles, 55–72. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. Levinson, Brett. 2004. Market and Thought: Meditations on the Political and Biopolitical. New York: Fordham University Press. Macfarlane, Robert. 2017. Books on Location: Robert Macfarlane on Putting ‘In-Situ’ Reading on the Map. Guardian, 21 July. https://www.theguardian. com/books/2017/jul/21/robert-macfarlane-why-its-time-to-put-our-reading-experiences-on-the-map. Accessed 30 August 2019. Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1: 54–68. Murdoch, H. Adlai. 1990. Severing The (M)Other Connection: The Representation of Cultural Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Callaloo 13 (2): 325–340. Nasrin, Taslima. 2001. French Lover. Trans. Sreejata Guha. New Delhi: Penguin India. Primorac, Ranka. 2012. Reasons for Reading in Postcolonial Zambia. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48 (5): 497–511. Procter, James. 2003. Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ramone, Jenni. 2017. The Postcolonial Book Market: Reading and the local literary marketplace. In: Jenni Ramone, ed., The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates. London: Bloomsbury. Ramone, Jenni. 2019. Architecture is repetition: Adapting postcolonial spatial theory for post-revolutionary socialist Cuba. Interventions 21 (7): 959–976. Simmons, Diane. 1998. Loving Too Much: Jamaica Kincaid and the Dilemma of Constructing a Postcolonial Identity. In Postcolonialism and Autobiography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, 233–245. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Soueif, Ahdaf. 1983 [1995]. Aisha. London: Bloomsbury. Tinklenberg, Jessica. 2015. Book Review: Amy-Jill Levine Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. RBL, Society of Biblical Literature. https://www.academia.edu/12968137/Review_of_Short_ Stories_By_Jesus?auto=download. Accessed 30 August 2019. Valens, Keja. 2004. Obvious and Ordinary: Desire between Girls in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25 (2): 123–149.

CHAPTER 2

Indian Partition Literature: Reading Displacement—Partition Reading Patterns, and Trauma

2.1   Introduction: Writing Partition Trauma Through analysis of the representation of books and reading in South Asian literature of Partition, this chapter argues that reading in India in the context of Partition is resistant, active, and marked on the landscape. In the aftermath of Partition, women rejected conventional gender roles in order to undertake resistant reading as a means of moving through and beyond Partition trauma, a narrative event which is figured in textual strategies of repetition, in the use of surprising metaphors, and through deferred endings, strategies of postcolonial writing about trauma more broadly, to which Elleke Boehmer has drawn attention in her recently published Postcolonial Poetics (2018). In the literature of Partition, these literary strategies come together in acts of reading and functions of the book. This chapter begins and ends with discussion of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, often referred to as the iconic Partition story. Its imagery is echoed in contemporary narratives: the division of land and construction of new boundaries are undertaken with the barbed wire that “Toba Tek Singh” circulates around, and the textual silence surrounding bodily harm done to women during Partition violence remains central to the way literature represents the events. The introductory section which begins with “Toba Tek Singh” is followed by a study of colonial cartography, and of pre-Partition literary culture, publishing, and book

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9_2

27

28 

J. RAMONE

production, contextualising the physical movement during Partition of an iconic bookshop, Ram Advani, and of an important research library. The central section of the chapter considers texts which employ these images and challenge gender roles through the strategic employment of books and reading. The final, longer case study section of this chapter analyses Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), exploring how the text draws on Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” as a foundational story in the novel, which is about writing film scripts while confronting the remapped landscape, marked by the uncomfortable, temporary barbed wire fences that recur in the text. This chapter considers instances of reading in literary texts (novels and short stories) which represent the Partition of India. Following Boehmer, and in response to the texts’ inherent patterns and repetitions, it seeks the means by which writers write through and beyond the trauma of Partition, and finds the answer to this in the representation of books and reading within these narratives. The chapter undertakes analysis in case studies of texts where books and reading are central, including a long analysis of Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), a reinterpretation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s writing and biography. Manto’s work is central to the archive of Partition literature, and “Toba Tek Singh”, his iconic short story of the process of Partition as applied to an insane asylum, provides a set of symbols and forms to which Partition literature coming after pays close attention: barbed wire, descriptions of barren landscapes, broken sentences, and unspoken violence being some of the most prominent among them. In her edited collection of fictional and non-fictional Partition narratives, Jayita Sengupta understands Partition as “a metaphor of difference, marking off borders, both at the geo-political and personal planes, between the two religious communities” (Sengupta 2012, xv). Partition also divided reading communities, spaces, and distribution networks. This chapter asks what reading means in South Asian stories about Partition, and what Partition stories do with books. Its impact is inevitably felt in literary texts that represent Partition, or are written in its aftermath. Partition is a trauma, felt by communities and witnessed in the landscape; much Partition writing reflects these traumas. Partition’s trauma is represented in literary texts that convey border crossing, the memory of place, idealised places, mapping and remapping, and the cutting and breaking of maps, borders, and books. Textual repetition and patterns of reading display the effects of trauma through displacement, while remapping is a repeated narrative strategy employed to recover from trauma. In Elleke Boehmer’s Postcolonial Poetics (2018), the writing of trauma is described as central to postcolonial literature, and as a writing that expresses

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

29

collective “crisis, pain, distress, or shock” (Boehmer 2018, 87). Boehmer suggests that trauma is signified stylistically through “hesitations, breaks, and repetitions, not only compelling the reader to relive the traumatic experience along with the speaker or writer, but also drawing them into the difficulty of its articulation” (Boehmer 2018, 88). This describes Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” unequivocally, the short story often considered as epitomising Partition writing. The story describes the impact of the Partition process on asylum inmates in Lahore, who respond uninhibitedly to the lack of certainty brought about by the creation of a new border. When the inmates’ families and home towns cannot be determined for certain as located in India or Pakistan, some refuse to be transported to new accommodation matching their designation as Pakistani or Indian, not wanting to be separated by this border from the life and people to which they are, after treatment at the asylum, hoping to return. Hesitations in the story convey the impossibility of declaring an individual as safe or of identifying a location in one or other territory, while they also refer to the most prominent Partition narrative: that of abducted and violently attacked women during Partition: “‘Your daughter Roop Kaur…’— he hesitated—‘She is safe too … in India’” (7). The existing research on Partition literature focuses, in the main, on the expression of violence towards women during Partition, unsurprisingly, since this is such a potent image with lasting effects. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence (1998) is the first and remains the most prominent study of histories ignored by the dominant narrative of Partition. In her effort to uncover unknown stories, Butalia notices women unable to voice their experiences and attempts to create a context in which those silences might be broken. Butalia continues with this aim in her subsequent study, Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir (2002), which offers further opportunities to collect the stories of abducted and widowed women, this time focusing on Kashmir. Jill Didur has discussed the palpable silences in both histories and literatures describing sexual violence suffered by women during Partition, citing work by Veena Das, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon (2004), and Kamala Bhasin, all of whom attempt to interpret the silences in histories, as Didur undertakes to do in the literatures depicting those histories. Didur notes that Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (The River Churning) (1967 [1995]), which is often described as the most prominent account of Partition in Bengal, foregrounds silence while it is centrally concerned with the abduction, violence, and repatriation of women during Partition.

30 

J. RAMONE

Titling sections of her novel after stories from the Mahabharata which recount violence towards women, Devi is, Didur suggests, “drawing a parallel between the gaps in the Mahabharata regarding this history and the gaps in accounts of women separated from their male relatives during the sectarian violence that accompanied India’s partition” (Didur 2006, 126). Debali Mookerjea-Leonard notes that protagonist Sutara’s silence is socially structured and policed by the family (her brothers’ paucity of interaction with her); by the community (she is not invited to social events); and by the state (the prohibition on biographical exchanges between students at the residential school she attends). In reinserting Sutara back into the script of middle-class domestic sexual economy, the novelist re-genders her, by way of establishing a claim for a different destiny for gender, and eventually, makes the details of people’s lives matter once again. (Mookerjea-­ Leonard 2003, para 42)

Other prominent studies of Partition violence include Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition (2017), which applies the impact of Partition to the current refugee crisis, in a new edition updating her 2007 study, another work that aims to convey the stories of ordinary people rather than political leaders. Joya Chatterji’s The Spoils of Partition (2007) addresses the impact of Partition in Bengal, focusing on the politics of a persistent open boundary, while Ashis Nandy (2003) insists that the trauma of Partition must not remain silenced, as silence risks inviting Freud’s “return of the repressed” (Nandy 2003, ii) and Tarun K.  Sant’s Witnessing Partition (2010) addresses the trauma of Partition as productively “reconstituted and reinterpreted” through literature. However, literary culture was as disrupted as other industries and networks, since Partition severed distribution chains between writers, publishers, and readers. Histories of paper, printing, and publishing in India form a useful context to an understanding of relocated libraries and bookshops during Partition. A discussion of selected emblematic relocations forms a contextual introduction to the case studies in this chapter, after which follows a discussion of the meaning of reading moments in Clear Light of Day, Filming, and Partition literature more broadly. Each of these texts employs repetition as a means to confront Partition trauma. While previous research has considered the way Partition is represented in literature, this chapter examines references to books and reading in literary texts (and their contexts) to understand what reading means in the context of Partition.

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

31

“Toba Tek Singh” makes productive use of its repetitions: not only is the general uncertainty of the distinction between India and Pakistan (“this India-Pakistan-Pakistan-India rigmarole” (Manto 1997, 3)) repeated throughout the story and left unresolved, there are numerous repetitive behaviours and instances of displaced trauma revealed in illogical actions: Bishan Singh, known as Toba Tek Singh, repeats “mysterious gibberish” (4) and inflects this with words and phrases of relevance to Partition: “annexe”, “the Government of Pakistan”, “Hindustan”, “Pakistan”; one inmate is “obsessed with bathing himself fifteen or sixteen times a day” (3); another resident decided to live in a tree, while a fellow inmate “ran into the garden stark naked” because of the unresolved debate and later this act of “tearing off their garments” extends to other inmates. Finally, the story’s ending offers three statements (one conjoined) which repeat each other’s structure and rhythm with minor changes, each of which are to do with location and the trauma inflicted by the attempt to identify the boundary: “There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh” (10). For Boehmer, the endings of short stories about trauma can be considered as “pressure points showing what kind of future might be imaginable beyond the moment of crisis or trauma in which the present appears to be imprisoned” (Boehmer 2018, 88). It poses little challenge to apply this to “Toba Tek Singh”—the story’s protagonist lies collapsed, powerless on undecided land between two territories marked as separate by barbed wire, emblematic of hostility and battle but also of impermanence. It is not clear whether he is alive or dead since “lay” might indicate the prone body of a man weakened by his circumstances, or a corpse. The creation of two territories imagines a future where the powerless individual is left inert, stranded between two territories without any temporal or spatial certainty. While the present is, as Boehmer suggests of endings in trauma writing in general, imprisoned, through the asylum and the barbed wire, the uncertainty enables a future to be imagined. In this short story, there is little sense of hope offered by the imaginable future, but more recent writing about the trauma of Partition employs the poetics of trauma as identified by Boehmer: reiterative poetics which provide a way of “breaking out of the repeating cycles of the present” (Boehmer 2018, 89); and repetition compulsions including Ato Quayson’s “symbolization compulsions” (Boehmer 2018, 95) which identify repeated symbolisation not related to character or plot but instead connected to an “unutterable traumatic

32 

J. RAMONE

occurrence” sometimes enabling eventual breaking out of traumatic patterns; and poetic effects which “map back to underlying trauma”—mapping back being a particularly apt description of the traumatic impact of remapping India in Partition. Mapping back includes “semantic and structural incoherence [again, recalling Toba Tek Singh’s repeated ‘mysterious gibberish’], hiatus, abrupt halts, and suspended action, especially but not only at the end of narratives” and also what Boehmer describes as “unexpected fade-out, the often elaborate and seemingly meaningful image or impression that is left undeveloped or lacks follow-through within the story-line” which might manifest as “fine-grained though ultimately inconsequential metaphors” (Boehmer 2018, 95–6). Possibilities for moving beyond trauma are offered by the text when it assumes the position of trauma, since the text undertakes the repetition compulsions that are destructive to the individual from a psychological perspective. Partition is above all symbolised (and represented in literary texts) by the altered map of India, sliced and divided violently by the hastily plotted Radcliffe Line which is famous for its impractical decisions including the way it sliced apart factories from their dependent crops, leading to economic decline. Partition is among Imperialism’s most violent acts of mapping, and a number of literary responses undertake a postcolonial remapping. Postcolonial remapping is a means of reclaiming a formerly colonised landscape. Like the tracing of repeated patterns, paying attention to the ways Partition narratives convey place, or remap, enables a reading that emphasises their efforts to represent and come through trauma. In Tabish Khair’s Filming especially, but also in Clear Light of Day and a number of other Partition narratives referred to more briefly here, the production and distribution of literary texts is dealt with directly. The availability of books—access to books and to libraries, changes in access—is bound up with the literary marketplace, or, the means by which books are produced and distributed and the decisions underpinning that process.

2.2   Part 1: Partition and India’s Literary Marketplace In a recent article in The Conversation, Adil Najam wrote that “Partition is to the psyche of Indians and Pakistanis what the Holocaust is to Jews” (2017, web). In 1947, India and Pakistan were divided as the last act of

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

33

the British Empire in India; the effect of this act was one of the most bloody and brutal periods of violence in human history. South Asian communities in the UK and worldwide live with the lasting impact of Partition, and benefit from projects which enable more Partition stories to be told, shared, and analysed. Books and reading have transformative potential and this is particularly the case for marginalised, displaced, and traumatised communities, alongside which postcolonial theory can perform an active, real-world role in addressing the effects of colonial history. Leela Gandhi suggests that the colonial encounter is repressed and actively forgotten by individuals and states but that this repression is not emancipatory, leaving space for postcolonialism to step in and theorise the recorded histories in order to produce real resistance to the effects of colonialism (Gandhi 1998, 4). Boehmer argues that, likewise, postcolonial literature employs patterns and poetics to work through representations of trauma rather than repressing it (2018, 65). The trauma of Partition is registered in the literature of India and Pakistan, sometimes in the gaps and silences that evoke unspeakable violence. Partition is an imprecise memory, which becomes blurred with later instances of sectarian violence; for instance, Urvashi Butalia found that communal violence in South Asia in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi triggered the retelling of Partition stories and also that individuals found it difficult to separate Partition, and the 1971 violence surrounding the second Partition creating Bangladesh from East Pakistan, from the 1984 events (Butalia 1998). Partition violence “echoes in postcolonial India” (Gopal 2009, 69) through these events and in memories of sectarian violence following the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Partition has continued to affect bookselling, production, and distribution in the literary economies that were established after or affected by Partition, and this is registered in events such as Ram Advani bookseller who moved twice after Partition—once to Shimla and again to Lucknow, and the ancient Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Library (VVRI) which was moved over the border piecemeal in refugee trucks. Writing in DNA India in 2017, Gargi Gupta describes the dramatic relocation of this important centre for Vedic studies which had taken place seventy years before. The library was a repository of ancient manuscripts located in Lahore at the Dayanand Anglo Vedic (DAV) College, which itself moved to Ambala in Haryana in India after Partition and was replaced by the Islamia College. Mahesh Sharma, in an article about the relocation, describes how the college itself became a “transit camp” (Sharma 2000,

34 

J. RAMONE

492) during Partition, an environment of “turmoil, loot, displacement and burning” (Sharma 2000, 492). Its library was transported to a building on the outskirts of Hoshiarpur in Punjab in refugee trucks. Gupta notes that the head of the research library, Acharya Vishwabandhu, had anticipated that the incoming Pakistani government would confiscate (or replace) Hindu libraries within its boundaries after Partition. In the absence of adequate packaging for the manuscripts, the librarians used jute sacks from food grains supplied to refugees, secured with ropes cut from the string cots inside the refugee hostels. 9000 manuscripts and more than 10,300 books from the VVRI collection were packed into heavy cartons, requiring 4000 sacks (Sharma 2000, 491). These were placed on the floor of army trucks that took refugees from the DAV College camp across the border, enabling the transportation of around sixty sacks each day in the fifteen refugee trucks travelling between Amritsar and Lahore daily. The four-month-long procedure was a success, with only one sack being confiscated at the border. The collection remained in Hoshiarpur for almost fifty years until it was rehoused in an appropriately temperature-controlled environment in the DAV College library in Chandigarh where the collection is currently undergoing English translation and digitisation for online access, a procedure which is partly undertaken already and is accessible from Lalchand Research Library’s Ancient Manuscript Collection online (n.d; Gupta 2017). The proximity of the books to refugees affected by Partition is striking: refugees inhabit the same physical space, sitting on top of the books in trucks, and one of the teams supporting the transportation project, Ved Prakash “Vachaspati”, describes sleeping in the open air in the winter cold on sacks of books when he was left stranded in Amritsar (Gupta 2017). The books are described in a far more active register than would ordinarily be applied to ancient scripts: alongside repeated reference to their transport, Gupta’s article is lively with references to the books’ “adventures”, to the “dangerous undertaking”, to a route sheltering “murderous mobs” and to escorting the books to their eventual safety. Mahesh Sharma’s article on the event, “Salvaging Manuscripts from 1947”, describes the process in more measured terms, noting the difficulties in the practical undertaking since those supervising the removal of books travelled with, and posed as, refugees, and could not afterwards return in the same trucks: “only on extreme emergencies, the military permit was granted to revisit the place of displacement. Certainly, the process of retrieving the library did not fall in that category” (Sharma 2000, 493). Nevertheless, books

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

35

and reading operate as significant markers of the impact of Partition, both in the ways they represent Partition and in the ways they are affected by Partition. In conversation after a keynote address at a conference held at Nottingham Trent University, Indian feminist publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia described Ram Advani bookseller as the best-known example of a bookshop which moved across the new border as a result of Partition (2017). Ram Advani’s bookshop was considered an intellectual centre in Lucknow, with Advani himself at the centre. His son reported that Advani had advised up to a thousand scholars including the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and writers including William Dalrymple, co-founder of Jaipur Literature Festival (Pande 2016). The shop was a meeting place for social and intellectual discussions, and Advani had a reputation for remembering his customers’ tastes, finding rare books that they wanted, introducing customers to each other, making insightful book recommendations, and inviting regular customers to lunch. Partition is conspicuously absent from articles about Ram Advani’s shop despite its movement after Partition. It is only in Ira Pande’s account of the bookseller and his shop that Partition is referred to directly: Pande writes: In 1945, his family opened a bookshop in Lahore and Advani was put in charge. But when the riots, tensions, and other distress of Partition erupted, he returned to Shimla by train, bearing witness to the bloodshed along the way. In Shimla, he opened a bookshop, but revenues weren’t sufficient and so he made his way back to Lucknow in November 1947, just months after India and Pakistan were born as two separate nations. (Pande 2016)

Other accounts of the bookshop’s movement hundreds of miles across the landscape attribute the move to Advani’s loneliness and sense of feeling out of place, and then to commercial factors which, though silent on the subject of Partition, are directly related to those events. For instance, Sonia Paul suggests that it was a commercial “masterstroke” to situate the Lucknow bookshop in Gandhi’s ashram since politicians and intellectuals visited the ashram and with it the bookshop, which became a networking hub as a result: “Two days before the shop was due to open on February 1, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. In the backdrop of that grim tragedy, Ray & Sons opened in Lucknow on February 15” (Paul 2016). Both the library and the bookshop relocations appear significant when charted on maps which are, in 1947, divided by their newly marked

36 

J. RAMONE

boundaries. While the Vishveshvaranand library was transported over a hundred miles from Lahore to Hoshiarpur, Ram Advani & Sons bookshop moved approximately 215 miles from Lahore (in modern-day Pakistan) to Shimla (India) before finally moving a further 460  miles to Lucknow (India) as a result of Partition—a 675-mile journey in total. Mahesh Sharma notes that the Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Library is of primary interest to “indologists, Sanskritists, and those interested in religion, liturgy and philosophy” who consult the “rare handwritten manuscripts”, the earliest of which were written in the fourteenth century A.D. (Sharma 2000, 491). The ancient texts of the Vishveshvaranand library which had otherwise been described in these scholarly terms, the library having been established to undertake research “in strict accordance with the principle of scientific and historical investigation in the entire domain of Indological Studies” (VVRI n.d.), became invested, during Partition, with the meaning of the books’ movement across borders hidden in refugee trucks; by moving across the map the books become items of adventure and danger (Gupta 2017). Likewise, the relocation of Ram Advani bookshop endows the bookshop with secondary meanings: the shop, in the context of its resilience and relocation, has been called “a bastion” (Haider 2016); a “scholar’s den” (Seth 2016); “intimate, welcoming” (Paul 2016); and “an intellectual hub” (Bhatt, in Husain 2016). The intellectual value of these two reading places persists in spite of their movement. Urvashi Butalia (2017) suggested that a number of publishers moved as a result of Partition, and that Bengal, in possession of all of the major paper mills, withheld it from other regions. The history of papermaking in India is very interesting: while there is a long history of paper manufacture in Bengal, including the Bhallavpur Paper Mill whose head office is in Kolkata, the full story incorporates mass manufacturing processes and handmade paper, while the influence of papermaking is also felt outside the factories. One unexpected factor is described in Sita Ramaseshan’s History of Paper in India (1989), which reveals that prisoners were heavily involved in paper production: Jails started manufacturing paper from about 1840 onwards. […] Prisoners were given the task of pounding, trading and polishing as a part of their hard labour and women and old prisoners were given the task of starching and cutting. There were hardly any new technological innovations in the jails apart from the introduction of steam boilers and the manufactories were

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

37

fitted with pounders, trading vats, and polishing implements. (Ramaseshan 1989, 115)

A number of paper mills were established in Kolkata during the colonial period following the installation of steam-powered machinery, using materials including waste paper, jute cuttings, rags, and local fibres before 1875, and bamboo and grasses afterwards. The paper produced in prisons was reported to be of poor quality in comparison to handmade paper and this had an economic impact on the industry (Ramaseshan 1989, 115). There were further developments in the process of papermaking in the decades immediately preceding Partition: new machinery and equipment enabled the mass production of paper from bamboo from 1931 onwards, since “papers made from bamboo were ‘protected’ or were tax free in the periods 1925 and 1932 under the British government” (Ramaseshan 1989, 118), and as a result paper was produced in sufficient quantities to be exported internationally. Then, “in 1940 in order to assist the All India Village Industries Association the British government in India introduced machinery for handmade paper manufacture from Great Britain which completely altered the nature of the industry” (Ramaseshan 1989, 116). Progress was halted, though, since “from 1940–1947 a paper famine existed in India and paper had to be mainly used from imported stock or made from waste paper” (118). These years lead directly up to Partition, although the paper shortage echoes the situation in previous periods; though the earliest Printing Press in India is recorded in Goa under the Portuguese colonial administration there was no record of a paper mill until 1716, located in the Danish colony in Tranquebar which persisted until 1772 when it closed due to a lack of raw materials, as Ramaseshan reports: “There seems to have been an acute shortage of paper and in 1725 paper had to be made from waste paper. For the remainder of the century the shortage of paper was a constantly recurring complaint” (Ramaseshan 1989, 116). More recently paper mills have developed to the extent that they even run schools in the areas where they operate: the Bengal Paper Mill School is situated near Ballavpur Paper Mill in Bardhaman, West Bengal, and is just one example of a number of schools named after, and sponsored by, paper mills. The paper historian Dard Hunter noted that Gandhi hoped that papermaking and weaving would “eventually be the salvation of India’s destitute millions, freeing the country, to a great extent, from the necessity of importing paper and cloth” (Hunter 1940, 7). The material context of paper and its connection with

38 

J. RAMONE

rehabilitation and education through Gandhi’s hopes and its presence in prisons and schools reinforce the economic integration of paper, books, and reading which was disrupted by Partition. Established in 1946 on the cusp of India’s Partition, Jaico is India’s best-known publisher, with a reputation as the first publisher of American paperbacks in India (of the kind read by Raja in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day). Distributing these texts was Jaico’s main business in 1946 when the company was founded, but Jaico was also the first company to publish English language paperbacks in India, and then in the 1960s, one of the first to publish Indian texts in English translation. Rita Kothari’s important study into the translation of Indian writing includes a detailed history of publishing in India, which offers insight into the ways in which Jaico operated within this, and how it developed alongside global and local publishing houses in the years leading up to, and following, Partition. In her examination of the publishing industry, Kothari insists that in India, what is published and what is read is not dependent on literary merit alone; the publishing industry plays a crucial role: “Situated at a point of intersection between culture and commerce, print capitalism ‘determines’, to an extent, the production and consumption of literature” (Kothari 2014, 59). Kothari notes that “Printing and publishing began systematically with the British presence in India” following sporadic printing projects, aimed at spreading the Gospel through print, undertaken by Jesuit missionaries in the 1550s. The Serampore Mission Press, established in 1800 as part of the colonial project, is considered “a watershed in the movement from the scribal to the printed word” (Kothari 2014, 60). The Serampore Mission Press published translations of the Bible into Indian languages, dictionaries, English translations of religious and literary masterpieces in Sanskrit and Persian, and British colonial documents, produced at Serampore College and Fort William College. Kothari notes that while “regional presses owned and run by Indians flourished in British India, publication activity in English during the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century was, by and large, in the hands of the British” (Kothari 2014, 60). Kothari lists particular publishers which continued to operate in the decades leading up to Partition, including Rajpal and Sons, M.N. Roy’s Renaissance Publications, and Gandhi’s Navjivan Press, but notes that even these were dominated by British publishers: Fringe efforts like that of the indigenous firm Popular Prakashan (1928), which also published English books were overshadowed by the large-scale

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

39

operations of the British firms. Macmillan, Longman and the Oxford University Press (established in 1903, 1906 and 1912 respectively) were the only ones to meet the demand for English textbooks in India. Until 1947, India’s entire English language book trade and most of its publishing industry comprised titles imported from the U.K. Indians confined themselves to subsidiary activities like distributing, importing and reprinting books. (Kothari 2014, 60)

Local political factors contributed to this; English-language readers were few in number, meaning a small market which was not necessarily commercially viable, and the strong socialist nature of the Indian state precluded mass commercial publishing activity. This also led to the nationalisation of school textbook production in the 1960s, and earlier, the establishment of the National Book Trust in 1957 and Sahitya Akademi, India’s literary institution, in 1954. These developments contributed towards the establishment of Asia Publishing House in 1961, a publisher, printer, and paper manufacturer, and in 1958, Writer’s Workshop, a literary publisher based in Kolkata founded by Indian poet and scholar Purushottama Lal, which published predominantly new authors of post-independence urban literature. The publishing industry was dominated by global publishers mostly based in the UK who formed the commercial centre of power, but this operated alongside a thriving local literary culture in both Punjab and Bengal, regions where Partition was felt most keenly. In the Partition period itself, local publishers and the associated local literary culture were most at risk. Farina Mir’s work on Punjabi vernacular, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (2010), includes a revealing examination of the local literary marketplace in the Punjab. A lively publishing industry led to eighteen different editions of Adi Granth (the hymn collection or sacred scripture of Sikhism) being published in the Punjab in the Urdu script alongside five Punjabi translations of Ramayana in this script, in the second half of the eighteenth century (Mir 2010, 85). Local publishing operated separately from state-funded initiatives, so these figures reveal only the most readily available information, and most publishers, not paid by the state for doing so, did not officially register their publications despite a thriving Punjabi literary tradition which was financially viable and in high demand. One factor which determined publishing decisions, without direct state control, was the official language—when Urdu was designated as the official language in the pre-colonial Punjab,

40 

J. RAMONE

literary production and print culture in the region responded to meet this requirement. The vigorous print culture was predominantly literary, and publication of the qisse, a famous Punjabi oral storytelling form, was in high demand. The name qisse means epic legend or folk tale and more informally, fable or interesting story, and Punjabi qisse are stories about love, passion, betrayal, sacrifice, social values, and revolt against the social system, with friendship, loyalty, love, and fidelity as central to the stories. Qisse offered a means of social commentary, to the extent that Mir argues they offer a counter-historiography of the region, dominating demand and instigating public performance. The qisse were central to what developed into a sustained, thriving Punjabi literary culture throughout the colonial period, and the form is symbolic, Mir suggests, of the region’s community and tradition which was not marked out by communalism, as conventional histories of the region suggest, but instead operated without regard to distinctions in class, caste, or religion (Mir 2010, 85). Mir notes that the literary tradition contributed towards a culture which enjoyed “shared practices of producing, circulating, performing, reading, and listening to Punjabi literary texts, qisse in particular” (Mir 2010, 97). Literary audiences were similarly diverse in terms of gender, class, caste, and religion, and the performances involved active participation—the audience, including women, social elites, and performers conventionally categorised as “low status” (including qawwals, mirasis, dhadis, dums, qalanders, putlivads, bhirains) participated together in literary performance (Mir 2010, 99). In addition to the qisse Punjabi print culture included books, pamphlets, and chapbooks, liturgical texts which were translated into Punjabi, and newspapers and journals with a specific target audience of particular religious communities. These have been taken to represent Punjabi culture, yet as a result of their communal production offer a limited picture. These books and pamphlets were sold in busy markets including Kashmiri bazaar in Lahore, Mai Sevan bazaar, and Naval Kishore Press (Mir 2010, 81). Mir acknowledges that a core Punjabi publishing industry persisted through the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-Partition periods, suggesting that despite the fierce violence at Partition which was experienced intensely in the Punjab, aspects of Punjabi society, including vernacular publishing (or, the local literary marketplace) persisted, as a result of the existing composite culture in the region (Mir 2010, 193). Tapti Roy offers evidence of a similarly vibrant Bengali local publishing industry and literary culture in her study which traces the publication

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

41

history of Bidyasundar in colonial Bengal. Bidyasundar was the story of Bidya, a princess from Bardhaman in Bengal, and her love affair with Sundar, a southern prince from Kanchi, which has been traced to original versions in medieval Bengali poetry. Eighteenth-century Bengali poet Bharatchandra’s work made the story better known, and as a result of the availability of printed copies in the early nineteenth century Bidyasundar became the most popular work of Bengali literature of the time (Ghosh 2019). Roy explains that the multiple versions of Bidyasundar in Bengal in the nineteenth century point to a diverse print culture in colonial Bengal, as well as “differences and fractures within the community of book producers” (Roy 2018, 14). Tracking these distinctions between multiple printed versions as well as the presence of different readers—commentators and critics of both Bengali and British origin—offers, Roy suggests, a record of “the emergence of a unique ‘culture’ of printing in nineteenth-­ century Bengal” (Roy 2018, 14) that transgressed traditional boundaries of space, period, and social category. In addition to local publishing networks and performance cultures, libraries in Punjab were affected by Partition, not least since formerly thriving libraries were forced to relocate. Dinesh Kumar’s informative study of public libraries in Punjab registers both the impact of Partition and the thriving local library networks. Kumar (2008) notes that the earliest form of state support for the development of the library system was the 1867 Book Act. The Press and Registration of Books (PRB) Act enabled the government to regulate printing presses and newspapers by a system of registration and to preserve copies of books and other matter printed in India (MIB n.d.). During Partition, in addition to the general disorder, a number of libraries moved from cities in the Punjab in India to Lahore or other cities in Pakistan; Kumar notes that both libraries and other dependent institutions, as well as the reading public, suffered and lost significant numbers of texts. Among the libraries that moved, Kumar notes in particular the First Punjab Public Library and the Dwarka Das Public Library in Lahore which was established in 1921 and is now located in Chandigarh and operates as a Cultural Centre. Aside from the major public libraries attached to universities and housing vast collections, village libraries (numbering 1500  in Punjab during the decades preceding Partition) were established by education departments of the Punjabi state government, which were open after school hours and were run by language teachers. According to Kumar, village libraries served 70% of the Punjab’s population, so these smaller libraries, stocking children’s literature, newspapers,

42 

J. RAMONE

periodicals, pamphlets, fiction and non-fiction books, and publications from the Department of Agriculture and Co-operations, were crucial to the sustenance of education and literary culture during and after Partition; the current situation shows a thriving library culture with 1 central state library, 14 district libraries, 104 municipal libraries, 1200 rural libraries, and 3000 reading rooms in Punjab.

2.3   Part 2: Mapping and Remapping John Harley suggests that maps detach the human from the landscape: as an impersonal type of knowledge [maps] tend to ‘desocialize’ the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality of the map […] lessens the burden of conscience about people in the landscape. Decisions about the exercise of power are removed from the realm of immediate face-to-face contacts. (Harley 2001, 81)

Kei Miller’s poem, “The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion” (2014), suggests that there is a fundamental unreliability about maps, and in making this observation, undoes the assumption of their power. In the poem, Miller opposes two voices who contemplate mapping the same space: one is constructed of “science” and is without “passion” or “bias”. This voice is reliant on “fences” and established landmarks; the other is alert to the damage maps do when they impose “things that shoulda never exist in the first place” like borders and governments, and points out the invisible things that maps erase even though people rely on them to make sense of their place: “board houses”, the “corner shop”, Miss Katie’s “famous peanut porridge”, and “what you never see” (Miller 2014, 15–19). What is included and excluded affords power to the cartographer, as Stephen Jones explained in the period leading up to India’s Partition: “the neat boundaries and striking colours of many maps conceal the fundamental inaccuracy of the basic data and the subjective decisions made by the cartographer” (Jones 1945, 86). For Lucy Chester, this unreliability is important to keep in mind: “Maps are problematic sources”, she insists, “They may appear authoritative, but by their very nature they display only selected, and sometimes distorted, aspects of reality” (Chester 2010, 84). The “conflicting cartographic information” that Radcliffe received was combined with his subjective analysis of the available maps, meaning that he “regarded a map produced by the (British) government of India as

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

43

more authoritative than any map submitted to him by other parties” (Chester 2010, 85). He had a limited timescale for undertaking the work, which “allowed the commission no time to conduct any kind of local survey” (Chester 2010, 86). These factors combined to produce a highly unreliable cartographic narration of India’s emerging boundaries and undoubtedly this unreliability contributed to the disorder of Partition as represented in literary texts. In turn, this provoked a literary remapping through representations of Partition which rewrite the events and locations at borders, and which often do so through the representation of books and reading. In her cartographic history of India’s Partition maps, Lucy Chester examines all available maps, including Pakistani reproductions of selected maps submitted during the boundary commission hearings, a sketch map showing an early version of Radcliffe’s line, the maps Radcliffe attached to his award, and an India Office copy of a map attached to the Radcliffe decision. Despite Chester’s disclosure that “it has so far proved impossible to trace any original boundary commission maps in the British, Indian or Pakistani archives”, examining the cartographic material that is available is a very valuable activity, since it “illuminates the patterns of thought that shaped the decolonization of the subcontinent” (Chester 2010, 83). Chester notes that “the available reproductions […] allow a rich analysis of the cartographic information available to Radcliffe and of its effects on his work” (Chester 2010, 83). Maps are so significant to an analysis of the Partition of India because of the role played by mapping in the work of Empire; likewise, postcolonial literary responses undertake a remapping as part of anticolonial and decolonising processes. In the case of the Partition of India, the official maps used by the boundary commission, The Survey of India, had their origins in imperialism, and their analysis helps to uncover the particular role and tone of imperial cartography in relinquishing control of South Asia, given, as Chester asserts, “the long history of British attempts to control South Asia by mapping it” (Chester 2010, 83). Radcliffe’s decisions over particular boundary lines took into consideration only the most immediate practical and geographical considerations, and did not consider economic or cultural transactions. Chester’s archival research identifies water—canals, irrigation systems, the prevention of disruption to Punjabi irrigation systems—as playing a key part in Radcliffe’s final boundary line decision, though rivers were avoided as boundary markers and Radcliffe did not take into account any natural boundaries despite party leaders on all sides suggesting they should be used, instead

44 

J. RAMONE

preferring to use administrative boundaries (Chester 2010, 74–7). Chester notes that “water was the key. And railway would come second, electricity would run third” (Chester 2010, 80). Evidence of disregard for cultural, educational, and even practical distribution and communication networks is clear from the maps Radcliffe used, which show “the British version of Punjab primarily as a theatre of battle, a sphere of colonial administration and a showcase of British engineering achievement, rather than the complex and heterogeneous society it was” (Chester 2010, 95). This was explained in part by the poor detail available on the maps—“degree sheets did not display information such as trading patterns between Amritsar and Lahore or kinship links between western and eastern Punjab” (Chester 2010, 95–6). But the lack of detail is not simply incidental—it is due to the purposes behind decisions taken over what to include on those maps; “maps sometimes functioned as imperial ‘weapons’, supporting and legitimizing empire and communicating imperial messages” (Chester 2010, 96). And if maps elect not to include population categories, patterns of local social interaction or other cultural information, this is due to their intended purposes—it is easy to include information about the natural and built features of the landscape which determine the activity of population networks, such as natural waterways, hills, and roads used to demarcate daily activity without trespassing into more “controversial” areas such as census information (Chester 2010, 96). If Lucy Chester is right when she suggests that there is an “inherent tendency of maps to distance the map reader from the social reality of the terrain portrayed” (Chester 2010, 97), then literary remappings depicting Partition work hard to replace that distance with acute social detail. Some of those literary remappings can be found in modern and contemporary novels including The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh (1988), and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). The Inheritance of Loss begins and ends with the idea of place; Sai, a young woman living in Kalimpong, in the disputed state of Gorkhaland which has been campaigning violently for independence since 1909, reads National Geographic while contemplating her home and the “roadblocks” (9) which prevent the newspapers from being delivered. The “inheritance of loss” is a phrase often used to define India’s post-Partition context, and Desai’s novel is often categorised as “post-Partition”, though its particular context is the violence resulting from the claim for a separate state, and the concept of the Indian diaspora abroad, instigated by the moment of Partition and independence. Ananya Kabir describes Desai’s novel in her essay on Partition and Indian literature as “a new way of talking about

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

45

nature’s triumph over cartography” (Kabir 2015, 131); however, the novel offers a rather more bleak response to cartography once the focus shifts to consider the function of reading about geography in the text. Reading in the novel is often frustrated or indirect: of 57 references to books and reading, only 6 describe reading books unhindered (brief histories and information books 119; Jane Austen 130; self-help books 190; Crime and Punishment 200; a book on the Dalai Lama 24; Wuthering Heights 250). There are six references to being unable or unwilling to read, four discussions of a library which is subject to the confiscation and return of its books by the Gorkhaland freedom movement’s GNLF soldiers; four references to books as part of an everyday backdrop of familiar objects, and further references to reading newspapers (ten instances), letters (fourteen instances), and other materials: colonial accounts (12); comics (197); a diary (63, 303); textbooks (66), and the Bible, as well as National Geographic (1, 2, 7, 14, 71, 247, 323). The relative prominence of reading National Geographic in the novel implies that remapping and defining boundaries is so bound up with the identity of a place that such attention to geography dominates what is read. The final section of the novel pivots around a conclusive act of reading National Geographic; Sai, having read the magazine, reaches a sense of resolution about her own destiny and “felt a glimmer of strength. Of resolve. She must leave” (323). Reading about geography—or cartography—invests Sai with strength, but this strength enables her to leave her home, implying that the border dispute results in displacement or exile. Place, bound up with travel, exile, return, and border violence, is just as central to Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988). The novel, which juxtaposes two connected moments in a family history—World War Two London and pre-Partition violence in Dhaka—includes forty-seven references to books and reading, the most potent of which involve seeking historical newspapers in a library’s news archive. Other references to books and reading include examples involving school (4, 7, 118, 197); bookshops and stalls (7, 63, 163, 175); libraries (13, 214, 217, 219, 222); domestic spaces filled with books (30, 108, 171, 191, 207, 209, 226); generalised reading or interrupted reading (11, 16, 18, 23, 27, 80, 117, 142), named writers (Lorca 9, Tagore 130); and the reading of other things—letters, newspapers, yearbooks (17, 22, 60, 63, 93, 97, 179, 219, 222, 224, 225, 227, 241). The narrator searches through news archives held at his university library in an attempt to reconcile his family history and the communal violence that led to the death of his cousin Tridib, the person whose

46 

J. RAMONE

influence he considers is the most important in his life. The family’s history is bound up with the mapmaking project of Partition and The Shadow Lines signals the relative unreliability of maps asserted by Lucy Chester, Kei Miller, and Stephen Jones. The narrator is frustrated by the atlas which projects inaccuracies about the relative distances between locations: I tried to learn the meaning of distance. His atlas showed me, for example, that within the tidy ordering of Euclidean pace, Chiang Mai in Thailand was much nearer Calcutta than Delhi is; that Chengdu in China is nearer than Srinagar is. Yet I had never heard of those places until I drew my circle, and I cannot remember a time when I was so young that I had not heard of Delhi or Srinagar. […] In perplexity, I turned back through the pages of the atlas at random, shut my eyes, and let the point of my compass fall on the page. (227)

The potency yet the contradictorily unreliability of maps instigates the narrator’s rejection of Partition’s logic and his assertion of the impossibility of defining boundaries: “I think to myself, why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It’s a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide a memory?” (241). The novel is structured around the inability to rationalise a memory, or a history; the narrator’s grandmother, cousin Tridib, and family friend May Price had been killed in riots in Calcutta in the days leading up to Partition. As an attempt to understand how their deaths could have happened, the narrator seeks newspaper stories to confirm the events. While he eventually locates the news article after a series of recollections helps him to identify the likely date, he is left with more questions and the library becomes a repository for his sorrow and anger: “For a long time after that I could not bring myself to go back to that library. I lay on my bed in my dank hostel room in the university […] wondering how, and why, my father had allowed them to go. It seemed too wanton and senseless—[…] he must have known that something was going to happen” (222), he says, using words that might equally describe Partition itself. Tellingly, finding the information he sought is described in terms of travel and landscape bound up with the library, or reading space: “sitting in the air-conditioned calm of an exclusive library, […] I began my strangest journey: a voyage into a land outside space, an expanse without distances; a land of looking-glass events” (219). The sense of space and place is as questionable as the events

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

47

themselves since neither offer logic nor solace. The narrator laments that memory is just as flawed and misleading as those unreliable maps since memory imposes pressure to adopt a coherent national narrative: “by the end of January 1946 the riots had faded away from the pages of the newspapers, disappeared from the collective imagination of ‘responsible opinion’, vanished without leaving a trace in the histories and bookshelves. They had dropped out of memory into the crater of a volcano of silence” (226), the hyperbolic image implying the sense of frustration and the magnitude of what is lost when memories are suppressed. Jayita Sengupta asserts that Partition has a “continuous impact on our lives” (Sengupta 2012, 3). The title of her edited collection, Barbed Wire, refers to one of the most prevalent metaphors of Partition, and signifies “the divide within and without as the feelings of segregation, separatism in the political (collective) and individual consciousness of the nation(s), with borders being marked internally, and externally, over again” (Sengupta 2012, 12). While barbed wire provides a visual metaphor for the division of people and nation(s), it is also a physical barrier used to quickly demarcate newly mapped boundaries. It is a temporary marker of boundaries, and a violent one, its barbs promising harm. The barbed wire both locates and dislocates at the moment of partition and many of the texts in the edited collection engage directly with location and dislocation: Jasbir Jain demonstrates that dislocation is a dominating theme in Intizar Husain’s stories (Jain 2012, 66–78) while Sreemati Mukherjee identifies dislocation as, along with madness, Manto’s primary concern in his short fiction (Mukherjee 2012, 81–93). Further texts in Sengupta’s collection engage directly with mapping and remapping: Dilipkanti Laskar’s poem “Locatings” stages a conversation revealing the uncertainty of place, where “doubts about the location of my home” lead to opposing definitions of the same place—“Karimganj, Assam” and “Bangladesh” are both used (Laskar 2012, 199) in an act of remapping occasioned by the speaker’s uncertain sense of place. Moushumi Dutta Pathak considers the impact of “marking and re-marking of the borders of Assam” (Sengupta 2012, 18), while Ashes Gupta’s essay “Living the Dream: Narrating a Landscape Lost and a Land Left Behind” can be defined as an exercise in remapping, through a life-writing narrative that recounts the author’s first visit to what he identifies as his land, though it was a place he “had never seen or visited” before (Gupta 2012, 50). Gupta describes a landscape familiar through its presence in his imagination and through his habit of remembering that place in misleading “superlatives” caused by the process

48 

J. RAMONE

of Partition which he expresses as a kind of forced remapping of the psyche: “the exodus triggered by Partition sought to change the cartography of the narrator’s self once and for all” (Gupta 2012, 50); here the “narrator” Gupta identifies is the individual recalling their Partition experience in any formally or informally expressed Partition story. Partition invites attention to the cartographies of literary texts, and these cartographies can be found in the disrupted experience of reading and encountering books in literary representations of Partition. Surjit Sarna’s short autofictional narrative, “The Distance to Lahore” is an account of disrupted reading due to Partition’s enforced dislocation, from the perspective of a college student training to become a teacher. The story positions the library at its centre: I loved the college library the most. My hunger for books refused to be satiated. Whatever time I would spare—not spare, but make a special effort to find—I would spend in the library. I would borrow books from the library and back home, after attending to my homework, I would be busy reading them well past midnight. The books opened out a whole new world which involved me and I was reluctant to come out of that world. […] my friends and I […] would sit in the sun and eat our lunch during recess and discuss books we had been reading. (Sarna 2012, 43)

The significance of place to the experience of books and reading is underlined by repeated references to the library, and to the “world”, and by the story’s title, “The Distance to Lahore”, which implies such a figure might be determined with the help of a map. The narrator’s pre-Partition world involved the experience of literature in all the places she visited: at the cinema she watches adaptations of David Copperfield and Jane Eyre (44) and before the film starts there are poetry readings (45). At home, reading novels takes place alongside listening to the radio and meeting friends (44), and books and reading are central to her experience: “ours was a small world but somehow I always had access to new books which opened out other worlds” (46), she notes, again connecting reading directly to her sense of being located in a particular local place within a global network. The word “somehow” indicates the taken-for-granted (but not unappreciated) access to books which is disrupted by Partition. Partition is figured as an “explosion” in the story; pre-Partition riots in 1946 “ruthlessly pulled us out of the world of our dreams” (46). Following this uprooting, pamphlets replace books: the students’ attention is turned

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

49

towards the production of multiple copies of pamphlets explaining the political situation, and from this point until the end of the narrative there is a conspicuous lack of books, conspicuous since the narrative began with the overwhelming centrality of books and reading, before Partition. Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (2001 [1980]), set in Old Delhi at some remove from the centres of violence, remarks on smaller, private libraries and book buying in an exploration of the impact of Partition on one family. The following section explores the way that books and reading register the impact of Partition in Desai’s novel, in Attia Hossain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), which engages more directly with Partition activism and violence through another family narrative, and in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” (1981), which explores the violent context of India’s second Partition during the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). Each of these texts involves the transgression of women’s gender roles as a result of Partition.

2.4   Part 3: Gender and Reading in Partition Literature Desai once suggested in an interview that Partition instigated her departure from India, and her  writing, claiming that she would never have begun writing “if everything made sense and was continuous” since Partition necessitated her written practice of “putting all the bits together” (Desai 2011). Partition is mentioned just five times in the novel; like everything else beyond the siblings’ emotional landscape and their relationships with each other, it is peripheral. For instance, their parents are largely absent, so when their mother dies after a short stay in hospital, “it was a little difficult for the children to remember that she was not at the club, playing cards, but dead. The difference was not as large as friends and neighbours supposed it to be” (Desai 2001, 54). The effect of their father’s death, too, “was pecuniary only, for the father had been, if nothing else, a provider” (65). The absence of the siblings’ emotion at these deaths is remarked upon by the narration of their father’s death, in particular: Bim describes the accident—he dies of a broken neck, having been flung from a car when the door opened; yet “There was no damage to the car at all. It could scarcely be called an accident, so minor was it in appearance, and harmless, but of course that was the only label that fitted, and it was fatal” (64). Like Partition, these deaths register their impact through

50 

J. RAMONE

what is not said—they underpin all subsequent events and cause the siblings’ later turmoil and strained friendships, but just like Partition they do not make their presence known. Instead, Partition makes its mark symbolically, through the effects it has on the books in the house: news of Partition is delivered through the radio which is kept on a bookshelf (93) and soon after, the hot winds sweep dusty grey sand over the books (95), an event which is told repeatedly since it is such a cause of distress (96). At the beginning of the second chapter, which unlike the main narrative action is set in summer 1947, Partition is described but it is not named: The city was in flames that summer. Every night fires lit up the horizon beyond the city walls so that the sky was luridly tinted with festive fames of orange and pink, and now and then a column of white smoke would rise and stand solid as an obelisk in the dark. Bim, pacing up and down on the rooftop, would imagine she could hear the sound of shots and of cries and screams, but they lived so far outside the city, out in the Civil Lines where the garden and bungalows were quiet and sheltered behind their hedges. (44)

Though Partition is not directly acknowledged, it is in this context that all narrative events take place. Instances of reading in Clear Light of Day almost always occur in this isolated family home, and these reading moments must be understood as signifying after Partition. Tara is most often associated with romance classics (Lorna Doone 120, 129, Gone With the Wind 120), Raja with poetry—Iqbal, Tennyson, Swinburne, and repeatedly, Byron (55, 60, 130), and Bim with political histories and with reading poetry aloud to Raja during his period of illness, as well as with TS Eliot, especially The Waste Land (41, 42, 100) and his Four Quartets which she recalls productively at the end of the novel. Tara, Raja, and Bim are siblings who, along with their younger brother Baba who has development problems meaning that he communicates with difficulty, were left in charge of the family home after the unexpected deaths of both of their parents. As a result, they have access to an extensive private library, which Bim supplements with expensive editions of texts she claims she needs for her work, teaching. In their adolescence, they also had access to their neighbour (and landlord, 47) Hyder Ali’s extensive library; however, after the Hyder Ali family move to Pakistan quietly one evening on the cusp of Partition, the library is out of bounds. Reading is a highly emotive activity in the novel: books can start a “blaze” (120), cause a “stupor” (120), and mark irreconcilable differences if reading tastes and habits fail to coincide

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

51

(121). Books are the repository for unspoken or unmanageable feelings: defeated to the point of exhaustion when his father forbids him from studying Islamic Studies at a Muslim college, Raja flings a book of Urdu poetry at Bim in frustration; this act being so out of character for a book lover, it indicates the growing divide between the two, and between Raja and his home. The text registers the significance of this act by repeating the arresting words “shock”, “shocked”, and “shocking”, noticeable in the description of Bim’s reaction: “Shocked, she bent to pick it up and dust it before quietly placing it on his bookshelf” (54). Repeated instances of the word “shock” are employed in the text, recalling the physical state of shock often experienced by victims of trauma. The word is significant since it is used to describe mundane conversations and activities: describing the family home, the suggestion that it might be changed on Tara’s return visit leaves her “truly shocked” (4); watching a snail lie “shocked and still” (3); visiting their neighbours the Misra sisters, and on leaving releasing the sisters from “shell-shocked postures”. There are eight further instances of the hyperbolic use of these words (10, 22, 39, 49, 77, 97, 131, 151) to convey unexceptional activities or emotions but often accompanied by vivid images that signal a meaning of the word “shock” beyond the immediate context, implying the shock of Partition is registered in the family in spite of their relative seclusion from its events. One of these vivid and violent images is used when Bim claims that her colleagues hate children and teaching: “‘Do they?’ said Tara, shocked. Hate was a word that always shocked her. The image of a dead dog immediately rose before her, bleeding” (151). Books register this condition of shock, since the event where Bim expresses shock at her brother’s treatment of a book is the first time the word is referred to in the chronological narrative; the text is organised non-chronologically, further displacing the trauma in a narrative embedded in surface domesticity. And it is through books that everyday human interactions are played out, often in transactions that echo the cross-­border movement of libraries and rare texts alongside everything else that was displaced through Partition; Bim and Tara borrow books through the fence from their neighbours the Misra girls (62); they send parcels of books to their Aunt Mira to draw her out of her “vague, absent-minded” (109) mood; Raja brings home volumes of Tennyson and Swinburne from the college where he studies English Literature (54), having been forbidden from studying Islamic Studies. Books are also a means of gaining access and insight into others’ true selves: in one of the more harmonious

52 

J. RAMONE

scenes, Raja reads a “much-thumbed” copy of Iqbal while his sisters scan his bookshelves: Urdu verses lay cheek by jowl with American paperbacks—those long thick flapping American army editions that he picked up second-hand on Connaught Circus pavements: Louis Bromfield’s Night in Bombay, Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, The Postman Always Rings Twice; the enormous green volumes containing Keats and Shelley, Blake and Donne; the verses of Zauq and Ghalib, Dagh and Hali in cheap tattered yellow copies—that odd ragbag of reading that went to make up their romantic and inaccessible and wonderful brother. (131)

Direct emotion is expressed towards reading and displaced on to books when it should signal elsewhere. The text also addresses a prominent motif of gender roles and conventions, frequently disturbed by Partition. Reading is gendered in the novel, not only in terms of reading matter (Tara and Raja reading typically feminine and masculine texts, respectively) but also in the functions reading performs. While Raja’s reading helped him to come “alive to ideas and images in books he read: Robin Hood, Beau Geste” and created a “blaze” in him (120), leading eventually to his journey from English Literature to Politics (55), Tara and Bim read themselves “into a stupor” (120). However, Bim resists her gender role expectations, in reading as in all things, tossing aside romance novels with “dissatisfaction” while Tara was “dragged helplessly” into them (120). For Bim, whose most meaningful relationship (that with her older brother Raja) was structured by books, only books can help her to resolve dilemmas about her caring responsibilities towards her younger brother Baba, her commitment to her teaching career, her preference for solitude and independence, and her resentment that Tara and Raja both have families and homes elsewhere and do not express the level of commitment to her and the family home that she expects. To attempt to resolve her feelings she sorts through piles of papers, an activity she comes to perceive as a “crazy paper-dance”. She “reached out towards her bookshelf for a book that would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and plait them into a composed and concentrated whole” (167). The book, among all the books that she kept nearby “to help her through the night”, was the Life of Aurangzeb, which is quoted at some length in the novel. The passage, an account of the

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

53

emperor’s death, offers the resolution that Bim needs to welcome her brother Raja back to the family home as a gesture of forgiveness (176). Among the references to books and reading in a novel about the impact of Partition, the repeated reference to The Waste Land merits further discussion. The Waste Land signals a sense of place, mapping and remapping, the violent process of severing the land, and the colonial practice of claiming so-called empty land acknowledged in the poem’s reference to Antarctic explorers. It also conveys the extent of the sisters’ anguish in response to family traumas that dictate their relationship, alongside their fundamental differences that prevent them from recovering from those traumas—another personal metaphor for the process of Partition and its effect on communities. The emotional disconnection between Bim and Tara is heightened by each reference to Eliot’s poem, since Tara, who is less scholarly than Bim, resents her sister’s easy acquaintance with The Waste Land (42). The text is also used to mark the event that severed the sisters’ relationship: the death of Aunt Mira—later, Tara reveals her guilt at not attending Mira’s funeral, and reflects on her further guilt for not even thinking about the funeral, immersed in her family life away from the house. For Bim, though, the image of Mira’s funeral pyre, along with memories of Mira’s last few erratic days as she succumbed to psychological torment and alcoholism, return: “for a long time Bim continued to see her, was certain that she saw her: the shrunken little body naked, trailing a torn shred of nightie, a wisp of pubic hair, as she slipped surreptitiously along the hedge” (100). Alongside this, Bim recalls The Waste Land as if there is a direct connection between the image of her aunt’s body in these two vulnerable states, and the poem: Who is the third who walks always beside you? […] Bim caught her lip in understanding when she read that […] she was sure now that she [Mira] was that extra person, that small shadow. […] The ship of death, O ship of death, Bim chanted to keep herself calm, calm. (100)

This event is recalled at a later chronological time, but is presented early in the text; like Partition which is extended in public consciousness to envelop other violent events, particularly the communal violence that either came after or led up to it, Mira’s death refers to other deaths. As children, Bim and Tara are haunted by the death of their cow, which drowned in a well in their garden on a stormy night and was too heavy to be hauled back to the surface. Mira’s death reminds Bim of the terror she

54 

J. RAMONE

felt at the cow’s death: “she used to say she would drown herself in [the well;] […] I felt she was still trying to get there” (41). The same seven lines from The Waste Land, ending and beginning with the questions “who is the third who walks always beside you?” and “—But who is that on the other side of you?” are repeated at both the instance and its recollection. The poem, haunting as it may be, is tied together with Bim and Tara’s relationship, since Tara resents the way her brother and sister’s relationship is strengthened through their mutual appreciation of poetry: “she had listened so often to Bim and Raja quoting poetry. […] It was another of those games that they shared and she did not. She felt herself shrink into that small miserable wretch of twenty years ago” (41–2). At the novel’s close, a musical performance sparks a memory: “Bim was suddenly overcome with the memory of reading, in Raja’s well-thumbed copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets, the line: / ‘Time the destroyer is time the preserver’” (182). The line from Eliot’s Four Quartets has an opposite effect from the lines recalled from The Waste Land. The memory of reading is triggered by her resolution to make peace with her brother after twenty years, and by watching a musician and reflecting on the similarities, rather than the differences, between the singers she knew: “One day perhaps Mulk would also sing like this, if Mulk were to take the same journey his guru had. After all, they belonged to the same school and had the same style of singing and there was this similarity despite the gulf between them” (182). The meaning of the line from Four Quartets is healing: “she huddled in its comfort, its solace” (182); through this line of poetry Bim perceives the cohesions between Mulk and his guru, and beyond that, her own family history as connected rather than disconnected: she saw how her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as well as her whole family with all their separate histories and experiences […] giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, […] always drawing from the same soil, […] That soil contained all time, past and future, in it. (182)

This redemptive message reads like a plea to come through trauma, and a method to do so, guided by poetry. In terms of Partition, it is also telling that most instances of reading, certainly the most meaningful among them, are memories of reading: in Clear Light of Day Partition memories are filtered through reading memories where books and reading serve as a route to recovery.

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

55

In her introduction to Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Anita Desai writes that the novel is a monument to the history of north India before Partition, in a country where, she claims, the past is ever-present and is “concrete, physical, palpable” (Hosain 1988, vi, v). Reading is central in the text in part because Hosain herself stated that as a child she read indiscriminately from her father’s extensive library, growing up “unsupervised” on English classics (Hosain 1988, viii). Although the text contains only around twenty references to books and reading, books are a means of resistance, both to national oppression in the form of imperialism and to local oppression from family to conform to a traditional gender role. The novel concerns Laila’s day-to-day life and her family and friends’ conventional attitudes towards marriage, sex, relationships, education, and books and reading. There are lengthy discussions about knowledge, opinions, and overheard conversations informed by details gleaned from others who have been to university. Books are central to the text from the opening lines; Laila’s nanny admonishes her for reading too much, claiming that books would eat her, a threat that she later repeats with the further detail that they would eat her eyes (14, 17), insisting that she should look instead at the world, and that if she reads too much no one will marry her. This turns out to be false—in fact, Laila falls in love and arranges meetings with the fellow book-lover she is to marry at “the corner bookshop” (219). Laila’s traditional cousin Zahra makes similar accusations, saying that Laila reads too much and even talks like a book. Bim, in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, shares a number of characteristics with Laila. Both avid readers, like Bim, Laila refuses to observe class or gender traditions. This is considered a result of her supposedly excessive reading by those around her (29). Unlike Bim, though, Laila remains undisturbed by her unconventionality and more independent from emotional ties to her family, answering their concerns about her reading with the counter-claim that, in fact, books will be “garlands of gold” around her neck (17), alternatives to wedding jewellery, perhaps. She finds friends with whom she can share her passion for reading—Nadira and Nita; “our world was bounded by our books, and the voices that spoke to us through them were of great men, profound thinkers, philosophers and poets” (126). Inevitably, perhaps, in the context of British imperialism, this engagement with books and conversation leads to activism: Laila and her friends study as a means to fight British imperialism (124); books are bound up with the action of this resistance activity and are not seen as an alternative to action: during a student protest, “Nita picked up her books

56 

J. RAMONE

and as she walked away said, ‘I will do something’” (159). In what has been described by Anita Desai as one of the most important narratives of Partition (Hosain 1988, vi), the prevalence of books and reading, and their central significance to enabling resistant politics, affirms the status of books and reading as a means to overcome the trauma of the present, in the Partition context. Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” is at once a rewriting of an ancient tale from the Mahabharata, a staging of gender power relations, and a response to the meaning of reading in the context of “the undoing of the binary opposition between the intellectual and the rural struggles” (Spivak 1981, 386). This is undertaken via a reassessment of “the opposition between reading (book learning) and doing” (Spivak 1981, 386) which implies there is, under certain conditions, room for the two spheres to merge—or, that reading and resistance are congruent. The context of the story is the second Partition of India, where violence between East and West Bengal led to the reformation of the former East Bengal into Bangladesh, a communal war often strongly associated with Partition and described in ways that recall its particular violence. Title character Draupadi is also known as Dopdi—Spivak notes that “she is introduced to the reader between two uniforms and between two versions of her name: Dopdi and Draupadi. It is either that as a tribal she cannot pronounce her own Sanskrit name (Draupadi), or the tribalized form, Dopdi, is the proper name of the ancient Draupadi.” Draupadi has a literary context: “the ancient Draupadi is perhaps the most celebrated heroine of the Indian epic Mahabharata” (Spivak 1981, 387). Her story in the Mahabharata is one of abuse by men to demonstrate their glory, instigated by the vulnerability of her position as the wife of five brothers in a polyandrous relationship that places Draupadi within the general category of “prostitute”; Devi’s version rewrites (making reference to the original story without upturning it, Spivak asserts) an episode where an enemy chief attempts to strip Draupadi naked in public yet fails since Krishna’s miracle determines that Draupadi is “infinitely clothed and cannot be publicly stripped” (Spivak 1981, 388). In Mahasweta Devi’s version, the men easily succeed in stripping Dopdi—in the narrative it is the culmination of her political punishment by the representatives of the law. She remains publicly naked at her own insistence. Rather than save her modesty through the implicit intervention of a benign and divine (in this case it

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

57

would have been godlike) comrade, the story insists that this is the place where male leadership stops. (Spivak 1981, 388)

The story signals in multiple ways that male leadership is seen as ineffectual or unwanted, first through the report revealing that Draupadi’s husband is dead, and that Draupadi was named by her mother after her father was killed, making any traditional familial male authority figure absent from the text. The military leaders are seen as equally ineffectual; they are hampered by the conflict between reading and doing that the text works through, and attempts to undo. “Neither uniform nor Scriptures could relieve [the] depression” (Devi 1981, 393) felt by Captain Arjan Singh when he discovered he had failed to stop tribal revolt ringleaders Draupadi and her husband Dulna. Mr Senanayak, an “elderly Bengali specialist in combat and extreme-left politics” (Devi 1981, 393), attempts to take up the challenge of fusing books and action: “the fighting forces regain their confidence in the Army Handbook. It is not a book for everyone” (Devi 1981, 393). This handbook supports the tribal fighters rather than the army since it suggests no matter what logic dictates, freedom fighters like Dopdi and Dulna’s “fighting power is greater than the gentlemen’s” (Devi 1981, 394). According to the book, lack of attention to books may be beneficial all round to the tribals: “since Dulna and Dopdi are illiterate, their kind have practiced the use of weapons generation after generation” (Devi 1981, 394). The irony of this statement is affirmed by the narrator’s aside, revealing that “although the other side make little of him, Senanayak is not to be trifled with. Whatever his practice, in theory he respects the opposition” (Devi 1981, 394). Senanayak is above all a theorist, reader, and writer, whose theory contradicts his practice until he rationalises it through reference to the literary text which can be relied upon to provide similarly contradictory figures: “Today he is getting rid of the young by means of ‘apprehension and elimination,’ but he knows people will soon forget the memory and lesson of blood. And at the same time, he, like Shakespeare, believes in delivering the world’s legacy into youth’s hands. He is Prospero as well” (Devi 1981, 394). Having overseen Dulna’s death, Senanayak had expected Dopdi, as obedient wife, to arrive to take proper possession of his corpse. When she does not do this, foiling both the captain’s plans and the patriarchal codes, Senanayak uses another book to signal his surprise and frustration: “he slaps his anti-­Fascist paperback copy of The Deputy and shouts, ‘What?’” (Devi 1981, 395). Further analysis on the part of Senanayak leads to the conclusion that Dopdi and her

58 

J. RAMONE

associates, rather than being categorised as simply illiterate or as having “forgotten book learning” (Devi 1981, 396), could instead be orienting their book learning to the soil they live on and learning new combat and survival techniques. One can shoot and get rid of the ones whose only recourse is extrinsic book learning and sincere intrinsic enthusiasm. Those who are working practically will not be exterminated so easily. Therefore Operation Jharkhani Forest cannot stop. Reason: the words of warning in the Army Handbook. (Devi 1981, 396)

Senanayak’s assumptions are little match for Draupadi’s analytical mind; the second part of the story is a representation of Draupadi’s thought processes on hearing her name called as she walks in search of shelter; not responding for fear of compromising her safety or that of others, she takes time to consider who could be calling her name, methodically, while recalling recent events and the location of her allies. Nevertheless, she is unable to escape Senanayak’s pursuit, for which Senanayak experiences an obdurate regret; his theory has failed him: Six years ago he published an article about information storage in brain cells. He demonstrated in that piece that he supported this struggle from the point of view of the field hands. Dopdi is a field hand. Veteran fighter. Search and destroy. Dopdi Mejhen is about to be apprehended. Will be destroyed. Regret. (Devi 1981, 400)

Leaving his soldiers to undertake the practice of what comes after apprehending Draupadi—brutal rape that for Draupadi lasts “a billion lunar years” (Devi 1981, 401)—Senanayak reads his newspaper. Draupadi’s final act of resistance is in refusing to cover her brutalised and bleeding, naked body when Senanayak summons her with the expectation that she will reveal the information he requires to capture her allies. Instead, as all the men around her accuse her of madness, she refuses to put on clothes, and this final act leaves her victorious despite her injuries: She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, “There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, counter me—come on, counter me—?”  Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid. (Devi 1981, 402)

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

59

Spivak explains the meaning of Draupadi’s (repeated) use of the phrase “counter me”: “it is an abbreviation for ‘killed by police in an encounter,’ the code description for death by police torture. Dopdi does not understand English, but she understands this formula and the word” (Spivak 1981, 391). While Draupadi’s use of this code description signals her textuality in a similar way to her equally perplexing dual naming, it is also an act of combat; the word “counter” is used in English in the text: Draupadi has achieved the culmination of text and action where Senanayak had been unable to do so, by using the textual (quoting the English language phrase abbreviation) to reinforce the physical act of resistance. Her repetition of the phrase, recalling the repeated rape she has endured, reinforces her challenge. The text is an assertion that “book learning” may be harnessed as a means of resistance to oppression, in the context of post-Partition borderland violence. Reading is equated with action in both Devi’s and Hosain’s texts, when the female protagonist resists gender role expectations and uses books and reading to support an active, resistant strategy. In terms of reading and Partition trauma, literary heritage is employed in the texts actively and the conventional pattern of active forgetting is resisted. Both texts demonstrate the function of books and reading beyond the limitations of the present, so the narrative ending is deferred and it becomes possible to imagine a future beyond the trauma of Partition, which is further emphasised by the post-Partition context of “Draupadi”.

2.5   Part 4: Tabish Khair’s Filming—Books and Reading, Memory, and Remapping In Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), maps haunt the text in peripheral ways. Like Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, Filming considers the idea of the map, its symbolic impact; while “Toba Tek Singh” witnesses strings of barbed wire demarcating both the borders of India and of Pakistan, leaving a no-­ man’s land in the centre for Bishan Singh to occupy, in Filming the barbed wire is to be found on houses, in cinemas, around animal shelters, and half-buried under the ground, and there is no physical border visible in the text, only the overburdened sense of the national boundary that either has, or has not, been traversed by the individual. Other literary responses to Partition offer more direct remappings of the landscape.

60 

J. RAMONE

Filming is centrally concerned with the writer best known for narrating Partition, Saadat Hasan Manto. It is at once an alternative biography of Manto conveyed through the figure of writer Batin (imagining a version of Manto who has taken alternative decisions), and a direct engagement with his writing. Manto, Manto’s stories, books and reading, and the foregrounded concept of narrativity or storyness are central to the text, and this literary subject matter is represented alongside other repeated imagery—firstly, of Partition. Partition overburdens the text by being both represented and also referred to obliquely; these oblique references mark the intrusion of the external event of Partition in private spaces. Partition is always accompanied by the image of barbed wire in Filming, and also by the concept of dreams. Dreams are both specific occurrences recalled on the page, and they are conveyed as personal and national hopes, ambitions, and desires. Partition permeates the narrative but, in keeping with the national amnesia that Greenberg and Ishtiyaque have noted is encouraged around the events, direct, named references are few. Instead, other things are named partitions: a window is named a “glass partition” (38); a screen is referred to as an “intricately carved partition” (293); and the separation of bodies from their shadows (or ghosts) is referred to as their partition (199). Several moments where the effect of Partition is perceived during day-to-day activities imply that Partition is peripheral or can be avoided: a violent young man’s meticulous observation of the film studio takes in markings on the wall which evoke the memory of Partition maps, yet this is conveyed in parenthesis, so he doesn’t have to fully realise its impact: “(The walls are as reticulated with lines and borders as those mullahs have made of the map of India, of Akhand Bharat, he thinks)” (157). The impossibility of Partition’s dream is articulated in the question: “how can you Partition freedom?” (343). The question signifies that hopes of freedom are in vain, but Partition’s action remains imprecise, conveyed in questions and dreams. However, when Partition is referred to directly in the text it leaves “simmering” fire years later (302). Barbed wire enabled Partition in a practical sense and Partition was aided by people’s willingness to perceive it, according to Batin: “Partition would have been impossible if it had taken place only in Parliaments and on paper; what made it possible was that it took place in the hearts of ordinary people” (358). The second group of images which recurs alongside the representation of books, reading, literary culture (and specifically, Manto), and Partition with its barbed wire and dreams, concerns trauma. Trauma is described directly and

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

61

represented through its effects, and it is combined with images of ghosts or shadows (often operating synonymously), and memory. Trauma has been central to representations of Partition in literature and theory, and it is here that books and reading (or, rereading Manto) take effect—here, I argue that Tabish Khair’s Filming, a novel that has as its central concern the question of literature’s representation of Partition, employs literature (books and reading) as a route through trauma by conveying Batin’s future as opposed to Manto’s story, and that it illustrates the effect of trauma through the secondary representation of Manto as a figure in the text (who remains separate from his fictional counterpart Batin). Amardeep Singh notes that Manto makes intermittent intrusions in Filming, paying particular attention to Manto’s appearance in the central Intermission section of the text, which is voiced by Saadat Hasan Manto himself, “conveying a kind of letter dated January 16, 1955—just before the historical Manto’s death—[…] addressed to Khair’s character Batin” (Singh 2014, 74). Manto is, through this Intermission, recognisably (literally) central to the plot and the meaning of Filming. Manto’s work is also signalled thematically, as Singh notes: “all of the stream of consciousness ‘Rasa’ sections in Khair’s Filming seem to point to Manto’s own partition stories, which thematize acts of violence often committed by well-meaning young men who don’t anticipate the possible consequences of their actions” (Singh 2014, 74). Manto is also present as a fictionalised alternative character Batin, who, like Manto, is “a script writer and Urdu short-story writer. Batin is described in the text as a writer who, like the historical Manto, spent a few years in Bombay writing film scripts in the 1940s. […] Also like Manto, Khair’s character Batin (then known as Saleem Lahori) decides to leave Bombay and India in early 1948, in large part because he comes to feel that Muslims are no longer welcome there” (Singh 2014, 74). For Singh, Batin represents the alternative that Manto could not envisage: “for Saleem Lahori and Durga, the total escape from the deeply fraught and compromised identarian options of a Partitioned Indian subcontinent enables possibilities Manto never seemed to contemplate: survival, rebirth, and reinvention” (Singh 2014, 84). Batin’s writing career, notably restricted to post-Partition publications since he mentions that his pre-Partition publications are not available (167–8) asserts the possibility of moving through the trauma of Partition, as Boehmer has claimed is a characteristic of contemporary postcolonial narratives of trauma: her observation on South African narratives of trauma holds true of Partition narratives—texts recalling both contexts engage in reiterated

62 

J. RAMONE

naming (and in Filming, renaming), and “the naming of referents is, literally interpreted, a marking time together, and so also entails a moving together, name by reiterated name, into a shared future” (Boehmer 2018, 111). Trauma is worked through via the text’s poetics and in Filming, this is directly connected with storytelling, writing, books, and reading, again in contrast with Manto’s Partition writing which evoked the persistence of trauma, a trauma that has been associated with the early death of the writer: “in Khair’s vision, it is not only physical survival that counts, but the survival of the ability to narrate. Manto dies with […] writings left in a fragmentary, incomplete state, but Saleem Lahori lives to tell the tale” (Singh 2014, 84). Manto’s intermission section is central to the text’s meaning. Punctuated by questions (around half of the sentences in the four-page section are questions), the intermission asks what impact Partition has had on writing, on books and reading, and on publishing in South Asia. Acknowledging Manto’s alcoholism and the periods he spent in a “lunatic asylum” (201), the thrust of the section is about Manto’s career—he may be “a greater story teller than God” (203)—and about censorship and his being put on trial for his writing which was described as blasphemous and vulgar (201). Yet here, Manto claims that he has survived through writing—he has “written proof” of his survival, having written “more essays and stories than ever” (201), although his interactions with editors and publishers have been less than satisfactory financially, as he has “sold them for a pittance” (202); this claim is further indication of the text’s awareness of Partition’s financial impact on South Asia’s literary marketplace. Communal violence in India remains connected with Partition: “To date, any communal riot is analysed and looked at from the lens of the horrific 1947 Partition. The wounds and trauma of this bloody bifurcation are still fresh amongst the South Asian consciousness” (Ishtiyaque 2014, 100). Likewise, memories of violence from before or after Partition become difficult to disentangle from Partition, as Urvashi Butalia has noticed: history “remained fluid” (1998, 235). In Filming, though, Partition, along with later violent events that each recall Partition, is represented with self-conscious emotional detachment: Saleem Lahori reflects that although he should experience an emotional response to the carnage created by war and violent attacks, such events elicit only “abstract regret and sympathy” (232), “conventional regret” (232), echoing what Farah Ishtiyaque describes as the government’s official narrative of Partition which, along with history books, “sanitized the event and described it in

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

63

terms of dates, protests, marches, and arrests” (Ishtiyaque 2014, 100). Ishtiyaque claims that “The cultural amnesia adopted by the nation state deterred its people to come to terms with the trauma of 1947. The horror was never spoken of, it was repressed, silenced, and people were seldom encouraged to talk about it” (Ishtiyaque 2014, 102). Nicole Rizzuto’s work on colonial trauma proposes that the onset of trauma is caused by the instability of events such as Partition which “brought to crisis representations of collective pasts, called into question the conceptual and affective underpinnings of nations, and challenged the legitimacy of empires” (Rizzuto 2015, 2). Effects of trauma, commonly including transference and repetition-compulsion in Freudian trauma theories, are factors in the representation of traumatic historical events: the central group of friends and colleagues in Filming are left “dazed and distracted” (193) by their differences which have been uncovered by Partition. There are further disorientations: confusion (the narrator figure admits that he “did not grasp the connections” (165) between events of 1929 and 1948); hidden emotions contained by a “secret indescribable mood” (392); and the admission of feeling “disoriented and resentful” (271) as a result of Batin’s relocation to Pakistan. Even the singular event of a suicide is conveyed as happening on an “inconsequential day” (59), after which the body of the “unidentified young man” (60) who threw himself from the highest building he could climb in protest against Congress and the British in a gesture of “determination” (repeated three times but, the text notes, not captured in “any history book” (60)), has no sense of ending. Instead, it is characterised by repetitions—his words, determination spoken three times in his final sentence—and by the combination of words indicating ending, as might be expected (last words, certain death, the very end, such an end) but contrasted with images conveying movement (moved, strangely moved, launched, mobility), even in the present tense terms conveying his final act: he is pictured “plummeting down to the asphalt below” and is recalled as “plunging to certain death” (60). The representation of death as mobility rather than stasis is a means of envisioning a future beyond the traumatic act, which accords with Elleke Boehmer’s work on hiatuses and trailings-off, inconclusive endings and persistences that envision a “liveable future” and “gesture onwards and give a sense of entitlement to the future and […] hope” (Boehmer 2018, 98). Here, the suicide is an act of protest against British imperialism in 1922, which resounds in future events because it gains momentum through its lack of finality—not represented in history books, it is an act without end but

64 

J. RAMONE

with reference to future dreams of Home Rule (164) and of achieving the demands of Congress which feature in Partition and Independence negotiations. What’s more, its representation as mobility, when considered in the context of Partition, evoke migration and the trauma of either leaving or staying: Batin is haunted by his migration, which he seems compelled to argue was not a decision he had power over, repeating: “I did not choose to leave. I never chose to leave. I simply chose to live” (271). Further repetitions gather: “All left”, though, Durga (at this point renamed as Bhuvaneshwari) reflects, “except. Except. Except those who stay because they have nowhere to go” (284). The past is always of central significance: the dreaming figure whose dreams are represented at the beginning of each of the novel’s sections or “reels” asserts: “I have not escaped the past I am still there” (154); Ashok is reminded by his mother to “let the past be […], let it lie” (256), which is something none of the figures in the text manage; even Hari’s film, the product that he has worked towards and for which he has sacrificed every aspect of his life including guardianship of his son, is named Aakri Raat, Last Night, and is understood to be a negotiation with the past (253). Aakri Raat is reconstructed from Hari’s memories (earlier in the text Hari is known as Harihar), captured in the fragmentary journal made up from his tattered exercise books. Trauma is bound up with memory (and postmemory) and for those seeking to understand and represent Partition, recovering memory is central to the project: Urvashi Butalia’s work in The Other Side of Silence (1998) sought to capture the memories of unheard voices; a recent oral narrative project based in Loughborough and London seeks to capture the memories of those affected by Partition in the UK and is titled Memories of Partition (2019); while the 1947 Partition Archive led by Stanford University similarly seeks to capture memories of Partition through recording oral narratives of those surviving or affected by it. The same is true of Filming: memory is central to the plot since the film that the text is always describing is a work of memory; memory is also a topic of constant discussion within the text, to the extent that, towards the end of the text, the idea of memory is itself challenged as unstable, even unproductive, when the scholar, reflecting on all of his gathered accounts of Batin’s life and those whose stories are connected with it, realises that “life cannot be remembered as memory, for that will make it seem like death” (382). This realisation amounts to undoing all of the certain recollections in the text in favour of an approach that asserts life’s tenacity, understood as its (life’s) ability to withstand Partition, since unlike memory it can

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

65

“crawl under the barbed wires [synonymous of Partition] of hate” as well as “escape the loving embrace of still photos” and go on, “alive”—present, current, ongoing (382). Memory words gather pace throughout the second half of the text, especially after the Intermission, the short section voiced by Manto. Even the dreams in the second half of the text repeatedly “remember”: in the studio, Saleem Lahori remembers the colour of Bhuvaneshwari’s lipstick when he sees the same colour on the studio’s dressing table mirror. He remembers it three times: “He remembers that colour”; “He remembers the date”; “He remembers it exactly” (167), and this evokes other memories of “those years”, a little more than five years before 1948, in Bombay in the Monsoon. Memory is usually precise and certain or actively recalled in Filming: the word “remember” is repeated emphatically when the group of friends are separated through Partition’s impact on their emotions (193) and Partition’s resonance in events beforehand and afterwards is insisted upon by the intrusive narrating voice of Batin, who asks whether his listener is struggling because he is “recalling too many things” (220). The figures whose stories he recounts, all of which lead one “to another” (220) are equally confident of their memories: Satish Mama describes the beginning of his work in the mills, and notes watching Gandhi and his family arrive by ship, saying “I distinctly recall, […] I even remember the date” (221). The same certainty of remembering is expressed by Batin who repeats a quotation from a tenth-­ century Farsi book on shadows, which is also remembered since Saleem repeats the words from memory of his father reciting the passages: “I am translating it from memory, but I remember it well. […] I can recall it almost verbatim” (244). Certainty of memory is restricted, though: in the text, only those who left (Batin) and those who describe remembering before Partition, are afforded confidence in their memories. Elsewhere, memories are faulty or lost, and these are invariably connected with the disconnections between people: Saleem is prevented from following his impulse to support Satish Mama working in intense loneliness, avoided by his co-workers, by “someone or something—Saleem could not recall” (269). Batin’s certain memory wavers when he is forced to recall the first time communalism caused the friends’ “jokes […] to turn sour” as “the yeast of religion had been at work”—here he says “I think I can recall the first time it happened” (189). The dreamer would remember his dream of killing Gandhi, having mistaken him for a Muslim, as his last dream (299), “mixed up with what he saw the next night […] and what he heard on the radio […] so that in old

66 

J. RAMONE

age he would not know what was real and what was not” (299). The “young scholar” whose efforts to reconstruct Batin’s story result in the narrative of Filming struggles with memory—first recalling Batin’s insistence that Bollywood was not an authentic term for original Bombay film, then becoming “startled from” that recollection (389) by a couple visiting the ruins where he is thinking, ruins that are inhabited by spirits. The couple’s insistence that the spirits from the past must not be disturbed, that “you have to let them lie in peace” again disturbs him and causes uneasy and uncertain memories: the “sentence disturbed me. I had heard it before, perhaps more than once. […] I could not recall when, but the words were in my notes somewhere” (391). This failed memory evokes the final collective image of trauma: that of ghosts and shadows. Having heard those disturbing and familiar words, suddenly “the shadows that accumulated in and around the ruins seemed much more than the sum of its parts” (391). The grammar of this sentence, multiple shadows equalling more than the sum of its (singular) parts, is a feature of the ghosts and shadows, which in Filming frequently disturb the certainty of singularity and plurality while the text grapples with the stories and dreams of individuals caught up in a collective dream which led to a collective trauma. Ghosts and shadows appear almost wholly in the second half of the text, during and after the Intermission section, the only exceptions in the first half of the text being a reference to Durga divining from shadows (43–4), and again the suggestion that Durga is contradictorily substantial in name (Durga is the name of the warrior goddess and protective mother, often depicted riding a lion or tiger, carrying a weapon in each of her eighteen arms) yet “insubstantial” and “ghostly” as a figure in the history of Bombay cinema, as traced by the narrator (65). In the Intermission, Manto, in the only section of the text where he functions as a focaliser, introduces the image of ghosts and shadows that will recur throughout the second half of the text, using the two words as if they equate to the same thing: Manto is speaking or writing to Batin (who is a fictional version of Manto who opted to leave India rather than stay) and asks whether he is dead, or “alive and yet only a ghost, one of the spectres who have visited me nightly”, some of whom were the spectres of those dead and others “spectres of the living, for those alive can cast ghosts as well as those dead” (199). The nightly visitation from spectres results directly from Partition, since Manto’s writing, fame, and subsequent decline into depression and alcoholism are a direct response to Partition, as is signalled by the use of the word “partition” where “separation” might normally do:

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

67

“We have both known the fragile unity of bodies and shadows, and the murder and chaos born from their partition” (199), Manto claims. Manto begs Batin for a drink, before relenting: “Oh, what’s the use? You are a bloody ghost./Or is it me who is a ghost?” (201). The text questions which of its central figures—this one, Manto focalising briefly as if delivering a long-anticipated monologue, or the other one, Batin as revered and yet resented figure who intrudes throughout the text—is the ghost, as if destabilising the historical version of Partition in favour of a more productive narrative truth which, since it does not rely upon national histories, has the power to resist their effects and in so doing, to traverse trauma. Shadows are again difficult to comprehend or fix when other violent events recall Partition or are recalled by Partition—“Who are these people? Or are they only shadows?” (283) asks Durga/Bhuvaneshwari, reflecting on a campaign to poison and murder all of the animals and birds once resident at the building and grounds that she and Harihar had inherited to use as a film studio. Shadows are only defined with clarity when books are involved: Al-Baruni (elsewhere spelt as the scholar’s name is usually rendered, Al-Biruni) is quoted by the intrusive narrator Batin as defining shadow as a “covering from the sun, and because of the contiguity of shadow and light, […] the one cannot be without the other” (293). With reference to trauma, the shadow as memory or trauma persists as a “follower” (293) even if the light or sun is dominant. The quotation is placed between discussion of an act of vandalism planned on the studio by a boy “lurking in the shadows” (293), and the use of the word “partition”, one of the text’s oblique signals of Partition, describing an “intricately carved wooden partition” or screen. This item functions only to recall Partition and has no actual textual function, in the same way that such an object would form the mise-en-scene of a film in order to signal meaning or context to an audience without direct relevance to the symbolic significance. The text is at pains to define the shadow, which is above all the shadow of Partition: Who fears shadows? Do lies cast a shadow? Have the massacres that made the European nations left more than the slightest shadow? What can a shadow do? Once the body of the nation has come into being, it will cast its own shadows. And he hoped he would be there to limn those shadows with the sunlight of, no, not lies, words. (306)

68 

J. RAMONE

The word “limn”—meaning highlight or outline—is taken directly from Al-Biruni. This hope that words might damper the shadows is expressed by the scholar Guruji. The scholarly text is employed in the novel to indicate that books and reading might be well placed to mitigate the trauma of Partition with art, operating as sunlight does around shadows. Having reconstructed Batin’s story from the night-long interview he conducted, shadows gather around the scholar: looking around after meeting “the lady doctor and her husband”, the scholar baulks at signboards bearing grandiose shop names for shacks, such signboards evoking for him the sense that such small and isolated shopping centres are “shadows of places more real, more solid” (335), echoing an imperialist or assimilationist attitude that metropolitan centres, likely Western ones, offer superior or more “real” experiences, triggered by names including “Imperial Tailors”. These shadows are accompanied by the gathering of more sinister ones as the scholar prepares to return to Berlin at the end of his research. At the kadamba tree and ruins said to be inhabited by the spirits of two lovers, the scholar asks himself: does he “dare to be possessed by the spectres of that time?” (388–9). His question is, on the surface, one of confidence: he considers his understanding of the period and its film history to be tenuous, and the material he has gathered to be flawed, with “so many gaps in the narrative” (388). The implication is that to fill those gaps could be harrowing, since this would require immersion in the violence of Partition and its effects either felt afterwards or affecting what had gone before. In this frame of mind, the scholar notices shadows, even after he has dismissed the idea that spirits are said to inhabit the tree and ruins with his “urban superiority and disbelief” (391). These shadows are of a different kind, though: “the shadows that accumulated in and around the ruins seemed much more than the sum of its parts” (391)— here the scholar refers to plural shadows (“the shadows”) but in the same breath marks a singular effect of the shadows which was “more than the sum of its parts” (391). The ruin itself becomes “more shadowy” (391) than other buildings, and on his final departure from his interviewees the shadows accumulate in the shapes of ash, clouds, people, memories: “the sun was sweeping shadows of clouds—or bundles of ash caught in the wind—across the landscape” (397); field animals witness “the sight of two shadows, each carrying a live bundle, moving past the village fields, from tree to tree, shadow to shadow” (398); “the tree casts its shadows on the wall of the house with no barbed wires” (398); its inhabitants are asleep, and they “are used to the night and its shadows. For them there is nothing

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

69

shabby about the place they inhabit, either in the light of day nor the shadows of night” (398). These shadows, the barbed wire connecting them firmly with Partition, are noticeably absent in the final passage of the novel despite the accumulation of objects that should cast shadows: the rough dusty curtains barely keeping out the streetlights, the mosquitos circling the mosquito coil, and the reading lamp on the bare table. The shadows, and the shabbiness and dreariness that the scholar feels when confronted with shadows, are gone as a result of the function of books and narrative, because of the act of reconstructing the stories: the scholar “takes out a new Moleskine diary” and “opens the notebook to its first page, crisp, creamy and thick” (399). Shadows remain at bay even beyond the text, since immediately following the scholar’s act of writing is a reference to the remembered tenth-century writer’s book on shadows, presented as a post-script to the text. The quotation from the work of Al-Biruni, who is noted to have lived 973–1048, relates to “illumination” rather than shadows—as another indication of the potential of the text to take the reader through and beyond trauma. Here, the reader is guided through trauma by the ghosts/shadows haunting Manto and yet pointing towards “illumination” in both the sense of light as healing and enlightenment as instruction, which is gained through books and reading. “Toba Tek Singh” recounts the madness of Partition as carried out through the project to divide asylum inmates to ensure Indian and Pakistani patients are contained in sanatoria in the appropriate country after Partition, despite the disorientating effect this has on the patients who have no understanding of the contemporary political events and are trying to understand what “Pakistan” might mean, and where the familiar locations they remember, and the people in them, might end up. Filming is dedicated to Manto (v), and he is listed in the book’s “cast list” as the main star; the list begins: “STARRING Saadat Hasan Manto as Himself” (xi). As already established, the text both does and does not sustain Manto’s starring role. Manto only appears in the brief Intermission section at the centre of the text, as well as being once listed among other notable cultural figures who frequent the Rajkumar Film Studio and its parties (186). In the Intermission section, voiced by Manto, he acknowledges his reputation for storytelling with a hint of irony, relating the words he had instructed his family to write on his gravestone: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and buried with him lie the mysteries and art of the short story. Under the weight of Earth he lies, wondering if he is a greater story teller than God” (203). The text’s tendency to repetition is visible at the

70 

J. RAMONE

moment Saleem Lahori (later we know that he is in fact Batin; and Batin is also a fictionalisation of Manto) considers whether to stay in Bombay despite the progress of Partition and expected violence, or to leave. He reflects: “Only the other day, he had been told that Manto had left, leaving his beloved city to join his family in Lahore. Manto, he had felt like crying out, what will you do there? But he knew Manto knew; he knew Manto had chosen the easier death—not the death of all he had known and believed in, […] but his own death” (354–5). Like Toba Tek Singh stranded between the barbed wire in no-man’s land, the Intermission section is demarcated by the text’s structures, and has no sense of certainty. Barbed wire has been recalled in many references to Manto and to his representation of Partition, but in Filming it takes on a material significance related to the practical undertaking and the financial feasibility of Partition. Barbed wire has been a frequently used metaphor for Partition since Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” related the stranded body of Bishan Singh in the no-man’s land between the barbed wire fences that demarcated India and Pakistan. Jayita Sengupta’s recent anthology of Partition fiction is titled Barbed Wire (2012) in reference to this pattern, but Filming undertakes to convey a social history of barbed wire, and suggests that the availability—and profitability—of barbed wire in 1947 was wholly bound up with the project of Partition, and that had barbed wire been unavailable or too expensive, Partition may have been impossible. Twice, the book conveys a material history of the product, noting that: “in the 1930s and 1940s, barbed wire started being used widely by the authorities: its usefulness had been established by two world wars and a series of concentration camps, set up for the Boers by the British, for the Cubans by the Spanish, for the Filipinos by the Americans, for the Jews by the Germans, and then finally by almost all modern nations for the peoples of other nations” (11). There is something ominous in the invention of barbed wire which “could in theory have been invented centuries earlier” (69); likewise, its presence in India had a greater influence than could have been predicted: you’d look in the day’s paper to see whether your bedroom was still in the same country as your toilet. This thana to Pakistan, that division to India. […] And barbed wire to make all of it real. There are nights when I wonder whether the British would have drawn those lines on paper if barbed wire had not been ready and available. And profitable. (138–9)

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

71

Barbed wire is, like Partition, ever present in the text: there are twenty-one references to it, often appearing in surprising locations: it is in the cinema, “tightly wound around two wooden posts, used to cordon off the entrance on occasions when the ‘House Full’ notice sparked a minor riot outside” (79); it bounds the enclosures of animals and “looks unusual in the rural setting” (138); it is found, to the surprise of the police, around “what was left of the studio building” (385) after it was burned down; its history is transcribed in the scholar’s notes of Batin’s interconnected stories (97); Batin’s narrative is “like lengths of curling barbed wire” (68); barbed wire and photography are “born from the womb of the same time” (68). Barbed wire is also to be found in more expected locations: it “demarcates the edge of […] a colonial-looking building some distance from the village” (137), it is found along the walls of the mills (226), and is used metaphorically—resistance acts challenge “the barbed wire of colonial authority” (60). The text registers surprise, too, when barbed wire is absent, as if startled at a place in India not touched by Partition, or by a momentary lapse of memory where Partition was forgotten: there is a house “with a red-brick wall lined with pink and white bougainvillaea and perforated rusted iron rods sticking from the top of the wall, but, surprisingly, no barbed wire strung from rod to rod” (71); this is remembered in the text’s final moments as “the house with no barbed wires” as if this is its main distinguishing feature (398). When we are asked to imagine this inconsistency, the barbed wire is reinstated and with it, the event of Partition. Memories of Partition are organised through that absent barbed wire, as a “beautiful woman in her thirties” (71) explains: she describes an occasion that she can date only because “it was just before the Emergency because it was then that Papa had all the barbed wire taken down from those rods on the wall” (72). The woman conveys the relevance of this act as a means of negotiating past trauma, when she explains that taking down the barbed wire, symbolic of Partition, perhaps symbolic, even, of complicity in Partition, was her father’s “way of protesting. It was his way of learning to live with the past, but on his own terms” (72). Removing the barbed wire means gaining distance from what it does to people: it leaves “our bodies bleeding” (70) while it becomes erected in “our minds”, leaving us “entangled in the barbed wire of history and our own pasts” (70), a history that includes “flesh burning, trapped in barbed wire” (381) as a commonplace image. Where it is left to rust it remains “in tangles in the undergrowth, […] the colour of blood” but this is also surprising, since “surely, the wire had value; what had prevented the villagers from

72 

J. RAMONE

removing it?” (388). Removing the barbed wire is another way of moving through and beyond trauma: once again, there is a sense of rejecting memory which makes life “seem like death” and surviving when life learns “to crawl under the barbed wires of hate” (382). Like the woman’s father who, in an act of protest, removes the barbed wire in order to resist Partition’s grasp over his memory, Farah Ishtiyaque has suggested that the dreams in Filming function to counter “the discourse of master narratives” (Ishtiyaque 2014, 104). The stated main function of dreams in the text is the dream of Partition—“Home Rule, autonomy, freedom” (164). Other ambitions are also figured as dreams— Harihar’s dream of filmmaking, for which he repeatedly eschews duties (47); Durga’s dream of being married which she understands is shared by all prostitutes (64); Saleem Lahori and his circle of actors and artists who shared dreams of “revolution and art, independence and success” (168). Repeatedly using the word “dreams” to define these diffuse hopes, ambitions, and desires ties in their realisation with the all-encompassing national dream of Partition, which is also connected with the dream of Independence. Saleem is aware that his dreams are inseparable from those that created in 1947 a refraction of light into “the orange and yellow of Hinduism, the green of Islam, the red of violence, the blue of disappointed hope, and […] the indigo and violet of subtle, unredeemable differences” (168). Harihar’s dream of filmmaking success, which he shares with his sponsor the Chotte Thakur, disturbs Durga since she is aware of the fragility and risk of shared dreams: “she wondered whether any two people […] could ever share the same dream. It was a disturbing thought, for without being fully aware of it she was living at a time when tens of millions were suddenly dreaming the same dream: that of Home Rule” (164). Indeed, the text presents the individuals’ separate dreams as “manufactured illusions” under the thrall of a time when their “land had known, more than ever before or ever since, the terrible glory of dreams” (343). Filming has been described as a film rather than a novel: Khair is not parodying a Hindi movie, he is filming a Hindi movie. From the doubling of characters, to the flashbacks and absence of linearity, to the structuring according to rasas, readers of Filming are not supposed to have the sense of reading a book, but rather of watching raw footage: flitting images, frames not yet spliced together, contradicting versions told from different perspectives. (Habegger-Conti, 2010)

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

73

The novel’s title supports such a reading with the implication of the present continuous tense (I am Filming, perhaps). The presence of the scholar, though, and the deliberate opening of Moleskine diaries and the setting of pen to clean, new paper insists that it is always books, writing, reading, and narrative that are central to the text, even if this is assumed to take place as a filmed event with the scholar as a character. The scholar does not, though, feature in the cast of characters listed at the opening of the narrative, placing him more firmly in the role of reader and writer than of filmed performer. The structure of film is adopted, with each section presented as a separate film reel, each of which adopts a rasa, or emotional landscape, which is intersected by the Intermission. Images—particularly of Partition—operate like mise-en-scene, to signal meaning despite their lack of involvement in the scenes. In this way, they operate as Elleke Boehmer has suggested metaphors can function: they are insistently present yet gather without purpose, being “left undeveloped” or lacking “follow-­ through” (Boehmer 2018, 96). Here, the purpose is obvious from the beginning, since the book takes on Partition as its subject, so references to Partition and to barbed wire inform that context, yet the items themselves remain detached except for their symbolic function. In contrast to these indications of a filmic register, much of the language used in direct reference to the construction of the story is the language of narrative rather than of film: reflecting on what he knows at the beginning of the text, the scholar understands there to be “already three versions, or four, if the narrator is to be counted (and surely the narrator must count as a protagonist in every narrative?)” (86). At the end, his sense of the story’s writerliness persists as he complains that there are “so many gaps in the narrative” (388). The scholar maintains this sense of narrative when Batin begins to describe a separate context with apparently separate characters, later revealed to be renamed principal figures, describing Batin’s style at this time as delivering in “a slightly different register: that of a witnessed, at times even autobiographical, narrative” (137). Batin is complicit in the maintenance of narrative gaps and multiple perspectives, noting that each story “leads to another”, has “many hooks”, each of which is “caught up by another hook”, that there are just “so many stories” that it’s difficult to decide what “to tell” (220). The filming of Aakri Raat, which is central to the plot, is likewise understood through the medium of the written word, and the book: Hari presents his script in seven diaries, “tattered and broken and held together by string or rubber bands”, “jottings” of which a screenplay could be made (234).

74 

J. RAMONE

These notebooks are one of a number of references to books and reading in Filming—however, of the twenty-three references to books and reading, very few are direct references to people reading books, and the majority signal the absence or misuse of books. Putting to one side the presence of Manto, references to books and reading are often indirect. “Reading” sometimes refers to other things: Durga can read shadows, having been taught to do so by her Madame, alongside “the reading of cards, tea leaves, palms, etc., all for the sake of ‘biznuss’” (44). Nevertheless, books remain part of Durga’s frame of reference despite her physical distance from them—she is aware that “Harihar had a way of making ordinary statements sound like lines from a book” (23), and that Harihar is influenced by books since he creates his dream of making films from “ideas glimpsed in talk and book” (132). Further references are to generalised book culture: Batin’s living room contains “a fashionable book-rack” (36)—whether or not any books are contained there is not disclosed. Later, Saleem is credited with godlessness while also signalling Islam’s textual culture, when he asks whether Allah’s world, or his book (the Qu’ran) is the more powerful creation (171). Saleem (later we know that Batin is the same person) is noted, repeatedly, to enjoy literary references—he says that “love had no place in his dictionary” (142) and he is considered to be “a voracious reader” who “loved to quote obscure writers” (173). When telling the story from the perspective of Batin, he recalls his/Saleem’s quotation of the tenth-century Farsi book on shadows (244). Even Manto remembers Saleem’s/Batin’s/his love of literary obscurity and in the intermission addressed to Batin he asks: “will you leave some clues behind, cryptic like those literary quotes with which you could pepper a late-night drinking round in Bombay?” (202). References to newspapers are often similarly indirect: the opening dream sequence refers to reading a newspaper item: “I see again the newspaper item I see myself read it under the green I see I read” (5), which triggers communal violence; and at the onset of Partition the group of friends who are about to be divided consider “a crumpled newspaper clipping” (193) from Dawn. The news item is rejected by those who see it as coming from the opposite side, intensifying their growing division. Meanwhile in 1948 Saleem Lahori reads newspaper cuttings declaring “the independence of India in huge block letters” pasted over broken window panes of the compound that once housed the film studio (140). Further, to sustain his sectarian aggression, the young man with binoculars charged with destroying the film studio “derides the Sant [Gandhi] and reads out extracts from certain publications”

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

75

(157)—these are unspecified but the implication is that they encourage separatism. The few direct references to books and reading take on a deeper significance in the midst of the majority of references which are indirect or obscure. There are five direct references to books and reading which merit attention, the first of which is a repeated image. When they first meet and she falls in love with his obsession with film, Durga is told by Harihar, later renamed as Hari, that he obsessively “bought books and magazines about films and cameras” (48); he doesn’t change when he has become a successful filmmaker except in the volume of his reading material—now he has “a library full of books on cinema” (316). These are books that serve a functional purpose, though, and literary works are barely represented in the text. Where they are, they are at a remove: Batin emerges from his study for the interview organised with the “young scholar”, and is described as appearing “from a room that was lined with shelves and cluttered with books” (36), the only such space in the novel, and this is in Copenhagen where Batin lives in exile, recovering from the trauma of Partition. His own publications are affected by Partition, he admits: “even those of my books that you find today are post-1947 editions. No one bothered to preserve a single copy of the first edition of Bandish. Its current editions are all post-47 reprints” (167–8). What is interesting about this passage, in addition to its repetitiveness, is that as the only reference in the novel to the publishing industry, it appears in parenthesis as an aside to Batin’s main point. The parenthetical reference to publishing post-­ Partition implies that Partition had a significant effect on publishing, and that this effect remains of only peripheral concern since it is not discussed directly. The suggestion Batin makes in his parenthetical comment is that earlier editions existed but were not preserved when Partition inflicted chaos on the publishing and bookselling industry. The final direct reference to books and reading is the surprising violent punishment of a part-­ time village worker at the haweli that is central to Hari and Durga’s film-making project. The youth is whipped violently in public for “stealing” and “lying” (122)—an old woman who tends his wounds discloses that this was punishment for stealing a book. She berates him: “What’s the use of reading for the likes of us? What can we get out of it but trouble? And a book like that! Even I have heard of it. I told you, I told you not to read books like Bandi Jiwan” (123). The contradiction in the old woman’s admonishments reveals that there is a sense that books are the preserve of the wealthy, to the extent that she suggests books can only cause

76 

J. RAMONE

trouble for her and other workers, yet she also expresses knowledge of book culture, with Bandi Jiwan being considered an exceptionally risky choice that she had already warned the youth not to read. Bandi Jiwan (which translates as A Life of Captivity) is a 1922 revolutionary tract written by Sachindra Nath Sanyal who founded an association with the aim of undertaking armed resistance against the British Empire. Books are perceived as powerful and revolutionary by those with money and power, and reading them leads to brutal punishment. Despite the representation of books and reading as almost always out of reach, distant, and dislocated in the novel, through its central engagement with Manto’s practice and works (and with imagined alternative versions of those) Filming insists that books and reading are vital instruments in shifting the Partition narrative away from both the “collective amnesia” (Greenberg 2005, 94) that Jonathan Greenberg identifies in national representations of Partition, and of the static trauma that Manto’s stories and those of others capture, towards a future beyond trauma.

2.6   Comment in Conclusion: What Reading Means in the Literature of Indian Partition In the literature of Indian Partition, books and reading take on the burden of trauma; while the individual protagonist reads repeatedly or repeatedly recalls reading, repetitive textual structures and patterns enable the reader to move beyond trauma so that the protagonist (and the reader) is not condemned to perform the repetition-compulsions that sustain trauma. Just as references to mundane partitions evoke Partition, and as references to barbed wire permeate the text to evoke Partition’s impact, dreams have a wider presence in the text and serve multiple functions yet always return to the question of Partition. Dreams provide an alternative structure in the text, yet their representation develops and they resist the static function of opening each section and responding to the rasa’s emotional intent. The first three reels begin with a dream, each of which reflects the section’s rasa: terrible, then heroic, then erotic. Each dream is constructed of repetitions and is conveyed as first person continuously flowing interior monologue. The first reel repeats “terrible terrible terrible” in response to a memory of Gandhi’s death, punctuated by further repeated references to weapons and bodily harm: shrapnel, Army, smouldering, charred, warped, explodes, scream, burned-out (3–6) as a representation of the violent acts

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

77

that the book refers to. The second reel is titled Rasa Heroic and repeats images of transcendent states alongside references to “screaming mobs” and “flaming torches” (91). These heroic or transcendent images—flying, luminance, luminescence, iridescence, beauty, possibility, and a thoroughbred horse galloping—point to a consciousness beyond the immediate moment of trauma and violence. The same pattern of repeated images corresponding with the rasa’s emotion occurs in the third reel, Rasa Erotic, where repeated words and images include thrusting, breathless, making love, kinesis, pelvis, sex, love, motion, lecherous, quilt, and “I want” (151–4). However, after the intermission, the rasas change. Instead of beginning with a dream, Rasa Marvellous (Reel 4) is a conscious description of both “a dream I have had before” and of waking (207–8). Reel 5, Rasa Pathetic, also includes “waking up with a jolt” (261) and expresses a preference for “the waking hours of the night” (262). Rasa Furious (reel 6) is reflecting on a dream rather than being trapped within it, and begins with the assertion that “in later years he would remember this as the last dream” (299) and indeed, Rasa Odious (reel 7) is a question about Gandhi’s last words, Hé Ram, questioning the “elusive phrase” and asking why such a “weak”, “ambivalent” expression was all that could be said— “just that? Just that? No, it cannot be” (341). The speaker is no longer subject to dreams but is able to question them and thus question dominant narratives by moving through the dreams which are bound up with Partition’s instigation and with its violence. In Filming, and in the other South Asian literary texts considered here, reading is an act of resistance with consequences. The function of reading in Indian literature of Partition is to move through the trauma that has been displaced by active forgetting. Repetitions of reading and memories of reading predominate, contributing to the sense that books and reading signify a method of recovery in Indian writing after the impact of Partition on South Asian literary culture. While it would be an exaggeration to suggest that reading these narratives can induce sudden recovery from trauma, Partition texts after Manto undertake the repetitive patterns of trauma as a means of moving beyond the traumatic stasis caused by Partition and national policies of active forgetting.

78 

J. RAMONE

References Boehmer, Elleke. 2018. Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence. London: Penguin. ———. 2017. Nottingham Trent University, 20 April. Chester, Lucy. 2010. Borders and Conflict in South Asia. The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Desai, Anita. 2001 [1980]. Clear Light of Day. London: Vintage. Desai, Kiran. 2006. The Inheritance of Loss. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2011. In Conversation: Kiran Desai Meets Anita Desai. The Guardian, 11 November. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/11/kirandesai-anita-desai-in-conversation. Accessed 26 June 2019. Devi, Jyotirmoyee. 1967 [1995]. Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (The River Churning). Trans. Enakshi Chatterjee. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Devi, Mahasweta. 1981. Draupadi. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Critical Inquiry 8 (2): 381–402. Didur, Jill. 2006. Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New  York: Columbia University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 1988. The Shadow Lines. London: Bloomsbury. Ghosh, Suman. 2019. Annadamangal and Bengal’s Tryst with the Printed Word. The Asian Age, 10 May. https://www.asianage.com/books/100519/annadamangal-and-bengals-tryst-with-the-printed-word.html. Accessed 18 June 2019. Gopal, Priyamvada. 2009. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenberg, Jonathan. 2005. Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25 (1): 89–110. Gupta, Ashes. 2012. Living the Dream: Narrating a Landscape Lost and a Land Left Behind. In Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, ed. Jayita Sengupta, 50–65. New Delhi: Routledge. Gupta, Gargi. 2017. A Hoshiarpur Library that Survived the Partition. DNA India, 13 August. http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-a-hoshiarpurlibrary-that-survived-the-partition-2528071. Accessed 26 April 2018. Habegger-Conti, Jena. 2010. Book Review: Filming by Tabish Khair. Transnational Literature 2 (2). http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html. Accessed 5 May 2019. Haider, Shozeb. 2016. The making of the grand bookseller of Lucknow. The Hindu, 20 March. ­http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-making-­of-thegrand-bookseller-of-lucknow/article8375043.ece. Accessed 9 May 2019.

2  INDIAN PARTITION LITERATURE 

79

Harley, John Brian. 2001. The New Nature of Maps. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hosain, Attia. 1988 [1961]. Sunlight on a Broken Column. London: Virago. Hunter, Dard. 1940. Dard Hunter Paper Museum. Design 41 (6): 7. https://doi. org/10.1080/00119253.1940.10741700. Accessed 1 September 2018. Husain, Yusra. 2016. After 71 Years, Ram Advani Book Store Closes Forever. Times of India, 7 November. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/After-71-years-Ram-Advani-book-store-closes-forever/articleshow/55283556.cms. Accessed 6 September 2017. Ishtiyaque, Farah. 2014. “Each Stone Is a Memory. Each Memory is a Stone”: Narrating Partition Differently in Tabish Khair’s Filming. In Tabish Khair: Critical Perspectives, ed. Cristina M.  Gámez-Fernández and Om P.  Dwivedi, 99–108. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishers. Jain, Jasbir. 2012. The Ultimate Dislocation: Migrations, Histories and the Human. In Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, ed. Jayita Sengupta, 66–78. New Delhi: Routledge. Jones, Stephen B. 1945. Boundary Making: A Handbook for Statesmen, Treaty Editors and Boundary Commissioners. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2015. ‘Handcuffed to History’: Partition and the Indian Novel in English. In A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria, 119–132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kothari, Rita. 2014. Translating India. London: Routledge. Kumar, Dinesh. 2008. Libraries in Punjab: A History of Public Library. APNA (Academy of the Punjab in North America). http://apnaorg.com/researchpapers/arjun-1/. Accessed 18 June 2019. Lalchand Research Library. n.d. Ancient Manuscript Collection Online. http:// www.dav.splrarebooks.com/. Accessed 1 April 2019. Laskar, Dilipkanti. 2012. Locatings. In Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, ed. Jayita Sengupta, 199. New Delhi: Routledge. Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1997. Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition. Trans. Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin India. Memories of Partition. 2019. http://www.memoriesofpartition.co.uk/. Accessed 12 June 2019. Menon, Ritu. 2004. No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh Write on the Partition of India. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. MIB. n.d. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. https://www.mib.gov.in/ acts/press-registration-books-act-1867. Accessed 1 April 2019. Miller, Kei. 2014. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Manchester: Carcanet. Mir, Farina. 2010. The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab. Oakland: University of California Press.

80 

J. RAMONE

Mookerjea-Leonard, Debali. 2003. Disenfranchised Bodies: Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Writings on the Partition. Genders. https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/2003/12/01/disenfranchised-bodies-jyotirmoyee-deviswritings-partition. Accessed 5 April 2019. Mukherjee, Sreemati. 2012. Partition as Leitmotif in the Stories of Sa’adat Hasan Manto. In Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, ed. Jayita Sengupta, 81–93. New Delhi: Routledge. Najam, Adil. 2017. How a British Royal’s Monumental Errors Made India’s Partition More Painful. The Conversation, 16 August. https://theconversation.com/how-a-british-royals-monumental-errors-made-indias-partitionmore-painful-81657. Accessed 26 August 2017. Nandy, Ashis. 2003. Foreword. In Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals, ed. Debajani Sengupta, i–viii. New Delhi: Srishti. Pande, Ira. 2016. The Bookseller of Hazratganj, the Lucknow of Ram Advani (1920–2016). Scroll.in, 11 March. https://scroll.in/article/804915/thebookseller-of-hazratganj-the-lucknow-of-ram-advani-1920-2016. Accessed 6 September 2017. Paul, Sonia. 2016. Remembering India’s Iconic Bookseller. Aljazeera, 20 March. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/rememberingindias-iconic-bookseller-160318162747934.html. Accessed 6 September 2017. Ramaseshan, Sita. 1989. The History of Paper in India, up to 1948. Indian Journal of History of Science. 24 (2): 103–121. Rizzuto, Nicole. 2015. Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature. New York: Fordham University Press. Roy, Tapti. 2018. Print and Publishing in Colonial Bengal: The Journey of Bidyasundar. New Delhi: Routledge. Sarna, Surjit. 2012. The Distance to Lahore. In Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, ed. Jayita Sengupta, 41–49. New Delhi: Routledge. Sengupta, Jayita. 2012. Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia. New Delhi: Routledge. Seth, Maulshree. 2016. His Bookshop Was a Scholar’s Den. Indian Express, 10 March. http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/life-style/his-bookshopwas-a-scholars-den/. Accessed 6 September 2017. Sharma, Mahesh. 2000. Salvaging Manuscripts from 1947 Lahore: The Making of an Indology Library. Bulletin D’Etudes Indiennes 17–18: 491–498. Singh, Amardeep. 2014. “The Easier Death”: Saadat Hasan Manto and the Ghost of Partition in Tabish Khair’s Filming. In Tabish Khair: Critical Perspectives, ed. Cristina M.  Gámez-Fernández and Om P.  Dwivedi, 71–86. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishers. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1981. Foreword to Draupadi. Critical Inquiry 8 (2): 381–402. VVRI. n.d. Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Institute http://vvrinstitute.com/ objectives.html. Accessed 1 April 2019.

CHAPTER 3

Nigeria: Nigerian Literature and/as the Market

3.1   Introduction: Reading the Market in Nigerian Literature Poetry is the hawker’s ditty the eloquence of the gong the lyric of the marketplace           Niyi Osundare, ‘Songs of the Market Place’ (1983)

“Songs of the Market Place”, Niyi Osundare’s much-misread poem of the first generation after Nigerian independence, is not, as is often claimed, a statement of poetry’s simplicity; instead, it is an assertion of poetics as transaction. In the poem, Harry Garuba observes, “‘Meaning’ is proposed as the site of interaction and exchange”; and meaning “is now seen as central to consciousness because it is meaning that stands between man and the object world” (Garuba 2003, 279). It follows that if meaning is the site of interaction and exchange, then we access meaning through this site of interaction and exchange—we might also term it the market. In Nigerian literature the market calls for attention; the marketplace is central to the meaning of reading, and the contingent position of the Nigerian author within their local literary marketplace is a repeated narrative event. The literal and the literary marketplace operate through generational © The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9_3

81

82 

J. RAMONE

periods in Nigerian literature. While the literature of the independence generation conveys a confidence about the ability of newly independent Nigerian writers and citizens to transform African literature, canonical European literature, and decolonised Nigerian society, this confidence is replaced by doubt in later generations. Business supplants education as the primary means of acquiring wealth, security, and status, and as a result books and reading lose their former prestige. This change in attitude is inseparable from the economic climate: it succeeds the oil boom and bust years, during which periods both education and publishing were severely under-resourced. This chapter considers what reading means in Nigerian literature in the light of the significance placed upon education, generations, and the market, in Nigerian literature, culture, and scholarship. Onitsha Market Literature is central to this discussion, and for this reason it is considered in detail here, as a means of illustrating the central position of the market in Nigerian literature and literary culture. It was the phenomenon of Onitsha Market Literature that originally sparked my interest in Nigeria as a location for this study. In the 1950s and 1960s, Onitsha was home to a thriving community of publishers whose livings were made by selling independently published literature at their local marketplace. Many of them entered publishing as a potentially lucrative career after finding themselves without work as soldiers after the end of the Second World War—hardly a common career trajectory outside this local context. These publishers had no intention of selling their publications to readers based elsewhere: Onitsha was a self-constructed and self-­ sufficient local literary marketplace. The literature it produced has been subject to opposing critiques, having been described as pulp fiction by some and as a distinct literary subgenre by others (KU Onitsha Collection; Ogene 2017). Onitsha was not alone: Kano is the second best-known local literary marketplace with a similar operation (see Furniss 2000); Ibadan’s Niyi Oniororo market published a closely comparable pamphlet series beginning in the 1960s (Griswold 2000, 67) and there were later, and there remain today, street markets selling locally published material alongside other goods across Nigeria. Relatedly, the annual Nigeria International Book Fair is the biggest in Africa, and it hosts regional fairs in Abuja, Enugu, and Ibadan. Reading Nigerian literature from all periods since the years immediately preceding Independence (1960), I have noted frequent representations of the market itself. Literal representations of the marketplace operate alongside the oppressive presence of a literary marketplace and the writer’s

3 NIGERIA 

83

anxieties about its impact on their writing and livelihood. Having first encountered the market as a dominant trope in Nigerian literature, I was drawn to the work of Misty Bastian, who had asserted some years ago in her doctoral thesis that for the Igbo, the world and the market are one and the same. Bastian suggests that the Igbo proverb “the world is a marketplace and it is subject to bargain” (Uchendu 1965, 15) is not a metaphorical statement. She elaborates: Uwa bu afia (the world is market/trade) does not mean that the world is like a marketplace; it is a very specific and concrete statement. The world and trade are one and inseparable. Everything must be contested and is subject to the luck of the marketplace; no one is assured of leaving the world with more spiritual good (mma) or material wealth (aku) than when they entered it. Marketplaces (afia) are the sites where the trading (afia) character of the world most directly manifests itself. Ideologically constructed as places of openness, transparency (ocha, also whiteness or clarity), and usefulness (ulu, also gain or profit), Igbo markets serve as the primary conduits for meeting people and seeing what the world has to offer. (Bastian 1992, 5)

Ben Okri’s short story, “The Dream-vendor’s August” (1986) exemplifies how the market and the world must be understood to operate inseparably, to function as each other. It also depicts a local market pamphlet publisher. The story begins with an assertion of life as a series of financial transactions: dream-vendor protagonist Ajegunle Joe is a publisher and seller of pamphlets. These pamphlets are transcribed dreams which he has analysed for their portentous possibilities: at the narrative opening he is depressed after subscribers to his secondary educational business call him a fraud and demand their money back. His response to this is to seek out another series of transactions: he looks for a “cheap prostitute” who proves unable to distract him from the subscribers’ voices that persist in his head; nevertheless, “he paid […] for her time” (105). Labelling her “cheap” and noting unnecessarily that he “paid her” emphasises the market transactions. At home the next morning, he discovers that he has been the victim of a burglary, and all the materials he needs to undertake his business and therefore earn money at the marketplace—“large quantities of printing paper, his tubes of printing ink” (105) as well as a much-valued book, The Ten Wonders of Africa—have been stolen. Ajegunle Joe’s visions and dreams, instigated by correspondence courses in psychology and salesmanship, became his material for

84 

J. RAMONE

publishing in pamphlets to sell on local buses as well as at the book markets. He titled these: Mysteries of Orumaka, How to Sleep Soundly, How to Have Powerful Dreams, How to Fight Witches and Wizards, How to Banish Poverty from Your Life. His later work, The Farce Which Will Become History, was censored and led to his arrest and two-week imprisonment. The pamphlet titles are typical of those sold at Onitsha and the other Nigerian local literature markets, which offer advice and follow a self-help model, and are frequently focused on themes concerning romance and marriage as well as those in Joe’s pamphlets: overcoming problems, sometimes with curses or witches, and gaining wealth and success. Titles of popular Onitsha texts include: The African bachelor’s guide and lady’s guide (to be read before marriage and after it); Bribery and corruption: (bane of our society); How to write and reply letters for marriage, engagement letters, love letters, and how to know a girl to marry; and Mabel the sweet honey that poured away, which laments a young woman’s loss of virginity before marriage (Onitsha web). Joe’s entrepreneurial efforts extend, eventually making his business circular: he sets up his own correspondence course, supported by his boss at the printing press, named “Turn Life into Money” (107). Assured of success, no doubt as a result of the Igbo proverb’s echo throughout life in Nigeria, he is instead defeated by the confiscation of his treasonous The Farce Which Will Become History and the ensuing financial costs. This is exacerbated by his boss’s lack of faith in the project and withdrawal from their joint venture, after first having deducted half the losses from Joe’s salary and giving him the sack (107). Despite deficiencies and bad luck throughout the story, including competitor pamphlet-sellers offering very similar titles (124), Joe’s attitude is also circular, and the story ends with his high hope that his life, so far “one long fever” (136) would change. The story is evidence that in the Nigerian local literary marketplace, the world is, indeed, market, even if this makes for an uneven world. The implication of hope at the end of the story and Joe’s friend’s repetitive reply, “That’s good. That’s good” to his sense that he is “getting well” (136) is undercut by the flimsy cause of that faith, that his new lesson would be different from the previous ones. However, this can be interpreted as a claim that new forms of expression are transformative in the literary marketplace. Understood in the context of Okri’s writing as re-traditionalisation or “re-enchantment”, adapting traditional cultural forms to reinterpret the modern world (Garuba 2003, 271), Joe’s faith is an expression of the lasting and global impact of local Nigerian literature as transformative. This is an assertion that recurs in Okri’s

3 NIGERIA 

85

writing as well as in Nigerian literature more broadly, as this chapter will go on to argue. “The Dream-Vendor’s August” is not the only Nigerian text to describe the marketplace in such detail. Descriptions of the marketplace often foreground a sense of personal loss as a result of the transaction—this is particularly the case in Ben Okri’s writing, and there are similar interesting examples in texts by Chris Abani and Cyprian Ekwensi. The first example of Onitsha Market Literature is, in fact, cited as Cyprian Ekwensi’s When Love Whispers (1947), Ekwensi being one of the few well-known literary authors to have also published an Onitsha pamphlet (Obiechina 1973, 7); Amos Tutuola is a further example (Bruner 1985, 166). Ekwensi published numerous novels with the Heinemann African Writers Series, often constructing narrative tropes such as the opposition of the urban with the rural, through stories of journalists’ encounters with political corruption, highlife music venues, families divided due to migration for work and education, and the everyday. Ekwensi’s Jagua in Jagua Nana (1961), who has relationships with wealthy men who give her gifts and money, has to reconcile her priorities and respond to her brother’s flattening assessment of her life when she visits Onitsha, and this personal reckoning occurs at the marketplace, meaning that her sense of her life’s meaning is encountered at the site of exchange: Onitsha was busy in a fiendish way, minting the money. By the riverside she saw the yams and the cassava, the newly-killed fish and the long canoes, vying for the merest space in which to squeeze and make a stand against the customers. […] Jagua felt caught up in the unbelievable atmosphere of trickery, opportunism, intuition, daring and amazing decisions. People who lived here she was sure, did not care what happened elsewhere. (102)

This local centre where people “did not care what happened elsewhere” typifies the Onitsha literary market, even if books are not the object of Jagua’s attention when she observes the market’s activity. The yams, cassava, and fish on sale alongside books is a pattern which persists in Chris Abani’s Graceland, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, and in the Caine Prize shortlisted short story “Bridge” by Jide Adebayo-Begun, where in each case the marketplace juxtaposes food and reading. In Graceland, Elvis’s mother’s recipes are collected in a journal that she wrote for him. These stand in stark contrast to the street foods scavenged from the market after her death.

86 

J. RAMONE

Since Onitsha is so well known for its market literature, “local” (African) readers would notice the absence of books and reading, signalling the operation of the market itself beyond what is offered for sale, while Jagua’s brother’s words about her relinquished beauty and dignity, imploring her to abandon her “loose life” (102) for a “righteous” (103) one performs the function of a dominant strand of Onitsha Market Literature tales about women’s lost modesty and opportunities. Interestingly, too, Onuora Nzekwu’s Eze Goes to School (1963), the set text for generations across Nigerian schools which conveys the positive value of education in the pursuit of a fruitful and satisfying life and stable employment, and the perils of failing in education, was recently replaced by Chinua Achebe’s Chike and the River (1966) on many school syllabuses. Chike and the River is a similar story of a young boy growing up and going to school, but its central focus is Chike’s unsanctioned trip to Onitsha market, and the perils of the market; books and reading feature very rarely. Having found a coin, Chike’s ambition is to invest it, since “sixpence was not enough; […] as their teacher said, little drops of water make the mighty ocean” (Achebe 2010 [1966], 33). The market as transaction (buying and selling goods and services) prevails over the market as encounter (the employment market and the self as commodified according to wealth, status, and educational level) in more recent Nigerian literature, and alongside this change is the shift in school set text from Eze Goes to School which prized education to Chike and the River, which offers advice on how to enter the marketplace while avoiding its greatest dangers.

3.2   Part 1: The Nigerian Literary Marketplace The literary marketplace in Nigeria is distinctly local but it is vast: “Nigerian publishers number in the dozens, and Nigerian readers in the millions” (Griswold 2000, 4). These publishers are often highly specialised, emerging as a many-pronged challenge to the British publishing industry that had controlled Nigerian writing previously. In her 2000 study, Wendy Griswold observed that mass retail is unfamiliar in Nigeria, so while speciality shops are commonplace, department stores and supermarkets are rare, meaning that purchasing a book involves a purposive trip to a bookshop (Griswold 2000, 86). Griswold notes that the emergence after the Second World War of a vast publishing industry in Nigeria was due to the availability of obsolete printing presses, demobilised soldiers looking for a trade to take up, and the rise in literacy—often among soldiers, too, who

3 NIGERIA 

87

had learned to read in the army (Griswold 2000, 65). As a result of the emergence of an embedded publishing industry, it was commonplace for publishing to be considered a lucrative career prospect (Griswold 2000, 68). Despite the localised pamphlet publishers and highly specialised later publishing industries spread across Nigeria in the colonial period, Griswold’s argument for the coherence of Nigerian literature as a category stands. This is based on the emergence of the Nigerian novel alongside the new independent state; a sense of Nigerian identity attributed by the literary culture in Nigeria; and the publication and distribution of novels being largely within the Nigerian border. Distribution is limited by three of Nigeria’s neighbours—Togo, Cameroon, and Chad—being French-­ speaking, and by the lack of distribution to Ghana: “one may expect Nigeria and Ghana […] to have close literary ties, multiple contacts among authors, common literary media, and much back-and-forth, [but] in fact they do not” (Griswold 2000, 61). A distinctly Nigerian local literary marketplace persists twenty years later since most of the reasons meriting the definition remain unchanged. One recent development is the greater access to a global audience through online shopping portals like Amazon. Presses like Cassava Republic and Parresia are able to compete with global publishers online, meaning that alongside the celebrated migrant Nigerian authors writing for a global audience, more “locally” inflected Nigerian literary texts are finding a route to a broader literary market. Approaching the literary marketplace from a postcolonial materialist perspective, a Marxist understanding of the market will always call for attention, particularly after an assertion that the world and the market are one and the same according to a traditional Igbo worldview. Simon Clarke’s helpful summary of Marx’s understanding of the market has some points of similarity to the Igbo understanding of the market as expressed by Misty Bastian: The market is no mere instrument of capitalist power, but the alienated form through which the capitalist as much as the workers is subjected to the anonymous power of capital. The capitalist no less than the worker is subject to the pressure of competition, and the fate of the capitalist no less than that of the worker is subject to the judgement of the market. The action of the individual capitalist is not an expression of his individual will, but of the social character of capital, and its social character is only imposed on the individual capital through its insertion into the sphere of exchange, as the individual capitalist seeks to valorise his capital. (Clarke 1995, 4)

88 

J. RAMONE

Both definitions share a sense that the market encompasses all: “everything must be contested” in the Igbo market, a place that everyone visits, as Bastian is told by the trader who shares with her his interpretation of the market (Bastian 1992, 5). Likewise, in Marx’s formulation worker and capitalist alike suffer the pressures, fates, and judgements of the market. Both are literal as well as physical spaces, and both are ideologically constructed; they differ in the sense that the Igbo market is understood as a place of transparency, while Marx’s market manifests as alienated and anonymous. This is the point of departure, and it is through this distinction that Okri’s representation of the market in The Famished Road becomes active and transformative as a means of responding to the global marketplace and the particular local communities it exploits, and to the local literatures it ignores or assimilates. Okri’s marketplace is all-­pervasive: everything that Azaro can imagine is found there amongst its noise and movement: Women with trays of big juicy tomatoes, basins of garri, or corn, or melon seeds, women who sold trinkets and plastic buckets and dyed cloth, men who sold coral charms and wooden combs and turtle-doves and string vests and cotton trousers and slippers, women who sold mosquito coils and magic love mirrors and hurricane lamps and tobacco leaves, with stalls of patterned cloths next to those of fresh-fish traders, jostled everywhere, filled the roadside, sprawled in fantastic confusion. There was much bickering in the air and rent-collectors hassled the women. (161)

The market is not a safe place; while its women traders are “hassled”, there is a “fight raging”, temporarily “abandoned” children crying, and “so many flies I was amazed I didn’t breathe them in” (162). For Marx, the market obscures rather than reveals—seeing the desired commodity prevents us from perceiving the product of human labour behind it. The market is not obscured by the commodity in The Famished Road, though: it is discernible in all its unpleasantness, while it remains central to all encounters, and this market sells little besides the essentials required to sustain life. If the market is not at a distance from the consumer, and it does not offer the alternatives that create an illusion of genuine choice, then it cannot follow the same rules as the European market conveyed by Marx. Instead of disguising the human labour behind the commodity, in The Famished Road the objective is to reveal it. Thus, as we see the horror on Azaro’s face as he witnesses the physical effort made by his father in

3 NIGERIA 

89

contributing towards the production of infrastructure required for the global circulation of products, the novel asks us to reconsider whether we correctly value that commodity in global circulation after witnessing the amount of human labour involved in its production. That commodity might be understood as the global product and its exploitative circulation. Thus The Famished Road removes the obscurity of the market, revealing the human labour and what it produces through the minutely detailed description of the local marketplace, a transaction and encounter that touches everyone in the novel and is thus revealed as something in which the whole world is complicit. This all-pervasive marketplace is constructed through human labour that is both brutalising in the demands it makes upon the body and the transformation in physical appearance it creates, and at the same time perplexing since, unlike much of the market activity it is decidedly not local: for what purpose are these bags of salt and cement and sand hauled on men’s backs? The two peripheries of Azaro’s world are the ghostly one and the equally haunting built-up location with its constant light and smooth lines. This built-up suburb is an indication of the exploitation visited upon Azaro’s community though global capital, and the road and the forest inhabit the gap between capital’s Janus-face, one face marking the accumulation of vast wealth, the other face witnessing the result: extreme poverty.

3.3   Onitsha Market Literature The Onitsha market was above all a commercial enterprise, led by entrepreneurial traders who aimed to appeal to a local buying public through cheaply printed pamphlets on subjects that were of interest to the majority of people. Don Dodson has described Onitsha Market Literature as “an entrepreneurial phenomenon as well as a cultural one”, and has noted that the pamphlets were sold predominantly in Onitsha, but were exported all over Nigeria (Dodson 1973, 172), extending its influence as part of the post-Independence Nigerian literary marketplace. In his wide-ranging study of the Onitsha Market Pamphlets, Emmanuel Obiechina outlines its origins, characteristics, and strengths, and notes that literature which appeals to the masses “must be simple in language and technique; it must be brief; and it must be cheap” (Obiechina 1973, 10), and insists that the Onitsha authors were exemplars: “The Onitsha Market pamphlets are […] stories about the common people, by members of the same class, for

90 

J. RAMONE

everyone’s enjoyment—though their keenest consumers remain the common people” (Obiechina 1973, 10). In a review of the study, Richard Henderson referred to Onitsha Market Literature as “a genuine and voluminous ‘literature for the masses’ produced on its own printing presses and written by and for the people living its everyday lives” (Henderson 1975, 962). Pamphlets were small in size, often between ten and seventy pages, and vernacular authors were published alongside texts written in English. For Henderson, the Onitsha pamphlets must be read as part of the broader Nigerian literary culture; he juxtaposes the literature of the Onitsha markets with the works of Chinua Achebe, and suggests that although the two differ in style and content, “the Onitsha pamphlets nonetheless form permanent testaments to the vitality of this eastern Nigerian town and its environs, which were later devastated in a prolonged civil war” (Henderson 1975, 962). Stephanie Newell agrees, suggesting in West African Literature: Ways of Reading (2006) that popular literatures, those produced locally and sold daily to the large local readership, including religious and self-help pamphlets, merit consideration as part of the Nigerian or broader West African literary “canon”. Onitsha had a particularly Igbo construct: “The printing press owners were Igbo business men and the writers were, with a few exceptions, Igbo people” (Obiechina 1973, 7). The market was more than a business for the writers whose works were sold: for the authors, seeing their work in print was highly desirable because of the prestige attached to authorship (Obiechina 1973, 12). John Povey describes the world of the Onitsha market pamphlets as an idealistic one filled with poetic justice, organising the pamphlets into two main categories—the “how-to-do-it” variety and the “moral tale with rich romantic counterpart”, explaining that the two categories often overlap, with “how-to” books often offering instruction on matters of the heart with titles such as “How to Speak to Girls and Win Their Love”, “How to Write Love Letters”, and “How to live Bachelors and Girl’s Life Without Much Mistakes” (Povey 1973, 86). Although the Onitsha book market was affected by the Biafran war, during which the market itself was destroyed in an attack in 1967, the literature continued to be produced in the town, and Joseph Anafulu lists titles published in later years (Anafulu 1973, 171). However, the publication of pamphlets after the destruction of the market took a different shape, and the demands of the marketplace itself proved fundamental to the construction of the literature at its height.

3 NIGERIA 

91

Paying attention to the descriptions of the Onitsha book market and the pamphlets themselves is one way to answer the question of what reading meant for the readers, writers, and publishers at Onitsha from the period after the Second World War, when the pamphlets first appeared, and into the 1970s. In a 1965 article, contemporaneous to the market literature’s circulation, Donatus Nwoga is able to identify patterns and purposes in the literature he analyses, despite noting that compiling an archive is very difficult with such an ephemeral body of work, which was, he notes, often printed without specifying the date of publication, and would be considered both “out of date” and of a similar value to newspapers; once read they were often used as toilet paper, their pages used to roll up tobacco into cigarettes, or thrown away (Nwoga 1965, 27). Positive functions recognised by Nwoga are twofold: first, he identifies an emphasis on educating the people, both directly through improving skills such as writing in English, and composing business letters effectively, and in the broader sense of providing moral instruction. Second, he suggests that the stories enabled new gender roles and representations, often conveying a new image of the African girl—in contrast with the traditional “quiet, modest, playthings of their parents” (Nwoga 1965, 27), these girls are often the heroines of their stories, voicing their own concerns (including over the fraught contemporary issue of the bride price) by writing letters and making demands. Ogali A Ogali’s Veronica, My Daughter, one of the best-known Onitsha stories, is given as an example. Stephanie Newell has since asserted the potential of the Onitsha pamphlets to convey radical new subject positions for women, stating that “pamphlets written and published by Nigerian men since the early 1960s show a nervous preoccupation with male and female roles in the rapidly changing society of Nigerian cities” (Newell 1996, 50) while Griswold supports this view, asserting that the pamphlets of Onitsha, Ibadan, and elsewhere overwhelmingly favour modernity (Griswold 2000, 68). The prevalence of pamphlets in Nigeria and elsewhere has provided a vehicle for women writers to challenge gender roles, especially in marriage, as Newell argued in her study of Nigerian and Ghanaian Christian pamphlets (Newell 2005). Wendy Griswold and Misty Bastian have suggested that an appetite for vernacular literatures about female-centred love stories of the kind made popular in Onitsha are visible in the distinction between a global or “Western” romance novel and a local, Nigerian romance novel, noting that while Western romances focus on a single love interest and a happy ending, Nigerian romance novels often present a protagonist in multiple

92 

J. RAMONE

love affairs and frequently end tragically or inconclusively (Griswold and Bastian 1987). Ogali’s aesthetics are considered to be as significant as his challenge to gender roles—he engaged his audience by conveying “an exciting dialogue situation out of the discrepancies in the standards of spoken English” (Nwoga 1965, 28). Ogali brought together the vernacular and Standard English for dramatic effect, where these registers usually remained separate in the pamphlets. His stylistics brought into focus questions about the perception of both English and reading in Nigeria at the time of the pamphlets’ popularity which coincided with the early Independence years and the coming to prominence of writers like Achebe. Expert knowledge of English was considered both a marker of prestige and a factor contributing to success in employment, a sentiment conveyed in Veronica My Daughter, where Veronica lacks respect for her father because he did not attend infant school and cannot read and write simple English. Nwoga identifies a contradiction in the Onitsha texts’ use of language; on the one hand he laments the over-reliance on English which can lead to unconvincing “flourishes of style” (Nwoga 1965, 32), suggesting, even, that much of the English used in the literature is below the linguistic standard of its own audience, and that the poor English employed is made worse in printing through inaccuracies of spelling and other errors, often as a result of the dictates of the market: publishers could control the subject matter and number of pages, and as writing was their main or only source of income, many writers produced the pamphlets rapidly (Nwoga 1965, 33). Nevertheless, the language was, Nwoga admits, sometimes exciting, and made for highly engaging stories: “they know what their audience wants. They too are part of the audience and share the same problems, and in the mode of expression, they also know how to put things to catch the attention […]—bombastic words, pidgin English” (Nwoga 1965, 29). Since the authors were keen to demonstrate their knowledge, the result was often overt intertextuality: the relationship between reading and writing is clear, with many authors integrating references to their reading into their texts, alongside Igbo proverbs: “a dictum among the Ibos is to the effect that to make a speech without using proverbs is like trying to climb a tree without the climbing rope” (Nwoga 1965, 30). Both proverbs and references to reading operate as a natural effect of the saturation of both books and proverbs in the culture of the pamphlet writers, while functioning as a strategy to elicit respect and convey their authority over the subject matter. Despite suffering from the rigours of high production demands and

3 NIGERIA 

93

their publishers’ influence, for Nwoga the literature is invaluable: “these books are significant both as literary efforts and in their revelation of the popular attitudes to socio-cultural phenomena. […] In the unassuming simplicity and directness of the Onitsha market literature we find authentic evidence of what these elements mean to the common man and what are his reactions to them” (Nwoga 1965, 33). The Onitsha Market is evidence of the prevalence of literature and the literary marketplace among a culture for whom the market is the world; indeed, in Onitsha the market and motor parks combined account for a quarter of the local government’s revenue (Olowu 1992, 39), which is considered unusual, but reflects the ongoing significance of the market in everyday life. The literary texts speak to the potential for literature if even a literary subgenre perceived by its own audience as throwaway was able to convey new subject positions and to engage directly with questions of language, culture, and identity. Onitsha market literature contributed towards Onitsha’s reputation for “excellent secondary schools and a highly literate population” (Henderson 1997, 216). It also asserted the centrality of reading as inherent in education, and education as a requirement for social and economic success in Nigeria, a theme that prevails in the national literature, but is challenged in particular ways by the current generation of Nigerian writers. The ethos of the Onitsha market persists in contemporary literary marketplaces, though recent city legislature means that in Lagos, pavement and street sellers have been discouraged from inhabiting the main marketplaces, and literature is more often to be found in shopping centre outlets, as Saudatu Mohamed, a research assistant employed to interview booksellers in her home city of Lagos, found when she conducted research for this project in 2015. Saudatu’s main observation from her interactions with booksellers in Lagos was that making sales was their primary objective. Perhaps unlike UK bookshops which are often described as needing to diversify and offer other products or services to draw in customers and supplement dwindling book sales, Lagos bookshops are busy with frequent footfall, so distraction from serving those customers is unwelcome. Saudatu managed to engage seven booksellers in conversation, sometimes after making a purchase. The interviews differ in length, but patterns emerge: the majority of bookshops surveyed sell secondary and tertiary education texts, and some offer primary and nursery school books, with others offering religious texts (see Appendix). Stock is ordered according to very specific customer demand: as well as stocking set texts from course

94 

J. RAMONE

lists communicated from schools and universities, many of the booksellers note a high frequency of customer requests for specific books for their courses. Education is mentioned as valuable by the booksellers, with one interviewee [Recording 5] asserting: “Education is a very good policy. If I had attended school, I may have been able to succeed in life more than I have. I would also have been able to gain more knowledge” (Appendix), while another [Recording 2] insists that “governments should know and value booksellers because we make an impact in the lives of people. Also, libraries should be provided so that knowledge can be gained by all” (Appendix). Responses to most of the questions indicate that the booksellers consider books as functional items, and that profitable sales are the objective of the bookshop. Yet three of the booksellers choose to add further comments when invited to do so, and these comments convey the value of books and reading beyond their instrumental function: “working here enlightens me”, says one respondent [Recording 1], while a second interviewee [Recording 2] asserts, “we enlighten people through the books we sell”, and a further bookseller [Recording 7] acknowledges the benefits of meeting people through the bookshop, and his sense of achievement: “through this place I’ve inspired people” (Appendix). The differentiation between bookshops’ stock and the degree of specialisation, sometimes even specialising in books required for a select tranche of courses offered at a particular local school or university, is evidence of a persistent locality. As well as assuring the local nature of the book market in Lagos, this reinforces the sense that reading is undertaken for a particular purpose, perhaps an instrumental one: books are read to pass educational courses as a means to securing careers and financial stability. This differs from Ranka Primorac’s findings in a Zambian local literary marketplace, which uncovered the same level of local self-sufficiency, but with a clearer sense that reading was undertaken as an aesthetic activity and that a thriving local literary culture required no international interference (Primorac 2012). The book market as a commercial operation may not reflect the totality of reading in Nigeria—in fact, to suggest it does would be absurd—but it does have an impact on the national narrative (or the local narrative) of reading. This sits alongside the sense shared by many Nigerian writers that their literary fiction is subject to the whims of the local market, as expressed in short stories by Olufemi Terry (2011), Elizabeth Ngozi Okpalaenwe (2011), Ken Barris (2011), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009), each of which conveys the story of an emerging

3 NIGERIA 

95

writer and their efforts to secure a publishing contract without sacrificing their subject or style. The internet is recognised by the booksellers interviewed in Lagos as a competitor, with cheap ebooks considered to be a growing market. Donald Kochan perceives positive benefits in this which he suggests could contribute to the re-emergence of a multivoiced pamphlet culture through blogging (Kochan 2006); if he is right, this is evidence that Onitsha’s cultural value persists as the literary marketplace extends online. Others support his assertion; filmmaker Amaka Igwe claims that “the video film industry today reminds one of the Onitsha market literature phenomenon. Just as then people turned to works by their own writers, so today Nigerians are turning to films by their own cinéastes” (Esonwanne 2008, 37). While this celebrates a local, Nigerian art form over a global one, it is also an effect of the Onitsha pamphlets’ reconsideration of gender roles—Igwe describes the negative reaction from patriarchal voices to her film To Live Again, about female infidelity (Esonwanne 2008, 35), suggesting that Nigerian filmmaking, like the Nigerian-produced pamphlets, creates a space for women to challenge gender stereotypes which prevail when access to literary and cultural markets is limited. Nevertheless, Onitsha and contemporary Lagos retain an emphasis on education—even if this objective is secondary to their commercial purpose. Education as a theme endures throughout Nigerian literature, as is discernible in the local bookselling apparatus, in previous studies of the Nigerian book market, and in all instances of reading in the literary texts consulted for this project. Reading and education are, of course, difficult to separate entirely, but in Nigerian literature formal educational settings or direct self-education materials are more directly addressed than in other contexts. An example of this can be found in the self-help books and correspondence courses represented in Ben Okri’s “The Dream-Vendor’s August”. In contrast, reading for pleasure in defined reading spaces dominates Cuban literature, and reading for consciousness can be identified as the ultimate objective in Black British writing. The inseparability of education and reading in Nigeria is repeatedly asserted. Chukwuemeka Ike’s study of contemporary reading culture among Nigerian youth (2007) is preceded by a summary of the inequalities of education compounded by the economic recession of the 1980s, following which an import licence on books made them “inaccessible and unaffordable to the majority of the youth” (Ike 2007, 339). Ike goes on to note that this is exacerbated by an economic system which enables wealthy individual Nigerians to own the

96 

J. RAMONE

private universities that have emerged in the twenty-first century (Ike 2007, 340). Wendy Griswold’s anecdotal observation is illustrative here: she notes that when Okri’s The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991, it was unavailable in Nigeria, and was sold only the following year in Nigeria, even then at unaffordable prices, noting that the “handful” of Nigerians “who were interested in books and had the means to buy them were scrounging around to get textbooks and other books they needed to prepare for examinations. For all but a very few Nigerians, if they had developed a habit of reading fiction at all, it was a habit recently acquired and easily broken” when financial circumstances made it difficult to pursue (Griswold 2000, 70). Fluctuating provision for Nigerian publishing was a phenomenon experienced earlier, too: “Nigerian publishing had always been beset with problems obtaining materials—ink, film, chemicals, plates, and most of all paper—as a result of high customs duties and scarce foreign exchange. With only three paper mills, newsprint was both insufficient and expensive” and the Structural Adjustment Programme of 1986 following the economic decline after the Oil Boom, combined with the Second-Tier Foreign Exchange Market, devalued the naira, meaning that the cost of books rose as the value of the naira declined (Griswold 2000, 69). For Ike, contemporary reading culture in Nigeria cannot be understood as separate from this highly unequal (market-driven) education system. For Ike, a combination of Onitsha and Kano market literature, British canonical literature and Victorian and Indian pulp fiction, and postwar African literature including Ekwensi, Achebe, and of off-syllabus English literature (James Bond, Hadley Chase, Enid Blyton, and the Mills and Boon series) constituted the pattern of material read by those privileged enough to be able to access books and education (Ike 2007, 340–342). Wendy Griswold’s interviews with Nigerian readers in Bearing Witness (2000) reveal that reading for pure pleasure or escapism was unfamiliar to the readers she interviewed who identified self-improvement, often through social, employment, and financial circumstances, as their reason for reading (to borrow Ranka Primorac’s “reasons for reading” phrase). Readers listed their reasons for reading as “for information—to see how people live and cope with their problems”; “for knowledge and entertainment, ‘to know what’s going on in the world’”; to find out “about useful things”; and “strictly as a tool for study and achievement” (Griswold 2000, 89, 90, 91, 92). The emphasis on literature as a means towards education for all but the very privileged few has meant that, for Ike, limited books exist for children and adolescents. What remains available are

3 NIGERIA 

97

materials which can be categorised as textbooks, or literature to improve reading skills, and this limited reading matter stifles the creative and aesthetic connection to literature. Ike suggests that: the time has come for the emergence of […] an independent literature for Nigerian youth, from infancy to the years of adolescence: literature targeted specifically at them—cognizant of their background, dealing with matters with which they are familiar, with protagonists with whom they can empathize, with issues touching on their everyday lives, problems and aspirations. This is a challenge for the twenty-first-century Nigerian creative writer and publisher. (Ike 2007, 342)

This being acknowledged, there are no shortage of contemporary Nigerian writers, many of whom directly address the problem of conflating reading with education, and education with socioeconomic success and personal fulfilment, which is the message of straightforward narratives such as Eze Goes to School and is harnessed as a catch-all motto by which to live. Some of these writers, including Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani whose novel I Do Not Come to you By Chance offers the most direct confrontation of this question, are explored in a later section in this chapter. Onitsha market literature emphasises the “autonomous roles of Nigerian creators (writers) and/or consumers (readers) in shaping the distinctive characteristics of local fiction” (Griswold 2000, 19), thus transforming the way literary culture had been understood in the territory since colonialism. Catering to mass tastes and reflecting the effect of reading and education in Nigerian culture, Onitsha differed from the state-led book markets that operated alongside the international book fair in Nigeria. These fairs aimed to transform literary culture and Nigerian society more broadly. The Nigerian international book fair had its origins in the Nigerian Publishers’ Association-led Ife International Book Fair. The Ife fair ran from 1976 until 1985 and its demise has been attributed to the pressures of military rule which were in operation from both 1966–1979 and 1983–1998 (Griswold 2000, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiv). The result was political instability (Block de Behar et al. 2009, 35) but the book fair was just as likely to have suffered as a result of the Oil Boom and bust during which period all state resources were initially directed towards the Oil industry. Even when the boom was over, there were limited resources for printing. Following the Ife fair, the Nigerian International Book Fair (NIBF) had three succinct aims: (1) To improve the reading culture in

98 

J. RAMONE

Nigeria; (2) to bring books closer to the people for better education and self-improvement; and (3) to inculcate in the younger generation of Nigerians, necessary readership and authorship skills for a wholesome book society (Kolawole 2009). These differ from Ife’s aims, which were more international in focus, as Akin Thomas, the President of the Nigerian Publishers’ Association outlined in his opening address at the eighth Ife fair in 1983. Thomas affirmed that the primary objective of the book fair is “to promote the free flow of published materials to the mutual benefit of Nigeria and other countries” (LRA 01/130/01 (2)), before outlining secondary objectives involving intersections between publishers, ease of sales, and enabling business transactions, as part of “the social, cultural and political growth” of Nigeria (LRA 01/130/01 (2)). The international focus is prevalent in the Nigerian National Congress on Books which takes place at the fair. Here, objectives include raising awareness of “the problems in the book world today in general”, identifying “problems peculiar to Nigeria”, and meeting targets, including “the formulation of a national book strategy”, the “creation of a reading environment in all types and at all levels of society”, and the “stimulation of international cooperation” (LRA 01/130/01 (3,4)). In 1983 there was a hopeful narrative with plans to tackle a government who had neglected books and reading in the fiscal period, to ensure that “all our resources should be geared towards full emancipation”, confident that they might persuade the government to “view the tools of education in this light” (LRA 01/130/01 (8)). By 1984 the mood had shifted to crisis—1984 was declared the “year of the Book Crisis” (LRA 01/130/02) and the director of the fair sent out an appeal to potential participants claiming that “any Nigerian publisher who does not exhibit at the 9th Ife Book Fair can not survive the present situation” (LRA 01/130/02). The fair was positioned as a collective endeavour to shape the future of a Nigerian population whose recovery from the history of colonial occupation was dependent upon education. The emphasis placed on reading and the faith in education in the immediate aftermath of Nigerian independence had begun to waver, as highly qualified students found that the job market was saturated with similarly qualified people. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to you by Chance (2010) conveys just this quandary faced by Kingsley, whose two paternal figures—his educated father who struggles to feed his family, and his illiterate uncle who commands a vast wealth built from running an online fraud business—stand as contrasting influences after whom he attempts to build a future that is both respectable and financially secure.

3 NIGERIA 

99

3.4   Part 2: Reading in Nigerian Literature— Education Transformation Of forty-three references to books and reading in Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to you by Chance, one an episode involving a hawker selling books through the car window which will be considered in more detail later, there are only three direct references to specific texts—the two others being the self-help book on romantic relationships, Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus (67) and Macbeth (118). There are only a handful of other direct literary references: five to the Bible (94, 128, 129, 179, 188), two to Shakespeare (one of these a Shakespearean metaphor; 129, 133), and one indirect reference to Tristram Shandy evoked through a description of “cock-and-bull-tales” (151). There is also a list of the textbooks that Kingsley has inherited (129). Six of the remaining references to reading are oblique, instead referring to education or philosophy; the novel is a consideration of Kingsley’s father’s philosophy that “education was everything” and anything else was “silly”, because educated people “have learned how to change their world to suit them” (16, 4). This idea becomes the main point of conflict for Kingsley; when he buys the book from a street hawker he experiences a turning point in his attitude towards books and education. Unlike the certainty expressed in the Nigerian novels published in earlier decades, and by Wendy Griswold’s interviewees, education does not precede socioeconomic and personal fulfilment in I Do Not Come to You by Chance. Instead, a clear generational distinction is established in the text. The older generation is represented by Kingsley’s parents, who respect and prize education, seeing it as the route towards wealth, respectability, even “eternal life” (16). Kingsley’s compliance with this dictum wavers as he observes that despite his father’s education he couldn’t “put money in his pocket” (19); it fails altogether when he is unable to secure employment despite his excellent qualifications and as a result his girlfriend Ola ends their relationship in order to marry a wealthy but uneducated “Big Man”. Driven by the desire to win her back, Kingsley seeks support from his uncle Boniface, who is known as Cash Daddy and is another “Big Man” who had supported the family financially through Kingsley’s father’s illness and death. Boniface is aligned with Kingsley’s generation having once been a childlike house guest interacting with Kingsley and his siblings rather than his own sister, Kingsley’s mother. He repeatedly ridicules education since it cannot bring wealth (127) and instructs Kingsley to

100 

J. RAMONE

think smaller, to be careful not to have “too much book” (316). “Book” and “education” are used interchangeably (2, 170, 315) in derogatory terms in the text, and eventually his father’s “full brain, empty pocket” (42–3) philosophy becomes abhorrent to Kingsley and he decides to join his uncle’s online business which is based on sending emails to foreigners to request transfers of online funds for fraudulent business ventures or charitable donations, known as “419”. Despite his surface disdain for education, though, Kingsley is unable to reject education—or books. He is compelled to turn to books both when he is distressed, and as a means to gain respectability. After meeting Ola and attempting a reconciliation with her, he buys a book from a street hawker, seemingly on a whim, and gives it to Cash Daddy. Stuck in traffic after his meeting with Ola who “seemed to hold some magical power over” him, Kingsley questions his life, and asks, “was the sacrifice I was making in 419 worth it?” (263). At this moment of intense self-analysis, the marketplace asserts its presence and Kingsley is approached by a series of hawkers selling goods through the window. He rejects rat poison, toilet seats, standing fans, cold drinks, gala sausage snacks, plantain chips, handkerchiefs, curtain rails, Irish potatoes and apples, but is struck when he notices a boy selling books: “When was the last time I read a book?”, he asks (264). The hawker, who clings to Kingsley’s jeep through a burst of moving traffic to ensure his custom, occupies a prominent space in the text: Rich Dad, Poor Dad; The Richest Man in Babylon; God’s Plan for Your Financial Increase; Why God Wants You Rich; Wealth Building 101; Cracking the Millionaire Code; Talent is Never Enough; Nine Steps to Financial Freedom; Think and Grow Rich; Money Making for Dummies …. Then I noticed a colourful series of booklets. […] The boy tossed four of the miniature books into my lap: Prosperity Scriptures; Healing Scriptures; Marriage Scriptures; Wisdom Scriptures […] I paid the hawker for one copy. Then on second thoughts, I asked for another one. And one of the marriage ones, as well. Cash Daddy would probably find these books very helpful—an easy way to memorise yet more scriptures without wading through the entire Bible. (264)

It is unsurprising that books signify satisfaction for Kingsley despite his uncle’s efforts to distance him from education; after all, meeting Ola refreshes his memory of their courtship ritual which had involved him placing books on the table to instigate discussion (25). The hawker’s book

3 NIGERIA 

101

is transformative for both Kingsley and Cash Daddy—it is also the trigger for a further generational transaction. Immediately after this book-buying episode, Cash Daddy’s command is unexpectedly threatened when he is taken to the police station for questioning (267), an event that symbolises his dwindling power. His authority continues to falter after he returns home where he is rendered “speechless as a stone […] for once” (277) when Kingsley hands him the book; eventually, he is able to respond, saying: “this is the first time in almost fifteen years that anybody has bought anything for me […] for no reason” (277). The arrest is the first in a series of disquieting events: Kingsley badly beats his brother because he refuses to study; Kingsley’s new girlfriend Merit rejects him once she discovers his 419 lifestyle; Kingsley’s colleague disappears after a botched 419 operation in Iran; and finally, Cash Daddy is murdered (328). Cash Daddy’s emotional response to Kingsley’s gift of the book is followed by his unexpected death when he is poisoned by a rival. Kingsley inherits the business—a 419 hub—and directly compares Cash Daddy’s “books” (accounts) favourably with his father’s legacy—textbooks: “Unlike my natural father, who had left me with nothing but grand ideals and textbooks, Cash Daddy had left me a flourishing business. I was touched. And proud” (335). According to Kingsley, “with the right diet and the right tutoring from superior brains, a monkey could probably learn how to […] pen great works of literature. […] But no monkey born of creation or evolution could swipe cool millions of dollars with such ease” (218). As well as this disdainful approach to literature, reading is equated with death in the novel: this is conveyed first through Kingsley’s father who is repeatedly described as unable to sustain his family and who is ultimately unable to pay for adequate medical treatment to save himself despite being highly educated. Next, Kingsley’s friend, an avid and silent reader, is ridiculed for his habit and nicknamed “Graveyard”. The motif extends to Cash Daddy’s murder occurring directly after he receives the unexpected gift of a book. Nevertheless, the equation of books with death does not encompass Kingsley who only avoids the same fate as his uncle because of his education. Likewise, it is only because of Kingsley’s outward show of applying his education to respectable and profitable use that he is able to reconcile with his mother, who sees her husband’s textbooks—and the education they represent—as a “priceless” legacy for her son (341). Unlike Cash Daddy’s bookshelves stocked with books that “looked like they had never been read” (94), when Kingsley opens a chain of internet cafes as a cover

102 

J. RAMONE

for the continuation of his uncle’s 419 business, his father’s textbooks are displayed at the centre of his bookshelves. If education has been revealed as ineffectual in contemporary Nigeria— or at least, ineffectual without an accompanying profit-yielding business/fraud—and so reading no longer leads to recognition, status, and an ensuing lucrative career, what does reading mean in contemporary Nigerian literature? Reading remains pivotal in this text, but the pattern of reading for education is broken; instead, a single encounter with a book transforms the direction of the narrative. What remains central in the representation of books and reading is its connection with education. Though education was represented more positively in earlier generations of Nigerian writing it was not, of course, characterised as a straightforward panacea. Ifeoma Okoye’s Men Without Ears (1984), for instance, conveys a common colonial African story of the assimilation and alienation caused by education, and includes a highly symbolic book placement. Men Without Ears illustrates the incompatibility between avid reader Chigo and the naira-obsessed post-Oil Boom Nigeria, while it conveys the alienating impact of colonial education. Things Fall Apart is placed alongside the mutilated body of a boy, who was killed so that his body parts could be used in a ritual intended to make money (153). Wendy Griswold has interpreted this as signifying the impotence of reading as protection against the contemporary form of “things falling apart”—ruthless moneymaking (Griswold 2000, 88–9). However, Chigo perceives Nigerian materialism from the distance of having lived and studied in Europe, so “things falling apart” signifies the disconnection between those who have undertaken colonial education and their families, and does not indicate cultural deterioration due greed implied by Griswold’s reading. Instead, the complicated relationship between generations of Nigerian literary texts and their writers in the aftermath of colonialism may explain the change in approach to education in contemporary writing and culture. In West African Literature: Ways of Reading, Stephanie Newell asserts Achebe’s profound influence on African literary culture as both a figurehead and in terms of his style. Boehmer takes this further in her recently published Postcolonial Poetics, extending Achebe’s influence across all postcolonial literatures that follow (Boehmer 2018, 13). Achebe’s influence is undoubted, but the representation of books and reading in Achebe’s No Longer At Ease, among his works the one that pays the most sustained attention to books and reading, is not replicated in the novels of later generations of Nigerian writers whose works demonstrate his

3 NIGERIA 

103

influence in their poetics, using “motifs Achebe had himself drawn from Igbo oral tradition to create channels of transference from his work into their own” (Boehmer 2018, 13). While No Longer At Ease confronts the received version of canonical literature through the discussion of books undertaken by a group of university students in Lagos, contemporary Nigerian novelists frequently extol a more profound transformation of the educational and social context in Nigeria, which includes questioning the idea that education and reading is inherently valuable. The broad concept of generations in Nigerian literature is central, and is related to the shape of the literary marketplace and to the functions of reading, books, and education in Nigeria. Nigerian literature in English is often organised into three “generations”, and writers in these generational categories are sometimes considered to share a common context, aesthetic, and thematic concerns (Dalley, 2013). Writers acknowledged as belonging to the first generation, stretching from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, include Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Flora Nwapa, whose works confront the effects of colonialism and the impact of independence in 1960. Recurrent themes in the literature of this period include the clashes and contradictions between tradition and modernity, and between the rural and the urban, as well as the practice of politics, including voting in local elections, and related corruption. Without wishing to over-­simplify the history of post-war Nigerian literature by categorising literary texts so baldly, it is worth considering this tendency to organise the literature into generations, especially since the theme of inter-generational conflict is prominent in contemporary Nigerian literature. A second generation of writers includes Festus Iyayi and Ben Okri, who respond to the context of the Oil Boom (1970–1983) and subsequent economic decline. Falola and Heaton describe the rapid expansion of the oil and petroleum industry which rapidly positioned Nigeria as the richest country in Africa (2008, 181); this unequally distributed wealth was followed by state prioritisation of oil which led to the neglect of other industries such as manufacturing and agriculture, and ultimately to economic decline since the Nigerian economy was left “extremely vulnerable” to fluctuations in the global price of oil as a result of its dependence on a single source of income (Falola and Heaton 2008, 182). A pattern of concerns—the impact of colonisation; Pan-Nigerianism; nationalism and resistance; the cultural divisions of Nigerians which led to the Biafran War (or Nigerian Civil War) of 1967–1970; the subsequent Oil Boom years; and later globalisation,

104 

J. RAMONE

neocolonialism, and migration—provide the sociohistorical context to much Nigerian writing in English, and to the three stages or “generations” of Nigerian literature. Wole Soyinka is best known for his poetry, memoirs, and as a playwright, but he also wrote two novels, one of which, The Interpreters (1965) is centrally concerned with books and reading. Above all, The Interpreters argues for a transformation of African literature. This is articulated figuratively through the representation of books and reading, and more directly through a philosophy named voidancy, invented by journalist Sagoe, which involves employing together “violence and creativity” (Bello 2014, 148); a method that “is not a movement of protest, but it protests! It is non-revolutionary, but it revolts!” (Soyinka 1965, 70). Voidancy involves scatology, purging through shit and vomit, in order to effect rebirth and prevent the spread of dangerous and polluted ideas and creative works. The philosophy might be described as a creative associate of Ngugi’s “decolonizing the mind” (1986). This philosophy is closely connected with books; Sagoe laments an occasion in France where, for the lack of a toilet, he was forced to defecate in the woods—notably, he carried with him a book; his repetition of this act through vocalising it as “book and shovel”, “book-and-shovel” (Soyinka 1965, 97) is the germination of his theory. Sagoe is dissatisfied by the reception of his lecture on voidancy delivered while resident in France, since the French students fail to understand voidancy as regenerative and instead see it as originary, revelling in their makeshift outdoor toilet trips and locating a canonical literary reference to support their activity as sufficiently highbrow: “they threw Andrew Marvell in my teeth, hurled refrains of ‘a green thought in a green shade’” (97). While Sagoe’s voidancy is intended as revolutionary, it is received “on the continent of Europe” in a manner which results in “regression” (97); his theory receives the same Eurocentric misinterpretation as African arts and culture have received during and after colonialism. The novel itself has been read as a manifestation of the need to “renew fiction in radically changed conditions” to convey “the overwhelming impression of how fortunes and standards are constantly turned upside down” (McEwan 1983, 67, 68). Neil McEwan suggests that the novel rotates around Egbo, the character most difficult to pin down, and whose narrative perspective is both dominant and incomplete. He embodies the elaborate uncertainty that is required to transform fiction. However, it is Joe Golder, a gay African American man studying in Nigeria, who is

3 NIGERIA 

105

repeatedly connected with books and reading. Nine of the twenty-two references to books and reading in the novel are associated with Joe Golder. Of the remaining, three refer to newspapers (Soyinka 1965, 72, 107, 159), one to illiteracy (202), six to religious texts (60, 87, 88, 91, 155, 240), two to Egbo who experiences intense pleasure in the library (53) and sweats “in fear of the magic of texts” (54). The remaining reference is embedded in Sagoe’s voidancy lecture (96–7). Joe Golder effects a self-construction through the books he has read (and perhaps more importantly, owned) and the libraries he has worked at. His references are not to books that have affected him deeply, but rather, his knowledge of books and libraries and their cultural significance is harnessed as currency. In one example of his performance of literariness, Joe Golder creates a situation where his colleagues discover him naked, “pretending to read Giovanni’s Room” (27) after he has used the library as a way to voyeuristically gaze at Black male bodies: “Joe Golder stood in the library staring at huge tomes of encyclopaedia, watching legs in shorts, slavering over blackness until he felt sick and giddy and was gradually restored” (217). To seek approval, he garners a reputation for lending valuable books (215), through repeated reference to his work at renowned libraries (191, 192) and by publicising his passion for books (188). He defines himself through bookish references, affirming his ideas with confidence even if they sound, he mock-apologises, “Rousseau” (195) yet when analysed, none of his extensive experience in working with or acquiring books has had a positive effect on his writing or reading. When he describes his second book, a historical novel that he has set in “Africa” to Sagoe, Sagoe is not listening to him but is instead “thinking” (190) as if Golder’s book could not elicit thought. And when they are travelling together in a car, Golder hastily dismisses James Baldwin’s Another Country, calling it “Another C-U-N-­ Try” and claiming that it reminds him of “Eric, or Little By Little” (200), a moralising late Victorian novel by Frederic W. Farrar about the dangers of “sin” (including sexual encounters between boys) at boarding school, implying that Baldwin’s novel does not sufficiently create a positive context for non-heterosexual love, perhaps because of the novel’s suggestion that Black resistance and Black nationalism only offer a narrative of “authentic” and heterosexual reproduction (Dunning 2001). Books and reading are repeatedly the impetus for conflict in the novel—even Sagoe whose approach appears the most sincere promises to burn his voidancy Book of Enlightenment at his fiancée’s request, once they are married. Books and reading in The Interpreters are of uncertain value, like the

106 

J. RAMONE

over-­subscribed higher education which requires supplementary business knowledge in contemporary Nigerian literature. In a Radio 4 documentary series broadcast in 2015, Wana Udobang asserts that new Nigerian writers are becoming more bold with their style, rejecting the older generations of Nigerian writers as role models and instead adopting a more experimental style, and a more daring and personal engagement with subject matter, including 419 which Nigerians can accept in fiction, but are unwilling to confront in essays or nonfiction. They are writing, again, primarily for a Nigerian audience and not a global one, and it is to this that Wana Udobang attributes their artistic freedom (Udobang 2015). Abubakar Adam Ibrahim places books and reading in a peripheral position in his collection of short stories, The Whispering Trees (2012). Only three of his short story protagonists read, and none of those prioritise reading: both the white English wife in “The Cat-Eyed English Witch” and Zainab, a reluctant housewife in “The Garbage Man” read to distract themselves from their unsatisfying lives, and both are implicated in potential extramarital affairs. Zainab stops reading and imagining herself as the romantic heroine in The Last of the Mohicans when her husband agrees to find her a job, while the English wife becomes immersed in her Nigerian family life after she learns that she can discuss books with her brother-in-­ law. In “Night Calls” a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row had been reading before the elaborate ordeal that led to his imprisonment. Despite the repeated reference to reading he will not admit to it and instead says he was “doing something” (90) unspecified, as if education, books, and reading are of little significance. Instead the final story in the collection, “Cry of the Witch”, conveys the author’s philosophy of reading through the sense that books have untapped potential. This title recalls “The Cat-­ Eyed English Witch” and for that reason invites a reading of the rapidly spreading plague in the story as connected with the history of colonialism. While searching for a plague cure, a butterfly with wings “like a book” leaves open the question that there might be a message or key to decipher, “something we are missing” (146). The thorough rejection of books and education that Kingsley expresses in I Do Not Come to You By Chance is undercut by the text’s gentle challenge to his outlook by demonstrating that where the uneducated Cash Daddy was victim to the ferocious and unchecked growth of his business, his educated nephew is able to apply his learning to ensure that the façade of respectability protects him. This argument for the combination of the separate spheres of education and entrepreneurship is distinct from the

3 NIGERIA 

107

earlier generations’ certainty that the two went hand in hand, and is also distinct from Cash Daddy’s generation’s suggestion that reading and education is worthless and cannot result in financial success, or even survival. It is also a response to the impact of colonialism, and 419 is justified, to an extent, as a reasonable response to the exploitation of ongoing colonialism in its contemporary forms; Kingsley’s remorse dissipates as one of his mugus demonstrates his Eurocentrism and confuses Nigeria with South Africa, saying “all them places are the same thing to me” (164). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “Apollo” (2015) conveys a similar sense that education and reading are not enough, yet they are needed as part of the scaffolding required by the younger generation to achieve something beyond what their parents can imagine: in Adichie’s story, what is desired is still in the future; protagonist Okenwa is young at the narrative’s close and much of the story is a recollection of his childhood. The story begins with Okenwa as adult narrator, yet his situation is uncertain and his narration is restricted since he is conscious of his parents’ expectations; these expectations extend to his sexuality: “Apollo” is the story of Okenwa’s unrequited desire for his family’s houseboy, Raphael, and his childhood betrayal of Raphael as a result of jealousy. There is one direct reference to specific books in the story: Okenwa “longed to wake up and be Bruce Lee” after watching kung fu films and to develop his leaps and poses, would “pull my mattress onto the floor, stand on two thick books— usually hardcover copies of “Black Beauty” and “The Water Babies”—and leap onto the mattress, screaming “Haaa!” like “Bruce Lee”” (Adichie 2015, 4). As a child, Okenwa wishes to emulate his global heroes; as an adult his circumstances remain unspecified in the narrative—he visits his parents and acknowledges the two ways in which he considers himself a disappointment to them: he has not produced a bride; he has never felt as passionately about books and reading as his parents: “I did not care for books. Reading did not do to me what it did to my parents, agitating them or turning them into vague beings lost to time” (Adichie, 2015, 3). Instead, Okenwa felt like an “interloper” in a house full of his parents’ books that extended into his own room making his occupation of the house “feel transient”, and he read books “only enough to satisfy them, and to answer the kinds of unexpected questions that might come in the middle of a meal” (Adichie 2015, 3). Books are understood by Okenwa as somewhat conventional and part of an unsatisfying received wisdom which imposes uniformity on children (he faces tests over dinner on the subject of his reading). His parents’ celebration of books fails to rescue them from

108 

J. RAMONE

a decline in old age from rationality towards tradition: “they had shed those old selves”—their identities as professors of political science and education—to become “the kind of Nigerians who told anecdotes about diabetes cured by drinking holy water” (Adichie 2015, 1). Like I Do Not Come to You By Chance, books are held in higher esteem by the older generation than the younger one which dismisses them, and like Kingsley whose education is the basis of his financial success, Okenwa needs books as a stepping off point (literally as his childhood anecdote shows) towards development. Chihundu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017) offers a somewhat subtler analysis of the ways in which education cannot support Nigerian children to achieve their potential due to the corruption ensuing as an effect of colonialism. Unlike the more straightforward sense that education alone cannot transform Nigerian society or the opportunities of individual Nigerians which, in Nwaubani’s novel, was reconciled by combining entrepreneurship (in other words, fraud) with education, Onuzo suggests that there is no straightforward defining boundary between education and the rest of daily life, between corruption and reform, between Nigeria and the rest of the world, including its colonial history. The group of protagonists, who meet on a bus as runaways from their separate circumstances, locate a hidden underground luxury apartment beneath a dilapidated house. It is Fineboy who looks for and finds this house, and it is also Fineboy who recognises that its owner is the wanted criminal, Minister for Education Remi Sandayo, when he returns to hide out in the apartment. The group had no plans beyond temporary survival together until the minister arrived with his embezzled millions of dollars, at which point they decide to put the money to its original intended use: Nigerian schools had failed to receive the funding for equipment they were due, so the group undertake their own business negotiations to provide local schools with the items they require under the guise of an anonymous benefactor. Chief Sandayo eventually accompanies them on their outings, in disguise, in part to gain their trust, but also to regain his original sense of purpose which he suggests had dwindled under the pressure of a corrupt economy. Sandayo claims that it was always his intention to use the stolen money, a tiny amount relative to the billions embezzled by others, to fund education in Nigeria, a lie that is not as clear-cut in private as in public: he saves the group from imprisonment and torture after Chike had permitted him to escape with the remaining money, though he is eventually killed, and

3 NIGERIA 

109

having taken the credit for the “education transformation” project is considered a martyr. Of all the Nigerian texts considered here, Welcome to Lagos has the highest frequency of references to books and reading. The references—68 in total, in a 354-page text—can be organised into seven main categories, the most prominent being references to the Bible (25 references), all but three of which relate to the Bible readings that Chike leads. The Bible appears in almost all of the postcolonial literary texts consulted as part of this project, as a symbolic object not very often read, which makes the sustained Bible reading in this text significant. The first reference to books and reading in the text occurs when Chike reads alone in his military dormitory. This is a new undertaking for Chike who reads “often now” that he is a soldier, preferring the “improbable images” in the Bible, which he describes with irreverent imagery—the manna he thinks of “like dandruff from the sky”—to the complications of real life (8). His sceptical interpretation of the parables does not stop him from relying on the Bible, and reading it becomes a sustaining habit. The narrative explores how a disparate group of people communicate when they shelter in the corrupt Chief Sandayo’s abandoned house engaged in a project to redistribute his stolen wealth as well as to escape the lives, jobs, or families they had run away from. Oma encourages him to read to the group and the Bible stories relate to the group’s experiences and punctuate their lives, remaining until the end “the only constant” (351) for Chike. The group undertake informal interpretation of the stories from their different perspectives; while Chike considers the multiplication of loaves and fishes “absurdity” (126), Fineboy explains the direct lesson: “It’s not such a big miracle […] I used to go to my grandma’s farm in the village. We planted maize there. You put four seeds in the ground and when you came back a few months later, if the soil was good and there was enough rain, a few seeds had multiplied into thousands” (127). Chike’s sudden realisation of “an agrarian rhythm to the gospels that he had never noticed”, being an “urban Ibadan boy” (127) cements the deepening trust and mutual respect between the group; by comparing analyses of the reading material Chike comes to understand Fineboy as more than a militiaman and to acknowledge his contribution. The reading sessions become a form of impromptu education for Fineboy and Yemi, while for Isoken, the most promising intellectual, they help to maintain her hope of achieving her dream of attending university. Remi Sandayo is discussed in relation to the Crucifixion passages in the Bible: he is not resurrected even in the “moment of quiet” in

110 

J. RAMONE

a broadcast interview with Sandayo’s son, understood as a “last invocation before time ran out” (345). Nevertheless, the reporting of his life and death portrays him as a Christ figure while Chike and the others remain nameless “principals” (332), unrecognised and not invited to Sandayo’s funeral. Like the formal Nigerian education system which is contingent upon funding, the reading undertaken by the group is conditional: sometimes Chike’s mind is too restless to read (138); when they live under the bridge for the second time their reading is suspended since their living conditions left them “too disheartened” (329); and when their first communal reading session after finding secure accommodation is disturbed by their benefactor, the thread is lost and Chike is unable to read about the Crucifixion and resurrection and instead stops reading at Jesus’s words “it is finished” despite his housemates’ gentle protest that “that’s not a nice place to end” (330). Though the novel avoids a simple evangelical narrative, it does insist upon the cultural and social relevance of a common book. The Bible is not universally read in Welcome to Lagos: Ahmed’s father refuses to join their group since he is a Muslim and a number of those who do listen to the stories are agnostic. The messages conveyed by the text are malleable to the situation: implied hope dwindles after a challenging day until a psalm feels like a “mockery” (89) and the verses convey a “confident self-­ righteousness” that the group are critical enough to recognise. If the Bible cannot structure life, some of the other texts that recur in the text might do so, such as the daily newspaper the Nigerian Journal, or the textbooks that signify formal education. After the Bible, the next most common reference is to education—textbooks, primarily, with most of the fifteen instances referring to the project undertaken by the group, at Isoken’s suggestion, to redistribute the money stolen by Chief Remi Sandayo to local schools; requested items always include textbooks. There are also seven references to newspapers (132, 189, 207, 222, 225, 230, 295), four to the Nigerian Journal (38–9, 160, 213, 268), and seven further references to reading, publishing, or storytelling, including Chike’s appearance which is described by Remi Sandayo on their first meeting as “bookish” (139, 148, 161, 224, 292, 328, 347). There are three further references to reading to pass time (187, 249, 337), and five references to particular writers (Fanon, Tolstoy, Achebe, and Maupassant (51); Marx (99); Garvey and Fanon (211); Ken Saro-Wiwa (346); and indirectly Achebe, through Chike’s name, which alludes to Chike and the River); the balance of these is postcolonial and revolutionary.

3 NIGERIA 

111

All twenty-four chapters in the second section of the book include, in addition to the references to books and reading listed above, an epigraph taken from the Nigerian Journal, a journal created and managed by journalist Ahmed, one of the eight principal figures in the novel. These epigraphs are not references to reading as such, but they relate to the content of each chapter, more directly than the Bible stories which help to channel an emotional response to the situation. A description in the Nigerian Journal of the under-bridge area where homeless Nigerians live and work as hairdressers and food sellers in exchange for informal ground rent precedes the group’s taking lodging there. A fashion article from the journal precedes a discussion of Ahmed Bakare’s well-chosen clothing. The epigraphs are more than a simple organising motif; they are worthy of mention as a narrative strategy since their inclusion implies that reading is both ever-present and contingent: all narrative action is preceded by a signal from a relevant journal extract, and the journal’s title evokes both the Nigerian everyday, and a sense of completeness. The epigraphs are also conspicuous by their absence from the other two sections of the book, inviting questions about the conditions that permit reading in Nigeria, and those that prevent it. The group engage directly with the journal and it is used as the vehicle to publicise their “education transformation” project (164) to redistribute Sandayo’s stolen money by funding school resources. It is this project that demonstrates Onuzo’s response to education in the text. The novel is above all about the possibilities for “education transformation” that eludes the group but is implied as part of an international collaboration by the text’s ending; Kenyan Farida secures a transfer with her BBC World Service role to Nigeria so that she and Ahmed can return there together, and there is an actual anonymous female benefactor whose millions are offered to continue an educational reform project, potentially to be undertaken by Chike and his group, in memory of Sandayo. In some ways this text reverses the narrative of I Do Not Come to You By Chance which justifies 419 as a resistant response to the history of global imperial exploitation. Here a relatively small amount (US $10 million) achieves “education transformation” when a group of people break their patterns of behaviour; this becomes the media story of a new independent Nigerian everyday through its association with the Nigerian Journal.

112 

J. RAMONE

3.5   Part 3: Nigerian and Nigerian Diaspora Literature as Transformative Like the other Nigerian novels considered so far, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004) emphasises education through frequent reference to school textbooks, which make up the majority of the references to books in the novel. Of thirty-five references to books and reading, seven are to textbooks, seven to newspapers or newspaper offices, and the remaining (except one) are to unspecified books and reading, many of these signalling the absence of books or disturbed reading: bookshelves are moved out (282); books are cleared up or given away (283); a lunchtime reading habit is abandoned (11); and there are references to books which associate them with the throwaway things that surround them— felt-tipped pens, a cracked mirror, medicines (114, 117). The only specific text mentioned, though, is a significant one: Equiano’s Travels, or the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African. Equiano was kidnapped as a child from Igboland which is in the modern-day territory of Nigeria, enslaved and transported to the West Indies and then the UK, where he lived as a slave. Equiano’s Travels merits attention since it is the only literary text directly named in a novel set in a house dominated by books, with a plot concerned with education, inviting discussion of what it means to read Equiano’s Travels in 1980s Nigeria, when the story is set. Given Adichie’s attention elsewhere to questions of publishing African literature and authorial control, it is likely that Equiano’s Travels is read in Purple Hibiscus since it has particular significance over other slave narratives, having been published by the Heinemann African Writers Series. This series is significant because of its much-discussed publishing practices. Graham Huggan suggests the Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS) demonstrates “symptoms of a controlling imperial gaze” (Huggan 2001, 52) constructed from books reflecting Euro-American preconceptions of Africa, the texts themselves manipulated through selection and editorial interventions (Huggan 2001, 52–3). Though Chinua Achebe was on the editorial board of the AWS, the series was largely managed by a UK team whose control of the representation of African literature within and outside the continent is still recognised by publishing scholars today; Alan Hill is described as instrumental in shaping the African Writers Series. In an article on the series, Nourdin Bejjit refers to Hill’s “unprecedented, but momentous decision to publish and promote obscure African writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o” (Bejjit 2018, 276). Bejjit

3 NIGERIA 

113

explains that Heinemann’s association of Achebe with the AWS could be described as an act of exploitation, intended to present the AWS to Europe: as an “authentic” literary series edited and supervised by an African who had already been hailed as the most important African writer, and whose Things Fall Apart was celebrated as the “first” influential African novel in English. Interestingly, Achebe’s name continued to be used as the “Founding Editor” on the prelims of every title published in the Series until 1986, though he had resigned his editorial job way back in 1972. (Bejjit 2018, 283)

In contrast, James Currey, the former publisher of the AWS, suggests that Heinemann editors were led by the literature and did not, as Gareth Griffths has suggested, construct it: Griffiths, Currey suggests, “credits Heinemann with a far greater ability to ‘control’ African literature than was the day-to-day reality” (Currey 2003, 582). Nevertheless, Currey’s 2008 book relating his experience of developing the series is subtitled “The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature” which inevitably claims a connection between the series and its role as instigator of African Literature, a role that Adichie suggests persists for African writers. She and others demonstrate their discomfort with this phenomenon through direct engagement with the restrictions of the publishing industry in fictional representations of working as a writer. Equiano’s Travels is a notable inclusion among a list of modern and contemporary texts published during the lifetime of the series, since it is the only slave narrative to be published by the AWS. Other republished works, relatively few in number and predominantly works by prominent contemporary novelists, were first published in the decades immediately prior to their being republished by the series. Examples include Peter Abrams’s Mine Boy (1963) originally published in 1946; Achebe’s A Man of The People (1966) originally published 1959; and Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1963) originally published in 1954 and republished by AWS in a revised edition. Republishing Equiano’s Travels, first published in 1789, is tantamount to a claim of its ongoing contemporaneity, and of its relevance as part of a contemporary African narrative. As Graham Huggan has shown, the Heinemann African Writers Series had a sizeable African readership; it is an interesting contradiction that Equiano’s Travels remains in wide circulation worldwide (Falola and Heaton 2008, 251, n.13) and is frequently taught in UK and US universities, but it is not as well known in Nigeria, as a literature student blogger attests: “I know

114 

J. RAMONE

most of you haven’t heard about Olaudah Equiano […] according to the editor, today, in Nigeria as elsewhere, Equiano’s book is not well known except to historians … AND ME!” (Onwukwe 2016). Onwukwe is quoting the AWS edition published in 1967 edited by Paul Edwards, but the point stands that the text is unfamiliar to Nigerian readers despite its prevalence in African Studies, World Literature, and Postcolonial Studies university modules in the UK and USA. The title does not appear on Nigerian online bookshop listings among the AWS titles stocked, despite a 1996 edition being published by Heinemann. It stands out on the AWS list, and its presence there is questionable, especially since its Nigerian readers have not embraced it as its global readers have. As James Green’s engaging and somewhat speculative account of the publishing history of Equiano’s Travels shows, the book was one of the most prominent books of its century. It was, Green notes, “one of the first points of contact between African narrative and Western print culture, and it was a prototype of a uniquely African-American literary genre, the slave narrative” (Green 1995, 362). But more importantly in terms of its reach and significance, the book had an extraordinarily active print history, being published in nine editions between its first publication in London in 1789 and 1794, while also being translated into German, Dutch, and Russian, and it is estimated as being “one of the best-selling new books of that half decade” in the UK (Green 1995, 363) as well as being widely reviewed as a serious text by London journals. It was also republished in the USA in 1791 to further unique acclaim: “of all the new literary works that had been published in London since the appearance of the first edition three years before, Equiano’s was the only one that had been selected for reprinting in America by 1791” (Green 1995, 368). It is notable that the book was not reprinted anywhere in the world between a republication in America in 1837 and the Heinemann African Writers Series edition in 1967; though it can be inferred that a text of such prominence may have been identified as neglected in the interim, this does not necessarily justify its inclusion in this particular series where it stands out as an anomaly because of its genre, date, and because its author identified primarily as British, where he lived for most of the years of his enslavement and after he bought his freedom. Notwithstanding the questionable legitimacy of suggesting an “African” narrative exists, the inclusion of Equiano’s Travels on a list of contemporary fiction assumes that slavery remains a preoccupation of contemporary African and African diaspora writers. The only exception to the series’

3 NIGERIA 

115

contemporary output is the inclusion of poetry originally composed in the nineteenth century and earlier (by Mwana Kupona, 1810–1860; Alda Lara, 1930–1962; Ingrid Jonker, 1933–1965 and even Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt, ca. 1504–1482 BC) in a collection of African Women’s Poetry edited by Stella Chipasula and Frank Mkalawile Chipasula, published in 1995. Other posthumous publications in the series are still of works which would be categorised as contemporary, or at least modern, and in most cases do not precede the series’ origination: Steve Biko (1946–1977), I Write What I Like (1987); René Maran (1887–1960), Batouala (published 1987); Thomas Mofolo (1875–1948), Chaka (published 1981); George Simeon Mwase (ca. 1880–1962), Strike a Blow and Die (published 1975); Arthur Nortje (1942–1970), Dead Roots (published 1973); Christopher Okigbo (1932–1967), Labyrinths (published 1971); Sol. T. Plaatje (Solomon Tshekisho) (1876–1932), Mhudi (published 1978); Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901–1937), Translations from the Night (published 1975); Kobina Sekyi (1892–1956), The Blinkards (published 1974); Can Themba (1924–1968), The Will to Die (published 1972). The posthumous publication of many of these texts follows soon after the author’s death and is most times explained by the author’s death at a young age—Christopher Okigbo and Steve Biko being prominent examples. These examples are very different from the context of Equiano’s narrative which was published in the series in 1967, in the first tranche of books to be published by the series which was only founded in 1962, just two years after Nigerian independence. With this in mind, the republication of a slave narrative can be read as either an act of reparation or a reassertion of colonial power; either way, the inclusion of an eighteenth-century text is not an endorsement of contemporary African writing, and insists upon a vague African geography which is at the same time ahistorical or timeless. As Adichie’s works attest, and as Stephanie Newell has asserted, colonialism (of which slavery is a part) is of secondary relevance to the Biafran war in Nigerian literature and culture. Without forgetting that colonialism contributed significantly to the causes of the Biafran War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War), Newell has claimed that the Biafran war was “a formative (and traumatic) moment in Nigerian literature, often endowed with far greater significance to Nigerian history and private life than colonialism” (Newell 2006, 157). The war is the context of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and the military coup that is the setting of Purple Hibiscus takes place in the subsequent decade, but is, again, separate from the

116 

J. RAMONE

context of colonialism and slavery in that it is a markedly local (Nigerian) rather than global event. Ibrahim Babangida, on whom the leader of the military coup in Purple Hibiscus is based, was an officer at the time of the Biafran War; his Structural Adjustment Programme in 1986 contributed towards the downturn in the publishing industry in Nigeria. In Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Equiano’s Travels signifies liberty from paternalistic control and space to learn to be independent for Kambili. Kambili and her brother Jaja experience emotional freedom when the military coup forces their move from their home, which was rigorously coordinated by their violent father, to their aunt Ifeoma’s house, which is full of books. Instead of their school textbooks, their study of which is strictly observed by their father and any neglect ruthlessly punished, at Ifeoma’s house books are things of enjoyment. This is observed in the direct contrast between the sound of Papa slapping Jaja’s face, conveyed in the image of a book: “his palm would make that sound, like a heavy book falling from a library shelf in school” (Adichie 2013, 69), and the presence of her Aunt, accompanied by her laughter, which “floated upstairs into the living room, where I sat reading” (71). Books are ever present at Ifeoma’s house, and can be found resting among everyday objects; her room is at once food store and library and bedroom (149). A common tendency in Nigerian literature is to observe how often books are used. Ifeoma’s are cared for: though they are so numerous that the wood of the extensive bookshelves “looked as though it would collapse if just one more book were added”, still “each book looked clean; they were all either read often or dusted often” (114). It is in the spirit of enjoyment that Ifeoma suggests that Kambili should read Equiano’s Travels, telling her “about a book she had just finished reading: it was on a table in her room and she was sure I would like it. So I went in her room and took a book with a faded blue cover called Equiano’s Travels, or the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African” (143). This invitation to take the book is again contrasted with Kambili’s oppressive relationship with her father, textbooks, and education, which are all bound up as one in her consciousness. Ifeoma makes the suggestion that she takes the book to rescue Kambili from her nervous response to being asked which school she attends by some local children. Kambili is unable to reply without stuttering and displacing her anxieties on to the pretty green and pink and yellow leaves of a plant, gripping and twisting them, “watching the viscous liquid drip from their stalks” (143). Kambili’s calm is restored by the book—she sits on the verandah with the book on her lap “watching one of the children chase a butterfly in the

3 NIGERIA 

117

front yard” (143). The book is a gift of understanding and support from Kambili’s aunt which counteracts the oppressive triangle of her father, her education, and her textbooks. Yet it is significant that this book was named among all the other books in Ifeoma’s house which remain nameless among her extensive library, which collectively signify freedom and enjoyment. For Adichie, it may be that Equiano’s Travels is just as important to consider because of its assertion of an “African” identity and narrative, an idea that she has contested in “Jumping Monkey Hill”. The short story critiques the “African” literary marketplace by placing eight African writers alongside a European publisher at a residential writing workshop where the British editor’s clout—he is “connected and could find them a London agent” (Adichie 2009, 113)—outweighs the lived and crafted experience of the writers who are asked to alter their stories, drawn from their experiences, to reflect his notion of authentic African realities (Ramone 2017). Adichie’s interest in Equiano’s Travels is likely to have something to do with Equiano’s control over the text and the absence of editorial intervention, which was not the case with later slave narratives: The History of Mary Prince (1831), for instance, is heavily “ghost”-edited, includes more pages of editorial than original text, mostly to authenticate Mary’s story and to endorse her good character, and is positioned carefully to elicit a particular reader response. Equiano’s Travels is more author-controlled than many contemporary works. To publish his text, Equiano personally approached hundreds of people who agreed to pledge to buy his book, which he then printed using their pledges, and distributed directly. The first edition even states that it was “printed for and sold by the author” (Green 1995, 363). He also engaged prominent locals in all the cities he visited to endorse his book as well as his authorship (Green 1995, 366). The significance of his authorship is repeatedly asserted by the book’s publishing history; Equiano refused to sell on the copyright to his work, which could have yielded a hefty sum due to excellent sales: he claimed to have sold 1900 subscription copies in Dublin alone, and these accounted for a small fraction of his sales since he regularly sold copies at his frequent addresses at large abolitionist assemblies (Green 1995, 365). This level of authorial control accords with Kambili’s gentle liberation in her aunt’s home. The significance of this text’s inclusion is extended further considering that in Adichie’s later novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself is the most significant text represented. It is referred to multiple times and is

118 

J. RAMONE

instrumental in transforming the experience of Ugwu. The book is first discovered in the militia barracks after Ugwu has been forcibly conscripted, and Ugwu reads the full title, a title that invokes independently asserted authorship. Half of a Yellow Sun conveys the relationship of twins Olanna and Kainene and their families, colleagues, and staff, as the Biafran War encroaches further and further into their everyday lives. For Kainene, the extent of the impact of the war is unknown; she is missing at the end of the text. For her partner Richard, an English writer, for Olanna, and for Olanna’s houseboy Ugwu, the war’s effects are mapped through their relationships with books and reading. Of sixty references to books and reading in the text, most concern Olanna’s husband Odenigbo’s professional circle who meet at their home to read and discuss literature, or they mark Ugwu’s development as a reader and informal teacher over the course of the narrative. Initially, Ugwu is overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of the books that fill Odenigbo’s house and is then restrained by his determination that he “would not marry until he had become more like master, until he had spent many years reading books” (Adichie 2006, 176). This determination is rewarded, but in the context of his internment with Olanna at a refugee camp. Here, Olanna trusts him to deliver classes to the children at the camp alongside her; interestingly, both Chike and the River (292) and Eze Goes to School (405) are available for children to read at the camp. For a time, Olanna protects Ugwu from the conscription at gunpoint that all of the other young men at the camp have experienced. When his carelessness leaves him vulnerable and he is commissioned, he finds a copy of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself which he “sat on the bed and read and read”, finishing the book in two days and repeating his reading, “rolling the words round his tongue, memorizing some sentences” (360). Ugwu’s success in military strategy is attributed by the other soldiers to the book (363) but in spite of their respect for him and the book that they assume he learned from, his comrade Hi-Tech tears out the title page to use as cigarette papers (364). In retaliation, Ugwu hits out at Hi-Tech, his rage turning into a confused headache (364). It may be relevant that immediately after this, Ugwu takes part in the violent gang-rape of a young barmaid. The representation of this event is careful; although Ugwu is a sympathetic character throughout the rest of the text and his responsibility for his actions in this attack are presented as slightly reduced (since his focalisation is confused during the scene, and he is put under pressure to join in), he is not excused for his actions by the narrative. Ugwu’s ejaculation is a “self-loathing release”

3 NIGERIA 

119

and he recalls the attack with guilt and this recurrent self-loathing repeatedly, most noticeably when Richard tells him the title of the book he is writing (The World Was Silent When We Died) and he recalls his complicity in the girl’s misery, her pinched face, and the hate in her eyes as she lay on the dirty floor (396). An ongoing internal intertext is a notebook contributing towards an anticipated publication about Africa and the Biafran War which appears in eight segments in Half of a Yellow Sun. Both Ugwu and Richard are writing manuscripts, and there is uncertainty over the attributed authorship of these segments. Recalling his time as a conscript, “Ugwu’s fear sometimes overwhelmed and froze him” (422), but he does not admit this to Richard, disclosing only the fear he felt on behalf of Frederick Douglass while reading. Neither does he admit his part in the attack on the barmaid; instead he speaks to Richard about his regret that his manuscript was lost, likely burnt with the other books and papers from the camp, by vandals (422). It is at this point that Richard recognises that Ugwu is better positioned to write about the Biafran war than he is, and hands over his book title to Ugwu. This replaces Ugwu’s intended title, which had closely echoed Frederick Douglass’s—The Narrative of the Life of a Country. Richard admits that he was no longer writing his book about the Biafran War since “the war isn’t my story to tell, really” at which point Ugwu is revealed as possessing a more critical stance towards authorship and a less hierarchical obedience than he has displayed throughout the text when he admits he “had never thought it was” (425). Ugwu’s lack of deference to those inhabiting a higher educational or social position to him also inflects the last words of the novel with a resistant sly civility: The Book: The World was Silent When We Died Ugwu writes his dedication last: For Master, my good man. (433)

As the last words of the novel, these destabilise the ownership of the text as well as reinforcing Ugwu’s resistance to his position of service and subordinance to both his Master Odenigbo and to Richard, the largely empathetic European outsider. Since Ugwu is the focaliser at the opening of Half of a Yellow Sun, it is appropriate that he should close the narrative and retain control, but the note “Ugwu writes” makes this inconclusive, too. Ugwu’s master and mistress are engaged in the emotional labour of grief and trauma after Kainene’s disappearance following a bomb attack, and the conscripted soldier and houseboy is keen to take up the challenge

120 

J. RAMONE

of writing about the war, though narrative interference in the note describes Ugwu writing a dedication rather than conveying that he is doing so, implying a separate chronicler of the events. The question of literary authorship and the telling of stories authentically in reference to the history of colonialism and slavery and the aftermath of independence emerges as an important thread holding the narrative together by the conjunction of Ugwu’s narrative and Frederick Douglass’s, and by the echo between Adichie’s two texts, each of which privileges a slave narrative, notably a slave narrative that particularly foregrounds the narrative’s authorship over others that could have been selected, like Mary Prince’s, which has been described as being haunted by its editorial “white ghost” (Whitlock 2000, 166). Like Adichie’s slave narratives, the books read or otherwise engaged with in Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love (1996) are all relevant to a postcolonial context; however, there is only tentative engagement with the texts. An oblique reference to Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born becomes the novel’s important focal point for understanding the function of books and reading, but this book is encountered indirectly; it is the title given to a painting around which the narrative action circulates. Including indirect references, there are thirty-six references to books and reading which include two references to newspapers and two to self-­ education, the first a disparaging comment on dusty old books that have not been read for a long time as if they had been “bought cheaply in a frantic self-education campaign” (Okri 1996, 11), the second by contrast a claim that all education is bad until you educate yourself from scratch, assuming nothing and questioning everything (294). There is a direct engagement with colonialism and its effects: one a statement about “rigged history books” (294) and another rejecting “negritude” (38) as an empty gesture. Books become a point of contact between protagonist  Omovo and Ifeyiwa, an unhappily married young woman with a violent older husband, but they are not simply a vehicle for romance; instead, they discuss Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child (83–4); Soyinka’s The Interpreters (168); and Chekhov’s short stories, noting in particular “A Boring Tale” (84), where the protagonist’s alienation from the world around him and his ensuing psychological confusion is echoed in Dangerous Love by Omovo’s similarly uncertain state. Other books mentioned include those by Joyce Cary (35) whose supposedly authentic representations of Africans incensed Achebe and persuaded him to write about Africa instead; James Hadley Chase whose crime thrillers are mentioned in more than one Nigerian literary

3 NIGERIA 

121

text (178); Neruda (203); T.S. Eliot (37); and finally Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood (which was translated from the French 1960 original into English for the AWS in 1962). God’s Bits of Wood is widely discussed because of its seminal status in African literature, its appearance as one of the first texts to be published by Heinemann’s AWS, and also because of its revolutionary message in a story about striking railway labourers. All of the other texts are presented with a degree of scepticism: they are partread, or the interpretation is secondary to the context which is often overbearing—for instance, Omovo’s father used to read Eliot aloud to him in a bid to expose him to supposedly great artists. God’s Bits of Wood is not read in the text but instead performs the function of a strategically placed object intended to elicit a particular response; the art gallery manager who Omovo approaches about exhibiting his paintings leaves the book on the table between them while he undermines Omovo’s work and asks him whether shaving his head (the result of an inept barber’s clumsy knife) was a gimmick (33). Omovo perceives the book as an object intended to convey status, as a tool for maintaining a notion of Africanness to which the gallery manager is the gatekeeper. In contrast, Omovo is an artist whose authenticity is conveyed by his lack of artifice or self-awareness while producing his works. He is celebrated locally but he does not believe his work has anything to do with a plan or message; instead, his work is inspired by a recurring, tortured memory of finding a girl’s dead body. This is an ongoing motif that drives the narrative, and towards the end of the novel he names his painting depicting this event “The Beautiful Ones” (314). The subtitle, “Relative Losses” is relevant to the theme of regeneration in The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. Armah’s narrative concerns the effects of a decision: a railway junction box operator refuses a bribe, the loss of which is felt keenly by his wife, who has become bitter through her relative poverty and compares herself to a neighbour whose marriage (to a man who accepts bribes) has made her wealthy (Armah 1988). In Dangerous Love, Omovo realises that the painting will always remain incomplete (reflecting the partial use of the title of Armah’s novel) (314) and the connection between the painting’s title and Armah’s novel is reinforced both by the amendments to the painting to include “the unborn” (315) and his friend Keme’s assertion that “we are a betrayed generation”, that “the old guard have to go, they have to die, before we can be born” (320). This is a direct response to Armah’s own comments about his novel in a later edition, where he notes the lack of attention to his title, which he considers the most significant tool for interpreting the novel: “The phrase

122 

J. RAMONE

‘The Beautiful One’ is ancient […] it is a praise name for a central figure in Ancient Egyptian culture, the dismembered and remembered Osiris, a sorrowful reminder of our human vulnerability to division, fragmentation and degeneration, and at the same time a symbol of our equally human capacity for unity, cooperative action, and creative regeneration” and an “image for the urge to positive social change” (Armah 2008, i). This ancient symbol of regeneration is reclaimed by Okri as a means of transferring the message from the first generation of African literature to his generation; he repeats this strategic gesture in Dangerous Love with another quiet reference to a classic Nigerian novel when Omovo is at the height of his turmoil, having been accused of drawing other men’s wives as a seduction technique after his sketch of Ifeyiwa caused controversy in the compound. After sketching some local children to prevent further verbal assault from his father and the other men, he reads The Interpreters in his sitting room, before turning to his diary: significantly, a poem falls out of the diary, the poem written by his friend Okur, a journalist suffering from the effects of war trauma. The poem “had inspired the painting on the wall” and it makes Omovo pause, but “he shook his head. He didn’t want to think” and instead waited for sleep with dreams of his mother smiling to mask her trauma (168). The poem is a question that invites its reader to consider their independence from maternal protection: “Little birds of the storm/struggling in flight/Was your mother cruel/To have pushed you/From such a height?” (168). Any suggestion that this might recall Omovo’s mother’s cruelty is precluded by his memory of the brutal beatings she suffered from her husband, including an occasion when she was pushed into the fire while holding the infant Omovo, the burns scarring her leg. The poem instead refers to Omovo’s generation and their emergence into independence; it recalls the poem that fell out of another book in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease; in Achebe’s novel, the poem is titled “Nigeria”, which speaks more directly to Nigerian independence, and is found within a book of A.E. Housman’s Collected Poems. “Nigeria” is written by Obi Okonkwo, who is the grandson of Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart, and has been educated in Britain before pursuing a career in the Nigerian civil service, overseen by the colonial administration. Obi writes the poem when he is a student in London in 1955, five years before Nigerian independence. While Dangerous Love, Purple Hibiscus, and Half of a Yellow Sun offer evidence of the authors’ confidence that African literature is transformative, in No Longer At Ease the idea of transformation is more closely related to the act of rereading and rewriting canonical

3 NIGERIA 

123

European literature. The next section explores Achebe’s engagement with canonical European literary texts through scholar and colonial civil servant Obi Okonkwo, and Chris Abani’s and Helon Habila’s complementary narratives of everyday encounters with literary texts which, taken together, show that books and reading in Nigerian literature performs an everyday transformation of European canonical literature.

3.6   Part 4: Reading in Nigerian Literature as an Everyday Transformation of Canonical European Literature There are twenty references to books and reading in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease, half of which are to habitual reading and writing (family Bible reading (52); reading as Obi’s pastime on his first sea voyage (20); a stated keenness for modern poetry (35)) or to phrases and references which refer to literary texts: Candide implied in a reference to the best of all possible worlds (24); colonial administrator Green demonstrating his intention “to bring light to the heart of darkness” (96). These fairly frequent references operate alongside more in-depth and direct discussions of literature which illustrate Obi and Green’s shared colonial education, and their differing interpretations of the texts. There are three lengthy conversations about literature including one during a job interview between interviewee Obi and the interviewer, the Chairman of the Public Service Commission, “which ranged from Graham Greene to Tutuola and took the greater part of half an hour” (35). Here, the chairman and Obi fundamentally disagree on the ending of Greene’s The Heart of The Matter, the Chairman seeing the European police officer’s suicide as a tragedy, while Obi understands it as a happy ending, which he qualifies by stating that the novel offers too straightforward a resolution and that real tragedy is never resolved, but takes place “in a corner, in an untidy spot” (36) away from the reader’s field of attention. Obi emerges as the better literary scholar, having the last word on the matter, and more to say about the novel than the Chairman, supporting his knowledge with further literary references. A poem that speaks of Obi’s revolutionary aims, his “Nigeria” interrupts this confident position of literary scholar widely read in European classics. The poem is highly significant in the novel and demands attention, not least because it is transcribed on the page in full not only the

124 

J. RAMONE

first time it is rediscovered among the pages of the poetry book, but also a second time when the same book is browsed. The poem reads: God bless our noble fatherland Great land of sunshine bright, Where brave men chose the way of peace, To win their freedom fight. May we preserve our purity, Our zest for life and jollity. God bless our noble countrymen And women everywhere. Teach them to walk in unity To build our nation dear; Forgetting region, tribe or speech, But caring always each for each. (Achebe 1960, 94)

The simple message of national pride which calls for a united yet independent Nigeria is written on a scrap of paper “frayed and browned from exposure to dust” (94) and Obi smiles when he reads it, rejecting it as the naïve output of his younger self, but folds it and returns it to the book before reading his favourite Housman poem “Easter Hymn”. Housman’s twelve-line, two-stanza rhyming poem expresses doubt in contrast with the certainty of Obi’s poem which is similar in form and rhyme scheme. Housman asks Jesus to act to save humankind (to “Bow hither out of heaven and see and save”) if he exists as a conscious being in heaven and is not, as the poet suspects, just a “son of man” who rests in sleep, unaware that he is “dead in vain”. The sense of doubt conveyed in the poem is expressed by Obi as an “irresistible” pessimism (136) when he turns to Housman again at a moment of tension. When he reads the poem this second time, he is seeking reassurance for his actions, having succumbed to accepting bribes in his professional work yet, despite his apparent status he is powerless to save his fiancée Clara while she lies in hospital, or to see her until she and the doctor give permission. Rereading “Nigeria” in this context his reaction is very different; “he quietly and calmly crumpled the paper in his left palm until it was a tiny ball, threw it on the floor and began to turn the pages of the book forwards and backwards. In the end he did not read any poem” (137). Despite his response to the poem—first dismissive of its naïveté and then roundly rejecting it—it is a prominent reminder of Obi’s lost idealism, compromised when he takes bribes despite his reluctance and guilt. It is also, because doubled, an insistence of the

3 NIGERIA 

125

validity of those ideals. At the same time, the poem is an expression of the right of the new generation of African writers to reject colonial literature in favour of their own literary depictions of their country, even if that process begins with an editorial process which involves rejecting the first draft in favour of something more powerful—Obi’s dissatisfaction with his own poetry and the poems he used to enjoy reading imply the beginning of such a process. More, though, the novel insists upon the validity of Nigerian literature through the representation in full of a further local text, this time a song performed by a band of funeral singers, local women, titled “The Song of the Heart”. This song concerns the impact of colonialism and print culture; the song opens when “a letter came to” the narrator of the song, which neither she nor two others could read. The figure who can, eventually, read the song informs them that it says: “He that has a brother must hold him to his heart,/For a kinsman cannot be bought at the market,/Neither is a brother bought with money” (117), a refrain that is repeated in the chorus. Again, the market is at the centre of the song which concerns life, death, and family. It closes the chapter before the death of Obi’s mother and his first surrender to bribery, so its sincerity reflects Obi’s, but it is also placed prominently to invoke the sense of a local Nigerian literature that remains unmediated and uncritiqued, unlike the European canonical texts which are interpreted and sometimes rejected by Obi and others. The text claims a prominent new position for emerging post-independence Nigerian literature inflected by local rhythms, structures, and meanings. While Dangerous Love positions Nigerian literature as transformative through acts of reading, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002) concerns the power of writing as a transformational force: “every oppressor knows that wherever one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there’ll be revolt” (Habila 2002, 195). For Lomba, the transformation is, initially, a process of rewriting. He is persuaded by his prison guard, Muftau, to write love poems, agreeing to do so in exchange for a book to read: he requests Soyinka’s prison notes, The Man Died, and instead receives A Brief History of West Africa (18). Despite this, he writes the requested poems on behalf of Muftau to Janice, his girlfriend, subverting the practice in two ways: firstly by inserting messages to alert the recipient to his incarceration, and second, by adapting existing poetry instead of creating new material, “plagiariz[ing] the masters from memory”, the most effective being a “bowdlerization of Sappho’s ‘Ode’” (20, 21). Bowdlerizing Sappho is a turning point in the process: reading this poem,

126 

J. RAMONE

the prison warder expresses confidence for the first time that one of Lomba’s poems could achieve the desired effect and pave the way for a marriage proposal. This poem instigates Janice’s visit to Lomba, too, and she admits that she was aware Muftau was not the author of the letters, and that the real writer was adapting existing poetry and inserting his own messages; in most poems, he included the phrase: “Save my soul, a prisoner” (28). Poetry dominates the literary references in the book, which include both classical poetry as ancient as Pindar (c.522–443  BC) and examples as local and recent as Okigbo and Soyinka; there are twenty-four references to writers, poets, and books, often being lent or discussed, lauded or quoted. There are a further eleven references to reading or to unnamed books being packed or lying among other things, and thirteen references to newspapers and magazines, the majority of which refer to The Dial, a literary magazine that Lomba works for, and whose editor James instigates the book’s most aggressive discussion of the state of the world literary marketplace and the relatively limited opportunities for Nigerian writers to undertake a successful writing career. Knowing that he has worked on a novel for three years, James asks Lomba, “have you finished your novel yet?” (191). Lomba’s passive acknowledgement that a “satisfactory denouement has eluded him” (192) is rejected by James who asserts that even assuming he had finished his novel, and that it is “potentially great”, he would not find a publisher for it: because it’d be economically unwise for any publisher in this country to waste his scarce paper to publish a novel which nobody would buy, because the people are too poor, too illiterate, and too busy trying to stay out of the way of the police and the army to read. And of course you know why paper is scarce and expensive—because of the economic sanctions placed on our country. (192)

Neither would he, if it was published despite these conditions, gain any kind of international acknowledgment for his work, since the Commonwealth Literary Prize, the most appropriate one for a writer from a Commonwealth country, is not an option: “Nigeria was thrown out of the Commonwealth of Nations early this morning. It was on the BBC” (192). Habila makes reference to a conversation that inspired this interaction in his afterword to the novel, noting that “if there is a passage in this book that illustrates more than any other the lived experience” of the 1990s in Nigeria, it is this conversation between James and Lomba; the

3 NIGERIA 

127

effect of the prevalence of political prisoners, declining public services, and international censure for the military regime is to create, “every day […] new limitations, new prisons” (223–4). In spite of this, it becomes clear that the author’s motivation for the novel is in part to convey the buoyancy of Nigerian local literary culture undeterred by the unfavourable literary economy. Lomba is invited to attend one of the regular literary events, a reading in support of two arrested poets, and is told that “every young writer in Lagos is here today” (211). The contrast between this assertion and the physical space of the event is striking, and is reminiscent of the tight corridors hidden from mainstream view that occupy Lamming’s London novels of the 1950s: “He leads them upstairs, holding them by the hand. This makes climbing the dark, narrow stairs awkward, and Lomba stumbles, hitting his leg on a step” (211). Once inside, Lomba listens to a reading, before he is introduced to the other writers attending: Helon Habila, Toni Kan, Chiedu, Otiono, Maik, Nwakanma, Mike Jimoh—“they keep coming” (215), these writers may be known or unknown to the global literary marketplace but they are rich in number and activity. The inclusion of Habila’s own name is a further attempt to suggest that events in the novel parallel the situation for Nigerian writers: the global literary marketplace is not open to Nigerian writers who instead contribute towards a lively local literary culture and market. Above all, the Nigerian literary marketplace is figured as part of the fabric of everyday life, and not as an exceptional or elite activity, through the numerous writers and the frequent casual references to reading in the most unlikely (because everyday) places: in Waiting for an Angel, literature takes place in prison where the guard accuses Lomba of judging him as illiterate because of his uniform (16); in university halls (58, 71, 72, 89); at the office of The Dial (191–2); at anticolonial meetings at the home of secondary English and literature teacher Joshua (124, 158); at markets, roadsides, and bus stops (68); and in the hidden upstairs rooms where writers meet in solidarity. Habila suggests that Lomba’s poetry can effect a transformation of canonical European literature while the text’s staging of Nigerian literary culture confronts the world literary marketplace; combined, these acts oppose the global literary marketplace to insist upon the vitality of local Nigerian literary culture. Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004) juxtaposes the local and the global literary marketplaces to similar effect. The novel opens with two intriguing references to books and reading, one indicative of the proximity of the global literary marketplace, and the second an analysis of

128 

J. RAMONE

the local reader’s sense of the functions of reading. Protagonist Elvis rests in his room surrounded by books: Jesus Can Save and Nigerian Eagles almanacs, magazine clippings, and “his few books, each volume falling apart from years of use” (5), organised on a bookshelf constructed from a piece of wood on cinder blocks. These books, few in number, are the total content of the description of the room, other than, coming after the books, a brief description of his dusty desk, rusty chair, thin mattress, and suspended bar on which to hang his clothes. The significance of books for Elvis is conveyed in the alarming image of the book he had been reading in bed, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, falling “to the floor, the old paperback cracking at the spine, falling neatly into two halves as precisely as if sliced by a sword” (5). The fragility of these books is in keeping with the state of Elvis’s other objects, and this is a direct comment on the sense of the marketplace itself which makes commodities of ideas and people—the first words Elvis hears after his precious book has broken from over-use are his father’s rebuking him because he is lying asleep, claiming “all your mates are out dere looking for work” (5). Invisible Man was first published in 1952, and it seems a fitting choice of reading for the remarkable and ambitious Elvis, who wants to be a dancer and to migrate to America rather than to find a conventional job. Invisible Man has a global readership, and is known for its experimental style and its representation of the everyday life of a young male protagonist in the American South, while conveying the author’s Marxist commitment and charting the protagonist’s involvement in protests, and his movement between college, hospital, a paint factory, a street market, a criminal group. Elvis’s everyday movements are similar, between street protests, jobs, and peripheral groups in society, so including this text in the introduction to Elvis is an acknowledgement that the Nigerian everyday is connected with the global everyday. The fallen book splitting in half so cleanly signifies Elvis’s commitment to the global, and his restriction to the local. A second reference to books and reading comes soon afterwards, as Elvis begins a bus journey towards his work as a street performer and dancer, where he reflects on his father’s rebuke and decides he needs “a better job with a regular income” (7). This idea instigates his reading of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, “his current inspirational tome”; a book advising a fledgling writer on how best to succeed, which marks, again, Elvis’s sense of connection with a global context outside his local circumstances. Elvis reflects upon his reading practice:

3 NIGERIA 

129

He read books for different reasons and had them everywhere he was: one in his backpack, which he called his on-the-road book, usually one that held an inspirational message for him; one by his bed; and one he kept tucked in the hole in the wall in the toilet for those cool evenings when a gentle breeze actually made the smell there bearable enough to stay and read. (7)

Again, his material conditions disrupt his reading despite his awareness of its value and of its sustaining presence in his life: the bus’s “narrow seat” restricts him and he is so uncomfortable “being pressed against the metal side by the heavyset woman sitting next to him”, that it leaves him preoccupied, trying to avoid “the loose metal spring poking up through the torn plastic of the seat cover” (7). He is forced to give up on reading and to contemplate instead the “half slum, half paradise” (7) of Lagos. Rilke’s Letters appears again in the novel, when Elvis replaces it with a copy of the Koran bought from a street vendor, so that he could make his own mind up about whether the text “called for the death of infidels” (46). Both texts are mentioned only in passing, yet together they offer evidence of Elvis’s productive engagement with books: his reading is instructive and might be considered self-education, but, except for one reference to American self-help writer Napoleon Hill (54), it is independent and operates separately from the strong emphasis on education as a route towards wealth and position that dominates earlier generation narratives. Instead, Elvis reads to understand the wider world on his own terms—with the example of the Koran, for instance, turning to an original religious text instead of to popular interpretations. Most references to specific books are to conscious reading or texts from the Black or African Diaspora: as well as Ellison, Elvis reads Baldwin (112, 319); Ken Saro-­ Wiwa (54); Armah (221); Conrad (231); and Dickens (111)—A Tale of Two Cities is Elvis’s favourite book, the first line of which—“it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—is another image of perfect division and duality like the broken copy of Invisible Man, and like his understanding of Lagos as half slum, half paradise. Elvis considers this line “the perfect description of life in Lagos” (111) and once again the book operates as a connective between a local depiction of Nigeria and a global literary culture—or specifically, as a connective between Lagos, and London and Paris (conventionally considered the original twin centres of literary culture). Lagos is depicted at the centre of a global marketplace, both a literary marketplace and a global economy. Nigeria’s local literary marketplace intervenes once more when the text refers to Onitsha Market Literature.

130 

J. RAMONE

It is telling that there is a “translation” of the texts’ purpose into an imaginary global parlance (actually a US context) by the narrator who describes them as: “the Nigerian equivalent of dime drugstore pulp fiction crossed with pulp pop self-help books” (112). Onitsha literature is given significant space, though, in a two-page section which describes its history in some detail, as being written between 1910 and 1970, produced on small presses, and offering a description of their moral tone, and listing a number of particularly well-known texts (111–12). Two Onitsha books are listed as invaluable in the book’s acknowledgements, too, implying their relevance beyond the status ascribed to them by Elvis. Elvis, though embarrassed at buying a book “considered to be low-class trash” (111), hides his copy of Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away between Dostoevsky and Baldwin (113). Despite this, the book is reproduced in a long extract functioning as the epigraph to chapter 12, a section taken from a moment of torment for Mabel, desiring to consummate her love with Gilbert but mindful of its potential consequences for her reputation. Discussions of books and reading in the text circulate around two functions: a reassessment of the global literary marketplace as dominated by canonical European literature, and a sense of the located reading of both canonical literature transformed for its local purpose, and placed side by side with postcolonial literary texts, mostly those written by African diaspora writers. The emphasis is on the everyday and on the market in Graceland, which is described in six lengthy passages (14, 29, 83, 111, 113, 113–15) that in sum, convey a sense of desperation; there are “broken rotting items” (113); child hawkers shouting “come buy” in an echo of Christina Rossetti’s goblin men (29); “screaming conversations” (83) and the ultimate classification of the market as “the crossroads of the living and the dead” (14), evoking again the Igbo sense of the market as all pervasive. The market as crossroads of the living and the dead finds its ultimate expression in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991). Invisible and absent books haunt The Famished Road alongside other spectral presences which, like the books, are subject to the whims of the marketplace. The novel opens with an invocation of the king of the abiku (or spirit-children) who lived multiple extraordinary lives which were not always transcribed: “One could pore over the great invisible books of lifetimes and recognise his genius through the recorded and unrecorded ages” (Okri 1991, 3). Such invisible books appear again in the text which, across 500 pages, is notable for the infrequent references to books and reading; there are just thirteen references to books, many of which repeat

3 NIGERIA 

131

particular images, alongside one discussion of party political leaflets, and nine references to newspapers, divided between the publication of stories recording political rallies in Abiku’s neighbourhood compound, and the use of old newspapers to undertake everyday tasks such as cleaning shoes or wrapping food. The invisible books are present once in the centre of the text, during one of Azaro’s walks—he “walked through books and months and forgotten histories” (307) following a beautiful, spectral woman and the scents, tunes, and visions of beauty that she created, until his mother broke his enchantment by calling his name and carrying him home to “a world drowning in poverty” (308). They recur for the final time at the end of the novel. Here, books are an idea or a potentiality alongside the sky, earth, death, wonderful things, that might be found inside the human, animal, and spirit life that coexists, according to the spiritual knowledge that Azaro’s father has gained at the end of his journey: “Inside a cat there are many histories, many books” (498). Azaro’s father embodies the combined concepts of education and the marketplace, while Azaro observes the effects of the market on the body with the uncanny self-erasure of a child who is never fully wedded to his earthly existence since he is in frequent communication with the spirits who try to persuade him to return to them. Azaro’s father’s body comes to resemble the marketplace: on Azaro’s first trip to the market he witnesses the inhumanity of men and children carrying heavy loads on their backs. David McNally has identified Azaro’s father’s body as “a marker for the irreducibility of labour”; his body bears the marks of his labour—“his skin turned a greyish colour because of the salt and cement that spilled on him from the loads he carried” (187)—and he is “transfigured as a beast of burden” and “colonised by commodities” (McNally 2011, 247). The salt and cement are irrelevant to Azaro’s community—instead, they are emblems of the distant forces of global capitalism enacting their impact on the men from Azaro’s compound whose homes are constructed from mud and tin which remain separate from the products their labour transports as the tools of production. The novel’s emphasis on consumption and hunger, the disconnected production undertaken by labourers including Azaro’s father, and its powerful spirit figures recall Cormaroff and Cormaroff’s zombie theory in the context of neoliberalism and the extension of unevenness across the globe; they note that “as consumption has become the moving spirit of the late twentieth century, so there has been a concomitant eclipse of production” (Cormaroff and Cormaroff 1999, 17). The market is all-pervasive in The Famished Road. While Dad, as

132 

J. RAMONE

McNally notes, “sustains the world of commodity-exchange” (McNally 2011, 247) in the public marketplace, Mum and Madame Koto are equally transcribed into the capitalist marketplace through their labour, Koto’s in her bar, and Mum’s through hawking which is figured as a largely female occupation: “her tiredness and sacrifice were not hers alone but were suffered by all women, all women of the marketplace” (162), an occupation described by McNally as “endless days in the ‘informal economy’” (McNally 2011, 248) but which actually operates in a formal sense in Azaro’s local community and only appears “informal” because of its reliance on exchange and its separation from the global commodity marketplace: Dad’s cement and salt are produced to sustain that global market with his cheap labour, while Madame Koto exchanges her palm wine for canned beer and Coca-Cola, advertised by a poster of a nearly naked white woman, in her bar. Dad’s subjection to the market persists until he gains the spiritual knowledge to overcome its effects, and becomes a fighter which earns him money and fame; he “began to spend a lot of the money he had won in buying books. He couldn’t read but he bought them. [Azaro] had to read them to him” (409), his passion for books driving his family “slightly mad”: “he bought a large dictionary which must have cost him at least ten mighty punches from the fists of the Green Leopard. […] Like a battered but optimistic salesman, he said: ‘This book explains books’” (409). The books become—suddenly—highly valued objects and when Mum made piles of the books to balance her basins on in frustration at their sudden encroachment into the house, “Dad got furious at her disrespect and they argued bitterly” (410). After he begins to echo things he has read in books, he gains faith in his potential to serve his community, and his fame is put to the same service as his wealth: he decides to run for political candidacy against the equally corrupt Parties “of the Rich” and “of the Poor”. Above all, he takes the decision to turn to politics as a means to educate the people: his community asked him how they could get books for their youngsters (411) and he rests his political ambition on the dream of a society where “everyone would have the highest education” and would be versed in “history, poetry, and science” (409). Dad’s ambition for a future where everybody is fulfilled is directly opposed to his experience undertaking heavy and dirty labouring, and is the result of his sudden immersion in books. The significance placed on books at this point in the text is noticeable because it emerges from a context where books are scarce. The emphasis is on the marketplace in The Famished Road; Azaro’s father turns

3 NIGERIA 

133

his attention towards books in response to the everyday struggle to find work and to survive: He bought the Greek and Roman classics. He became fascinated by the Bible. Books on the cabala intrigued him. He fell in love with the stories of the Arabian Nights. He listened with eyes shut to the strange words of classical Spanish love poetry and retellings of the lives of Shaka the Zulu and Sundiata the Great. He insisted that I read something to him all the time. He forced me to have a double education. (409)

Dad relies on books in a contradictory fashion: he avoids the financial wranglings of everyday life; while Azaro “read to him from Homer, […] Mum vented her anger about the horrors of the celebration” (427), a local event which had significant economic costs including a bill for replacement chairs broken by the revellers. In the next breath, he reflects on what has been read to him in order to tackle the problems of everyday life for his community: “After I had read to him again from Homer’s Odyssey, Dad wondered aloud about how he was going to be able to do any good in the world if he didn’t learn more about politics, and didn’t infiltrate existing organisations” (427). Through the impact that books make in the market in The Famished Road, the novel intimates that books can offer hope of emancipation from the exploitation of local human labour for global profit in an uneven system. There is at the same time a sense that the text addresses the idea of “African” writing in this global context. The novel is decidedly local in its frames of reference; Azaro’s story takes place in the compound where he lives, and details the specificities of life there, in the nearby marketplace and neighbouring compounds, and with his travels, largely on foot, to nearby homes, woods, and a lake. The world seems vast from Azaro’s perspective and his insight conveys the vastness of its meanings and its stories, yet the area is of limited distance and is largely disconnected from separate communities, aside from a brief glimpse at a wealthy suburb. The only global markers in the novel are Madame Koto’s American drinks and advertising materials, her car which is treated as an oddity in the novel, and the texts themselves that Azaro reads to his father. These books come from multiple literary traditions, not all of them canonical or expected in a former British colony—the Spanish love poems, for instance, are notable for their disconnection from either a Nigerian or a British context. There is significance in the fact that global literary texts inflect so strongly a very

134 

J. RAMONE

local story of work, living conditions, politics, and spirituality. In the context of the frequent foregrounding of ideas about the African writer in Nigerian literature and the co-option of Nigerian writers into local and global publishing machines, it is possible to interpret Mum’s story about a white man at the market in this sense. Azaro often asks his mother to tell a story. These are traditional stories with instructions or riddles, and the most striking of these comes at the end of the novel in response to Azaro’s father’s passion for politics and books. Mum describes the story of meeting a white man while she was hawking her provisions in the city, who said to her: “If you tell me how to get out of Africa I will give you my sunglasses” (482). This man tells her that after seven years in Africa “all the Independence trouble started and for three years he tried to leave but […] Every time he prepared to leave something came along and prevented him” (483). Mum made him buy all her provisions then asked him to tell her “what the tortoise said” (483). There are lots of Nigerian traditional tales about the tortoise, explaining the tortoise’s cracked shell, and the land and water tortoises (or, tortoise and turtle), but this question may refer to the Lewis Carroll short text, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”. The tortoise refuses Achilles’s certainty that Logic should force him into a particular position, but instead demands that Achilles keep a written record of what Logic dictates: “‘Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down,’ said the Tortoise. ‘So enter it in your book, please’” (Carroll 1982, 1108). Carroll’s short text asks the reader to abandon convention and logic, suggesting the possibility of operating beyond the boundaries of rules, or logic. In The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), Peter Winch suggests that Carroll’s paradox demonstrates that learning logical relations is not enough (Winch 1958, 57). As Raynaud suggests, “the text points to what cannot be explained, remains unresolved, enigmas and riddles” (Raynaud 2012, web). Okri’s definition of an African aesthetics is just this: “it’s the aesthetic of possibilities, labyrinths, of riddles—we love riddles—of paradoxes” (Wilkinson 1992, 87–8). This aesthetic of possibilities is a resistant aesthetics; through its insistence on a local perception of reality (Wilkinson 1992, 86), The Famished Road is evidence that an African consciousness will persist despite the onslaught of colonialism. This explains the hopeful ending of the novel; Dad is “redreaming the world” (492), “restless for justice” (494); he creates “storms of demands in his dreams” and raises “impenetrable questions” (494). The resistance enabled by books asserts: “we can redream this world […] we are freer than we think” (498).

3 NIGERIA 

135

3.7   Comment in Conclusion: What Reading Means in Nigerian Literature What the tortoise said is repeated unconsciously by the white man who asks for a way out of Africa (his choice of words echoing the title of Karen Blixen’s colonialist autobiographical text, roundly rejected by African writers, as represented in Adichie’s short story “Jumping Monkey Hill”). He reads the motto painted on a passing bus—“all things are linked” (483). As Raynaud has shown, Mum’s story is as much about storyness as it is about the events narrated: “its very structure is reflexive of the status of narration in the novel, of the modality of storytelling”—“Then he told me his story” is repeated twice—and of the status of narrators and narrates—the children interrupt to ask: “Then what happened?” (Raynaud, web). This motto—“all things are linked”—was, Mum tells him, what the tortoise told her, and without paying attention to the message of the tortoise whose presence is felt throughout African storytelling, the man would “never find any road at all”, she said. At this point his awareness is provoked and he declares that “The only way to get out of Africa is to get Africa out of you” (483). Intriguingly, he is then enabled to redream the world, since just fourteen days later he returns as a Yoruba man who insists he met Mum 500 years before in the guise of the white man at the market. Becoming African only happened following a government job, marriage, and death, in England where the notion of Africanness has a particular content. Going to the market to buy some eels (484) completes his awareness, and he says, taking leave from Mum, “Time is not what you think it is” (484), echoing the tortoise’s conversation with Achilles where the tortoise’s idea of time defies Achilles’ logic. Okri’s African marketplace is one of resistance and his African aesthetic exists but it opposes a European definition of Africanness, partly through its profound emphasis on the local. Okri’s market in The Famished Road is “turbulence” (168). It is senseless unfairness: three men in dark glasses push over a woman’s “flimsy stall of provisions”, knocking her table over a second time after she had patiently picked up and cleaned them all while “the marketplace shuffled on regardless” and “nothing could make the market listen” (168). This senseless unfairness is revealed as personal, too, when Azaro suddenly recognises the woman as his mother. The market produce, listed at length, does not include books (161–3) yet its description continues over ten pages and its central question again presents the market as crucial to all

136 

J. RAMONE

aspects of life. Azaro, looking for his mother, encounters a dangerous man who feeds him a meal and water laced with something scented like the strange roots on his stall (165), after which he questions Azaro about his mother: ‘Who is your mother?’ ‘My mother is in the market.’ ‘How do you know that your mother is the market?’ ‘I didn’t say she was the market.’ ‘What did you say?’ ‘She’s a trader in the market.’ (166)

The misunderstanding here reveals the embodied labour of the mother from whom, like all women in the text, the market is constructed. The function of books and reading in Nigerian literature is to draw attention to, and then to debate, the place of education in a society where the market dictates life. In the most recent years, the neoliberal market has created opportunities for Nigerian writers to enter a global literary marketplace, with the corresponding entry of 419 operations into the global economy. Both factors destabilise education, formerly the predominant function of books and reading, as the route towards success, replacing it with business. During the same short period since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a global increase in terror groups. These include Boko Haram, the group whose most widely publicised act was kidnapping 276 girls from a school in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria, in 2014. Although the group is considered to be responsible for the displacement of more than 2.3 million people, and tens of thousands of deaths since its founding in 2002, this act is of symbolic significance not just because of its saturation coverage in the West, but also because Boko Haram can be translated to the phrase “Western education is forbidden”, “boko” signifying Western education in Hausa, and haram meaning, of course, forbidden or sinful. Although the terror group do not figure in any of the texts considered here, the direct resonance with the West, signifying imperialism and capitalism, and with education, means that the kidnapping of the schoolgirls from Chibok forms part of a wider pattern of the shifting significance of education in Nigeria, and of the ways in which Nigeria and Nigerian literature is perceived from outside its local marketplace. Ultimately, books and reading signify engagement with forms of education in Nigerian literature, but increasingly, instances of reading for

3 NIGERIA 

137

education are displaced by instances of reading which signify the import of the market itself—sometimes this is signalled by the writer’s preoccupation with their place in the literary market, while at other times the horrors of market forces take a central position.

References Abani, Chris. 2005. Graceland. New York: Picador. Achebe, Chinua. 1960. No Longer at Ease. London: Heinemann. Achebe, Chinua. 2010 [1966]. Chike and the River. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2006. Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Harper Perennial. ———. 2009. Jumping Monkey Hill. In The Thing Around Your Neck, 95–114. London: Fourth Estate. ———. 2013 [2004]. Purple Hibiscus. London: Fourth Estate. ———. 2015. Apollo. The New Yorker, 13 April. Anafulu, Joseph C. 1973. Onitsha Market Literature: Dead or Alive? Research in African Literatures. 4 (2): 165–171. Armah, Ayi Kwei. 1988 [1969]. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Oxford: Heinemann. Armah, Ayi Kwei. 2008. The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. San Francisco: Per Ankh. Barris, Ken. 2011. To See the Mountain. In Caine Prize: To See the Mountain and Other Stories, 83–92. Oxford: New Internationalist. Bastian, Misty L. 1992. The World as Marketplace: Historical, Cosmological, and Popular Constructions of the Onitsha Marketplace. Unpublished thesis. https:// www.academia.edu/12562318/The_World_as_Marketplace. Accessed 12 February 2018. Bejjit, Nourdin. 2018. A Colonial Affair: Heinemann Educational Books and the African Market. Publishing Research Quarterly 34 (2): 275–287. Bello, Hakeem. 2014. The Interpreters: Ritual, Violence, and Social Regeneration in the Writing of Wole Soyinka. Ibadan: Kraft. Block de Behar, Lisa, Paola Mildonian, Jean-Michel Djian, Djelal Kadir, Alfons Knauth, Dolores Romero Lopez, and Marcio Seligmann Silva. 2009. Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity. Vol. III. Oxford: EOLSS Publications (UNESCO). Boehmer, Elleke. 2018. Postcolonial Poetics. London: Palgrave. Brown, Aaron. 2018. Family Politics: Negotiating the Family Unit as Creative Force in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.

138 

J. RAMONE

In Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Abimbola Adelakun and Toyin Falola, 69–82. London: Palgrave. Bruner, David K. 1985. Review: Veronica My Daughter and Other Onitsha Market Plays and Stories. World Literature Today 55 (1): 166. Carroll, Lewis. 1982 [1895]. What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. In The Penguin Complete Lewis Carroll, 1104–1108. Penguin: Harmondsworth. Chipasula, Stella, and Frank Mkalawile Chipasula. 1995. The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry. London: Heinemann African Writers Series. Clarke, Simon. 1995. Marx and the Market. Centre for Social Theory, University of California, Los Angeles. https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/ LAMARKW.pdf. Accessed 21 Mar 2019. Cormaroff, John, and Jean Cormaroff. 1999. Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism. Codesria 3&4: 17–28. Currey, James. 2003. Chinua Achebe, the African Writers Series and the Establishment of African Literature. African Affairs. 102 (409): 575–585. ———. 2008. Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature. London: James Currey. Dalley, Hamish. 2013. The Idea of ‘Third Generation Nigerian Literature’: Conceptualizing Historical Change and Territorial Affiliation in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel. Research in African Literatures 44 (4): 15–34. Dodson, Don. 1973. The Role of the Publisher in Onitsha Market Literature. Research in African Literatures 4 (2): 172–188. Dunning, Stefanie. 2001. Parallel Perversions: Interracial and Same Sexuality in James Baldwin’s Another Country. Melus 26 (4): 95–112. Ekwensi, Cyprian. 1987 [1961]. Jagua Nana. London: Heinemann African Writers Series. Esonwanne, Uzoma. 2008. Interviews with Amaka Igwe, Tunde Kelani, and Kenneth Nnebue. Research in African Literatures 39 (4): 24–39. Eze Goes to School. 2012–2013. http://www.naijastories.com/tag/eze-goes-toschool/. Accessed 20 November 2015. Falola, Toyin, and Matthew M. Heaton. 2008. A History of Nigeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Furniss, Graham. 2000. Documenting Kano ‘Market’ Literature. Africa Bibliography 1998: vii–xxiii. Garuba, Harry. 2003. Explorations in Animist Minimalism. Public Culture. 15 (2): 261–286. Green, James. 1995. The Publishing History of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Slavery & Abolition. 16 (3): 362–375. Griffiths, Gareth. 2000. African Literatures in English. Harlow: Longman. Griswold, Wendy. 2000. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

3 NIGERIA 

139

Griswold, Wendy, and Misty Bastian. 1987. Continuities and Reconstructions in Cross-Cultural Literary Transmission: The Case of the Nigerian Romance Novel. Poetics 16 (3): 327–351. Habila, Helon. 2002. Waiting for an Angel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Henderson, Richard N. 1975. An African Popular Literature: A Study of the Onitsha Market Pamphlets by Emmanuel Obiechina. American Anthropologist 77 (4): 962–964. Henderson, Helen Kreider. 1997. Onitsha Women. Annals of the New  York Academy of Sciences 810 (1): 215–243. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Ibrahim, Abubakar Adam. 2012. The Whispering Trees. Lagos: Parresia. Ike, Chukwuemeka. 2007. Contemporary Nigerian Youth and the Reading Culture. Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 33 (1): 339–342. Kochan, Donald J. 2006. The Blogosphere and the New Pamphleteers. Nexus: A Journal of Opinion 11: 99–129. Kolawole, Samuel. 2009. The Book Chain and National Development. http:// www.samuelkolawole.com/images/Building%20A%20Virile%20Society.pdf. McEwan, Neil. 1983. Africa and the Novel. London: Macmillan. McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Leiden: Brill. Newell, Stephanie. 1996. From the Brink of Oblivion: The Anxious Masculinism of Nigerian Market Literatures. Research in African Literatures 27 (3): 50–68. ———. 2005. Devotion and Domesticity: The Reconfiguration of Gender in Popular Christian Pamphlets from Ghana and Nigeria. Journal of Religion in Africa 35 (3): 296–323. ———. 2006. West African Literature: Ways of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey. Nwaubani, Adaobi Tricia. 2010. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. London: Phoenix. Nwoga, Donatus. 1965. Onitsha Market Literature. Transition 19: 26–33. Nzekwu, Onuora. 1971 [1963]. Eze Goes to School. Lagos: African Universities Press. Obiechina, Emmanuel. 1973. An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets. London: Cambridge University Press. Ogene, Mbanefo S. 2017. Onitsha Market Literature: An Accepted Literary Subgenre or Fossilized Specie? A Formalist Approach to Ogali Ogali’s Veronica My Daughter. Studies in Literature and Language 14 (5): 1–5. Okoye, Ifeoma. 1984. Men Without Ears. London: Longman. Okpalaenwe, Elizabeth Ngozi. 2011. The Lost Friend. In Caine Prize: To See the Mountain and Other Stories, 160–169. Oxford: New Internationalist. Okri, Ben. 1986. Incidents at the Shrine. London: Penguin.

140 

J. RAMONE

———. 1991. The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1996. Dangerous Love. London: Phoenix House. Olowu, Dele. 1992. Urban Local Government Finance in Nigeria: The Case of Onitsha Local Government. Public Administration Development 12 (1): 39–52. Onitsha Market Literature. University of Kansas Libraries. http://onitsha.diglib. ku.edu/index.htm. Accessed 20 November 2015. Onuzo, Chihundu. 2017. Welcome to Lagos. London: Faber. Onwukwe, Chimdinma Adriel. 2016. Equiano’s Travels (Part One). Adrielnaline, 23 May. https://adrielzjournal2013.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/equianostravels-part-one/. Accessed 22 March 2019. Osundare, Niyi. 1983. Songs of the Market Place. Ibadan: New Horn. Owusu, Martin. 1973. The Sudden Return and Other Plays. London: Heinemann. Phillips, Delores B. 2012. ‘What Do I Have to Do with All This?’ Eating, Excreting, and Belonging in Chris Abani’s Graceland. Postcolonial Studies 15 (1): 105–125. Povey, John. 1973. Review of Onitsha Market Literature by Emmanuel N. Obiechina. African Arts 6 (4): 86. Primorac, Ranka. 2012. Reasons for Reading in Postcolonial Zambia. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48 (5): 497–511. Ramone, Jenni. 2017. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates. London: Bloomsbury. Raynaud, Claudine. 2012. The Text as Riddle and Death’s Many Ways: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Études anglaises. 65: 331–346. https://www.cairn.info/ revue-etudes-anglaises-2012-3-page-331.htm#. Accessed 23 February 2019. Soyinka, Wole. 1965. The Interpreters. London: Andre Deutsch. Terry, Olufemi. 2011. Dark Triad. In Caine Prize: To See the Mountain and Other Stories, 204–214. Oxford: New Internationalist. Uchendu, Victor C. 1965. The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Udobang, Wana. 2015. Writing a New Nigeria, Episode 1. BBC Radio 4, 3 December. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qm3mk. Accessed 20 March 2016. Ugochukwu, Francoise. 2009. Review of Stephanie Newell, West African Literature: Ways of Reading. Africa 79 (2): 311–312. Whitlock, Gillian. 2000. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London: Cassell. Whitsitt, Novian. 2002. Islamic-Hausa Feminism and Kano Market Literature: Qur'anic Reinterpretation in the Novels of Balaraba Yakubu. Research in African Literatures 33 (2): 119–136. Wilkinson, Janet. 1992. Ben Okri. In Talking with African Writers, 76–89. London: Heinemann. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Black Writing in Britain: Going Back to Move Forward—Black Consciousness Now and in the Archives

4.1   Introduction: Reading for Power Speaking at an event on Malcolm X and Social Liberation held in London at St Matthew’s Meeting Place in March 1985, scholar Michael Cadette notes that he was among a group of Black students at Tulse Hill School in 1973 who read Malcolm X’s On Afro-American History (first published in 1967); he describes the book as offering direct instruction as to how he should approach Black Consciousness and activism: “that was the book that shaped [me], which gave me very specific and direct guidance about what I wanted to do” (BFC/04/06/01/08/02). Literary fiction may not always convey its message in such a direct instruction, but there is a discernible pattern in Black Writing published in and on the subject of Britain—consciousness is central to its function, and to the function of books and reading as they appear in literary works published from the Windrush until the present day. “You have to face backwards before you can face forwards” (23) says Mikaela in Pete Kalu’s Being Me (2015) to her friend Adele, the novel’s teenage narrator. Her advice is intended to comfort her friend Adele, who looks white (1), is mixed race with one Black (Ethiopian) grandparent, plays football, and questions her family, her identity, race, and education, while she struggles to understand why she feels that things are “unfair” (22). Mikaela easily identifies as

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9_4

141

142 

J. RAMONE

Black—she “has two Black parents and is dark skinned, has a big African booty” (1)—and has a strong sense of African cultural history. She expresses Black Consciousness having gained the confidence to do so from a well-­developed cultural education, one that takes lessons from history following the Sankofa principle (looking backwards to move forwards being the common translation), and values the notion of community—“it takes a village to raise a child” (22), she says, acknowledging her natural duty towards her friend. It is Sankofa in particular that I will suggest operates in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) as a means of maintaining Black Consciousness in the context of contemporary global trade and tourism, migration, and the loss of the collective voice—in Being Me, Mikaela acknowledges the community’s power; in Swing Time, the unnamed narrator struggles to locate a functioning community, but is helped towards consciousness by its quiet manoeuvres. This chapter contextualises instances of reading in Black Writing in Britain by citing these within the history of Black Consciousness bookshops in the UK and acknowledging the part they played in the wider Black Consciousness movement, which was led by publishers, writers, and education activists. The work undertaken by teachers, teaching volunteers, and education policy-makers for organisations including NAME (the National Association for Multiracial Education, later National Antiracist Movement in Education) and NASS (the National Association of Supplementary Schools) involved analysing the impact made on students’ sense of identity when schools changed the texts that they were reading, acknowledging that children learn their attitudes about identity, race, and nation “from the printed word” (AME 5/3/4/1). This chapter argues that Black Consciousness remains a defining feature of Black Writing in Britain, that it is traceable in literary texts through their representations of acts of reading, but that it has adapted with the changing socioeconomic context and no longer conveys a strong sense of community activism, but is instead located in the individual. The originator of Black Consciousness was, of course, Steve Biko, the South African student and activist. He campaigned against the apartheid system and instigated collective Black resistance to avoid the dominance of white liberal allies, who were not directly affected by the regime, in his anti-apartheid work, using “Black” in the same way that it was applied in the development of Black Writing in Britain as a field, and in Black artists’ collectives in the UK: to include all non-white communities. “Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the Black world for a long time” (Biko 1978, 245), Steve Biko asserted. Biko’s definition of Black Consciousness was adapted from his practice in a South African context by Black communities

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

143

worldwide. Kalbir Shukra (1998) notes that in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s “Black power” operated as an umbrella based on the idea that Black people had to redefine themselves by asserting their history and culture to displace negative images with positive ones, a concept that appealed to all Black communities—revolutionary, conservative, cultural, nationalistic. Biko focused on practical changes in South Africa under Apartheid: health, education, job creation, and community development. In South Africa, the Black Consciousness movement developed from a students’ union into something along the lines of a trade union functioning with the agenda of creating a Marxist state, acknowledging the Black population as “a labouring class, and hence a socially exploited group, intent on ending its exploitation by rising to political self-definition and power” (Coetzee 1997, 431). One of the movement’s founders, Barney Pitanya, held a symposium in London to convey his message that a socialist principle is the means of harnessing Black Consciousness as a material weapon (Gibson 1988, 12–13). Biko’s definition of Black Consciousness was developed in university reading groups, and the South African government’s banning order imposed upon him suggested that he was considered a dangerous radical, while it recognised the transformative potential of the written word since it specified that Biko could not be published or quoted. Because literature is so widely acknowledged as transformative in the Black Consciousness movement, groups like the National Association of Supplementary Schools (NASS)—formed of the earlier groups the Black Parents Movement (BPM), Black Education Movement (BEM), and the Black Supplementary School Movement (BSSM)—and the National Antiracist Movement in Education (NAME), whose extensive archives can be consulted at the George Padmore Institute in London, understand that it is necessary to develop new generations of Black writers who are supported financially so that they can continue to write, and whose work will help to ensure that Black children recognise themselves in their curriculum. The following section asserts that literature, education, and Black Consciousness bookshops were central to the operation of Black Consciousness in Britain from the 1970s onwards. Archival materials convey the depth and breadth of that activity, offering a context that underlines the presence of consciousness and the significance of reading the right literature as a means to develop consciousness, in Black British Writing from that period onwards.

144 

J. RAMONE

4.2   Part 1: Black Consciousness Bookshops in Britain For the Black Consciousness movement in Britain, reading is power. Not only that—writers must be empowered if they are expected to provide the resources required to engender and maintain power. During discussion at the Black People in Britain: The Way Forward conference, held on January 17–19, 1975, which has as its founding principle the aim of supporting the establishment of a Black curriculum, S.  Safiruddin, delivering the Education Sub-Committee report, suggests that “Black writers […] should be given incentives in the form of a cash prize, or a guarantee of publication of such books which would help Black children and give them an identification” (LRA/01/0114/03). Likewise, at the Second African Books Festival held in 1987 by the Foundation for African Arts, the theme is Children’s Literature precisely because of the identified “desperate need to find ways of redressing the shameful and inadequate representation of children of Africa and African descent in Western European and American literature” (LRA/01/130/01). Because of their stated intention to elicit social change, notwithstanding the hostile environment which the bookshops were working to overcome through education, art, and social justice, bookshops were seen as threatening to the status quo; the Walter Rodney bookshop (the renamed BLP bookshop) was subjected to systematic racist attacks (LRA/127/1). As part of its stated aim to publish works “by Black people and from a Black perspective” (LRA/127/1), the BLP notes the particular need to publish books for children—“books which have relevance and meaning to our children’s past, present and future” (LRA/127/2). At the Black People in Britain conference, during a panel discussion on developing educational provision for Black students, panellists agree that “Black history and Black cultural materials should be reassessed and examined to eliminate undesirable and degrading conjectures and statements” and that “Black scholars should be encouraged to re-­ write them” (LRA/01/0114/03). It is worth noting how closely this claim accords with the motivation of Brother Kiyi in Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play Fix-up (2004). Fix-up takes place inside a Black Consciousness bookshop which is under threat of closure because Brother Kiyi who runs the shop can no longer afford to pay his rent as a result of his working practices: he lends books which invariably come back in an unsellable condition, if at all, and buys books that he thinks are worthwhile, valuable, important—books that Black people should read—rather than the books

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

145

that they choose to read (frequently, Black romance novels). The play remains ambivalent on the question of who is doing more for Black Consciousness: the sincere and highly principled Kiyi, or the apparently more forward-thinking militant and capitalist Kwesi, who wants to run a Black hair products business from the bookshop’s current location. Kiyi wonders about the difference between Black and white romance novels, asking “stories of Black love. I wonder how that differs from say stories of white love?.” Unable to find a clear enough distinction, he removes them from the shelf to make space for three sets of twelve volumes, described as accounts of the last remaining 2300 people to have been slaves, interviewed by social anthropologists in 1899 (10). Alice, a young mixed-race customer hungry for books that she is certain will help her to find herself, sees value in the Black romance novels that are, for Kiyi, symptomatic of a lack of consciousness. For Kiyi, Black romance novels are “nonsensical nonsense” that distract from the valuable reading and knowledge that his customers should be acquiring—Van Sertima’s Africa, Cradle of Civilisation!, Chancellor Williams’ Destruction of Black Civilisation, Peterson’s The Middle Passage, Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery […] books on the Dogons, the Ashantis, […] the pyramids of Ancient Zimbabwe’ (38). The play contains references to, staged audio recordings from, and discussion of Black Consciousness books and historical figures (among others, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Marcus Garvey, Claude Mackay). This means that the play operates very much like the Black Consciousness bookshop: it educates through close reference to texts that fill gaps in knowledge about Black history and culture. Having become a regular visitor to Kiyi’s Black Consciousness bookshop, Alice discovers two things which derail her burgeoning sense of self, or consciousness: she finds proof that Kiyi is her biological father, and she discovers that he has written the interviews with former slaves himself, revising and displacing similar, genuine narratives in order to fill what he perceived to be a historical omission. In this way, the play confronts the lost, peripheral, or “silent” voice and its recovery: the “recovery” of the slave narratives is undertaken by Brother Kiyi and his approach is to create narratives which should exist but do not. It could be argued that his constructed texts are little different from the heavily edited slave narratives still in circulation, and that instead of “white ghosts” the volumes in Kiyi’s shop are written by a Black Consciousness activist with a deep knowledge of books, without any profit motivation. “White ghosts” are editors who regulate slave narratives—like Pringle in David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress,

146 

J. RAMONE

they are privileged writers who can transcribe the other, often assembling substantiating documentation to support a slave’s story as if it cannot be trusted independently (Whitlock 2000, 166). Such nineteenth-­ century “white ghosts” ensured the narratives were “palatable”, and demonstrated appropriate humility and Christianity in order to propel reformist and abolitionist projects. For Kiyi, his work is a service providing West Indians with stories to help to understand their histories. However, Alice has a different interpretation: she already feels alienated because of her lack of knowledge of Black and/or African culture and history, and the play implies that she might feel more emboldened by uncertainties and gaps than she does by a rigid hierarchy of knowledge that she is expected to consume in full before she is acknowledged as “conscious”. For Alice, Kiyi’s writing and his failure to support her as his daughter are two fraudulent acts that undermine his position. The impact of this discovery is the destruction of the shop, its books, and its purpose: Carl, a rival for Alice’s affections, scatters and destroys books and shelves while Kwesi justifies his plans to close down and replace the shop by resorting to the flawed “logic” of market forces: “People don’t—want—books”, Kwesi says, drawing attention to the fact that they remain unsold in the shop. Ultimately, then, economic conditions exert pressure on Kiyi and result in the bookshop’s closure. Bogle L’Ouverture and New Beacon Books are probably the best-­ known Black Consciousness bookshops in Britain. Both are London-based and of the two, only New Beacon Books remains open. Both organisations emerged in the late 1960s, and soon afterwards a number of other Black radical bookshops were established in cities across the UK, many of them in London, including Centerprise, Head Start, and the Peckham Publishing Project. Radical book fairs which ran during the period when these bookshops were at their most prominent list details of booksellers, publishers, and other literary organisations who attended from the UK, Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Bogle L’Ouverture Publications (BLP) notes in its press releases that “together with New Beacon Books who pioneered Black publishing and bookselling in Britain, we have set the pace for a number of other bookshops and booksellers which are to be found in the Black community throughout the UK” (LRA 127/3). Bogle L’Ouverture was “not simply a London-based publisher and bookseller”, as its press release for an event in October 1979 to commemorate its tenth anniversary asserted, but also “an important centre of Black community activities with links in the Caribbean, Africa and America” which was underpinned by “committed political work” (LRA 127/3). Initially operating from the

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

147

living room of founders Jessica and Eric Huntley and later from premises in West Ealing, it was a community hub, a centre for social activism, and an organisation which advocated for writers and writing, noting in particular its emphasis on publishing and stocking children’s literature and supplying libraries and schools. Like the other Black Consciousness bookshops, all of whom worked collaboratively and served a broader function for community and political activism, it was not motivated by commercial concerns, but by the need to change the literary and social landscape in Britain. Its October 1979 press release reaffirmed the function of Bogle L’Ouverture Publications (BLP) as a “medium of expression for the growing voice of Blacks and other oppressed peoples” (LRA 127/3). Bogle L’Ouverture identifies itself in relation to its past and the future; by its name, the organisation “commemorates two outstanding revolutionary heroes of the Caribbean [Paul Bogle and Toussaint L’Ouverture] and dedicates itself to upholding the high ideals for which they died” (LRA 127/3). At its ten-year anniversary event, the organisation acknowledged that it “looks forward to the next decade with every confidence in the knowledge that our work is both necessary and important” (LRA 127/3). This position looking both to history and to the future exemplifies the Sankofa principle, a proverb advising “it is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten”, the essential characteristic of Black Consciousness which will remain a central organising principle for this chapter. Sankofa is symbolised by the Sankofa bird holding a seed in its beak to represent the germ of wisdom from the past, which is also the seed from which future generations will benefit. In the introduction to her edited collection “Black” British Aesthetics Today (2007) Victoria Arana has described the Sankofa symbol as operating aesthetically: she notes that artists and writers living and working in Britain today have emerged out of “earlier aesthetic positions and practices” and that they are still connected to these “in important ways” (2007, 9). The Black Consciousness movement in Britain was preoccupied by the combined need to improve education and develop a literary culture for emerging generations of Black British people. The Sankofa principle can be identified throughout the generations of Black Writing in Britain, providing evidence of the continuing presence of Black Consciousness despite its more muted voice in the decades since the period in which Bogle L’Ouverture celebrated its ten-­ year anniversary.

148 

J. RAMONE

New Beacon Books was founded by John La Rose and his partner Sarah White in 1966, as the first Black publisher, Black Consciousness bookshop and international book distributor in the UK. It describes itself, like BLP, as “never just a book business” but an organisation with “political and cultural vision” based on John La Rose’s experience in the Caribbean and South America, citing among its achievements the central role it undertook in a number of social and political projects: the George Padmore and Albertina Sylvester Supplementary Schools, the Caribbean Artists Movement (1966–1972), the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association (CECWA) campaign against putting Black children in ESN schools, the International Book Fair of Radial Black and Third World Books (1982–1995), the Black Parents Movement (1975–1990s), the New Cross Massacre Action Committee (1981), the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya (1980s), the George Padmore Institute (GPI) archive of the struggle of people of African, Caribbean and Asian descent in Britain (1991), and the European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice (1990s) (New Beacon Books n.d.). New Beacon Books was temporarily closed due to severe financial constraints in February 2017, but the New Beacon Development Group led by a team including John La Rose’s son and grandson called for volunteers to support the shop, which soon reopened with reduced hours, followed by a social media fundraising campaign which enabled New Beacon to survive to support “a new generation of the public including activists, students, educationalists, parents and children” (New Beacon Books n.d.). Both bookshops were active in the establishment of a radical literary culture, organising influential book fairs attracting large audiences. John La Rose noted in the closing statements at the end of the First International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books (held April 3, 1982 at Islington Town Hall) that over 3000 people attended (archive BFC/1/5/1/2/1). The Radical Black and Third World Book fairs organised by Jessica Huntley, John La Rose, and colleagues attracted one-­ hundred stallholders—bookshops, publishers, literary agents, and representatives from other relevant organisations; while the majority of these were African and Caribbean visiting representatives, lists of formal attendees to the fairs show that there were around thirty Black British bookshops and publishers in attendance; this figure is not likely to be definitive, but is an indication that there were a number of Black Consciousness bookshops actively trading in the 1970s and 1980s who were engaged with political, social, and literary activism.

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

149

Further evidence of the reach of this local literary marketplace is the establishment of The Radical Bookseller, a magazine aimed at radical bookshops which was intended to “complement or supplement” The Bookseller. In its second issue, the Radical Bookseller claimed that there were over one-hundred radical bookshops (The Radical Bookseller Nov 1980; LRA/1/741/01). Not all of these were Black Consciousness bookshops; the majority would have been categorised as socialist bookshops, which, though aligned with Black Consciousness, did not have the same primary objectives: The Radical Bookseller foregrounded “the radical left” in its editorials and agenda (LRA/1/741/01) and categorised Black bookshops alongside “feminist, etc.” bookshops in a sub-section of its potential target readership (LRA/06/654). A survey of radical bookshops in Britain was begun in 1999 and has been updated on a continual basis since that time, by Dave Cope and Ross Bradshaw. It shows that of the 228 radical bookshops located as operating at the time of the survey or formerly, from the 1960s to the present day, approximately 28 were categorised as “Black”, “African”, or “Third World”, and there was also one distributor listed—Third World Publications (Cope and Bradshaw). Of the thirty-two member booksellers listed on the Alliance of Radical Booksellers website, only one is listed as predominantly selling Black, or in this case “African” books—this is the Africa Book Centre in Brighton (Member Booksellers, 2019). However, New Beacon Books does not appear in this directory, so although it is not necessarily representative of the number of surviving Black Consciousness bookshops, it does support the pattern emerging from analysis of the separate sources considered here, that Black Consciousness bookshops were a highly active group of radical bookshops, but that they were not the majority even in this category. The Black Consciousness bookshop was in many instances attached to a publisher, and in other cases distributed home-produced magazines which celebrated reading conscious materials while advertising stock, providing updates, and seeking support for their activities. In all its forms, it can be defined as a local literary marketplace if for no other reason than its stated distance from the mainstream publishers. Those international publishers had until this point published highly selective African and Caribbean literature to targeted minor markets which did not necessarily sit squarely with the Black Consciousness agenda: Graham Huggan has discussed the limitations and biases of the Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS), for instance. Huggan suggests that the series betrays “symptoms of a controlling imperial gaze” (Huggan 2001, 52) and that while the book series

150 

J. RAMONE

purported to represent contemporary African writing, it in fact reflected Euro-American preconceptions of Africa in its selection, editorial, and production strategies, the writing manipulated by editorial interventions (Huggan 2001, 52–3). While the AWS had a sizeable readership in Africa, its primary market was in Europe; still, Caroline Davis has shown that the publishing industry operating in Africa was similarly motivated by the twin aims of profit and colonial propaganda in her work on Oxford University Press in Africa (Davis 2015, 27). Countering the continued tendency to misrepresent Africa, the Caribbean, and Black people in the mainstream UK literary marketplace, there remains an active sense of consciousness in Black British publishing and bookselling: at the time of writing, there is a crowdsourcing project underway in support of London’s first Black Feminist Bookshop, which is expected to open in 2020 and is currently seeking funds for a travelling pop-up store which will appear at relevant events and in community spaces (Wood 2019). Similarly, Knights Of independent publisher are fundraising to create a permanent bookshop in Brixton following a highly successful pop-up. This shop will stock children’s books with Black, Asian, and ethnic minority protagonists, recognising the need for Black children to recognise themselves in books, and Penguin Random House is a major sponsor, having donated half of the £30,000 target (Voice 2019). The Black Feminist Bookshop targets a broad audience, noting that its purpose is both “to create a safe and welcoming space where Black women can explore and discuss literary works that centre and reflect the Black female experience” and to offer new texts to all readers, since “everybody would benefit from engaging with Black feminist texts, because as well as offering a radical perspective on resistance, resilience and perseverance, they also offer an opportunity to become better informed about race, gender and inclusion” (Wood 2019).

4.3   Black Consciousness in the Archive and on the Contemporary Page The definition of Black Consciousness was always predicated on the collective endeavour to achieve consciousness and thereby to achieve equality of opportunity, representation, and resources. For George Lamming, speaking in 1967 at the First Annual Caribbean Artists Movement Conference, this involved dismantling the structures of mass

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

151

communication, particularly radio, in order to bring the substance of artistic and intellectual work to a mass audience (CAM/4/1/2 (10)). This is not to say that the art of the Black Consciousness movement was straightforward or modified for mass consumption—in fact, the opposite was true, and highly experimental forms were the norm for the movement which was focused on transforming the future, as Elsa Goveia, the Caribbean scholar who was the first woman professor at the University College of the West Indies (now the University of the West Indies) in Kingston, asserted. She claimed that the artist had, firstly, to look to the intellectual community for support because the works are “too difficult for immediate understanding” (CAM/4/1/2 (10)). Goveia’s and Lamming’s comments are elaborated upon in a conference paper delivered by Andrew Salkey at the Third Annual Caribbean Artists Movement conference, August 15–17, 1969, during which he provides his “working definition of the phenomenon of our new Black awareness”—or, Black Consciousness, as it is operating in the UK at that time (CAM/4/3/4 (3)). Salkey’s definition of Black Consciousness is, in keeping with the Sankofa principle of looking back, an assembly of the influences which come together to form the movement. In their breadth, these influences also construct a community. Beyond this, though, the primary organising principle is the need for economic reform, based on “the awareness of ourselves as unorganised power”, as “ill-used economic units of progress” (CAM/4/3/4 (3, 4), and on the history of slavery where Black labour was “Black power at the service of others” (CAM/4/3/4 (3)). This movement is international—identifying with global events which motivated its inception including Nkrumah’s Ghana, the Haitian revolution, Garveyism, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Sekou Toure’s Guinea, Black revolution in the USA, and “the success of the Cuban revolution” (CAM/4/3/4 (4)). Salkey reminds his audience that this is a collective movement—“we are not islands unto ourselves and our problems are not our own”, he states, insisting that their experiences are shared with other brutalised people (CAM/4/3/4 (4)). In this sense Black Consciousness is active, and is not shy to declare its revolutionary aims: it is “the will to make concrete and viable, our vision of ourselves as initiating, self-protecting, inventive, courageous, productive and ultimately culturally enriched people” which is “the beginning of our search and definition of revolution” (CAM/4/3/4 (4)). Black Consciousness remembers its heritage: Salkey takes time to list influences which include some of the major figures of the time (Malcolm X, Walter Rodney) and prominent organisations including the Caribbean

152 

J. RAMONE

Arts Movement, but also grassroots collective endeavours and cultural groups: private language exchange, woodcarving, Rastafarianism, Rudies, and a code of protective group ethics. For Salkey, art and literary creation is as central to the movement as its political spokespeople, and he acknowledges influential poets (Edward Brathwaite, Sebastian Clarke, Frank John, John La Rose, Tony Matthews, Basil Smith) and novelists (Lindsay Barrett, Jan Carew, Roger Mais, Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and Orlando Patterson), identifying the particular characteristics of each writer’s contribution. He includes essayists (George Beckford, Adolphe Edwards, C.L.R.  James) and playwrights (Le Frank, Dennis Scott, Marina Maxwell, Barry Reckord, Mortimer Plannel). Of all the writers listed in these four categories, it is noticeable that Marina Maxwell is the only woman, but this should not be taken as evidence of a masculinist strategy behind the Black Consciousness movement in Britain: it was led by men and women working together, and many of the leading figures of the movement were women (Jessica Huntley, Sarah White, Margaret Busby), as were those involved in the publishing, literary, and educational organisations that undertook the day-­ to-­day work that is recorded in the conference proceedings and exhibition and workshop materials collected in the George Padmore Institute. Although better representation of women in intellectual and creative work was not foregrounded by Salkey in his important definition of Black Consciousness, it was conveyed in the work done by those in NASS, NAME, and the regional focus groups analysing educational materials to provide better resources for Black children. A common assertion was, like the one made by the Foundation for African Arts from their Second African Books Festival press release, that the problem of “sexism is very closely related to that of racism” (LRA/01/130/01)—their focus here is children’s literature, acknowledging that positive female role models in books for children were required as much as positive Black role models, and making the case that this claim extends beyond children’s literature and into society more broadly. The Black Consciousness movement is Caribbean-centred: “our own Caribbean communities must become the new centres of which we first seek approval of the fruits of our imagination” and to enable this, it is considered important to reject the tendency to seek “metropolitan approval” (CAM/4/3/4 (10)). The movement is local, people-centred, “principle-guided”, “self initiated”, “truly imaginative” (CAM/4/3/4 (10)), and transformative—concerned with plundering and reshaping, then “transmuting the plundered material” (CAM/4/3/4 (11)). Black Consciousness “must be capable of renewing

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

153

itself” (CAM/4/3/4 (10)), Salkey states, asserting the central relevance of the Sankofa principle. Aside from its collected records of conferences and meetings, reports and press materials, the George Padmore Institute is also a rich repository of published works and unpublished manuscripts, which include hard to locate short creative nonfiction works including a piece by founding American Black Arts Movement poet Jayne Cortez, delivered as a public address at an event held in March 1985 at St Matthews meeting place, titled “Malcolm X and Social Liberation”. Cortez’s performance is both a summary description of Black Consciousness writing of the period, and an example of that writing. She notes that, inspired by Malcolm X, “Black poets considered politics and consciousness-raising as a cultural necessity and specific cultural duty” (BFC/04/06/01/08/02 (14)). More than an instigator for their writing, Malcolm X became a literary model for the writers who came after him, according to Cortez, who claims that poets were deeply influenced by his ability to “forge the fragmentary pieces of Black lives together in a dynamic way”; accordingly, writers constructed their works to be “strong, like a Malcolm X speech” (BFC/04/06/01/08/02 (15)). Cortez uses the word “standards” to identify Malcolm X’s “statements and opinions on white America”, claiming that “Black people represented themselves” using these standards. While acknowledging that Black poetry was directly responsive to both the style and the activist content of Malcolm X’s speeches, the use of the word “standards” and the reference to the dynamic fusion of fragmentary pieces invites a reading which asserts Black Consciousness writing as “repetition with a Black difference”—if not in direct parallel with Henry Louis Gates’s interpretation of Black Writing, then in reference to the potential of signifyin(g) to pay attention to a literary past or heritage in order to create something new and experimental for the benefit of the future generation. A British-based Black Consciousness is visible in the archive materials of the George Padmore Institute which was both central to that movement and is a record of its breadth and impact. Black Consciousness is a collective project focused on the good of the community, for resistance and change—as Jessica Huntley puts it, it is an endeavour for those who share “the bitter sweet membership of the Black community” (LRA/127/1). Black Consciousness is also registered here as “local” in the sense that it sits separately from the mainstream literary, publishing, and educational contexts—by necessity rather than choice in many cases, since a repeated insistence is the desire to open up Black literature and art, Black history

154 

J. RAMONE

and education, to all school children and to the wider public. Instances of reading in Black Writing in Britain from the 1950s to the present day are bound up with the Black Consciousness movement: texts foreground characters who insist on reading the right things, on reading useful material that will develop the reader and enable them to gain identity and awareness. Through an analysis of literary texts from the 1950s until the present day, questions emerge about the possibility of Black Consciousness persisting in the post-Thatcher context which promotes the individual over the community. However, by engaging with the Sankofa principle—paying attention to the past to inform the future—which is at the core of all definitions of Black Consciousness, and by focusing on the tendency of contemporary Black Writing to repeat with a “Black difference”—plundering, reshaping, transmuting, as Salkey insists—it is possible to argue that Black Consciousness remains central to both Black Writing in Britain, and to the instances of reading which continue to play a pivotal role in contemporary texts; it is also evidence of the centrality of reading to the transformative Black Consciousness movement.

4.4   The Black Art Movement and the Function of Art in the Pursuit of Consciousness The Black Consciousness bookshop played an important role within broader Black arts and culture, with theatre and arts organisations conveying congruent aims with the bookshops, and organisers working together on social and educational projects. The practice of art as defined though the Black Art Movement is participatory: the Black-Art Gallery claims that the art it collects illuminates “Black people’s ongoing struggles for equality, justice and basic human rights” (LRA/01/103); the gallery undertakes to instruct visitors on how to look at Black Art: “we have to take part”, they insist, because “a piece of art-work is only really complete when we, its viewers, are playing our part” (LRA/01/103). This is an instruction to participate rather than to observe passively. This practice is extended throughout the broader Black Art and Consciousness movement, and to ensure that the practice is something that becomes natural and familiar, it is instated in children’s workshops and competitions attached to cultural events—the Obaala poetry theatre, for instance, offered a Summer Art School for 7–16  year olds. Their 1987 event

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

155

involved three weeks of “creativity, self-discovery, Black history, plus lots of fun”, with the theme of Marcus Garvey and a competition to draw a parent or grandparent, inviting children to take inspiration from their own immediate community as well as from their international cultural heritage (LRA/01/103). Such initiatives are frequent events, with various advertising posters collected in the archive. The Obaala Poetry Theatre emphasises the collaborative nature of poetry as well as poets’ commitment to their community when it describes poetry as “inspirational” in the sense that “it allowed many others to recognize the potential of the oral tradition as a valid and effective means of communicating ideas, and raising and exploring issues that are relevant to their communities” (LRA/01/103). Obaala’s adverts and statements of purpose eschew the notion of the individual poet in favour of the collective endeavour of poetry as a movement, repeating “ourselves”, “our own”, and “us” when describing the group’s vision (LRA/01/103). The ethos behind the group is to assert the validity of visual and oral arts as “routes of positive expression by our community” (LRA/01/103). Black Consciousness bookshops supported the initiatives led by the wider cultural and creative industries, including theatre and the media, taking part in events organised by groups such as Black Theatre—Act Now. Black Theatre—Act Now aimed to establish properly equipped and located theatre venues under the management of Black people; to be funded to a level that would enable Black theatre to achieve high standards of professionalism in all areas including production values, marketing, and management; to ensure there was enough funding to maintain several companies, thus enabling a variety of artistic styles and policies to thrive; and to ensure that all bodies receiving money from the Arts Council implement their equal opportunities policy (LRA/01/118). The project’s main objective was to provide a legitimate opportunity for Black writers to make theatre, replacing the existing system of scrutiny requiring Black playwrights to seek approval from white artistic directors, thereby returning control of Black culture to Black theatre practitioners and ensuring a robust Black theatre in a context of “institutional racism within arts funding” (LRA/01/118) which resulted in unemployment among Black theatre workers, and an absence of Black theatre aside from the sole successful theatre company, Talawa Arts. These objectives cohere with those identified by Ionie Benjamin as the primary motivations behind the establishment of the Black press in Britain—newspapers and magazines intended for a mainstream Black audience operated among a competitive and

156 

J. RAMONE

critical environment, meaning that by the 1980s West Indian World, which had been established in 1971, was being described as demonstrating a “1960s mentality” (Benjamin 1995, 5), while The Voice, considered a “tabloid” in comparison to earlier newspaper-format publications, established in 1982 and focusing on a young demographic rather than identifying a political or class-based demographic as other tabloids might, was gaining in popularity; it remains in press as the only weekly printed Black newspaper. Benjamin’s The Black Press in Britain (1995) surveys the history of Black Consciousness magazine publishing in Britain and lists magazines which operated from the 1960s onwards, contextualising these within a history of Black British publishing beginning in the late nineteenth century, though many of the magazines published in the late 1960s and 1970s were short lived and not always readily available. Although some of the magazines had origins in the Black Consciousness movement and maintained a radical viewpoint, others targeted a group referred to as “BUPPIES”—Black Upwardly Mobile Professionals, while a preoccupation of the Black Magazine and news media in general was to provide a “training ground” for Black journalists intending to pursue radio and television careers (Benjamin 1995, 67, 113). Professional training was a more prevalent motivation for the Black press than it was for the Black theatre; underlying Black Theatre—Act Now’s project was an assertion of the practical significance of Black Consciousness: without a strong Black theatre presence in Britain, the risks identified were: a lack of theatre by or about Black people for Black audiences to identify with; African Caribbean people’s disenfranchisement from expressing their own cultural heritage; and the loss of an opportunity to educate their children and the wider public about African Caribbean values in contrast with mass media representations (LRA/01/118).

4.5   “We are our own educators” Educational aims are central to the arts in the context of Black Consciousness. Arts organisations worked with and drew on the work of bodies set up to challenge existing educational politics and practices, many of which were in close communication with local and national government representatives, and whose research was adopted by local education authorities. Among the most effective and prominent organisations whose materials are collated at the George Padmore Institute are NASS (the National Association of Supplementary Schools) and NAME (the National

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

157

Antiracist Movement in Education, formerly the National Association for Multiracial Education). The first supplementary school was the living room George Padmore Community School run by John La Rose, as Patrick Ainley noted in an article for Teacher magazine (LRA/01/130/02). The slogan used by the National Association of Supplementary Schools (NASS) was “we are our own educators”, which was used widely, including in the title of a book published in 1986 by Valentino Jones, a supplementary school teacher in Hackney. Supplementary Schools survived police harassment (LRA/01/130/02) because of their collective strength. This collective principle is emphasised by education activist, researcher, and writer Gus John who, in December 2016, chose to emphasise the importance of community in his British Library lecture “Changing Britannia through the Arts and Activism” for the fiftieth anniversary of New Beacon Books. At the 1991 AGM of African Caribbean Governors, he speaks very strongly on this principle in response to the proposal that a highly effective but underfunded supplementary school should be remodelled as a fee-paying day school. The proposer describes this move as “progressing to a more developmental stage” (NAS/03/03 (2)), which is roundly rejected by John as a “degeneration” (NAS/03/03 (4)) and as “education for some” (NAS/03/03 (5)), based on “grooming people to become part of that 20% on whom the system chooses to confer status and rewards and ‘tickets’ of excellence” enabling “the Black middle classes” to be “created straight off the backs of struggling Black workers” (NAS/03/03 (5)). John’s objection is above all to the risk that such a school system would create an elite group of apparently exceptional individuals whose privileged education guarantees academic success “at the expense of their ‘self esteem’ or ‘Black identity’” (NAS/03/03 (4)) during which a “primary goal” (archive 6624) is to separate them from their community. The result of adapting the school to a fee-paying system would be to maintain the status quo which has rested on such hierarchies. Permitting a handful of Black students who are disconnected from their community and heritage to inhabit the existing British elite is, for John, “paradoxical” to the supplementary school system which is emblematic of the “Black working class struggle” (NAS/03/03 (5)). The supplementary school system is a collective endeavour constructed of parents, teachers, and students who “form a triangle sustaining the school” (LRA/01/130/02 (9)) and together with the National Antiracist Movement in Education (NAME) their aim was to create a Black Studies programme for delivery to all students irrespective of ethnicity, which would at the same time

158 

J. RAMONE

provide a “foundation for understanding, self-awareness and self-­ confidence” for Black students (NAS/03/03 (7)). NASS was formalised in 1987 and operated as a national centre for Black supplementary schools which were in operation throughout the UK. It developed from groups which had been acting to improve the education of Black children since the late 1960s, coinciding with the foundation of BLP and New Beacon Books, namely the Black Education Movement and the Black Parents Movement. NAME’s main aim was securing “social justice and equality for people of all ethnic and racial origins” (AME 4/1/3). The association originated in 1973 and was initially focused on the education of children from overseas, but in 1984 changed its name and primary motivation in order to tackle racism in society and in mainstream education. There are two dominant strands which emerge from an analysis of the meeting minutes and conference proceedings, newsletters, focus group findings, research projects, and publications of the two associations. The first strand is the aim of directly combating racism in schools. This included tackling prevailing tendencies to assert “colour-blindness” which is considered to equate to ignoring racism, and to generate the risk of “assimilation” through ignoring culture (AME 5/1/2 (17)), factors which are often associated with the “hidden curriculum”. The “hidden curriculum” comprised a set of “assumptions behind the selection of content”, implied values, and through the process of education produced “residual” learning experiences through encounters in or outside school (AME 5/1/2). There was agreement that racism operated in schools as it did “in all areas of social life and in all institutions” (AME 4/1/5). This affected Black school students directly in two ways: firstly, through an overactive application of the category of ESN (which at that time stood for “educationally subnormal”), and second, by setting up a cycle of low expectations and achievement. Linton Kwesi Johnson has spoken about the wilful categorisation of Black children as educationally subnormal from his own experience at school, describing the practice of assigning a Black child to an ESN school because they, in his example, drew a picture of a house without a chimney, which was considered flawed. Johnson notes that many of those children had migrated from the Caribbean and from African regions where a chimney was not an ordinary feature of a house (2002). This anecdote is not out of place among the findings of NAME, NASS, and of those described in smaller arts and cultural publications; in a 1986 Black Attack newsletter, an article on the British education system notes that a headteacher at an

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

159

ESN school had admitted that 49% of the Black children at the school were wrongly placed there, and that many of those placed at the school had been rejected from mainstream schools because they had been described as “disruptive, defiant and aggressive” (LRA/01/104). Further, Bernard Coard reported that Black children were placed in ESN schools not because it was appropriate for them, but as a strategic move to “permanently limit their development” (NAS/03/02), noting that West Indian children of average and above average ability were assigned to these schools. The article describes “embedded racism” in the teaching, school system, and curriculum, a prevailing concern also reported by Queen Mother Moore School whose objective was to correct the mainstream educational practice of “training” children to become “objects onto whom other people’s wills are imposed” (NAS/03/02). NASS confirms that alongside the need to develop a curriculum which includes African and Asian history, “the main issue is still racism” (LRA/01/130/01), while the Education Sub-Committee at the Black People in Britain conference held in 1975 notes that “education in a capitalised state is designed to maintain and perpetuate the existing status quo”, and that “Britain is a racist society embedded in schools, teachers, [and] teaching materials” (LRA/01/0114/03 (2)). NAME asserts that it was “the only national organisation solely devoted to combatting racism in education” (AME 5/3/4/1), and when it reluctantly disbanded in July 2004 it listed among its final activities a survey to ascertain how schools are responding to the Race Relations (Amendment) Act (2000), and the publication of the final edition of a series of Student Briefing Papers on race and racism in Britain from 1950 to the present day, affirming that “racism is, disgracefully, still alive and well and flourishing in all geographical areas and therefore in many different educational settings” (AME 5/3/4/1 (1)). The second strand revealed by analysis of NAME’s archives is their effort to reconstruct the popular view of the Black community both to motivate Black students (NAS/03/04) and to address negative representations thus creating a positive representation of Black history and the achievements of Black individuals and societies for all students, for teachers, and for the public, irrespective of their racial identity or community. This was to be achieved primarily through the creation of a Black Studies programme operating independently and feeding into schools, teacher training, educational policy-making, and society more broadly. The project was led by a group who intended to commission academics to write articles and contribute to major conferences addressing key topics. Those

160 

J. RAMONE

listed include: the case for Black Studies; an appraisal of the effects of Black Studies in the USA; its consequences for Black communities, education, and society; an assessment of Black achievement and the contribution of Black peoples to world civilisation; the history of the Black presence in Britain; a model syllabus for Black studies; the implementation of Black Studies in British school curricula; the benefits of Black Studies to Black pupils and the whole school community; the importance of culture and art for minority communities in Western society; and an annotated bibliography and resource guide; (NAS 03/04 (3)). Better representation of Black history is considered essential for both self-confidence and self-awareness (NAS 03/04 (7))—in other words, Black Consciousness. The groups aimed to eradicate racist practices throughout education by undertaking initiatives with the youngest through to the most advanced level children and students, parents, the public, and trainee and established teachers, as well as governing bodies and councils whose decisions had an impact on school practices and curricula. In terms of the curriculum, in addition to activities and approaches recommended generally, particular projects engaged with specific school subjects. Dawn Gill’s active campaign to rewrite racist Geography textbooks was a particularly well resourced and publicised project (NAS/03/04/01). In terms of English or literary studies, there were several discrete projects generating valuable resources for teaching literature in schools. Some of these include a survey of children’s books carried out by the Dudley branch of NAME, which included a lengthy checklist to follow as a methodology for assessing the suitability of books, which paid attention to the likely response of the “minority child” to the book; the author’s relevant qualifications (or, experience) and background; themes and point of view; character relationships and hierarchies with race in mind; and the functions of illustrations and vocabulary (AME 5/3/4 (7, 9)). Applying this methodology to the Easy Readers section of a comprehensive school library in the region (identified because its size enabled a full analysis and because it was likely to be used with second-­ language English speakers who might be expected to make up a portion of non-white pupils), only 8 out of 131 dealt sufficiently with relevant geographical regions or multiracial contexts, and of these only 5 fulfilled the criteria for suitability (AME 5/3/4 (9)). In this context, it is unsurprising that children’s literature was such a priority; the aims of the Second African Books Festival, organised in November 1987 by the Foundation for African Arts, was to encourage increased publication of children’s literature for African children, to enhance the quality and increase the quantity

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

161

of African books in the British education system, and to examine the representation of Africa and children of African descent in literature to aim to eliminate racist literature in schools (LRA/01/130/01). Allied to these aims were practical workshops encouraging children to take part in creative activities, and to share resources to support publishers and education specialists. When The Voice ran an article on NASS in November 1987 John La Rose received letters offering support or involvement in the national project which were in keeping with the very open format of the movement which not only repeated the slogan “We are our own educators”, but also ran workshops for interested parents keen to teach in supplementary schools (confirming that there was “no experience required”) or to become engaged in conscious ways with the mainstream school system (NAS/03/02). Queen Mother Moore School expressed this community agenda in its statement of aims as a school “created by the community, for the community” which can “only grow and prosper with the consent of the community” (NAS/03/02). It was of utmost importance that those involved shared collective goals, and that the members “should not allow NASS to be colonised by any governmental body” (NAS/03/02). Efforts to initiate supplementary schools, and later to develop new approaches within mainstream education, emphasise collective endeavour, and assert the importance of community over the individual in the quest to combat the “issues of self-identification” where the curriculum excludes Black art, literature, history, and culture. What is repeatedly asserted in the NASS and NAME materials is an underlying racist culture permeating the school system (leading to “ESN syndrome” which encourages the majority of teachers to attempt to find “a scientific basis for their racist views” (LRA/01/0114/03)) meaning that the child is ultimately “regarded as a failure” (LRA/01/0114/03). A further NAME-supported study offered a similar checklist to assist in deciding on the suitability of illustrations (AME 5/3/2/1), while in Manchester, Walsall and Wolverhampton literary reports were produced based on considerations such as the need to “appreciate the possibility of developing multiple loyalties” (AME 4/2/1/1 (appendix 1)); to “encourage pupils to appreciate good literature by writers who are not of Anglo-Saxon origin” (AME 4/2/1/1(9)); to “promote a greater understanding” of “other people’s […] ways of life and positive attitudes towards these” while illustrating those other people’s “views concerning aspects of English ways of life” (AME 4/2/1/1(9)); “to draw the attention of pupils from ethnic minority

162 

J. RAMONE

backgrounds to writings by peoples of their own cultural backgrounds and therefore to increase their knowledge of their own cultures, their feelings of self-respect and their motivation in school” (AME 4/2/1/1(9)); to highlight the impact of racism (AME 4/2/1/1(9)); to “foster humanitarian attitudes” (AME 4/2/1/1(10)); to consider the representation of language and dialect (AME 4/2/1/1(29)); and to instate “new ways of looking at the third world” and its history (AME 4/2/1/1(86)). These reports were generated in recognition of increasing concern over the books found in “multiracial classrooms” (AME 5/4/1 (25)) as well as the need for anti-racist provision even in all-white areas (AME 5/4/1). The Walsall report is particularly detailed and offers various methods of ensuring balance is represented by opposing books with different hierarchies and power structures so that patterns which maintain inequality are not conveyed. Scilla Alvarado’s model syllabus for multicultural curriculum development is presented with the caveat that racism cannot be “combatted with the provision of more knowledge in the curriculum” only, insisting that the practices and structures of the education system require an overhaul and in this sense her report seeks to “place” appropriate literature “within a cultural and social framework”, which asks all pupils to “mak[e] strange” their own lives (AME 5/1/2 (8)). This is achieved through categorising texts into geographical regions which are suitably international—the five categories include African, Afro-American, Caribbean, Asian, and European literature, and this final category is constructed of texts that represent Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and Jewish contexts. Lists of positive books for teachers and librarians to stock are included with these reports (AME 4/2/1/1; AME 5/3/4)—an interesting parallel can be drawn between these and the pattern of categorising reading materials as suitable or unsuitable depending on their definition as consciousness literature or not, revealed by my analysis of instances of reading in Black Writing in Britain.

4.6   Part 2: Reading for Consciousness in Black British Writing The history of Black Writing in Britain can’t be separated from its composition, publishing, and bookselling contexts. In The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming describes his arrival in London in 1950 by declaring

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

163

that he and Sam Selvon along with a new acquaintance were given shared lodgings in a room “the size of a successful publisher’s office”. This strange metaphor conveys less about the size of the space—how many readers then or now can accurately gauge what size a successful publisher’s office might be?—and is more of a statement of intent about his and Selvon’s position in London: they are and will continue to be the kind of people who frequent successful publishers’ offices because they have come to London to write. Migrant readers are portrayed as having the same level of confidence as the writers: Louise Bennett’s poem “Colonisation in Reverse” (1966), in a different way, disturbs the dominant Windrush narrative of young male migrant workers by presenting instead “Jane” an avid reader and a subversive figure, a woman inclined to read for pleasure, who “will never fin[d] work” because “all day she stay pon Aunt Fan couch/ An read love-story book”. The newer generation of writers who are often cited as exemplary of the direction of Black Writing in Britain include Zadie Smith whose repeated engagement with Shakespeare’s “dark lady” in educational settings (in both White Teeth and Swing Time) presents a critically thinking reader challenging received knowledge about the most established interpretations of canonical texts. A postcolonial materialist perspective would, of course, note that no literature can ever be disconnected from its economies of production and distribution. The marketplace is, as Sarah Brouillette and David Finkelstein assert, “never quite separable” from the text itself (2013, 3). However, there is something different about Black Writing in Britain. A comparative analysis of the representations of books, book-spaces, and reading across Black Writing in Britain, Nigerian literature (where there’s sometimes a crossover, of course), South Asian Literature (again, perhaps involving some crossover), and Cuban literature reveals that in Black Writing in Britain reading is frequently evaluated for its “quality” and that primarily, the quality of what is read is determined by the extent to which it can enable consciousness. Many examples of Black Writing in Britain quite straightforwardly present literature as a means of developing consciousness, and the texts’ articulations of consciousness can be analysed to consider the extent to which literary representations match the articulations of consciousness circulating at the time, or align with the statements of purpose circulated by radical Black bookshops, publishers, and literary and educational organisations in Britain. In some very recently published texts, Black British writers continue to present reading as part of Black Consciousness, though new contexts suggest that to an extent, revised

164 

J. RAMONE

understandings of Black Consciousness have partly superseded its original meaning. As might be predicted, newspaper and Bible references are predominant in many texts across all periods (including particularly frequent occurrences in Andrea Levy’s Every Light in the House Burnin’, Fruit of the Lemon, Never Far from Nowhere, Small Island; Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging; and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, among others) but a number of texts are centrally concerned with representing and foregrounding acts of reading fiction. In the 1981 film Burning an Illusion directed by Menelik Shabazz, the act of reading is a visual referent of Pat’s journey towards consciousness. After Pat’s partner Delroy is imprisoned for four years after intervening in an argument and injuring a policeman, her immediate response is to rip up the book she was reading while sat in bed as a signal that nothing can help her to understand her new situation. The book’s title is not visible on screen but it is recognisable as a slim Mills and Boon orange-topped romance paperback. Her romance reading is emblematic of her lack of consciousness up to this point, so the act of destroying the book is a recuperative act. Soon afterwards, Del begins requesting books from Pat; she reads these before sending them on to him in prison, and these books, she says, “really opened her eyes about Black people’s conditions”. Her burgeoning consciousness is strengthened when she meets Cynthia, another woman whose partner is in prison, and whose bookshelves offer further insight. As she reads more, her appearance and her language changes, visibly marking her developing engagement with Black Consciousness. Burning an Illusion asks questions about the function of literature in the context of Black Consciousness and Black identity in British society in the early 1980s, and remains somewhat ambivalent about the relative power of reading and writing in opposition with action or experience which in the film remain somewhat separate, the distinction implied by definitions of consciousness (Black Consciousness as an attitude of mind and a way of life, as Biko asserted) and reinforced by the diffuse nature of Black Consciousness and rights movements in the USA and then in the UK. One particular encounter with books illustrates the perceived conflict between consciousness as gained from the act of reading, and the alternative in what is considered to be authentic experience or action. Pat’s new confidence is shaken when she is shot with an air rifle by a group of white men in a car in a random act of racist violence. The injury she receives leaves her in hospital for a short time, and in response to this she rejects the book that her friend Lana gives her, claiming to need “experience”

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

165

instead of books. Lana insists that she needs the book as well, but Pat remains ambivalent about the function of reading: the contrast between experience and reading is apparent again at the film’s close when Pat reorganises her books, keeping only those perceived to be important and throwing others into a waste incinerator (she throws away romance books, Barbara Cartland’s name visible on screen). Her non-diegetic narration of the scene is her assertion that having experienced the attack she is now, like others, part of the struggle for justice. These words imply, as does the act of reading for consciousness, that reading is a significant aspect of this struggle, yet the song lyrics in the soundtrack following the scene assert that words are ineffective and instead, “now is the time for militancy”. In Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen, protagonist Adah reads novels written by Black women authors, and through this activity she develops a sense of consciousness and rejects the notion that Black means inferiority in a straightforward political statement, insisting that her children: “were going to be different. They were all going to be Black, they were going to enjoy being Black, be proud of being Black, a Black of a different breed” (Emecheta 1974,  148). Reading is central to the text, but it is initially taken for granted; though Ada works in a library in Nigeria and then in the UK, she does not engage with books until years after she begins her career. As a result of her job, Adah is able to observe a contrast between British and Nigerian reading habits: Only God knew what the people of North Finchley did with all the books they borrowed. The queue sometimes stretched so far that some people had to stand outside waiting, just to borrow books. This was a big contrast to the library she had worked in before. At the consulate, they had to bribe people to make them read fiction. They were only keen on reading textbooks in order to raise their status economically. (42)

Not only does the comparison between Nigerian and Black British reading instances help to reinforce the distinctions between different reasons for— or functions of—reading in texts from separate locations, it also helps to address two things about Buchi Emecheta’s work. Firstly, it situates Emecheta as a Nigerian writer more than a Black British writer because of the kind of reading (and writing) that is undertaken in the novel: like the findings in Wendy Griswold’s study on Nigerian reading, and through my analysis of the majority of reading instances in Nigerian literature discussed in the chapter on Nigerian writing in this book, Adah understands reading

166 

J. RAMONE

as a tool for self-improvement and financial benefit. In clear contract to Kiyi’s writing and reading in Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Fix-up, where he erases his authorship and evades all kinds of financial reward for his work or his books in order to enable education in others, Adah in Second-Class Citizen writes in order to locate herself as a very individualistic reader and writer whose writing is a career that can support her family financially. This is, at the same time, a way to know herself—to an extent, she demonstrates an awareness of Black Consciousness, but primarily she is coming to know herself as an individual, and as a mother. Second, the comparison helps address the accusations made of the text—Elaine Savory Fido notes that Buchi Emecheta has been “rightly identified as having perpetuated and reinforced certain negative stereotypes about Igbo culture and Africans in her writing” (Fido 1992, 340). These accusations hold more weight in the contexts of migration and diaspora, since the text is expected to contribute something to Black British identity and to celebrate collectivism and community. This expectation is not present in the same way in Nigerian literature where, of course, there is no migrant collective community to uphold and where reading is repeatedly figured as individualistic and motivated by financial improvement. Despite Adah’s disdain for fiction, she is encouraged to read books by Black women writers (who she had not heard of before). In contrast to Adah, Verona, the protagonist of Joan Riley’s novel, Romance (1988), has an obsession with reading romance novels: “She would read until the heating came on and the room warmed up. She picked up the book that sleep had interrupted. She had been in the middle of the last chapter; she might as well finish it before getting ready for work” (27). For Verona, reading is pretence—fantasy and escapism, even denial, but the central motif of the text is the unsuitability of her reading matter. Instead of taking action or even telling her family when she loses her job, Verona goes to the library and avoids her situation by “getting comfortable in the cushioned Black chair” and arranging “her four romance novels in a neat pile” (40). Repeatedly, her friends and family call it “trash”, “white trash”, “rubbish”. Her family criticise Verona’s habit—“all you do is read them stupid books” (22) and analyse her motivations; her sister accuses her of pretending to be the white heroine in the novels: “That’s why you’re always reading these trashy books, isn’t it? So you can pretend. What’s the matter with you anyway? What’s wrong with a Black man?” (69). Verona only understands the real events in her life through cross-reference to the romance novels: “It was just like in Concertina Love, she recalled” (172),

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

167

excusing misogyny in a white man because it replicated the misogyny in the books that gave her so much pleasure. Only the realisation of an unplanned pregnancy interrupts her reading: “She couldn’t even lose herself in romance any more, feeling too unwell and worried to concentrate” (200). The term “lose herself” seems particularly apt here. Ultimately, reading romance novels has a potentially destructive effect because losing herself in a book is, in fact, losing her self, her identity in racial, cultural, social terms: pretending to be “an innocent blonde-haired virgin” (74), reading is undertaken at the expense of attention to her brother, sister, father, her job, and ultimately her awareness of her identity. By the end of the novel, Verona begins to consider other reading material, having acknowledged that her reading choices are in conflict with the values of the people she respects, the people who run Black Consciousness meetings. She is given “a children’s book by a Black writer” (229) and this implies not only that she might restart her reading, but also that she might in the future share her reading with her unborn child, and that the child might have a more worthwhile experience of reading, signalled by Verona’s more positive ideas about the future at the novel’s close. What emerges from an analysis of these reading instances is a conflict between losing the self (in fiction—in white romance novels) and finding the self: locating the self, or locating consciousness is, in Romance, inseparable from reading texts that are acknowledged to be of merit in intellectual and activist terms. In Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), the pattern is similar in a narrative that follows a young woman’s aspirations to go to university and the conversations between Black women about what should and should not be read: Hyacinth becomes obsessed with Mills and Boon romance books she finds left behind in her lodgings, and initially rejects her friend Perlene’s suggestion that reading Walter Rodney’s book (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972) would make her better aware of the causes of racism. A number of texts from the subsequent decades (including Joe Pemberton’s Forever and Ever Amen (2000) and Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991)) only engage in a peripheral way with books and reading—but this accords with their young protagonists’ experience: the acquisition of consciousness in literary texts tends to occur in adulthood rather than in childhood; the attempt by the Black Parents’ Association and Supplementary School Movement to engender consciousness in children’s experiences is absent from many of the novels about growing up as Black children in Britain. Writers like Atinuke who celebrates “Amazing

168 

J. RAMONE

Africa” in her Anna Hibiscus stories continue to provide a consciousness narrative, though. Joe Pemberton’s Forever and Ever Amen (2000) foregrounds popular culture and conveys reading as a peripheral marker of the pre-adolescent boy’s experience: James reads Pop Hits magazine, comics, and encyclopaedias, and observes Bibles and the Manchester Evening News as part of the background to his narrative. Similarly, though Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991) is a novel about school and education, there are only a handful of references to books and reading, and the majority of these are brief descriptions of fairy stories, and of reading for study and self-­ improvement, in addition to references to the Bible. The exception is the narrator’s Aunt Grace’s house where tall stacks of books take up much of the available floor space (73) and thus become an oddity, something that makes little sense to the young Nigerian girl. Like Buchi Emecheta’s writing, Simi Bedford’s book can be read as a Nigerian narrative of development and migration rather than a Black British story and for this reason it does not foreground the Black British reading culture of the period and, also, only begins to tackle an idea of consciousness as part of the experience of being Black in Britain. There are examples of texts from this period which actively engage with consciousness, though. Dreda Say Mitchell’s Killer Tune (2007) refers to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to signal ongoing attention to Black Consciousness. Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996) is more centrally concerned with consciousness and its pressures—Dele is “desperate and dazed by his condition, clutching at phoney straws and trampled roots, dizzy from the decay of his inheritance” and “gravely charged with fashioning some tool for empowerment and agency” (47). Here, the ability to profit from Black art forms and events undermines the impetus to organise on Black Consciousness lines, attributing the decline of Black Consciousness to its economic context. My former research assistant Conna Ray published a short piece of writing as part of my project on representations of books and reading in postcolonial literature, and observed that Caryl Phillips’ works convey reading as self-improvement in both general and consciousness terms. In Higher Ground (1989), Rudi Williams reads in prison, through letters urging his family to read Mao, Marx, and Lenin; Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois; Richard Wright and Nelson Mandela to understand the history of slavery and the oppression of Black peoples. She noticed an ambivalence in the representation of reading—“excessive reading” causes Rudi’s eyesight to deteriorate, leaving him physically weak and almost blind, and interpreted

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

169

this as a way of conveying that the story of Black Consciousness remains “unfinished” (Ramone 2018, 76–8). Contemporary writers, I suggest, take up this unfinished story and approach new contexts in which Black Consciousness can be seen to operate with new perpetrators and new stated aims but to similar effects. Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (2013) presents intellectual, well-­ read older men, keen to discuss modern classic literature in confident ways. Reading and reading matter is discussed in mock-conflict by the partners: “That novel [Brave New World] wasn’t half bad, Barry. Remember you gave it to me to read? Although I am of the opinion that Nineteen Eighty-Four is better.” “One of my small victories, Mr de la Roux. Getting you reading fiction. Remember the days when people sat on the tube reading good book?” “Not everyone’s a book reader like you. A newspaper will do.” (81)

Their conversation over the next few passages cements their renewed good relations following an argument about their future. It has the function of bringing them back together by resolving their differences indirectly— they discuss the merits of well-regarded modern classic novels over tabloid newspapers instead of their differences of opinion over whether and how to announce that they intend to live together. In this instance, reading has the function of diffusing emotional conflict. It also conveys their separation from those of younger generations and reinforces their difference of perspective which can be extended to take account of their status as migrants, and as gay men. The text conveys that these men are intellectual, well-read, and able to discuss modern classic literature in confident ways, locating their position in European modernity rather than outside of it, to coincide with Paul Gilroy’s insistence that the Black intellectual is part of European modernity and that Black people have always necessarily been part of it: they are not new arrivals. Barry and Morris might read books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four because they, too, feel that they are being socially conditioned—partly by surveillance—to conform to certain rules of behaviour and practice governed by rules about appropriate gender roles, sexuality, and cultural roles. But their reading is also conditioned by their context in post-Thatcher Britain, and demonstrates the ways in which the cult of the individual and of meritocracy has inflected their sense of

170 

J. RAMONE

consciousness. The text is not perhaps as much about race as it is about sexuality, at least in terms of activism and agency. The elderly couple keep their relationship private and resist gay activism, struggling to perform as role models to the young gay Black men who assume that the older men are as open about their sexuality as themselves. Mr Loverman is one example of the pattern in recent texts which chart the ways in which capitalist individualism and neoliberalism undermines consciousness. Consciousness is recuperated by Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, though.

4.7   Part 3: Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Consciousness Despite Neoliberalism The opposition between white trash reading and Black Consciousness reading persists in Swing Time, but it is less pronounced than in Joan Riley’s Romance: in Swing Time, the unnamed narrator’s mother ridicules the dancers’ biographies that her daughter reads, and instead describes the texts that she considers valuable—texts about Africa and about consciousness, and by Black writers. Yet, her reading recommendations are not straightforwardly acknowledged in the text. “The mother’s the reader” (Smith 2016,  211), she asserts—and the narrator’s mother’s reading determines all of her own relationships: the narrator’s father reads The Communist Manifesto (19) to gain her praise; the Noted Activist leaves her when his own reading and writing can’t match hers; Miriam supports her when she runs Black Consciousness meetings and Black History Months events, often in local libraries (151) where “relevant literature” (239) is sold. And her daughter’s ultimate statement of rebellion is to say that she doesn’t care about her books (187). Reading dictates, of course, her relationship with her daughter, and consequently this determines the narrator’s relationships with others. The mother is an activist and reads constantly, from a library that she builds containing mostly books that constitute suitable Black Consciousness materials: “The Black Jacobins” (16); “Langston Hughes’ poetry” (306); “a wall of slave narratives” (439); “histories of the Caribbean” (439); James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (444). She carries “serious books with her all the time” (233) and even uses these as a pillow to prop up Tracey’s head when she drives her home, after the narrator meets her drunk at a nightclub, Tracey being the narrator’s childhood friend and her constant foil. At university, the narrator is drawn towards Rakim, who resembles

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

171

her mother in his unwavering commitment to consciousness and activism and in his reading habits, but who, similarly, makes her feel inadequate for not achieving the required level of consciousness in her attitudes or behaviour. Her behaviour is criticised even when they have sex, where Rakim explicitly says she isn’t “conscious enough”, because for Rakim consciousness should enable her to demonstrate earthy abandon; she understands sex, instead, as something that doesn’t disturb an equal and everyday relationship or event, describing her version of sex in a book-metaphor: “like a shelf of books between bookends”. Books organised this way are separate from the rest of life and do not spill over into other things. They are organised and tidy, easy to pick up and put down again—nothing like her mother’s books that take over every interaction and encounter: important objects can be found left “under a pile of books” (213); her home is “half buried” (431) in books and when the narrator goes to stay there she moves “piles of books” (440) around, ineffectively attempting to make space for herself. Unlike her mother, the narrator’s reading is often unfocused: she reads avidly as a child: old showbiz biographies (121), dancers’ biographies (210), and The History of Dance (100, recalling this again later (329)); this focused reading selection is considered a mark of her gifted abilities by her schoolteacher. The books also help her to cement her friendship with pianist Mr Booth who reads from her library books before they sing together at her ballet classes (118, 119). However, as an adult her reading is something that she considers as a good habit that is difficult to maintain: at work she sometimes has a “book in her hand” (87) and uses The Biography of Rock to construct press releases (91); she tries to read in her room regularly (131) when living with her employer, the popstar Aimee, setting herself a target of half an hour of reading each day (132) and encourages Aimee to read books that she considers valuable (133). In Africa, she reads books about the region by head torch (249) but she is unable to recall one of the earliest reading moments in the text that has a profound impact on her: one of her mother’s first attempts to guide her daughter’s reading is when she tells her that she is reading about the Sankofa bird, explaining that “it looks backwards, at the past, and it learns from what’s gone before” (30). Sankofa is an Akan word originating in Ghana derived from the words SAN (return), KO (go), and FA (look, seek and take). The sense translation of the word and the symbol is “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind”. The bird is mentioned after the child narrator asks

172 

J. RAMONE

her mother for a doll who wets herself. She had been playing a game performing as the incontinent doll’s parents with Tracey, and her mother responds to this request by looking “up from her books with a mixture of incredulity and disgust”, before turning the Sankofa bird’s lesson into an insult aimed at the father (“some people never learn”) and an instruction for her daughter involving an awareness of her difference from Tracey: “That silly dance class is her whole world. It’s not her fault—that’s how she’s been raised. But you’re clever. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got flat feet, doesn’t matter because you’re clever and you know where you came from and where you’re going” (31). Although she promises she would never forget (31) what her mother told her, her next thoughts are of Tracey and how to maintain their friendship without dolls. This moment only becomes significant on a second reading of the novel, since the narrator dismisses her mother’s instruction and the moment is not recalled in the text. The adult narrator experiences a connection with a real baby for the first time when her employer, popstar Aimee, adopts an African baby (who is named Sankofa) in a transaction the narrator considers exploitative and, in retaliation, circulates the adoption documents to try to discredit Aimee’s motivations and reveal legal faults. Aimee dismisses the narrator from her job and she has no choice but to return to the UK and seek out her mother, who she has failed to contact for many months despite knowing that she is dying. The adopted baby instigates her journey back to her mother, which in turn leads her back to Tracey, who she finds dancing. For the narrator, the Sankofa bird’s advice that “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind” is understood to refer to Tracey who had been left behind, and to take from that return the idea of a future family with Tracey, who she regards as her “sister”—this, combined with the Afrocentric symbol of Sankofa indicates the achievement of consciousness. Victoria Arana observed that the Sankofa symbol can be witnessed in operation aesthetically, noting that Black artists and writers in Britain today have emerged out of “earlier aesthetic positions and practices” and that they remain connected to these “in important ways” (2007, 9). Some of the earlier aesthetic positions and practices that inform Swing Time are swing dance, and writing about dance: in an interview, Zadie Smith revealed that part of her inspiration for the novel was dancer and choreographer Martha Graham’s biography, and quoted instructions from the text which she seemed to interpret as allowing her to write without the pressure of expectation (or, the burden of representation):

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

173

One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers—you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham’s biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” (Smith 2016)

The passage is full of commas, creating a curious parallel with the same habitual use of commas in extra-grammatical ways in Smith’s novel, which has been noted for its unorthodox punctuation in reviews. Smith’s use of the comma has been connected with dance, but it also seems to assert a distance between story and text, overtly engaging with textuality: the commas disrupt the reading experience which never becomes passive. The narrator’s return to her “sister” Tracey, combined with the Afrocentric symbol of Sankofa conveys the resurgence of consciousness in Swing Time through an act of reading (appropriately conscious material) to her mother in the hospice and which was triggered by one of the earliest moments of reading (consciousness-reading) in the text, and, as the final word of the novel—“dancing”—affirms, is connected with an instance of reading outside the narrative that enables freedom of expression. In the early years of the Black Consciousness movement in Britain, there was an identifiable literary content and style that was considered to align with the movement, but this was anything but restrictive, as Andrew Salkey explained in his lengthy discussion of what he terms “the new Black awareness” in 1969, discussed above. Above all, the movement insisted that writers are at the same time activists; for Victoria Arana this might be termed otherwise as writers expressing their “tigritude”. Acknowledging the ongoing relevance of Sankofa, and by extension Black Consciousness, Victoria Arana also asks whether contemporary writers are still “enunciating their tigritude or taking it for granted” (2007, 8). With this question, Arana considers Wole Soyinka’s claim that if a tiger does not “boast of its tigritude” the Black writer or artist should not boast of his or her negritude; taking issue with this, Arana finds that in the diaspora the artist needs not just negritude but also tigritude—the “growl” of the British

174 

J. RAMONE

artist reaching out deliberately with their works which insist on both a politics of identity and an aesthetics of identity (2007, 2). This is a useful way to address the shifting sense of Black Consciousness in the UK: Arana’s question is, not whether Black Consciousness is still required, but whether it remains a position to be debated or is instead an integral part of the Black writer’s professional identity—in which case, it might be both restrictive in the ways that publishers demand particular perspectives, and restricted, since its lack of enunciation may affect its political potency. Michelle Jon Wilkinson notes that we have a responsibility to remember tradition, but that “a tradition of revolution […] swings, pendulum-like, up against the past with each stride it makes into the future” (Arana 2007, 16). Rather than departing from its origin, Black Writing in Britain today is, Adriene M Taylor suggests, “hitting up against” “the tradition of revolutionary poetics of the Black Diaspora” (Arana 2007, 16). Black Consciousness bookshops, I argue, encouraged generations of readers to become critical thinkers and emphasised the significance of books and reading in shaping ideology. The result is the continued belief in the relevance of the arts as transformative, and in artists (and readers) as active participants in social change, as Arana maintains: “the arts—the works of the creative imagination—can do a good deal more than” bear witness (2007, 3). Smith’s Swing Time engages with one of the African diaspora’s founding writers, James Baldwin, in order to move the narrator towards a conscious position which is informed by Sankofa. While her mother’s reading about Sankofa, and her own repeated reading of dance biographies are two of the three significant reading moments in the text, the final important act of reading takes place in the final pages of the novel where the narrator reads from Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” to her mother who is dying in the hospice (444–5). James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (2009 [1957]) is described as the narrator’s mother’s favourite book and it begins with a statement that is both a repetition of reading, and also a remark about the effect of reading and the need to repeat an act of reading in order for it to begin to make sense: “I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again” (17). The story is about two brothers, one who has achieved a level of financial security and social purpose as a schoolteacher, and the other who is a musician and drug addict, who had joined the navy and been in prison as a result of his drug addiction. It is also a story which foregrounds the prescribed routes that young Black boys and men have available to them: the

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

175

narrator describes the boys he teaches banging their heads against the ceiling of their actual possibility in conflict with the possibilities that cinema shows them. It is a story about cycles and repeated patterns. These patterns are difficult for the community to accept in the text: on Sunday afternoons, “the old folks [sit] […] talking about where they’ve come from, and what they’ve seen, and what’s happened to them and their kinfolk”, and then they stop talking, because, “the child knows”, “if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him” (27). We might perceive as an echo in Swing Time the narrator’s unwillingness to allow the past to inform her future; her ultimate insult to her mother is to reject her books and to promptly forget the lesson about the Sankofa bird that she had solemnly promised to remember. Through its quiet references to the Sankofa principle, Swing Time offers a way back towards the Black Consciousness movement. Sankofa offers hope in the contemporary post-Thatcher, capitalist context where the Black individual rather than the Black community is central. The narrator’s mother struggles to accept that a Black community—or more generally, a working-class community—has no meaning in this period, and for this reason, her sense of responsibility towards Tracy can be read as motivated by the collective endeavour that her generational understanding of Black Consciousness conveys. The narrator’s Black Consciousness is affected by the culture of the individual, and is damaged by it: it takes her unconscious maternal and daughterly love for baby Sankofa and her loss of moral capital over this baby’s future, as well as the loss of her own mother, for her to feel capable of embarking on a collective path of sisterhood and community motherhood with Tracy. But her story is one of consciousness, where reading, as a direct means of acquiring consciousness, remains central. Consciousness is conveyed in ways that reflect how the processes of Black Consciousness (collective organisation and community engagement) and its sites (including the Black Consciousness bookshops and other spaces for the arts) have been transformed by neoliberalism. Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” remains conspicuously unfinished at the end of the text as the narrator’s mother is dying. This contributes to an identifiable pattern of unread texts in Black Writing in Britain in recent decades, but is also significant since it resists a redemptive reading involving the mother and daughter’s reconciliation. It also refuses to suggest that the daughter learns directly from her mother, that she is conveyed as dutiful, and that she enters into a linear narrative or chronology. While her mother is dying, the narrator takes the decision to

176 

J. RAMONE

walk towards Tracey instead of to the hospice to finish reading to her mother, and it is during the act of her walking away that her mother dies. In her article on the directions that dance can offer writers, Smith writes, “maybe nobody truly owns anything”, referring to the world of aesthetic possibilities. Ultimately, this is a novel about embodied labour, and particularly Black women’s embodied labour, including motherhood—in this context, Smith’s comment can be interpreted as a statement about wage labour, and the control of bodies which is Kendra Unruh’s concern in her work about the Lindy Hop and the ways in which swing dance enabled Black women to step outside their embodied labour (Unruh 2011, 214) The Lindy Hop has become fashionable in recent years, but there is a clear distinction between the contemporary dance, often performed in competitions by almost exclusively white dancers wearing fashions from later periods, and the version performed in the film Hellzapoppin from 1941. In Hellzapoppin, the performance is more aggressive and faster paced, and it is danced in workwear—the dancers wear maid’s outfits, cleaner’s outfits, labourer’s clothes, and postal worker’s uniforms. The dance troupe are the renowned Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers who, also known as Whitey’s Hoppin’ Maniacs, were “a group of professional Lindy Hoppers organized by Herbert ‘Whitey’ White in the early 1930s. Whitey often had numerous groups (up to twelve at one point) which he would send all over the world to perform the Lindy Hop either on stage or in films. Most of the groups disbanded by 1942 when many of the male dancers were sent to war” (Unruh 2011, 233 n.6). Whitey’s Lindy Hop scene is staged in the liminal space behind their on-screen place of work, surrounded by stairwells (Homi Bhabha’s favoured liminal space being enacted here). Not only this, but the dancers move further and further away from the dramatic foreground, the visible space, often moving off screen more swiftly than the camera can (or chooses to) follow, implying unseen activity. The idea of liminality and the oppressive hierarchy of class and race implied are enhanced by the speaker at the beginning of this sequence, who suggests that dancing to this rhythm is inevitable and that he will be unable to resist unless the music stops in time. It is noticeable that he makes this claim three times, evoking the swing rhythm which is itself a rhythm of “triples”: “in the basic step of the Lindy Hop ‘the swingout’ the two partners were able to both pull apart and establish their individuality through improvisation (on counts one and two and then again

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

177

on counts seven and eight) and then pull together for the triple step on counts three and four as a means of working together” (Unruh 2009, 10). This 1941 film is made before Black Consciousness emerged as a movement—even before the beginning of the civil rights era. This evokes the presentation in Swing Time of a period before the narrator’s coming to consciousness which strikes a discordant note with the other representations of developing consciousness expressed in texts which it might be expected to resemble, such as Burning an Illusion and Romance. Instead of demonstrating a linear journey towards consciousness, Swing Time pivots around the narrator’s misgivings concerning cultural appropriation and exploitation—her own as much as her pop star employer Aimee’s. It ponders the various ways in which Black Consciousness can create a version of public identity, and it conveys the complexity of living as a mixed-­ race child then woman. It is only the narrator’s later recognition of the white narrative that she was drawn into that allows her to appreciate that it has made Black or mixed-race experience invisible, and this encourages her to pursue her journey towards consciousness. Hellzapoppin can be read as foregrounding—rather than maintaining— the cultural appropriation of swing dance by white dancers and capitalists. The Lindy Hop had a particular cultural meaning. In general, as Joel Dinerstein asserts, “[t]he social function of nearly all African American musical practice before 1945 was to create a public forum that provided the following: social bonding through music and dance, an opportunity to create an individual style within a collective form, and a dense rhythmic wave that imparts ‘participatory consciousness’ to the audience” (Dinerstein 2003, 7–8). More specifically, it had significance for the Black working class meaning that segment of society was distinct from what was recognised at the time as a Black bourgeoisie, who felt threatened by the potential for sexual promiscuity that they perceived the Lindy Hop offered. Unruh notes that: [Langston] Hughes points out the need for revolt against work; […] many Black working-class people at this time agreed and took solace in jazz dance. These young, Black men and women included not only “kitchen mechanics”, a slang term for maids and cooks, but also waiters, porters, doormen, secretaries, hairdressers, stevedores, carpenters, and janitors. […] At the most basic level, jazz culture allowed the workers to reclaim their bodies as a source of personal enjoyment rather than a mechanism of labor. Furthermore, it provided […] a means to resist the dominant culture, both

178 

J. RAMONE

the White and Black bourgeois culture that emphasized the importance of work and respectability. (Unruh 2011, 214)

It is interesting to note that dance was inseparable from embodied labour in this context: as Unruh asserts, dance was a resistance towards, specifically, “wage labor that was repetitive, non-engaging, and poorly paid” (Unruh 2011, 215). Tera Hunter explains that “the connotation of ‘work’ in Black culture had multiple meanings. Work not only meant physical labor, it also meant dancing” (Hunter 1997, 181). The Lindy Hop was adopted into white culture when it was perceived that it could be exploited for profit. The dance was transformed from its original purpose, which was the recovery from and a rejection of the dancers’ embodied labour during working hours. It was instead used as a means to exploit embodied labour, as Unruh describes: “clubs like the Cotton Club were able to make money [from] the white consumption of staged performances of the Lindy Hop […] [and] the film industry also contributed to the dissemination and ‘whitening’ of the Lindy Hop” (Unruh 2009, 12) According to Gena Caponi-Tabery, the “technical innovations” of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers were spread across the country through films like A Day at the Races (1937), Merry-Go-Round (1937), Radio City Revels (1938), Keep Punching (1939), Hellzapoppin (1941), and Cabin in the Sky (1943) (Caponi-Tabery 2008, 59). However, Unruh goes on to note that for most American film audiences, their first encounter with the Lindy Hop was when it was performed on film by white dancers. In the film A Day at the Races (1937), for instance, air steps were first introduced to a national audience (60). However, the Lindy Hop scene was censored because the scenes involved “racial mixing” so they were “censored out of distribution copies throughout the South and other areas of the United States” (Giordano 2007, 93). Unruh sees this as the erasure of the Lindy Hop’s history and its re-presentation as a white dance (60). In Hellzapoppin the Black dancers are explicitly separated from whites, and this is marked in the cinematography, the language, and the costumes—it is overt, and I maintain that the purpose of this is to convey a deliberate message about the effects of racial segregation. The film plot concerns an attempt to put on a dance performance to raise money, and in the film the Black dancers are observed by the white event organisers who say at the end of the dance, “I wish they were in our show. Maybe next time” commenting— perhaps only very gently and not as effectively as is necessary to create revolution—on the context of inequality at the heart of race relations and

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

179

politics and economics in the USA in 1941. If the white characters fail to convey sufficient revolutionary zeal, though, the Black dancers are more successful. Even if white capitalist culture did appropriate the Lindy Hop it did so in a sanitised way that fails to capture the essence of the dance. The aggression displayed in the movements of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers conveys a sense of collective organisation, alongside a powerfully expressed desire to take back control of their embodied labour that can be read as part of the foundation on which Black Consciousness was later to be built. Swing Time can be read through the representation of the Lindy Hop in this film for a number of reasons. First, because it is a novel about the pattern created by that swing rhythm—“threeness” rather than “twoness”; this describes the narrator and Tracey’s relationship which is always dependent upon a third person: Tracey’s father; the narrator’s mother; Aimee. The Lindy Hop is also appropriate to Swing Time’s particular articulation of consciousness: “in the basic step of the Lindy Hop, ‘the swingout’, the partners were able to pull apart and establish their individuality through improvisation and then pull together for the triple step as a means of working together” (Unruh 2009, 10), again a clear echo of Tracey’s and the narrator’s relationship, which is at the text’s centre. It is a novel concerned with dance as a way to assert identity, and the protagonist, like the Lindy Hoppers, is preoccupied with her embodied labour and the extent to which this dictates her identity. The novel repeatedly poses questions about the nature of embodied labour, considering how this applies to the dancers; to those employed by Aimee in various roles, most of whom were required to traverse conventional boundaries in their roles as her “assistants”; through to the carer who nurses the narrator’s mother in the hospice at the end of the text who, she emphasises repeatedly (also using his full name Alan Pennington despite her daughter’s question about this habit), is employed to care, who cares for a living. The novel is particularly alert to questions over Black women’s embodied labour, including motherhood—both in terms of maternal care and duties, and in relation to international adoption enabled through economic transaction and the girl child as gift or purchase. Reading for consciousness is displaced in the novel: firstly when one of its most steadfast followers, Rakim, is discovered to be mixed race despite his claims to the contrary, when his white mother attends his graduation ceremony, and later in the death of the narrator’s mother. Her assertion of reading for consciousness formed a difficult structuring device for the protagonist who was drawn instead towards dancing and, indeed, at the end

180 

J. RAMONE

of the novel the narrator’s mother drifts away from books as she passes out of her conscious life; this is emphasised at her death: the narrator walks towards her friend Tracey’s flat and sees Tracey and her children “dancing”, which is the final word in the text. If dancing replaces reading as a means to acquire identity in this text it does so through an engagement with dance as a precursor of consciousness movements, and also because of another act of reading. It seems very possible that the text itself was inspired to no small degree—both in subject and in style—by the book that the author has described reading, a book about dance which uses the comma in the idiosyncratic manner used by Zadie Smith. The cited dancer’s autobiography also circumvents some difficult political questions in favour of an expression of freedom and individualism; this evokes the context of capitalist individualism which is the direct subject of the text: the narrator, as well as her mother, Tracey, and Aimee, are able to work—to varying degrees—their way out of their class-determined contexts and to become either rich and famous (Aimee), influential and powerful (the narrator’s mother), powerful through beauty and performance (Tracey), or powerful through the assumptions attached to their raced bodies (the narrator). If the text is not a straightforward narrative of developing consciousness through reading, still it is a book about the ways in which reading and developing consciousness in a particular socioeconomic and historical context shape identity and subject position. The Lindy Hop created the opportunity for “social bonding” and enabled “individual style within a collective form” to impart “participatory consciousness” to the audience (Dinerstein 2003, 7–8). This aesthetic history seems to have enabled Zadie Smith to express a post-neoliberal version of consciousness that looks back to move forward in ways that the narrator’s mother—restrained by a “pure” version of consciousness—couldn’t. The text asks us—gently—to look back as a way of moving forward, and to do so by taking instruction from jazz music, which embodies the principle of repetition, and provides ways for us to understand the principle of repetition with a Black difference. Likewise, we are expected to learn from dance, even paying attention to the way that dancers write as though it can inform how we understand reading and writing. The text primarily engages with swing timing and with the history of swing dance, so if we keep in mind that the history of Black Writing in Britain, and of African diaspora writing worldwide, insists that art has a power that can transform, then the original, Black swing dance emerges from Swing Time as a source for a

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

181

contemporary articulation of Black Consciousness which contains within it the history of appropriation. Mixed race identities and the rhizomatic connections between Black individuals and populations worldwide result in the kind of complexities that the unnamed narrator represents in Swing Time.

4.8   Part 4: Helen Oyeyemi and Repetition with a Black Difference In Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House (2007), there is an injunction, after Emily Dickinson, to write against the grain, “telling it slant” (Oyeyemi 2007, epigraph). Here, and in Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman, reading is the province of the individual who can succeed based on their own “merit”. The idea of hierarchy surrounds reading in Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection What is not yours is not yours (2016), too; books generally operate in contexts of privilege: libraries are left in wills and female Oxbridge students stage a protest by replacing male society members’ reading materials with books written by women. Although it doesn’t foreground consciousness, The Opposite House suits a treatment via signifyin(g)—repetition with a Black difference (Gates 1988). Gates’s “Signifyin(g)” has been the object of much discussion and interrogation: it insists upon a “Black difference” that is, as John Cullen Gruesser has argued, supposed to identify a literary style but relies upon context: if, as Gates argues, the term does not identify a racial essence, then the “‘identifiable Black Signifyin(g) difference’ that makes African American literature distinctive had to have been created by the material conditions in which a particular group of people (arbitrarily) designated as Black found themselves” (Gruesser 2005, 55). This, Gruesser asserts, calls the term into question because it uncovers the politics motivating the literature rather than an aesthetic principle which is what Gates intended to define. Signifyin(g) involves indirect discourse and ambiguous, humorous language; it challenges Standard English; it undermines the notion of order and coherence, intention, and control; it produces contradictions; it draws attention to—and thus destabilises—what has been taken for granted or is invisible (Gruesser 2005). Signifyin(g) is not usually applied to British literature and is instead considered in relation to African American writing, especially writing with transnational influences and references. Yet, since its origins are in African and Caribbean mythologies and storytelling,

182 

J. RAMONE

and these are the literary roots shared by Black British writers alongside a European literary heritage, there is merit in considering its relevance. The Opposite House presents a very typically British context set in a London suburb and exploring education and work, it also engages with several non-British contexts. A parallel narrative presents a figurative “somewherehouse” informed by Cuban Santeria and with doors opening in both Lagos and London. Further, Maja comes into contact with the white British world in a peripheral way as the only white people in the text have determinedly non-British identities: her white boyfriend Aaron grew up in Ghana, identifies as Ghanaian, and demonstrates closer identification with Black Ghanaians than white Britons—this is something that Maja resents, perhaps because of her own disconnection from her non-British origins in Cuba. And Maja’s best friend Amy Eleni, though white, is insistently non-­ British and polices this identity through the use of her Cypriot middle name at all times. Oyeyemi positions herself as a global writer rather than a local one, and writes about different contexts across her literary output, her recent short story collection focusing on Eastern European storytelling traditions. Maja’s job as a jazz singer is in itself “Repetition with a difference”, the staple of jazz, which signifies on non-African American popular songs, known as standards. Jazz performance is one of the repeated textual events and this is reclaimed as a Black tradition by the text, engaging with both negritude and signifyin(g), the vernacular nature of jazz being its improvisation and the concept of self-invention. The lack of a prescribed origin or pattern which is conveyed in definitions of negritude is reinforced by this improvisational musical form. But even this highly experimental form is disrupted in the text by three things, which we might understand as three repetitions with a difference: first, Maja’s lost voice; second, her pregnancy; and finally, her encounter with the woman she knew as a child and the revelation of her false memory, meaning that her repetitions of that scene which have formed part of her core identity have been false. It is significant that the collapse of Maja’s only memory of Cuba occurs when she is singing with her jazz band. Maja’s sense of Cuban identity rests upon this memory, where she sat under a table and watched another child experiencing a fit while feeling helpless and enthralled. This child, now an adult, tells the same story with the opposite scenario: it was Maja who had the fit and the other girl who observed. “Repetition with a difference” is also the basis of psychotherapy. Repetition with a different frame is considered in psychotherapy to be

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

183

healing. And like Gerard Genette’s narrative theory on repetition, in psychotherapy there is no “absolute” repetition—as a result, psychotherapy can employ techniques to improve the context on each repetition. Maja and Amy Eleni share a “hysteric”, a personification of their fears and anxieties. This “hysteric” figure can be read as a feminist presence who disrupts the “quiet”, “lovely”, appropriate femininity expressed by Amy Eleni’s mother. She is also big and strong and can “grab”, “catch” them, but only if they allow her to. At the same time this hysteric sanctions their self-cutting. Tracing the repeated presence of the hysteric reveals hysteria repeated with a Black difference in this text. Hysteria has been—along with psychoanalysis—represented as a particularly white middle-class and feminine phenomenon. This is problematic in multiple ways, but this text addresses particular implications: the hysteric is repetition with a Black (British) difference of Fanon’s deep psychological damage done to the Black man on contact with the white world. It is also, of course, repetition with a Black British female difference. The hysteric might be seen as positive since it indicates that the interiority of the Black subject now emerges with central significance in place of an emphasis on living conditions or political rights, yet it seems irrational to suggest that embracing hysteria indicates something positive for the Black British subject. Helen Cousins notes that the presence of the unborn child in The Opposite House disconnects Maja from her bodily self (2012, 12), and in this context we can read the representation of maternity and the pregnant body as repetition with a (Black) difference: while Amy Eleni’s revelation to her mother that she is gay leads her mother to grieve her daughter’s wasted maternity (177), Maja’s pregnancy corresponds with her psychological dissolution. More striking is her unorthodox response to her pregnant body: she describes her breasts as useless “rotten lumps” despite their traditional purpose in her unborn baby’s future, and unlike the typical maternal image of the mother caressing her growing body, she says: “I keep holding my hands away from myself” (17). The idea of repetition with a Black difference supports a productive reading of Oyeyemi’s novel which evades straightforward categorisation as “Black British”: its contexts are not typically postcolonial since they involve a migration from Cuba rather than a former British colony (which is not strictly historically accurate); it avoids Black/white binaries by disrupting narratives of both Black and white identities through their transnationality; it rejects the publisher-preferred Black British narratives of cultural alienation, poverty, and racism, and instead centres around a talented middle-class family of

184 

J. RAMONE

academics, sportsmen, and musicians. Despite its focus on cultural activity, the novel conveys a resistant narrative through its repetitions with a Black difference which refigures the flawed grand narratives of hysteria and maternity. There are nineteen instances of reading in The Opposite House. Seven of these refer to specific texts and writers, any many instances involve multiple references. Most are classic texts of philosophy, literature, or modern literature, and a handful are canonical German and Latin American texts: Kant (12); Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto (82); Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter, a classic German collection of children’s moral tales (85); Saki, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, The Great Gatsby, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (129); Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba, Alejo Carpentier, Gertrude Gomez de Avellanda’s Sab; Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (132, 198); Shelley, Marvell, Donne, Shakespeare (229). Maja’s brother and her parents, especially her father, as well as her closest friend Amy Eleni and her boyfriend Aaron—all of the people of significance in Maja’s life—value books very highly. Her brother Tomas would easily be distracted and go in search of books—typically, while his mother was braiding cornrows in his hair, “he would think of something and get impatient halfway through and wander around the house looking for a book with the paragraph that was perfect for that starburst of thought” (226). Maja understands that her father lives for books; a self-confessed “bookhead” (156), he “didn’t think of money as money; he thought of it as a way to get books, going over title lists in his head over and over again” (155). His repetitions are a method of approaching and acquiring books; when Maja enters into repetitive behaviours it is to avoid books. Maja’s family and friends rely upon books to define status, Maja’s father declaring “I write textbooks!” as an indication of his social standing, then instructing Maja to “read a book or something” as his idea of a customary and sanctioned pastime (94). Books are acknowledged as offering support and without them, there is no solution—for Maja’s father, again, it is impossible to understand Maja’s decision to visit Cuba since “there are no texts he can turn to for this problem” (206). Maja has a strained relationship with books. She is uneasy with them, admitting while struggling to understand Kant that “the very layout of the book took the words away from me” (12), and later experiencing a kind of crisis during her English Literature degree studies, and claiming, “I hated books and would kill the spirit of all novels if that power was mine” (79). Contradictorily, she remains attached to books in an intensely

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

185

personal way, likening somebody’s knowledge of her private life to “letting someone read a book […] that has worked witchery on me” (222). As if in battle with books as this admission that their “witchery” might sometimes defeat her implies, she resists them, obstructing Aaron’s attempts to create a closer bond between them through swapping books. Her obstructive tactics are conveyed in a lengthy passage which stands out for its close attention to books because of the strategic avoidance of reading or discussing them, especially since it is the most direct engagement with books in the novel. The passage is highly repetitive and it too begins with a battle over books and reading: “A while ago Aaron wanted us to swap books that we loved; he wanted to read with me, read me. I said, ‘I don’t read.’ He asked again, and on this asking [...] I agreed to swap some books” (129). Almost as if the repetitive process—repeating “swap” “books”, “read”, and “ask” in this short passage—was necessary, this is followed by a further repetitive section during which Maja—again, contrarily—refuses to read the books in imaginative ways: “instead of reading them I smelt them, let them fall open at random pages to look for forehead- or fist-shaped pressure. I walked around wearing a pair of his jeans and put Gatsby in the back pocket the way Aaron did—Volume I of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in one pocket, Gatsby in the other” (129). The most defiant aspect of all is her assured statement, smacking of supreme confidence about literature, over why she does not need to read his books: “I didn’t read the books; I didn’t need to. I could have told him that these were the books he would give me” (129). Her self-confidence wavers when it comes to sharing the books that might reveal something of herself to Aaron, and she initially tries to avoid having to do this by giving him books in Spanish, a language he cannot read. Yet, the books she selects are more imaginative and unpredictable that Aaron’s, and they have particular meaning for her as well as substance: “stories that made Chabella and me laugh”, and the story “about the strong slave who falls in love with a white woman and learns that love makes him better than everyone” (130). Like her awareness of the power or knowledge that being around Aaron’s books might afford her, even if she won’t read them, her close engagement with the books that she shares belies her claim that she does not value books. It might be argued that she has a latent esteem for books while her outward response to books is to discard them, even rejecting a job in a library that her mother had organised, with the exclamation: “I screamed at Mami, ‘A books job! Chabella, are you mad?’” (103). In fact, in the opposite house, the somewherehouse, which might be understood

186 

J. RAMONE

as constructed through Maja’s unconscious, books are privileged: “this place is more of a home for books than it is for people; scruffy paperbacks lounge in heaps on the sofa, rickety shelves host a gap-strewn gallery of faded titles” (162). Feeling guilty about the difficult reading task she has set for Aaron, Maja relents, and after apologising for giving him books that he could not read, her confidence is met by his correspondingly self-­ assured admission that “they’re quite good. Light reading. You know, tube reading” (130), an opinion that he has arrived at with the help of English language translations that he has secretly acquired. In The Opposite House, Maja’s relationship with books and reading transpires as a latent desire, repressed as a result of her detachment from her past. Signifyin(g) might be observed in the repetitions, contradictions, oppositions, and challenges to what is taken for granted. The text avoids some aspects of signifyin(g), namely humour, and challenging Standard English. Yet towards the end of the text there is another important reference to reading, the final one in the novel, which is once again conveyed through highly repetitive patterning. This instance is related to Maja by Amy Eleni and its context is detached from Maja’s. A story about Amy Eleni’s difficult English Literature class, it is both humorous (at least from the point of view of the instigators, Amy Eleni’s students) and is a challenge to the English Literary canon, and to what is taken for granted about that canon (if not to Standard English as a mode of expression): attempting to teach English literature, Amy Eleni is confronted with an incessant barrage of questions, all posed to destabilise her, and not because they require a literal answer: When I talk about Shelley, this same kid at the back shouts out, “Who’s Shelley?” When I talk about Marvell or Donne, this boy or deep-voiced girl shouts out, “Who’s Marvell? Who’s Donne?” When I talk about Shakespeare, this little shit at the back shouts out, “Who’s Shakespeare?” I look and look but there’s about eight of them with their hands over their mouths. (229)

The answer sought might be arrived at through questioning English literary heritage and the relevance of these canonical texts, so this passage might be interpreted as signifyin(g) on that tradition. The students’ actions are similar to Maja’s refusal to read what had been taken for granted as valuable literature when Aaron invited her to share the books he valued. The students have strength in numbers, though; like Maja, they

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

187

are attempting to find their confidence, or perhaps their consciousness, but unlike her they are not doing so in solitude. The novel’s title itself emphasises that which is contradictory, indirect, ambiguous, non-standard, and by foregrounding what is opposite draws attention to or destabilises what might otherwise be invisible or taken for granted. The text repeats a middle-class suburban London adolescence and adulthood with a Black difference, that difference being characterised by narratives that are grounded in repetition: jazz music, repressed memories of childhood as a Black Cuban immigrant, and the representation of hysteria and pre-natal (rather than post-natal) depression. Maja’s sense of consciousness is disturbed by two things: her resistance to reading, which has provided her parents with a foundation of knowledge from the past to draw upon, and, conversely, her parents’ resistance to enabling her to take from her own particular past in Cuba. By the end of the novel she learns that this is what she needs in order to move forward and overcome the fear created by her pregnancy. Maja’s desire to rip up or destroy the spirit of books accords with Salkey’s instruction to plunder, reshape, and transmute literary influences in the service of achieving Black Consciousness (CAM/4/3/4 (11)). Her destructive expression is, she admits herself, not absolutely sincere: “Papi is not so wrong when he says of Cuban women, ‘Siempre el drama [always, drama]’” (79). Her battle is to locate Sankofa and thereby achieve consciousness independently since that has been displaced from her everyday reality. It is, above all, the level of independence she has been expected to achieve, a level that almost constitutes abandonment, that makes Maja’s struggle to find consciousness so pronounced. In the context of her high achieving and wealthy Black middle-­ class family, the capitalist, post-Thatcher context of a so-called meritocracy locates this solitary struggle squarely within an economic explanation.

4.9   Comment in Conclusion: What Reading Means in Black Writing in Britain The Black Consciousness bookshop has, of course, a physical location, and, as explored in James Procter’s (2003) Dwelling Spaces, there is a preponderance on physical spaces in Black British writing: domestic spaces, remapping the street, and encounters in public spaces. Following this, I was expecting the reading space to emerge again as a focus in Black British texts representing reading. Interestingly, the somewherehouse is informed

188 

J. RAMONE

by Cuban Santeria, and this is the only example in The Opposite House where the reading place is prioritised over reading matter, an observation that I have made about the purpose of reading instances in Cuban literature in the chapter on Cuba in this book, and in previous publications (Ramone 2016, 2019). Instead of finding reading places in Black Writing in Britain, with the exception of the play Fix-Up which takes place within that bookshop space, the bookshop recedes into the background and what emerges instead is a keen attention to what is read. To give an example from the film Burning an Illusion, Pat’s burgeoning consciousness owes much to her “community bookshop” but this location is never visible on screen and is only mentioned, quietly and following a pause in Pat’s voice, in response to her friend Sonia asking where she got her “nice” carved giraffe ornament—this is a prominent scene in the film where Pat asserts her cultural identity to lifelong friend Sonia, who is resistant to these ideas (baulking at a friend’s new baby being given an African name, and rejecting Pat’s Malcom X book as part of “that Black thing”)—it is notable that it is not the book itself that is described as having come from the “community bookshop”, but the carved giraffe. In Black British writing, what is read is all-important. Reading is a responsibility, not just to the self but to the community, a responsibility to a national, cultural, or racial identity, and to the Black Consciousness movement itself. This provides an explanation for the repeated instances of books being unread, discarded, left unfinished, or used to shelter from the rain: such instances are especially common in Black British writing (and less evident in postcolonial literature from other locations). These rejected or misused books, such as those that Maja refuses to read in The Opposite House (Kipling, Saki, The Great Gatsby) are those that do not represent a commitment to consciousness. In Black Writing in Britain, books and reading function as a route towards consciousness, enabling that process even in contemporary contexts where individualism displaces collective organisation. Locating the reader here is about locating the self: in Fix-Up, in Burning an Illusion, in Romance, in Mr Loverman, in Swing Time, in multiple examples, the book chosen must serve an intellectual function that enables consciousness.

References Adebayo, Diran. 1996. Some Kind of Black. London: Abacus. Arana, R. Victoria, ed. 2007. ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

4  BLACK WRITING IN BRITAIN 

189

Baldwin, James. 2009 [1957]. Sonny’s Blues. In The Jazz Fiction Anthology, ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife, 17–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bedford, Simi. 1991. Yoruba Girl Dancing. London: Heinemann. Benjamin, Ionie. 1995. The Black Press in Britain. London: Trentham Books. Biko, Steve. 1978. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brouillette, Sarah, and David Finkelstein. 2013. Postcolonial Print Cultures. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48 (1): 3–7. Caponi-Tabery, Gena. 2008. Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Coetzee, Pieter. 1997. A Marxist Interpretation of Black Attempts at Political Self-­ definition in South Africa. Koers 62 (4): 423–446. Cousins, Helen. 2012. Unplaced/Invaded: Multiculturalism in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House. Postcolonial Text 7 (3): 1–16. Davis, Caroline. 2015. Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dinerstein, Joel. 2003. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Emecheta, Buchi. 1974. Second Class Citizen. London: Heinemann. Evaristo, Bernardine. 2013. Mr Loverman. London: Penguin. Fido, Elaine Savory. 1992. Mother/lands: Self and Separation in the Works of Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head and Jean Rhys. In Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta, 330–349. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, Nigel. 1988. Black Consciousness 1977–1987: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa. Africa Today 35 (1): 5–20. Giordano, Ralph G. 2007. Social Dancing in America: A History and Reference. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gruesser, John Cullen. 2005. Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Hunter, Tera W. 1997. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Johnson, Linton Kwesi. 2002. Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4, 13 December. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00947g4. Accessed 1 February 2016. Jones, Valentino O. 1986. We are Our Own Educators! Josina Machel: From Supplementary to Black Complementary School. London: Karia Press. Kalu, Pete. 2015. Being Me. London: Hope Road.

190 

J. RAMONE

Mitchell, Dreda Say. 2007. Killer Tune. London: Hodder & Stoughton. New Beacon Books. n.d.. https://www.newbeaconbooks.com/new-beaconbooks-1/. Accessed 28 January 2019. Oyeyemi, Helen. 2007. The Opposite House. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2016. What is Not Yours is Not Yours. London: Picador. Pemberton, Joe. 2000. Forever and Ever Amen. London: Headline Review. Potter, H. C., dir. 1941. Hellzapoppin. Universal. Procter, James. 2003. Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ramone, Jenni. 2016. Reading Takes Place: Reading and the Politics of Space in Leonardo Padura’s Havana Quartet. Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 4 (1): 99–118. ———. 2018. The Postcolonial Book Market: Reading and the Local Literary Marketplace. In The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing, ed. Jenni Ramone, 71–88. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2019. Architecture is Repetition: Adapting Postcolonial Spatial Theory for Post-Revolutionary Socialist Cuba. Interventions: International Journal Of Postcolonial Studies 21 (7): 959–976. Riley, Joan. 1985. The Unbelonging. London: The Women’s Press. ———. 1988. Romance. London: The Women’s Press. Shabazz, Menelik, dir. 1981. Burning an Illusion. BFI. Shukra, Kalbir. 1998. The Changing Pattern of Black Politics in Britain. London: Pluto. Smith, Zadie. 2016. Swing Time. London: Penguin. Unruh, Kendra. 2009. Swingin Out White: How the Lindy Hop Became White. https://www.academia.edu/25841172/Swingin_Out_White_How_the_ Lindy_Hop_Became_White. Accessed 4 February 2017. ———. 2011. From Kitchen Mechanics to “Jubilant Spirits of Freedom”: Black, Working-Class Women Dancing the Lindy Hop. The Journal of Pan African Studies 4 (6): 213–233. Voice. 2019. Penguin Supports BAME Bookshop Campaign With £15,000, 2 January. https://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/penguin-supports-bamebookshop-campaign-%C2%A315000. Accessed 22 January 2019. Whitlock, Gillian. 2000. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London: Cassell. Wood, Heloise. 2019. Crowdfunder Launches for London’s First Black Feminist Bookshop. The Bookseller, 8 January. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/ crowdfunded-cash-rolls-londons-first-Black-feminist-bookshop-926461. Accessed 22 January 2019.

CHAPTER 5

Cuba: Reading and Revolution—Cuban Literature and Literary Culture

5.1   Introduction: Literary Culture, the Marketplace, and its Contexts In their editorial to a special journal issue on postcolonial print cultures, Sarah Brouillette and David Finkelstein assert that in any consideration of postcolonial literature, it is necessary to pay close attention to the literary marketplace, claiming that “the internal dynamics of the postcolonial literary text are never quite separable from the ostensibly external world of commodity production and market relations” (2013, 4). This confident assertion might be made with still stronger evidence in the case of Cuba, which provides a particularly apt example of the inseparability of the text and its conditions of production and dissemination. In Cuba, the literary marketplace is central to the nation’s economy, and, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Cuba’s literary marketplace is constructed to a distinctly local model, which operates entirely separately from the global literary market within which most nations are co-opted. This certainly applies in terms of the segment of Cuba’s literary economy which circulates as global, postcolonial, or world literature, in translation. The literary marketplace is central to Cuba’s contemporary, post-Special Period economy, as this chapter will convey, but there have been fluctuations in literature’s place in Cuban society in four distinct periods, as Par Kumaraswami observes in The Social Life of Literature in Revolutionary Cuba: Narrative, Identity, and Well-being (2016). Kumaraswami’s study is

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9_5

191

192 

J. RAMONE

one of the most substantial and influential publications on Cuban literary culture, alongside her Literary Culture in Cuba (2012) co-authored with Antoni Kapcia, and Pamela Smorkaloff’s Readers and Writers in Cuba (1997), which is focused on the pre-Revolutionary period. The four distinct periods in Cuban literary culture can be identified as: prior to the Revolution which took place in 1958–1959; during the first decades of the Revolution up until 1990; during the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990; and in the more recent years of that period from 2000 onwards, years governed by the policy known as the Batalla de Ideas (Battle of Ideas), which Kumaraswami notes is little discussed in academic work within or outside Cuba despite its profound effect on Cuban culture. Cuba’s literary culture from the time of the Revolution onwards is acknowledged as unique due to its prominence and its centrality to everyday life. Policy changes enacted in response to the economic hardship of the Special Period have had the most far-reaching effects since the Revolution. During this period, Cuba felt the full impact of the US-imposed trade embargo, since there was no longer an opportunity for preferential trade agreements with the Soviet Union to offer balance, as had been the case up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Stephen Wilkinson has noted in his far-reaching study of Cuban detective fiction, though, even in the Special Period progress was considered an “achievable goal” in Cuba; Wilkinson suggests that the apparent contradiction of “rapid social, technical and educational development” without the normally adjacent consumerist, late-capitalist milieu results in a battleground, but this is a battleground where Cuba remains healthy: “the revolution, as a modernising and perfecting machine, has survived not merely against a real outside enemy but also against pessimistic attitudes […] from within” (Wilkinson 2006, 256). Wilkinson recognises this pessimism in Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde detective fiction; Padura’s later work, though, recuperates from some of this pessimism in the light of Cuba’s continued efforts to maintain its achievements. The effects of the Special Period are particularly visible in relation to the upsurge in the tourist market, and there has been a resulting accommodation to that market of Cuba’s literary culture. This chapter considers three of those changes in order to offer a response to the question of what reading means in Cuba: the second-­hand book markets, the use of Ernest Hemingway as a tourist attraction, and the impact on social spaces for reading and writing. In Cuba, revolution played out through spatial justice and the reclamation of space. The effect of this in everyday Cuba is the understanding that

5 CUBA 

193

space is not neutral or abstract, a position frequently taken for granted elsewhere, as prominent spatial theorists assert: the work of Edward Soja, for instance, focused on demonstrating the ways in which space is still considered neutral, and on demonstrating the ways that spatial decisions had political motivations and social effects—motivations and effects that combined to maintain and even to increase spatial injustice. Cubans understand space as highly politicised. Since literacy and universal access to literature were central priorities of the Revolution, and since the Revolution involved the redistribution of space, inevitably the spaces identified for reading and for locating books have political significance. It cannot be accidental, then, that literary culture now dominates spaces that were, before the Revolution, symbolic of colonial control. The Plaza de Armas, as its name implies once the location for military exercise in one of the city’s four major squares, is now home to the large second-hand book market which operates every day except Sundays. The large colonial fortress, The Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña (known locally as La Cabaña), once a symbolic and practical instrument of colonial domination of the city, now runs as a museum and is the site of Cuba’s national literary festival and art exhibition, a change of purpose which occurred in 1990 to support an increased international tourist market (Montalvo 2000, 54), with the additional benefit to Cuban citizens since they are the attendees of the literary and art festivals. As I argued in “‘Architecture is repetition’: Adapting postcolonial spatial theory for post-Revolutionary socialist Cuba”, the politics of space remains foregrounded in Cuba, yet increasing accommodation to international trade and tourism poses the risk of reintroducing unequal access to space. To identify this risk, and to consider the meaning of the representation of reading spaces in Cuban literature, this chapter will employ the adapted spatial theory that I developed in that article, employing architectural principles because of its concern with clients, commissions, and the authorship of space which enables an approach to space that is sensitive to the context of Cuba’s increasing involvement with global trade and tourism. Reading spaces are of such importance because in Cuban literature, spaces of reading frequently emerge as what the texts prioritise, rather than the reading matter itself. This is true of “canonical” or classic Cuban literature, contemporary writing, and genre fiction. An example is Leonardo Padura’s series of crime novels which circulate around private and public acts and spaces of reading (Ramone 2016). Here, I engage with Padura’s more recent text, Adios, Hemingway, which might be

194 

J. RAMONE

described as both literary biography and detective fiction—in this text, reading spaces generate productive engagement with the crime detection process, but I apply a prominent architectural concept—repetition—to analyse the repetitions in the text, repetitions which refer to reading, reading spaces, and to Hemingway’s literary persona as part of Cuba’s cultural tourism industry. This chapter will trace the function of reading in Cuba by exploring the representation of reading in texts from the Revolution onwards, contextualised alongside a history of Cuban literary culture. In all periods, there is an emphasis on the spaces and places where reading takes place, which is repeated in literary representations of reading. Examples of Cuban literature foregrounding reading spaces extend far beyond Padura, of course: recent short stories written by Cuban women include, alongside references to canonical literary texts, descriptions of libraries, bookshops, bookshelves, and they recount places where reading happens: attics, bedrooms, hotel lobbies. The texts demonstrate a broader engagement with space, collections of detective fiction being organised in city districts as in Achy Obejas’s Havana Noir (2007), and other collections titled to draw attention to space, such as María Elena Llana’s Domicilio Habanero/An Address in Havana (2014). Further, texts obliquely encounter space by making reference to the neighbourhood, room, patio, living room, or to tracking, or orienting, all in the context of literature (Berg 2003; Yañez 1998). In a later section, I will discuss reading spaces in two works by Alejo Carpentier; for the moment it is worth noting that even in The Kingdom of this World (1957) which invites relatively few references to books since is set in early nineteenth-century decolonised Haiti, those instances of reading that do take place are referred to in terms of reading spaces—booksellers, bookshelves, the plantation slavemasters’ home. As a final example, in Jesús Díaz’s The Initials of the Earth (1987), “Library” is so nicknamed because of his knowledge of books, but he is named for a reading place rather than after a book or a reading practice. The emphasis on reading places in literary texts may be directly related to the history of Cuban reading culture which involves intense censorship and elite private reading groups in pre-revolutionary Cuba, and the repurposing of public and private spaces for reading and writing workshops after the revolution, along with vast second hand book markets and a literary festival occupying a former colonial prison, and covering every period the phenomenon of the cigar factory readers, together forming a pattern of unorthodoxy and change in reference to reading spaces.

5 CUBA 

195

5.2   Part 1: Cuban Literary Culture and its Reading Spaces 1720–2000 Pamela Smorkaloff’s Readers and Writers in Cuba (1997) offers the most comprehensive account of Cuban literary culture before the Revolution. Her study traces print culture in Cuba from the arrival of the printing press in 1720 until the contemporary period. That earliest period was characterised by persecution and censorship and a very small literate public of around 15% of the population by 1825, which led to a private, elite, and somewhat secretive literary circle meeting in tertulias, gatherings in private houses, which were particularly active in the 1830s and 1840s. This pattern persisted until the early decades of the twentieth century and was determined by complementary factors: restrictive laws against reading particular materials, a lack of funding for literature, and a severely limited higher education provision overseen by the Spanish colonial powers, at one point restricted to theology as the sole subject that could be taught in Cuba, which was restricted further in that only wealthy white males were admitted to the university. In the 1830s and 1840s Havana was one of only six cities in the Americas (alongside Bahia, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, and Rio de Janeiro) with a population of over 100,000, yet books published in the city only had a lifetime sales figure of 250 copies (Smorkaloff 1997, 3). This was a result of low literacy levels, a growing illiterate population, and a Higher Education system that developed slowly; the tertulias emerged as a limited outlet for writers and readers to meet, but even this was restricted by divisions between the literate elite (the literati, the university community, and the sugar elite), which were aggravated by the Spanish monarchy who feared losing control over an educated distant colony, as Smorkaloff observes, and who, as a result, implemented a decree prohibiting entry into Cuba of “all printed matter that attempted to provoke discontent and foment” followed by a local ban imposed by Governor Lersundi on any gathering “for the purposes of reading and commenting on literary works and periodicals” (Smorkaloff 1997, 6–7). Lacking support, literary culture remained elite and limited, and resorted to a printing-on-credit model which continued into the 1950s, in combination with the circulation of literary journals: this pattern determined the nature of literary culture until the Revolution. A further limiting factor was the domination of this restricted literary culture to Havana; this was exacerbated by the war of 1868–1878 which caused the devastation of formerly busy presses in Cienfuegos, Sagua la Grande, and

196 

J. RAMONE

Güines, allowing Havana-Matanzas printers to gain control (Smorkaloff 1997, 17). Similarly, the struggle for independence from Spain culminating in the Spanish-American war of 1898–1899 had an impact on literary productivity since writers who had the impetus to write in defence of nationalism and independence experienced a hiatus which lasted, as Smorkaloff observes, from around 1906 in the aftermath of independence from Spanish colonial rule, until the 1920s (Smorkaloff 1997, 19). The period between colonialism and revolution was restricted by conditions little different from the colonial period, since the historical pattern of censorship practices, limited material resources, and a 75% rate of illiteracy towards the end of the nineteenth century “constituted unsurmountable obstacles for the development of a national publishing industry” (Smorkaloff 1997, 21). A commitment from writers and artists to develop a literary culture gained some traction in the 1920s and 1930s, when writers began rejecting the idea of personal advancement in favour of creating a readership and “redefining national culture” (Smorkaloff 1997, 41). However, in addition to the challenges facing the development of a literary culture already existing prior to the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, two further factors stifled literary culture in the decades leading up to the Revolution: the first was the development of further censorship restrictions, which permitted booksellers to stock and sell materials considered “subversive”, but prosecuted those who read the texts (Smorkaloff 1997, 45). The second factor was the advent of a “mass art” context in the 1940s and 1950s; for Smorkaloff this was a wholly negative phenomenon which can be attributed to the level of control exerted over writers contributing to these forms. Smorkaloff describes the proliferation of soap operas, radio novellas, and Hollywood productions as “pseudocultural” (Smorkaloff 1997, 55), in part because writers were instructed to follow strict guidelines for scripts, stipulations over characterisation, and rigid recommendations were followed up by heavy editorial control, leaving “no room for creativity or autonomy on the part of the writer under contract” (López 1998, 353) and little time outside their contracts to pursue independent writing which was then subject to dispute over intellectual property rights with the production companies who employed the writers (Smorkaloff 1997, 56). Steps taken to produce literature outside this context took two forms: the first replicated earlier elite literary circles, with journals like Origenes and Manigua, who focused on “a belief in poetry” in the first case and on writing for the “guild”, a “select group of writers

5 CUBA 

197

and intellectuals aware that the reading public was a minority” in the second (Smorkaloff 1997, 60, 64). The other attempt to alter literary culture corresponds with ideas about the democratisation of literature and education which was to come with the revolution: Paginas, the publishing house of the first socialist party of Cuba, aimed to bring literary culture to the general public and to “facilitate the distribution of literary works to the reading public” (Smorkaloff 1997, 61). The group had been preceded by a short-lived but highly successful project in the mid-1920s when cigar-­ makers founded El Ideal publishing house. The work undertaken by El Ideal and then Paginas informed the literacy and literary project of the revolutionary period and followed what Smorkaloff observes as a pattern common to all reading cultures: that education and literary culture have a direct correlation. Whatever particular impact this might have in terms of control of the curriculum in particular local contexts, in the Cuban post-­ revolutionary period education and literature were developed simultaneously which led to the scenario where, in stark contrast to earlier observations about the limited reading public, in the 1980s Mexican publisher Siglo XXI noted that with a population of just 10  million, Cuba absorbed ten times more books than the rest of the Latin American continent (Smorkaloff 1997, 69). The example of El Ideal is particularly interesting since the cigar factory can be read as a marker of both the way reading was embedded in everyday culture in Cuba even before the Revolution, and an example of the way reading was restructured after the Revolution to become a more collaborative and democratic process rather than a relationship between expert and audience. It is also evidence of how the parallel Cuban cultures in Cuba and Florida prior to the Revolution began to diverge afterwards. Nilo Cruz’s play Anna in the Tropics (2003) recalls the practice of el lector, the reader, in cigar factories in Cuba and Florida. The play is set in a factory in the “cigar city” of Ybor City in Tampa, Florida, in 1929, where the practice of lectores in the factories ceased in 1931. It is concerned with the romantic encounters of the family who own the factory, encounters which accompany a reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina by the factory’s resident reader or lector. Nilo Cruz states in the afterword to his play that this was a result of both mechanisation in the factories and because lectores, who were often politically radical and were paid for by the cigar workers, were seen by the owners as a threat (Cruz 2003, 89). The cigar factory strikes in Florida in the first three decades of the twentieth century were attributed in part to the reading of socialist literature and

198 

J. RAMONE

world news alongside canonical literature. The play imagines a mother and daughter taking factory profits to pay the travel expenses of Juan Julian, a celebrated Cuban lector who has been employed to replace the aged Teodoro who spent three months reading Wuthering Heights before he died. Juan Julian reads Anna Karenina, and comes to inhabit the role of Anna’s lover for both Marela and her married sister, Conchita; while he begins an affair with Conchita he simply compliments Marela. Juan Julian is killed as a result of his status as the focus of the cigar workers’ desires— not by Conchita’s husband with whom she discusses the affair openly, but by Cheché, their uncle, jealous of Marela’s admiration of the lector and resentful that she has rejected romantic attention from him. The play sensationalises the power and threat of the lector by conveying his impact in romantic rather than political terms, but it is above all a vindication of reading: it asserts the power of reading to “educate” and “inform” (21) and the cigar factory owner’s wife Ofelia claims that “only a fool can fail to understand the importance of having a lector read to us while we work” (27). It is also a statement about the emotive power of reading: “the story enters my body and I become the second skin of the characters” (29), Marela says, while another cigar worker becomes “a sea of tears when she listens to the stories” (20). It affirms reading as a collective project: the workers who pay for the lector are “very excited” (19) about his arrival, and after his reading sessions they discuss the text at length, debating character motivation and their own reading experiences: “I don’t try to understand everything” (29), Marela says in reply to her sister’s mechanical attention to detail; while Cheché asserts that he “never hear[s] the story the same way” (27) as Marela, and Palomo encourages debate: “I’d like to hear what you have to say” (27), he tells his sister-in-law. After the lector is killed, Conchita’s husband reads Anna Karenina in response to the repeated plea from his wife and sister-in-law that “we should continue reading”, because only reading will make them feel “glad that we are alive”, and because “stories should be finished” (83). Though the practice ceased in Florida in the 1930s as a combined result of mechanisation and hostility towards the lectores who were seen as socialist activists by the cigar factory owners, in Cuba the practice persists and Cruz makes reference to this in his afterword, while in his stage notes he laments “the end of a tradition” (6) when lectores were removed from the Florida factories in 1931. US National Public Radio documentary series Lost and Found Sound explored the history of Florida’s cigar factory readers after listener Henry Cordova contacted the programme to discuss the

5 CUBA 

199

recorded memoirs of his grandfather who read to cigar workers in factories in Tampa, Florida. The radio broadcast described Florida’s hundred cigar factories, each employing several hundred people undertaking a quiet and monotonous task, and noted that the role of cigar factory reader was considered a good employment prospect. The practice of reading materials aloud to workers is claimed by some to have started in Cuba’s cigar factories in the 1850s, and by others to have been transplanted to the factories after it was observed that reading canonical novels aloud to prisoners was redemptive. The reader would read a novel for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, after an initial hour or two reading articles about world events—the radio researchers identify Cervantes, Dickens, Victor Hugo, and describe the lector as taking most of the decisions about reading materials, but occasionally inviting workers to vote (Lost and Found Sound 1999). The lector can be understood as representative of the divide between the literate minority and the illiterate majority: as Cruz notes, and as he has his characters repeat, many of the cigar workers were illiterate but could recite passages from the novels they heard as they worked (Cruz 2003, 88). The lector is also a bridge between the pre- and post- revolutionary literary cultures in Cuba: paid for through workers’ wages to educate them about their rights while disseminating classical world literature to a mass audience, he prepares the ground for the post-­ revolutionary literate public. Separately to this, the revolutionary project was to establish a publishing context to support the development of contemporary writers: once again, spaces of reading were an essential aspect of this. It is often assumed that Cuba’s artists and writers from the Revolutionary period onwards  have been subject to more substantial censorship than writers operating elsewhere in the world. As Kumaraswami’s research on literary culture shows, Castro’s methods of including writers in his revolutionary vision for Cuba do not support this view. Although Castro and the subsequent revolutionary policies paid attention to writers and reminded them that, like other Cubans, their work would be part of the communal project—“the state should support them materially in their role as educators and cultural facilitators of the pueblo” (Kumaraswami 2016, 52)— this did not have a bearing on what they wrote: “they need not sacrifice artistic or intellectual quality in their new role, but rather work to raise the cultural level of the population” (Kumaraswami 2016, 53). The infrastructure for writers developed rapidly in the revolutionary period with the establishment of several literary journals including Lunes de Revolución,

200 

J. RAMONE

Casa de las Américas, El Caimán Barbudo, the revised La Gaceta de Cuba, and academic journals based at the University of Havana and new universities in Las Villas and Oriente (González Echevarría 1985). Literary culture was embedded in Cuban society with writing workshops, cultural spaces, alongside “literary competitions within the workplace and educational settings, [and] magazine sections featuring readers’ contributions” (Kumaraswami 2016, 71). The 1980s has been described by Pamela Smorkaloff as the pinnacle of the revolution’s literary, cultural, educational, and publishing achievements (Smorkaloff 1997, 174). Reading was considered essential to creating a democratic and socialist Cuban culture with a literate and critical population encouraged to engage with art and literature critically and actively rather than to passively consume, while ensuring “books and cultural activities were available to everyone” (Davies 1997, 118). The appropriation of buildings and open spaces for the purpose of developing an inclusive literary culture was far more rapid a project than the comparatively lengthy project of repurposing residential spaces. In their comprehensive Literary Culture in Cuba (2012), Par Kumaraswami and Antoni Kapcia note that Casa de las Americas, which inhabits an imposing and iconic modern building in Havana, is one of the most significant literary and cultural centres in Cuba. The hub for arts and culture in the Americas has operated as a lively space for conferences, seminars, and community engagement since the first days of the Revolution, reflecting the reach of literature in Cuba: “Casa, as an institution, and then its rapidly successful eponymous magazine, had significance far beyond literature, developing into an institutional and intellectual space across several genres and cultural forms” (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012, 64–5). Kumaraswami and Kapcia identify an “explosion of provincial publishing spaces” as an immediate effect of the Revolution, and a literary culture that was alert to both metaphorical and actual space for writers and readers. While literary prizes and the state offered new spaces for writers, La Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí (BNJM) aimed to socialise literature via the space of the public library (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012, 61, 86, 92). The Literacy Campaign, which eradicated illiteracy in Cuba within a year (Gott 2005, 189), and the talleres literarias, literary workshops, ensured that literacy and literature became a part of everyday reality in Cuba. Both of these initiatives involved the flexible use of space: the literacy campaign involved sending 100,000 teachers into the homes of rural Cubans to teach them to read and write (Gott 2005, 189), while the

5 CUBA 

201

talleres enabled the circulation of literary culture at a mass level in multiple spaces (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012, 117). They were usually held weekly in a suitable location, meaning that literary culture was instated in Cuban everyday life not only by the appropriation of buildings but by using spaces flexibly. In “‘Architecture is repetition’: Adapting postcolonial spatial theory for post-Revolutionary socialist Cuba”  (Ramone  2019) I outlined architectural approaches that should be applied in the analysis of Cuban space. My findings suggest five principles to follow when analysing Cuban space: awareness of the significance of client and commission; flexibility; collaboration; the interstitial; and attention to repetition. Employing the concepts of the client who pays for architectural work, and acknowledging the commission as granting permission to interpret the client’s offer of work, draws attention to the reasons behind changes to Cuban space and the use of space in the context of increasing concessions made to global tourism. This approach corrects the assumption that Cuban building is directly comparable with that in other locations which do not need to employ mass tourism as a means to combat severe financial restrictions—in Cuba, this takes the form of trade sanctions under the US embargo. Cuban space (including buildings, thoroughfares, and plazas that might be protected under heritage arrangements elsewhere) must be perceived as flexible, as space that is repurposed in response to need. While this adaptation has largely been undertaken to ensure the Cuban population has equal access to space, increasing accommodation to making profit in line with providing a tourism industry means that Cuba’s flexibility may itself be a risk to its ability to provide for its people according to need. Flexibility and openness to foreign influences in the specific context of an architectural philosophy that neglects authorship in favour of collaborative architecture means that space in Cuba must be understood as a negotiation, as grounded in practices of collaborative planning and the use of space according to the priorities of the local population. This understanding of space means that in Cuba, the politics of space is foregrounded and that relationships between time and space are equally political and significant. It is helpful to assert time-space as interstitial, following Andrew Benjamin and Peter Eisenman—architect Peter Eisenman foregrounds the “timespace relationship” in his practice, and architectural philosopher Andrew Benjamin (2000, 5) notes that pursuing the detail of that relationship is the task of architectural theory. This replaces the rather unhelpful comparative analysis of time and space, and affirms that time-space is

202 

J. RAMONE

connected with the flexible, local, and collaborative use of space. This position is required to assert that Cuban space is engaged in a project of becoming, which is being undertaken by the people collaboratively, as a politically alert endeavour accompanying Cuba’s transition towards more comprehensive international relations. And as a final principle, the repetition of space asserts the difference between the former fixed use of space and current flexible uses of space, reasserting the nature of Cuba’s post-­ Revolutionary context, while it gestures towards the ways in which spaces may be expectant and therefore open to change and repurpose, in a politicised and not a passive sense. Literature provides a record of the impact of the Special Period and subsequent Batalla de Ideas years in three ways: its impact on Cuban writers, on Cuban literary culture, and how the period was represented in literary texts. During the Special Period, for the first time since the Revolution, Cuban writers were courted by foreign publishers who had particular expectations about the content and style of Cuban literature. As Kumaraswami and Kapcia demonstrate in Literary Culture in Cuba, this context required Cuban writers to produce work that was appealing to market forces and publishers’ expectations, which meant representing Cuba as exotic, erotic, decadent, and dissident (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012, 136). Guillermina de Ferrari’s observation that “publishing abroad became a viable alternative for local authors in 1991” (de Ferrari 2014, 2) does not acknowledge that contracts offered were exploitative in many cases, conditional upon securing awards (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012, 136), or that accepting such new publishing opportunities involved writing in a style and subject that would satisfy the market, something unfamiliar for Cuban writers whose literary culture did not operate as a commercial enterprise (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012, 136). While the sudden interest of the global literary marketplace had an impact on the careers and output of Cuban writers, the Special Period meant significant changes for the highly developed literary culture within Cuba, too: without funds to support publishing, writers published pamphlets or plaquettes independently (Davies 1995; Fornet in Kumaraswami 2016). There remains evidence of the ongoing effects of this in bookshops in Havana: those which, in the main, cater for tourists resemble the high street bookshops found in Europe, while the bookshops publishing local literature are stocked with thin paperback editions with minimal cover design. Nevertheless, literature remains available and affordable, and publishing continues. The effects of the Special Period have been presented in other

5 CUBA 

203

positive ways, too, as Kumaraswami observes following her series of interviews with writers and representatives of Havana-based cultural and literary organisations: at the time of greatest crisis, the institutional network and protection afforded by nationwide structures and the individuals who formed them, such as UNEAC—and, indeed, Prieto as Ministro de Culture—had allowed them to survive and even develop as writers; and provincial writers in particular stressed how important these national spaces and networks were in terms of gaining access to the reduced publishing network that was, for some time at least, centered in the capital. (Kumaraswami 2016, 104)

Kumaraswami rejects the commonplace assertion that the period from the 1990s up to the present day was one of “paralysis” or disintegration, instead providing evidence in her analysis of Cuban literary culture that “significant renegotiation and recalibration” of the principles of revolution and homeland was undertaken to ensure their survival (Kumaraswami 2016, 3). She describes the core principles and policies in Cuba as “dynamic” (Kumaraswami 2016, 3); this correlates with my analysis of architectural writings on Cuba and offers a further rebuttal from a cultural context to representations of Cuba as dilapidated or stagnant (including Krol (2013) who refers to “crumbling spaces” in her article on Havana as a literary city). Literature of the Special Period sometimes acknowledges the economic restraint that accompanies everyday life, and at other times celebrates other kinds of wealth: Maria Elena Llana’s “Rooms” (2014 [1998]) is a story about extending seasonal celebrations beyond their calendar date by transforming rooms of the house into rooms for Christmas, Circus, and Carnival, with out-of-season visits to those rooms for suckling pig, turkey to carve, carols and gifts at the perennial tree. The story’s counterpoint to the festivities is the hurricane, a common occurrence in Cuba though it is rarely reported in global media, and neither is the Cuban response which is typically swift and effective. While Padura’s Conde novels signal the food rations that make mealtimes challenging, they also celebrate the creativity of Skinny Carlos’s mother Josefina whose cooking skills could surmount economic restrictions: “the impossible would become possible, dreams reality, and then their Cuban longing for food would suddenly transgress any frontier of reality measured by quotas, ration-books and irremediable shortages” (Padura 2005b, 69). Llana’s “Eleggua Spray”

204 

J. RAMONE

(2014 [1998]) similarly conveys contradictory wealths, rather than uniform lack: a young woman referred to as a “princess” because of her elegance and self-assurance seeks a Santeria reading from a woman of her mother’s generation. The older woman describes the items required in preparation which combine to create a splendid picture: coconut, flowers, oleaster leaves, ribbons, smoke, and perfume. The younger woman questions each item and its use from her perspective, separated by a generation and by a more modern and luxurious lifestyle—instructed to clean with perfume, the older woman rephrases when the younger one expresses confusion and asks her instead to add fragrance after the cleaning lady’s visit. The older woman symbolises traditional Cuban values and because of this, it is important to note that she is conveyed as possessing flexibility. Stories from the Special Period rarely signal want, stasis, or apathy. As well as flexibility, stories convey energy, pace, and enthusiasm: “On Returning” (2014 [2004]), a story about a trip home to Havana, is a celebration presented in hasty lists, garrulity, and short sentences interrupted by sub-­ clauses. “A Five-hundred-Year-Old-Rum” (2014 [2004]) is a story conveying such energy that it asserts, finally, that Havana is a city that can “defy[…] the wind” (Llana 2014, 212). Where literature of the Special Period represents reading, it does so, invariably, in the context of indulgence, extensive knowledge, and progress. Sonia Bravo Utrera’s “Sandra” is someone who “read and read, from Kafka to […] Corin Tellado romances” (Utrera 2003, 170). In “Russian Food”, Russian literature is devoured just  as wantonly (Serova 2003, 54). Ena Lucia Portela lists, breathlessly, a rich background of literary, musical, and cultural references in “The Urn and the Name” (1998), as does Boudet’s reader in “Potosi II: Address Unknown” (1998) whose familiarity with Hemingway, Byron, Vallejo, Tovstonogov, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante sits alongside Dashiell Hammett, Brandenburg concertos, and Fritz Lang movies. Even these short stories emphasise the spatial. As I demonstrated in “Reading Takes Place: Reading and the Politics of Space in Leonardo Padura’s Havana Quartet”, private and public acts and spaces of reading dominate Leonardo Padura’s crime novels, where crime is displaced, foregrounding instead Cuba’s literary marketplace. Spaces of crime and literary spaces coalesce in the novels; the clues needed to implicate Rafael Morín Rodríguez in the fraud that resulted in his death are found in a private library. The date that Rafael Morín Rodríguez is reported missing (January 1, 1989) is relevant, considering that Havana Blue was published in 2000 (in Spanish, as Pasado Perfecto—Past Perfect—the very

5 CUBA 

205

different connotations of the novel’s original title implying the date’s relevance.). The temporal marker, at the onset of the Special Period, lends weight to the significance of the library, a reading space which is also the centre of criminal, literary, and romantic activity in Havana Blue. The timing of the narrative action implies looking both backwards and forwards to the recent years of the Special Period, during which more and more concessions are being made to market capitalism. Padura’s later novel Havana Fever describes a rapacious international marketplace poised to wrest away Cuba’s literary treasures. Alongside this we might see a global literary marketplace fashioning a “worlding” of select Cuban writers whose exotic is suddenly accessible. Padura himself might fill this position if it wasn’t for the self-conscious engagement with literary marketplaces that dominates his work. The continued concession to global capitalism turns short-term “opportunity” for writers into a long-term threat to social space.

5.3   Part 2: The Odyssey in Cuba—Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps and the Pre-­Revolutionary Cuban Literary Elite Alejo Carpentier is one of Cuba’s—and Latin America’s—best-known writers. Carpentier was one of the founders of the Afro-Cuban movement in the 1920s and 1930s which sought to represent Black or African culture in literature, art, and music. He lived and worked abroad during the 1950s but returned to Cuba after the Revolution and was instrumental in the development of contemporary Cuban literary culture. After returning to Cuba following the Revolution, Carpentier published Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) which was written between 1956 and 1958  in Guadeloupe, Venezuela, and Barbados. This text merits brief discussion because of its representation of reading as the most reliable source of information, and because it is a strong indicator of Carpentier’s attitude towards Cuban literary history. Thomas Colchie has suggested that the novel circulates around two repeated images operating in parallel: the guillotine and the printing press. This was read by Colchie as a meditation on the danger of revolution after dictatorship for writers and writing in broad terms (1991, 417n2), a statement which readers in 1991 might infer is a reference to the Cuban Revolution. However, the novel is more centrally concerned with reading literary texts than it is with either of these images, and the guillotine and printing press, apparatus of the

206 

J. RAMONE

revolutionary forces, remain distinct from the representations of books and reading which are intimately connected with the protagonists’ identities. The printing press is referred to just 11 times in the 349-page novel, each time in connection with an instruction related to printing propaganda pamphlets for use by the French Revolutionary troops operating in the Caribbean. The guillotine is this group’s more prolific apparatus, and references to the guillotine’s transportation, erection, and application are often grotesque in that public witnesses celebrate or passively observe the constant bloodlettings which take place in town squares and courtrooms to avoid the delay of setting up an execution schedule. There are thirty-­ eight references to the guillotine, the first appearing in the first few words of the novel. The text engages with the impact of the French Revolution as it is transported to France’s Caribbean colonies under the leadership of Victor Hugues, and it is centrally concerned with power, violence, and slavery; Hugues is motivated to kill those loyal to the French monarchy and its colonial project in order to free slaves, but when power shifts back to a French elite loyal to the church and a monarchical structure, he reinstates slavery, undertaking as brutal a scheme towards the slaves who were only briefly freed as he had enacted previously on those who held slaves. The main female protagonist, Sofia, is absent from the long central section of the book which stages the first violent conflicts; she is part of the family whose books make meaning among the political violence. Of the 123 references to books and reading in the novel, several convey books as revealing an individual’s core identity, by associating them with heritage and heredity (Carpentier 1962, 349): the final section of the text is an attempt to find out what happened to Sofia and her cousin Esteban after their home was abandoned suddenly; after consulting household servants, their bookseller is presented as the logical source of information and a lengthy two-page section details their reading habits and provides reliable information in comparison with the “patchwork narrative” (343) gleaned from others questioned. Books are frequently connected with love affairs and marriages and with the sense of both home and returning home; Esteban understands the growth he has experienced in his years away from home through the way books acquire new meaning: “certain books above all” (255) reveal his development. Sofia relies upon books at home and whilst away, reading voraciously as she is often instructed by her brother, cousin, husband, and lovers to stay away from areas of action and violence; nevertheless she develops an independence politically and physically through the process of reading and observing the actions around her,

5 CUBA 

207

eventually leaving Victor because he reinstated “everything which the greatest books of the age had taught must be abolished” (322)—violence and slavery. Carpentier was highly critical of the pre-Revolutionary dictatorship in Cuba and its impact on reading, so if the novel was intended to be read with a contemporary parallel, Batista’s colonial dictatorship is likely to have been his target rather than Castro’s Revolution. During the immediate post-Revolutionary period, Carpentier worked in the state publishing industry, undertaking one of those roles combining a writing career with work intended to benefit literary culture in Cuba more broadly. From 1966 he moved to Paris to work as the Cuban ambassador to France and developed a body of critically acclaimed writing, while the international French school in Havana is named after him. He remains a prominent figure in Cuba’s literary landscape: the Fundacion Alejo Carpentier museum which contains his manuscripts and other artefacts is situated just two doors away from Ernest Hemingway’s favourite bar, the Bodeguita del Medio, in Havana. The Bodeguita del Medio is included in the itinerary of literary and cultural tours focused on Hemingway, so Carpentier’s house is visible to many of Cuba’s cultural tourists. Carpentier’s work is typical of Cuban writing in terms of the frequency of literary reference and allusion, but The Lost Steps (1991 [1953]), which is also his best-known work internationally, provides the most sustained reference to books and reading. The Lost Steps has been described as a novel based on Carpentier’s autobiography, though the author did not describe the book in these terms and instead acknowledged that he, like the text’s narrator and central protagonist, had travelled to remote areas of Latin America, and had been trained in music. The unnamed narrator is persuaded by a museum with research funding to undertake a trip to prove his own theory about the origins of music by finding primitive instruments used by remote jungle communities to create music which emulates natural sounds. His extra-marital lover Mouche insists on joining him and intends to falsify their findings and treat the trip as a holiday; during the trip the narrator falls in love with a native woman who he sees as the opposite of Mouche because of her authenticity, and through the representation of these two women, the novel offers an analysis of the nature of authenticity in which the narrator’s definition is revealed as flimsy and naïve. A discussion of the references to reading Homer’s Odyssey in The Lost Steps recalls the centrality of classical, canonical, international literature in Cuban literary culture in the pre-Revolutionary period. In the novel of 278 pages, there are 116 references to books and reading. Of

208 

J. RAMONE

these, twenty-seven are references to The Odyssey, Ulysses, or Penelope. A further seven are discussions of the related text, Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound which has related origins and which the narrator himself claims is a more straightforward and more easily accessible substitute for The Odyssey when he is looking for a text on which to base a new musical composition. The Odyssey is often described as the most frequently read and adapted Western story, so its familiarity in Cuba is not surprising. There are some particular contexts that make the narrative relevant, though: there are, for instance, mapping studies which locate part of Odysseus’s travels in Cuba. Armin Wolf notes that: the currents of the Atlantic led Ulysses to the Sirens in Haiti and Cuba, then far to the north to Homer’s Island of the Sun between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in eastern Canada, over the Atlantic to Calypso’s cave on the Azores and back again to America to the country of the Phaeacians in Florida. (Wolf 2004, 318)

Second, a Jungian psychoanalytical reading of The Odyssey has resonance with the situation of migrant writers in general, but also those, like Carpentier, writing outside Cuba in the period just before the Revolution. The Lost Steps can be read as a version of The Odyssey: the unnamed narrator is a composer and music theorist; though he travels like Odysseus, he is not engaged in battle and he is not seeking to return home: the glory he seeks is not to reclaim a kingdom but simply to justify his patron’s trust in funding the expedition. Rather than reinterpreting Homer’s text, The Lost Steps encounters The Odyssey and seeks to understand its purpose in the context of a journey which involves unexpected encounters and obstacles. The narrator’s guide Yannes carries with him a copy of The Odyssey and interprets the world around him through the text, referring to it frequently in conversation. After he has located the primitive musical instruments that were his expedition’s purpose, the text becomes the narrator’s inspiration for an original musical score, as well as the centre around which the narrator’s meditations on hierarchies and forms of knowledge, and on his own desires, pivot. This section considers the meaning of reading The Odyssey in one of Cuba’s best-known novels of the immediate pre-­ Revolutionary period. It considers the ways in which the idea of an individual quest for personal enlightenment or glory is revealed as a false premise which, I argue, corresponds with the pre-Revolutionary literary

5 CUBA 

209

culture in Cuba which was elite and restricted, based upon maintaining the kinds of categories that anthropologists rely upon to neatly divide cultural groups—the novel critiques anthropological understanding of cultural types through the narrator’s naïve comparison between the city and the jungle that he comes to understand through his idealised perspective of artifice and authenticity as opposites. The text is centrally concerned with the idea of the journey from the supposedly civilised Western world to what the narrator understands to be a challenging and untouched native culture hidden in the jungle, inaccessible due to water levels during the rainy season. It is about the narrator’s relationship with both places, and the idea of a hierarchy of knowledge; he perceives the Western version of this hierarchy to be flawed after encountering native culture and forms of knowledge which cannot be recorded and replicated in books. Despite his ambivalent relationship with them, he is bound to books throughout the narrative, even if he uses them unconventionally: he writes down his musical score on any paper that he can find, including books, using those he considers of low cultural value first. He is also driven to make choices and to understand himself through his engagement with books. At both the moment when he understands himself to be at the crossroads, and perceives that he may choose to remain in the world of ‘civilisation’ with Mouche, or to state his affiliation with the native woman Rosario and her culture, and the moment when he is located by pilots searching for him and understands that he must leave the jungle, books are central. When the aeroplane lands near to his camp and he is informed by the pilot that the world media is inventing gruesome stories about his circumstances, he understands himself to have become “the hero of a novel” (Carpentier 1991, 233). Only his need to find paper and ink, notebooks, and materials with which to continue transcribing his music persuades him to leave the jungle—he explains this as a temporary situation, and leaves his unfinished score with Rosario. It was Rosario’s reading matter, in comparison with Mouche’s, which had first led him to understand that his destiny lay with Rosario in the jungle: travelling together on a bus, the narrator initially suggests that Rosario “imitates” Mouche by finding a book to read (98), and compares Rosario’s “volume printed on cheap paper, pure trash” with a “gaudy cover” with Mouche’s bestselling book—a work that he has rejected as “obscenity” (99). The narrator notes that the contrast between their reading materials “struck” him “forcibly” (99) before describing his activity with some deliberation, stating that he “was reading over the two women’s shoulders” (99), describing their

210 

J. RAMONE

reading habits in some detail over two full pages, before attempting to engage Rosario in discussion about her book. This process of comparative reading of two other people’s books results in the narrator rejecting Mouche who, he thinks, embodies what she reads about: a version of sex that he perceives as “degradation and distortion” (99) in contrast to artistic attempts to convey sex with “authentic grandeur” in Hindu sculpture and Incan pottery. Conversely, he sees Rosario’s thoughtful reading of her text as a marker of her authenticity. His somewhat patronising comment to entice a response from her about the text (Genevieve of Brabant—he says, “those are tales of other days” (100)) results in her repetition of a secure assertion of her text’s value: “These books tell the truth”; “What these books tell is the truth” (100). Though the narrator surmises that Rosario’s simplicity leads her to see the book as factual, it is this moment that is pivotal in his understanding of the two women and the worlds they represent. This is made more obvious by their names—Mouche’s means “fly” but also “spot” or “patch”—rather insubstantial things, while Rosario is, in Spanish, the rosary beads, which symbolise faith and fervour. Prometheus Unbound becomes a source text for the narrator’s musical score in the jungle. The environment enables him to work with the text, “cutting certain passages, to give it a more authentic cantata quality” (272). In the jungle he is able to better understand Shelley’s text, saying, after remembering the lines “how canst thou hear/Who knowest not the language of the dead?”, that those who remained in the city “were unaware of the meaning of these words, for they had forgotten the language of those able to talk to the dead” (131). His impression arises from witnessing the mourning practices of natives, which, in addition to the display of “anguish” and screaming, involved placing around the corpse emblems of communication: “passwords, credentials, safe conducts” (131). The narrator compares these practices with the more unfavourable “big business, bronzes, pomp, prayers and all” of the funerals he has attended in the European city which reveal the business of death to be a money-making scheme. This direct comparison of two cultures’ funeral rites is one of many instances in the novel offering direct reference to anthropology. Graham Huggan observes that Carpentier is aware of Levi-Strauss’s Eurocentric bias in his anthropological work, and claims that the novel is a parody of Levi-Strauss which at the same time pays tribute to it (Huggan 1994, 119). Brett Levinson notes that a deorientalist approach is prevalent in contemporary Latin American Studies (2002, 110) and that, therefore, readers of Latin American literary texts may misread texts that present

5 CUBA 

211

orientalist discourse as complicit with it, when those texts are actively engaged in undoing that discourse. Thus, he rejects Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of the text as orientalist and notes that The Lost Steps should not be read as Eurocentric in its representation of South American tribal people, and like Huggan, suggests that instead the narrator’s engagement with “primitive” people should be read as a comment on Eurocentric attitudes, particularly those found in anthropology. According to Huggan, Carpentier sees value in Levi-Strauss’s work but also its abuse in the hands of European anthropologists who use it to engage in “conquistadorial fantasies” (Huggan 1994, 119). The narrator is revealed, repeatedly, as naïve—he is unaware of the precarious nature of the fantasy he creates around his own jungle experience, and once his wife Ruth, his Parisian lover Mouche, and his native lover Rosario are revealed to the public in a tabloid newspaper story as the genuine motivations for his trip, he sees returning to Rosario in the jungle as an easy solution, and is amazed to find that she has moved away and married in the six months that he has been absent. Huggan interprets this naïveté in stronger terms and suggests that he stages his return to nature from a fraudulent position and that his journey “merely ratifies a nostalgic longing to reassert the superiority of European culture” (Huggan 1994, 120). For Huggan, this is visible through the narrator’s longing to impose a “false universalization” (Huggan 1994, 120) through his philosophical and artistic responses to city and jungle. It is true to say that the narrator’s motivation remains the classical European text: The Odyssey; despite its disconnection from the jungle setting, he remains certain that the two contexts will merge into a successful, universal music. In the jungle, the narrator’s confidence in his ability to create a universal music means that he is able to undertake practical and methodical musical work. This is in direct contrast with earlier descriptions of his life with his wife Ruth, which he describes repeatedly as a “prison” (6, 7), having “deflected his destiny” (7) in order to support her acting career, by working in an office and neglecting his musical training and calling. Though he begins to engage with Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in the earlier parts of the novel, in the main these references circulate around his difficulty in beginning work: rather than buying The Odyssey as he had intended, noticing Prometheus Unbound in a bookshop window makes him “forget the world of books” (12). He remembers the war distracting him from working on the cantata based on Shelley’s work (19), and comparing the worlds of art and culture as they exist in the two locations

212 

J. RAMONE

reinforces the narrator’s sense that the jungle provides an authentic and creative space to immerse himself in knowledge, while knowledge as performed in the city is constructed from false assertions and flimsy evidence. Nevertheless, his fraudulent discovery of new systems of knowledge in the jungle is revealed through his engagement with the literary text: he remains reliant upon Shelley’s text in the jungle even when he claims to feel inspired to create by the sounds of nature around him—by  “those choruses of mountains, springs, storms, elements by which I was surrounded and which I felt. That voice of the Earth” (217); instead of creating, he holds back: “no. It was absurd to excite my imagination with this when I did not have Shelley’s poem there” (218). Missing the text that he had intended to work from, he is left with three choices of texts to use as inspiration: “Rosario’s Genevieve of Brabant, Fray Pedro’s Liber Usualis […] and the Odyssey” (218). This is the point at which he decides to work on a musical score based on The Odyssey, and the text becomes a reflection of his desires (a word that Huggan pays attention to in his discussion of the narrator), often relating to the two women, but also to his journey in both physical terms and in terms of the way it engenders his construction of knowledge. Knowledge and competing versions of knowledge are, for Levinson, the central concern of the text. Levinson understands the narrator’s experience as a rejection of Western knowledge (as “artificial” and corrupt (2002, 116)) in favour of an “authentic” “know-how”, a “genuine knowledge” that is inscribed in the “text of nature”—the Amazon is indecipherable to the narrator because he is burdened by a Western education that prevents his understanding (Levinson 2002, 116). He remains peripheral to the native knowledge that he admires but it enables him to create a musical score after having shaken off the physical and symbolic “bad fat” and “mental sloth”—he works and thinks at a “feverish pace, with uncanny precision” (Levinson 2002, 116). The musical score based on The Odyssey is understood as emerging from the inspiration of nature, or as having been inscribed upon the narrator’s mind through his encounter with nature, in a form of “unartificial” knowledge: “the jungle […] had taught me far more of the essence of my art, of the profound meaning of certain texts, […] than the reading of so many books that lay dead forever on the shelves of the library” (254). As Edith Hall notes, The Odyssey is as much concerned with knowledge as it is with the undertaking of a journey. The nostos, the Greek term signifying the hero’s epic journey by sea, has an etymological relationship with the words “neomai (come, go, arrive) and noein (to have an accurate

5 CUBA 

213

mental perception of a person or situation)” (Hall 2008, 163). However, the narrator of The Lost Steps can hardly be said to replicate what Hall describes as Odysseus’s display of travel and knowledge: “Odysseus achieves a successful homecoming because he has a record of exceptionally accurate mental perceptions of situations, and the ability to act on those perceptions” (Hall 2008, 164). Instead, the narrator is left straddling both locations, neither of which can be identified as “home”, recognising that neither location offers a satisfactory means of undertaking his journey towards the creation of music: he requires the paper abundant in the city and the knowledge provided by the jungle; the passage between the two locations is reliant upon both funding to undertake the flight and the season, since the river route to the village is impassable during the rainy season. Apart from an idealised comparison between the breadth of racial mixing in the South American jungle in comparison with the more limited mixing available to Ulysses’ compatriots, and three references to physical sensations connected with food (one asserting that leek soup sprinkled with oil and salt provides a gateway to the taste of the Mediterranean “already on the tongue of Ulysses’ comrades” (48), a second suggesting that Yannes, the traveller whose copy of The Odyssey accompanies him everywhere, is “drinking Homerically” (126) and a rather dismissive reference to his disposal of porcupine quills in the campfire after eating their owner could be “probably explain[ed] by a verse from the Odyssey” (156)), the other references to the text fall into three categories: quotations from the Odyssey (there are six instances of these); references to extracts from the text including analyses of the text in relation to the musical composition (eleven instances); and descriptions of the physical copy of the book (seven instances). Analysing these categories reveals, unexpectedly, that the narrator’s reliance on the text is misplaced, since there are few positive references to the text amongst all of these examples, examples which might correspond, if categorised, with the worlds of scholarship, analysis, and the book market. The quotations from The Odyssey that the narrator mentions are often either “fragments” (154) or they are absent from the page altogether and are glossed over as in his analysis of the natives’ response to Yannes’s campfire readings: the narrator assumes that their affiliation with the text is based on something “obscure”, focused on “character” (154) and that their reading of the text was based on passages learnt “by heart” and read in a “harsh, angular accent” (154). Where they do appear in the text they are not immediately comprehensible to the narrator and instead cause frustration (132) or they are concerned with

214 

J. RAMONE

unelevated things: “wantonness” (155), and Ulysses’ unreliable sailors undone in the land of the lotus-eaters (199). The analyses of the text are, in the main, similarly negative in tone: Rosario is twice described, unfavourably, as being “no Penelope” (276), but when Ruth is described by the narrator as Penelope it is in the context of her performing the role as an accomplished actor for her world media audience, in order to occupy the position of faithful wife awaiting the return of her husband presumed lost. Elsewhere, the narrator describes being “irked” by Ulysses’ cruelty towards his men, and conveys defeated expectations of the jungle in comparison with the riches discovered in the text (146). He also rejects the text a number of times: he claims that the jungle enables him to see beyond Ulysses’ wounds (to a fuller understanding than that available through textual scholarship) (200), claims that some scenes from the text are “too full of action” (218) and others are too difficult to adapt (224), and the only productive discussion of the adaptation process in which the text is seen to serve a useful purpose follows the narrator’s decision to “prune Homer’s text down to the needed simplicity” (219), a reductive reading of the text which suggests it has no inherent value beyond a generalised plot description. The descriptions of the physical book itself, however, are more positive: on leaving to undertake a mining expedition, Yannes gives the narrator and Rosario his copy of The Odyssey in lieu of owning any other valuable object (188). This corresponds with the narrator’s desire to buy a copy at the beginning of the narrative (12) and with the lengthy description of Yannes’s cherished but tattered, cheap edition. Yannes’s copy serves to cement the narrator and Rosario’s relationship, operating as a kind of informal betrothal gift in recognition of their cohabitation, and it appears while the narrator watches Rosario bathe outdoors (199). The Odyssey is valued above the other books available in the jungle—there are only three to select from—and this is asserted repeatedly when the narrator undertakes his project to write music (218). It is interesting to note that it is the physical book which is valued as an object over its narrative meaning, and that the purpose of the book is therefore not to be found in scholarship or analysis but in its exchange value. This observation leads to the question: What does reading The Odyssey in The Lost Steps mean? Edith Hall describes The Lost Steps as an example of a Jungian version of The Odyssey. She elaborates, stating that:

5 CUBA 

215

The journey homeward is the permutation of the quest myth that has attracted attention from Jungian psychoanalytical theorists. The hero’s journey has always had the propensity to be seen as a double quest, both literal and metaphorical: it often requires an expedition home not only to the place whence the hero departed but to a state of being that was in his heart all along. (Hall 2008, 164)

Hall continues to note that “Jungians see the mythical return as ‘encoding’ the psychic journey that must be taken by every fully formed adult” and claims that “Jungian cultural critics see the pattern of journey outward, knowledge acquisition, and return as articulated more clearly in Odysseus than in other mythical figures” (Hall 2008, 165). Hall concludes that the idea of “home” has become tainted in the post-Second World War context and that as a result the hero of The Lost Steps cannot achieve the process of understanding and recognition required to complete a successful journey home. Instead, she suggests he undertakes an unnecessary journey and that the assumed joy on return must inevitably be compromised with recognition of World War Two (Hall 2008, 167). However, Hall’s study is a broad engagement with references to The Odyssey throughout history and she suggests that Cesaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) must be read in the same way, erasing the context of colonialism and slavery that Cesaire’s text addresses. While it is possible that the narrator of The Lost Steps is dissatisfied with Eurocentric knowledge systems in part because the horror of war has disturbed the assumptions of their basis in supposedly “enlightened” thinking, it is also the case that the text is as much concerned with undermining the universal in favour of the local, and that the text critiques the limited and privileged version of arts and culture that holds sway in metropolitan centres including New York and Paris as described in the novel, and in Cuba: the novel was written during the period of the most intense censorship and control, in the years prior to the Revolution when education and literary production was restricted to wealthy white male descendants of Spanish colonial families. While the narrator recognises the performance of knowledge among the Euro-American elite of which he is a part, the narrative shows that, despite his attempts to reject Eurocentric knowledge forms in favour of nature, he is ill-equipped to do so because literary culture circulates around a limited canon of classic texts. Carpentier’s involvement in Afro-Cubanism decades before he wrote The Lost Steps is evidence of his desire to reflect a

216 

J. RAMONE

more diverse literary culture, and his discussion of the pomposity of Paris and New York artists in the novel implies that his ambition remains unresolved. Carpentier’s return to Cuba to support the Revolutionary government’s publishing project can be read, after The Lost Steps, as an effort to create a different kind of universal literary culture from the false one that the novel’s protagonist attempts to recognise: a literary culture with universal membership in Cuba, comprising experimental literary texts recognising local cultural and historical influences. This is reflected throughout Carpentier’s work. Carpentier’s later short novel The Chase (1989 [1956]) begins with an instance of reading; a ticket seller in his theatre box office attempts to read Beethoven: His Great Creative Years, a biography of the composer written partly in Italian which is discussed and extracted throughout the novel, the title of which is not revealed until the final pages. Despite the apparent prominence of reading that this opening implies, reading in the text is always limited, disrupted, and elite, paralleling the characteristic of pre-­ Revolutionary literary culture as described by Nancy Smorkaloff. Although there are multiple moments of reading—20 lengthy examples in a short novel of only 121 pages—only the Beethoven biography, a Bible, and a large, heavy book used to disguise a bomb are described. The only other books mentioned in the text are a pile of abandoned university textbooks, and a reference to reading news items. This sense of the limited nature of reading is combined with its elite quality due to the persistent presence of the university with its “studious types” (36). The novel conveys obstacles to reading rather than pleasure taken from reading these elite and limited materials; the text begins with the narrator being “torn from his reading” (3) and when he is able to read this is at the expense of his work, as he returns “to his books, no longer thinking about” customers (6). Even when textual quotations interrupt the narrative, these are disjointed and do not enhance narrative events. The book is a burden—carrying it is arduous and its presence is uncomfortable: “the book was hurting his arm now—the edge of its binding as sharp as a reproach—amid the stench of the wet turkeys, the guinea hens poking their vulturous heads through the holes in the chicken wire” (27). In a context of restricted reading, the image of confined guinea fowl implies the threat of punishment as a result of reading out of place. This is extended when the external environment has a negative effect on the book read outdoors, “whose pages turned blue in the flash of a neon sign” (27). Having read about the finale of this evening’s symphony performance, the narrator endeavours to get back in

5 CUBA 

217

time to hear what he had just read about. However, on arrival he reads the book instead, and even this is unsatisfying: “the ticket seller was closing the book with a gesture of irritation, no longer paying any kind of attention to what was being played behind the frayed damask curtain” (120). His reading takes him away from life to the extent that he feels “the penury of his obscure life” that takes place “in a cage” (121). It is worth noting that the book, though first published in 1956, was not translated into English until 1989, by US translator Alfred J MacAdam. Aspects of the text conform to the foreign publishers’ expectations of Cuban literature in the Special Period and afterwards: the text circulates around images of decay (decay described before the Revolution, note, and not as an effect of it), crime, corruption, and prostitution. The text ends when the ticket seller identifies a counterfeit note in the hand of a dead man found outside the theatre, the noise of his death being obscured by the symphony. A policeman takes the apparently fake banknote and claims: “it will have to be included with the evidence of the case” (123). This image of corruption is applied in the novel to books, too: there is lengthy discussion of the “exploding book”, a “tome” once used to assassinate an enemy, which is described as a “thick book, strongly bound, within whose pages a kind of grave could be carved” (79), focusing on the physical properties of the item rather than the written content to convey again the distance between the functions of reading in pre- and post-Revolutionary Cuba. The following section offers a case study of Ernest Hemingway’s adoption into the tourist industry, tourism being the predominant factor in changes to literary culture as it is encountered in everyday life and in public, in the Special Period and beyond.

5.4   Part 3: Repetition and Tourism in Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway is both a novel and a fictional biography of Ernest Hemingway’s life in Cuba. Padura’s novel imagines that almost forty years after the writer’s death, a dead body is discovered in the grounds of the Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s house, and that Hemingway is the murder suspect. Today in Cuba, the Finca Vigia is a popular yet unexploited tourist attraction, normally accessed as a stop on a scheduled tour, and lacking commercialisation, with no souvenir or refreshment outlets except for a small hand-operated sugar cane juice stand outside, small

218 

J. RAMONE

crowds, and no direct access from Havana except by taking a taxi. Yet Hemingway is a prevalent symbol for Cuban literary and cultural tourism: a bronze statue of the writer rests on the bar of La Floridita, Havana’s most slick cocktail bar and Hemingway’s favourite place for a daiquiri, and hourly tours arrive at Hemingway’s other favoured bar, the shabbier Bodeguita del Medio, where tourists stop for a meal or a mojito. His name remains associated with the fishing port that he frequented on the outskirts of the city, and with an annual fishing competition held there. Hemingway’s story is reproduced in Cuban tourism literature, and not just in the Hotel Ambos Mundos where he lived when he first moved to the island. Padura’s novel is as much a response to the tourist’s version of Hemingway and the part the writer plays in international diplomacy as it is about the narrative of a suspected murder at his home. The novel presents Hemingway as somewhat disgraced: retired detective Conde and his friends describe him as cruel towards animals, traitorous towards other writers who were his former friends, dismissive of Cuban literature and culture, sadistic with other men, unfaithful to his wife, and he is ridiculed because although he claimed to live in Cuba he had never fallen in love with a Cuban woman. For Mario Conde, who is consulting on the case while pursuing a writing career, the objective is to find out who Hemingway was, so the narrative becomes a task of reconciliation with a writer whose works he once much admired but now struggles to separate from the man represented in biographies. Yet Conde has a further connection with Hemingway: he recalls a moment in his childhood when the author waved to him and his grandfather, and this version of Hemingway is an elderly fisherman, not a famous writer, a hostile public figure, or a potential murderer. Adios, Hemingway is a Mario Conde novel, but in a departure from the Havana Quartet books that Padura is best known for, Conde is no longer a detective; having followed his ambition to become a writer, he decides to take an informal role in the investigation because he does not believe that Hemingway was responsible for the death of the man whose body was found buried at the Finca Vigia. Conde’s detective instinct about the murder investigation rests on his reading of Hemingway’s short story, “Big Two-Hearted River”. “Big Two-Hearted River” is a two-part short story first published in In Our Time (2003 [1925]), a collection of stories with the same central protagonist, Nick Adams, who is often conflated with Hemingway himself, since the stories replicate a number of the author’s

5 CUBA 

219

experiences, including military service in the First World War and childhood fishing holidays. The short stories in In Our Time were interspersed with other narrative materials in a fragmentary structure, but were later republished in a volume titled The Nick Adams Stories which included further stories focused on the same protagonist, and this collection has prompted most critics to treat the stories as a novel with a nonlinear structure. Conde’s recollections of the writer and the short story appear multiple times, and both the writer and his story are presented with a degree of uncertainty: the meaning and function of both are unfixed throughout much of the narrative. Characteristic of all of Padura’s Conde novels, the evidence required to conduct the investigation is ultimately to be found in books and reading. In this case, two books operate together, both of which can be understood in terms of what they repeat: while the repeated reading of “Big Two-Hearted River” absolves Hemingway of his crime based on the circumstantial evidence of his personality, a remembered photograph of the writer with his gun in a biography provides another clue. Adios, Hemingway, like most detective novels, functions through a series of repetitions: the dead body is one, the crime scene (the Finca Vigia) is another, but the two repetitions which stand out as especially meaningful are the reading of “Big Two-Hearted River” and the reference to Ava Gardner’s knickers, left in the house as a museum artefact until Conde takes and repurposes them in a gesture that is a comment upon both Hemingway as an American in Cuba and Cuban emigrants in America. This section analyses repetitions in Adios, Hemingway, including the repeated reading of “Big Two-Hearted River” in order to locate Hemingway and his readers in Cuba’s literary tourist market. In “Reading Takes Place”, I made reference to tourism as a factor driving the rearticulation of reading spaces in Cuba, and noted that this was reflected in Leonardo Padura’s detective fiction; Havana Fever, for instance, describes the second-hand book trade as a “dicey business” (Padura 2009, 13) where foreign buyers seek to pay substantial prices for rare Cuban books that book traders are legally obliged to return to archives. Padura’s Adios, Hemingway, set in 1998, some years into the Special Period, focuses on Ernest Hemingway, Cuba’s best-known example of a foreign resident writer, and the text offers insight into the function and meaning of the writer as part of the Cuban literary landscape, his response to, and effect on, Cuban literature and the local literary

220 

J. RAMONE

marketplace, and the spatial significance of his house, now a prominent tourist attraction. I will argue that rereading—or, repeated reading—of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” is a method of circumventing the public profile or tourist representation of Hemingway in favour of an authentic version of the writer; this in turn draws attention to the dual representation of Cuba, and its changing relationship with global trade and tourism. Tourism has been associated with repetition by A.V.  Seaton, who has termed the tourist’s behaviour metempsychosis, a term he uses to reflect experience characterised by ritual repetition and captured in the language of the tourism industry which creates a role for the tourist to adopt where “novelty” and “discovery” are built in to the tourist’s itinerary (Seaton 2002, 136, 138). Scott McCabe has argued after Seaton that “repetition is ingrained throughout all tourist experience” and that this repetition, which involves following in the footsteps of admired historical or celebrity figures, is to an extent a subconscious behaviour (McCabe 2014). In this sense, Hemingway functions as a figure in whose footsteps tourists follow when they repeat his drinking preferences in the Floridita and the Bodeguita del Medio. Adios, Hemingway can help to disturb this metempsychosis if we pay attention to repetitions and locate the private Hemingway who is normally visible only in his short stories. These stories operate as condensed and displaced versions of protagonist Nick Adams’s psyche, whose ideas are attributed by Conde to Hemingway, despite the author’s claim that the Nick Adams stories were not substantially autobiographical. Here, I explore repetitions in the text which align with a Cuba-­ adapted spatial theory and enable a rereading of Hemingway’s house and its socioeconomic and symbolic meanings in Cuban literary culture, while seeking to establish reasons for reading “Big Two-Hearted River” in Cuba in 1998. Reading and repetition are common features of detective fiction which has its origins in the “whodunnit” version of the genre, the question of ‘whodunnit’ often being answered by an investigator whose notes, diaries, letters, and books provide clues where conversations do not. In his well-­ known and much-republished essay “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1977), Tzvetan Todorov sets out the repetitions inherent in the genre when he clarifies that the story will typically involve two narratives, that of the crime being committed, and that of the crime being detected, each of which operates in their separate story times. Detective fiction brings these together in such a way that the first story is of action, the second of

5 CUBA 

221

learning: “the characters of this second story, the story of the investigation, do not act, they learn. Nothing can happen to them: a rule of the genre postulates the detective’s immunity” (Todorov 1977, 44). Todorov calls this learning process a “slow apprenticeship: we examine clue after clue, lead after lead” (45) and this process is rendered in straightforward narrative structures. Giving the example of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which interrogates twelve suspects in the book’s twelve chapters and provides a prologue for the crime and an epilogue for its detection, Todorov points out the genre’s uniformity, or its “geometric architecture” (45), and indicates that detective fiction follows the Russian formalist principle of fable/fabula (story) and narrative/syuzhet (text): “the first—the story of the crime [the story]—tells ‘what really happened,’ whereas the second—the story of the investigation [the text]—explains ‘how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it’” (45), and notes that detective fiction uniquely manages to place both side by side within the narrative (46). Todorov explains that this is possible because the second story is insignificant without the first, and the first is an absent story which must be pieced together by a narrator who cannot be omniscient. The thriller genre fuses the two stories so that the “narrative coincides with the action” (47) and an element of risk to the detective is initiated as the reader’s interest is maintained through both curiosity and suspense, though this suspense is not reserved for the revelation of the killer on the narrative’s final line, as it is with the traditional “whodunnit”. The suspense novel is identified by Todorov as a further development in the genre and is characterised by the reader’s interest in both what has happened in the past and what will happen in the future. In the suspense novel, the detective is part of the story world and is implicated by events, rather than adopting the safe and distant position of the reader. Padura’s detective novel is structured typically for the genre: it begins with a crime and proceeds through a series of attempts to detect the criminal which include interviews with suspects and potential witnesses, archival research, and the analysis of objects found at the scene. The element of suspense in Adios, Hemingway is displaced in favour of the (again, repeated) assertion that it is more important that the crime is not attributed to Hemingway than that the facts of the case are established, that Hemingway’s reputation, though already tarnished, is not destroyed. The lack of interest in solving the case is typical of Mario Conde, and is typified in one of the instances when the house is mentioned, where he falls asleep in Hemingway’s armchair imagining the writer’s everyday life there instead

222 

J. RAMONE

of searching the building for clues. Conde’s behaviour might be characterised as following in the writer’s footsteps like a tourist, while he is allowed unique access to inside spaces which are out of bounds to tourists who must observe the rooms from behind small ropes stretched across the large open doorways and windows. However, Conde’s impetus to solve the case is reinstated when the evidence mounts against Hemingway and Conde is preoccupied by a memory of the writer’s gun, the supposed murder weapon. Brief sections focalised by Hemingway and voiced by an external narrator are intercut with the narrative proper which focuses on the investigation; the final of these sections includes the death under investigation. Keeping in mind my assertion that architectural approaches enable spatial analysis of Cuba, we might consider the relationship between physical markers that orient the pedestrian in the city and textual markers which orient the reader, particularly in the detective genre. Modern and redeveloped city spaces are constructed so as to provide navigational cues through pedestrian spaces, often in the form of the placement of lighting, fences or bollards, and obstacles intended to control crowd flow through busy areas, ensuring that “people are guided in the general direction of their destination via a minimal directional cue” (Robinson et al. 2012, 973). The navigational cues are also known as “waypoints”, and these are often used in contemporary pedestrian technologies to aid navigation through urban spaces, or even to alter patterns of navigation by introducing new waypoints which present different versions of the city from those which are associated with established patterns and, we might add, dominant narratives. Fiorella De Cindio identifies Geograffiti as one such technology which aims to reactivate city spaces to engender more democratic access to space and even to rewrite the city (De Cindio 2008, 247). These methods of rewriting the city by directing attention to different markers repeat the city space with a difference, while they also resonate with the repurposing of city spaces in Cuba. But further, such navigational cues recall narrative cues that guide the reader through the text, and in Adios, Hemingway these cues are explicit since the text is centrally concerned with rereading and interrogating Hemingway as a writer, in the process of establishing the truth of the dead body found at the Finca Vigia. These explicit narrative cues include overt signals of ending (“Conde knew that he was coming to the end of something” (Padura 2005a, 179)); the use of diagrammatic markers to indicate the change in narrative perspective and time in the form of an asterism (or section/scene break); and Conde’s reflection on the “iceberg

5 CUBA 

223

principle” or theory of omission when he declines to hear the formal outcome of the case against Hemingway, calling that detail “the hidden part of the iceberg” (218). This principle draws on Hemingway’s stated practice of paring down his writing; he noted: “you could omit anything […] if the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (Hemingway in Smith 1996, 43–4). The “iceberg principle” has been defined by Carlos Baker as a practice of drawing attention only to direct actions while drawing attention away from textual strategies such as metaphor and descriptive language (Baker 1972) and by Charles Oliver in relation to “Big Two-Hearted River” as focusing on the physical experience of Nick Adams’s solitary fishing trip as a diversion from the trauma of war (Oliver 1999, 322). The principle enables the writer to avoid directly describing the psyche of protagonist Nick Adams and instead allows him to employ repeated metaphors to imply reasons for the seemingly mundane acts that occupy the surface of the stories. Conde tells his friends to reread “Big Two-Hearted River” with an awareness of the iceberg principle, not to better understand the story but to use it to answer the question about who was responsible for the dead body at Finca Vigia. He implies that understanding Hemingway as a person negates the circumstantial evidence which would have constructed a straightforward case for his guilt; Conde’s search for alternative evidence through interviewing Hemingway’s former employees and consulting his manuscripts and other belongings archived at the house reinforces his instinct that Hemingway was not the murderer. There are repetitions of both the house (as object, location, or crime scene) and the discovery of the dead body. There are twenty-eight references to the house itself, which vary in naming the house as the Finca (or la Finca, though the use of la/the is the translator’s decision), the Vigia, the Finca Vigia, or by excluding the name. Some of these are interesting for their close descriptions of the house or garden, from a vantage point which enables a sweeping view of the scene in ways that both recall and disturb the touristic gaze by introducing signs of the criminal case among the picturesque: Conde […] looked once again at the drawing-room with its bullfight scenes and empty chairs, its little bar with the dried-up bottles, sterilised by time. […] the dining-room with its hunting trophies and the table laid with ­notable items from the dinner service marked with the insignia of the Finca Vigia; […] the room in which Hemingway used to write, the foot of the bed

224 

J. RAMONE

where he would sleep off his drunken binges and have his siestas. […] Conde went down to the area of the garden where the fountain was situated and around which the police had excavated about thirty square metres. On the edge of the hole, leaning against the peeled trunk of an African pepper tree, Conde lit his cigarette. (178–9)

The house is encountered repeatedly in the text with reference to “doing the rounds” by Hemingway’s employees, an event which is both repeated and referred to repeatedly in conversation between Hemingway and his employees (so these repetitions are equivalent to what Genette would term as both singulative and repeating narration). “Doing the rounds” involves walking around the property for a final time before locking up the house each night, with a dog and a gun, necessitated by Hemingway’s reported “paranoia” that he was being watched by the US intelligence services, a feeling that was later justified as true, but not until he had undergone significant treatment for mental illness. These events are repeated since they lead the reader towards the reason for the murder: one night, despite his staff having done the rounds, a CIA officer intrudes in to Hemingway’s house and searches his bedroom looking for the badge and gun that he lost on a previous trip to survey the property and its inhabitants. The policeman is killed when Hemingway’s employees find him threatening to shoot the writer who refuses to return the lost items. This repetition operates to draw the reader towards the event of the murder under investigation. However, in this case the detective is not privy to these events and instead must piece together evidence gathered decades later. This necessitates another expected repetition in the text: the repeated narration of the discovery of a dead body. The dead body is referred to on twenty-six occasions in the text, but a number of instances stand out because they follow expected patterns for the detective story: there is an initial detailed and unemotional police account of finding the body (12–13) followed by detective Manolo’s simplified brief analysis of the scenario (14), then Conde’s projection of external reports of the murder which he expects will place Hemingway as the killer (14) and his subsequent introspective account of the murder considering the likelihood of Hemingway being the killer (15). Further repetitions of the murder are employed to elicit information from potential witnesses (147, 150, 184); to express the same concern that external media will “turn it into a political issue” if Hemingway is named as the murderer (79); and to express doubt about Hemingway’s guilt (52), before a final reference to the dead

5 CUBA 

225

body which displaces it to a flexible or transitional state: in the final scene Conde’s friend Skinny Carlos describes the case, concerning an unidentified body and a motiveless killing by an unknown killer: “it’s as if nothing had ever happened. There was no dead man, no killer, nothing” (220). As a detective story, Adios, Hemingway employs the repetitions typical of the genre in order to defeat them: the case disperses instead of being concluded and Conde invites this uncertainty because he sees it as appropriate to Hemingway’s writing which is, ultimately, Conde’s idea of authenticity. Manolo, Conde’s former colleague who is in charge of the case, hears Conde’s evidence, including character evidence using “Big Two-Hearted River” to reveal Hemingway’s authentic self “free of the character he’d invented for himself” (217). When Manolo asks “Shall I tell you what I’m going to do?”, his question conforms to the detective fiction genre and this moment is where the case should be concluded; it isn’t, because Conde refuses to hear the formal outcome which is, he implies, less significant than his own assessment of the case: “don’t tell me […]. Let me imagine it” (218). The direct reference to Hemingway’s well-­ known iceberg theory of writing which operates throughout the In Our Time story collection can be read as an instruction from Padura to pay attention to “Big Two-Hearted River”—to read the story itself in combination with Adios, Hemingway. Like Hemingway’s refusal to disclose Nick Adams’s unconscious motivations, Conde avoids disclosing information about “Big Two-Hearted River”, though he insists that his friends and colleagues read (or, more accurately, reread) it. Howard Hannum has suggested that “Big Two-Hearted River” strongly implies the mental breakdown of protagonist Nick Adams. This is due to Hemingway’s strategy in the collection of employing the implied metaphor or metonymy: predominant examples in the collection relate to the adult Nick’s experiences of injury and killing in the First World War (Fossalta) in the 1924 edition of In Our Time which consists of eighteen vignettes; and to the child Nick’s witnessing of the traumatic event of an emergency caesarean performed by Nick’s father with a hunting knife while Nick and his uncle assist, during which the baby’s father commits suicide by slitting his throat in “Indian Camp”, the first story in the 1925 edition. Hannum notes that after Hemingway’s assertion that soldiers returning from war in Nick’s condition could not tolerate any mention of the war, his stories omit direct reference to it, and the “presence of the war […] would thus have to rest on implications in the details of the text” left with the expectation that readers would be aware of his “calculated

226 

J. RAMONE

repetition” (Hannum 2001, 106). The two events (the caesarean and the war) are repeated in implied metaphors and metonymy throughout the 1925 collection and later Nick Adams stories: blankets, camps, and beds stand in for the caesarean, and images of burning, loud noises, and guns stand in for Nick’s war experiences. Hannum suggests that “Big TwoHearted River” is “climactic” (2001, 103) and notes that both the most common (guns, bunks) and the less prevalent but equally significant symbols (the knife and cutting, the swamp, and logs and railroad tracks) come together in this story. The metempsychosis of tourism (metempsychosis being connected with rebirth and reincarnation and in some contexts with the repeated birth of the same soul) is recalled in Hannum’s suggestion that, with reference again to the iceberg, Nick has “submerged the trauma of the Caesarian throughout his youth, [and] he has submerged both the Caesarian and Fossalta by the time we meet him in ‘Big Two-Hearted River’” (2001, 104). Hannum suggests these images are complicated by their accretion by “Big Two-Hearted River” (2001, 95) in which there are repeated and central implications of Nick’s fear of the soul’s departure and its return. “Big Two-Hearted River” is on the surface a monotonous tale about Nick, alone, camping, cooking, catching bait, and fishing, but read in the light of the caesarean and Nick’s experience of war, and with an awareness of his obsession with death and rebirth and the relationship between the soul’s death and another’s birth, the story becomes a narrative about both submerged or displaced meaning and about repetition; the story demonstrates, as Teodora Domotor has suggested, a “neurotic routine” (70). It begins with Nick immersed in his two fears: “sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding” (therefore touching and surrounded by the caesarean and suicide) and in the first nine short sentences there are four references to burning (which signifies the war). The text frequently foregrounds the ways in which Nick is managing his emotions: he “felt all the old feeling” (unspecified in this story) and his pack (or this feeling) is “too heavy”, “much too heavy” (134). Mid-fishing trip he “thought it would be better to sit down”, after “the thrill had been too much” (150) and “he did not want to rush his sensations any” (151) to the extent that going out further into the swamp to fish, away from the bank, is too much to countenance: “He felt like reading. He did not feel like going into the swamp. […] the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it” (155). Among such statements that indicate Nick’s fragility and would usually seem out of step with the story’s subject and pace,

5 CUBA 

227

further references to burning, pain, cutting, and other markers of war and to blankets, bunks, bedding, and the camp, accrete. An approximate count reveals seventy-two relevant references to the war (burning, fire, frying, matches, too hot, dead, spitting, blackened) and forty-two references to the caesarean (blankets, camp, bedding, tent, canvas). These generally operate in distinct sections of the story where one or other set of implied metaphors dominates, but the final section of Part I of the story roughly alternates the images of tent, fire, blanket, match, canvas, match, blanket, blanket as he settles down for the night immersed in these submerged memories which repeat as he falls asleep. Part II of the story contains a lower frequency of implied metaphors but concludes with Nick’s impression that, despite the fear conveyed by the swamp, “there were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (156) implying that his circumstances are ongoing and unlikely to change. If “Big Two-Hearted River” is a story about trauma submerged and displaced in repetitions, then what does it mean to read this repeatedly in Cuba in 1998 when the story is set, or in 2005 when Adios, Hemingway is published, in the context of understanding an authentic version of Ernest Hemingway in contrast with the public persona presented in the context of tourism? And what does this mean when read in the context of the other external story, of emigrant Cubans in the USA? The search for Hemingway in Cuba is an ongoing project, and Adios, Hemingway has a number of intertexts, including a film from 1990 (set in 1956) titled Hello Hemingway, clearly a reference point for the novel with its parallel title. The Biblioteca Nacional de Jose Marti in Havana shows eighty-two items on a search for Hemingway. This includes a number of Hemingway’s works, which is not a complete bibliography but does include the collected short stories, as well as publications by the Finca Vigia museum itself, annual reports on the Hemingway fishing tournament, and a range of biographical and academic sources. The first item returned from the search is a tourist map of Cuba including a detailed map of Havana. This lists as one of its five bulleted features “Muestra algunos lugares vinculados a la vida de Hemingway” (“It shows places connected with the life of Hemingway”). The catalogue also includes Fernando Perez’s (1990) film Hello Hemingway. The film is made in 1990 but is set just before the Revolution in 1956, and is the story of Larita, a schoolgirl who lives within sight of the Finca Vigia and dreams of studying in the USA but is unable to secure a university scholarship. Meanwhile her school friends become engaged in resistant politics, acknowledging emerging revolutionary

228 

J. RAMONE

activism at the time of the film’s setting, and her family’s financial struggles worsen. As well as the title, there are other resonances with Padura’s novel: Larita’s uncle is a police sergeant named Manolo (the name of Conde’s former colleague, in charge of investigating the dead body found at Hemingway’s house), and in the opening scene Larita and her cousin sneak into Hemingway’s garden to swim in his pool while Hemingway scowls from his window (Padura’s novel sensationalises the image by having Conde imagine Hemingway watching Ava Gardner swimming naked in the same pool). In the film, Larita watches Hemingway fishing and he waves to her from his garden, an action mirrored in Adios, Hemingway when Conde as a child meets the writer and waves goodbye to him. Hemingway had been ineffective in Larita’s bid to obtain a scholarship to study in the USA: he was away in Africa when she approached his household for this reference, which represented her only option in the absence of other markers of her suitability for the scholarship (a father, class, position, wealth), and his waving at the end of the film is similarly extraneous to the narrative. Hemingway’s wave in Adios, Hemingway serves the opposite purpose while it repeats the action, since Conde’s memory of this authentic Hemingway carrying his fishing tackle and waving to his grandfather at Cojimar instigates his commitment to rescue his reputation by pursuing the investigation. Adios, Hemingway repeats Hello Hemingway; it then repeatedly reads a text full of repetitions constructed in order to foreground repetition as a strategy of avoiding the direct reference to what is submerged or repressed after trauma. It is also a novel about space: the text reconsiders the Hemingway House museum as tourist space and so invites a reading through spatial theories about repetition. As established previously, Cuban space elicits new forms of spatial analysis, and engagement with architectural thinking enables a Cuba-adapted response to the representation of space. Ava Gardner’s knickers might seem a whimsical object to contain the symbolic resonances of Cuban tourism, but analysis of the repeated reference to this object (mentioned on thirteen separate occasions in the text, repeatedly in many of those instances) alongside the repeated reading of the Hemingway short story elicits further insight into the function of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ in the novel. Ava Gardner’s first prominent acting role was in The Killers, a 1946 film based on Hemingway’s short story of the same name, which was first published in 1927. It is reported that Gardner would later visit Hemingway’s Finca Vigia and, as depicted in Adios, Hemingway, swim naked in the pool

5 CUBA 

229

(Server 2006, 300). Her place in the text is explained by her friendship with Hemingway but her function is more likely to rest on her incongruity at the Cuban house and pool, and her knickers have a similarly incongruous and unexpected presence. Her fame, beginning with her role in The Killers, has the same incongruity: her character in the film, Kitty Collins, was written for the screenplay and was not an original character in the short story. Her prominence in Adios, Hemingway, with repeated reference to her knickers which are kept alongside Hemingway’s possessions at the Cuban house, can be read as a means of either referencing, or contributing to, the marketing of Cuban literature as exotic and dirty; Padura’s detective fiction is marketed according to these expectations, though the writing itself does not reflect its advertising copy. However, she is also a symbol of fame, reputation, and public interest, reflecting Hemingway’s position which is questioned by Conde; Conde seeks a truth about Hemingway beyond the somewhat sullied reputation of the writer who was derisory about the Cuban literary scene while he was writing there, and was remembered as cruel and cold towards people and animals. My analysis of architectural work revealed five principles to follow when analysing Cuban space: an awareness of the significance of client and commission; flexibility; collaboration; the interstitial; and attention to repetition. The idea of the repetition of space demonstrates the difference between the former fixed use of space and flexible uses of space in post-­ Revolutionary Cuba, acknowledging how spaces may be expectant and therefore open to change. These aspects resonate with the representation of Ava Gardner’s knickers: they are under the museum’s stewardship yet handed over on trust to Conde who operates as client in the interaction. They are represented multiple times in the text and each time they convey a separate meaning or resonance, suggesting that as a symbol they operate with a level of flexibility. They also act as a bridge between the former meaning of the Finca Vigia and its occupant and the present meaning of that space and the reputation assigned to Hemingway. Most of all, though, they represent the interstitial: they are process, transition, the between; they disrupt the fixity of inside and outside by coming to mean what is inside them (the woman’s body) while also being outside the body and by their presence in the outside at the pool, made more evocative because they are unexpected in that outside space. They are new because they are novel and unknown until Conde is told about them (in spite of his long-­ time obsession with the writer), yet they are at the same time old, and fast becoming a memory of old men. They are both surface and void since

230 

J. RAMONE

they evoke the internal (or, as Conde puts it, they are “the nearest thing to seeing a woman naked” (55)) while they become a surface and a texture; this applies to Hemingway’s use of the knickers to wrap the gun he keeps nearby: as they take on the scent of “grease and gunpowder” (165) they become the surface that hides the gun and the void that remains when the gun is absent. The knickers are not an official display object at the museum; the museum director mentions them to Conde when he secures special access to the house’s interior during the investigation and after that Conde “couldn’t think of anything else” (57) as he considered the case. A substantial section of Conde’s interview with Toribio, one of Hemingway’s former employees expected to be able to exonerate Hemingway, is given over to his memory of Ava Gardner stripping at the pool and wearing those knickers which Conde considers in hyperbole as “immortal” (94–6). Throwing the knickers out to sea in the bottle that carries a letter to émigré Andrés ensures that the knickers will retain only the same status as Toribio’s recollection of Ava Gardner’s striptease, that of a fading memory. This final act also renders the knickers as in constant transition: in the sea, between Cuba and Florida, memory and actuality, past and present, as the bottle is left to the repeating pattern of the waves. Both “The Killers”, the story that was later adapted to provide Ava Gardner’s first major film role, and “Big Two-Hearted River” are Nick Adams stories, and both are centrally concerned with the preparation of food and with eating (eating in a café; fishing) as a means to evade bigger questions about direction and belonging, masculinity and human connections. Teodora Domotor reads the Nick Adams stories as a demonstration of melancholia, in contrast with earlier studies of the collection which characterise the introspective protagonist as offering essentially optimistic accounts of the development of coping mechanisms (Domotor 2012, 54). Domotor suggests that dissatisfaction with the American Midwest is a prompt for the melancholia represented in the texts, as well as Nick’s inability to marry his sense of nostalgia for home with his dissatisfaction on returning: he experiences guilt and ambivalence about “abandoning America yet longing for it and still not finding it a home” (Domotor 2012, 65). What Domotor refers to as “Nick’s will to distance himself from and yet return to his homeland” (Domotor 2012, 63) is also the experience that Conde and his friends attribute to their friend Andrés, who left Cuba for the USA. They suggest that he, too, is ambiguous about his original and adopted homelands: “in order to be able to live on the other side, […] he needed to tear himself away from the life he left on this side” (225) and

5 CUBA 

231

as a gift to affirm their friendship they throw Ava Gardner’s knickers, wrapped around a letter in a bottle, into the water at Cojímar, the harbour in Habana del Este where Hemingway’s fishing boat was once docked, also the port at the closest point to Florida’s Key West, and the route Hemingway’s Harry Morgan used to deliver rum from Cuba to Florida during the Prohibition era, in To Have and Have Not. This is the final repetition of the symbol, and this act, like the rest of the novel, and like architectural analyses of Cuban space, insists upon uncertainty in the most positive sense rather than certainty, and on productive flexibility rather than fixed meaning. The bottle enters an interstitial space. Like the built work, the in-between space represents Cuban possibility and rejects fixed narratives of Cuba, either in the context of its political history or in tourist discourse which insists on fading splendour: the novel expresses fear that if Hemingway is found to be guilty of murder this will be read in damaging ways in both of these discourses. Conde reads “Big Two-Hearted River”, then, in order to offer a positive, “authentic” Cuban narrative of both Hemingway and the future, in place of a regretful one that laments a lost, fixed past.

5.5   Comment in Conclusion: What Reading Means in Cuba—The Batalla de Ideas if, before going to Mexico, I had read those books, I believe I would not have killed him. (Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs, 2014, 532)

The disarming faith in the significance of books and reading in this statement from Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin in Padura’s recently published novel, is typical of Padura’s work, as is the association between literature and political activism. Padura’s detective fiction insists on the pre-eminence of literary culture in Cuban life in the Revolutionary and Special Periods, to the extent that reading spaces and events dominate and determine the narrative in each of his novels, while questions of literature’s social responsibility are raised by detective Mario Conde and those he meets during criminal investigations. Mercader’s claim that the assassination for which he had undertaken a lifetime of training could have been diverted by reading is made with reference to the years he spent imprisoned after the attack. On the bed in his prison cell, an anonymous donor left copies of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed and Stalin’s Crimes. As a brief aside, it is worth considering the publishing history of Stalin’s

232 

J. RAMONE

Crimes. This was a posthumously printed work, published in France, extracted from Trotsky’s diaries. The text may have been published in Cuba in accordance with the mass publication of works considered valuable following the revocation of copyright law, explaining Padura’s inclusion of the work here as if it was accessible. Or, its inclusion (despite its low circulation and limited availability) may invite us to question the fallibility of textual and narrative assertion. If the work does not exist (or was not accessible in Mexico), Ramón’s assertion of his changed attitude may be a false memory, as may other assertions within and beyond the text. This reading event in the space of crime’s punishment draws attention to the association between literature, crime, and the politics of space, in Padura’s writing. The Man Who Loved Dogs is Padura’s most concerted departure from the detective fiction genre that brought him international acclaim. While the text is an examination of an act of criminal transgression, there is no detective strand; indeed, though caught in the act of assassination, Mercader remains on the margins of detection because he only has false identity documents making repatriation and accountability difficult. The prevalence of literature in a novel depicting the assassination of a prolific writer is perhaps less remarkable than its overwhelming presence in the detective stories set in Havana’s centre and suburbs, the texts known internationally as the Havana Quartet. Literary culture, as conveyed through private and public acts and spaces of reading, dominates Padura’s Havana Quartet, inviting spatial analysis of the ways in which criminal and literary spaces cohere in the Havana series of detective novels, which provides an insight into the changing nature of literary culture in Cuba in the Special Period, as the provision and function of literary spaces alters to make room for global tourism. Both Adios, Hemingway and The Man Who Loved Dogs express perhaps a gratification of influence (rather than an anxiety of influence) to one of the best-known texts of Cuba’s modern literary canon, G.  Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers (1990 [1965]). Though Padura’s writing is significantly more conventional in narrative structure than Infante’s highly inventive prose, there are a number of important parallels which are of relevance to my analysis of Hemingway’s position in Cuban tourism, the prominence of space and the centrality of architectural thinking to understanding Cuban space, and to reading, rereading, writing, and rewriting— in Three Trapped Tigers, overt repetitions present Cuba through the tourist gaze, and represent the Death of Trotsky, in several subsequent sections. The death of Trotsky is considered to be of particular significance to

5 CUBA 

233

Cuban writers because the killing was carried out by a Cuban. Infante’s novel includes an extended section titled “The Death of Trotsky as described by various Cuban writers, several years after the event—or before” (235–79), a forty-four-page section which is organised into subchapters, each titled by a Cuban writer’s name and their date of birth and (where appropriate) death. These sections emulate the written style and evoke the well-known published work of Cuban writers Jose Marti, Jose Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, Lydia Cabrera, Lino Novas Calvo, Alejo Carpentier, and Nicolas Guillen (the section attributed to Guillen appearing twice, in both Spanish and English translation). The element of repetition reinforces the significance of paying attention to the function of repetition in Cuban literature, and affirms its association with architecture’s concern with repetition since within this section, in Carpentier’s subchapter, there is a lengthy, detailed architectural discussion (260–2). Because of its structure which retells the much longer story surrounding Trotsky’s assassination from multiple perspectives and evades a final “truth”, Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs could be said to revisit this section of Infante’s text thematically. It does so from a contemporary perspective, which pays attention to Padura’s two main literary characteristics: the detective genre, though the novel does not strictly conform to this genre, and reading: Padura pays close attention to what Trotsky read, and to his reading habits and locations. Infante’s novel, like Padura’s recent texts, is concerned with writers and readers, repetition, and architecture. Three Trapped Tigers is set in the period prior to the Revolution when Cuba was a holiday destination for those seeking squalid attractions, offered through Mafia and US-managed hotels and bars, with prevalent gambling and prostitution. Hemingway is a contemporary of the period and was resident in Cuba between 1939 and 1959 (excluding periods living in Europe and China). The text is permeated with references to Hemingway—sometimes slight (Vivian Smith-Corona’s name evoking Hemingway’s famous typewriter; Ava Gardner implicating Hemingway by the common association (223)); sometimes alert: Romero de Torres and Hemingway’s depictive or descriptive styles compared in passing (128); a passing critique of his work—“You read Eminguey? […] Isn’t he a little out of fashion?” (146). Hemingway’s background presence in the text sits alongside the presence of tourism. Like Trotsky’s death, the same event, experienced by an American couple on holiday, is narrated multiple times, contradictorily. The responses to Cuba are naïve and offensive, typical of the representation of Cuba internationally during the pre-Revolutionary

234 

J. RAMONE

period as both backward and exotic: “there was this group of enchanting natives playing a guitar and rattling some gourds and shouting infernal noises, the sort of thing that passes for music here” (177). Telling the tourist experience repeatedly is the unconcealed function of the section, which includes the subtitle “Mrs Campbell’s Corrections” (202), crossed-­ out lines, footnotes, and above all a sense of contradiction. The contradiction associated with repetition in the pre-Revolutionary setting draws attention to the opposite function of repetition after the Revolution, from which point onwards repetition functions to draw attention to the altered use of space and to the functions of space (before the Revolution, spaces had fixed purposes, afterwards, they are used flexibly), and to convey space as accommodating to change and the practice of repurposing space for need (to allow for tourism) or for good (to maintain equality of access and opportunity for Cubans). For Kumaraswami, the further policy compromises formally imposed in Cuba in 2011, which include increased provision for self-employment, carry with them the risks of increased social divisions and the sacrifice of cultural life to market forces, as opposed to culture’s purpose in Cuba of enhancing society (Kumaraswami 2016, 4). Kumaraswami has observed that in the period known as the Batalla de Ideas, attempts to reverse the effects of consumerism and individualism through the development of initiatives enabling access to education and culture relied upon the book, with reading as central to combating “passive cultural or material consumption, social fragmentation, moral corruption, the banalization of daily life, and social/political anomie, among a host of other perceived ills” (Kumaraswami 2016, 188). She notes that the Feria International Literary Festival which runs in Havana and was expanded across Cuba in this period is the strongest evidence that reading remains central to the Revolution and its continued effect in everyday Cuba (Kumaraswami 2016, 188). We can conclude from this that in Cuba, reading is considered to be directly compatible with social equality: the symbolic and practical function of the book is in the current period to “improve the quality of life of sectors of the population that had been marginalized socially” (Kumaraswami 2016, 188) with the advent of self-employment. If reading is central to policies and campaigns undertaken to respond to perceived social and economic challenges, then the success of those policies must also, to some extent, be considered to have emerged from reading. As a social activity, reading, when combined with the continued policy of free education, is a significant factor in Cuba’s resilience and strength in the

5 CUBA 

235

face of decades of international hostility and the trade embargo, as well as the current threat from neoliberalism which is most clearly visible in tourism and dependent trade. In Cuba, the function of books and reading is bound up with resistance and resilience. We might compare the functions of reading gleaned from the literary texts with the stated reasons for reading summarised by Par Kumaraswami, who conducted a reading group discussion with volunteer readers in Havana, the results of which she reported in The Social Life of Literature in Revolutionary Cuba. Functions of reading observed and stated by the participants include “emotional relaxation and spiritual fulfilment” (Kumaraswami 2016, 145); “reader agency” through “imaginative freedom”; and the requirement that literature is “credible” rather than “escapist” (145); this combination helps to establish the reader’s “political position as a Cuban and educate non-Cubans in the realities (both good and bad) of the Revolution” (147) through enabling self-examination and reflection on the nation and the reader’s way of life (148). Kumaraswami also observes that it is precisely the Cuban context that allows readers to reflect with this level of comfort on their personal, political, and national contexts: Cuban literary culture combined with universal free education creates critical and resilient readers “comfortable with the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies of their responses” (Kumaraswami 2016, 156). In Cuba, reading means space to read, write, learn, and reflect. Reading remains, as conveyed in the epigraph to this section from Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs, of central importance in the construction of Cuban reality; more than anywhere, books and reading in Cuba are objects and activities of esteem. In Cuban texts and contexts, books and reading enable resistance since their readers embody resilience; the maintenance of the reading spaces that are ever-present in the literary texts is essential for the reader, hence their recurrence.

References Baker, Carlos. 1972. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, Andrew. 2000. Architectural Philosophy. London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press. Berg, Mary G. 2003. Open Your Eyes and Soar: Cuban Women Writing Now. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press.

236 

J. RAMONE

Boudet, Rosa Ileana. 1998. Potosi II: Address Unknown. In Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women, ed. Mirta Yañez, 131–147. Boston: Beacon Press. Brouillette, Sarah, and David Finkelstein. 2013. Postcolonial Print Cultures. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48 (1): 3–7. Carpentier, Alejo. 1957. The Kingdom of This World. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1962. Explosion in a Cathedral. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1989 [1956]. The Chase. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1991 [1953]. The Lost Steps. London: Minerva. Cigar Stories: El Lector, He Who Reads. 1999. Lost and Found Sound. US National Public Radio. Colchie, Thomas. 1991. A Hammock Beneath the Mangoes: Stories from Latin America. London: Penguin. Cruz, Nilo. 2003. Anna in the Tropics. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Davies, Catherine. 1995. Women Writers in Cuba 1975–1994. Bulletin of Latin American Research 14 (2): 211–215. Davies, Catherine. 1997. A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth‐Century Cuba. London: Zed Books. De Cindio, Fiorella. 2008. Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. New York: Routledge. de Ferrari, Guillermina. 2014. Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba. London and New York: Routledge. Díaz, Jesús. 1987. The Initials of the Earth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Domotor, Teodora. 2012. Hemingway’s In Our Time: Masks, Silences and Heroes. Doctoral thesis, School of English and Languages, University of Surrey, May. González Echevarría, Roberto. 1985. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hall, Edith. 2008. The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. London: I.B. Tauris. Hannum, Howard L. 2001. “Scared Sick Looking at It”: A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories. Twentieth Century Literature 47 (1): 92–113. Hemingway, Ernest. 2003 [1925]. In Our Time. New York: Scribner. Huggan, Graham. 1994. Anthropologists and Other Frauds. Comparative Literature 46 (2): 113–128. Infante, G. Cabrera. 1990 [1965]. Three Trapped Tigers. London: Faber and Faber. Krol, Natalie. 2013. The Literary City of Havana and the Restoration of Culture in the Writing of Abilio Estévez. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90 (7): 837–851. Kumaraswami, Par. 2016. The Social Life of Literature in Revolutionary Cuba: Narrative, Identity, and Well-being. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

5 CUBA 

237

Kumaraswami, Parvathi, and Antoni Kapcia. 2012. Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-Building and the Book. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Levinson, Brett. 2002. The Ends of Literature: The Latin American ‘boom’ in the Neoliberal Marketplace. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Llana, María Elena. 2014 [1998]. Domicilio Habanero/An Address in Havana. Chico: Cubanabooks. López, Óscar Luis. 1998. La Radio en Cuba. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. McCabe, Scott. 2014. Towards a Better Theory of Tourism Experience? A Response to Gnoth and Matteucci. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 8 (2). https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJCTHR-04-2014-0026. Montalvo, María Luisa Lobo. 2000. Havana: History and Architecture of a Romantic City. Translated by Lorna Scott Fox. New York: The Monacelli Press. Obejas, Achy. 2007. Havana Noir. New York: Akashic Books. Oliver, Charles. 1999. Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Books. Padura, Leonardo. 2005a. Adios Hemingway. Translated by John King. Edinburgh: Canongate. ———. 2005b [1997]. Havana Red. Translated by Peter Bush. London: Bitter Lemon Press. ———. 2009 [2005]. Havana Fever. Translated by Peter Bush. London: Bitter Lemon Press. ———. 2014. The Man Who Loved Dogs. Translated by Anna Kushner. London: Bitter Lemon Press. Perez, Fernando, dir. 1990. Hello Hemingway. Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC). Portela, Ena Lucia. 1998. The Urn and the Name. In Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women, ed. Mirta Yañez, 199–207. Boston: Beacon Press. Ramone, Jenni. 2016. Reading Takes Place: Reading and the Politics of Space in Leonardo Padura’s Havana Quartet. Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 4 (1): 99–118. ———. 2019. Architecture is Repetition: Adapting Postcolonial Spatial Theory for Post-revolutionary Socialist Cuba. Interventions 21 (7): 959–976. Robinson, Simon, Matt Jones, John Williamson, Roderick Murray-Smith, Parisa Eslambolchilar, and Mads Lindborg. 2012. Navigation Your Way: From Spontaneous Independent Exploration. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 16 (8): 973–985. Seaton, A.V. 2002. Tourism as Metempsychosis and Metensomatosis: The Personae of Eternal Recurrence. In The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, ed. Graham M.S. Dann, 135–168. Wallingford: CABI.

238 

J. RAMONE

Serova, Anna Lida Vega. 2003. Russian Food. In Open Your Eyes and Soar: Cuban Women Writing Now, ed. Mary G. Berg, 53–56. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press. Server, Lee. 2006. Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing. New York: St Martin’s Press. Smith, Paul. 1996. 1924: Hemingway’s Luggage and the Miraculous Year. In The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson, 36–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smorkaloff, Pamela. 1997. Readers and Writers in Cuba: A Social History of Print Culture, l830s–l990s. London: Routledge. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Utrera, Sonia Bravo. 2003. Sandra. In Open Your Eyes and Soar: Cuban Women Writing Now, ed. Mary G. Berg, 170–174. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press. Wilkinson, Stephen. 2006. Detective Fiction in Cuban Society and Culture. Bern: Peter Lang. Wolf, Armin. 2004. Mapping Homer’s Odyssey. Eastern Mediterranean Cartographies Tetradia Ergasias 25/26: 309–334. Yañez, Mirta. 1998. Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women. Boston: Beacon Press.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Located Reading

Vijay Mishra argues that literature cannot be imagined without “interference” (Mishra 2019, 206) in terms of form, intertextuality, and the economics surrounding literature—following Moretti, Mishra claims that local literatures adopt the form of texts in global circulation but add local content and voice, attributing this to the effects of market forces and circulation. The principle of “interference” holds true when considering what reading means when the local literary marketplace is recognised as operating in spite of (rather than in the service of) a global literary marketplace. A resistant or self-sufficient local literary marketplace engages in a type of interference that can produce more positive effects than Moretti’s and Mishra’s analysis suggests, enabling resistance and recovery. In 2012 Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson edited Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception, which aimed to recognise the impact of readers, readerships, or audiences in the broad sense—“from ideal to real readers” (Benwell et al. 2012, 1). In so doing, they aimed to overcome what C.L. Innes has identified as the common practice of imagining the reader in presumptuous and reductive ways as either the generalised Western or cosmopolitan reader, or a member of the writer’s own community. The impact of such expectations is a “haziness” about readers, which “hinges upon commonsense assumptions about the location of reading, whether it is conceived in terms of national affiliation or in more generalised, global and diasporic terms of cosmopolitan consumption in ‘the’ West” (Benwell et  al. 2012, 43). The edited collection of essays © The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9_6

239

240 

J. RAMONE

addresses various categories of readers—including publishers, academic audiences, and specific genre fiction readers—some of whom are reading texts with particular local relevance at a distance from that locality (examples include Michelle Keown’s analysis of the global reception of New Zealand animated comedy, and Elizabeth Le Roux’s chapter on the international reception of South African academic texts). The editors’ own focus, though, is conveyed in a chapter presenting the results of their long-term international reading group project on the reception of global postcolonial literature by readers in thirteen locations across the UK, Africa, the Caribbean, India, and Canada. Benwell, Procter, and Robinson remain focused on a readership which is, if not global, at least globally connected—readers of postcolonial fiction, they note, are “likely to be global (as well as local), where reading, viewing and listening are frequently activities involving mobile, exilic and diasporic audiences, and where the potential distances between producers and consumers place an increased emphasis on translation and mistranslation” (Benwell et  al. 2012, 1). Their reading groups are aware of assumptions about their locations and about their own reading communities; they often resist those representations, or, conversely, express a kind of responsibility for characters that they perceive to be from their own location in a positioning that Benwell, Procter, and Robinson describe as “occupying a located identity” (Benwell et al. 2012, 48). Conclusions to the study include the assertion that “locatedness” is valued (Benwell et al. 2012, 50); that there is a high degree of complexity in location and the practices of reading; and that it is necessary to both contest and confirm “the meaning and value of ‘the literary space’ of books and their readerships” (Benwell et al. 2012, 54). Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading takes part in the project to confirm and contest the meaning and value of the literary space of books and their readerships, through identifying the local literary marketplace, the means by which books are produced, consumed, and distributed in particular locations, as of fundamental significance in understanding how and why books are read or unread in postcolonial literary texts, and in postcolonial contexts. Once the idea of the “local” is connected with the literary economy, it is necessary to recognise that books and reading are integrated within their local literary marketplace and that this local economy exerts a particular kind of influence over the life of that book and its meaning, that meaning is dependent upon where a book is read. This holds true whatever the individual (fictional or “real”) reader’s relationship to or position

6  CONCLUSION: LOCATED READING 

241

within their local economy or local literary marketplace; a wealthy and well-travelled reader is wealthy or well-travelled in the context of their local literary marketplace. Restrictions faced by books and readers do not work in parallel; as Dany Laferriere’s I am a Japanese Writer (2008) insists, location, nationality, and origins have a fluid relationship—“what is a Japanese writer? Someone who lives and works in Japan? Or someone who lives in Japan and writes in spite of it (there are nations that are happy without writing)? Or someone who was not born in Japan, who doesn’t know the language, but who decided one fine day to become a Japanese writer? That’s my situation” (Laferriere 2008, 8). Laferriere’s narrator insists that reading involves repatriation: “Very naturally, I repatriated the writers I read all the time. All of them. […] I take on my reader’s nationality. Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer” (Laferriere 2008, 14). The books read, examined, and handled in the literary texts addressed in Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading sometimes have local significance, while at other times the event of their being located in a particular place can be traced, but with differing degrees of straightforwardness. Asking why a particular book is relevant in a particular literary text offers a route towards understanding what reading means in that local context, and to do this there is a need to undertake located reading—that is, to read with an understanding of local economic, political, and, relatedly, cultural factors—in order to perceive the impact and function of books and reading. The specific instance offers lessons for reinterpreting books and reading elsewhere, and for acknowledging their centrality to all aspects of collective and individual agency. A theory of located reading might undertake to read in ways that echo my findings on the representation of Cuban space employing architectural theories: architecture’s focus on client and commission finds a straightforward parallel in located reading which requires an awareness of the significance of the economic factors underpinning the local literary marketplace; this becomes a route towards maintaining awareness of the literary economy. The other principles—flexibility, collaboration, the interstitial, and attention to repetition—suggest a practice of reading which insists on the potential for resistance and change through flexibility; which focuses on reading communities and contexts through collaboration rather than the isolated individual reader; that operates in the local spaces (interstices) which are often invisible or deprioritised in analyses of reading which are alert only to global readerships and economies; and which emphasises the patterns and practices

242 

J. RAMONE

(repetitions) which may, once again, confirm or contest ideas of the “local” when they are compared and contrasted. The function of reading in Indian literature of Partition is to enable those who read or do other things with books to move through the trauma that has been displaced by the government’s insistence on active forgetting. In the South Asian literary texts considered in Chap. 1, reading is an act of resistance with consequences. Repetitions of reading and memories of reading predominate, contributing to the sense that books and reading signify a method of recovery in Indian writing after the impact of Partition on South Asian literary culture. Books are understood to be powerful and revolutionary, and books and reading are vital instruments in shifting the Partition narrative away from both the “collective amnesia” (Greenberg 2005, 94) that Jonathan Greenberg identifies in national representations of Partition, and of the static trauma that stories including Saadat Hasan Manto’s convey, towards a future beyond trauma. In Nigerian literature, discussions of books and reading circulate around three functions: questions about the ways in which reading and socioeconomic success cohere; a reassessment of the global literary marketplace as dominated by canonical European literature; and an assertion of the prominence of a local literary culture. The market is central to all conceptions of books and reading in Nigerian writing. In The Famished Road, books offer hope of emancipation from the exploitation of local labour for global profit in an uneven system; this extends to the idea of “African” writing in this global context—Nigerian texts frequently foreground ideas about the African writer and the co-option of Nigerian writers into local and global publishing machines. Okri’s (1991) African marketplace is one of resistance and his African aesthetic exists, but it opposes a European definition of Africanness, partly through its profound emphasis on the local. In Black Writing in Britain, reading is a responsibility, not just to the self but to the community, to a national, cultural, or racial identity, and to the Black Consciousness movement itself. This explains repeated instances of unread, discarded, unfinished books, and of misused books: such instances are especially common in Black British writing. These rejected or misused books are those that do not represent a commitment to consciousness. Locating the reader in Black Writing in Britain is about locating the self: in many examples, books are valued only if they serve an intellectual function that enables consciousness.

6  CONCLUSION: LOCATED READING 

243

In Cuba, reading is considered to be directly compatible with social equality. As a social activity, reading, when combined with the continued policy of free education, is a significant factor in Cuba’s resilience and strength in the face of decades of international hostility and the trade embargo, as well as the current threat from neoliberalism which is most clearly visible in tourism and dependent trade. In Cuba, reading means space to read, write, learn, and reflect. Reading remains, as conveyed in Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs, of central importance in the construction of Cuban reality; more than anywhere, books and reading in Cuba are objects and activities of esteem. In practice, reading in Cuban literature draws attention to spaces, and this, when considered in the context of the high value placed on books and reading in Cuba, and the corresponding high levels of educational, social, and artistic achievement offer good evidence for the significance of analysing what reading means in its local context. As Lydia Pyne insists in her fascinating study of the cultural meaning of the bookshelf, the reason for a book being read in a specific location is highly meaningful: for Pyne, the bookshelf “shows the decisions that went into getting the book to its current spot on the shelf. These decisions can reflect whims of fancy and they can reflect hundreds of years of tradition” (Pyne 2016, 47). Located reading as a purely cultural phenomenon as is expressed by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction, determined primarily by education (Bourdieu 1984, 1–2), might be undermined in Benwell, Procter, and Robinson’s study by readers who resist cultural categorisation and/or demonstrate reading tastes and practices outside the expectations assigned to them by their cultural or educational categorisation, where this extra-­ cultural taste is sometimes enabled by either diasporic contexts or the effects of globalisation. Once again, the instruction to be able to both confirm and contest the significance of place is relevant. It might be assumed that my analysis of reading in particular locations implies a uniformity of reading taste or experience. This is not intended, although my project does uncover reading patterns and practices which differ from place to place and which are instated by the literary economy (rather than a somewhat more abstracted “culture”, though these things will overlap). Bourdieu implies that class and socioeconomic categorisation are connected directly with the precise ways in which a reader can enjoy or understand a literary or other artistic work:

244 

J. RAMONE

through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. (Bourdieu 1984, 6)

While Bourdieu’s thesis is somewhat inflexible, we might extract from his analysis the inevitable impact of unevenly distributed literary economics, while remembering that this does not operate straightforwardly; in Cuba, despite limited financial resources for literature, prominent spaces are given over to the public reception and circulation of books, while literature is highly valued in education, meaning that Cuban readers have unparalleled access to books and reading despite the relatively small budget for literature. An abstracted sense of Bourdieu’s Distinction operates more effectively than the rigid definition: this means recognising that the meaning and function of books and reading are dependent on the socioeconomic context in which they are read and distributed. Reading is located, since it is initiated by the economic opportunities or constraints. Even if reading is not culturally located, meaning that readers who share a cultural background will not necessarily read in the same way or consider reading to serve the same function, reading is economically located: readers who share a location’s economy will understand the function of reading to be dependent upon that local economy, acknowledging the variation between individuals depending on their level of access to wealth within their economic system. Put simply, using the location expressing the greatest level of uniformity in my analysis, readers in Nigeria will understand reading to function in connection (in some way) with education and the access that this provides to high-paid, highly-valued jobs. In recent years, the directness of this relationship has been challenged, and business has come to replace reading as the most reliable means to acquire wealth and status. But Nigerian readers still understand reading as operating within the economic structure of the country rather than as an arts activity which is disconnected from the economy, which is the way that literature in Cuba had been understood prior to the Revolution. Similarly, in the UK, conscious literature was understood to have a direct impact on the ability of Black people in Britain to articulate and undertake their rights and to resist and reform racist policies, especially for children and young people. In India, books and reading emerge as fundamental because of the

6  CONCLUSION: LOCATED READING 

245

effectiveness with which they operate as a means towards working through trauma. Ben Okri’s novel The Freedom Artist (2019) positions “books, books, books” (59) as both dangerous and vital, and as implicated within the economy: “Money is the last frontier of the imagination. It is the last object in art” (88). The Freedom Artist is a speculative narrative which imagines a future where bookshops are “disappearing from contemporary life” and “people had stopped reading books” (93). Here, freedom is achieved when “books” bring back into the world “the mystery of the lost word” (345)—in The Freedom Artist, books “keep things”, “reveal things” and “they’re like a mirror” (270). Methods of passing on the skills and knowledge that books can offer resemble the practices revealed in the texts I have analysed in these chapters. However, there is a different tone: because The Freedom Artist imagines a dystopian future without books, there is a greater urgency to express the need for books. For instance, an old bookseller says that in order to convey the work of books, he “must become the pelican who feeds the young with its own blood” (250). The bird and its bridging role between the older and younger generations, the past and the future, recalls Sankofa; but the Sankofa bird functions in a continuum where the stories and lessons from history are not lost but are instead part of the community’s intellectual and creative wealth. In The Freedom Artist, the old bookseller must use his own blood to feed the young because he is the last holder of that knowledge in a dystopian context where books and their function have been outlawed. The Freedom Artist insists that books “could change” things—“they changed whatever they encountered” (227); without them, “no one remembered that there were once people who dreamt and embarked on fabulous adventures, people of bold imagination and daring hearts” (244). In this abstract and decontextualised novel, reading is necessary to overcome repression, and to empower. In the specific locations considered in my research—Cuba, India, Nigeria, and in Black British writing and publishing contexts in the UK—books and reading are instrumental in resisting the particular effects of colonial history and neoliberal unevenness. Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading is, above all, a vindication of reading and an observation of the impact of reading in four resistant postcolonial contexts as a means of insisting on the significance of books and reading for empowerment, resistance, recovery, and creativity.

246 

J. RAMONE

References Benwell, Bethan, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson. 2012. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenberg, Jonathan. 2005. Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25 (1): 89–110. Laferriere, Dany. 2008. I am a Japanese Writer. Translated by David Homel. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. Mishra, Vijay. 2019. Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy. London: Bloomsbury. Okri, Ben. 1991. The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2019. The Freedom Artist. London: Head of Zeus. Pyne, Lydia. 2016. Bookshelf. London: Bloomsbury.



Appendix

Lagos bookseller interviews, August 2015 The following interviews were conducted in Lagos bookshops by Saudatu Mohamed, an NTU SPUR undergraduate research assistant on a funded project attached to this book, in August 2015. Saudatu, an NTU international student, was recruited by Jenni Ramone to conduct semistructured interviews with booksellers in her home city during her summer vacation. Saudatu’s questions appear in italic font. Saudatu elected to transcribe the interviews into a Standard English to ensure their ideas are fully comprehensible to as wide an audience as possible, though some of the interviews were conducted in a local dialect or a mixture of Standard English and local dialect.

Recording 1 How would you describe a bookshop to someone that has never visited one? It is a place where books are bought. We specialise in books for tertiary education. A first timer may be confused as to what to buy and help can be rendered. He/she is asked what book they need and what author they are most interested in because there are a number of authors for a particular book. When did you start working here? How would you describe your role and have things changed in terms of customer patronage? © The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9

247

248 

APPENDIX

This bookshop was previously stocked and equipped to the taste of the former owner. When it was handed over me about a year ago, I restocked and equipped it to my own taste. Who are your competitors? This is an open market. Everyone is my competitor. Do e-books reduce your level of sales? Do you see it as a form of competition as well? Yes. Sometimes when students feel they cannot afford the books due to the price, they decide to download a soft copy because it is a cheaper option for them. They may decide to bargain for the books and if it is at a profitable price, I sell it to them. If not, I accept that I the e-book is my competitor. Do you operate independently or do you have a community of other retail sellers? Of course. We have so many Nigerian authors that we buy from. Describe your typical customer and what does the person buy? Engineering maths is a book we make sales from every day. Do you have recognisable customers? Yes I do. There are some customers that we know will always pay on the spot. Is there a time of the year that is particularly busy or there is no pattern to it? As a tertiary dealer, there is no particular day but I can narrow it down to every Friday. We usually have customers who travel from Aba to buy books from us. How would you compare the reading culture in Lagos to that of Aba or Onitsha? I cannot really compare. How/who makes the decision of what books to stock the shop with? Since I am the manager, I am the right person to make the decision of what books to buy for the bookshop. The only exception is when my boss buys the books himself. What authors are your bestsellers? Which ones attract more customers? Mostis J B Copter published in India. Are your customers mostly Nigerians? Yes they are mostly Nigerians but I have a few Ghanaian customers as well. What type of books do you specialise in? Tertiary books in fields such as medicine and engineering.

 APPENDIX 

249

Do you have policies or a practice in displaying your books? No I do not. We used to display/arrange them according to their titles (alphabetically?) but we ran out of space. Now we arrange them according to their field. What is your favourite experience working here? My favourite experience is selling a book. I am happy when I make sales. Is there anything you would like to add? Maybe about your experience working here? At this age, working here enlightens me. Majority of our customers are students and I learn things when they ask us about the books we sell.

Recording 2 How do you describe the books you sell? There are numerous fields like academic and professional books. There are also religious books like the general acceptance book which is a motivational book. Which of the books do you make the most sales from? The motivational books which attract graduates or post graduates who want to start their own businesses. These books act as mentors to them because they read about the already existing entrepreneurs in the line of business they wish to start. Seeing as you are at the road side, do you feel you are at an advantage compared to those who have shops? It is easier to make more sales in motivational and religious books in a make-shift shop by the road side because passers-by see the title of the books and it draws their attention. The only exception is when a shop is located in a strategic place. With academic books however, the customer goes into the shops and asks for what he or she wants. In Nigeria, the impact of road side book sellers are valued. I have lost a lot of books here since the last government regime. This shouldn’t be the case because we enlighten people through the books we sell. Are there authors that attract more customers? Sometimes, I do not advise people to have special authors because subsequent books of an author is hardly ever as good as the first published book. More knowledge can be gained when you divert to another author. There are some people that ask for new books from certain authors. Do you read books and what type of books do you read?

250 

APPENDIX

I like reading motivational books because it helps me mind map and acquire tips to work towards my goals. Do you get your books from the publishers or wholesales? I get it from wholesales who import. Do you sell Christian books and fiction? Yes, Christian books are the most popular ones. As for the professional books, I do not generate much sales from them because the market (people who will buy) for them aren’t located around here. Because the demand for those books are low in my location, I have to sell them for a much lower price whereas people with shops sell them for a much higher price. Do you have any additional input? I would like to add that the government should know and value booksellers because we make an impact in the lives of people. Also, libraries should be provided so that knowledge can be gained by all. They should not discourage road side sellers because we have the same books that those with shops have.

Recording 3 How would you describe your bookshop in terms of the books you sell? I sell engineering and other professions. Do you have a target market? We request for books based on what most customers want. Do you read and what type of books do you like to read? Yes I do. I enjoy reading motivational books. Do you have much competition? And how do you get customers to patronise you and not your competitors? I am in constant communication with my customers. They call to request for the books they would like. Who makes the decision of what types of books to stock? I supply to both primary and secondary schools. Since you supply to primary and secondary schools, do you get your books from the publishers? Yes I do. And I get 10–20 per cent discount. What books in your stock have the most sales? Junior secondary books have the most sales. Which are your bestselling authors? Longman.

 APPENDIX 

251

How long have you been working here and what has the experience been like? I have been working here for 25 years. Is there anything you would like to add? Generally, sales have been poor unlike before when we generated a lot of sales during exam periods.

Recording 4 What type of books do you sell? I sell primary, secondary and tertiary educational books. What time of the year do you have the most sales? I have my most sales in the third term of school. That is two months In September (that’s what I heard but it doesn’t make sense and I can’t make sense out of it lmao. Does he mean two months before September? Or two months after September?). Are you the owner of the bookshop? Yes I am. Do you make the decision of what books to sell or do you stock your bookshop based on popular demand? I make the decision on what books to buy. How long have you been in this business? About twenty years. Do you get discounts from publishers? Yes I do. Do you plan on expanding your business? I would like to but financing it would be the issue. Do you plan to stick to just primary, secondary and tertiary educational books? Or do you plan on extending it to novels etc.? I would like to extend to medical, fictional and motivational books. Do you read books? Yes I do. Do you have recognisable customers? Yes I do. Do you give discount to every customer or only frequent customers? Or do you sell at your designated prices only? I give discounts. Do you have any additional input? No, I don’t.

252 

APPENDIX

Recording 5 How would you describe your bookshop to someone that has never been here before? We sell nursery, primary, secondary and tertiary educational books. Do you have frequent customers? Yes we have many customers. We are retailers as well as wholesalers so we have people who come from Zaria, Lagos, Abuja, Oshodi and Ikorodu to buy for their bookshops. We buy directly from the publishers from home and abroad. We import the foreign books. Do you have books that generate the most sales? Imported children’s books generate the most sales. The others have seasons. It depends on what the different schools recommend for students. Different schools recommend different books for their students. The books recommended in the public schools are different from those recommended in private schools. Some nursery schools would prefer the imported books while others want the local ones. Also, teachers tend change books every session. This is why we cannot really tell which ones generate the most sales. Who are your competitors? I have a lot of competition. It is the same way you compete with your peers in school. How many years have you owned this shop? I started on the 1st of May 1983. So about thirty years now. What is your advice to people who buy and read books? I have children that are graduates. I can only advise them to also educate their own children as well. Education is a very good policy. If I had attended school, I may have been able to have succeeded in life more than I have now. I would have also been able to gain more knowledge than I currently have. I still thank God for what he has done for me.

Recording 6 How do you describe the books you sell? I sell secondary and tertiary educational books. When do you generate the most sales? Mostly in January and February. Do you own the bookshop? No, it belongs to my brother. I am the manager.

 APPENDIX 

253

Recording 7 Do you have a target market? Yes. This bookshop is own by the Christian Anglican Communion so we are known for the publishing of hymn books used in Anglican churches. How would you describe your role? I am the manager of the place and I have some subordinates that work in different sections of the bookshop. How long have you been working here? I have been here for four years. Has your role changed over time? I was formerly a cashier before I was promoted to the managerial position. Who are your competitors? The bookshops located around us are our competitors even though they aren’t as large as we are. One of our competitors is Bible wonderland. Do you feel like your bookshop is part of the Christian community? Yes it is. It is owned by the Anglican Communion so most churches buy their books from us. We also relate with the community in general. We have school books we publish and supply to different schools. Fonix mental math is a book published by us and it used in some schools. Do you have recognisable customers? Yes we do. Are there certain periods of the year that are busier than others? Yes we do. After third term, parents buy their children’s books. In December, we generate a lot of sales from church hymn books. Do you attend local or national events? The MD attends London book fairs and those within Nigeria as well. Who decides what books to stock? The market or an individual in the bookshop? As people request more for a certain book, I inform the store keepers and the store informs the purchasing department. Do publishers offer you discounts? Yes they do. We buy from other publishers and they offer us discounts. Who is your bestselling author? I cannot really say because the bookshop is very large. People come for our hymnals and during school season, many parents come for school books. Do you alter the layout of the store from time to time? Yes we do.

254 

APPENDIX

What is your favourite experience about working here? I love working here because through this place I have inspired people. Would you like to make any additional input? I have met people through this bookshop and if I leave here today, I would like to have my own bookshop too because it a lucrative business.

Index

A Abani, Chris, 85, 123, 127 Graceland, 85, 127, 130 Achebe, Chinua, 19, 86, 90, 92, 96, 102, 103, 110, 112, 113, 120, 122–124 Chike and the River, 86, 110, 118 No Longer At Ease, 102, 103, 122, 123 Adebayo, Diran, 168 Some Kind of Black, 168 Adebayo-Begun, Jide, 85 “Bridge,” 85 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 19, 94, 107, 108, 112, 113, 115–118, 120, 135 “Apollo,” 107 Half of a Yellow Sun, 115, 117–119, 122 “Jumping Monkey Hill,” 19, 117, 135 Purple Hibiscus, 112, 115, 116, 122 Adiga, Aravind, 12, 15 The White Tiger, 12, 15 Adoption, 172, 179, 217

Afro-Cuban movement, 205 Antigua, 1, 2, 5 Apartheid, 142, 143 Architecture, 22, 201, 233, 241 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 120–122, 129 The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, 120, 121 Atinuke, 167 Autobiography, 6, 180, 207 Ava Gardner, 219, 228–231, 233 B Babri Masjid, 13, 33 Baldwin, James, 105, 129, 130, 145, 170, 174, 175 “Sonny’s Blues,” 170, 174, 175 Bangladesh, 13, 33, 47, 56 Bangladesh Liberation War, 49 Barbed wire, 20, 27, 28, 31, 47, 59, 60, 65, 68–73, 76 Batalla de Ideas, 192, 202, 231–235 Baudelaire, 15 Fleurs Du Mal, 15

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Ramone, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9

255

256 

INDEX

Bedford, Simi, 10, 167, 168 Yoruba Girl Dancing, 10, 167, 168 Bengal, 29, 30, 36, 39, 41 Bhabha, Homi, 3, 4, 11, 12, 15, 176 Biafran war/Nigerian Civil War, 90, 103, 115, 116, 118, 119 Bible, 38, 45, 99, 100, 109–111, 123, 164, 168, 216, 253 Biko, Steve, 115, 142 Black Art Movement, 154–156 Black consciousness bookshops, 18, 21–23, 142–150, 154, 155, 174, 175, 187 Black Education Movement (BEM), 143, 158 Black Parents Movement (BPM), 143, 148 Black Supplementary School Movement (BSSM), 143 Bodeguita del Medio, 207, 218, 220 Boehmer, Elleke, 20, 27–29, 31–33, 61–63, 73, 102, 103 Bogle L’Ouverture Publications (BLP), 144, 146–148, 158 Boko Haram, 136 Bookselling, 2, 4, 16–19, 24, 33, 75, 95, 146, 150, 162 Border crossing, 28 Bourdieu, Pierre, 243, 244 Distinction, 243, 244 Brouillette, Sarah, 19, 22, 163, 191 Bulawayo, NoViolet, 5, 9 We Need New Names, 5, 9–11 Butalia, Urvashi, 29, 33, 35, 36, 62, 64 The Other Side of Silence, 29, 64 C Camp, the, 34, 70, 118, 119, 209, 227 Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), 148, 151, 152, 187

Carpentier, Alejo, 184, 194, 205–217, 233 Explosion in a Cathedral, 205 The Kingdom of this World, 194 The Lost Steps, 205–217 Cartography, 5, 20, 27, 28, 32, 42–49, 53, 208 Castro, Fidel, 199, 207 Children’s literature, 41, 144, 147, 152, 160 Collaboration, 111, 201, 229, 241 Colonialism, 4, 11, 12, 22, 24, 33, 97, 102–104, 106–108, 115, 116, 120, 125, 134, 196, 215 Columbus, Christopher, 6 Commonwealth Literary Prize, 126 Cruz, Nilo, 197–199 Anna in the Tropics, 197 D Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 5, 7 Nervous Conditions, 5, 7, 9 Desai, Anita, 38, 49, 55, 56 Clear Light of Day, 30, 32, 38, 49, 50, 54, 55 Desai, Kiran, 44 The Inheritance of Loss, 44 Detective fiction, 192, 194, 219–221, 225, 229, 231, 232 Devi, Jyotirmoyee, 29, 30 Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (The River Churning), 29 Devi, Mahasweta, 49, 56–59 “Draupadi,” 49, 56–59 Díaz, Jesús, 194 The Initials of the Earth, 194 Displacement, 12, 13, 27–77, 136

 INDEX 

E Edoro, Ainehi, 23, 24 Education, 1–3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 19–22, 38, 41, 42, 55, 82, 85, 86, 93–112, 116, 117, 120, 123, 129, 131–133, 136, 137, 141–144, 147, 154, 156–162, 166, 168, 182, 195, 197, 215, 234, 235, 243, 244, 247 Ekwensi, Cyprian, 85, 96, 103, 113 Jagua Nana, 85 El Ideal, 197 Eliot, TS, 50, 53, 54, 121 The Waste Land, 50, 53, 54 Embodied labour, 136, 176, 178, 179 Emecheta, Buchi, 164–166, 168 Second-Class Citizen, 165, 166 Equiano’s Travels, or the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African, 112, 116 Evaristo, Bernardine, 18, 169, 181 Mr Loverman, 169, 170, 181, 188 Exchange, 30, 81, 85, 87, 96, 111, 125, 132, 152, 214 F Fanon, Frantz, 110, 168, 183 Black Skin, White Masks, 9, 168 Finca Vigia, 217–219, 222, 223, 227–229 Fraud, 83, 98, 102, 108, 204 G Garvey, Marcus, 110, 145, 155 Gates, Henry Louis, 153, 181 Gender roles, 20, 27, 28, 49, 52, 55, 59, 91, 92, 95, 169 George Padmore Institute (GPI), 143, 148, 152, 153, 156 Ghana, 87, 151, 171, 182

257

Ghosh, Amitav, 41, 44, 45 The Shadow Lines, 44–46 Ghosts, 60, 61, 66, 67, 69, 117 Gilroy, Paul, 169 Global capitalism/global capital, 23, 89, 131, 205 Global imperial exploitation, 111 Global trade and tourism, 22, 142, 193, 220 Griswold, Wendy, 82, 86, 87, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 102, 165 H Habila, Helon, 123, 125–127 Waiting for an Angel, 125, 127 Heart of Darkness, 4 Heinemann African Writers Series, 85, 112–114, 149 Hellzapoppin, 176–178 Hemingway, Ernest, 14, 192, 194, 204, 207, 217–233 “Big Two-Hearted River,” 218–220, 223, 225–228, 230, 231 In Our Time, 218, 219, 225 The Sun Also Rises, 14 The History of Mary Prince, 117 Hodge, Merle, 8, 9 Crick Crack, Monkey, 5, 8, 9 Homer, 133, 207, 208 The Odyssey, 133, 205–217 Hossain, Attia, 49 Sunlight on a Broken Column, 49, 55 Huggan, Graham, 19, 112, 113, 149, 150, 210–212 I Ibrahim, Abubakar Adam, 106, 116 Iceberg principle, 222, 223 Ife International Book Fair, 97

258 

INDEX

Igbo, 23, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 103, 130, 166 Infante, G. Cabrera, 204, 232, 233 Three Trapped Tigers, 232, 233 Intertextuality, 92, 239 J Jaico, 38 Jane Eyre, 10, 48 K Kalu, Pete, 141 Being Me, 141, 142 Khair, Tabish, 20, 28, 32, 59–76 Filming, 20, 28, 30, 32, 59–77 Kincaid, Jamaica, 1, 2, 5 Annie John, 5 A Small Place, 1 Kolkata, 36, 37, 39 Kortenaar, Neil Ten, 19, 20 Kumaraswami, Par, 191, 192, 199–203, 234, 235 Kwei-Armah, Kwame, 144, 166 Fix-up, 144, 166, 188 L La Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí, 200 La Rose, John, 148, 152, 157, 161 Laferriere, Dany, 241 I am a Japanese Writer, 241 Lamming, George, 127, 150, 151, 162 The Pleasures of Exile, 162 Landscape, 20, 27, 28, 32, 35, 42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 59, 68, 73, 147, 207, 219 Lectores, 197, 198

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 210, 211 Library, 1, 2, 5–8, 12, 14, 17, 20, 22, 28, 30, 32–36, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48–51, 55, 75, 94, 105, 116, 117, 147, 160, 165, 166, 170, 171, 181, 185, 194, 200, 204, 205, 212, 250 The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, 117, 118 Lindy Hop, 176, 178–180 Literacy, 19, 20, 86, 193, 195, 197, 200 Literary activism, 148 Llana, María Elena, 194, 203, 204 Domicilio Habanero/An Address in Havana, 194 Located reading, 1–24, 130, 239–245 Lost and Found Sound, 198, 199 M Macfarlane, Robert, 23 Mahabharata, 30, 56 Malcolm X, 141, 151, 153 Mangrove Restaurant, 23 Manigua, 196 Manto, Saadat Hasan, 20, 27–29, 31, 47, 59–62, 65–67, 69, 70, 74, 76, 77, 242 “Toba Tek Singh,” 20, 27–29, 31, 32, 59, 69, 70 Mapping, see Cartography Marxism/Marxist, 87, 128, 143 Mass art, 196 Memory, 7, 23, 28, 33, 46, 47, 53, 54, 57, 59–77, 100, 111, 121, 122, 125, 182, 187, 222, 227–230, 232, 242 Miller, Kei, 42, 46

 INDEX 

“The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion,” 42 Mitchell, Dreda Say, 168 Killer Tune, 168 N Nasrin, Taslima, 6, 12, 13 French Lover, 6, 12–14, 17 Shame (Lajja), 13 National Antiracist Movement in Education (NAME), 142, 143, 152, 156–161 National Association of Supplementary Schools (NASS), 142, 143, 152, 156–159, 161 Negritude, 23, 120, 173, 182 Neoliberalism, 131, 170–181, 235, 243 New Beacon Books, 146, 148, 149, 157, 158 Newspaper, 3, 13, 17, 40, 41, 44–47, 58, 74, 91, 105, 110, 112, 120, 126, 131, 155, 156, 164, 169, 211 Nigeria International Book Fair, 82 Nwaubani, Tricia Adaobi, 97–99, 108 I Do Not Come to you By Chance, 97–99, 106, 108, 111 Nzekwu, Onuora, 86 Eze Goes to School, 86, 97, 118 O Obejas, Achy, 194 Havana Noir, 194 Obierchina, Emmanuel, 89, 90 Oil Boom, 21, 82, 96, 97, 103 Okri, Ben, 83–85, 88, 95, 96, 103, 120, 122, 130, 134, 135, 242, 245 Dangerous Love, 120–122, 125

259

“The Dream-vendor’s August,” 83, 85, 95 The Famished Road, 85, 88, 89, 96, 130–135, 242 The Freedom Artist, 245 Onitsha Market Literature, 21, 82, 85, 86, 89–98, 129 Onuzo, Chihundu, 108, 111 Welcome to Lagos, 108–110 Origenes, 196 Osundare, Niyi, 81 “Songs of the Market Place,” 81 Oyeyemi, Helen, 181–187 The Opposite House, 181–184, 186, 188 What is not yours is not yours, 181 P Padura, Leonardo, 192–194, 203–205, 217–233, 235, 243 Adios, Hemingway, 193, 217–232 The Man Who Loved Dogs, 231–233, 235, 243 Paginas, 197 Pamphlets, 17, 40, 42, 48, 49, 82–85, 87, 89–92, 95, 202, 206 Papermaking, 36, 37 Paper mills, 36, 37, 96 Partition, 18, 20, 21, 27–77, 242 Pemberton, Joe, 167, 168 Forever and Ever Amen, 167, 168 Perez, Fernando, 227 Hello Hemingway, 227, 228 Phillips, Caryl, 10, 168 Cambridge, 10 Printing press, 41, 84, 86, 90, 195, 205, 206 Punjab, 34, 39–42, 44

260 

INDEX

Q Qisse, 40 Qu’ran, 74 R Race Today, 3 Radcliffe Line, 32 Ram Advani, 20, 28, 33, 35, 36 Reading spaces, 22, 46, 95, 187, 193–205, 219, 231, 235 Remapping, 28, 32, 42–49, 53, 59–76, 187 Repetition, 12, 20, 27–32, 59, 63, 64, 69, 76, 77, 104, 153, 174, 180–187, 194, 201, 202, 210, 217–234, 241, 242 Resistant, 8, 23, 24, 27, 56, 59, 111, 119, 134, 184, 188, 227, 239, 245 Revolution, 3, 4, 16, 21, 72, 151, 174, 178, 191–235, 244 Riley, Joan, 164, 166, 167, 170 Romance, 167, 170, 177, 188 The Unbelonging, 164, 167 Rodney, Walter, 144, 151 S Salkey, Andrew, 23, 151, 152, 154, 173, 187 Sankofa, 142, 147, 151, 153, 154, 171–175, 187, 245 Santeria, 23, 204 Second-hand book markets, 16, 22, 192–194 Self-education, 95, 120, 129 Selvadurai, Shyam, 10 Funny Boy, 10 Sembène, Ousmane, 121

God’s Bits of Wood, 121 Sengupta, Jayita, 28, 47, 70 Sexuality, 107, 169, 170 Shabazz, Menelik, 164 Burning an Illusion, 164, 177, 188 Signifyin(g), 50, 102, 136, 153, 181, 182, 186, 212 Slave narratives, 112–115, 117, 120, 145, 170 Smith, Zadie, 10, 142, 163, 170–181 Swing Time, 142, 163, 170–181, 188 White Teeth, 163 Smorkaloff, Pamela, 192, 195–197, 200 Soueif, Ahdaf, 12, 14 Aisha, 12, 14, 17 Soyinka, Wole, 20, 103, 104, 120, 125, 126, 173 The Interpreters, 104, 105, 120, 122 Spanish-American war of 1898–1899, 196 Spatial theory, 22, 193, 201, 220, 228 Supplementary schools, 157, 158, 161 T Talawa Arts, 155 Talleres literarias (writing workshops), 200 Tertulias, 195 Todorov, Tzvetan, 220, 221 “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” 220 Tolstoy, Leo, 110, 197 Anna Karenina, 197, 198

 INDEX 

Trauma, 7, 20–22, 27–77, 119, 122, 223, 226–228, 242, 245 Tutuola, Amos, 85, 103, 123 U Ulysses, 14, 208, 213, 214 V Vishveshvarand Vedic Research Library (VVRI), 33, 34, 36 The Voice, 150, 156, 161

W White, Herbert “Whitey,” 176, 178, 179 Wuthering Heights, 14, 45, 198 Y Ybor City, 197 Z Zimbabwe, 7, 9, 11

261