Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis 900432285X, 9789004322851

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis: An Introduction • Cecile Sandten & Annika Bauer
Citizenship and (Alternative) Market Economies in the Postcolonial Metropolis
The Economics of Urban Development for the Postcolonial Poor • Melissa Kennedy
Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt • Enda Duffy
Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multi-Cultural London • David Tavares and Marc Brosseau
Political Change and Contested Spaces in the African and South African Metropolis
Tracing the Rural in the Urban: Re-Reading Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow through Brooding Clouds • Annika McPherson
The Representation of Place in Three Post-Apartheid South African Novels • Michael Wessels
‘Welcome to Johannesburg’: Melancholia and Fragmentation in Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 • Danyela Demir
Angels in South Africa? Queer Urbanity in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America • Verena Jain-Warden
The Thrust of the City: Penis Fixation in Jude Dibia’s Blackbird • Chris Dunton
The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rightsin Contemporary African Women’s Writing • Chielozona Eze
The Asian and South Asian Metropolises on the Move
Utopian Sights: Re-Inventing the Asian Metropolis • Bill Ashcroft
A City on the Move: Routing Urban Spaces – Literary and Cinematic Representations of Mumbai’s Lifeline, the ‘Local’ Trains • Mala Pandurang
The Experience of Urban Space in the Poetry of Arun Kolatkar • Rajeev S. Patke
The Metropolis in the Province: Interrogating the New Postcolonial Literature in India • R. Raj Rao
‘No One Is India’: Literary Renderings of the (Postcolonial) Metropolis in Salman Rushdie and Indra Sinha • Roman Bartosch
The Glocal Metropolis: Tokyo Cancelled, The White Tiger, and Spatial Politics • Pia Florence Masurczak
Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities • Agnes S.L. Lam
Reframing the Australian / Canadian (Settler) Metropolis
City of Words: Haunting Legacies in Gail Jones’s Five Bells • Sue Kossew
Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog: History and Identity in the Metropolis of Melbourne • Marijke Denger
Indigenous Urbanities: Representations of Cities in Native Canadian, Aboriginal Australian, and Māori Literature • Frank Schulze–Engler
Senses, Sounds, and Languages in the Postcolonial Metropolis
From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture: Multimedial Reflections on Metropolitan Space • Rolf J. Goebel
Between Ghetto and Utopia: London as a Postcolonial Metropolis in Recent British Music Videos • Oliver Lindner
The Sounding City: Soundscapes and Urban Modernity in Amit Chaudhuri’s Fiction • Christin Hoene
Pidgin Goes Public: Urban Institutional Space in Cameroon • Eric A. Anchimbe
Emancipation from and Re-Invention of the Linguistic Metropolis in a Postcolonial Speech Community • Michael Westphal
Notes on Contributors and Editors
Index

Citation preview

Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis

Cross/Cultures readings in post/colonial literatures and cultures in english

Edited by Gordon Collier Geofffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent

Co-founding editor †Hena Maes-Jelinek

VOLUME 188

asnel Papers asnel Papers appear under the auspices of the Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (gaps) Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies Katja Sarkowsky, President Englisches Seminar, wwu Münster Formatting, layout, and fijinal editing: Gordon Collier

VOLUME 20

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/asne

Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis Edited by

Cecile Sandten Annika Bauer

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: © Daniel Wagner Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952180

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1385-2981 isbn 978-90-04-32285-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32876-1 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhofff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Illustrations

ix

Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis: An Introduction CECIL E SA NDTEN & ANNIKA BA UE R

CITI ZEN SHI P

xi

(A L T E R N A T I V E ) M A R K E T E C O N O M I E S POSTCOLONI AL METR OPOLIS

AND

IN THE

The Economics of Urban Development for the Postcolonial Poor MELIS SA KE N NE DY

3

Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt ENDA DU FF Y

17

Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multi-Cultural London DAV I D TAV ARE S

IN

A ND

MARC BROSSEAU

33

POLITIC AL CHAN GE AN D CON TE ST ED SP AC ES THE AF RIC AN AND S OUTH AF RICAN METR OP OLI S

Tracing the Rural in the Urban: Re-Reading Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow through Brooding Clouds ANNIKA MCPHERSON

57

The Representation of Place in Three Post-Apartheid South African Novels MICHAEL WESSELS

71

‘Welcome to Johannesburg’: Melancholia and Fragmentation in Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 DANYELA DE M IR

87

Angels in South Africa? Queer Urbanity in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

101

The Thrust of the City: Penis Fixation in Jude Dibia’s Blackbird CH RI S D UN TO N

115

The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights in Contemporary African Women’s Writing CHIEL OZON A EZE

129

THE ASIAN

AN D

S O UTH AS IAN ME TR OP OLI SES

ON TH E

MOVE

Utopian Sights: Re-Inventing the Asian Metropolis BILL ASHCR OFT

145

A City on the Move: Routing Urban Spaces – Literary and Cinematic Representations of Mumbai’s Lifeline, the ‘Local’ Trains MALA PANDURANG

167

The Experience of Urban Space in the Poetry of Arun Kolatkar R A J E E V S. P A T K E

183

The Metropolis in the Province: Interrogating the New Postcolonial Literature in India R. R A J R A O

197

‘No One Is India’: Literary Renderings of the (Postcolonial) Metropolis in Salman Rushdie and Indra Sinha ROMAN BARTOSCH

213

The Glocal Metropolis: Tokyo Cancelled, The White Tiger, and Spatial Politics PIA FLOR ENCE MAS URC ZA K

231

Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities A G N E S S. L . L A M

REFRAMING

249 THE

A U S T R A L I A N / C A N A D I A N (S E T T L E R ) M E T R O P O L I S

City of Words: Haunting Legacies in Gail Jones’s Five Bells SUE KO SSEW

277

Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog: History and Identity in the Metropolis of Melbourne MARIJ K E D ENGER

291

Indigenous Urbanities: Representations of Cities in Native Canadian, Aboriginal Australian, and Mǒori Literature F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

309

S E N S E S , S O U N D S , A N D L A N G U AG E S POSTCOLONI AL METR OPOLI s

IN THE

From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture: Multimedial Reflections on Metropolitan Space R O L F J. G O E B E L

327

Between Ghetto and Utopia: London as a Postcolonial Metropolis in Recent British Music Videos OLIVER LINDNER

343

The Sounding City: Soundscapes and Urban Modernity in Amit Chaudhuri’s Fiction CHRI ST IN HOENE

363

Pidgin Goes Public: Urban Institutional Space in Cameroon E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

379

Emancipation from and Re-Invention of the Linguistic Metropolis in a Postcolonial Speech Community MICHAEL WESTPHAL

401

Notes on Contributors and Editors Index

419 427

Illustrations

Figure 1.

BILL ASHCR OFT Xi Ni Er, “Change: Obituaries of Three Generations of the Liu Family in the Late 20th Century”

153

MALA PANDURANG Photograph 1.

180

Photograph 2.

180

Photograph 3.

181

Table 1.

A G N E S S. L A M Themes in poetry from Macao

253

Table 2.

Themes in poetry from Hong Kong

256

Table 3.

Themes in poetry from Singapore

257

Table 4.

Themes in poetry from the Philippines

259

Table 5.

Themes in poetry from India

Table 6.

Poems with postcolonial reference(s)

263

Table 7.

Thematic categorization of Asian poetry

263

Figures 1a/b.

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E The University of Buea and its anti-Pidgin signposts

380

Figure 2.

Pidgin as intermediary of state policy

396

Figure 3.

Evolution of functions of Pidgin

397

Table 1.

Prohibition of Pidgin in various contexts

383

Table 2.

The use of English and Pidgin in various domains in the 1990s

386–387

261–62

Table 3.

The use of Pidgin in various domains in 2003

387

Table 4.

Equinoxe T V ’s Pidgin News programme (2014)

393

x

R E -I NVENTING THE P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

MICHAEL WESTPHAL Language preference for newscasts: Which language do you prefer in a newscast? (multiple answers possible)

410

How does it sound to you when Jamaicans use a British/ American accent on the radio? (multiple answers possible)

411

Mean scores for the ratings of seven newscast clips in twelve categories on six-point scales

412

Figure 4.

Jamaican newscasting speech

416

Table 1.

Newscast samples overview

407

Table 2.

Phonetic differences between accent varieties

Table3.

Mean scores and standard error for standardness and authenticity (N = 187)

Figure 1. Figure 2.

Figure 3.

407–408 413

Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis An Introduction C E C I L E S AN DT EN & A N N I K A B AU ER

Cities are miracles. Cities are hell. Cities are fascinating, multicolored, multifaceted. Camus once wrote that it is the small passions that one shares with a city: the encounters, mysteries, and nooks and crannies in our memories, the physicality, the odors. But cities are also an expression of sheer mass and size, scenes of the struggle for power, money, and recognition.1

C

D E L L ’ S D E S C R I P T I O N O F M E G A C I T I E S provides a useful starting point for our consideration of how art, literature, and popular culture re-invent, shape, reflect, and represent the postcolonial (in the) metropolis. This was the leitmotif of the 24th GNEL/ASNEL conference held at Chemnitz University of Technology in May 2013, which simultaneously set out to explore the applicability, spatiality, topography, physiognomy, and materialization underlying a wide scope of urban imaginaries while investigating the aesthetic re-invention of literary representations of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis. Despite the recent flourishing of scholarly work on the metropolis in literary and cultural studies, notions of the metropolis remain associated with prevailing Western-centric ideas of modernity. London, for instance, is still often regarded as one of the metropolises par excellence.2 Because cities such as Delhi, 1

HRISTOPH ER

Christopher Dell, “Megacity,” in City and Structure, ed. Kristin Feireiss (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008): 41. 2 See John Clement Ball, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004); Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 2003); Emrys Jones, “Race and Ethnicity in London,” in London: A New Metropolitan Geography, ed. Keith Hoggart & David R. Green (1991, London: Edward Arnold, 1992): 176– 90; London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis, ed. Susana Onega (Heidelberg:

xii

R E -I NVENTING THE P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Mumbai, and Singapore were part of the British Empire, they were often depicted in colonial literature as “outposts of progress,”3 quaint and foreign shores where the quality of life did not quite match up to that in the British capital. Only recently has scholarship on postcolonial metropolises in their own right begun to appear,4 superseding those studies that centre their analyses on the socio-economic aspects of the “global city.”5 These studies, however, mostly address issues that seem to plague these cities, such as overpopulation, unequal access to economic and material resources, and slumification.6 Following Anthony King, who convincingly observed that the postcolonial metropolises as discursive environments in their own right have been “woefully neglected”7 in the field of postcolonial studies, the essays gathered here complement and enrich already existing scholarly work by augmentating socio-economic and urban-studies perspectives with readings of texts, defined broadly, through the critical lens of theories from urban, sociological, postcolonial, literary, linguistic, and cultural studies. As the topic of the urban imaginary has only just begun to receive nuanced critical attention,8 this collection of essays on “re-inventing the postcolonial (in

Winter, 2002); The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London, ed. Lawrence Phillips (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004). 3 Joseph Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress,” in Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (1897, Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002). 4 Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and Its Subject: London, Nairobi, Bombay (New York, London: Routledge, 2012); Rolf J. Goebel, Benjamin Heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (Munich: Iudicium, 2001); African City Textualities, ed. Ranka Primorac (Special Issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.1, 2008); blank—— Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Hilton Judin & Ivan Vladislaviǰ (Rotterdam & Cape Town: NAi, 1998). 5 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000); Ulf Hannerz, “The Cultural Role of World Cities,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (1996, London & New York: Routledge 2006): 313–18. 6 Dell describes Mumbai in the following passage: “two thirds [of the population of this megalopolis] have no proper home, and must camp alongside the railway lines, or live in enormous slums in huts made of cardboard, plastic sheeting, and corrugated iron. Or they spend the nights in the heart of the city on the pavements. Every day another hundred Indian families arrive in Bombay to find their fortune” (Dell, “Megacity,” 42). 7 Anthony D. King, “World Cities: Global? Postcolonial? Postimperial? Or Just the Result of Happenstance? Some Cultural Comments,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 320. 8 See Cecile Sandten, Ines Detmers & Birte Heidemann, “Introduction: Tracing the Urban Imaginary in the Postcolonial Metropolis and the ‘New’ Metropolis,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (December 2011): 483–87, and Cecile Sandten, “Intermedial Fictions of the ‘New’ Metropolis:

ጓ Introduction

xiii

the) metropolis” is dedicated to fresh approaches to literary and cultural representations of what has been variously termed the ‘global city’, ‘world city’, ‘megacity’, ‘megalopolis’, ‘cosmopolis’, ‘tiger city’, ‘galactic metropolis’, ‘boomburb’, and ‘metroplex’. Global world cities, which are no longer limited to the European and American metropolises such as London, Paris, and New York, are now also identified with global capital and international business flows, which are based primarily on expediency and profit at the cost of the everyday city dweller and the average citizen. In this context, forms of Western neoliberal capitalism have not only clearly led to the unequal distribution of material wealth and resources but have also had an adverse impact on the lived experiences of urbanity in postcolonial metropolises around the globe. The essays presented here aim to promote a dialogue between the politics and poetics of urban spaces – both real and imagined – and recent re-directions and re-inventions of ideas and ideologies pertaining to postcolonial discourse in the light of what Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler have termed the “metropolitan turn.”9 Dating back to antiquity as a concept, the ‘metropolis’ was rediscovered in the Industrial Age of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, we are less interested in this notion of the metropolis as a merely abstract “concept or category of practice.”10 Instead, readers of this volume are invited to explore the ways in which postcolonial metropolises represent and reflect a multiplicity, diversity, and sprawl that defy easy categorization or even description. As contact zones,11 transit zones, underground territories of subculture, multi-lingual hotbeds of radical social and political change, contested and ‘gendered’ spaces/ places, soundscapes, or spaces of (post)modern flânerie, but also as architectural sites that simultaneously feature the splendour and decay of different time periods (from colonization to postcoloniality), metropolises are material testaments to processes of transhistorical, transcultural, and palimpsestic developments. To put these premises into perspective, a brief overview of critical theory on the metropolis at the turn of the millennium might be useful. The discipline of Calcutta, Delhi and Cairo in the Graphic Novels of Sarnath Banerjee and G. Willow Wilson,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (December 2011): 510–22. 9 Ignacio Farías & Susanne Stemmler, “Deconstructing ‘Metropolis’: Critical Reflections on a European Concept,” C M S Working Paper Series No 004-2006 (Centre for Metropolitan Studies: Technical University Berlin, 2008): 2. 10 Farías & Stemmler, “Deconstructing ‘Metropolis’,” 2. 11 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1991).

xiv

R E -I NVENTING THE P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

sociology has been particularly interested in the affiliations between urban studies and postcolonial theory. Critical scholarship in this field12 has explored the connections between megapolitan expansionism on a global scale and the emergence of new forms of asymmetrical power-relations, often in tandem with the advent of social elites in ‘Third-World’ societies and cities. In this regard, these studies often do not address the potentially subversive view of the postcolonial metropolises as alternative economic and cultural hubs that are marked by a distinct sense of “vernacular modernity” (the critical appropriation of Western modernity in Indigenous form), diversity, and possibility that contests its colonial histories.13 During the GNEL/ASNEL conference, three main points pertaining to the postcolonial (in the) metropolis were thus emphasized: first, a critique of the neo-colonial image and visage of the so-called ‘ThirdWorld’ city as a disordered, disorderly, and dysfunctional entity; second, a critical scrutiny of Western concepts of ‘modernity’ and processes of ‘modernization’ in the city’s social spaces; and, third, critical recognition of the far-reaching impact and imprint of Western ideologies and colonial histories upon postcolonial metropolitan spaces and their urban imaginaries. In this respect, Raoul Granqvist, for instance, argues: The postcolonial city is anchored in a historical and spatial double-bind: freed from colonial authority but immersed in neo-colonial politics and practices of dehumanizing commoditization, whose major emblems are hunger and violence.14

12

Mike Davis, “The Urbanisation of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos,” Social Text 22.4 (2004): 9–15; Ashley Dawson & Brent Hayes Edwards, “Introduction: Global Cities of the South,” Special Issue of Social Text 22.4 (2004): 2–7; Raoul J. Granqvist, “Peter Pan in Nairobi: Masculinity’s Postcolonial City,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 15.3 (2006): 380–92; Brian Larkin, “Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria,” Social Text 22.4 (2004): 91–112; Rudolf Mrázek, “Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis,” Social Text 24.1 (2006): 103–25; AbdouMaliq Simone, Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 2014); AbdouMaliq Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (New York & London: Routledge, 2009); AbdouMaliq Simone, Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City. Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (London: Zed, 2005); AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Urban Life in Four African Cities (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2004); Varma, The Postcolonial City. 13 An exception is AbdouMaliq Simone, who, apart from his urban-studies’ approach, focuses on “everyday practices of large and often messy cities” – “on the cities as occasions for experimentation” – by looking at “what might happen when bodies, materials, and affect intersect, and the various ways of living that can proceed from this intersection.” City Life from Jakarta to Dakar, xii–xiv. 14 Granqvist, “Peter Pan in Nairobi,” 380.

ጓ Introduction

xv

Against this background, the dialectic of the ‘postcolonial metropolis’ and the ‘postcolonial in the metropolis’ gestures towards both the colonial influence on the former imperial centres and – this is the focus of most of the essays gathered here – the growing (cultural, economic/financial, and global) importance of the meanwhile independent cities of the former colonies in the socalled ‘developing’ or, more problematically, ‘Third-World’ countries. In this sense, attention is paid to the processes of geo-political, demographic, and socio-economic change that these postcolonial metropolises have undergone, and which, in turn, have enabled them not only to enter but to substantially influence the system of global finance capitalism (think, for instance, of the impact of Google in India). As a result, what readers of postcolonial urban narratives are often confronted with are multilateral spaces of contact and contestation characterized by their constant vertical and horizontal expansion, simultaneity and heterogeneity, layering and interstices.15 This is reflected in narratives that depict how these cities and metropolises have been re-invented and re-shaped in the urban imaginary. With the ‘spatial turn’ and the attention it pays to the spatial geographies, and not merely temporalities, of modernity, the notion of the city as palimpsest is one that has become particularly relevant for its critical exploration of overlapping and competing forms of architecture, social practices, political ideologies, and technological media effects. Literary texts have depicted this palimpsestic quality of the metropolis in various postmodern techniques such as literary fragmentation, disjuncture, non-linear and atemporal narratives, and multiple narrative perspectives. Thus, urban spaces and their perceptions, imaginings, re-configurations, and re-conceptualizations are often characterized by palimpsestic forms of expression and processes of transcription and re-negotiation. A seminal work on the modern metropolis, and one whose topic is reflected in its palimpsestic and sprawling form, is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40).16 Methodologically, Benjamin’s work aligns itself with the “art of citing without quotation”17 and with the “literary montage”18 to which he compares the classical avant-garde. With this method, the historical ideology of (Western) progress, the repressed or suppressed memories of the past, can be 15

See Tobias Wachinger, “Stadträume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche: Schichtung als Paradigma des Zeitgenössischen Britischen ‘Großstadtromans’,” Poetica 31 (1999): 263. 16 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge M A & London: Belknap/Harvard U P , 1999): 458. 17 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 458. 18 The Arcades Project, 460.

xvi

R E -I NVENTING THE P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

processed in the present by an engagement with alternative modes of knowledge-formation such as textual (re-)inscription, since “one can read the real like a text.”19 The concept of the palimpsest (from the Greek palimpsestos ‘rubbed smooth again’) stems from the practice of re-using ancient parchment, since it was expensive. The script had to be washed or scraped off the parchment before it could be used again. However, the earlier writing on it showed through as translucent. Thus, the traces of the earlier work, which remained largely illegible, could nevertheless still be seen. The French narratologist Gérard Genette was the first scholar to explicitly employ the notion of the palimpsest to describe the poetic process of intertextuality.20 The idea of re-writing through which earlier works still remain recognizable was, however, not new: palimpsestic structures, for example, were already to be found in Sigmund Freud’s psychological concept of memory as the return of the repressed or the operation of displacment.21 Walter Benjamin, too, applied this idea to the architectural form of the passage and the figure of the modern flâneur, in order to describe the multi-layered spatio-temporal explorations of the city of modernity that he experienced. In what ways, however, is the experience of urbanity reflected, represented, aestheticized, translated, or transfigured in the urban imaginary? We assume that the readability of the metropolis as a cultural text is based on the hermeneutic deciphering of its material phenomena, since the cityscape is also perceived sensually (sights, sounds, smells), physically (by walking, driving, cycling), and mentally (interactions, perceptions, affects). All these ideas recall the notion of the palimpsest, as the textual and visual layering become even more noticeable in the context of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis, since postcolonial metropolises are characterized by processes of accelerated urban renewal and gentrification, hybridity, cross-cultural interaction, and contestation.22

19

Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 464. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, tr. Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky (Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré, 1982; Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997). 21 As in Sigmund Freud’s “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’,” in General Psychological Theory, Chapter X I I I , 1925, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (Oxford: Macmillan, 1964): 207–212, or in his essay on “Civilization and Its Discontents,” tr. David McLintock (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930; tr. London: Penguin, 2002). 22 One might think of, for instance, the common experience of passing by a particular building where a favourite restaurant or local grocery shop used to be, or a landmark that has been torn down in order to make space for new urban developments. 20

ጓ Introduction

xvii

The essays offered here are all concerned with the idea of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis, from different disciplinary viewpoints and from a wide range of cityscapes, spanning five continents, and literary renderings of the postcolonial city. The essays explore, on the one hand, ideas of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation and the unequal distribution of resources, and cultural alienation, and, on the other, the possibility of transformation, reinvention, and reconfiguration of the ‘postcolonial condition’ in and through the literary text and visual narratives. Thus, the volume has been subdivided into five main sections: 1. “Citizenship & (Alternative) Market Economies in the Postcolonial Metropolis”; 2. “Political Change and Contested Spaces in the African and South African Metropolis”; 3. “The Asian and South Asian Metropolis on the Move”; 4. “Reframing the Australian/Canadian (Settler) Metropolis”; and 5. “Senses, Sounds, and Languages in the Postcolonial Metropolis.” ጓ The three essays making up the first section examine the depiction of alternative market economies in the postcolonial metropolis. M E L I S S A K E N N E D Y ’s essay focuses on the dynamics of the postcolonial slum, while E N D A D U F F Y ’s contribution turns to the intersections of postcoloniality and debt. Last but not least, D A V I D T A V A R E S and M A R C B R O S S E A U consider the role that representation plays in creating urban identities by way of a critical reading of two novels by second-generation South Asian British writers based in London. The second section, “Political Change and Contested Spaces in the African and South African Metropolis,” focuses on South African and African (Nigerian, Zimbabwean, and Ugandan) urban narratives, exploring the notion of the city as a text that also creates a dialectic between the city and literature whereby both discourses require thorough analysis. The essays in this section concentrate on the rural–urban juxtaposition of postcolonial topographies. While A N N I K A M C P H E R S O N reflects on the representation of the city and questions of social organization and community in post-apartheid urban narratives, D A N Y E L A D E M I R examines how two post-apartheid novels set in Johannesberg refuse closure and reject official narratives that have attempted to lay apartheid’s ghosts to rest. C H R I S D U N T O N ’s and V E R E N A J A I N – W A R D E N ’s essays turn to the metropolis’s queer and sexualized spaces (in Nigeria and South Africa respectively). Finally, C H I E L O Z O N A E Z E ’s essay (on three Ugandan and Nigerian women writers) examines the feminist and ethical implications of transcultural negotiation for global cosmopolitan conviviality.

xviii

R E -I NVENTING THE P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

In the third section, “The Asian and South Asian Metropolis on the Move,” B I L L A S H C R O F T concentrates on poetry from Singapore and Hong Kong as representations of the transnational. M A L A P A N D U R A N G explores the idea of routing urban spaces in Mumbai by taking into consideration the (gendered) local train and its literary representations. R A J E E V P A T K E focuses on the depiction of urban space in the work of the Maharashtrian poet Arun Kolatkar, who wrote in both Marathi and English, and R O M A N B A R T O S C H examines topographies of excess in a discussion of the megalopolises’ extreme and chaotic character. R A J R A O emphasizes the necessity of dismantling the myth of the province in order to overcome the common dichotomy of postcolonial metropolis vs rural landscape. The essays also broach the potential of cities to foster notions of nationhood/urban citizenship, but also their transitory status as “non-places,”23 as P I A M A S U R C Z A K elucidates in her analysis of the glocal metropolis. Finally, A G N E S L A M ’s wide-ranging essay discusses a poetry project that investigates issues of transculturality and cosmopolitanism in poetry from Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and India. Australia and Canada are among the world’s most highly urbanized countries, yet myths of the wilderness and the bush continue to dominate their national imaginary, perhaps especially to deny indigenous peoples full rights to the city. The three essays collected in the fourth section, “Reframing the Australian/Canadian (Settler) Metropolis,” engage with postcolonial urban imaginaries as they are challenged, redefined, and reframed through texts that reposition the national, the global, and the transcultural. S U E K O S S E W looks at Sydney’s iconic urban spaces by analysing contemporary literary and cultural texts with regard to the transculturality of a city that both accommodates and alienates its inhabitants. For his part, F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R concentrates on indigenous city textualities in Native Canadian, Aboriginal Australian, and ǒori literatures in which the urban lives of indigenous peoples are acknowledged. Finally, M A R I J K E D E N G E R examines the urban cityscape as enabling a novel’s protagonist to (re)form his identity in an Australian context. The last section, “Senses, Sounds and Languages in the Postcolonial Metropolis,” attends critically to media culture and the mediascape of the postcolonial metropolis. R O L F G O E B E L begins by engaging with Homi Bhabha’s notion of the subversive inscription of non-Western voices in the dominant discourse of the (Western) metropolitan centre. O L I V E R L I N D N E R ’s contribution scrutinizes recent black British and British-Asian music videos as expressions of multi23

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992; London: Verso, 1995): 75.

ጓ Introduction

xix

cultural utopian urban space in the twenty-first century, while C H R I S T I N H O E N E focuses on the soundscapes of postcolonial metropolises and how they constitute a re-imagining of the city and a reclamation of modern urbanity. Turning from sounds to languages, E R I C A. A N C H I M B E examines how Cameroon Pidgin has started to play informational roles in the wider, pluricentric townscape, and M I C H A E L W E S T P H A L ’s contribution focuses on the influence of British, American, and Jamaican English radio newscast speech. With the theoretical implications and comparative issues that the volume’s umbrella theme has raised, the articles presented here focus on literary, cultural, linguistic, and media case studies devoted to particular cities and metropolises, authors, or individual texts. All of them engage with and discuss how the spaces of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis are lived, experienced, contested, perceived, imagined, and negotiated via processes of narrative, visual, intermedial, linguistic, affective, and sensory re-invention, reconfiguration, and reshaping that challenge and re-inscribe colonial histories, their metanarratives, and their paradigms. We would like, in closing, to thank our sponsors, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DF G ), GNEL/ASNEL (now G APS ), the Freunde und Förderer der Technischen Universität Chemnitz, the British Council, the Gunzenhauser Museum, and the Stadtbibliothek Chemnitz, for their generous support.

W OR K S C I T E D Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992; London: Verso, 1995). Ball, John Clement. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2004). Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Das Passagen-Werk, 1982; Cambridge MA & London: Belknap Press/Harvard U P , 1999). Conrad, Joseph. “An Outpost of Progress,” in Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (1897; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002): 1–26. Davis, Mike. “The Urbanisation of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos,” Social Text 22.4 (2004): 9–15. Dawson, Ashley & Brent Hayes Edwards. “Introduction: Global Cities of the South,” Social Text 22.4 (Winter 2004): 2–7. Dell, Christopher. “Megacity,” in City and Structure, ed. Kristin Feireiss (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 41–52.

xx

R E -I NVENTING THE P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

Farías, Ignacio, & Susanne Stemmler. “Deconstructing ‘Metropolis’: Critical Reflections on a European Concept,” CMS Working Paper Series No 004-2006 (Centre for Metropolitan Studies: Technical University Berlin, 2008), https://www.geschundkunst gesch.tu-berlin.de/uploads/media/004-2006_03.pdf (accessed 22 March 2015). Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, tr. David McLintock (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930; London: Penguin, 2002). ——.“A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (1925), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (Oxford: Macmillan, 1964), vol. 19: 227– 32. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, tr. Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky (Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré, 1982; Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1997). Goebel, Rolf J. Benjamin Heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (Munich: Iudicium, 2001). Granqvist, J. Raoul. “Peter Pan in Nairobi: Masculinity’s Postcolonial City,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 15.3 (2006): 380–92. Hannerz, Ulf. “The Cultural Role of World Cities” (1996), in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London & New York: Routledge 2006): 313–18. Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 2003). Jones, Emrys. “Race and Ethnicity in London,” in London: A New Metropolitan Geography, ed. Keith Hoggart & David R. Green (1991, London: Edward Arnold, 1992): 176–90. Judin, Hilton, & Ivan Vladislaviǰ, ed. blank____ Architecture, Apartheid and After (Rotterdam & Cape Town: NAi, 1998). King, Anthony D. “World Cities: Global? Postcolonial? Postimperial? Or Just the Result of Happenstance? Some Cultural Comments” (2000), in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 319–24. Larkin, Brian. “Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria,” Social Text 22.4 (2004): 91–112. Mrázek, Rudolf. “Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis,” Social Text 24.1 (2006): 103–25. Onega, Susana, ed. London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002). Phillips, Lawrence, ed. The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London (Costerus; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1991). Primorac, Ranka, ed. African City Textualities (special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.1, 2008). Sandten, Cecile. “Intermedial Fictions of the ‘New’ Metropolis: Calcutta, Delhi and Cairo in the Graphic Novels of Sarnath Banerjee and G. Willow Wilson,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (December 2011): 510–22.

ጓ Introduction

xxi

——, Ines Detmers & Birte Heidemann, ed. “Introduction: Tracing the Urban Imaginary in the Postcolonial Metropolis and the ‘New’ Metropolis,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (December 2011): 483–87. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). Simone, AbdouMaliq. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (New York & London: Routledge, 2009). ——.For the City Yet to Come: Urban Life in Four African Cities (London: Duke U P , 2004). ——.Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 2014). ——.Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City (Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa & London: Zed, 2005). Varma, Rashmi. The Postcolonial City and its Subject: London, Nairobi, Bombay (New York & London: Routledge, 2012). Wachinger, Tobias. “Stadträume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche: Schichtung als Paradigma des Zeitgenössischen Britischen ‘Großstadtromans’,” Poetica 31 (1999): 261–301.

ጓ

C I T I Z E N S H I P A N D (A L T E R N A T I V E ) M A R K E T ECON OMI ES IN TH E PO STC OL ONIAL METR OP OLI S

The Economics of Urban Development for the Postcolonial Poor M E LI SSA K E N N E D Y

D

often concentrate on negotiations of cultural identity and forms of mobility across and within national and global spaces. One kind of movement rarely given close consideration, however, is the displacement of the poor by urbanplanning projects in which city beautification is almost always synonymous with privatization. This lack of attention to the physical precarity of the impoverished is surprising, given the significant number of postcolonial novels that describe the material reality and lived experience of urban poverty, particularly across Africa and the Indian subcontinent. This analytical silence, however, is commensurate with that across the social sciences. While almost one in three urbanites in the world is a slum dweller,1 they are notoriously difficult to define, count, and keep track of. As the homeless are defined by their lack of rights to dwelling space, they are inaccurately counted and receive little or no welfare or political representation. Their homes, deemed temporary and illegal, are unmapped and often lack public amenities such as water and waste disposal. Too mobile to be considered locals and too sedentary to be considered refugees, migrants, or diasporic cosmopolitans, in their small-scale precarity they fall through the cracks of the cultural identity-politics forming the mainstay of postcolonial studies. Discussion of the postcolonial city, however, must take account of this important demographic, which is bordered on the outside by private property, gated communities, and the policing of public spaces, and on the inside by illegal activities, including subletting, protection rackets, and street hierarchies, which mean that not even a park bench or doorway is ever free. Such slum dynamics, which are amply described in fiction, journalism, and the case studies of anthropology, development, and urban studies, contain multiple 1

ISC USS IO NS OF THE POS TCOLO NIAL ME TRO POL IS

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London & New York: Verso, 2006): 23.

MELISSA KENN EDY

4

ጓ

instances of the discrimination, marginalization, and disenfranchisement – particularly of women, children, and ethnic minorities – that form the heart of postcolonial studies. By tracing the repetition of evicting the poor from historical and international urban spaces, this essay interprets such instances of immiseration as economic in origin, tightly connected with free-market capitalism from colonial to global neoliberal eras. During the urbanization and industrialization of London that gathered pace throughout the nineteenth century, the phenomena of slums and working-class poverty were integral to the newly forming discipline of modern economics. In particular, the side-by-side habitation of rich and poor, and the process of slum demolition and city beautification, was early identified by Friedrich Engels in The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), and by Karl Marx’s observations of industrializing Manchester, so central to The Communist Manifesto (1848) – considered one of the founding texts of modern economics. These structures of urban living are also frequent in literature, from Charles Dickens’s nineteenth-century representations of London’s East End to contemporary descriptions in Indian fiction of slum-razing in Mumbai. This pattern of urban development is consistent across space and time, in both Great Britain and her colonies, at least since the era of concentrated industrialization at home and colonization abroad – two interdependent and concomitant world developments. As the historian Ellen Meiksins Wood puts it, “it seems indisputable that the development of capitalism at home in Britain determined the shape of British imperialism.”2 Thus, the postcolonial city, not rooted in any particular time or place, can be nineteenth-century London or present-day Mumbai or New York. Although there are clearly great differences between being poor in nineteenth-century and modern London, or between a mega-slum in Mumbai and a state-housing suburb in Johannesburg, economic indices such as the World Bank Poverty Index and G I NI coefficient use relative measures to make comparisons possible and useful. Whereas the social sciences define, evaluate, and categorize poverty as objectively as possible, literary analysis pays attention to subjectivity, representation, and affective and relational responses to immiseration, thus providing a welcome (if depressing) complement to the ‘hard’ data. Both are necessary and mutually informative; however, there is a strong tendency for literary analysis to ignore data and statistics, just as there is a reluctance on the part of the social sciences to legitimize recourse to literary testi-

2

Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London & New York: Verso, 2003): 89.

ጓ The Economics of Urban Development

5

mony and the study of literature.3 This essay tries to bridge that divide by considering the economics of urban planning through the depiction in literary and journalistic texts of slum clearances and the precarious housing of the poor. The French urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann theorized city development which meshed state funding with corporate rent-seeking, and in which government protected the rights of real-estate speculation over civic rights to city space, often with force. Haussmann’s razing of working-class Paris in the 1850s displaced workers to the peripheries at the same time as employing them on privately funded building projects on often expropriated land.4 London similarly razed slums and invested in urban development in the late-nineteenth century and again in the 1930s, after reforms to the Poor Laws. In the early 1940s, directly inspired by Haussmann, New York implemented a similar renovation,5 which was repeated on a smaller physical scale in Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 1990s Homeless Policy, which aimed at driving the homeless out of prime real-estate areas, off the street, and out of public shelters. Similar projects were recorded in Beijing before the 2008 Olympic Games, Johannesburg before the 2010 Football World Cup, and Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the 2014 Football World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. In describing the historical and global expansiveness of ‘Haussmannesque’ urban development driven by speculative investment in real estate, David Harvey describes a contemporary and global phenomenon: Almost every city in the world has witnessed a building boom for the rich – often of a distressingly similar character […]. These building booms have been evident in Mexico City, Santiago in Chile, in Mumbai, Johannesburg, Seoul, Taipei, Moscow, and all over Europe (Spain’s being the most dramatic), as well as in the cities of the core capitalist countries such as London, Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York (where more large-scale urban projects were in motion in 2007 under the billionaire Bloomberg’s administration than ever before).6 3

Examples of social scientists defending the use of literature in their discipline include the political scientists David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock, “The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge,” Journal of Development Studies 44.2 (February 2008): 1–17; and the urban geographer Marc Brosseau, “Literature,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography 6, ed. Rob Kitchin & Nigel Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009). 4 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London & New York: Verso, 2012): 7–8. 5 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 9. 6 Rebel Cities, 12.

MELISSA KENN EDY

6

ጓ

Common across this global repetition of Hausmann’s technique, the uneven urban development signalled by unequal distribution of civic space and civil rights connects urban development to postcolonial concerns. Periodic drives to move the poor out of urban cities have always been justified on various social grounds, although they are always supported by policy and law, and enforced by police or military coercion. Reasons include: the demands of new city infrastructure such as roads and sport or civic complexes; the replacement of low-standard housing with the promise of something better elsewhere; the fear of riots, protests, and violence; the illegal occupation of land now deemed valuable; or simply the landlord’s selling out to another private developer – a process commonly associated with gentrification. In each case, politics works closely with private business to ensure the smooth running of a capitalist, economy-led state, which packages its motivations as concerns for the common good, in the name of ‘progress’, ‘beautification’, and even ‘social justice for the poor’. As Harvey puts it, in a claim echoed by several critics of neoliberalism, a surface veneer of competitive capitalism therefore depends on a deep substratum of coerced cooperations and collaborations to ensure a framework for the free market and open trade.7

Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge make a more explicit link between neoliberalism and earlier imperialism, labelling the global phenomenon of gentrification “the new urban colonialism.”8 Like colonization, gentrification involves not simply the physical takeover of the city by the middle class but the more insidious propagation and normalization of the Western capitalist values it brings with it, supported by the nation-state. In multiple examples from different times and places, urban reform appears motivated by the visibility of poverty rather than by the presence of poverty itself, a Catch-22 caused by conflicting demands for an on-hand supply of cheap labour to service the city while preferably remaining as invisible as the undesirable jobs they undertake, such as constructing, cleaning, producing, and transporting goods. Arjun Appadurai describes the conundrum most succinctly: “one wants the poor near at hand as servants but far away as humans.”9 The push–pull situation of the workers who are necessary as labourers for urban 7

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 181. Rowland Atkinson & Gary Bridge, “Introduction” to Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, ed. Atkinson & Bridge (London & New York: Routledge, 2005): 2. 9 Arjun Appadurai, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture 12.3 (Fall 2000): 637. 8

ጓ The Economics of Urban Development

7

construction but undesirable as inhabitants of the new cities10 is well-documented in nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century fiction and journalism set in London. Engels provides an early description anticipating the Haussmann method in his graphic descriptions of the abysmal material living conditions of the poor in British industrializing cities, particularly London and Manchester. He further highlights the precarity of even these poor spaces: the practice that has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in areas which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health or for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or, owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, [...]. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same: the scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish selfpraise by the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighborhood.11

Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), a fiercely socialist treatise against the “social abyss”12 that has created poverty and overcrowding in London’s East End, follows nineteenth-century writers such as Dickens in describing and indicting great economic inequality, which the American attributes to exploitation by the rich in techniques such as the cycle of rent-seeking and demolition. 13 Thirty years later, in the interwar Great Depression, George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)14 describes vagrancy in Greater London, particularly the doss-houses which regulated illegal squatting, begging, and vagrancy caused by mass unemployment and post-World War One dislocation. As with the previous writers, Orwell describes how the poor, sick, and unemployed down-and-out are maintained at a profit. While some lodging houses were

10

Discussion of the dynamics of urban drift, in the great number of rural poor who migrate to the city in search of work, is unfortunately outside the scope of this essay. Certainly, urban drift and the shock of the city is a major theme across postcolonial fiction that merits close attention from the economic perspective outlined here. 11 Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872; New York: International, 1935): 74–75. 12 Jack London, The People of the Abyss (1903), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688 (accessed 21 October 2013): 311. 13 London, The People of the Abyss, 210–11. 14 George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933; London: Penguin Classics, 2001).

MELISSA KENN EDY

8

ጓ

publicly funded, others were privately run15 in an early version of late-twentiethcentury privatization of civic services in the name of competitive management and streamlining. The tone in all of these journalistic texts is indignant, even outraged, both at the substandard conditions in which the poor live and at the perceived injustice of collusion between private companies and city administration. Jack London’s treatise rails against the presence of abject poverty and human debasement “in the year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.”16 In the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the champion of public spending to raise the living standards of the poorest, openly condemns the profit-motive fuelling urban development: London is one of the richest cities in the history of civilization, but it cannot ‘afford’ the highest standards of achievement of which its own living citizens are capable, because they do not ‘pay’.17

Such indignation is not confined to history but persists in British literature and journalism today. The stubborn presence of relative poverty even in the world’s richest countries18 challenges the logic of development promoted in city planning, which might better be considered as strategies of concealment19 and displacement of the problem of socio-economic inequality. The Haussmann technique of urban displacement does not belong merely to an historical moment in the U K . Inextricably tied to capitalist conceptions of profit and reinvestment, and benignly packaged as development, progress, and improvement, the system continues apace. Certainly, the postwar welfare state and overall increase in living standards palliate the impact of beautification projects in developed nations, without ever eradicating them. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), for example, has recently been updated in Stephen 15

The 1851 Lodging Houses Act allowed local authorities and private firms to borrow money to set up and operate lodging houses, http://www.workhouses.org.uk/lodging/ (accessed 25 October 2013). Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 133. 16 London, The People of the Abyss, 78. 17 John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency” (1933), in John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings, vol. 21, ed. Elizabeth Johnson & Donald Moggridge (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1982): 242. 18 Relative poverty, a term and set of calculation criteria established by the World Bank and adopted by most nation-states, is calculated as 60% of the median income of any country; 2011 European Union poverty rate estimate 17% (Eurostat 2011); 2011 U K relative poverty estimated at around 22% (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2011; Institute for Fiscal Affairs, 2011). 19 Solomon J. Greene, “Staged Cities: Mega-Events, Slum Clearance, and Global Capital,” Yale Human Rights and Development Journal 6.1 (2003): 163.

ጓ The Economics of Urban Development

9

Armstrong’s The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited (2012).20 The global charity Oxfam’s “Poverty in the U K ” homepage points to economic inequality in a similarly indicting tone: The U K is the world’s six [sic] largest economy, yet 1 in 5 of the UK population live below our official poverty line, meaning that they experience life as a daily struggle.21

The problem of housing the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum remains a hot topic, particularly following the April 2013 benefit cuts in the name of post-financial-crisis austerity. In a sanitized version of Haussmann’s slum clearances, beneficiaries whose subsidies are not enough to afford high London rents (on the private market due to a lack of social housing) may be rehoused in lower-rent areas in the North of England – areas which are often in economically depressed regions or which already contain high numbers of lowincome households. While hundreds of families may be forced to move, many more are encouraged to do so through London Mayor’s ‘Housing Moves’ relocation scheme.22 In the political and bureaucratic paper-shuffling that aims to solve the problem of affordable housing by merely displacing the people affected, the pattern Engels identified is still recognizable. The Haussmann cycle described by Harvey and illustrated in the British context is also evident in the colonial setting, where the capitalist underpinnings of empire are evident in the colonial need for native labour to build the colonial cities, man its mines and factories, and provide its menial services. Mike Davis’s comprehensive Planet of Slums (2006) outlines historical colonial attitudes to native occupancy of the cities, which formed the basis for both urban migration and the construction of slums in the colonies. Across European colonies in Africa, blacks were considered temporary visitors to the cities, controlled and policed through pass laws and zoning restrictions to control migration.23 Lack of provision of or right to sanitation, water, roads, transport or, later, electricity is 20

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London: Houghton Harcourt, 1972). Stephen Armstrong, The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited (London: Constable, 2012). 21 Oxfam G B , “Poverty in the U K ,” http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/our-work/poverty-inthe-uk (accessed 1 August 2014). 22 Information at: http://www.housingmoves.org/. Media criticism of the scheme: Randeep Ramesh, “Tory borough plans to move homeless away from London,” The Guardian (2 May 2012), http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/may/02/tory-borough-move-homeless-away; Amelia Gentleman, “The families priced out of their London homes by benefit cap,” The Guardian (5 March 2014), http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/05/families-priced-out-londonhomes-benefit-cap, (all accessed 1 August 2014). 23 Davis, Planet of Slums, 51–53.

MELISSA KENN EDY

10

ጓ

documented across British, French, and Belgian African colonies. Davis concludes: this almost universal refusal to provide even minimal sanitary infrastructures for the ‘native quarters’ until the 1950s was more than stinginess: it pointedly symbolized the lack of any native ‘right to the city’.24

Just as slums were a feature of industrializing England, so, too, were they a feature of colonial settlement and urban management. Postcolonial fiction set during historical colonial times compellingly describes diverse forms of unequal and unfair material conditions for the colonized poor.25 Patrick Chamoiseau, in Texaco (1992), his epic history of colonization in Martinique, traces multiple eras of displacement and precarious living among ex-slaves, a process that the historian Frederick Cooper describes in terms of a shift from colonial slaves to neoliberal squatters.26 The novel recounts a constant battle to claim a space to live, from rural bivouacs of straw after the end of slavery to the twentieth-century development of bidonville slums on urban peripheries made of crate wood and asbestos boards, “our battle for so little existence.”27 Throughout history, plantation owners, followed by local government and the French social state, are seen to conspire in blocking settlement rights. In a similar pattern of legal persecution, the early South African black writer Peter Abrahams in Mine Boy (1946) portrays Malay Camp, a De Beers diamond-mining workers’ settlement in Kimberley.28 In the 1940s, De Beers donated the land to the district council, which razed the slum and dispersed the inhabitants to the newly formed homelands of the apartheid regime. Miners were then housed in single-men’s migrant labour quarters on the mining corporation’s land, which thus deprived the workers of both private family homes and the use of communal public space. Similar laws in white settler colonies, the U SA , Canada, Australia, and New Zealand contained the indigenous on ‘reserves’, pushed off their traditional lands and banned from the cities under race laws. In Benang (1999), the Abori-

24

Davis, Planet of Slums, 53. The focus of the present essay ignores the presence of colonized native elites which emerged in all colonies and which facilitated post-independence neocolonialism and, later, global neoliberalism. This cross-over is a surprisingly underdeveloped area of postcolonial studies. 26 Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor & Agriculture in Zanzibar & Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1980). 27 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, tr. Rose–Myriam Réjouis & Val Vinokurov (Texaco, 1992; New York: Vintage, 1997): 328. 28 Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy (1946; Harlow: Heinemann, 1989). 25

ጓ The Economics of Urban Development

11

ginal writer Kim Scott describes the process of consolidated segregation in early-mid-twentieth-century Australia: The residents of nearby houses – some of which had windows facing the reserve –believed the place shameful; the idle people, the little children, the shabby huts and tents, the untidiness and squalor of it all. [...] They wanted the place improved; the reserve must be moved out of sight, and the children sent to some school of their own. Jack had built a hut in the bush just the other side of town. He used old timbers, hessian, flattened kerosene tins. [...] A policeman and a public health inspector arrived together. The inspector reported that the hut was not fit for human habitation. They were moved onto the reserve.29

The above passage shows the conflation and confusion of the fact of being Aboriginal with that of being poor, and exposes the value judgments that criminalize indigence and underrate intelligence in a web of cultural assumptions based on racism and assumptions of indigenous non-modernity that mask the fact of economic imperatives of wealth accumulation for settlers gained by Aboriginal land dispossession and subjection to low-wage labour. Although the connection between racism and economic exploitation has been overlooked by postcolonialists, it is central to both Walter Mignolo’s concept of modernity and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. For both critics, the socio-cultural structures of imperial control, particularly racism, christianization, and cultural ‘enlightenment’, all serve to further the economic imperatives of wealth accumulation gained principally by land dispossession and subjection to low-wage labour.30 The close relationship between ethnicity and social class is spatially visible in the very fabric of the postcolonial city, an economy-based segregation that includes slums and gated communities, city centre and suburban periphery. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it in their book on the common wealth, city space is segregated by wealth: “rent and real estate are omnipresent apparatuses of segmentation and control that [...] configure the diapositifs of social exploitation.”31 As indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities continue to suffer exclusion and ghettoization on economic terms, similar chroniclings of relative poverty persist in postcolonial literature up until the present day. While state housing has mainly replaced informal

29

Kim Scott, Benang: from the heart (Freemantle, W A : Freemantle Arts Centre P, 1999): 136. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2011): 6; Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London & New York: Verso, 1983): 75–80. 31 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2009): 258. 30

MELISSA KENN EDY

12

ጓ

housing in British ex-settler colonies, the pattern of forced resettlement through gentrification, sub-standard housing, and lack of amenities continues to afflict the poor, as represented in South African fiction after the end of apartheid, Aboriginal communities in Australia, and Mǒori in New Zealand.32 In a recent literary documentation of the by-now-familiar cycle of slum establishment and demolition, the American journalist Katherine Boo traces the history of the Annawadi slum in Mumbai. In the 1990s, land was settled by southern Indian Tamil labourers next to the new airport they were brought in to build. Following privatization of the squatter’s land for airport development, Annawadi was to be razed and 90,000 families displaced in the name of airport security, image-conscious national pride, and speculative development:33 The apartments promised to displaced airport slumdwellers would be tiny – 269 square feet – but would have running water, which made them a valuable asset in a city starved of affordable formal housing. Hence overcity people had been buying up shacks in the slums and concocting legal papers to show that they were longtime Annawadi residents. Most of the speculators intended to use the rehabilitation flats as rental or investment properties. [...] A small-time politician named Papa Panchal had secured a large block of flats by the sewage lake on behalf of a major developer, hiring thugs on commission to persuade the occupants to sell.34

Boo depicts a scenario familiar in popular postcolonial novels about Indian slums, including Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995).35 Perhaps the most incisive example is Vikas Swarup’s Q and A (2005), set in Dharavi, Mumbai, one of the largest slums in the world, first settled in the 1880s following British expulsion of Indians to ‘native towns’ on the outskirts of the colonial

32

See, for example, J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983); Sindiwe Magona, Mother to Mother (Claremont, S A : David Philip, 1998); Kim Scott, Benang; Archie Weller, Day of the Dog (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981); Alan Duff, Once Were Warriors (Auckland: Tandem, 1990); and Patricia Grace, Cousins (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1992). 33 Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (London: Portobello, 2012): 42. 34 Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, 225. 35 Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (New York: Free Press, 2008); Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (London: Faber & Faber, 2006); Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (London: Faber & Faber, 1995); Vikas Swarup, Q and A (London: Doubleday, 2005).

ጓ The Economics of Urban Development

13

centre – a mangrove swamp and factory dumping-ground.36 The popularity of Danny Boyle’s movie Slumdog Millionaire (2008), based on the novel and shot on location in Dharavi, drew Western attention to the plight of Dharavi residents, when the homes of the three child actors were razed by bulldozers under a new government clean-up scheme.37 While Boo’s vivid narrative style makes Behind the Beautiful Forevers read as fiction, the Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter’s own career, dedicated to documenting poverty in the U SA , creates another point of comparison between the developed and developing worlds. In her author’s note, she claims: “in Annawadi, I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time”:38 And another set of questions nagged, about profound and juxtaposed inequality – the signature fact of so many modern cities. (The scholars who map levels of disparity between wealthy and impoverished citizens consider New York and Washington, D.C., almost as unequal as Nairobi and Santiago).39

Boo connects the structures of poverty in India with those in the U SA , thereby refusing to maintain a false dichotomy between developed and developing nations, noticing similarities across times and spaces more usually considered unrelated. In a later interview she elaborates: in fact, you walk into a low-income person’s house and you might notice that 90 percent of it is like your house. I guess I think that in writing about the poor, so often there’s an idea that it’s a completely alien, anonymous culture, and it’s not really part of, quote, our culture. That makes for better stories, but it distorts the connective culture that there is in this country.40

36

Kalpana Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum (London: Penguin, 2000): 5–8. 37 James Sturcke, “Home of Slumdog Millionaire child actor is demolished,” The Guardian (20 May 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/20/slumdog-millionaire-rubina-ali-homedemolished; reports in 2011 claim the Dharavi slum-clearance project is still on the books: Jason Burke, “Money, power and politics collide in the battle for Mumbai’s slums,” The Observer (5 March 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/05/money-power-politics-battle-mumbai-slums ?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487. (All accessed 1 August 2014). 38 Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum, 253. 39 Behind the Beautiful Forevers, 248. 40 Lois Beckett, “Katherine Boo: Reporting Across the Income Gap” (17 March 2009), http: //ncnj09.blogspot.co.at/2009/03/katherine-boo-reporting-across-income.html (accessed 21 October 2013).

MELISSA KENN EDY

14

ጓ

Along with journalism such as that of Boo, Orwell, London, and Engels, fiction has an important role to play in representing to a broad public the material conditions and lived experiences of the impoverished from both historical and contemporary periods, and from both the ex-colonies and our own back door. The focus on the constant displacement of the poor during urban development offers one narrow context in which to notice the extent to which unchecked capitalism’s inbuilt economic inequality underpins strategies of marginalization and discrimination in both the developed and developing, colonizer and colonized, worlds. Despite the antiquated (nineteenth-century London) or exotic (Mumbai) location of some of these texts, the Western reader is shocked to recognize the contemporaneity of the experiences described through the familiar patterns of economic inequality mapped onto our own cities. The present theme-based approach to the mechanics of urban poverty, rather than one based in the postcolonial time or place, uncovers uncanny commonalities across literature usually kept apart. As Rita Felski puts it, in her consideration of the uses of literature, texts from the past can interrupt our stories of cultural progress, speak across centuries, spark moments of affinity across the gulf of temporal difference. Their very untimeliness renders them timely.41

The comment is especially apt with regard to economic inequality and poverty – the impact of the 2008 financial crisis brought to public attention in Western Europe and North America the great disparities of wealth and the difficult material conditions of the poor in some of the richest countries in the world. Despite the progress, development, and improvement of life over the past 150 years since the Industrial Revolution and the colonial period, the age-old issue of poverty remains a global and contemporary problem.

W OR K S C I T E D Abrahams, Peter. Mine Boy (1946; Harlow: Heinemann, 1989). Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger (New York: Free Press, 2008). Appadurai, Arjun. “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture 12.3 (Fall 2000): 627–51. Armstrong, Stephen. The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited (London: Constable, 2012). Atkinson, Rowland, & Gary Bridge, ed. Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 2005).

41

Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2008): 120.

ጓ The Economics of Urban Development

15

Beckett, Lois. “Katherine Boo: Reporting Across the Income Gap,” (17 March 2009), http: //ncnj09.blogspot.co.at/2009/03/katherine-boo-reporting-across-income.html (accessed 21 October 2013). Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (London: Portobello, 2012). Brosseau, Marc. “Literature,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. Rob Kitchin & Nigel Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009), vol. 6: 212–18. Burke, Jason. “Money, power and politics collide in the battle for Mumbai’s slums,” The Observer (5 March 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/05/moneypower-politics-battle-mumbai-slums?I N T C MP = ILC NE T T XT 3487 (accessed 1 August 2014). Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco, tr. Rose–Myriam Réjouis & Val Vinokurov (Texaco, 1992; New York: Vintage, 1997). Chandra, Vikram. Sacred Games (London: Faber & Faber, 2006). Coetzee, J.M. Life and Times of Michael K (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983). Cooper, Frederick. From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven CT : Yale U P , 1980). Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (London & New York: Verso, 2006). Duff, Alan. Once Were Warriors (Auckland: Tandem, 1990). Engels, Friedrich. The Housing Question (1872; New York: International, 1935). Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature (Oxford & Malden MA : Blackwell, 2008). Gentleman, Amelia. “The families priced out of their London homes by benefit cap,” The Guardian (5 March 2014), http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/05 /families-priced-out-london-homes-benefit-cap (accessed 1 August 2014). Grace, Patricia. Cousins (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 1992). Greene, Solomon J. “Staged Cities: Mega-Events, Slum Clearance, and Global Capital,” Yale Human Rights and Development Journal 6.1 (2003): 161–87. Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2009). Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London & New York: Verso, 2012). ——.Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000). Keynes, John Maynard. “National Self-Sufficiency,” in John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings, vol. 21, ed. Elizabeth Johnson & Donald Moggridge (1933, Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1982): 233–46. Originally in the Yale Review 22.4 (June 1933): 755–69. Lewis, David, Dennis Rodgers & Michael Woolcock. “The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge,” Journal of Development Studies 44.2 (February 2008): 198–216. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss (1903), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688 (accessed 21 October 2013). Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother (Claremont, SA: David Philip, 1998). Meiksins Wood, Ellen. Empire of Capital (London & New York: Verso, 2003).

MELISSA KENN EDY

16

ጓ

Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2011). Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933; London: Penguin Classics, 2001). ——.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London: Houghton Harcourt, 1972). Ramesh, Randeep. “Tory borough plans to move homeless away from London,” The Guardian (2 May 2012), http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/may/02/toryborough-move-homeless-away (accessed 1 August 2014). Scott, Kim. Benang (Freemantle, WA : Freemantle Arts Centre P , 1999). Sharma, Kalpana. Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia s Largest Slum (London: Penguin, 2000) Sturcke, James. “Home of Slumdog Millionaire child actor is demolished,” The Guardian (20 May 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/20/slumdog-millionairerubina-ali-home-demolished (accessed 1 August 2014). Swarup, Vikas. Q and A (London: Doubleday, 2005). Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical Capitalism (London & New York: Verso, 1983). Weller, Archie. Day of the Dog (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981).

ጓ

Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt E N D A D U FFY

To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?1

T

is this: how does postcolonial literature deal with Third-World debt? In the last thirty years, ThirdWorld debt has emerged as a defining symptom of relations between ‘the West’ and ‘the global South’, a salient fact of the nexus of economic and political life that condemns the poor of indebted countries to even greater poverty. It contributes to the certainty that that poverty is not merely a legacy or inheritance, but will continue unabated and unrelieved into the future. The socalled ‘debt-trap’ forestalls the potential of political independence, and condemns whole peoples to austerity. Calls to ‘drop the debt’ have occupied the energies of a branch of the most impassioned, partly effective ‘no-global’ activists. The potential for action by Western powers to postpone or cancel debt payments has become a major weapon of these powers’ influence on various African nations. Offering ‘micro-loans’ to foster small-scale entrepreneurship among the poor in countries such as India has met with tremendous initial enthusiasm and subsequent profound scepticism. How, then, scholars of postcolonial literature and culture should ask, has this salient fact of geopolitics and postcolonial economic and power-relations as they affect real people, been dealt with in literature? Clearly, poverty, life, and death in the urban slum is a pervasive postcolonial literary topic. Yet one of poverty’s specific causes, the debt relation and its specific systems of economic tyranny, seems seldom to surface as an overt topic in postcolonial fiction or poetry. Postcolonial theory, too, is noticeably reticent 1

HE QUESTION PO SED BY TH IS ESSAY

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollindale (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887; New York: Vintage, 1989): 57.

E N D A D U FF Y

18

ጓ

about debt. Why? As regards critical readings of literary works themselves, this blindness results in part because, as critics, we are beholden to the representational imperative: in other words, the conditions enabled by debt, as represented in novels or films, are much easier to grasp than the reasons why the debt was entered into in the first place, or the complex structures of power it sets in place. As regards postcolonial theoretical approaches, this reticence on debt has resulted in part because of the emphasis on cultural difference, and ideological dissonance, in the dominant strands of postcolonial theory, under such rubrics as ‘hybridity’, ‘subalternity’, combatting eurocentrism, and so on. The pervasiveness of the culturalist horizon in recent decades of academic postcolonial theory (which is complemented by the faith in representations shown by critical readings) means in part that economic relations per se are an implied rather than a specifically explored issue. The most recent (2008) economic implosion and its prolonged aftermath, however, has led to renewed interest in what used to be called “the economics of the last instance.”2 The focus on the enormous unsustainable debt of peripheral European nations such as Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, and to a lesser extent Hungary, Italy, and Spain, has turned attention afresh to the Argentinian debt crisis, default, and restructuring of 1998, and, by extension, back to the global issue of national indebtedness in general. Since 2000, there has also been the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign, a mixture of First-World grassroots and pop-culture activism, which culminated in limited debt abolition for eighteen impoverished nations following an agreement at the G8 Summit in Scotland of 2005. Postcolonial theory, in keeping with the general literary-theoretical retreat from cultural studies, has begun to reflect a renewed economism. Texts ranging from Amitava Kumar’s collection World Bank Literature3 to Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital4 recast the postcolonial as a geo-economic issue rather than simply a geopolitical redistribution of cultural capital as power. This re-envisaging offers enormous and exhilarating challenges which cultural critics must seize. How does literature participate in or challenge the postcolonial ‘debt trap’? The answer is not merely, I suggest, to be found in literature’s depiction of debt’s effects, moving as such depictions may be. Rather, we must trace how the structural forces at play in the debt relation enter into play in strange, mutated but recognizable forms in literary texts. 2

See, for example, Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt: The World Financial Crisis and the Poor (1988; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). 3 World Bank Literature, ed. Amitava Kumar (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002). 4 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013).

ጓ Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt

19

This is the project that I begin to explore here. I use the case of the poet W.B. Yeats in late- and post-colonial Ireland as my example. In brief, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I wish to suggest that the longings expressed in what may be called ‘the poetic’, particularly the dreams of selfhood expressed in lyric poetry, provide a window on the way debt affects both nations and each of its citizens. Poetry, in its ability to flash imagery before us, by short-circuiting the seductiveness of fictional narrative, might have the power to allow us to escape the lure of reading only representations. At the same time, poetry’s strangeness, its ability to traffic in illusions, dreams, and openly displayed desires, ensures that the wishes it evokes (and the lies or truths it might promulgate) relate well to the matter in economic life of debt and indebtedness. Postcolonial poetry has generally received less attention from critics than has fiction. Yet this poetry’s allusiveness, and its flaunting of desire, make it a particularly apt locus for thinking of the dream of postcolonial prosperity and wealth, and how to achieve it. Poetry’s wishfulness, its celebration of aspiration, is related to the desire preyed upon by the offerers of debt. How, then, to theorize this debt as one determining topic of, or even basis for, a literary form? To grasp global debt as more than just another injustice among many and, rather, to read the full extent of the ‘debt relation’ as possibly the determining one in power-relations between what used to be called the First and Third Worlds in the postcolonial era, we need to consider how debt’s apparently ‘soft’ version of power came to replace the direct oppression of colonial occupation. Here two problems present themselves. First, critical theory or materialist theory itself has not fully or satisfactorily theorized the modern debt economy. Late Marxism, focusing on alienation and reification as the result of the exploitation of labour, is adept at grasping relations between invisible labourer and the reified, glittering order of consumption; it is less adept at limning the less evidently exploitative, perhaps merely ‘asymmetrical’, relation of debtor and creditor. The injustice of the contrast between Bangladeshi sweatshop work conditions and Western consumerism based on brands, for example, is easily demonstrated by an activist, whereas the debt-relation between the West and the Rest, usually entangled in inter-governmental intrigues and layers of banking and civil-service bureaucracy, seems relatively intangible. This means that the debt trap is often read simply as a function of postmodern global money flows, merely a fictional construct of so-called ‘financialization’. Let me be clear: this reading of the debt-relation as evil merely because the capital behind it is ‘fictitious’ results only because of the lack of thoroughness of the theory which describes it. Financial instruments and contracts, in their level of abstraction from the buying of real goods or from payment for any actual

20

E N D A D U FF Y

ጓ

services, may appear fictitious, but there is always a material referent for such text-based contractual arrangements – a referent of which the beneficiary is regularly reminded by the loan’s repayment schedule. Second, postcolonial theory has with reason focused on the psychic cost of colonial oppression (as in the work of Frantz Fanon), and on the anti-imperial identities necessary to counter that oppression. Thus, an under-theorized economism and a fervently theorized identity-politics have combined to read the ‘bad fiction’ of fastflowing, border-ignoring capital and the ‘good fiction’ of performed subaltern identity-making as narratives that never meet. To grasp the power of the debt relation as a basis for postcolonial poetry, we need to grasp, instead, that these fictions are in each case based in real, material acts and conditions which very much affect each other. In fact, the more esoteric (in Western eyes) the late- and postcolonial narratives of identity, the more recalcitrant they seem to Western versions of the apparently transparent, the more, I want to claim, they express the tortured entrapment, in a strange time-loop, of the debt-relation. Thus, the claim of this essay is that when postcolonial literature self-consciously employs the mythological, the fantastical, the folkloric, and other versions, reworked, of the old imperial trope of the primitive, it is often doing so to offer a secret meditation on the emerging postcolonial debt-relation. Fantasy textuality in postcolonial texts, I want to claim, has a specific affinity with debt. How, then, to revamp the now creaking machinery of ‘dependency theory’ and ‘world-systems theory’, (which have already been recast by Giovanni Arrighi and reformulated as the bases for key paradigms in a geopolitical cultural theory by Fredric Jameson5) in terms of the debt trap? Let us begin with Rosa Luxemburg’s observation, outlined in her study The Accumulation of Capital6 of 1913 – and thus a signal modernist text of the very late era of the last age of empire – that the ultimate use of the colonies for the West was as markets for its goods. This is the key insight developed extensively and meticulously by the geographer David Harvey7 in his accounts of modern global economic expansion and his theory of the ‘Spatial Fix’, by which he means the way in which crises in the West have been repeatedly resolved in the colonial and 5

See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994), and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late-Capitalism (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1991). For a major influence on both of these, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, tr. Joris de Bris (Der Spätkapitalismus, 1972; London: Verso, 1978). 6 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951). 7 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Wiley–Blackwell, 1991).

ጓ Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt

21

post-colonial era by finding resolutions in the form of expansion (often, of markets) in the ‘developing world’. As Western capital expands, it works to achieve new markets, solving crises at home, crises engendered by its internal contradictions, by exploiting growth opportunities, through commodity or service sales, elsewhere. This spatial fix, then, demanded the increasing transformation of the colonized into consumers. In brief, the post-colonial moment might be said to have come about for any given colony when the earlier imperial imperatives, first, of resource extraction (the key topic of imperial texts from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is how such extraction might affect the subjectivity of the colonist–extractor) and, second, of cheap labour exploitation (the topic of numerous plantation novels), were trumped by the need on the part of the imperial metropole for the colony to become a market for the centre’s consumer goods. Since the amount of money paid out in the colonies for resources and labour was nominal, at best, this market-making was achieved through loans. In this way, the origins of modern, Third-World debt is to be found at, and around, and as a secret-in-plain-sight history of, the moment of post-colonial independence. To the extent that the handover of power to independent postcolonies might be thought of as a benign act by their former imperial masters, it was epitomized by the ex-empire’s desire to create in the former colonies a bourgeois class like the bourgeois class at home – that is, a class of consumers. As the colonies were comparatively without money, the spending power of this class had to be financed by the imperial power – and this was done by extending loans. Further, it was the members of this fragile, invariably urban middle class who created and consumed what we call postcolonial literature. The loan relationship, as such works as Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of Indebted Man and David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years make clear,8 offers a better account of the complexity and completeness of modern capital in the global, postcolonial, and postmodern world economic system than does Marx’s account of Victorian class relations of worker and capitalist and its resultant relation of the modern subject to matter as reification, which described conditions under First-World conditions of production. The ‘debtrelation’ suggests a more convincing account of the workings of modern capital in late modernity, as it describes not merely how we sell our labour power for less than it is worth but, rather, the way in which, once we are in debt, our 8

Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, tr. Joshua David Jordan (La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: Essai sur la condition néolibérale, 2011; New York: Semiotext(e), 2012); David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (New York: Melville House, 2011).

22

E N D A D U FF Y

ጓ

whole subjectivity is embroiled in the relation to the debtor, since we have to plan how, in the future, we will repay the debt. In Lazzarato’s terms, “the debt economy solicits and produces processes of subjectification” exemplified by the way in which it makes each of us “entrepreneurs of the self.” For Lazzarato, “debt breeds, subdues, manufactures and shapes subjectivity.” 9 Debt thereby involves what Nietzsche called the ‘domestication’ of humans as characteristic bourgeois subjects. Under colonialism, which might be defined as a political power-grab based on the military occupation of territory, rent might be seen as the basic unit of the dominant economic power-relation: rent represented the colonized subject’s acceptance of the colonizer’s demand that he pay in order to occupy his own land. In the postcolonial order of things, however, debt instead becomes the dominant, apparently indirect model of the now postcolonial subject. In Lazzarato’s terms, while the debt-relation is apparently indirect, offering the indebted subject a measure of freedom, it is in practice much more comprehensively interpellative of the entirety of the psyche of the postcolonial subject. As Marx himself acknowledged it in an early essay of 1844, the relation between banker and debtor only appears to be one of honest, unmediated interaction; on the contrary, it is much more alienating than the labourer–capitalist relation, as “its element is no longer commodity, but man’s moral existence, man’s social existence, the inmost depths of his heart.”10 This hyper-interpellative aspect of debt, which makes it a mechanism, through the exacting of interest payments, for the extraction of capital through control of each subject’s self, means that it is much more intimately bound up with culture, particularly with literature, which also wants to know “the inmost depths of the subject’s heart,” than is the labour-relation. Both literature and bank lending, it should be noted, achieve this entrée into the depths of the human heart through brilliant manipulations of the progressive account of time. They twist the account of times past and times future, to bind them in intensive proximity to the present of the indebted subject. Inviting the borrower to invest in the future, the debt system works, in fact, to attempt to ward off all of the unintended, and potentially exciting, changes that the future might hold. Debt aims to neutralize the uncertainties of the future. In Lazzarato’s terms, debt “subordinates all possibility of choice and decision which the future holds to further the reproduction of capitalist power relations.” 11 In this 9

Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 38. See Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill – Elements d’economie politique Translated by J.T. Parisot – Paris 1823,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, Marx and Engels, 1843– 44, tr. Jack Cohen (New York: International, 2005): 211. 11 Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 46. 10

ጓ Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt

23

sense, debt is inherently conservative: to the greatest extent possible; it judges the future through the lens of the past. Further, and crucially, obtaining credit – denominating oneself as worthy of becoming a debtor – necessitates the creation of the past, of memory: one must invent a story about one’s past whose lesson or moral is that one can be trusted with debt. As Jean–Jacques Goux writes, “a society dominated by credit uses time as expectation.” 12 In the debtrelation, memory must be created and associated with the debtor; this memory is not a vehicle for conserving the past but is a “memory straining towards the future,” in Nietzsche’s phrase.13 This strange deployment of a remembered past for strategic uses in the debt-relation bears uncanny parallels with the ways in which the past is constructed in late- and postcolonial nationalist narratives and their associated literary texts. To see how this applies specifically to the nexus of economics, politics, and culture at decolonization, let us consider the case of Ireland prior to and following its moment of post-colonial independence, 1921. There, the political narrative almost invariably presents itself as a successful nationalist-inspired anticolonial uprising in 1916, which developed into a guerrilla war of independence, which in turn culminated in the independence of most of the island of Ireland following the treaty between the Irish delegates, including Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, and the British government, led by Prime Minister Lloyd George, in 1921.14 This story follows the class pattern of nationalist struggle leading to the achievement of successful post-colonial independence. The economic story of British disengagement and Irish self-determination is, however, a more complex one. To the extent that the anti-colonial rebellion in late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century Ireland may be cast as a fully popular uprising, its origins might be located in the ‘Land War’, the peasants’ refusal to pay rents to British landlords. The Land War itself erupted about thirty years after the potato famine of 1845–48, in which up to a million people died, and which led to the emigration of approximately a million more. The land agitation came to a gradual end when, between 1870 and 1907, the British government introduced a 12

See Jean–Jacques Goux, “Cash, Check or Charge,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics, ed. Mark Osteen & Martha Woodmansee (London: Routledge, 1999): 122. 13 For an excellent discussion both of the importance of money in Nietzsche’s philosophy and of the influence of his discussion of debt, in particular, on such figures as Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, see Nigel Dodd, “Nietzsche’s Money,” Journal of Classical Sociology 13 (2013): 47–68. 14 For histories of modern Ireland, see F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1985), Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990), and R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988).

24

E N D A D U FF Y

ጓ

series of schemes to lend the peasants the money to buy their farms, which the government would in turn buy from the landlords. These highly successful schemes ended serfdom and reorganized the system of land ownership in rural Ireland, thus paving the way for the modernization of the system of agricultural and food production in an almost wholly agriculture-based economy. It effected this modernization, however, by turning the peasant renters into farmer debtors. In a massive transfer of ownership supervised by such British government special administrative bodies as the Congested Districts Board, the AngloIrish landlords, many of them descendants of Elizabethan adventurers or Cromwellian army captains, were bought off, while the peasant renters were offered the deeds to their farms and thirty-year mortgages to pay for them. This fostered an Irish bourgeois native Catholic class, based on mass debtorship to the colonial rulers. Presented as a progressive action by benevolent imperial administrators responding to Irish ‘unrest’, the schemes modernized Irish agriculture as a relatively cheap source of food for Britain. The poorest ‘cottier’ class, who had often been sub-leasors of smaller plots of land from the other rentier-peasants, was displaced by this new wave of modernization. Many of them emigrated, providing cheap labour in British and American cities, sometimes sending their savings home to help pay off the government-provided debt taken on by their resettled family members to buy their land. In this sense, the last major initiative of the British colonial administration in early-twentieth-century Ireland was to create a modern agricultural economy based on British government-supplied debt. Postcolonial independence did not interfere with these debt-payments: when the succeeding generation won Irish national independence, the payment of these debts by Irish farmers to the British government continued. A specific clause in the Anglo-Irish treaty between the guerrilla leaders and the British government guaranteed this. Further, the new Irish government, as was confirmed in the 1925 London Agreement, guaranteed that the new state would continue to contribute to British national debt payments, with one hundred and fifty thousand pounds down and two hundred and fifty thousand per annum for sixty years. These payments continued until 1933, when the government of Eamon de Valera refused to pay the ‘Land Annuities’ to the British government. The British under Ramsay McDonald retaliated with a twentypercent tariff on Irish imports. Since Irish imports to Britain were a mainstay of Irish agriculture, the new nation’s chief industry, this was devastating to the Irish economy (ninety percent of all Irish exports went to Britain). The ‘Economic War’ had begun, devastating the fledgling Irish economy, impoverishing the newly independent nation and its citizens, and in turn leading to a huge new

ጓ Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt

25

wave of emigration, much of it to Britain. Only in 1935, with the ‘Coal–Cattle Pact’, were the tariffs imposed by the opposing factions somewhat eased. Now let us consider how the poetry of W.B. Yeats intersected with all of this revolutionary change. Yeats’s life and career, from 1865 to 1939, matches these years exactly. Yet it is amazing, given his status as national poet, acknowledged at the time and never really challenged since, that he never, to cite one example, ever really mentions emigration, although it may well have been the primary social fact of Irish life in this whole period. Yeats is still seen as the poet of the rebellion and revolution; he carefully cast himself, moreover, as the poet-magus who reinstilled in the timid Irish a pride in their ancient, mythological history, which in turn fired them to fight the British successfully in the years from 1916 to 1921. His Irish audience, with striking unanimity, has almost wholly accepted his overwhelming importance in this role. In other words, he successfully cast himself, in the final instance and despite numerous caveats and doubts, as largely a writer in collusion with what has become the official, triumphalist – because successful – version of Irish anti- and post-colonial political history.15 Meantime, his imbrication in the actually lived economic and social lives of the Irish, on whose behalf he claimed to speak, seems much more mysterious and ambivalent. But it need not be so. Remember Nietzsche’s brilliant phrase in his essay on credit: “A memory straining towards the future”? This vividly describes Yeats’s work in poetry. Gilles Deleuze, commenting on Nietzsche, says: “It is credit, not exchange, that Nietzsche sees as the archetype of social organization.”16 In this mode (as in many others), Yeats was definitely a Nietzschean: the structure of the relations he chooses to dramatize in his poetry is one of credit, with debtors owing debts to powerful creditors. Deleuze goes on to explain that to see credit as the basis of social organization implies, first, always conceiving of one’s society on the basis of an asymmetry of power (whereas the exchange-relation implies potential equality). Second, it implies a redefinition of money, since the creditor has the power of destruction and creation over a society. Thirdly, it 15

Yeats criticism has in recent years both richly developed and also questioned this account. See, for example, Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996), and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Syracuse N Y : Syracuse U P , 1996). Recent Yeats criticism has returned to formalist approaches. For an overview, see Joseph Valente, “Formal (Re)Introductions: New Criticism of Yeats,” Eire – Ireland 47.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2012): 269–79. Notable books in this new mode include Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2007), and Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2010). 16 See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 6.

E N D A D U FF Y

26

ጓ

involves seeing the economy as always subjective, since the debt-relation approaches each subject individually, controlling his or her whole future behaviour and decisions. Each of these characteristics may be thought of, too, as a key feature of Yeats’s poetry. Almost every Yeats lyric dramatizes a power asymmetry, with a struggling subaltern figure roiling in ressentiment. 17 Even every love-poem is cast in these terms: “How can I blame her that she filled my days with misery?” begins the sonnet “No Second Troy” (37), a masochistic cri de coeur in which the resented and, in a characteristic Yeatsian move, smoothly vilified strong woman is obsequiously praised by the helplessly suffering poet. One can dismiss this as a gesture of abasement characteristic of romantic angst, yet, inescapably, it delivers that angst through the medium of male masochism, in the process offering the abject pose as the appropriate stance in which human relations of the deepest sort might be conducted. Furthermore, the poems are also subtly, but often in plain sight, keen to draw our attention to money, “But I being poor have only my dreams,” from “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (29), being one early example. Yeats’s most famous poem, his complex and doubt-ridden elegy for the executed leaders of the rebellion, “Easter 1916” (76), opens by noting that the warrior-clerks who would subsequently fight and die in the rising were first encountered by him coming “From counter and desk” – that is, that they were bank-clerks, accountants, or shop-assistants. More, money is cast as a horror: “September 1913” (44), famously, opens thus: What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in the greasy till, And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save

This “saving” of cold money is in the next stanza contrasted to the grander version of salvation, when Yeats asks rhetorically of the dead revolutionaries of Ireland’s previous anti-colonial wars, “And what, God help us, could they save?” Here saving money is contrasted with saving a nation. In one of Yeats’s greatest and last poems, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” (150), the evil cash register makes a return appearance, now with misogyny and a trace of the old deeply 17

For all of the poems by W.B. Yeats quoted in this essay, see The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama and Prose, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2002). Further page references are in the main text.

ጓ Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt

27

resentful male masochism: “that raving slut / Who keeps the till.” This figure of a goddess of money is castigated as the last of the forces underlying the great poetic images the poet is proud to have invented. The rhetoric in each of these instances suggests a romantic horror of money-grubbing, yet that money-grubbing is mentioned ostentatiously and, in the context of lyric poetry, anomalously, in order that the poet can dramatize his recoil from it. In his own life, it seems, Yeats combined a similar mixture of haughty disdain for matters economic with a tough-minded sense of economic reality. The most famous story in this regard concerns his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature: on receiving the telephone call with the good news, his first reaction reportedly was to ask, “How much, Smyllie, how much is it?”18 Earlier he had bought an Irish castle, which he made famous as ‘Thoor Ballylee’, as a great bargain for thirty-five pounds – from the aforementioned Congested Districts Board. Perhaps sensing this dual aspect of things monetary, the new Irish post-colonial administration put him in charge of the committee to design the new state’s coinage. He pursued this task with characteristic energy. Consider coinage design: money redeemed for culture by symbolism. This formula applies to the persistent citation of the money factor, and then its dismissal with supercilious disapproval, in Yeats’s poetic oeuvre. Note, finally, in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, the key point he raises: that debt renders the economy, which might seem like an abstract entity, thoroughly subjective.19 This is the turn Yeats invariably effects regarding money, and its link to abasement, on the one hand, and the possibility of heroism, on the other, in his poems. The Dublin clerks of “Easter 1916” worked at “counter and desk” but became heroes; the Irish are enjoined to self-create a subjectivity that will have “all that delirium of the brave” that carries them above and beyond the grubby concern with “the greasy till.” Yeats’s Nietzscheanism, in other words, implies his acknowledgement of the debt economy and his willingness to show how Irish subjects might still thrive in it by, literally, forgetting that they are in debt. They are told that they should do better than worry about “the greasy till,” but only after they are reminded that the greasy till is still there. And they can forget the till by reminding themselves of the inspirational heroics of the era before that debt economy appeared – by developing memories or by fabricating them. Yet these must be “memories straining towards the future,” in Nietzsche’s brilliant phrase – that is, memories whose use-value as well as their surplus 18

R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (London: Oxford U P , 2003): 245. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Hugh Tomlinson (Nietzsche et la philosophie, 1962; New York: Columbia U P , 1983): 135. 19

28

E N D A D U FF Y

ጓ

value is fully accounted for. Yeats, with his cries for a Nietzschean heroics located in an historic, quasi-mythic Celtic twilight, often thinks in accounting terms. Even speaking of his Irishness, he notes: “Know, that I would accounted be / True brother of a company / That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong” (“To Ireland in the Coming Times” [20]; italics mine). The actuarial imperative often shimmers close to the surface beneath the economy of imagery which appears to elide, but invariably evokes, the economy of money as debt-power in Yeats’s poetry. This has much to do with urbanism, and with the late- and post-colonial urban milieu specifically, as it appears in Yeats’s poetry. Yeats often invokes the city, as he does money itself, as the mean site of modern mediocrity, site of a bourgeois, grasping, pallid existence which his gestures towards the mythic will transcend. This move from modern urban existence to mythic continuity is the central leap enacted in his two most famous poems. “Easter 1916” begins as a modernist flâneur-poem; the encounters in the streets with the home-returning bank-clerks is redolent of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”20 and suggestive of the passage about the crowd of black-coated clerks crossing London Bridge which would appear in Eliot’s The Waste Land21 of 1922. The latecolonial city for Yeats, then, as the site of the counting house, is only a pallid copy of the imperial metropolis. At the close of Yeats’s most famous lyric of all, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1888) (13), the poet likewise stands “on the sidewalk, or on the pavements gray” while he thinks of living instead in a cottage in the depths of rural Ireland. Again, ostensibly, this urban, money-saturated modernity is cast over against a primitivist national feeling, whether for the abstract dream of a nation (“We know their dream enough” in “Easter 1916,” or, in “Innisfree,” the feeling for the soil that only the peasant proprietor can possess). I would suggest, however, that by invoking the modern money world of the city, Yeats is telling his Irish readers that it is they who can have the mythic fantasy, that the fantasy is only that, a fantasy – and that this fantasy will make bearable their gnawing anomie in the face of their indebtedness. This fantasy, fuelled by a ressentiment kept under control, of the heroic past projected into a future of freedom, thoroughly parallels the temporal structuring of the debtor’s fantasy. Yeats, a realist about money and a fantasist about Irish identity, uses a Nietzschean theory of indebted man as the basis for his version of an Irish cultural transition from subservience to an achieved sense of national identity.

20 21

T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971): 3–7. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays, 1909–1950, 37–51.

ጓ Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt

29

By now, we all have credit cards; we are all debtors; in the West, too, no one is debt free. Every modern nation-state, whether in the First or the Third World, is in fact a debtor entity. In this way, nationhood and debt are integrally linked and always have been. As such, nationalism is in fact an ideology of communal debt. For the vast majority of First-World nations, debt-sustainability, the ability to carry a large debt, is the narrative that sustains national pride. Moreover, much of the debt, through mechanisms such as bond sales, may be held by the moneyed portion of the citizens of the nation itself, so that the idea of investing in oneself and investing in one’s nation is not necessarily illusionary. For the Third-World nation, however, because the debt is to banks of more powerful nations, to those nations themselves, or to their pooled money loaned by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, the notion of national pride based on national debt-sustainability is much more fragile, or even manifestly illusory. This also means that the enormity of the debt makes the debtor nation exist in a state of perpetual crisis. Yet the postcolonial debt-trap is not an invention of the postcolonial era; as I showed in the case of Ireland, it is part of a modern creation of mass indebtedness, which, like many modern bureaucratic inventions, was first tried out in the waning days of colonial administration, experimentally, as it were. What I am suggesting is that there is a link between postcolonial imaginaries of ostentatious, almost obsessive mythologizing, the embourgeoisification of some postcolonial subjects, and the institution of a new power-relation – a geopolitical one, yet interpellating each subject in a total and complex manner – of debt. The debt-relation may be, as Nietzsche claims, the basic mechanism underlying modern subjecthood; it is also the economic power-relation of the neo-liberal state, as the condition under which, with house mortgages, credit cards, and the extension of credit generally, the capitalists allow increasing numbers to join the middle class. It was first experimented with on a mass scale in colonial settings, such as that of the British government in late-nineteenth-century Ireland. In the emerging cultural formations of new post-colonial nation-states, fantasy and debt go hand in hand. A recent book by Franco Bifo Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance,22 sees poetry as the linguistic route of escape from the framework of an indebted imaginary. This strikes me as all too close to the fantastic thinking that is precisely enabled by the debt relationship. In Yeats’s last poetic dictum, “Cast a cold eye” (in “Under Ben Bulben” and on his gravestone), he showed again that he wished to maintain the realism of the actuarial imperative at the core of his mythmaking enterprise, that his best poetic imagery would be buoyed up by an only slightly 22

Franco Bifo Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (New York: Semiotext(e), 2012).

30

E N D A D U FF Y

ጓ

submerged awareness of the economic realities that pertained to the postcolonial Irish independence project. He had always wanted poems that were both “cold and passionate” (“The Fisherman” [64]). Looking with the coldness of the banker–creditor, we as critics need to analyse the mythologizing tendency as an incitement to, and an education in, the postcolonial relation of debt.

W OR K S C I T E D Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994). Berardi, Franco Bifo. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (New York: Semiotext(e), 2012). Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013). Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Syracuse NY : Syracuse U P , 1996). Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Hugh Tomlinson (Nietzsche et la philosophie, 1962; New York: Columbia U P , 1983). ——.“Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. Dodd, Nigel. “Nietzsche’s Money,” Journal of Classical Sociology 13 (2013): 47–68. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971). Finneran, Richard J., ed. The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama and Prose (New York: Scribner, 2002). Foster, R.F. Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988). ——.W.B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (London: Oxford U P , 2003). George, Susan. A Fate Worse Than Debt: The World Financial Crisis and the Poor (1988; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). Goux, Jean–Jacques. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, tr. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca NY : Cornell U P , 1990). Graeber, David. Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (New York: Melville, 2011). Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Wiley–Blackwell, 1991). Howes, Marjorie. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996). Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late-Capitalism (Durham NC : Duke U P , 1991). Kumar, Amitava, ed. World Bank Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2002). Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man, tr. Joshua David Jordan (La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: Essai sur la condition néolibérale, 2011; New York: Semiotext(e), 2012). Lee, Joseph. Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990).

ጓ Post-Coloniality, Poetry, and Debt

31

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital (1913; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951). Lyons, F.S.L. Ireland Since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1985). Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism, tr. Joris de Bris (Der Spätkapitalismus, 1972; London: Verso, 1978). Marx, Karl. “Comments on James Mill – Elements d’economie politique Translated by J.T. Parisot – Paris 1823,” Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3: Marx and Engels, 1843–44, tr. Jack Cohen (New York: International, 2005): 211–28. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollindale (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887; New York: Vintage, 1989). Valente, Joseph. “Formal (Re)Introductions: New Criticism of Yeats,” Eire – Ireland 47.3– 4 (Fall-Winter 2012): 269–79. Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2007). Wood, Michael. Yeats and Violence (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2010).

ጓ

Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multi-Cultural London  D AVID T AVAR E S

AND

M AR C B ROSSE AU

Introduction Focusing on the representation of a city in a novel may well be interesting, but what has become more interesting for geographers is thinking about the role that representation plays in creating urban identities. From this perspective, questions of what is true and false in a text are irrelevant; instead the focus is on the ability of the text to create reality through the invention and documentation of difference.1

L

E N G L A N D . Once the nerve-centre of Europe’s largest empire, London has long been the destination of transnational flows of people, goods, information, and culture from around the world. Yet it was with the mass arrival of migrants from former British colonies in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent during the mid-twentieth century that London emerged as a truly diverse city characterized by substantive ethnic, racial, and religious pluralism. With the birth of the children and grandchildren of these migrants, and a new wave of migrants and refugees from around the world, approximately thirty percent or 2.25 million Londoners are classified as members of non-white ethnicities by the Office of National Statistics. This ethno-racial plurality goes hand in hand with the greatest religious diversity of any city in the U K .2 As a result of the co-presence and interaction of diverse cultural groups, London has emerged as an important site where the politics of difference and conviviality are played out in modern Britain. For the same reasons, it is also a key space for 

ONDON,

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Professor Cecile Sandten, Annika Bauer, and the G N E L / A S N E L for their generous support and kind collaboration. 1 Phil Hubbard, The City (New York: Routledge, 2006): 75. 2 “Focus on London,” Office of National Statistics (2007), http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase /product.asp?vlnk=10527 (accessed 26 February 2009).

34

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

the production, performance, and transformation of urban cultures and identities. Given that over half the members of London’s non-white ethnicities are now British born, London is an ideal site to examine the multiple ways to imagine the postcolonial (in the) contemporary metropolis. According to John McLeod, postcolonial literature about London has the potential to daringly imagine an alternative city in which divisive tensions are effectively resisted, and progressive, transformative kinds of social and cultural relationships are glimpsed. [...] Such projections are often inspired by the popular cultural energies of everyday life in London [... ] where received models of race, identity and belonging begin to break down. [...] The articulation of utopian visions of London which take seriously the possibilities of diasporic living are frequently bound up with the critical advocacy of youth. This is not, of course, to presume that new versions of London spring into concrete existence immediately when they are voiced, or that the social divisions of the city magically disappear at the moment when they are semiotically challenged in novels, films, songs or poems. I do not wish to pursue an unrealistic culturalist approach to the mystical effectivity of postcolonial London writing, but I would like to suggest that such projective, utopian impulses possess a transformative potential which contributes to and resources the changing shape and experiences of London’s ‘facticity’.3

This may certainly be the case in the novels studied by McLeod, and it is hard to deny that literature and other forms of popular representation do not encode a progressive politics of ‘conviviality’ that, as Gilroy writes, “makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, and reified identity.”4 However, referring to a particular subgenre within this growing body of literary works, Silvia Albertazzi identifies some of the pitfalls of attempting to depict the lives of migrants and their descendants: Of the various sub-genres that characterize post-colonial literature, surely diasporic writing is the most influenced by the infamous principle of ‘political correctness’. To avoid any charge of racism or offense to minority groups, migrant stories have to underline the pain, suffering and victimization of migrant people, even at the risk of sentimentalizing their reality and/or stereotyping it. Novels like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or Monical Ali’s Brick Lane, the most successful testimonies of this trend

3

John McLeod, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (New York: Routledge, 2004): 15–16. 4 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia U P , 2005): xv.

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

35

in recent years, have set the boundaries for what has been labelled ‘migrant ethno-mélo’.5

Two recent novels tackle these very issues head-on. Tourism and Londonstani were both published in 2006 to widespread critical attention. Their respective authors, Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal and Gautam Malkani, are both second-generation Londoners of ethnic Indian background6 and their novels form part of an original and irreverent body of recent cultural production emerging from London and other British cities. Indeed, for Albertazzi Tourism provides a “refreshing” departure from the “ethno-mélo” tendency described above. A spatial reading of these novels that attends to the ways in which the identity of the main characters takes shape in everyday spaces offers a nuanced and equivocal perspective on the identity-politics of ‘BrAsian’ identities (on both the urban and the national scale) in modern Britain. As Sayyid writes, BrAsian signifies the impossibility of a hyphenated identity. In the context of the postcolonial, ethnically marked identities cannot be mere superficial additions to the national identity which remains basically the same. BrAsian demonstrates that transformations occur across the national majority/ethnic minority divide, and disrupts that balance of power in which the national majority holds all the cards since the boundaries that constituted that national majority are themselves subject to the process of social and cultural transformations.7

On the urban scale, the spatial negotiation of BrAsian identities in the novels constitutes only a tenuous and limited basis for informal urban citizenship. On the national scale, these identities may disrupt the normative categories of identification that inform the national story, but offer equally rigid conceptions of identity as alternatives. It follows that the two novels generate and circulate representations that effectively encourage the reader to resist dwelling primarily on the transformative and emancipatory currency of BrAsian identities. They suggest that the production of hybrid identities in the city and their representation in various media does not necessarily offer a facile imaginary of informal 5

Silvia Albertazzi, “Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism: How to Exploit Diaspora and Live Happily Ever After,” in Diasporic Subjectivity and Cultural Brokering in Contemporary Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Igor Maver (Plymouth: Lexington, 2009): 165. 6 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, Tourism (London: Vintage, 2006), and Gautam Malkani, Londonstani (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006). Further page references are in the main text. 7 Salman Sayyid, “Brasians: Postcolonial People, Ironic Citizens,” in A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain, ed. Nasreen Ali, Virinder S. Kalra & Salman Sayyid (London: C. Hurst, 2006): 7. See also M. Wetherell, “Speaking to Power: Tony Blair, Complex Multicultures and Fragile White English Identities,” Critical Social Policy 28.3 (2008): 299–319.

36

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

citizenship in urban and national contexts of cultural pluralism. Rather, they reinforce the need for a perspective on urban identities and the politics thereof that is grounded in the spaces of everyday life in the city. In this essay, we propose to outline some of the current research concerned with the spatial politics of urban citizenship in order to set the conceptual stage for an analysis of the two novels. A brief summary of both novels will be provided as well an overview of some of the critical reviews they generated at the time of their publication. We will then proceed with a spatial reading of the novels that emphasizes how place informs the deployment of the processes and practices associated with urban citizenship. We conclude by considering how the literary representations under consideration sit with discourses about cultural pluralism and the politics of identity in Britain.

The Spatial Politics of Informal Urban Citizenship8 The concept of urban citizenship – like citizenship more broadly – can be thought of as having two dimensions that are at once interrelated and semiautonomous. The first, often termed the ‘formal’ dimension, refers to the dynamics surrounding the legal rights and obligations of individuals or groups in an urban polity or the relationship between individuals or groups and the national polity of which they are a part as grounded in the vicissitudes of urban life.9 The second dimension, referred to as ‘informal’, pertains to the socio-cultural practices and processes by which individuals and social groups negotiate the terms of their membership within the urban public. Informal urban citizenship has to do with identity and identification, social recognition, participation, and influence, and with the ways in which these are variously acquired, interpreted, contested, and, importantly, denied in urban contexts.10 Consequently, many 8

The material presented in this subsection comes from an article of ours examining similar questions – see David Tavares & Marc Brosseau, “The Spatial Politics of Informal Urban Citizenship: Reading the Literary Geographies of Toronto in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 33.1 (2013): 9–33. 9 See Jen Dickinsen, Max J. Andrucki, Emma Rawlins, Daniel Hale & Victoria Cook, “Introduction Geographies of Everyday Citizenship,” A C M E : An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7 (2005): 100–12; Hilda Kurtz & Katherine Hankins, “Guest Editorial: Geographies of Citizenship,” Space and Polity 9 (2005): 1–8; Engin Fahri Isin, “Introduction: Democracy, Citizenship and the City,” in Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City (New York: Routledge, 2000): 1–22; Engin Fahri Isin, “City, Democracy and Citizenship,” in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin Fahri Isin & Bryan S. Turner (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2002): 305–16; Joe Painter & Chris Philo, “The Spaces of Citizenship: An Introduction,” Political Geography 14 (1995): 107–20. 10 See Anna Secor, “Citizenship in the City: Identity, Community and Rights among Women

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

37

scholars tend to think of informal urban citizenship in terms of Lefebvre’s notion of ‘the right to the city’.11 As a concept, “the right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: rights to freedom, to individualization and socialization, to habitat and to inhabit.”12 It implies the ability to participate in the creation of the city as an oeuvre, a collective ‘work’ produced by the actions and interactions of individuals and the social groups to which they belong.13 Defined in this way, informal urban citizenship retains a dynamic of its own. 14 It is widely held that the politicization of identity is important to what Holston and Appadurai refer to as “the public calculus of citizenship.”15 Identityformation is central to urban citizenship because it is through the construction and performance of urban identities that social positioning is contested and the discourses that inform social relations are encountered and engaged with. 16 That is to say, identity becomes political both as a property through which claims to informal urban citizenship are made and a basis upon which informal urban citizenship is denied or deferred through processes of social, economic, and political exclusion. In either case, urban space plays a central role as the site where identities are generated and performed in relation to dialogic encounters with difference and broader discursive formations. As Isin writes,

Migrants to Istanbul,” Urban Geography 24 (2003): 147–68; Lynn A. Staeheli, “Cities and Citizenship,” Urban Geography 24 (2003), 97–102; Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (New York: Continuum, 2003); Engin Fahri Isin & M. Siemiatycki, “Making Space for Mosques: Struggles for Urban Citizenship in Diasporic Toronto,” in Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, ed. Sherene Razack (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003): 185–210; Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002); Isin, “Introduction,” 1–22; James Holston & Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Cities and Citizenship,” in Cities and Citizenship, ed. James Holston (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1999): 1–20; Isin & Patricia K. Wood, Citizenship and Identity (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1999). 11 See Secor, “Migrants to Istanbul,” 147–68; Lynn A. Staeheli & Lorraine Dowler, “Special Issue on: Social Transformation, Citizenship, and the Right to the City,” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 73–75; Isin, “City,” 305–16; Isin, “Introduction,” 1–22; Isin & Wood, Citizenship and Identity. 12 Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” (1968), in Writing on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kaufman & Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 174, cited in Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford, 2003): 18. 13 See Mitchell, The Right to the City; Eugene J. McCann, “Space, Citizenship, and the Right to the City: A Brief Overview,” GeoJournal 58 (2004): 77–79. 14 Painter & Philo, “The Spaces of Citizenship,” 107–20. 15 Holston & Appadurai, “Cities and Citizenship,” 8. 16 See Anna Secor, “‘ There is an Istanbul that belongs to me’: Citizenship, Space, and Identity in the City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (2004): 352–68; Secor, “Migrants to Istanbul,” 147–68; Isin, Being Political; Holston & Appadurai, “Cities and Citizenship,” 1–20.

38

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

Space, understood as a configuration, is thus never simply a passive background of becoming political. It is a fundamental strategic property by which groups […] are constituted in the real world, and, through this constitution, structured as objective realities. Space as configuration can have no definite shape or form independent from the groups that constitute and are constituted by it and the strategies and technologies that are embodied in its constitution.17

A number of scholars have argued that urban space and the geography of the city shape the identity-politics through which informal urban citizenship is contested and negotiated specifically in relation to contexts of urban multi-culturalism such as the ones found in the novels considered here.18 In particular, some research is concerned with everyday spatial practices and how these negotiate the relationships, structures, and discourses that impinge upon informal urban citizenship.19 It is this spatial optic, which focuses on everyday inhabitations of the city, that will be mobilized to tease out these relationships in the two novels. How, then, can a study of literature add to the contemporary research on the spatial politics of urban citizenship described? We propose that an analysis of these two novels highlights the potential of literature (and, indeed, of other representational texts) to shape the geographical and sociological imaginary of informal urban citizenship in contemporary multi-cultural London. Literary representations do not simply reflect existing social geographies but also contribute to their very constitution. Consequently, one might say that the geographical and sociological imaginary – both popular and academic – is shaped by a dialogic relationship between the material world of socio-spatial encounters and its representation in various texts. As Ogborn writes, neither spaces nor texts can be the a priori basis for the other. Instead, texts are part of the cultural production of spaces and spaces are part of the cultural production of texts.20

Thus, a focus on literature contributes to recent research on urban citizenship considering the role of representation (and not only practice) in the shaping of 17

See Isin, Being Political, 49. See Ash Amin, “The Good City,” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23; Staeheli, “Cities and Citizenship,” 97–102; Sandercock, Cosmopolis II; Isin, Being Political; Paulo Cesar Da Costa Gomes, A Condição Urbana: Ensaios de Geopolítica da Cidade (Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2001); Isin & Wood, Citizenship and Identity. 19 See Dickinsen et al., “Everyday Citizenship,” 100–12; Secor, “ ‘There is an Istanbul that belongs to me’,” 352–68; Secor, “Migrants to Istanbul,” 147–68. 20 Miles Ogborn, “Mapping Words,” New Formations (2006): 146. 18

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

39

both popular and academic conceptions of urban spaces and identities in the multi-cultural city.

Tourism and Londonstani Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal (1974–) was born in West London to Punjabi immigrants. He pursued English and American Studies at Nottingham University before taking a job in broadcasting at the BBC , which he left to become a freelance journalist and writer in 2000. His pieces now regularly appear in such newspapers as the Guardian, The Times, and the Evening Standard. Prior to the publication of Tourism, Dhaliwal was already a minor public figure in Britain owing to his marriage to Liz Jones, a fashion editor and journalist. In her widely read weekly column in the Mail on Sunday, she published many intimate details of their turbulent marriage, which ended in divorce in 2007. As a result, Dhaliwal quickly became a focal point for heated discussions about the cultural politics of gender, marriage, and feminism. The publication of Tourism, which offers bold and uncompromising perspectives on ethnic, racial, and gender relations, increased Dhaliwal’s public profile as a highly controversial and provocative figure who elicits both assent and disdain for his views on the politics of identity in contemporary Britain. Tourism is written as a first-person narrative in the voice of Bhupinder ‘Puppy’ Singh Johal, a second-generation Londoner in his late twenties whose Sikh parents immigrated to Britain from the Punjab region of northern India. The novel is set largely in central London during the late spring and summer of 2002, yet the narrative often tracks back in time to describe Puppy’s youth growing up in the multi-ethnic, working-class London suburb of Southall, as well as the period leading up to and following his move to central London at the age of around twenty. Less plot-dependent than character- and context-driven, the narrative essentially offers the reader a window onto Puppy’s urban life, experiences, and encounters in multi-cultural London. Politically incorrect to an extreme in its unapologetic representation of racial and gender-based frictions, Tourism is marked by Puppy’s unconventional and controversial views on the spaces and people that he engages with during his everyday life in the city. The narrative plays out in a variety of places and spaces in London, whose specific characteristics and socio-cultural composition feature prominently in the novel’s representation of identity-politics in the city. Gautam Malkani (1976–) was also born and raised in West London. His mother is part of the large cohort of ethnic Indians who immigrated to Britain from Uganda in the early 1970s. He studied social and political sciences at

40

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

Christ’s College, Cambridge, then joined the Financial Times as a journalist, where he continues to work today. Londonstani grew out of his undergraduate thesis. for which he researched what he calls the “Brit-Asian rudeboy scene.” His original intention was to write a non-fictional account of this urban culture, but over time he decided to incorporate his research material into a novel. The manuscript was sold for a large advance at the Frankfurt Book Fair and drew considerable attention upon its release. The recognition Malkani has received for his depiction of Rudeboy culture in West London seems to have spurred much of his recent journalism to focus on themes broadly connected with the novel, such that he has become a commentator on British Asian youth culture, social integration, and so forth. Yet, his contributions to the public debate have been far more measured than Dhaliwal’s and he has not courted controversy (or attention) in the same way. Londonstani depicts a year in the urban lives of four nineteen-year-old youths – Hardjit, Amit, Ravi, and Jas. Together, these characters make up a gang selfidentified as ‘Desi-Rudeboys’, a label intended to capture an assertive urban street culture associated with second-generation British youth of South Asian parentage.21 All four were raised and continue to live in Hounslow, a suburban borough of London located in the far west of the metropolitan region adjacent to both Southall and Heathrow airport. Hardjit is the son of Sikh immigrants, whereas Ravi and Amit are the children of Hindu immigrant parents. Although it is only revealed in the final chapter of the novel, Jas, the most recent addition to the gang, is not of Indian origin at all but, rather, a white British youth (full name: Jason Bartholomew-Cliveden) who has self-consciously sought to adopt the particular second-generation identity of his three peers. As the novel’s narrator, Jas offers the reader an almost ethnological account of the Desi-Rudeboys’ culture he is attempting to internalize, describing the set of values, attitudes, perspectives, behaviours, practices, and activities of his new associates. Jas’s narration generates a detailed and evocative representation of how urban citizenship is contested in the socio-spatial milieu of Hounslow (as well as London more generally) through the performance of a Desi-Rudeboy identity. Given the parallels between the novels – in terms of publication date, background of the authors, and general subject-matter – many reviews of one novel often made mention of the other. In a number of cases they were reviewed in

21

This is an interesting cross-cultural appellation, combining as it does a catch-all word (derived from Sanskrit deshi ‘country’) for South Asians and the standard Jamaican word for a young, black, male drop-out or gang member, sometimes with a Rastafari affiliation. See epigraphic quotation below, 46.

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

41

tandem. As a result, Tourism and Londonstani were circulated among the reading public as a sort of couplet on the politics of identity among British-Indian youth. It is thus fitting that they are discussed here for their combined contribution to the geographical imagination of urban citizenship in multicultural London. Both novels received widespread media attention at their release, both at home and abroad. To begin with, a number of media reviews suggest that the novels offer readers an accurate reflection or illustration of social life in London. For instance, it is argued that Dhaliwal “offers a peek into modern Britain and the generation of immigrant children it raised,” while Malkani’s “overall portrait of a hybridity of races, religions, ethnicities and globalized reference points is a welcome reflection of the everyday life of London’s youth.”22 This common refrain is reinforced by reviews that emphasize the degree to which the content of the novels is based on the authors’ first-hand observations and experiences. A number of reviews convey the idea that Tourism is an autobiographical novel based on Dhaliwal’s experiences as the son of working-class Punjabi immigrants.23 With regard to Londonstani, much is made of the fact that Malkani was not only raised in the area of Hounslow but also that he wrote a thesis on Rudeboy culture as part of an undergraduate degree at Cambridge University (“He spent months hanging with the Hounslow homeboys, jotting down their thoughts and folkways”24). Therefore, in this case, the novel’s representations are upheld as the product not only of experience but also of scholarly analysis. In relation to both novels, the reception tends to naturalize their textual content as a rendition of social conditions beyond the novels themselves. In this way, the novels are circulated as a privileged and unparalleled source for gaining insight into social identity and citizenship among second-generation youth, as well as broader manifestations of society and culture in the multicultural city. Although the notion that the novels provide a mimetic representation of society and social space is a dominant theme in media reception, many reviews also propose that the novels offer the reader more than just a reflection of something they could otherwise go and see for themselves. These reviews suggest that the novels convey original perspectives and insights that challenge the reader, forcing him or her to think differently about the referents of the novels. It has been proposed that in Tourism, Dhaliwal steers away from “a reductionist

22

Gary Younge, “Londonstani Calling,” The Nation (25 September 2006): 36. See, for instance, John Williams, “A Torrid Tale Powered by Fury and Lust,” Mail on Sunday (4 June 2006): 62, and Olivia Laing, “Review of Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” The Observer (9 April 2006): 27. 24 Donald Morrison, “Pump up the Street Cred,” Time International (3 July 2006): 66. 23

42

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

debate about [cultural] authenticity” by “deftly avoid[ing] a caught-betweentwo-cultures orthodoxy that is prevalent in depictions of Asian youth.”25 Indeed, it is argued elsewhere that Dhaliwal exposes readers to a perspective that is different from established ones: Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal set himself a very tricky task when he sat down to write his debut novel, Tourism. He wanted to talk about race in contemporary London. But, unlike Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, he did not want to come at the topic from the point of view of a particular ethnic and geographic community. Nor did he wish to use the light-hearted, middlebrow comic approach of popular comedy series such as Goodness Gracious Me or The Kumars at No. 42. And he actively turned away from the well meaning, socially conscious, liberal discourse employed by Asian journalists and commentators writing newspaper op-ed columns.26

Instead, he “uses his own unimpeachable minority ethnicity” 27 to engage in a controversial and politically incorrect depiction of second-generation experiences in the multicultural city. Malkani, too, is said to offer a “controversial and jarring look at the way race and identity politics operate in contemporary urban space,”28 one characterized by “the deeper meaning it imparts to easy catchwords such as ‘assimilation’ and ‘multiculturalism’”:29 In the end, Malkani offers few easy answers to the identity issues that plague his characters. Instead his provocative and skilfully wrought conclusion poses a final, intriguing question of the future of race in London society. In its frank interrogation of racial categories and its adept play with language, Londonstani is a compelling debut that demands a response from its readers.30

The idea that the content of the novel ‘demands a response’ is especially significant here, since it invites the reader to form opinions and viewpoints by actively engaging with the novel. According to a number of reviews, this is significant insofar as the novel contributes to how ethnic and race relations in Anamik Saha, “Londonstani by Gautam Malkani; Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” Darkmatter: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal (14 June 2007), http://www.darkmatter101.org/site /2007/06/14/londonstani-by-gautam-malkani-tourism-by-nirpal-singh-dhaliwal/ (accessed 29 April 2014). 26 Sukhdev Sandhu, “Review of Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” Wasafiri 53 (Spring 2008): 79–80. 27 Olivia Laing, “Review of Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” 27. 28 Tara Lee, “Not your merrie old London,” Globe & Mail (8 July 2006): D3. 29 Terry Hong, “Boys in the ’hood (London that is),” Christian Science Monitor (11 July 2006): 14. 30 Tara Lee, “Not your merrie old London,” D3.

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

43

London take shape in the aftermath of the 7 July 2007 bombings and the anxieties over ‘home grown’ terrorism that ensued.31 Our reading of both novels focuses on the relationships between the production of urban identities, everyday inhabitations of space, and informal urban citizenship. Albeit in different ways, it is argued that in both novels, the spatial negotiation of urban identity gives rise to fundamentally ambiguous or equivocal forms of urban citizenship. On the one hand, the inhabitation of everyday urban spaces by the principal second-generation characters allows for the performance of urban identities that are underscored by individual choice and agency with respect to self-definition and urban living. Put differently, the everyday activation and inhabitation of urban spaces in London fosters a politics of identity through which the characters negotiate their ‘place’ (both literally and metaphorically) in the urban public. On the other hand, in both cases the experience of everyday spaces and the urban identities performed within them can also be argued to condition the ability of the characters to claim substantive and sustained urban citizenship in multicultural London. Rather, urban citizenship remains partial, provisional, incomplete. In the first case, the main character and narrator remains detached (tourist), in the second case, the “assertive ethnicity” and hyper-masculinity displayed only carries weight in the bounded neighbourhoods from which it emerges: it is a place-specific currency, so to speak.

Cosmopolitan Misfit: Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism I’m just a fucking tourist, I just look at the view (85).

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s main character, Puppy, chooses to distance himself from the ethno-racial identity associated with the immigrant neighbourhood of Southall where he was given a traditional Sikh upbringing. He moves to central London, where his everyday life encompasses a variety of urban spaces that together reflect the city’s ethno-racial, class, and social diversity as well as the ways in which this diversity intersects and fuses. Puppy lives his life across these spaces, moving between them as a proficient urbanite, with ease, confidence, and competence. Yet, despite his cosmopolitan urbanity, Puppy positions himself as being constantly displaced in each of the (very different) socio-spatial 31

See, for instance, Jill Lawless, “A Novel Approach to Hounslow Streets,” The Houston Chronicle (9 July 2006): 14, Rageh Omaar, “West Side Stories,” New Statesman (1 May 2006): 48, and Gary Younge, “Londonstan Calling,” 36–39.

44

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

environments his everyday life takes him. This is true in Southall where he grew up and in Hackney where he lives when he first moves out of the family home. “I’ve got to get out of Hackney. It’s making me a racist” (63). In fact, Hackney is anything but a space of belonging for Puppy, who regards the neighbourhood’s working-class population as being fractured along clearly defined ethno-racial groups, whose cultural practices and values offer him no basis for identification. A similar sense of being ‘out of place’ yet in known territory prevails in Holland Park, where he moves in with Sophie, his new upper-class white girlfriend: [In Holland Park] everything was pristine; almost everyone was White. It felt beautiful, stepping out of the house and into her car, exchanging nods with the couple who lived opposite, obvious millionaires who assumed I was one too. Money alchemises people, the mere suspicion of it changes everything. The gentilesse of Sophie’s street – people sharing glances and smiles, stepping aside for one another on the pavement – came from the mutual assumption of wealth. They were a beloved elect: Europeans, Arabs, Americans and Jews; each saw the other through a prism of money, and loved what they saw. I lived in Hackney where people had nothing, or just enough to inspire resentment. Hackney’s rich owned Land Rover Discoveries and Smeg fridge-freezers; Holland Park’s owned the world. (52–53; emphasis in original)

In a way, the same feeling applies to his successive workplaces or the cafés and nightclubs he patronizes. Although he inhabits their spaces, he always retains a sardonic stance toward London’s metropolitan elite commenting on them as an outsider, or detached observer. It was a Saturday afternoon. I looked from the café balcony onto Portobello Road. It was a miscegenist heaven: White women clung to well wrought ethnic studs who pushed tricycle pushchairs laden with fat brown babies; demure young White men guided Asian girlfriends through stalls selling hookahs, avant-garde sneakers and sun dried tomatoes. The café was crowded, full of people drinking Spanish beer and eating parmesan and rocket salads, enjoying the pluralist esprit de corps of Notting Hill. I hated the area: a vapid, would-be bohemia, it was too fey for imagination and radicalism, but had odd pockets of deprivation, the remnants of the old West Indian quarter. It was home to the corporate rump of the creative media – scriptwriters, agents, marketing impresarios – and a hub for the under-belly of the English bourgeoisie: antique dealing heroin addicts, thespians-turned-coke-dealers, New Age charlatans selling Ayurveda to the upper classes. (52)

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

45

Rather than being a progressive urban space where established categories of socio-cultural identity are disrupted and new criteria of belonging emerge, for Puppy Portobello Road is little more than a space of liberal self-congratulation and exploitation. As a result, he regards Portobello Road as an inauthentic façade of intercultural harmony that responds to upper-class sensibilities and corporate commoditization while paving over the antagonisms that characterize multicultural London. Above and beyond superficial encounters and exchanges, the city, for him, is a space of deeply rooted differences and antagonisms based on class, ethnic, racial, religious, gendered, sexual, and more narrowly defined (sub)cultural constituencies. Indeed, this is the dominant image of the city we get from the novel. Consequently, Puppy’s experience of London is characterized by a constant sense of inner displacement and disassociation from the urban spaces of everyday life in the city. This occurs despite an outward appearance of being perfectly at ‘home’ in the city. Nothing I have ever wanted has come true; I was tired of being let down. I was tired of my lingering, lifelong sense of incompletion. I’m a man of few talents; the one skill I have is the acceptance of disappointment. Nonetheless, I lay there feeling drained and beaten. I hadn’t wanted much from life: love, safety, a sense of belonging to somewhere or someone. Instead, I had nothing. I listened to the people around me laughing and joking with one another: was anyone happy, or was everything a shroud, hiding one’s mediocrity and sadness. (162)

The attitudes Puppy exhibits toward the people he interacts with in the city are not the result of superficial cynicism, as some reviewers have argued, but of a more deep-seated sense of disconnection and absence of belonging. One could even argue that he feels no desire to belong. Silvia Albertazzi cleverly interprets Dhalival’s particular ‘tourist’ stance, which is inspired by Michel Houellebecq’s own nihilistic tourist ethos in Plateforme (2001)32: Puppy’s self-identification as a ‘tourist’ allows him to assume toward Britain the attitude of a person away from home, who looks at the world around him/her with detachment and takes advantage of his/her spatial estrangement to indulge in activities that he/she would never do at home. Moreover, since, while holidaying in faraway exotic resorts even the dullest man-in-the-street turns into a sort of neo-colonizer for whom 32

Michel Houellebecq, Plateforme (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). Tr. by Frank Wynne as Platform (London: William Heinemann, 2002).

46

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

the natives are only colonial subjects to be exploited, it is not so farfetched to affirm that Puppy wants to be a ‘tourist’ in Britain in order to ‘colonize’ British society, believing that ‘taking advantage of [its] postcolonial melancholia can lead to some form of reparation’.33

Regardless of the postcolonial critique one may read into Puppy’s ways of experiencing London, the reasons for his sense of displacement vary in relation to the specific social and cultural characteristics of the urban spaces in which he finds himself. It is his everyday inhabitation of these spaces that leads to his perception of fundamental difference – in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, class, political views, gender, and sexual outlook, etc. – from the people he encounters. Consequently, Puppy’s spatial negotiation of London produces a deeply ambiguous form of urban citizenship, given that his everyday life is characterized by a seemingly unconstrained, cosmopolitan occupation of the multicultural city, whereas his experiences of everyday spaces give rise to a constant sense of displacement and dissociation from his socio-cultural environment.

Assertive Identity: A Place-Specific Currency in Londonstani People’re always tryin to stick a label on our scene. That’s the problem with havin a fuckin scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits. These days we try an use our own word for homeboy an so we just call ourselves desis but I still remember when we were happy with the word rudeboy. (5)

If Puppy’s inhabitation of the city fails to generate a basis for collective belonging in multicultural London, the same cannot be said for Hardjit, Amit, Ravi, and Jas, the four second-generation characters in Londonstani. By contrast, they exhibit what is arguably the strongest form of group membership and shared identity in the city – the gang. This gang is defined by their ‘DesiRudeboy’ street culture, which acts as the basis on which Malkani’s characters insert themselves into the public sphere of Hounslow, the West London suburb in which they all live. As represented in Londonstani, Desi-Rudeboy youth culture features a number of elements, including their own linguistic vernacular, selective pop-culture affiliations, careful fashion choices, latest-model mobile phones, hyper-masculinity and homophobia, and religious symbolism, as well

33

Silvia Albertazzi, “Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal Tourism,” 168. Albertazzi is quoting from Saha, “Londonstani by Gautam Malkani; Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal.”

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

47

as a set of what are perceived to be opposing cultural forms.34 Granted, ethnicity and religion continue to be important aspects of their subjectivity: Sikhs an Hindus fought side by side in all them wars. Both got beef with Muslims. Both support India at cricket. Both be listenin to bhangra, even though Sikh bredren clearly dance better to it. (81)

However, the complex fusion of multiple influences and perspectives makes this a characteristically BrAsian identity that transcends ‘traditional’ categories of belonging. Yet, in this case, the result can hardly be termed progressive. Through the spatial performance of a Desi-Rudeboy identity on the streets of Hounslow, Malkani’s characters contest urban citizenship by (often violently) asserting their presence and social difference in urban space. An example of this process is provided by Malkani’s description of the four main characters cruising the vicinity of Hounslow High Street in Ravi’s “pimped up” (14) BMW M3. Sitting in the back seat, Jas describes the image that Hardjit and company are projecting to the world around them: Windin down the tinted electric window, resting his elbow on the door frame, flashin his Tag Heuer, sovereign ring an karha bracelet. Grabbin the top a the door frame with his left hand, he straightened his shoulder so that his upper arm snapped into place, his tight Black D&G vest giving everyone outside an even better view. An just like the empty side roads gave Ravi an excuse to slide down into second gear an do some seriously sharp rudeboy manoeuvres, they gave Hardjit an excuse to grip harder on the door frame an tense his arms up more. The engine an drivetrain connected to his biceps, the brake pads connected to his pecs. Ravi swervin past some random slowcoach Citroën like he was at the arcades playin Daytona US A . Beep beep, get the fuck off the street. […] Her legs had come into view soon as we’d turned out the side roads an onto the London Road. Whoever she was, she was wearin one a them fuck-me miniskirts an fuck-me-harder knee-high boots. […] Ravi slowed the fuck down now while Hardjit turned up DMX ’s ‘Ruff Ryders Anthem’ with the arm that weren’t on display in the door frame. Soon as we’d passed her legs, Amit gives it. (19)

The success with which they appropriate space and territory for self-representation in Hounslow suggests that Desi-Rudeboy street culture is a powerful basis

34

For an interpretation of these processes in Tourism, Londonstani, and other contemporary writings by British Asian men, see Ranasinha Ruvani, “Racialized Masculinities and Postcolonial Critique in Contemporary British Asian Male-Authored Texts,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.3 (2009): 297–307.

48

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

on which to claim urban citizenship, albeit to the exclusion of social ‘Others’: “We best all stick to our own kinds, boy, don’t you b playin wid fire” (49), or “we shud all breed apart” (146). Having said this, as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that Desi-Rudeboy identity offers only a provisional and incomplete basis for contesting inclusion in the urban public. We shall see that its currency, powerful as it may seem, is limited to a marginal suburb of West London, outside of which it is revealed to be decidedly insular, dogmatic, and generally out of touch with urban culture in the global city. According to the narrator, with the emergence of a robust, assertive DesiRudeboy culture, there “in’n no desi needin to kiss the White man’s butt these days an you definitely don’t need to actually act like a gora” (23). These days, lager louts had more to fear from us than us lot had to fear from them. Honest to god, in pinds like Hounslow an Southall, they feared us even more than they feared Black kids. Round some parts, even Black kids feared people like us. (5)

However, it turns out that, outside of Hounslow, their immediate “turf,” they have few options: we couldn’t go south cos that was Richmond. Too swanky, too poncey. To the west was Brentford, but that was going the way a Richmond now. To the north it belonged to the Southall Desis and all the land to the west had anti-terrorist police cos a Heathrow airport – an those muthas got guns. (112)

Indeed, a spatial reading of the novel reveals that the ability of the main characters to contest informal urban citizenship in London does not extend evenly across the metropolis but remains very much place-specific. The evolution of the novel’s plot reveals how the adoption and spatial performance of a Desi-Rudeboy identity, while initially offering a seemingly strong basis for contesting urban citizenship, is, in fact, fraught with ambiguities and limitations in this regard. Granted, being Desi-Rudeboys allows Malkani’s characters to claim urban space and territory for self-representation in Hounslow. In so doing, they exert considerable agency over social positioning in West London. However, Hounslow is represented in the novel as little more than a marginal space on the periphery of London whose horizons the characters find constraining: It’s just one car park after another round here: grey field a empty spaces, concrete bollards, those giant bins for shop rubbish, a couple a crap cars an pay-an-display ticket machines bolted onto their posts with extra padlocks as we saw. (88)

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

49

Even here, their ability to instantiate themselves in the social world of the neighbourhood depends on constantly (and often violently) asserting their identity in public space, a task that is conditioned by various figures of authority. Moreover, the need for a constantly increasing source of income to sustain the identity on which their position in the neighbourhood is based leads them into a risky criminal scheme whose outcome undermines the social and symbolic capital they have accrued by being Desi-Rudeboys in Hounslow. Insofar as it introduces them to new spaces in central London, participation in this scheme also reveals how the political currency of their urban identity is devalued outside of West London. Consequently, informal urban citizenship for Malkani’s characters remains provisional, incomplete, and largely restricted to a marginal space on the periphery of the metropolis.

Conclusion In the year 2000, a landmark report entitled “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” argued that the “national story” of Britain in the postwar period has been characterized by the discursive construction of cohesive, ethno-racially marked communities of Others that are denied entry to the imagined community that forms the basis for British identity. In short, “the national story excludes them, or relegates them to subservient and marginal walk-on roles.”35 This core argument has been reiterated by a variety of scholars over the past decade.36 They have considered the emergence of hybrid youth identities in British cities that destabilize the discursive binaries between Britain and its others. As noted earlier, many believe that BrAsian identities constitute a progressive fusion of British, South Asian, and other cultural and social identities and that their emergence is related to various forms of contemporary popular culture, including television, film, music, and literature, that are coming out of Britain’s major cities, most notably London. These cultural productions are wildly held to articulate BrAsian identities and actualize their political currency by circulating them as a basis for collective belonging and social inclusion in urban Britain. In doing so, BrAsian identities are said to destabilize the normative boundaries of

35

Bhikhu Parekh, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (London, Profile, 2000): 5. 36 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. See also Ashley Dawson, Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007), and Christina Julios, Contemporary British Identity: English Language, Migrants and Public Discourse (Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2008).

50

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

Britishness and encourage a re-imagining of the national story in more fluid and inclusive terms. Without denying their significance, it is easy to overstate the political currency of so-called BrAsian identities, or at least to overlook their ambiguities as a basis for urban citizenship in contemporary British cities. This is not least because many of the representations that are held to epitomize BrAsian identities are highly original and irreverent cultural productions that capture the imagination of their audiences, popular and academic. Consequently, there is a risk of dwelling largely on their transformative potential instead of pursuing more nuanced analyses that register more equivocal cultural politics associated with BrAsian identities and their representation in various media. This is not to accuse scholars of adopting a wholly uncritical approach to BrAsian cultural production but, rather, to highlight the perspective we have sought to adopt in relation to Dhaliwal’s Tourism and Malkani’s Londonstani. A close reading of these novels captures both the potential and limitations of urban citizenship based on the negotiation of BrAsian identities. Notably, in both cases, the BrAsian identities of the characters transgress putative identitarian boundaries and simultaneously create new ones that are equally rigid and exclusionary. As a result, they do not ultimately offer a robust challenge to the binary oppositions at the heart of British cultural nationalism. Indeed, the spatial inhabitation of London among the main characters fosters identities that continue to be predicated on fundamental differences rather than new affiliations that cross-cut the urban public. That is to say, in the process of negotiating urban citizenship in London, the various second-generation characters come to define themselves relative to a series of opposing identities rather than broader criteria of commonality. Normative ethno-racial identities associated with the British nation remain the starkest axis of difference, conveying that, in both cases, the production of BrAsian identities does not necessarily lead to belonging and inclusion within the British nation as an imagined community. Instead, in these two novels, the status of BrAsian is defined in considerable measure by the degree to which it remains outside the British nation.

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

51

W OR K S C I T E D Albertazzi, Silvia. “Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism. How to Exploit Diaspora and Live Happily Ever After,” in Diasporic Subjectivity and Cultural Brokering in Contemporary Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Igor Maver (Plymouth: Lexington, 2009): 165–78. Amin, Ash. “The Good City,” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23. Da Costa Gomes, Paulo Cesar. A Condição Urbana: Ensaios de Geopolítica da Cidade (Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2001). Dawson, Ashley. Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2007). Dhaliwal, Nirpal Singh. Tourism (London: Vintage, 2006). Dickinsen, Jen, Max J. Andrucki, Emma Rawlins, Daniel Hale & Victoria Cook. “Introduction Geographies of Everyday Citizenship,” A CME : An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7 (2005): 100–12. “Focus on London,” Office of National Statistics (2007), http://www.statistics.gov.uk /statbase/product.asp?vlnk=10527 (accessed 26 February 2009). Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia U P , 2005). Holston, James, & Arjun Appadurai. “Introduction: Cities and Citizenship,” in Cities and Citizenship, ed. James Holston (Durham NC : Duke U P , 1999): 1–20. Hong, Terry. “Boys in the ’hood (London that is),” Christian Science Monitor (11 July 2006): 14. Houellebecq, Michel. Plateforme (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). Tr. by Frank Wynne as Platform (London: William Heinemann, 2002). Hubbard, Phil. The City (New York: Routledge, 2006). Isin, Engin Fahri. Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2002). ——.“City, Democracy and Citizenship,” in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin Fahri Isin & Bryan S. Turner (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2002): 305–16. ——.“Introduction: Democracy, Citizenship and the City,” Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City (New York: Routledge, 2000): 1–22. ——, & Myer Siemiatycki. “Making Space for Mosques: Struggles for Urban Citizenship in Diasporic Toronto,” in Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, ed. Sherene Razack (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003): 185–210. ——, & Patricia K. Wood. Citizenship and Identity (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1999). Julios, Christina. Contemporary British Identity: English Language, Migrants and Public Discourse (Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2008). Kurtz, Hilda, & Katherine H. Hankins. “Guest Editorial: Geographies of Citizenship,” Space and Polity 9 (2005): 1–8. Laing, Olivia. “Review of Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” The Observer (9 April 2006): 27. Lawless, Jill. “A Novel Approach to Hounslow Streets,” Houston Chronicle (9 July 2006): 14.

52

DAVID TA VA RE S & MA RC BR OS SE A U

ጓ

Lee, Tara. “Not your merrie old London,” Globe & Mail (8 July 2006): D3. Lefebvre, Henri. “The Right to the City” (1968), in Writing on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kaufman & Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 147–59. McCann, Eugene. “Space, Citizenship and the Right to the City: A Brief Overview,” GeoJournal 58 (2004): 77–79. McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (New York: Routledge, 2004). Malkani, Gautam. Londonstani (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006). Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford, 2003). Morrison, Donald. “Pump up the Street Cred,” Time International (3 July 2006): 66. Ogborn, Miles. “Mapping Words,” New Formations (2006): 145-149. Omaar, Rageh. “West Side Stories,” New Statesman (1 May 2006): 48. Painter, Joe, & Chris Philo. “The Spaces of Citizenship: An Introduction,” Political Geography 14 (1995): 107–20. Parekh, Bhikhu. The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (London: Profile, 2000). Ruvani, Ranasinha. “Racialized Masculinities and Postcolonial Critique in Contemporary British Asian Male-Authored Texts,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.3 (2009): 297–307. Saha, Anamik. “Londonstani by Gautam Malkani; Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” Darkmatter: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal (14 June 2007), http://www .darkmatter101.org/site/2007/06/14/londonstani-by-gautam-malkani-tourism-bynirpal-singh-dhaliwal/ (accessed 29 April 2014). Sandercock, Leonie. Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (New York: Continuum, 2003). Sandhu, Sukhdev. “Review of Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” Wasafiri 53 (2008): 79– 80. Sayyid, Salman. “BrAsians: Postcolonial People, Ironic Citizens,” in A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain, ed. Nasreen Ali, Virinder S. Kalra & Salman Sayyid (London: C. Hurst, 2006): 1–10. Secor, Anna. “Citizenship in the City: Identity, Community and Rights among Women Migrants to Istanbul,” Urban Geography 24 (2003): 147–68. ——.“ ‘There is an Istanbul that belongs to me’: Citizenship, Space, and Identity in the City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (2004): 352–68. Staeheli, Lynn A. “Cities and Citizenship,” Urban Geography 24 (2003): 97–102. ——, & Lorraine Dowler. “Special Issue on: Social Transformation, Citizenship, and the Right to the City,” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 73–75. Tavares, David, & Marc Brosseau. “The Spatial Politics of Informal Urban Citizenship. Reading the Literary Geographies of Toronto in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 33.1 (2013): 9–33.

ጓ Equivocal Identity-Politics in Multicultural London

53

Wetherell, Margaret. “Speaking to Power: Tony Blair, Complex Multicultures and Fragile White English Identities,” Critical Social Policy 28.3 (2008): 299–319. Williams, John. “A Torrid Tale Powered by Fury and Lust,” The Mail on Sunday (4 June 2006): 62. Younge, Gary. “Londonstani Calling,” The Nation (25 September 2006): 36–39.

ጓ

IN

POLITIC AL CHAN GE AN D CON TE ST ED SP AC ES THE AF RIC AN AND S OUTH AF RICAN METR OP OLI S

Tracing the Rural in the Urban Re-Reading Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow through Brooding Clouds A N N I K A M C P HE R SON

I

A F R I C A N L I T E R A T U R E S that a rural setting is commonly associated with history, tradition, and belonging. A tragic ‘clash of cultures’ frequently erupts upon the arrival of – usually colonial or neocolonial – harbingers of modernity, as, for example, in Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather (1968).1 Urban spaces, however, tend to connote this very modernity with which rural migrants in turn struggle upon their arrival to the city. In South African literature, this is best exemplified in the ‘Jim comes to Jo’burg’ genre, in relation to and as a ‘subversion’ of which Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) has often been discussed.2 Since its publication, Mpe’s novel (which in reviews has also been classified as novella, morality tale, social commentary, testimony, or confession) has received steadily increasing critical attention and has even acquired “cult status.” 3 Unsurprisingly, the cityscape of Johannesburg, particularly the novel’s initial mapping of the neighbourhood of Hillbrow, has been the focus of attention. Mpe’s own critical concern with representations of the city in literature in general, and particularly the lack of literary depictions of Hillbrow up to the late 1990s as articulated in his essay “‘Our Missing Store of Memories’,” further

1

T IS N OT O NLY I N M AN Y

Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968; Oxford: Heinemann, 1995). Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001; Athens: Ohio U P , 2011). For Mpe’s novel as a “variation” or a “subversion” of the ‘Jim comes to Jo’burg’ story, see, for example, Rob Gaylard, “Stories and Storytelling in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” in Words Gone Two Soon, ed. Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane (Pretoria: Umgangatho, 2005): 180–86. 3 Elena Bregin, “Editor’s Preface,” in Phaswane Mpe, Brooding Clouds (Scottsville: U of Kwa Zulu–Natal P, 2008): xi. 2

58

ANNIKA MCPHER S ON

ጓ

encourages such urban-centred readings of the novel.4 In his essay, Mpe discusses representations of Johannesburg in a cross-reading of canonical Western conceptualizations of cityscapes and South African literary depictions of the city. With a focus on the city’s “capacity to always change, both in its physical structure and social fabric,” Mpe explores the common notion of the city “as a text that begs to be deciphered” in terms of a “dialectic between the city and literature” in which both discourses require analysis.5 The literary representation of Hillbrow “as a monster,”6 however, which is also echoed in his novel, in Mpe’s assessment constitutes a misreading of the underlying “new rules of life” and “new sets of expectations” as the “social disorder or chaos” of changing cityscapes.7 Hence, Mpe’s analysis of representations of the city in connection with “the role of literature in a changing society” addresses questions well beyond the very trope of social disorder and the disintegration of community which has dominated his novel’s reception to date.8 In the following, I thus suggest that questions of social (re-)organization and community formation are not only informed by disruptive changes regarding the city’s new ‘rules of life’, but also reveal some striking similarities to its ostensible rural counterparts. While most reviewers and critics have pointed out the novel’s rural–urban juxtaposition of Hillbrow and the village of Tiragalong and tend to mention their connectedness in passing, few have paid attention to the ‘rules of life’ governing what I shall be discussing as Tiragalong’s extension into Hillbrow or, rather, their interdependence. Reading Welcome to Our Hillbrow alongside Mpe’s posthumously published collection of short stories and poems, Brooding Clouds (2008), enables an elaboration of this interdependence of rural and urban settings.9 Key aspects of the suggested rural continuities become visible not only in the texts’ thematic links and shared set of characters but also in their style, particularly the voice of narration.

4

Phaswane Mpe, “‘ Our Missing Store of Memories’: City, Literature and Representation,” in Shifting Selves: Post-Apartheid Essays on Mass Media, Culture and Identity, ed. Herman Wasserman & Sean Jacobs (Cape Town: Kwela, 2003): 181–98. 5 Mpe, “‘Our Missing Store of Memories’,” 183. 6 “‘ Our Missing Store of Memories’,” 191. 7 “‘ Our Missing Store of Memories’,” 184. 8 “‘ Our Missing Store of Memories’,” 196. 9 Phaswane Mpe, Brooding Clouds (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P, 2008). Most of the texts in this collection were written between 1997 and 2000 and were previously published in various journals and collections.

ጓ Tracing the Rural in the Urban

59

Neville Hoad’s “melodramatic” summary of the novel demonstrates its rather complex character constellation and provides a first indication of how Tiragalong is connected to Hillbrow: Refentse [sic] is in love with Lerato, who cheats on him with his friend Sammy. Refentse had previously cheated on Lerato with Sammy’s girlfriend, Bohlale. Refilwe is a former girlfriend of Refentse’s from Tiragalong, who dislikes Lerato and spreads rumors that she is the daughter of a foreigner. Refentse commits suicide. Refentse’s mother, back in Tiragalong, is accused of witchcraft when she attempts to keep her son away from Lerato and is consequently murdered. Once in heaven, Refentse watches a film that reveals that Lerato is the daughter of Piet, father of Tshepo, a beloved Tiragalong friend of Refentse. Piet is also killed as a consequence of witchcraft allegations in Alexandra. Refilwe goes to study in Oxford. She then falls in love with a Nigerian man, who resembles Refentse; discovers that she is HIV positive; and comes home to die. Underlying this melodrama are the pressing preoccupations of contemporary South Africa – xenophobia, AIDS , witchcraft, crime, urbanization, democracy – all presented in the lives and stories of the denizens of our Hillbrow.10

While the rural and urban settings flow rather seamlessly into each other in this description, Melissa Tandiwe Myambo has pointed out that the tension between conceptualizations of ‘postcolonial’ urban topographies and the desire to write a ‘new’, distinct South Africa into being has frequently led to a troubling emphasis on binary relations such as “‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’, the ill and the healthy, the dead and the living, the rural and urban” – in spite of claims that the novel’s aim is to undo these very “antagonisms.”11 In Myambo’s cross-reading of the Freedom Charter, Mpe’s novel, and the 2006 film Catch a Fire, she evokes Hillbrow as what can be described as a South African ‘everyplace’: “‘they’ are ‘us’ and ‘we’ are everywhere and everywhere is Hillbrow.”12 According to Myambo, The idea of space/place/home is constantly extended, pushed back and out and, in the final instance, even up to Heaven, a heaven that is not outside but inside of us. The text performs a radical explosion of space 10

Neville Hoad, “An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” in Literature and Globalization: A Reader, ed. Liam Connell & Nicky Marsh (London: Routledge, 2011): 334. 11 Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy: A Theory of ‘Belonging,’ Not Belongings, in the New South Africa,” Comparative Literature 63.1 (Winter 2011): 74–75. 12 Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy,” 76. Catch a Fire, dir. Phillip Noyce (perf. Derek Luke, Tim Robbins, Bonnie Henna, and Mncedisi Shabangu; U S A , 2006; 101 min.).

ANNIKA MCPHER S ON

60

ጓ

and rethinks rural to urban migration, migrations from periphery to metropole, and return journeys to collapse all of this into a New South African-global space that is purely abstract. In the final analysis, we, the children of the world, ‘belong’ to this world. A sense of ‘belonging’ is forged into an idealized version of a potential nation.13

Belonging in such an “abstract” global space can no longer be tied to any singular location. Hence, the “actual Hillbrow” becomes a “metaphorical” one that is “symbolic of the world at large” and invokes “interpenetrating, overlapping spaces,” which is also illustrated by the run-on-sentences pointing to Refilwe’s “expanding consciousness”:14 Because soon, very soon, she would be joining Refentše, Lerato, Bohlale, Tshepo and the others in the World of our Heaven. Together they would talk about Hillbrow and Tiragalong and Oxford. [...] They would discuss ways of turning their spoken and unspoken thoughts into written fictions and poems. And as Refilwe comes to this part of her journey to AIDS and Tiragalong condemning her [... and] herself reaping the bitter fruits of the xenophobic prejudice that she had helped to sow Hillbrow and Tiragalong flowing into each other in her consciousness with her new understanding of life love and prejudice [...] life reconsidered in the light of harsh possibilities of rural virtues laid bare under the eyes of human microscopes all these and many more things flowing into and blending with Refilwe’s expanding consciousness... Welcome to the World of our Humanity...15

Whether such invocations reflect a TRC -style “narrative of forgiveness and reconciliation” portraying an abstracted “radical multiculturalism that breaks down all types of borders and boundaries,” as Myambo suggests,16 or, rather, a melancholic demonstration of the perpetuation of such boundaries as a form of writing back to late 1990s South African ‘rainbowism’ and nation-building, remains controversial. Re-reading Welcome to Our Hillbrow through Brooding Clouds permits an elaboration of the interconnectedness of rural and urban places in addition to the one articulated throughout the novel. Elena Bregin calls the collection a “prequel manuscript” to the novel, as they share many characters and some stories clearly form the basis of the novel.17 In frequently cited interviews, Mpe 13 14 15 16 17

Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy,” 77. “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy,” 77–78. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 113. Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy,” 78. Bregin, “Editor’s Preface,” xi.

ጓ Tracing the Rural in the Urban

61

describes the act of writing Welcome to Our Hillbrow as “therapeutic” in the face of depression and his own suicidal tendencies.18 In this work, largely written over a single weekend, Mpe’s self-declared aim was to “resurrect” some of the characters who had previously committed suicide in his stories.19 Strategically reversing or, rather, neglecting the aspect of temporality in the writing of these narratives, I argue that, just as much as the novel characterizes not only the urban setting but also the rural one, the collection does more than “evoke the insular rural world of the author’s own beginnings” and his “emblematic concerns: love, sexual betrayal, poverty, xenophobia, the dislocations of migrancy, and the scourge of ‘witch’ burning.”20 Rather, Brooding Clouds, too, illustrates the two settings’ interwovenness. The characters linked through these narratives include not only Tshepo, Refentše, Sammy, Lerato, Refilwe, Terror, Cousin, and Professor but also the personified village of “Tirogalong itself” – in Bregin’s words, a “sometimes sinister puppeteer, [...] its omniscience fed by the migrant grapevines that travel the highways between Hillbow/Braamfontein and Tiragalong.”21 Those highways are indeed frequently travelled, as the characters often go back ‘home’ both for short visits and for extended periods of time. Also, their Hillbrow social circles consist mostly of ‘homeboys’ and ‘homegirls’, all of whom are in constant contact with relatives and friends in various villages as well as in other neighbourhoods. Their condition might thus more suitably be described as one characterized by mobility than by migrancy. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Bregin should describe Hillbrow and Tiragalong as “the twin nodes of [Mpe’s] psyche” which “were not just place to him, but identity, woven into the experiential fabric of his being.”22 What is interesting, however, is the recurring notion of “being caught” between supposedly irreconcilable “rural roots and urban possibility.”23 Such a notion of socio-cultural identity points to the assumption that identity and culture are singularly localized. Given the frequency of almost all the characters’ interaction with rural settings, I would argue that this duality of experience also represents the very ‘new rules of life’ which do not allow for a clear separation between rural and urban lives, nor do

18

Adrian Knapp, The Past Coming Home to Roost in the Present: Historicising History in Four Post-Apartheid South African Novels (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2006): 85. 19 Lizzy Attree, “Healing with Words: Phaswane Mpe Interviewed by Lizzie Attree,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.3 (September 2005): 139. 20 Bregin, “Editor’s Preface,” xi. 21 “Editor’s Preface,” xi. 22 “Editor’s Preface,” xii. 23 “Editor’s Preface,” xii.

62

ANNIKA MCPHER S ON

ጓ

they merely point to familiar stories of uprootedness and dislocation. Rather, they complicate the very notion of place itself. If everywhere is not only Hillbrow but also Tiragalong, the village can be read not only in terms of a South African ‘everyplace’, but also as a ‘non-place’. As opposed to “anthropological places,” Marc Augé describes non-places as spaces “which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.”24 The non-places Augé refers to are products of supermodernity, spaces that are formed with certain ends in mind (such as transport, transit, or commerce). They certainly do not fit the common associations of rural settings as marked by long histories and close-knit social relations perpetuating localized cultural identities. Non-places instead make a spectacle of identity, relations, and history, and indicate an inability to communicate. Spectacle and miscommunication, however, even when intentional, indeed run deep through both Tiragalong and Hillbrow. Read as anthropological places, they would have to “create the organically social,” while as non-places they appear as marked by “solitary contractuality.”25 Although there are, of course, meaningful and consequential social relations which determine life in Tiragalong and Hillbrow, instances such as punishment and social ‘purging’ through rubber-tyre ‘necklacing’ and burning in the village, or the detrimental effects of gossip on the protagonists indeed question the meaning of such relations as indicative of a localized basis of identity. Yet, in many discussions of the novel the rural remains tied to positively connoted notions of home and community. Refentše’s coming to Hillbrow, for example, is first and foremost perceived as marking the “dissolution of traditional understandings of home and community,” in that his “personal history and memories originate elsewhere [...]. Hillbrow, for Refentše, is devoid of a history and of an identifiable set of shared values or beliefs.”26 While the shared values and traditions of village life need not, of course, be positive, they seem to stand for singularly located forms of identity. However, considering that the communal narrative voice travels with Refentše and seems to already have provided him with a range of preconceptions about Hillbrow upon his arrival there, and particularly given how village life is presented in various stories in Brooding Clouds as constraining and fraught with lethal rivalries and tensions, it is questionable whether rural identity is located in “social 24

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la supermodernité, 1992; London & New York: Verso, 1995): 77–78. 25 Augé, Non-Places, 94. 26 Carrol Clarkson, “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 451–52.

ጓ Tracing the Rural in the Urban

63

continuities” and “allegiances” as suggested by, for example, Clarkson, while urban space is marked by chaos and dislocation.27 Both places are similarly marked by various types of ‘brooding’ – a recurring metaphor especially in the collection. Not only do the clouds brood, but almost all of the characters, and even the personified places themselves. Their brooding refers to a variety of mental states ranging from melancholic meditations to violent outbursts. Through the unfolding layers of the stories and the novel, which can also be described as thematic and stylistic versionings of each other, the settings are revealed as inextricably entwined, which indeed “subverts the traditional dichotomy of corrupting city and nurturing village.” 28 One exemplary thematic strand connecting the stories and the novel as well as their rural and urban settings is the topic of witchcraft. The depiction of witchcraft is reminiscent of Mpe’s analysis of the mediation of oral history in Sol Plaatje’s 1930 novel Mhudi.29 Like Mhudi in Mpe’s reading, Welcome to Our Hillbrow can also be seen as “preoccupied with holding a dialogue with itself” and reflecting “upon itself as an instrument” of “the manner in which historical knowledge is created and mediated.”30 In the context of postapartheid public discourse, the novel thus functions as a mediation of the processes of historical interpretation and knowledge-formation: The “meanings of historical and fictional texts,” writes Mpe, “lie not in what is expressed or omitted, but in the way in which the utterances and the silences are negotiated.”31 In this vein, Brooding Clouds and Welcome to Our Hillbrow arguably constitute both a mediation of and a meditation on space, place, and identity. In the title story, “Brooding Clouds,” for example, “stories of witchcraft and ordinary lives” are not confined to the village but work their way into the city and back.32 At first sight, Tshepo’s death by lightning from the “black clouds, brooding for a long time over the village” (“Brooding Clouds,” 5) appears to be a distinctly rural demise, 27

Clarkson, “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” 452. Peter Blair, “The Moral and the Macabre: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 14.1 (2002): 166; cited in Adrian Knapp, The Past Coming Home to Roost in the Present: Historicising History in Four Post-Apartheid South African Novels (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2006): 86. 29 Phaswane Mpe, “‘Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition’: Plaatje’s Mediation of Oral History in Mhudi,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 8.1 (1996): 75–89; Sol Plaatje, Mhudi (1930; London: Heinemann, 1978). 30 Mpe, “‘Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition’,” 75–76. 31 “‘ Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition’,” 76. 32 Phaswane Mpe, Brooding Clouds (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P, 2008): 3. Further page references are in the main text. 28

64

ANNIKA MCPHER S ON

ጓ

supposedly caused by Makgolo’s witchcraft. Hence, the Comrades decide to ‘necklace’ Makgolo in order to cleanse the village, albeit only after her status as a witch has been confirmed by a bone-thrower. Their actions are explained in the signature form of communal reasoning: Tshepo had made a name for the village by going to study in the South. He was then intending to teach at the local school. No! Children could not be deprived of a proper education simply because of the jealousy of this old witch! The youth of Tiragalong called a meeting. In that meeting they decided that the village should be cleansed. The youth were not going to sit back and simply watch while their efforts to bring progress to the village were threatened. (“Brooding Clouds,” 7)

The village depends on its urban connections and circular migrations, but actions in the village also affect the city dwellers. The tone of this story, like most others in the collection, is set by the voice of gossip. Rumours turn into selffulfilling truths, and the personified village is a conveyor of knowledge – hence, Refentše already ‘knows’ everything he supposedly needs to know about Hillbrow upon his arrival in the city. It is this “pandemonium” (“Occasion for Brooding,” 32) of gazes and voices, of knowledges and truths, of being told in recurring phrases of village wisdom that runs through and connects these stories. Similarly, in Mpe’s reading of Plaatje, those who are actually involved as the narrator and the audience respectively have their presence masked as absence. It is instead those who are absent who seem to be doing the narrating and the listening.33

Such a narrative consciousness informs both the stories and the second-person form of address of the novel. Yet, little attention has so far been paid to the use of irony by, and the facetious tone of, what can indeed be described as a “communal narrator.”34 One example of the interplay between this signature communal voice and an alternating narrative consciousness is the switch in focalization that coincides with a switch to the present tense just as Makgolo awaits her ‘necklacing’ in “Brooding Clouds:” Oh, their song is audible already! Fear seizes her. The freedom songs become louder. The Comrades are approaching fast. Makgolo’s fear grows with the loudness of the songs. ‘They say I am a witch…’ Her mind is engrossed with these words. And she imagines that the songs are about witchcraft.

33 34

Mpe, “‘Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition’,” 79. Knapp, The Past Coming Home to Roost in the Present, 86.

ጓ Tracing the Rural in the Urban

65

‘They say I am a witch…’ Makgolo does not understand the songs. She cannot understand them, for they are sung in isiZulu. If she knew isiZulu she would realise that the language of the songs is bad isiZulu. The Comrades are singing political songs, songs that freedom fighters used to sing in the apartheid era, willing new, hopefully democratic, governance into being. The Comrades sing bad isiZulu because they, too, are strangers to the language. But they do not think about the un-Zuluness of their freedom songs. What matters is that they should cleanse the village. They shall sweep into the roaring flames of their rage all the scorpions in the village. Witchcraft shall be no more! (“Brooding Clouds,” 8)

Rather than connoting the village as a place of organic social relations and history-based identity, such episodes show how deeply spectacle has become ingrained in the attitudes and actions of the Comrades. They do not understand but merely simulate the language they use, hence cannot construct a coherent and convincing narrative of themselves. This failure to communicate, while achieving its disastrous effect, locates uprootedness in the village just as much as in the city. Although the language invoked has become more of a simulacrum than a marker of identity, the Comrades’ actions are of dire consequence and detrimental to the suggested attempt at furthering social cohesion. Reports of another ‘necklacing’ similarly demonstrate the workings of ‘knowledge’ and purported ‘truths’ in the versioning of the events surrounding the death of Refentše’s mother in the story “Memories of Silence.”35 As Lerato finds out during a phone call, Sammy had encouraged the Comrades of Tiragalong to necklace Refentše’s mother [...]. The mother was accused of practising witchcraft, of having bewitched Refentše and a few other villagers. She had been known, ever since Refentše’s funeral, to be a witch. This fact was revealed on that hot Saturday morning, when she fell into her son’s grave as she was throwing a handful of soil into it. It was unheard of for anyone to fall into an open grave without good reason. Medicine-men had established long ago that it was only when the witch had killed the deceased that such bizarre conduct could result. It was said to be some kind of punishment from the deceased one’s Ancestors. (“Memories of Silence,” 69; my emphases)

Such logic of pre-mediated knowledge again not only affects life in the village but also determines the further actions of the city dwellers and impinges upon

35

Phaswane Mpe, “Memories of Silence,” in Brooding Clouds, 62–71.

66

ANNIKA MCPHER S ON

ጓ

their social relations in Hillbrow. Although Mpe’s discussion of the workings of ‘truth’ in oral history points to its flexible and fluid nature, he emphasizes three aspects: first, the importance of “what each narrator does to the generally known story” (in this case the preconceptions about Hillbrow); second, “what is remembered depends on how it is remembered [which] in turn influences the manner of its narration” (the logic of ‘truths’); and, third, “the narrative is a mediative strategy that attempts to mask the processes that go into the overall pattern of mediation” (as indicated by the narrative voice and perspectival structure of the novel and the stories).36 In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, self-reflexivity is part of such mediation. Finally, “the way oral history is linked to gossip” and how pieces of gossip are “doing the rounds” in an area, which Mpe traces in Plaatje’s work,37 are also strikingly similar to the connections between the narrative versionings of Brooding Clouds and Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Not only Hillbrow is scorned by the villagers, however, which supports reading it as an abstract South African ‘everyplace’ beyond its localized markers. For example, Lerato early on learns about the dangers of Alexandra when her mother Liz points out that “Alexandra [...] was full of vultures. Robbers. Murderers. Rapists ... Any instance of careless living could easily lead one into trouble” (“The Menacing Lights,” 73). The story of Lerato’s father Piet also indicates an awareness of dysfunction elsewhere: Although the villagers liked to believe that they were in many ways better than Johannesburgers, those who were acquainted with Tiragalong’s deeds while in Jo’burg had alternative stories to tell. (“The Menacing Lights,” 74)

In Johannesburg, it is Terror’s yearning for revenge based on old grudges that keeps him from developing a more substantial and meaningful social relationship with Refentše. Hence, they remain “merely fellow villagers who happened to live close to each other in Hillbrow and to help out each other now and then” (“Shades of Sanctuary,” 83). Sammy, moving back and forth between Tiragalong and Hillbrow, in turn is tormented “by the sound of Refentše’s mother’s screams popping out of the concrete walls of Hillbrow skyscrapers, transforming into echoes that reverberated persistently within his skull,” and even his attempt to consult a herbalist offers no consolation (“Shades of Sanctuary,” 89). This points to what Liz Gunner has called “the rural shadow in the city” of Welcome to Our Hillbrow.38 36 37 38

Mpe, “‘Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition’,” 80. “‘ Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition’,” 85. Gunner, cited in Knapp, The Past Coming Home to Roost in the Present, 88.

ጓ Tracing the Rural in the Urban

67

Yet, through gossip and the villagers’ preconceptions, Hillbrow similarly casts its urban shadow over the rural setting, while practices of witchcraft again connect both settings and question their division along lines of tradition and modernity. In Hillbrow, Lerato, just before swallowing a lethal dose of pills, imagines “the campus buzzing with the story” of her betrayal of Refentše (“Shades of Sanctuary,” 93), while the version of Refentše’s cousin Leruo indicates “that witchcraft was practised in the city as well, and that there was no civilization anywhere” (“Shades of Sanctuary,” 94). Beyond thematic links, these aspects again show the rural and the urban setting to be inextricably interwoven, an impression that is fostered by the communal voice. In addition to the rural–urban binary, Mpe, in another article on Plaatje and the politics of cultural representation, has also pointed out the problematic effect of an “unnecessary binary opposition between orality and writing” which frequently results in the “mystification of both orality and tradition, as well as of the African past.”39 Mpe thus develops a series of questions: Instead of seeing oral forms in written texts as an unproblematic mirroring of extant oral traditions, we need to ask how writers solve the manifest problems that come with this project [of demystification]. How, for example, does one deal with representing oral forms of one language in another? What are the aesthetic, ideological and political possibilities that are opened up by such representations of orality?40

Hence, the communal voice and second-person form of address should also not be equated simplistically with ‘oral traditions’ as indicative of village traditions. Rather, in order to avoid the perpetual “mystification” of tradition, more detailed research is necessary – for example, regarding the influence of Sepedi linguistic and cultural signification as implied in both Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Brooding Clouds. This is particularly significant, given that language transfer and the demands of English-language publishing are issues with which Mpe struggled during his first attempt to have the collection published.41 39

Phaswane Mpe, “Sol Plaatje, Orality and the Politics of Cultural Representation,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 11.2 (1999): 76, 77. 40 Mpe, “Sol Plaatje, Orality and the Politics of Cultural Representation,” 77. 41 See Attree, “Healing with Words,” 142. Clarkson has pointed out some of the Sepedi connotations and the effect on the conceptualization of storytelling: “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” 456. See also Phaswane Mpe & Monica Seeber, “The Politics of Book Publishing in South Africa: A Critical Overview,” in The Politics of Publishing in South Africa, ed. Nicholas Evans & Monica Seeber (Scottsville: U of Natal P, 2000): 15–42, and Mpe, “The Role of the Heinemann African Writers Series in the Development and Promotion of African Literature,” African Studies 58.1 (1999): 105–22.

ANNIKA MCPHER S ON

68

ጓ

It seems that, although these questions are as yet unanswered, the collection Brooding Clouds contains some starting points for, if not the key to, addressing the aspect of voice, narration, and orality as a connector between the rural and the urban settings. A rural counter-reading thus helps to further emphasize the indivisibility of places in the novel and the “false opposition” between “city and countryside,” as Hoad has phrased it in his reflections on African cosmopolitanism, pointing to their “intimate web of connections” instead.42

W OR K S C I T E D Attree, Lizzy. “Healing with Words: Phaswane Mpe Interviewed,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.3 (September 2005): 139–48. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la supermodernité, 1992; London & New York: Verso, 1995). Blair, Peter. “The Moral and the Macabre: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 14.1 (2002): 163–68. Bregin, Elena. “Editor’s Preface” in Brooding Clouds. Phaswane Mpe (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2008): xi–xvi. Catch a Fire, dir. Phillip Noyce. With Derek Luke, Tim Robbins, Bonnie Henna, and Mncedisi Shabangu (US A , 2006; 101 min.). Clarkson, Carrol. “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 451–59. Gaylard, Rob. “Stories and Storytelling in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” in Words Gone Two Soon, ed. Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane (Pretoria: Umgangatho, 2005): 180–86. Head, Bessie. When Rain Clouds Gather (1968; Oxford: Heinemann, 1995). Hoad, Neville. “An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” in Literature and Globalization: A Reader, ed. Liam Connell & Nicky Marsh (London: Routledge, 2011): 332–43. Hunt, Emma. “Post-Apartheid Johannesburg and Global Mobility in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” A RI E L : A Review of International English Literature 37.4 (2006): 103–21. Knapp, Adrian. The Past Coming Home to Roost in the Present: Historicising History in Four Post-Apartheid South African Novels (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2006). Mpe, Phaswane. Brooding Clouds (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu-Natal P , 2008). ——.“ ‘Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition’: Plaatje’s Mediation of Oral History in Mhudi,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 8.1 (1996): 75–89. 42

Hoad, “An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism,” 336.

ጓ Tracing the Rural in the Urban

69

——.“‘Our Missing Store of Memories’: City, Literature and Representation,” in Shifting Selves: Post-Apartheid Essays on Mass Media, Culture and Identity, ed. Herman Wasserman & Sean Jacobs (Cape Town: Kwela, 2003): 181–98. ——.“The Role of the Heinemann African Writers Series in the Development and Promotion of African Literature,” African Studies 58.1 (1999): 105–22. ——.“Sol Plaatje, Orality and the Politics of Cultural Representation,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 11.2 (1999): 75–91. ——.Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001; Athens: Ohio U P , 2011). ——, & Monica Seeber. “The Politics of Book Publishing in South Africa: A Critical Overview,” in The Politics of Publishing in South Africa, ed. Nicholas Evans & Monica Seeber (Scottsville: U of Natal P , 2000): 15–42. Myambo, Melissa Tandiwe. “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy: A Theory of ‘Belonging,’ Not Belongings, in the New South Africa,” Comparative Literature 63.1 (Winter 2011): 64–85. Plaatje, Sol. Mhudi (1930; London: Heinemann, 1978).

ጓ

The Representation of Place in Three Post-Apartheid South African Novels1 M I CH AE L W E SSE L S

T

of people to place and their experience of it, in a world characterized by constant movement, forced or desired, and the rapid transformation of physical environments is a potent means of exploring themes such as identity, affiliation, memory, loss, and alienation in postcolonial literature. Place is intricately mediated by class, gender, and ethnicity. It also operates in powerfully symbolic ways. Place is always more than raw physical space. It is produced by the transformation of the open, pre-cultural space of nature in a dynamic process that involves various kinds of cultural and psychological orientation or mapping as well as economic and social practices. One of literature’s chief characteristics is its ability to explore “the subjective experience of a given location, those qualities that we project onto undifferentiated space.”2 The experience of place is both mediated by and deeply constitutive of forms of individual and social consciousness. In contexts of inequality, appropriation, and different codes of ownership, the power to transform space into place is contested.3 The same space can be different places for different people and groups of people. The nature of the relationship of space to place and the dynamics of the multiple ways in which people belong to a place or find themselves alienated from it are extremely

1

HE REPR ESENTATION O F THE R ELA TIONSHIP

I wish to acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation (N R F ) of South Africa that enabled me to conduct the research that resulted in this essay and also the organisers of the 2013 A S N E L conference in Chemnitz who invited me to present the first version of it at that conference. 2 Jesse Ferguson, “Violent Dis-Placements: Natural and Human Violence in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.2 (2009): 36. 3 For a succinct discussion of this point, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, “Place,” in Ashcroft et al., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998): 177–83.

72

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

ጓ

complex. Bill Ashcroft begins his consideration of the concept of place in colonial and postcolonial writing with the observation that: The issues surrounding the concept of place – how it is conceived, how it differs from ‘space’ or ‘location’, how it enters into and produces cultural consciousness, how it becomes the horizon of identity – are some of the most difficult and debated in post-colonial experience.4

One of the difficulties is that the concepts ‘place’ and ‘space’ are defined differently by different writers, and some do not distinguish between them at all. Henri Lefebvre, for example, analyses the ways in which space itself is produced through social practice and language.5 For Michel de Certeau, space represents the triumph of ordinary life and everyday practice over the hegemonic systems of control that constitute place: “space is a practiced place.”6 For Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, the use of the two terms points to an experience of displacement that accompanies colonial conquest, dispossession, and settlement. “In many cases,” they note, “‘place’ does not become an issue in a society’s cultural discourse until colonial intervention radically disrupts the primary modes of its representation by separating ‘space’ from ‘place’.”7 Questions of place have a particular sharpness in South Africa with its history of dispossession, colonization, resettlement, migratory labour system, and different conceptions of private and communal land ownership and tenure. One of the ways in which South African writing has approached the issue has been to contrast two places that appear to be so different that they constitute a binary. South African fiction has a long history of exploring and establishing the differences between the village and the city, the farm and the city, or the township and the white town, for example. The delineation of place here requires the preservation of a space between places, a space that is at once physical, historical, political, and symbolic. Most commonly in writing by black South Africans, as Michael Titlestad has noted, the countryside has been depicted as an idyll of communality and traditional values in contrast to the city, a space of the loss of innocence and accumulation of experience.8 At the same time, though, as in the writing of the Drum generation, the modernity of the city and the new 4

Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001): 124. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 6 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Stephen Rendall (L invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980;; Berkeley: U of California P, 1984): 124. 7 Ashcroft et al., “Place,” 177. 8 Michael Titlestad, “Writing the City after Apartheid,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Atwell & Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2012): 676–96. 5

ጓ Place in Three Post-Apartheid Novels

73

modes of being it offers have been celebrated along with the rejection of “racial classifications of Africans as essentially tribal peoples from distant reserves.”9 In post-apartheid fiction, too, the representation of place gains much of its symbolic resonance and purchase through the positioning of places in relation to other places. The nature of these relationships is endlessly varied, as one would expect, given the fluidity and unevenness of economic, political, and social transformation in the country as well as the different repertoires and traditions of representation that are available to South African writers. In this essay, I will discuss the ways in which binaries of place are represented, explored, and undermined in three post-apartheid South African novels: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,10 Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood,11 and Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man.12 Read together, the novels suggest that a sense of place in contemporary South Africa is fragile, fluid, and precarious. At the same time, Young Blood and Hunger Eats a Man hold out the possibility that old places can become new ones when the physical and symbolic spaces between them are reconfigured. Despite the fact that the three books can all be described as postapartheid novels, they each display a radically different set of political, social, and psychological concerns, and this is apparent in the way they represent the differences and spaces between places while also questioning, in various ways, the premises on which binaries of place have been constructed historically in the country. As its title indicates, Mpe’s novel is situated chiefly in Hillbrow, a crime- and drug-ridden but vibrant inner-city quarter of Johannesburg. Nevertheless, the village of Tiragalong is ever-present, mentioned in at least half of the pages of the novel. So, too, is Heaven, the place of the ancestors, from where the events that take place in the novel are viewed and narrated. Mzobe’s novel moves between Durban’s satellite black townships and the once exclusively white suburbs. While Mzobe carefully describes and situates place, the main characters exist in a fluid, mobile space, constantly in motion in fast cars on the city’s highways. Sithole’s novel is set in a rural area in the foothills of the Drakensberg. The village of Ndlalindoda (or ‘Hunger Eats a Man’ in English) is an impoverished place, bereft of both natural bounty and the communal qualities associated with a rural village. It is in reality neither countryside nor town, a sprawl that

9

Michael Chapman, South African Literatures (Pietermaritzburg: U of KwaZulu–Natal P, 2003):

238. 10 11 12

Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 2001). Sifiso Mzobe, Young Blood (Cape Town: Kwela, 2010) Nkosinathi Sithole, Hunger Eats a Man (Scottsville: VukaNathi, 2011)

74

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

ጓ

possesses an urban density but without a civic core or identity. Ndlalindoda’s characteristics are brought into focus in the book by its contrast with both the protected wilderness area that adjoins it on one side and the middle-class suburb on its other border.

The Meeting of Village and City Hillbrow has long held a place in the South African social imaginary. Even in the high days of apartheid, the area had a cosmopolitan, transgressive character that challenged the hegemonic discourses of Afrikaner Christian nationalism. Before the demise of apartheid, it became a grey area, one of the first in the country, into which black people moved despite the Group Areas Act. By the time in which Welcome to Our Hillbrow begins, a few years before the first postapartheid elections, Hillbrow houses in its densely occupied high-rise buildings an uneasy mix of South African migrants and people from the rest of Africa, makwerekwere (an onomatopoeia for the gibberish foreigners are supposed to speak) to the chauvinistic South Africans of Mpe’s novel, who blame Hillbrow’s crime and AIDS on foreigners. The novel’s chief protagonist Refentše inhabits the places in the book, chiefly Hillbrow and Tiragalong, precariously. He is alienated emotionally from his home village. This is initially prompted by his mother’s rejection of him if he persists in his relationship with his girlfriend, Lerato. Refentše’s sense of alienation follows him to Hillbrow: “You discovered, on arriving in Hillbrow, that to be drawn away from Tiragalong also went hand in hand with a loss of interest in Hillbrow.”13 His dislocation deepens as his relationships and friendships are threatened by depression, infidelities, and misunderstandings, and he becomes increasingly aware of the xenophobia and prejudice that characterize both Tiragalong and Hillbrow. Refentše resists the logic of founding communal identities on false distinctions between urban and rural places and between foreigners and South Africans. In so doing, he separates himself from an identity that is based on prejudice and the demonization of others but struggles to find an adequate alternative “conception of self.” 14 The use of the possessive pronoun in the book’s title suggests the collective ownership of Hillbrow, something that was impossible in the apartheid era when the only black people who were allowed to stay in Hillbrow were registered 13

Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 48. Further page references are in the main text. Carrol Clarkson, “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow: Connecting Cultures,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 451. 14

ጓ Place in Three Post-Apartheid Novels

75

servants. But the reader soon learns that the phrase ‘Welcome to our Hillbrow’ carries an ironic inflection. It is first encountered when a girl, “seven years old or so,” is hit by a car that is spinning in the road in celebration of the South African football team’s victory (2). This is accompanied by one of the novel’s recurring auditory images, the scream; sirens and gunshots are others. The screams soon pass, for the chilling reason that the girl’s “screams died with her” (2). This is the first of several abrupt deaths that occur in the novel. Here the car speeds off, the police arrive too late to catch the driver, and the patriotic song of sporting victory resumes; a song of national unity becomes the anthem of an uncaring mob, inured to sudden death and violence. At this point, a man turns to his female companion and comments with heavy irony: “Welcome to our Hillbrow” (2). This becomes the novel’s refrain. The signification of the phrase, though, is unstable; it is used in a variety of ways, and the word “Hillbrow” itself, as the novel progresses, is replaced by other place names in the phrase: these include Tiragalong, Alexandra, Oxford, England, and Heaven. The next time we hear the refrain, “welcome to our Hillbrow,” it is articulated by the collective voice of Tiragalong (5). The horrors of Hillbrow reinforce the people of Tiragalong’s sense of difference from it, ironically articulated through the use of the possessive pronoun. “Welcome to our Hillbrow,” they chorus when they hear Hillbrow horror stories on the radio news broadcast of “car hijacking and robber’s shootouts” (4), murdered men, raped women, Nigerian drug deals, stoned street kids, deaths during New Year celebrations, and, even, men raped by prostitutes (5). The phrase is encountered again a few pages later when Refentše, on his first night in Hillbrow, wakes to gunshots and screams: “Welcome to our Hillbrow” (9). Here it signifies a place in which one can never feel safe or at home. The cover of the first edition of the book (Mpe 2001) depicts the Johannesburg cityscape illuminated against the night, with the Hillbrow tower dominating the city. The pages of the novel, however, do not give the reader the same graphic purchase on the place that the cover does. Mpe provides little visual description of the places in the novel but invokes them largely through sounds, such as the recurring scream alluded to earlier, and the constant reiteration of place names – Hillbrow itself, its streets, the village of Tiragalong, Oxford in England. The first chapter, entitled “Hillbrow: The Map” (1), is characterized by the careful cataloguing of street and places as the reader accompanies Refentše and his cousin through the streets of Hillbrow and the neighbouring inner-city quarter of Braamfontein to the university campus: Your own and cousin’s soles hit the pavements of the Hillbrow streets. You cross Twist, walk past the Bible Centred Church. Caroline makes a

76

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

ጓ

curve just after the church and becomes the lane of Edith Cavell Street, which takes you downtown; or, more precisely, to Wolmarans on the edge of the city. Enclosed within the lane that runs from Wolmarans to Clarendon Place (which becomes Louis Botha a few streets on) is a small, almost negligible triangle of a park. (10–11)

Mapping and naming in the colonial era involved claiming, controlling, and transforming space.15 The control that is sought here, though, is of a different order. The enunciation of street names and places works initially as a form of recognition as Refentše matches the names and places with those he has heard spoken of in Tiragalong. This orientates the new arrival in the city. The continued repetition of street and place names as the novel proceeds, though, begins to sound like a desperate attempt to gain a purchase on a place that is slipping away, like the suicidal protagonist’s life itself. The places the protagonist passes and inhabits become as much analogues of his state of mind as physical phenomena. The reality of the place and Refentše’s experiences in it exceed the attempt to contain it through mapping and cataloguing. Similarly, the use of the first-person-plural possessive in relation to Hillbrow acts at first as a token of familiarity, but it soon comes to express an alienation from the place as the pronoun becomes increasingly disanchored. As Minesh Dass notes, “one cannot be sure who the ‘Our’ refers to – and thus who is being addressed and asked to respond.”16 The sense of disorientation that this produces is compounded by the novel’s use of the second person, which has the effect, Carrol Clarkson observes, “of simultaneously distancing, but engaging the reader in the implied community signalled by the 'our' of the novel's title.”17 No one, in the end, possesses Hillbrow, neither the migrants from other African countries nor the xenophobic South African migrants who cannot shake off the way that places like Tiragalong shape their experience of Hillbrow. While the phrase “our Hillbrow” is a means of laying claim to a certain kind of knowledge of the place, it also signifies an abrogation of responsibility for Hillbrow’s iniquities. And when the phrase is used to represent a generalized reaction to the place, when articulated by the people of Tiragalong, for example, it has the effect of proclaiming a collective disavowal of ownership.

15

See Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 145–51. Minesh Dass, “Response and Responsibility in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Alternation 11.1 (2004): 167. 17 Carrol Clarkson, “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow: Connecting Cultures,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 452. 16

ጓ Place in Three Post-Apartheid Novels

77

The village is part of Refentše. It accompanies him to Hillbrow, but it does not offer him the sort of traditions, memories or histories from which he could draw sustenance when he is away from it. In an unremittingly circular journey, Refentše leaves Tiragalong for Hillbrow only to find himself facing the same diseases, prejudices, beliefs in witchcraft, lack of real agency, and subjection to violence that characterize the village. Neither urban cosmopolitanism nor rural vitality survives as a possibility. Like Hillbrow, Tiragalong is not given physical features, apart from a single reference to its parched and dusty fields (116). It is a place the protagonist and his former lover, Refilwe, leave physically, and yet it accompanies them wherever they go. Tiragalong, as critics such as Ken Barris have noted, is a place of jealousy, violence, and murderous accusations in which misfortune is regularly attributed to malevolent intentions on the part of a fellow villager. 18 The village is also a breeding ground for prejudices against people, especially women, who grow up in the city. Meg Samuelson makes the important point that “such gendered constructions are intimately linked to the binaries of city versus countryside, ‘modernity’ versus ‘tradition’.”19 The people of Tiragalong consider Johannesburg to be Tiragalong’s other, a place of HI V , betrayal, and infidelity, exemplified by the dangers of consorting with Johannesburg women. Ultimately, though, Johannesburg’s negative qualities are seen to be integral to Tiragalong itself; it shares Hillbrow’s pathologies. After all, the people who live in Hillbrow come from places like Tiragalong. Place in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, maintains Clarkson, is related less to the physical world than to networks of relationships and affiliations, which are inescapable but tenuous and potentially destructive. 20 Individual identity is linked to a sense of belonging to a spatially located community whose sense of collective self relies on the difference of outsiders and the policing of insiders, through witchcraft accusations and moral condemnation. When Refentše rejects these values, he loses not only his prejudices but his sense of self and belonging comes under unbearable pressure.

18

Ken Barris, “Dreaming of a Humane Society: Orature and Death in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 26.2 (2009): 44. 19 Meg Samuelson, “The City Beyond the Border: The Urban Worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera,” African Identities 5.2 (2007): 254. 20 Carrol Clarkson, “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,“ 453.

78

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

ጓ

Moving Between Township and Suburb Young Blood is the only one of the three novels whose title refers not to a particular place but, rather, to a style and phase of masculinity. Nevertheless, it includes more physical description of place than do the other two novels. The action moves rapidly between the township of Umlazi, home of the novel’s seventeen-year-old chief protagonist and first-person narrator, Sipho, and the formerly white suburbs of Durban, places that have traditionally been separated, although they have always been entangled in complex ways. 21 The fixed racial barriers that once prevented township people from moving to the suburbs have gone. Economic obstacles persist but these are not insurmountable. A successful criminal career makes the passage possible, as does a higher education. The difference between suburb and township represents new opportunities, not just of upward mobility but of symbiosis and trade; an ability to move easily between the two worlds is very useful to a successful car thief. While the novel establishes links between disparate places, it also exploits the hierarchy of place in terms of social rank that has its origins in the racialized history of class in South Africa: “For every suburb there is a township, so for each section in the township a shantytown – add a ghetto to a ghetto.”22 There are shantytowns, such as Power, from which the main protagonist’s upwardly mobile friend and mentor in crime, Musa, hails. Then there are the established townships, which today have their own upmarket areas. Sipho’s girlfriend, Nana, lives “in a mansion at leafy High Ridge in N section, which was practically a suburb within the township” (44). At the top of the scale are the formerly white-only suburbs, now also home to the black elite, including the criminal syndicate leaders who inhabit mansions in the wealthiest and most established suburbs. The suburbs are not only places from which to steal cars, but also places in which to relax in the houses of the criminal bosses and indulge in the consumption of drugs, alcohol, and sex. The poverty or wealth of a place is emphasized: the dusty shantytown, the down-at-heel township, the luxurious suburban houses with their expansive gardens. But the novel does not establish a simple binary between rich and poor areas. The narrator’s sense of belonging is strongly linked to Umlazi and to his family. His house in the township is affectionately described even though the

21

See Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009). Nuttall writes that “Entanglement is a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with; it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored or uninvited” (1). 22 Sifiso Mzobe, Young Blood, 14. Further page references are in the main text.

ጓ Place in Three Post-Apartheid Novels

79

outside wall is unfinished (9–10). This house is a place of sanctuary to which the protagonist retreats to rest and recover from his adventures in the wider world (82; 213). The different townships are also distinguished from each other, chiefly by their criminal specialities: stolen goods (96), car theft (205), house-breaking, drugs (55). Together they form a web of symbiotic relationships that Sipho has to negotiate. This is not without its dangers. Policing the spatial divisions are gangs, denoted by numbers, and a police force that is itself enmeshed in the criminal economy. Female sexuality is closely linked to location. The young women with whom the criminals consort in their leisure time are described by their relationship to place: country girls, Varsity chicks (149), mall chicks, township girls (59; 103), suburban chicks (53), “out of town” girls (89; 161), Durban girls (199). Like brands of whisky (usually Johnnie Walker Black Label) or cars, these categories are important markers of consumption. At one point, the young men mull over whether to spend their time with the drinking girls of Musgrave centre mall or with the cannabis-smoking Durban University of Technology girls (70); the two places are literally a block apart. As Megan Jones notes, luxury cars are places in themselves.23 For Sipho, the most desirable place to be is in an expensive stolen car, moving with freedom and speed, in the open stretches between township, city, and suburb, along the highways on the way to a party in a suburban mansion, high on cocaine and cannabis, with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label at hand, accompanied by friends and desirable young women. Place is linked to cars in multiple ways. The wealthy suburbs are places to “get” cars. Then there are places, the townships, to which to take cars: to hide, re-spray, and disguise them (85). The townships are also the places where one can most safely and conspicuously display a fancy car or one’s skill at driving one. In many ways, the freeway is the most significant space in the novel. The protagonist’s sense of identity results as much from his mobility as from his Umlazi roots.24 Sipho and his friends cross great swathes of space very quickly on the freeways in short periods of time, as it is possible to do on the system of ring roads that encircles Durban. One of the chapters is aptly entitled “We Moved With Ease Down the South Coast” (77). Sipho moves along the freeways 23

Megan Jones, “Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14.2 (2013): 219. 24 Jones, “Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township,” 219.

80

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

ጓ

continuously. Sometimes these journeys have a goal, such as the theft or disposal of a car or the transportation of drugs, but often they are an end in themselves. Towards the end of the novel, he plans to drive the 200 km to Port Edward in his new car simply to buy a packet of cigarettes (193). He is arrested, though, on the evening before the planned excursion. The shiny red car he is driving, which he bought for R2,000 (about 200 euros in 2010), turns out to have been stolen in a violent hijacking; Sipho is held for vehicle theft, attempted murder, and the possession of drugs (205). The police find 2,500 Ecstasy pills in the spare tyre and a thousand mandrax tablets under the seat. Fortunately, the police (a multiracial group of black, Indian, and white cops) let Sipho go once he gives them the cash from his crime proceeds (208–10); R20,000 is hidden under his mattress. A few weeks later, he sees one of the policemen driving the red car (227). Sipho is arrested quite soon after the assassination of his accomplice, Vusi, by the Cold Hearts gang and hours before Musa is fatally wounded in a revenge shootout with the same gang (216). At this point, his mother gives him a pamphlet detailing courses at a technical college (214). Sipho has little choice but to follow his mother’s suggestion: his comrades are dead and he is under police surveillance. In spatial terms, he will use education, a course in mechanics, to move from a life of crime that will inevitably end in prison or death to the promised land of life in a better suburb with his loyal girlfriend, Nana. This is his dream, at any rate. Even if Sipho is successful, it will be a slow and gradual process, not the instant and thrilling bridging of worlds that crime offers. While the novel serves in many ways “as a cautionary tale”25 about the dangers of a life of crime, it is notable that the criminals are never judged as morally reprehensible. Nor does the protagonist reject the material values that drove him to crime when he opts to study instead. He is still heading for the life of beautiful cars and consumer objects. At one point, Sipho describes the aesthetic of American hip-hop as “the excess, the gleaming gloating and the have-nots when they finally have” (175). This could also be a description of the mood and style of the novel. Page after page, for example, is devoted to describing the spinning of a luxury car in the strange night light of the township, amidst the heady aroma of girls, marijuana, and whisky (17–25). The burning of the car in homage to Sipho’s brother in crime, Vusi, at his funeral is also rendered in lurid detail (158–59). Here the adoration

25

Jones, “Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township,” 211–12.

ጓ Place in Three Post-Apartheid Novels

81

of luxury cars is elevated to a religious ritual.26 Despite his grief, the protagonist finds the spectacle riveting. The use of the description of place to celebrate wealth is augmented by the loving depictions of luxury houses (73), cars, expensive clothes (89), upwardly mobile young women, and the lavish fittings in suburban houses. The narrator’s celebration of consumption is also present in the attention the novel devotes to the detail of every fast-food meal he eats and cigarette or joint he smokes at roadside garages, not to mention the weed, whisky, and cocaine he consumes in suburban mansions. Young Blood exemplifies a point made by Achille Mbembe: the single most important transformation the end of white minority rule has brought is the turning of South Africa from a society of control to a society of consumption. This shift is happening in the absence of structures of mass production and in the context of an armed citizenry – the majority of whom is propertyless.27

Crime and education are explored as instruments of upward mobility, figured in the movement between places and in the ability to exploit the spaces in between them. Place is representative of class. The class system itself is not questioned, though; on the contrary, the novel’s moral message, aesthetic, and structure of feeling depend on its maintenance. Hunger Eats a Man also identifies place with class. In contrast to Young Blood, however, it contains an explicit critique of social and economic inequality and posits a form of class struggle as the solution to poverty.

The Village Occupies the Town Hunger Eats a Man is a title that refers to a specific place, just as Welcome to Our Hillbrow does. But the book’s treatment of place is altogether different. Ndlalidlindoda and Tiragalong are similar places, but the former is presented from the perspective of a poor man who cannot leave his village rather than from that of a depressed university lecturer who has left the village behind, at least physically. While Young Blood celebrates free circulation between places that have 26

Megan Jones discusses this incident in the context of an aesthetic of “conspicuous destruction” that pervades the novel and links it to the current township practice of i’khothane in which “designer clothes and shoes worth thousands of rand are set alight in a display that asserts wealth through indifference to the commodity.” “Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township,” 209–10. 27 Achille Mbembe, “Consumed by Our Lust for Lost Segregation,” Mail and Guardian (28 March 2013), http://mg.co.za/article/2013-03-28-00-consumed-by-our-lust-for-lost-segregation (accessed 5 April 2014).

82

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

ጓ

historically been kept apart, there is little movement between locations in Hunger Eats a Man. Place is concrete and static. The novel opens with the words: “the only thing that moves here in Ndlalindoda is time. Everything else is stagnant.”28 Welcome to Our Hillbrow weakens the binary between Tiragalong and Hillbrow, and also between Hillbrow and Oxford, England, by suggesting that these places are not as different as they might appear, since the same sorts of human relationships, prejudices, and inequalities characterize them all. Young Blood separates township from suburb in order to track the movement from one to the other, both literally and figuratively. Hunger Eats a Man sets up a distinction between places that, until the final page or two of the book, is absolute. The novel calls into question traditional notions of urban and rural areas. Rural slums like Ndlalindoda have the population density of urban areas but lack many of the usual features of a city and also the possibility of cosmopolitanism. The open countryside itself lies on the other side of the Giant Castle wildlife park fence and is out of bounds to the people of Ndlalindoda. The beauty of the mountains in the distance is a reminder of the village’s deprivation rather than a source of solace and inspiration. This is shown on the book’s cover: emaciated stick figures dance in front of a relentless sun while in the foreground the lush grass of the wildlife reserve sways in the breeze. The montane grasslands have become the exclusive preserve of wildlife and the tourists who pass through Ndlalindoda without stopping. Between the wilderness and the settlement, there is no intermediate zone of cultivated fields. The rural in the sense of the bucolic and agricultural no longer exists. Ndlalindoda is a drought-stricken dustbowl even though the area in which it is located has a high rainfall. The only agriculture described in the book is on the white-owned farms, where desperate people get temporary, poorly paid work in conditions that persist from the apartheid days (58–63). The choice between education and crime that is presented in Young Blood is not available to the poverty-stricken characters of Hunger Eats a Man. There is no comparable tradition of crime in the place on which an aspiring highlevel criminal could draw; the networks, gangs, and illegal businesses that characterize Durban’s townships do not exist. The education system, in the hands of incompetents like the local headmaster, Bongani Khumalo, does little more than reinforce and legitimate existing class divisions. There are no young men like Sipho in the village of Ndlalindoda (Hunger Eats a Man). The village, though, has produced Sandile, the schoolboy son of the main protagonist, Priest, and an aspiring poet and short-story writer who alone is able 28

Nkosinathi Sithole, Hunger Eats a Man, 7. Further page references are in the main text.

ጓ Place in Three Post-Apartheid Novels

83

to imagine social, economic, and political transformation. His story about the inhabitants of Ndlalindoda invading the neighbouring suburb of Canaan forms the concluding episode of the book and could be read as an allegory of revolution in South Africa, in which the masses, acting in concert, claim the country’s resources. That this action takes place on the local level, though, also calls to mind the service-delivery protests that have become ubiquitous in South Africa. Economic and political change, the story suggests, might result from the cumulative effect of local insurrections rather than from a national movement. Place in Hunger Eats a Man is a site of political and historical contestation rather than the analogue of an inner state or a terrain of desire and upward mobility. Sithole’s book contains the sort of direct political and historical analysis that is reminiscent of the struggle literature from an earlier era. It is perhaps apposite to point out here that Sithole wrote his novel in isiZulu, translated it into English himself, and started a publishing company called VukaNathi (let us awake)29 to publish isiZulu literature.30 This is clearly an author for whom writing is inseparable from politics. Much of the stagnation in Ndlalindoda is due to the termination of economic opportunity in the urban areas. In a cruel historical irony, the neo-liberal period of globalization coincides with the end of apartheid. While the migrant-labour system of the colonial and apartheid eras undermined the older rural economy in fatal ways, it also sustained the illusion of the autonomous traditional village, both culturally and economically. Now that the jobs have gone, the retrenched have returned to the rural areas, relying on kinship ties and rural codes of hospitality for food and shelter. The novel shows these ties unravelling in the face of poverty and starvation. The desperation of life in Ndlalindoda is thrown into stark relief by the novel’s comic mode. The solutions the rural poor find to alleviate their plight – recourse to charlatan izinyanga (medicine men), for example – are risible, but this laughter leaves a bitter taste. The novel’s chief focalizer is Priest, a religious man who finds both his faith and his status in the community slipping away as unemployment and hunger undermine the social, spiritual, and economic fabric of the area. He himself has been retrenched, with the closure of the bacon factory in a nearby town, and is unable to provide for his family (14). In a version of what Homi Bhabha terms the “unhomely,” Priest no longer feels at home in 29

My translation. A revised version of the novel has recently been published: Nkosinathi Sithole, Hunger Eats a Man (Johannesburg Penguin, 2015). 30

84

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

ጓ

his own house, as he is faced with his wife’s displeasure at his failure to earn a living and the reality of empty kitchen shelves; in the context of unemployment and poverty, “the home does not remain the domain of domestic life”31 but becomes a site of conflict and unease. Ndlalindoda is an indeterminate place – a sprawling slum that runs into similar areas. It is also the poorer component of the municipality of Gxumani, a product of “the diligent work of the Rainbow Nation” which has combined the former “Whites-Only” suburb of Canaan, now home to the black elite, and Ndlalindoda (81). Ndlalindoda is essential to Canaan’s existence; not only does it supply cheap domestic labour but the sense of self-importance of people like Khumalo depends on the misery of other people’s lives. Khumalo’s doublestorey house, known to all as “the stairs” (29–30), requires lesser buildings over which to tower. Class divisions are guarded by the new elite as zealously as racial ones were by the old. The poverty in Ndlalindoda undermines the old codes of rural civility and cooperation. Families hide food from other families so that they do not have to share it (110–13). The protocols of hospitality are eroded as well; visitors are not offered food and drink (132–33). People turn to diviners and izinyanga in desperation, paying them their hard-earned savings for medicines of dubious value and, in one case, provenance, when an inyanga is arrested for using human body parts (120). Religious belief, though, is also destabilized by poverty. Priest himself, a man who serves as a pastor and who “never leaves his home without his priestly regalia” (10), eventually destroys the Christian symbols in his house, burning the Bible and smashing the pictures of Jesus on the wall; he needs a God who listens to the starving (152). His friend Sithole, respected throughout the area for the animal sacrifices he makes to the ancestors, by the end of the novel has lost faith in the ability of his ancestors to help him. The novel identifies multiple sources of poverty: the perpetuation of apartheid’s economic and racial divides; a government that takes votes but doesn’t keep its promises; retrenchment – the surrounding factories have closed down or have laid off most of their workers; bad education – the principal of the local school, Bongani Khumalo, exemplifies the unmotivated educator who has bought his certificate and is interested only in the status his position affords him – and corruption, again epitomized by Khumalo, this time in his role as a local councillor who takes bribes.

31

Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 141.

ጓ Place in Three Post-Apartheid Novels

85

But the novel does not leave the reader with a picture of starving people stuck in a place that eats their flesh and vitality and for whom no hope exists. It mitigates this gloomy scenario with two bits of revolutionary utopianism; one is enacted in the novel, while the other, mentioned earlier, is imaginatively created by Priest’s son, Sandile, in a short story he writes. The first scenario begins with a women’s meeting organized by Bongani’s wife, Nomsa, who, motivated by the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a relative when she was a child (37–39), forms the Grinding Stone, the Gxumani Women’s Organisation (83). Many of the women of Ndlalindoda attend the group’s meetings, the only time they go to Canaan, where the meetings are held. Nomsa wishes to channel their anger against abusive men into a conscious-raising feminism, but the women of Ndlalindoda, led by Priest’s wife MaDuma, ignore her calls for restraint and castrate two men themselves, one for having sex with a dog in front of his disabled mother and the other for sleeping with his eleven-year-old daughter (93; 114). The second example of transformative action from below occurs in Sandile’s story, in which the starving people from the surrounding area invade Ndlalindoda and eat all their food (156–73). After a few days, they invite the people of Ndlalindoda to help them invade Canaan. The army is waiting to protect property but is morally immobilized when a crowd of disabled people are sent out to face them. The division between rich and poor, figured by their respective location in place, is collapsed by the people’s action. That this is redemptive is seen by the fact that the novel closes with a description of rainfall, the beauty of nature, and the restoration of the house as home and refuge: Outside he [Priest] watches the land and is struck by its beauty. He was not aware that spring had come. ... Nothing makes him happier than to see the raindrops falling; especially when he is watching it all from the safety of his house. (174)

Conclusion In each of the three novels, binaries of place are established and then tested, but for quite different purposes and in different ways. In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the difference between places, chiefly the village and the city, is seen to rest on false premises about the innate characteristics of both places. In Young Blood, the distinction between places signifies class difference and opportunity. The divide between township and suburb can be bridged by crime and daring or, more slowly and less certainly, by educational achievement. In Hunger Eats a

MICHAEL W ES SEL S

86

ጓ

Man, the class divide represented by village and suburb can only be bridged by class struggle and revolutionary action.

W OR K S C I T E D Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001). ——, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998). Barris, Ken. “Dreaming of a Humane Society: Orature and Death in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” English Academy Review 26.2 (2009): 38–47. Bhabha, Homi. “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 141–53. Chapman, Michael. South African Literatures. (Pietermaritzburg: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2003) Clarkson, Carrol. “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow: Connecting Cultures,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 451–59. Dass, Minesh. “Response and Responsibility in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” Alternation 11.1 (2004): 165–85. Ferguson, Jesse. “Violent Dis-Placements: Natural and Human Violence in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.2 (2009): 35–49. Jones, Megan. “Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14.2 (2013): 209–24. Mbembe, Achille. “Consumed by Our Lust for Lost Segregation,” Mail and Guardian (28 March 2013), http://mg.co.za/article/2013-03-28-00-consumed-by-our-lust-for-lostsegregation (accessed 5 May 2014). Mpe, Phaswane. Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P , 2001). Mzobe, Sifiso. Young Blood (Cape Town: Kwela, 2010). Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009). Samuelson, Meg. “The City Beyond the Border: The Urban Worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera,” African Identities 5.2 (2007): 247–60. Sithole, Nkosinathi. Hunger Eats a Man (Scottsville: VukaNathi, 2011). ——.Hunger Eats a Man (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2015). Titlestad, Michael. “Writing the City after Apartheid,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Atwell & Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2012): 676–96.

ጓ

‘Welcome to Johannesburg’ Melancholia and Fragmentation in Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 D A N Y EL A D E MIR

Introduction1

I

SO UTH AFR ICA N

WRI TI NG ,

Johannesburg was, and continues to be, in the centre of countless novels. Writers have been fascinated with the city’s role as the economic hub of South Africa. Already the Gold Rush in the nineteenth century enhanced the myth of the metropolis as a place of opportunities, on the one hand, and the fear of being seduced and lost to its dangerous and “sinful” ways, on the other. One genre that deals precisely with this ambivalence is the by now prototypical ‘Jim Comes to Jo’burg’ novel.2 The most famous examples are Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1946). A recurring pattern of the genre is that the novel’s hero, a young man from rural South Africa, leaves his home in order to make his dreams and ambitions of success and riches come true in Johannesburg. As the novel unfolds, however, the hero falls into the city’s many traps and becomes criminal or corrupt. As Hein Willemse points out, N

Most of these novels bear an anti-modernization message of urban decay, personal neglect and debauchery, often ending with the redeeming insight that the city is a bad place.3

In post-apartheid writing, authors such as Phaswane Mpe, in his novella Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001), and Kgebetli Moele, in Room 207 (2006), have drawn on and written back to this genre in varied ways. While the contrast 1

I am very grateful to Annika McPherson for her insightful comments during the writing of this article. 2 See Christopher Heywood, A History of South African Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004): 25, 104. 3 Hein Willemse, “Afrikaans Literature, 1948–1976,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell & Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2012): 437.

88

DANY ELA DEMIR

ጓ

between rural and urban life is still central to the plot, Johannesburg, and especially Hillbrow, is not described as a capital of sins anymore but is claimed, rather, as “just a residential area, where people are living and trying to make a living.”4 Moele’s Room 207 focuses on six young black men who share a flat in the notorious city centre. Most of them come from rural areas to Johannesburg in order to pursue their ambitions of an artistic career. In the post-apartheid state the young men are, theoretically at least, free to move from their flat to any part of the city whenever they wish to do so, since pass laws and segregation are no longer in place. The breakdown of apartheid’s segregationist boundaries does not mean, however, that the so-called ‘freeborn generation’ (the generation which came of age around the time Nelson Mandela was released from prison) can leave the country’s past behind. On the contrary: the novel depicts this generation of young people which does not have to fight against colonial oppression as deeply scarred and haunted. This image opposes any Rainbow Nation rhetoric of mourning and a subsequent new beginning with a brighter future for all South Africans. In what follows, I will argue that Room 207 is, despite its repeated claims that post-apartheid Johannesburg is a city of freedom, a deeply melancholic narrative, where memories of South Africa’s past are being repressed and resurface as dark echoes or silences in the text. By drawing critically on Sigmund Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), I will show that Room 207 refuses closure and rejects official narratives of laying apartheid’s ghosts to rest. This is visible on two levels: first, in terms of content and story development; secondly, on a narratological level, owing to the text’s fragmentation, nonlinearity, and unreliable narration.

Melancholia and the Crisis of Masculinity Written as a first-person account, Room 207 is centred on the life in Hillbrow of Noko – the narrator – and his five flatmates (D’Nice, Molamo, Matome, Modishi, and the Zulu-boy). In extremely blunt and vulgar language (women are casually called “whores,” for instance: 47, 56, 59, 121) and by the frequent use of Sotho and Zulu words and idioms (which is why a glossary is provided at the end of the book, 237–38), Noko recounts the six men’s struggle to survive in

4

Kgebetli Moele, Room 207 (Johannesburg: Kwela, 2006): 65. Further page references are in the main text.

ጓ ‘Welcome to Johannesburg’

89

Johannesburg, where the abuse of alcohol, drugs, and women are shown to be part and parcel of their daily existence. At first glance, Noko and several of his roommates resemble the young men of the ‘Jim Comes to Jo’burg’ genre. They have left their rural homes in order to seek their fortune in Johannesburg. All of them initially went to the city in order to pursue a university degree. Yet, all flatmates fail at this attempt except D’Nice. Still, they share two dreams. First, they want to start out on artistic careers. Noko, for instance, wants to be a film-director, Matome founds Brains Records, a music production company, and the Zulu-boy, D’Nice, and Modishi are into music. Secondly, they dream of finally moving out of Hillbrow, whereby this event should ideally be preceded by the “out-of-Hillbrow party” (14), an optimistic future story invented by Matome, which strengthens and holds the community of the six flatmates together. In contrast to Paton’s and Abrahams’ novels, where black men were wanted in the city only as labourers but not as citizens with equal rights, Moele’s characters live in a post-apartheid era. Thus, the narrator observes, The British had their time [in Johannesburg] and it passed. The Afrikaaners had their time; they enjoyed it, and then it too passed by. Now Johannesburg is under the control of the black man, his time is here, and, by the looks of things, his time will never pass. (69)

Here, Noko refers to the historical periods of colonialism (when the British dominated South Africa and Johannesburg, its economic centre), apartheid (when the Afrikaaners were “owning” the city), and the present post-apartheid state where Johannesburg belongs to “the black man,” indicating that the power-structures between black and white people have changed since the end of apartheid. And yet, making a living in post-apartheid Johannesburg proves to be more difficult than the narrator would have it in his observations of the city’s changes. Although it seems that the characters can move freely now (since apartheid’s segregationists laws are no longer in place) and they also seem to be more mobile in social terms – by the end of the novel, four of the six men have moved from the dilapidated flat to the richer suburbs – the city and its inhabitants are melancholically haunted by its apartheid past, and at the same time overwhelmed by present post-apartheid problems, such as the AIDS epidemic (to which the Zulu-boy falls victim), mass poverty, and xenophobia, which is also a central topic of the book (e.g., 65. 102). Besides, it seems that the characters, contrary to the rhetoric of a new beginning in and for South Africa, find themselves unable to face their country’s past, let alone mourn it.

90

DANY ELA DEMIR

ጓ

According to Freud, the process of mourning is natural and even necessary in order to go on with life after having suffered a loss. Melancholia, in turn, is defined as pathological, as the person suffering from it does not detach his or her libido from the lost object of love (which does not necessarily have to be another human being, but can also be something more abstract, such as a lost country or home).5 The melancholic’s libido regresses narcissistically to his or her own ego, thereby producing a conflict of ambivalence. The melancholic person denigrates her- or himself, while forming at times a subservient and at other times slightly hateful attitude towards the lost object of love. The melancholic person is, to put it in Anne Cheng’s words, “psychically stuck,” hence unable to overcome a loss which was probably traumatic at a time in the past.6 While Freud focuses on melancholia with regard to individuals, more recent theories have considered the impact of melancholia on societies (see Shinhee Han and David Eng [2000] and Anne Cheng [2001]). They focus on topics such as melancholia with regard to racial passing, stereotyping, and racial discrimination in the U SA . Also in contrast to Freud, they do not see melancholia as pathological but, rather, as an empowering way of being constantly, and painfully, though at the same time productively, engaged with remembering and working through loss. In South Africa, the narrative of collective mourning has certainly been established through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC can be regarded as an institution which has been set up to support a country-wide mourning process, where the wounds and traumatic experiences of the past should have healed in order to be able to build a democratic future, ideally embodying the metaphor of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. This image was evoked by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe the New South Africa, where people who have experienced the country’s past under extremely different circumstances should ideally live peacefully side by side: My appeal is ultimately directed to us all, black and white together, to close the chapter on our past and to strive together for this beautiful and blessed land as the rainbow people of God.7

5

See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, tr. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001): 243–58. 6 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford U P , 2001): 8. 7 Desmond Tutu, “Chairperson’s Foreword,” in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, ed. Desmond Tutu et al., vol. 1 (1998): 23, http://www.justice.gov.za/Trc/report /finalreport/Volume%201.pdf (accessed 4 November 2013).

ጓ ‘Welcome to Johannesburg’

91

This aim should ideally be reached through a public process of mourning, whereby the ultimate goal is to attempt to close the chapters of the past: However painful the experience, the wounds of the past must not be allowed to fester. They must be opened. They must be cleansed. And balm must be poured on them so they can heal.8

However, even the ‘freeborn generation’, which is supposed to be the generation least affected by apartheid, grapples with its past, despite the TRC ’s aim to find closure. In Room 207, this is shown most forcefully through the fact that the word ‘apartheid’ is barely used, although the characters often allude to it. In fact, the word is only used twice throughout the whole book (94, 157). Otherwise, there frequently appear three dots indicating an ellipsis where the word ‘apartheid’ should be, or the characters refer to it in rather evasive terms, using phrases like “back in the days” (41, 90). The silence around the word seems to be a clear indicator that history cannot be mourned or laid to rest yet. Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie state that the text “disavows the past all together” and represses it through silence.9 This silence is further complicated in Room 207 when one considers the topic of masculine identity during and after apartheid. The roommates have a “wall of inspiration” where they put up pictures of men “who, in their very own ways and byways, made it to the top” (16). The wall is, among other things, plastered with pictures of anti-apartheid struggle heroes, Massai warriors, and freedom fighters such as Che Guevara. The narrator emphasizes that the image of the male freedom fighter is iconic and something to hold on to: “these brothers are [on the wall of inspiration] for their spiritual and soulful support only” (18). As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that in a post-apartheid present, the role model of the anti-apartheid freedom fighter and masculine hero is no longer available. Noko says, for example, that “I loved Mandela the freedom fighter and I miss that Mandela” (17). In a post-apartheid South Africa, where the image of the freedom fighter belongs to the heroic anti-apartheid past and not to the future, the male characters of the novel find themselves in a crisis of subjectivity. Their lives evolve around alcohol (more often than not, they cannot pay the rent for having drunk away all their money), unfulfilled artistic dreams, and abuse of their female partners. Modishi, for instance, beats up his teenage girlfriend Lerato at regular intervals. Once she even has to be taken to hospital by 8

Tutu, “Foreword,” 7. Ronit Frenkel & Craig MacKenzie, “Conceptualizing ‘Post-Transitional’ in South African Literature in English,” English Studies in Africa 53 (2010): 2. 9

92

DANY ELA DEMIR

ጓ

Molamo and Noko. D’Nice also abuses his girlfriend Lebo, the mother of his children, once he has moved out of Room 207 (206). The struggle-hero, a remnant of the apartheid past, seems to be an icon on which the characters dwell melancholically in the post-apartheid present, which may be seen as a form of disavowing their present crisis of masculine identity. This crisis is becoming ever more acute because the ideal image of a post-apartheid masculine identity is, for most of the characters at least, impossible to live up to. Masculinity in the new South Africa seems to be defined by capitalist values rather than revolutionary ideals. In addition, social mobility and above all economic success and status symbols, such as expensive cars and big houses, matter a great deal. While, for instance, Matome, one of the characters who become economically successful in the end, can move without impediment through any part of the city, choosing which car to drive and where to live, Noko, who fails to realize his dreams, cannot identify with this new image of masculinity. Despite his promise to himself that when he leaves Johannesburg “[he] will be driving [his] own car” (45), he remains dependent on taxis or other people who have cars in order to move through the city. It is telling that every time he visits one of his former roommates in the suburbs, he is subsequently taken to wherever he has to go by his respective host. When he hurriedly decides to shorten his visit at Modishi’s place because he cannot stand the feeling of jealousy towards Modishi for having been able to leave Hillbrow while Noko himself remains there, that threatens to overcome him, “father and daughter had to drive [him] back to Joubert park” (208). Also, when he meets Matome for the last time, he is taken to Melville by the latter “in a sports car” (200). These two incidents emphasize quite clearly that both Matome and Modishi are, through their higher economic status, much more independent. Matome, the prototype of a self-made man, has not only managed (all on his own) to establish a company, own a house in the suburbs, and marry a highly educated woman, but he also owns a sports car, one of the arguably most significant symbols of masculine power, sexual potency, and upward mobility in the novel. It is also noteworthy that the young men regard women as just another status symbol that a successful man “should own.” Matome, for example, married his wife Basedi merely in order to have children, which he states in an extremely dehumanizing way: “For me, [Basedi’s] a golden incubator and I hope it hatches golden chicks” (201). In contrast to Matome’s success, Noko’s dependency on other people’s cars, taxis or other means of transportation (as well as his jealousy of his roommates) shows clearly that he has not managed to overcome his crisis of masculinity by the end of the novel. This contrast between Noko and his former roommates

ጓ ‘Welcome to Johannesburg’

93

indicates that post-apartheid Johannesburg is segregated not only along racial lines but also along economic lines (since one can only move out of the poor areas of the city, which are predominantly inhabited by black people, if one becomes successful in financial terms). This is an additional factor that further complicates the characters’ various struggles to realize their ambitions and hopes for a better future.

Johannesburg: A Place of Melancholia Apart from the six men who live in room 207, Johannesburg itself can be seen as another protagonist of the novel. The city has been described as a city of surface and depth by scholars such as Achille Mbembe (2008) and Sarah Nuttall (2009): In Johannesburg, it is rather, or at least in a related but unique vein, the intertwining of surface and depth – in its historical and psychic senses – that defines the life of the city. Surface and depth exist in a set of relations in which each relies on the existence of the other, in which they are entwined or enfolded, suggestive each of the other, interpenetrating, and separating out at different points.10

This image may, on the one hand, allude to the city’s mining history, which is ever present in the inhabitants’ minds.11 In Zulu, for instance, Johannesburg is called Egoli, city of gold, which refers to the historical importance of gold mining for the city.12 On the other hand, it describes the present living conditions of the population: while Johannesburg is the economic hub of South Africa, according to Sarah Nuttall, marginalized figures such as “the migrant worker, the aging white man, the ‘illegal immigrant’, and the hustler” emerge out of the underneath structures of the city.13 The image of surface and underneath may also refer to Johannesburg’s historical changes, from being predominantly a mining city during the period of colonialism to having become one of Africa’s largest metropolises where people from all over the continent go to seek their fortune. As mentioned above, the narrator of Room 207 observes that the city belongs to the black population now. However, underneath this surface of 10

Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 83. See Achille Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 38–68. 12 Gavin Steingo, “South African Music After Apartheid: Kwaito, the ‘Party Politic’, and the Appropriation of Gold as a Sign of Success,” Popular Music and Society 28 (2005): 352. 13 Sarah Nuttall, “Literary City,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 199. 11

94

DANY ELA DEMIR

ጓ

‘ownership’, apartheid and its detrimental consequences resurface time and again. After all, the characters are themselves marginalized figures (most of them can be described as hustlers), who live a precarious life in Hillbrow. This precarious existence is caused by the fact that the characters all grew up during apartheid and were thus underprivileged in terms of education and economic status, for instance (34–35). Noko emphasizes that this is the main reason why most of the six men do not manage to obtain a university degree, since they fail “at trying to keep up with [their] peers” (64). When he describes these accounts of failed dreams and desires, Noko refers to them as “sad black stor[ies]” (17, 40, 48, 50). The novel’s characters are thus faced with the city as a place of ambivalences. Often referred to as a “dream city” (e.g., 13), Johannesburg is both a place that holds hopes for a brighter future and a new beginning after apartheid and a place of hopelessness, death, and devastation: “Here, as you can see, a darkie brother bled to his death [...]. Let’s hope he survived? No. He’s dead. He is dead and hoping doesn’t change the facts here” (162–63). Besides, the characters observe that Hillbrow has become run-down ever since the whites left it and moved to the suburbs. Thus, the young men perceive Johannesburg as still being a racially divided city. Its history of segregation has not been overcome (or worked through), but, on the contrary: “Walk around Hillbrow and you are bound to find a red map, where someone, probably a black man, died” (94–95). Another indicator of Johannesburg’s still being a racially segregated city is the fact that the black characters hardly interact with whites. This is particularly noticeable when one looks at the character constellation: There are only two white characters in Room 207. One of them is Michelle, one of D’Nice’s girlfriends, who lives in a rich suburb of Johannesburg and ventures out to Hillbrow only in order to see her boyfriend. The narrator claims that Michelle is the only white girl who enters room 207. He also emphasizes that Michelle’s family would never accept her relationship with D’Nice: Michelle loved D’Nice. She loved the darkie brother. It went on and on, despite the fact that they both knew that the relationship was a cul-desac from the beginning – she was from a very powerful family and the music was just a way of killing time between now and when she found Mr Right. (39)

Thus, apartheid’s segregationist laws are no longer officially in place, but the ‘freeborn generation’ still seems to be affected by them. The only other white character apart from Michelle who appears in the novel is David, Noko’s former professor, who looks at the latter’s film scripts, declares them to be extraordinarily good, but still refuses to give Noko the chance to prove himself as a film scriptwriter and director (145ff.). The fact that racial and social boundaries still

ጓ ‘Welcome to Johannesburg’

95

exist in the city, then, indicates the inability of finding closure in a post-apartheid state. Moreover, the character’s precarious living conditions in Johannesburg make it extremely difficult to let go of the apartheid past (which can be seen by the aforementioned crisis of masculinity and the retention of the image of the freedom fighter as icon) and hope for a better future in the city. Not only are the buildings in Hillbrow run-down but, on a tour through the district with the narrator, hustlers, drug dealers, and someone who “bled to his death” (162) are presented in a matter-of-fact tone. Apartheid’s official segregation and pass laws seem to have been merely replaced by other boundaries, this time set by a democratic state: Pass through that once grand entrance. It used to be the only door here when apartheid was the greatest security guard to all white people, but not anymore. Democracy is here with its security gates, iron bars and security guards. (157)

Tightened security measures make it impossible to move freely through the city, thus emphasizing the replacement of apartheid boundaries by other, capitalist boundaries. Although segregation may no longer be officially in place, it does exist, adding the economic to the racial factor: the possibility of moving out of Hillbrow, as Matome does by the end of the novel, depends largely on economic factors. Thus, while the city holds out promises of a brighter future, just as it did in the times of Abrahams’ and Paton’s protagonists, in the present it is buried under memories of failure and loss, and cannot fully be claimed as a place for successful new beginnings. This is further emphasized by the fact that Noko has to return empty-handed to his village, where an even more hopeless future seems to be awaiting him: “Life is never fair, I tell myself, choking to even get into the taxi. I am leaving all alone on this afternoon” (235). But Noko has not completed his return journey, as the book ends with the scene quoted from here. Still dependent on public transport (in contrast to his former roommates), he is melancholically drawn to the city, despite the fact that he was unable to realize his dreams, and in spite of having lost all his friends and meagre possessions. He still seems unwilling to leave Johannesburg: “I’ve been here since halfeight and now it’s fourteen fifty-two. Can a goodbye last that long?” (234). At the same time, he is overwhelmed by the place and states that he “can’t hear anymore” (234) because of all the noise around him. Shortly before leaving, he declares himself to be “de-city-ised” (231), which is synonymous with being utterly disillusioned with his life in the city. Thus, Noko’s feelings towards Johannesburg can be seen as ambiguous and deeply melancholic in a Freudian sense.

96

DANY ELA DEMIR

ጓ

Although he has “lived fourteen years of hard nothing” (235), he has also experienced the city as a place of fast, energetic, and intense living and opportunities. This is probably the reason why it is so hard for him to leave: Letting go of Johannesburg also means abandoning his hopes for the future.

Fragmentation and Marginalization The aspect of melancholia is further reflected on a structural level. At first glance, the narrative appears to be circular, since the novel starts by recounting how the characters have come to live in room 207, and it ends by portraying how each of them leaves the apartment. If one looks more closely at the narrative structure, however, it appears fragmented, since it is a non-linear account of the characters’ lives. It consists of seven chapters, which have headings such as Refuge, Mortals, and Noughts and Dreams (Chapters 1, 2 and 3). The number seven highlights a sense of circularity through the recurring reference to the seven days of the week. However, the plot appears much more fragmented when one looks at the various chapters. Reminiscent of a film script, each chapter consists of small sub-chapters, sometimes merely fragmented scenes, making the plot appear incoherent at times. Although the novel has a timeframe of fourteen years during which the six men live in the apartment, one does not know when precisely the recounted scenes occur. Thus, past and present seem to blend into each other, and a refusal of chronology and coherence is discernible. According to Sally-Ann Murray, “there are evident motifs which hold the narrative together.”14 Yet, those recurring motifs, such as boozing, or people who keep reappearing (for instance, Justice, a homeless man who is given shelter by the roommates), do not seem to contribute to a sense of stability or linearity. Because of the first-person narration, the story is – even though Noko is recounting the other characters’ lives as if told from a thirdperson perspective – always told from Noko’s perspective, which makes it highly unreliable and questionable at certain moments. For instance, Noko explicitly states that he does not accompany Molamo when the latter visits his girlfriend Tebogo towards the end of the narrative. However, he gives the reader a detailed account of what might have happened in Tebogo’s flat (215ff.). The narrator, furthermore, implies that the person to whom the story is recounted is another black man. By the beginning of the novel, the addressee is given a tour through the apartment, and Noko ends it with the words “brother, 14

Sally–Ann Murray. “On the Street With Vladislaviǰ, Mhlongo, Moele and Others,” in S A -Lit Beyond 2000, ed. Michael Chapman & Margaret Lenta (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P, 2011): 87.

ጓ ‘Welcome to Johannesburg’

97

you are home” (15). Besides, when Noko talks about white people, he refers to them in the third-person plural, not including the addressee (125). Moreover, when Noko guides the addressee through Hillbrow he refers to the notion of ownership of the city again: “Walk [Hillbrow] like it belongs to you, because me and you, we have inherited this” (158). However, in spite of these invocations of similarity, the addressee seems to have a very different lifestyle from the that of narrator and his roommates. He does not seem to know his way around Hillbrow, since Noko is giving him a tour at some point during the narrative: “We’ll buy something later, this is not the only twenty-four-hour supermarket around here, there’s another one in Highpoint” (158). He also does not seem to take drugs, for instance: “We are going to sit here together, roll a smoke, puff and be happy for a couple of minutes – all courtesy of me knowing how to survive in Johannesburg. You don’t smoke? Too bad.” (168)

These dialogues between the male first-person narrator and a male addressee can make the narrative highly uncomfortable for a female reader, as she might feel excluded and marginalized throughout the process of reading. After all, she does not only witness a dialogue conducted exclusively between two men, but, during the reading process, she will also have to cope with the fact that all of the flatmates, the narrator included, speak in highly derogatory terms about the female characters. The narrative perspective, the fragmented form of the novel, and the male addressee are relevant when reading Room 207 as a melancholic counternarrative to the TRC ’s mourning paradigm. In contrast to many other contemporary South African novels, Room 207 barely refers openly to the Truth Commission. In fact, there is only one implicit reference: every Sunday, the roommates hold a kangaroo court in which everything that happens during the week is under review: “Here, lies and half-lies, truth and half-truth, conclusions and observations are all on the table” (109). Undoubtedly, this is an allusion to the SABC ’s weekly programme presented by the journalist Max Du Preez, in which the week’s events during the TRC hearings were summed up and reviewed.15 The TRC Report went on for almost two years. It ran every Sunday night, and it was one way of keeping up to date with the developments of the Commission in a condensed form. Thus, South African readers may even associate the Sundayevening kangaroo court somewhat more readily with the TRC than will nonSouth African readers. 15

All the T R C reports can be watched online (see “Truth Commission – Special Report” http: //www.sabctrc.saha.org.za/ (accessed 4 November 2013)).

98

DANY ELA DEMIR

ጓ

Against the TRC ’s attempt at closure, coherence, and a stable narrative, the fragmentation and incoherence of the text point to the refusal of closure on the narratological level as well. The narrative perspective of the novel raises the same questions as the TRC process: Whose truth is being told? Who tells whose story and which voices are being marginalized in favour of others? Especially the issue of marginalization of certain groups in favour of a grand national history during the TRC process is foregrounded here.16 Kerry Bystrom accordingly remarks, in her essay “Johannesburg Interiors:” “It is for a reason that the reader/guest is gendered male, or ‘Brother’, from the very beginning of the novel.”17 She argues, further, that the “invitation” and the feeling of being at home in room 207 turn out to be highly ambivalent, given the specified addressee and the way the women characters are treated. But she also stresses that, “regardless of such discomforts [the specified addressee, and the dilapidated state of Room 207], however, these interiors remain, as we read the novel, our temporary refuge.”18 And yet, it is precisely due to the fact that the addressee is thus specified that women are openly excluded from and marginalized in room 207, for instance. This indicates that, despite an inclusive TRC rhetoric, there are excluded and marginalized groups and voices in the new South Africa which are not encouraged to participate in the country’s rewriting of its history, nor in the envisioning of its future. Like the narrator’s failure to make his dreams come true, which stands in opposition to a Rainbow rhetoric of a better future for all South Africans, then, the narrative structure stands against the grand narrative of mourning of the TRC . Instead, it can be seen as a counter-narrative of melancholia, which, because of its painful past, cannot be shaped into a coherent form, or made sense 16

Heidi Grunebaum and Steven Robins have written extensively about the marginalization of coloured people during the T R C process, for example (cf. Heidi Grunebaum & Steven Robins, “Crossing the Colour(ed) Line: Mediating the Ambiguities of Belonging and Identity,” in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. Zimitri Erasmus [Cape Town: Kwela/South African History Online, 2001]: 149–73). Also, Yvette Christiansë emphasizes the fact that people who were coloured but passed for white, for instance, were never heard in front of the T R C . Besides, because the T R C mostly focused on victims of political crimes, the daily consequences of the segregationist system, such as the terrible housing situation, or the deliberate undereducation of the black population, were felt to be neglected somewhat by the Commission. Christiansë aptly calls these histories of suffering which were not sufficiently dealt with by the T R C “quotidian narratives of loss” (Yvette Christiansë, “Passing Away: The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng & David Kazanjian [Berkeley: U of California P, 2003]: 375). 17 Kerry Bystrom, “Johannesburg Interiors,” Cultural Studies 27.3 (2013): 9. 18 Bystrom, “Johannesburg Interiors,” 9.

ጓ ‘Welcome to Johannesburg’

99

of, at least not yet. Also, by the end of the novel, Johannesburg itself appears as a place of loss and suffering instead of as a city where people can realize their dreams. After all, Noko not only has to face the fact that he has no chance of making it in the city, but he has the feeling that he has lost his friends to it, too. Thus, despite its disavowal or negation of the past, Room 207 is a text that is, as David Medalie observes of many other post-apartheid novels, “inclined rather to a preoccupation with the past than an embrace of the future.”19 However, while other novels, such as Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow, or Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, can be read against more recent theories which attempt to depathologize melancholia, Room 207 appears as a melancholic text in a rather Freudian sense, given the silences in the text, its fragmented structure, the novel’s focus on the characters’ individual psychological development, and, finally, the hopeless prognosis for Noko’s future.

W OR K S C I T E D Abrahams, Peter. Mine Boy (London: Dorothy Crisp, 1946). Bystrom, Kerry. “Johannesburg Interiors,” Cultural Studies (2013): 1–24. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford UP , 2001). Christiansë, Yvette. “Passing Away: The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa;” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng & David Kazanjian (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003): 372–95. Frenkel, Ronit, & Craig MacKenzie. “Conceptualizing ‘Post-Transitional’ South African Literature in English,” English Studies in Africa 53 (2010): 1–10. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, tr. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001): 243–58. Grunebaum, Heidi, & Steven Robins. “Crossing the Colour(ed) Line: Mediating the Ambiguities of Belonging and Identity,” in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela/South African History Online, 2001): 149–73. Heywood, Christopher. A History of South African Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004). Mbembe, Achille. “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham N C & London: Duke UP , 2008): 37–68. Medalie, David. “The Use of Nostalgia,” English Studies in Africa 53 (2010): 35–44. Moele, Kgebetli. Room 207 (Johannesburg: Kwela, 2006). Mpe, Phaswane. Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P , 2001).

19

David Medalie, “The Use of Nostalgia,” English Studies in Africa 53 (2010): 36.

DANY ELA DEMIR

100

ጓ

Murray, Sally–Ann. “On the Street With Vladislavic, Mhlongo, Moele and Others,” in SALit Beyond 2000, ed. Michael Chapman & Margaret Lenta (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu– Natal P , 2011): 69–97. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009). ——. “Literary City,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 195–221. Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948). Steingo, Gavin. “South African Music After Apartheid: Kwaito, the ‘Party Politic’, and the Appropriation of Gold as a Sign of Success,” Popular Music and Society 28 (2005): 333– 57. Tutu, Desmond. “Foreword,” in Truth and Reconciliation of South Africa Report, ed. Desmond Tutu et al., vol. 1. (1998): 1–24, http://www.justice.gov.za/Trc/report/final report/Volume%201.pdf (accessed 4 November 2013). Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light (London & New York: New Press, 2006). Willemse, Hein. “Afrikaans Literature, 1948–1976,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell & Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2012): 429–52.

ጓ

Angels in South Africa? Queer Urbanity in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America V E R E N A J AIN –W AR D EN

K.

S E L L O D U I K E R ’ S N O V E L The Quiet Violence of Dreams can be called a queer text in various respects: it explores different concepts of queerness, which are often inspired by the West, as well as the limits of these concepts in a South African context. In many ways, the novel’s discussion of queer city life is reminiscent of Tony Kushner’s play in two parts Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.1 The play has been praised not only for its queer depiction of the era of Reagan and H I V/ AI D S but also for its vision of a world in which everyone, independent of their religion and sexuality, can be a citizen. The Quiet Violence of Dreams shares the fantastic features of Angels in America as well as many of its influences from Walter Benjamin’s philosophy: the employment of flânerie, the criticism of consumerism, and the darkly visionary view of history. It is set in Cape Town, the city that has been called the capital of gay culture in Africa,2 and draws on post-apartheid developments that allow for “new spaces of ‘queer’ visibility, identity politics, and literary/cultural practice.”3 The novel does not directly refer to the discrepancy between the legal situation, with its “constitutional protection of same-

1

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1995; London: Nick Hern, 2007). 2 Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town (Oxford & Malden M A : Wiley–Blackwell, 2009): 49. 3 William Spurlin, “Broadening Postcolonial Studies / Decolonizing Queer Studies: Emerging ‘Queer’ Identities and Cultures in Southern Africa,” in Post-Colonial, Queer, ed. John C. Hawley (Albany: State U of New York P, 2001): 186.

102

V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

ጓ

sex intimate relationships,”4 and the reality of everyday homophobia and homophobic violence.5 Nevertheless, Cape Town’s position as a tolerant and open space in which homosexuality is wholeheartedly accepted is complicated at several points. In fact, the contradictions and tensions of postcolonial Cape Town, particularly of its queer subcultures, finally make the novel’s protagonist Tshepo turn away from U S -inspired ideas of queerness as they are advocated, for instance, in Angels in America. Instead, he looks for new, different ways of queerness in South Africa. His engagement with various concepts of queerness can be traced in his numerous walks through the city, his prophetic visions of an apocalyptic future, as well as his changing attitude towards consumerism and ethnicity. ‘Queer’ has become one of those terms that can be used in many different ways, giving it a plethora of meanings. An important aspect of queerness that has been stressed by researchers such as Judith Halberstam is its focus on nonnormativity. Halberstam writes: “‘Queer’ refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time.”6 Significantly, queerness is linked with, but not limited to, sexuality in this definition; the term ‘queer’ encompasses ways of being and living that oppose “institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction,”7 but the “willfully eccentric modes of being”8 that Halberstam deems queer also serve to counter notions of productivity, sustainability, and longevity.9 Such an inclusive view of queerness, which goes beyond sexuality, does justice to texts such as The Quiet Violence of Dreams, which takes up many more facets of queer life than just sexual ones. Above all, the characters’ queerness manifests itself in their attitudes towards the space they live in. Queer space refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.10

4

Mark Hunter, Love in the Time of A I D S : Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2010): 173. 5 See Hunter, Love in the Time of A I D S , 173. For a detailed discussion of homophobic violence (particularly against women) in contemporary South Africa see, for instance, Henriette Gunkel, The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa (New York & London: Routledge, 2010). 6 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York & London: New York U P , 2005): 6. 7 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 1. 8 In a Queer Time and Place, 1. 9 See In a Queer Time and Place, 1, 6. 10 In a Queer Time and Place, 6.

ጓ Angels in South Africa?

103

Queer space, in this reading, is heavily influenced by queer temporality and queer ways of inhabitation. Halberstam defines queer time as those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once it leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.11

It is, hence, a time that is disrupted, and that converges and is diffused in unexpected ways which contradict normative structures of time and its uses of it. Rebecca Romanow reads postcolonial spaces per se as queer: she claims that such space is “constructed by the history of colonization, the process of Othering, and the pressures and realities of the diaspora and the emerging global community.”12 Due to these processes and realities, “the notion of a normative timeline is disrupted by both the increasing weight of the past” 13 and an insecure future, and a strong focus is placed on the present. According to Romanow, the history of the nation, which is marked by past injustices, is not the defining feature of postcolonial queer spaces. Instead, these spaces are defined by “the non-normative modes of living which are produced and enacted by the individual.”14 In line with this definition, the characters in The Quiet Violence of Dreams shape the urban space of Cape Town by inhabiting it in diverse nonnormative ways. Halberstam writes: All kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club kids, HIV -positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed. Perhaps such people could productively be called ‘queer subjects’ in terms of the ways they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned, and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains that other people assign to privacy and family.15

While this definition of ‘queer subjects’ entails some generalizations, mixing groups as diverse as homeless people and club kids, whose motivations could hardly be any more different from each other, all these groups contribute to shaping a space that can definitely be called ‘queer’ in Halberstam’s sense of the 11

Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 6. Rebecca Fine Romanow, The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006): 7. 13 Romanow, The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time, 7. 14 The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time, 4. 15 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 10. 12

104

V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

ጓ

word. The Quiet Violence of Dreams depicts Cape Town from the perspective of, and peopled with, many such ‘queer subjects’: urchins, all-night clubbers, drug addicts, rastafarians, and male prostitutes. The city seems to be divided into heterotopic16 spaces for each (queer) subculture, in which every group has its own space, club, or view of the city. In fact, the novel’s protagonist Tshepo can be called the ‘queer subject’ par excellence: labelled psychotic, he moves from endless walks through the city to a psychiatric hospital and finally discovers his sexuality when he starts to work as a rent boy. The act of walking, roaming or ‘cruising’ as a queer urban activity is a placemaking strategy that Halberstam and Romanow mention only in passing. It is examined in detail in Dianne Chisholm’s investigation of queer city writings and her queer readings of Walter Benjamin. She focuses on the ways in which Benjamin, as well as contemporary queer city writers, make use of “motifs of seeing, sensing, and staging the shocking dialectics of the metropolitan era.”17 In her view, the protagonists’ walks through the city are not only queer in the obvious sense of appropriating spaces for queer pleasure and exploring nonnormative sexual acts and commodities in sites that defy the boundaries between private and public, but also in the sense that they “navigat[e] the historical contradictions of current reality.”18 This aspect of city walks features prominently in The Quiet Violence of Dreams. The novel begins with the protagonist Tshepo’s committal to a mental institution after he has been found “roaming around Main road in Woodstock [while being] naked except for an old sheepskin seat cover that is precariously wrapped around his waist.”19 When he is asked where he spent the past few days, he simply replies: “Walking” (14). What at first looks like an act of mental confusion turns out to be more than that: while walking the city, Tshepo tries to understand its contradictions, and at the same time he tries to place himself in relation to these contradictory sur16 See Foucault’s definition of heterotopias: “There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” tr. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 24. 17 Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 2005): 9. 18 Chisholm, Queer Constellations, 31. 19 K. Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001): 13. Further page references are in the main text.

ጓ Angels in South Africa?

105

roundings and the city’s inhabitants. Thus, during another walk through the city, he describes how he sees his “life in the expression of strangers, in the things people [are] doing” (67). In contrast to Benjamin’s flâneur, Tshepo is far from merely reading or translating city spaces into language: instead, he attempts to make sense of a fractured city and a fractured mind and thereby creates the space that surrounds him. In this way, postcolonial Cape Town and its subjects define each other in The Quiet Violence of Dreams. While Tshepo says during one of his walks that his “mind feels disjointed, breaking into a kaleidoscope’s fractured colours” (90), Cape Town itself is represented as fractured as well. Alla Ivanchikova has described the Cape Town of The Quiet Violence of Dreams as “a porous and blotched space where the fabric of the first world is perforated with enclaves of the third and fourth worlds.”20 While the use of ‘First-’ and ‘Third-World’ rhetoric is problematic, Cape Town is indeed a porous and blotched space in the novel, one in which different cultural influences are far from shaping a colourful and harmonious picture. Instead, disrupted by the “weight of the past,”21 colonialism, and racial injustice, these different cultural influences lead to tensions and violence. In his quest to understand this particular ‘queerness’ of the place he lives in, Tshepo feels that he has to “explore the seedy back streets” (91) of the city, “the underbelly of human misery” (91). This plan is realized towards the end of the novel: Tshepo roams the townships, now driven by a compulsive need for movement. This last walk takes several days on end, hence defies the sense of productivity that is connected with normative uses of time. His compulsive need to keep moving without feeling healed by it recalls Benjamin’s famous description of the “Angel of History”: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. [...] This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from

20

Alla Ivanchikova, “Commodity and Waste as National Allegory in Recent South African and Post-Soviet Fiction,” Comparative Literature and Culture 13.4 (2011): 3. 21 Romanow, The Postcolonial Body in Space and Time, 5.

106

V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

ጓ

Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. [. ..] This storm is what we call progress. 22

Benjamin’s “Angel of History” is one of the central images in Angels in America, in which the character Prior Walter defies the Angel America who tells him to embrace stasis and stop moving, by arguing: “We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks – progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It’s animate, it’s what living things do.”23 Tshepo, however, does not seem to accept the fate of human beings so easily. At the very beginning of the novel, he voices his fear of the condition of being-in-time by claiming: “Time is against me. [...] It’s frightening. It’s like dominoes endlessly falling into oblivion” (10). His compulsive walks of Cape Town and his continuous confrontation with the ruins that the (colonial and apartheid) past has left seem to be completely in line with the “Angel of History” who looks at the past as one catastrophic palimpsest while being sucked into the future. The ‘now’ of The Quiet Violence of Dreams is, as in Halberstam and Romanow’s queer time, defined by the weight of the past and the sense of a diminishing future. And it also incorporates traces of the way Benjamin defines Jetztzeit (the ‘here-and-now’). Written in 1940 while he was on the run from the Nazis, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History” are a unique attempt to combine Marxist historical materialism and theology. In the face of fascism, Benjamin criticizes historicism’s tendency to construct the past as a fluid, progressive development and instead claims that “the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”24 Thus, he proclaims a view of history in which specific events, particularly those which have a revolutionary potential, are “blast[ed] [...] out of the homogeneous course of history”; in his discussion of history, the present, in the sense of Jetztzeit, is not only a moment of transition from the past into the future: “time stands still and has come to a stop.”25 Jetztzeit is characterized by the possibility of being “blasted out of the continuum of history”26 and it is also

22

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zorn, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 1940; tr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; London: Pimlico, 1999): 249. 23 Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1995; London: Nick Hern, 2007): 263–64 (ellipsis in original). 24 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 247. 25 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254. 26 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 253.

ጓ Angels in South Africa?

107

eschatological time: every moment may prefigure the coming end of time and thus fulfil its messianic potential.27 Despite the very different circumstances in which Angels in America and The Quiet Violence of Dreams were written and the different societies they represent, their messianic view of time also connects Kushner’s Prior Walter and Duiker’s Tshepo. Regardless of their different views on movement and history, the protagonists share their role as prophets of the apocalypse. Tshepo’s walks are always connected with a sense of messianism, and he says about himself: I have been sent here by emergency powers. I am just a messenger. Within me are the seeds of our eventual destruction and redemption. These are the final moments, they are divorced of time. (437)

Just like Prior, Tshepo starts to see angels, although they seem to be less powerful and terrible than the ones in Angels in America. He claims: “They follow me everywhere. On trains, taxis, in the street” (89). In contrast to the Angel America, these angels do not seem to look like angels in stereotypical iconography: “‘Do they have wings?’” (89), Tshepo’s friend David asks, whereupon Tshepo replies: “‘No, they’re like you and me’” (89). Tshepo has other visions that are less peaceful, however. One of them is described, with slight variations, twice: A storm is rising, the monster we created in our nightmares is hungry, it is stalking us. The serpent is writhing in fury. Great trees will topple, mountains will come crashing down. The world will be in uproar, devouring each other while terrible cold and intolerable heat persist. When I listen to the beast’s slicing screams I know that a stifled will is longing to break free. A feral creature is out there, every day I feel it advancing. (95)

It is no coincidence that, at a different point of the novel, Tshepo claims that his dreams are “like revelations” (139). The Book of Revelation, the part of the bible in which the apocalypse is depicted in most detail, has a very similar description of the tumbling of mountains and the desperation of men: And every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men [...], and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. [Revelations 6. 14–16; see also Revelations 15–16] 27

See Vivian Liska, “The Legacy of Benjamin’s Messianism: Giorgio Agamben and Other Contenders,” in A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rolf J. Goebel (Rochester N Y : Camden House, 2009): 197.

108

V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

ጓ

While Tshepo’s vision is thus decidedly Christian, he turns to a more syncretic version of it later on, combining it with features from Greek and Zulu mythology (Medusa and Mam’lambo, the goddess of rivers, respectively) and linking it to Norse mythology by comparing it to Ragnarök, the battle of gods that leads to the destruction of the world (140). Despite, or possibly even because of, his prophetic powers, Tshepo is an outsider who never fits in. His naivety, solitariness, and ambiguous sexuality provoke many of the men he interacts with. Surprisingly, instances of homophobia occur only before Tshepo begins to explore his sexuality, and they are never explicitly revealed as homophobic. His flatmate Chris eventually rapes Tshepo and takes away his job, giving as a reason: “He’s so nice, so fucking nice it makes me sick. It makes me angry” (210). Since Tshepo is an educated, middle-class boy from a black family and Chris is a ‘Coloured’ man from the Cape Flats, racism and feelings of inferiority on Chris’s part, in addition to homophobia, are likely explanations for the rape. A fellow patient at the mental institution, Zebron, who turns out to be responsible for Tshepo’s original childhood trauma – namely his being raped for the first time, and the murder of his mother – describes Tshepo in terms similar to those used by Chris, claiming that he simply asks to be abused. He does, however, admit that there is something special about Tshepo, linking this otherness with homosexuality: “Tshepo will always do right. He has that stubborn streak in him, that nauseating capacity that we all think is for sissies and moffies” (50). This is the only instance in which Tshepo is compared to – not called – a ‘sissie’ or ‘moffie’, and even here the statement is equivocal: the characteristic that makes Tshepo ‘other’ is his ability to do the right thing. In spite of the ambiguous valency of the traits that set him apart, Tshepo is depicted as an eternal ‘other’, and, like Prior Walter, dying of AIDS in Angels in America, his loneliness is connected with physical suffering. The experience of pain, which has no meaning in itself, becomes a central theme both of Angels in America and of The Quiet Violence of Dreams: through their prophetic visions, both Prior and Tshepo try to give meaning to something they are unable to understand, because it simply makes no sense. Tshepo and Prior’s loneliness, caused, in part, by their suffering as well as by their ‘queerness’, can be seen as the particular quality that makes them prophets: Ranen Omer-Sherman, in an article on the fate of the Other in Angels in America, claims:

ጓ Angels in South Africa?

109

in ancient Judaism, the prophet is not so much a ‘seer’ (understood as one who merely predicts the future) but rather an often marginalized outsider who critiques society.28

Just like Prior, who, in his final speech in Angels in America, evokes a postsexist and post-racist society which is represented by the post-nuclear family gathered around the statue of the angel in Central Park, Tshepo’s dream for South Africa is originally very positive and connected to the idea of “a rainbow nation in which all South Africans mix and mingle to enrich each other.”29 Thus, he asks himself: Is it possible to feel South African and not to always source my culture to a particular race group? Can I claim Afrikaans, Coloured tsotsi taal, Indian cuisine or English sensibilities as my own? Must I always be apologetic for wanting more than my culture offers? (347–48)

At the beginning of the novel, Tshepo believes that the creation of such a rainbow nation is connected with the ‘healing powers’ of capitalism. He is sure that in some places in Cape Town no one really cares that you’re black. [...] People only care that you can dance and that you look good. They care that you are wearing Soviet jeans with an expensive Gucci shirt. (34)

In this new, cosmopolitan Cape Town that Tshepo embraces, labels count more than racial categories. And when he begins to explore Cape Town’s gay subcultures, they are represented in similar ways, stressing the equalizing power of global capitalism and consumerism. Despite his experience of homophobic violence, the widespread idea of Cape Town as “an almost mythic space of freedom”30 for queer people seems to lure Tshepo at first. However, his vision of a queer, non-racist future for Cape Town is undone by reality in the course of the action. First of all, Tshepo realizes how consumerism cannot satisfy him in the long run because “after a while the glamour wears off. […] And all the clothes in the world cannot hide, cannot cover the loneliness that haunts [him], the feelings of inadequacy” (320). As a consequence, he walks the townships of Cape Town while, quite literally, shedding his consumerist values: he gives his expensive shirt to a squatter under a bridge, his wallet is stolen by urchins, and he loses the keys for his flat. His remaining clothes and his body become dirty 28

Ranen Omer-Sherman, “The Fate of the Other in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America,” M E L U S 32.2 (Summer 2007): 9. 29 Dobrota Pucherová, The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (Trier: W V T , 2011): 123. 30 Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 34.

V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

110

ጓ

and shabby during the walk; in short, he turns into what Alla Ivanchikova calls a “trash citizen.”31 In this environment, which permits a quite different way of queer inhabitation than the U S -inspired gay club life that he has experienced before, Tshepo feels that “it is easier to be weird and to be considered eccentric […]. No one cares” (429). At the same time, his disenchantment with consumerism is accompanied by another disappointment. “The geography of the city, with its stark racial boundaries,” which, according to Ivanchikova, “reveals the truth behind the ideology of equality, universality, and hybrid culture,”32 also reflects the racism inherent in Cape Town’s queer life. For a while, it seems that Tshepo finds his post-racial utopia at a gay massage parlour where he starts to work as a rent boy and changes his name to “Angelo,” thus turning into an angel himself. However, after a racist remark by one of his co-workers, he begins to question why, for example, “almost all the men that come to see [him] are white” (331), why there are so few black, Coloured, or Indian masseurs, and why he hardly sees any black faces at his favourite club (343–44). The awareness of racist tendencies in Cape Town’s gay culture comes to a peak when it is connected with Tshepo’s changing attitude towards commodity capitalism. In his new role as “the underdog” (432), after his walk through the townships, Tshepo tries to enter his favourite club and is rudely turned out by the bouncer (441). This event is the final straw that shows him how the westernized queer culture of Cape Town only hides the strict rules of queer liberalism. In an exploration of Cape Town’s queer community, Andrew Tucker writes: The recent visibility of white queer men [...] has helped create a lifestyle that while seemingly open and accepting, is strongly biased towards middle-class men who subscribe to a narrow interpretation of queer lifestyles.33

When Tshepo sheds his well-groomed middle-class appearance, the bouncer’s rejection harshly confronts him with the narrow margins of black participation in the largely white gay clubs he frequents. In fact, he now sees, racism has always been present and the only reason why he could become part of Cape Town’s gay scene is that he adhered to certain capitalist codes. The consequence of his disillusionment is that Tshepo turns his back on Cape Town and moves to Johannesburg. At the same time, he reverts to his old name, since ‘Angelo’, in the words of Brenna M. Munro, is “now perhaps too 31 32 33

Ivanchikova, “Commodity and Waste,” 3. “Commodity and Waste,” 8. Tucker, Queer Visibilities, 55.

ጓ Angels in South Africa?

111

close to ‘Anglo’ rather than ‘Angel’.”34 Johannesburg, though its gay scene is not as visible as Cape Town’s according to the characters (114), becomes a liberating space for Tshepo. Throughout the novel, the city serves a purpose similar to that of San Francisco in Angels in America: it introduces a “competing paradigm […] of urbanism”: that is, it suggests alternative ideas about how identity can be negotiated in contemporary cities. 35 San Francisco is used not as a setting but as both a destination for one of the characters at the end of Angels in America and as an image of the afterworld when the character Belize claims that heaven looks “like San Francisco”36 and is a place where “race, taste and history [are] finally overcome.”37 Johannesburg, evoked as a contrast to Cape Town at several points in the novel, is usually represented as less fashionable, more culturally diverse, and more strongly middle-class. When he finally moves to Hillbrow, living “with foreigners, illegal and legal immigrants,” Tshepo feels “at home” (454). His disenchantment with queer Cape Town as a place that, he now feels, “looks too much to the West for inspiration” (420) leads him to look for a new way of being queer, independent of consumerism. Apart from working with disadvantaged youths at a childcare facility, he collects ‘gifts’ in the form of interesting ideas and thoughts from various men he meets and sleeps with, pursuing his goal of “building a new civilization, a new way of life” (455). While Angels in America “ends with the evocation of a community as a newly formed, extended, inclusive family”38 and clearly follows the sociopolitical agenda of gay liberalism in which queers become a part of the family of the nation,39 The Quiet Violence of Dreams ultimately returns to Tshepo’s very first exclamation: “It’s about me. It’s always been about me” (7). Thus cast as “an agent in his own history,”40 Tshepo becomes a postcolonial queer subject in the sense of performing “a metamorphosis from a member of the nation, to an autonomous agent in the metropole.”41 Shortly before his disillusionment, when Tshepo feels that he is part of a queer group at the Cape Town massage parlour, 34 Brenna M. Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 2012): 214. 35 J. Chris Westgate, Urban Drama: The Metropolis in Contemporary North American Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 14. 36 Kushner, Angels in America, 209. 37 Angels in America, 210. See also Westgate, Urban Drama, 40. 38 Jonathan Freedman, “Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner's Angels in America,” P M L A 113.1 (1998): 97. 39 See Westgate, Urban Drama, 50–51. 40 Pucherová, The Ethics of Dissident Desire, 118. 41 Romanow, The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time, 5.

112

V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

ጓ

he dreams of “the rainbow nation as a field of erotic male comradeship,”42 picturing himself surrounded by “a rainbow of muscular torsos” (416). But even before he turns his back on Cape Town, it becomes clear that “there are no allies, no community of the downtrodden, no political struggle.”43 Tshepo remains “a loner, a solitary figure fighting his own battle”:44 the project of queer nationalism is replaced by queer individualism. For all its criticism of Western concepts of queerness, The Quiet Violence of Dreams reproduces the phallocentric attitude that is inherent in texts such as Angels in America as well. Women, in Angels in America, are ultimately reduced to icons of motherhood: thus, the only woman who is present in the play’s final post-nuclear family is Hannah, Joe Pitt’s forgiving mother, who comes to represent mothers in general. Similarly, Mmabatho, who is introduced as Tshepo’s independent and strong best friend in The Quiet Violence of Dreams, “dwindles, in the latter part of the text, into a state of mystical maternity.” 45 While Tshepo criticizes one of his fellow workers at the massage parlour for his misogyny (254), his confession that “around women and shopping centres treacherously pumping out oestrogen [he] become[s] weak, confused, vulnerable” (416) and that he has an “aversion to female hormones, even to women sometimes” (417) makes his own position no less questionable. The vision of a queer South Africa that Duiker creates in The Quiet Violence of Dreams thus questions much of the liberalist hopefulness that Kushner advocates in Angels in America, but it does not get rid of all the stereotypes connected with gay identity-politics. Louis Ironson, a character from Angels in America, famously says about his country: “There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past.”46 The staging of the Angel America and the play’s negotiation of Jewish-American history vehemently refute his statement. Duiker accomplishes a similar linking of South African spiritual and racial history with queer identity through his use of a variety of mythologies and allusions to the country’s past. While his vision of a queer future remains vague, The Quiet Violence of Dreams comes to the conclusion that there is no need to depend on U S -American models to create a queer identity, since “there is enough inspiration in Africa” (420). 42

Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come, 210. Shaun Viljoen, “Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction: Richard Rive’s ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six and K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams,” English Academy Review 18 (2001): 52. 44 Viljoen, “Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction,” 52. 45 Annie Gagiano, “Adapting the National Imagery: Shifting Identities in Three Post-1994 South African Novels,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 819. 46 Kushner, Angels in America, 98. 43

ጓ Angels in South Africa?

113

W OR K S C I T E D Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zorn, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 1940; tr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; London: Pimlico, 1999): 245–55. Chisholm, Dianne. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 2005). Duiker, K. Sello. The Quiet Violence of Dreams (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001). Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces” (“Des Espaces Autres,” 1967), tr. Jay Miskowiec, diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27. Freedman, Jonathan. “Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner’s Angels in America,” P ML A 113.1 (1998): 90–102. Gagiano, Annie. “Adapting the National Imagery: Shifting Identities in Three Post-1994 South African Novels,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 811–24. Gunkel, Henriette. The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa (New York & London: Routledge, 2010). Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York & London: New York U P , 2005). Hunter, Mark. Love in the Time of A I D S : Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2010). Ivanchikova, Alla. “Commodity and Waste as National Allegory in Recent South African and Post-Soviet Fiction,” Comparative Literature and Culture 13.4 (2011): 1–9. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1995; London: Nick Hern, 2007). Liska, Vivian. “The Legacy of Benjamin’s Messianism: Giorgio Agamben and Other Contenders,” in A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rolf J. Goebel (Rochester NY : Camden House, 2009): 195–215. Munro, Brenna M. South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 2012). Omer–Sherman, Ranen. “The Fate of the Other in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America,” M E LU S 32.2 (Summer 2007): 7–30. Pucherová, Dobrota. The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (Trier: W V T , 2011). Romanow, Rebecca Fine. The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006). Spurlin, William. “Broadening Postcolonial Studies / Decolonizing Queer Studies: Emerging ‘Queer’ Identities and Cultures in Southern Africa,” in Post-Colonial, Queer, ed. John C. Hawley (Albany: State U of New York P , 2001). Tucker, Andrew. Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town (Oxford & Malden MA : Wiley–Blackwell, 2009).

V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N

114

ጓ

Viljoen, Shaun. “Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction: Richard Rive’s ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six and K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams,” English Academy Review 18 (2001): 46–53. Westgate, J. Chris. Urban Drama: The Metropolis in Contemporary North American Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

ጓ

The Thrust of the City Penis Fixation in Jude Dibia’s Blackbird C HRIS D U N T ON

A

L T H O U G H P A R T S O F T H I S E S S A Y are taken up with contextualizing the work of Jude Dibia within the contemporary Nigerian scene, and his novel Blackbird within his work as a whole, the main objective is to employ the concept of focalization, as developed by Mieke Bal, to address the following problem: that while the primary subject-matter of Blackbird appears to be the exploitation of the Nigerian poor – in particular the marginalization and dispossession of the Lagos urban poor – the main thematic drive and creative energy of the novel lie elsewhere, in an obsessive penis-fixation that constitutes a story that is not quite the story being told. The writer whose work I am focusing on in this essay belongs to the group commonly referred to as the ‘third generation of Nigerian novelists working in English’ – the term is approximate; as Harry Garuba asks, “when is a generation?” and more recently a challenging probing of the usefulness of the categorization has been carried out by Hamish Dalley.1 If Dibia’s novels are less



My heartfelt gratitude to Prof. Dr Cecile Sandten and Annika Bauer, whose hard work and exceptional helpfulness enabled me to attend the 2013 G N E L /A S N E L conference at the University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany, where an earlier version of this essay was presented; thanks also to my Head of Department, Dr Beatrice Ekanjume–Ilongo, for a small grant from the Department’s budget to help fund the trip to Chemnitz, and to my friend and colleague Prof. Motlatsi Thabane for his always invaluable input. Any inadequacies in the essay are, of course, entirely my responsibility. 1 Harry Garuba, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry,” English in Africa 32.1 (May 2005): 52; Hamish Dalley, “The Idea of ‘Third Generation Nigerian Literature’: Conceptualizing Historical Change and Territorial Affiliation in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel,” Research in African Literatures 44.4 (Winter 2013): 15–34. The latter can be taken as a state-of-the-art contribution, critiquing and extending, as it does, previous work on the topic; it focuses on such questions as whether ‘third-generation’ works reflect continuities or breaks with

116

CHRI S D UNT ON

ጓ

widely known than those of some of his contemporaries, that is because, unlike them, he is based in Nigeria and not in the West, and because – although his second novel was reprinted in a South African edition and Blackbird is available as a Kindle download – his work has been published by small presses in Lagos with predominantly local distribution networks. Other third-generation novelists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Helon Habila, and Sefi Atta are now well-known figures, and in terms of bookshop display and shelving in the U SA , the U K , and South Africa, their work has broken out of the ghetto of ‘African literature’ and is now marketed as mainstream. As Adesanmi and Dunton have put it, they belong to an emergent generation of writers the most visible and celebrated of whom now reside in Euro-America, and whose corpus forms part of a borderless, global, textual topography that Rebecca Walkovitz refers to as the ‘transnational book’.2

Yet, although it has only a limited international distribution, Dibia’s work is important, not least on account of its concern with sexuality and body politics, however problematic that might be in the case of Blackbird. The work of the ‘third generation’ novelists has not been universally applauded in Nigeria itself. Some older writers and critics have dismissed it, sometimes vehemently. Witness Charles Nnolim, whose strictures can be taken to apply to the kind of work Dibia produces, although he doesn’t discuss Dibia specifically. Nnolim refers to “the fleshly school of writers”3 and argues that whereas “good literature refines and uplifts us through its affective prose”4 – which comment I take as an injunction not to counter hegemony– “contemporary Nigerian fiction depicts a society adrift and a people lost.”5 The Lagos novel is singled out: Lagos as setting has come to assume a special place in contemporary Nigerian fiction enough to assume a character all its own, enough to become a symbol in its own right, symbol of corruption, hedonism, debauchery and shenanigans.6 past work, and whether the national-generational framework will do in discussing work that takes on a transnational dimension, such as novels by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Teju Cole. 2 Pius Adesanmi & Chris Dunton, “Everything Good is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation,” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (Summer 2008): v–xii. 3 Charles Nnolim, Issues in African Literature (Lagos: Malthouse, 2009): 208. 4 Nnolim, Issues in African Literature, 160. 5 Issues in African Literature, 207. 6 Issues in African Literature, 206. I cannot resist calling attention here to the comic anti-climax brought about by the placing of “shenanigans” at the end of the list of horrors. “Oh, no! Not

ጓ The Thrust of the City

117

Commenting on novels by Adichie, Maik Nwosu, and Toni Kan, it is almost as if Nnolim blames these authors for the conditions they depict. As Mieke Bal puts it, in such a case “characters are attacked or defended as if they were people that the critics like or dislike. To make matters worse, author and character are viewed as one and the same.”7 With reference to Dibia’s work, in his Foreword to the first edition of Walking with Shadows, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu refers to “the sanctimonious reading of Nigerians and Africans. Most critics almost always end up attacking the novelist as a protagonist of homosexuality instead of actually reading the novel.”8 The starting-point for my discussion is an article I published in 2008 titled “Entropy and Energy: Lagos as City of Words” 9 (the phrase “city of words” being borrowed from Tony Tanner’s seminal study of the twentieth-century novel on urban life in the U SA 10). That essay had two chief foci: first, the recognition that the account of entropy offered in the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be applied to infrastructural collapse and communication breakdown in the modern metropolis; and, second, the recognition that, when entropy occurs, fresh or alternative energies arise: for example, the work of journalists and creative writers contesting social and economic injustice. For present purposes, similar insights are offered by chaos theory. After all, the narrator of Jude Dibia’s novel Unbridled says of another character: “I loved the fact that he spoke with an accent that reminded me of the chaos of Nigeria”; 11 and Lonely Planet Africa (2008) comments that “Lagos is chaos theory made flesh and concrete.”12 In his introduction to chaos theory, James Gleick refers to “a fantastic and delicate structure underlying complexity;”13 a scientist working on chaos knows shenanigans!” A similarly risible effect is achieved through the hierarchization of adjectives in Edia Apolo’s pornographic short-story collection Lagos Na Waa I Swear, where a lesbian relationship (introduced primarily for titillation) is categorized as “grossly repulsive, un-African and most unlikely“; Edia Apolo, Lagos Na Waa I Swear (Lagos: Heritage, 1982): 44. 7 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009): 120. 8 Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, “Foreword,” in Jude Dibia, Walking with Shadows (Lagos: Blacksands, 2005): 5. 9 Chris Dunton, “Energy and Entropy: Lagos as City of Words,” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (Summer 2008): 68–78. 10 Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 11 Jude Dibia, Unbridled (2007; Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008): 153. 12 Quoted in Kaye Whiteman, Lagos: A Cultural and Historical Companion (Oxford: Signal, 2012): xix. 13 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Cardinal, 1988): 4.

118

CHRI S D UNT ON

ጓ

“to look for wild disorder, and [knows] that islands of structure [can] appear within the disorder.”14 A caveat here – and one shamefully overlooked in my 2008 essay – when we apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or indeed the consolations of chaos theory, to societal realities or to communication networks – and when we are seduced by the promises of stability that these theories hold out to us, and by the beauty of the equations and graphics that they generate, we run the risk of overlooking the depths of the human misery that the contemporary city harbours. And few cities more so than Lagos, a place that many people, including Africans, would happily never set foot in as long as they live. I shall now turn to Jude Dibia, first accounting for him as a novelist of Lagos and then exploring the question of penis-fixation in his most recent novel, Blackbird,15 and attempting to connect this question to his evolving vision of the city. Dibia’s début novel, Walking with Shadows,16 has attracted widespread commentary as the first novel by a Nigerian to address the subject of male homosexuality and (in a country in which public expressions of homophobia are widespread and virulent) to do so with insight and sensitivity. I devote some space to contextualizing this text, as its concern with same-sex sexuality bears on the question of penis-fixation in Blackbird, whose central character is obsessed with the penis of a former boyhood friend and who narrates his own penis from the point-of-view of the woman who rapes him. Prior to the appearance of Dibia’s novel, the treatment of same-sex sexuality in the few Nigerian texts that tackled the subject was mostly pejorative, in line with the continental norm at the time – see, for example, Kole Omotoso’s The Edifice (1971), Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1973), and Dillibe Onyeama’s Sex is a Nigger’s Game (1976).17 An exception is Wole Soyinka’s 1965 novel The Interpreters, where the characterization of the African-American homosexual Joe Golder is far more nuanced and where Golder’s role fulfils a sophisticated function in the novel’s complex thematic development; notable, too – and relevant 14

Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, 56. Jude Dibia, Blackbird (Lagos: Jalaa, 2011). 16 Jude Dibia, Walking with Shadows (2005; Lagos: Blacksands, 2007). For a detailed and extremely insightful analysis of this novel, see Chantal Zabus, Out in Africa: Same-Sex Desire in SubSaharan Literatures and Cultures (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester N Y : James Currey, 2013), 95– 104. 17 Kole Omotoso, The Edifice (London: Heinemann Educational, 1971); Wole Soyinka, Season of Anomy (London: Rex Collings, 1973); Dillibe Onyeama, Sex is a Nigger’s Game (London: Satellite, 1976). 15

ጓ The Thrust of the City

119

to the present essay’s concern with focalization – is the fact that Golder is given the chance to speak for himself.18 In the Middle of the Night (2003), by the splendidly named Vintage Promise,19 features a lesbian relationship that is projected as being scandalous (particularly given the criminal involvement of the characters concerned), but which is at the same time allowed space to breathe on its own terms. Biyi Bandele’s The Street (1999)20 is set in Brixton, South London, and has a multiracial cast of characters, some of them Nigerian in origin. It is a discontinuous narrative with extended set-pieces such as a Nation of Islam sermon and its heckling; a novel peppered throughout with the surreal and in places verging on magical realism (the inadequacies of that categorization acknowledged) and, above all, with irrepressible asides and Bandele’s constant, vibrant word-play and conceptual games. There is a bare hint early on that one of the Nigerian characters, ‘Biodun, aka The Heckler, may be gay;21 at the end of the novel this is confirmed, with an account of ‘Biodun’s life with his boyfriend, André, who has died of AIDS , and of his meeting a new boyfriend.22 A point of interest is that through this incident Bandele in no way foregrounds, but establishes almost as an afterthought, the gay identity of one of his central characters, thus normalizing it, or at least denying it any marked significance in itself. Finally, published in the same year as the first edition of Dibia’s novel, Unowa Nguemo Azuah’s novel Sky-High Flames23 is centred on a sensitive exploration of lesbian affect. It is too early to say whether Walking with Shadows will encourage a new openness among Nigerian writers on the subject of same-sex sexuality (in the same way as interchanges among young writers in post-apartheid South Africa have helped encourage the conviction that anyone, from whatever background, is free to write about anything). Certainly, the novel has received a great deal of publicity in the Nigerian press (albeit some of its prurient24) and

18

For a detailed account of the character and role of Golder, see Chris Dunton, “‘ Wheyting be Dat?’: The Treatment of Homosexuality in African Literature,” Research in African Literatures 20.3 (Autumn 1989): 422–48, and, especially, Neville Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006): 82–129. 19 Vintage Promise, In the Middle of the Night (Lagos: Oracle, 2003). 20 Biyi Bandele, The Street (London: Picador, 1999). 21 Bandele, The Street, 14. 22 The Street, 273–78. 23 Unowa Nguemo Azuah, Sky-High Flames (Baltimore M D : PublishAmerica, 2005). 24 Here is one example, scarily deft in its synthesis of disclaimer and innuendo: “Mr. Jude Dibia, the author of Walking with Shadows, denies sharply he is Adrian Njoko, the major character in his first ever published novel. Adrian is gay. Jude is not, or he claims not to be. [. . .] Still, readers can’t help wondering whether the writer has not injected a bit of himself into the first completely

120

CHRI S D UNT ON

ጓ

Dibia is frequently invited to speak by the Nigerian media and on the publicreading scene. There is little evidence of a new openness to date, though one work worth citing is Sanya Osha’s 2011 novel Dust, Spittle and Wind.25 This begins by locating same-sex sexuality as an outcome of enforced separation from the other sex (as does much of the pejorative work of earlier decades); confined to a male military hostel, the narrator observes: some lads took to emergency homosexuality. In fact one day Olu Ray [the central character] was going to another building to see a friend when he stumbled through a door and saw two naked muscular and handsome guys having a go at it. Fortunately he had a camera with him and asked if he could capture their most climactic moment for posterity.26

Later in the novel, however, a tender relationship develops between Olu Ray and another man that is projected as having the potential to become truly loving, were it not for the failure of Olu to understand what is going on, and the death of the other character (one might argue, of course, that the text can have it no other way). The major setting of Walking with Shadows is Lagos (with a few retroversions set in rural Nigeria). What is notable is how far removed Dibia’s account of the city is from that in the bulk of ‘third-generation’ novels: the dominant recognition here is of the range of facilities the city offers to those who are economically privileged.27 homosexual character in Nigerian fiction”; Mike Jimoh, “Review of Walking with Shadows,” Sunday Sun (Lagos) (11 September 2005): 38. The reviewer has apparently not stumbled across Joe Golder. 25 Sanya Osha, Dust, Spittle and Wind (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Research and Publishing, 2011). 26 Osha, Dust, Spittle and Wind, 8. 27 Dibia has returned to same-sex sexual relationships as a component in his subject-matter more recently in his short story “Driver” (Sentinel Nigeria [December 2011], sentinelnigeria.org /online/issue-8-november-2011/…driver/ [accessed 21 November 2011]). This opens as follows: “‘ My master fucks men.’ These were the first words Gabriel Achimota heard when he entered the drivers’ waiting room [. . .] The speaker was Ade Enunla; he was assigned to Jide Macauley. He was Jide’s driver” (1). As the drivers discuss their respective masters’ inconsiderateness and peccadilloes, Gabriel comments: “Now, with Ade Enunla’s statement there was a massive shift in the equation of things. This was serious talk, no longer within the limits of jokes but tethering on the premise of permanently destroying a man’s reputation” (4). The evidence for Ade’s charge is that he has a friend who will do anything for money, including having sex with Jide (he shares the money with Ade, his procurer). After this opening scene, the remaining twelve pages of the story go off in a different direction, as Gabriel colludes in a brutal car-hijacking in which his master is robbed: so that the initial emphasis – distancing from the callousness of the masters – is modified.

ጓ The Thrust of the City

121

Dibia’s ground-breaking achievement in the context of Nigerian literature is to have produced a novel of considerable power and tenderness in which it is the verbal and physical abuse inflicted on Adrian, the central character, that readers are invited to distance themselves from, not his sexual orientation. This is most evident in a sequence in which Adrian receives a message on his office computer reading “‘ T H E Y K N O W W H A T Y O U A R E T H E Y K N O W W H A T Y O U A R E ’.”28 Following this, Adrian’s driver, Rotimi, a homosexual who is in love with him, asks to kiss him, but Adrian is too traumatized to respond positively and to take up the love he is being offered. In an episode added to the novel’s second edition to provide thematic enrichment, Dibia gives Rotimi’s back-story, including his first, schooldays’, encounter with a homosexual: “He recalled that as he opened his eyes after ejaculating, Ella [a fellow schoolboy] stood inches away from him, his eyes fixed on his now-deflated penis.” 29 Dibia’s second novel, Unbridled, is largely set in London, but with extended retroversions set in Lagos. Here the terrain is more familiar, with references to traffic jams, power and water outages, trigger-happy policemen, and the harassment of trade unionists. At one point the narrator comments: “I just hate this country […] one day, I would leave this Godforsaken place.”30 With reference to what I shall have to say about Blackbird, it is interesting that, of Dibia’s three novels to date, Unbridled is the only one to have a female central character – who narrates – and the only one in which the narrator is intra- rather than extradiegetic: that is, one who takes part in the material (or fabula) from which the story is worked up. In the same vein of castigating the marginalization and dispossession of the Nigerian masses, a little later a trade unionist comments on his government’s disregard for the suffering of workers and its pursuit of its own selfish, self-aggrandizing agenda, asserting: “If not for us the government will keep doing what they like until the common man cannot survive in this country.”31 With Dibia’s third novel, Blackbird, we are in the hellish side of Lagos from the outset. The opening lines are a set of instructions to a trio of hitmen: “Get For present purposes, and with reference to Dibia’s construction of narrative form, the interest lies in the fact that, while Gabriel remains the focalizer throughout the story, empathy is generated first with respect to the drivers and then shifted to the masters, including, by extension, the apparently rapacious homosexual. In what ends as a delicate balancing of distancing and empathy, Gabriel’s use of the term “equation” takes on a challenging degree of relevance. 28 Dibia, Walking with Shadows, 169. 29 Walking with Shadows, 187. 30 Dibia, Unbridled, 79. 31 Unbridled, 83.

CHRI S D UNT ON

122

ጓ

into the house. She will be alone. Finish her!”32 Led by the character Scorpion, and fuelled by gin and marijuana and the promise of rape, the three stagger by the detritus cast up by the lagoon: “a seagull’s skull, uncapped beer bottles, horse scat, empty packets of cigarettes, the left foot of a size twelve shoe, a dead army of used condoms” (14). Everything is degraded: even the full moon resembles “a suspended piece of Trebor peppermint” (14). Yet within a few minutes’ drive they are at the gates of an expensive, guarded housing estate: The lawns were well tended, the streets looked like one could eat off them [...]. There was not even a stray dog in sight. It still surprised Scorpion that only fifteen minutes separated chaos from harmony. He sighed; this was the country they lived in. (16)

In another standard notation of the contemporary Lagos novel, the military officer in command of the guards recognizes Scorpion and lets the killers in. The first reference to Scorpion’s penis follows: as the woman they are to kill screams, “Scorpion felt the meat between his thighs stir, as if it was a man in coma, shocked back to consciousness, some lava from the underworld crossing back into life” (18): a passage that anticipates later references to Scorpion’s diabolical virility – references that will consolidate the motif of penis-fixation. The second chapter introduces the novel’s main character, Omoniyi, welleducated but jobless and alienated from his wife, Maya, who has started working in order to pay their sons’ medical bills, her silent accusation of Omoniyi being understood by him to be “You are not a man” (22, emphasis in original). In a retroversion, the younger Omoniyi is described as “by far the most beautiful boy around [with] an androgynous masculinity which made his good looks delicate. Some may call it a dangerous beauty” (26). That phrase “some may call it” alerts us to the indeterminate focalization that renders this novel both fascinating and problematic (I am using the term focalization as explicated by Mieke Bal in her book Narratology – where this is understood as “the relationship between the ‘vision,’ the agent that sees, and that which is seen.”33) Bal further comments that focalization, “the relation between who perceives and what is perceived, ‘colours’ the story with subjectivity” (8). In the passage quoted here, what kind of subjectivity is it that colours androgyny and delicacy as being “dangerous”? This would appear to be a heterodiegetic interpolation, operating on the level of Communication I; the effect is to set up a shockwave of speculation regarding the issue of sexual vulnerability.

32 33

Dibia, Blackbird, 13. Further page references are in the main text. Bal, Narratology, 149.

ጓ The Thrust of the City

123

I shall proceed by giving a brief plot summary of Blackbird, then return to accounting for it as an archetypal third-generation Lagos novel, before moving on to discuss the issue of penis-fixation, in which respect Blackbird is not archetypal at all. After the opening chapters, already described, Dibia introduces two further major characters, the British hotel manager Edward and his Nigerian wife Nduesoh. In what is at first a two-stranded narrative development, Omoniyi’s wife Maya finds work at the hotel as a singer while Omoniyi becomes involved with Scorpion, the gangster introduced in the opening episode. Scorpion lives in a shanty town, of which we are told – pace the Second Law – “it has its own lost soul and palpable body; its own life […]. Once you set foot in Underground City, you felt its touch and its breath on you” (105); Kaye Whiteman notes of the brutal clearance of such a slum, a locus classicus in modern Lagos history: Maroko [...] was undoubtedly illegal, unsanitary and an eyesore [...] but it still had that sense of community found in shantytowns [...]. Its destruction was a very emotional story that captured the imagination of writers [such as Nwosu and Soyinka].34

Edward gives Maya a room in the hotel for her family, since they have been evicted from their own. Omoniyi also gets a job there and recognizes that Edward is besotted with Maya; meanwhile, he is seduced by Nduesoh, who is attracted to his beauty but also sees him as a means of preventing Edward from having an affair with Maya. At Omoniyi’s request, Scorpion is given a room by Nduesoh, who uses him to spy on Edward. The denouement is catastrophic, with multiple deaths brought about by the violence of Scorpion and of a police raid on the hotel. The novel’s depiction of Lagos is built on a handful of key recognitions. Early on, a wealthy American comments on a slum that is due to be cleared to make way for a Free Trade Zone: “you have a growing population of – let’s just say the wrong kind of people – living at such close proximity to people like us,” to which a Lagos chief responds: “And what would you propose we do – Get rid of them just like rodents?” (49–50). The majority of Lagosians, like Omoniyi, live a “barely-there existence” (56; emphasis in original); they have no protection – of the rapacious police force, one character comments “Dem supposed to dey protect common man” but “Dem thief power” (70). Government anti-poverty campaigns, generally spearheaded with much publicity by the First Lady, are a cynical farce (134). Increasingly, “it was quite easy to see that an uprising was brewing […]. It was no longer concealed, this hatred […] the majority harboured 34

Whiteman, Lagos, 99–100.

124

CHRI S D UNT ON

ጓ

against the ruling class” (116); only, mass unrest never quite coalesces, in part because the repressive state apparatus is so formidable. Penis fixation re-emerges in the text when Omoniyi first re-encounters Scorpion, who was his protector when they were schoolboys. Admiring Scorpion’s expensive watch, he is reminded of a colonial clock-tower: “a phallic reminder of the pre-eminence of the old world order” (65), which Nigeria’s neocolonial government and its beneficiaries – as in South Africa, the tiny minority who enjoy Black Economic Empowerment – have enthusiastically embraced. During this encounter, Omoniyi is not sure “if he was impressed or repulsed by the rippling mass of muscle, tattoos and scars that marked [Scorpion’s] body,” while for his part all Scorpion sees in Omoniyi is “beauty and vulnerability” (67). Thematically, the trend is set, the penis identified with the kind of control that eludes Omoniyi and with the invulnerability of those who wield power – both those in the state apparatus and those (such as Scorpion) who are outside it but who are complicit with the overarching moral disorder. When, later, Omoniyi visits Scorpion in his room in Underground City, he finds “crouched between his legs […] a young woman with his cock in her mouth” (109). He is fixated on the massive size of Scorpion’s penis and yet “disgusted” by the gangster’s lack of concern for privacy; when Scorpion momentarily leaves the room, although invited to do so Omoniyi cannot bear to sit in his chair, presumably through fear of a symbolic transference of Scorpion’s virility. With Nduesoh’s seduction of Omoniyi, “He tried to take control, to put up a sort of defense, but […] she would not let him, proving to be the more aggressive of the two” (217). A double focalization now occurs, the one nestling in the other: “He watched this drama detachedly, as if it weren’t happening to him, but to someone else” (218). Like Omoniyi with Scorpion, Nduesoh is fascinated by Omoniyi’s penis: “he felt her slowly encircling its head, seemingly intrigued by its unprotected vulnerability” (219) – the term “seemingly” here accommodates the same kind of slippery, unfixable focalization seen in the phrase “Some may call it” quoted above. In one of the passages in the novel that could qualify for the annual Bad Sex Writing award, we read of Nduesoh that “she felt the more than generous length and thickness of the housekeeper [Omoniyi] embedded in her” – and then, one of many passages of double focalization, where a watcher is watched, in losing control and debasing herself with the housekeeper, [Nduesoh] gained the most control she had ever wielded [...] she had wanted to see the look on [Omoniyi’s] face as she straddled him. (220)

ጓ The Thrust of the City

125

The salacious element in this passage – and, more seriously, Nduesoh’s objectification of Omoniyi – prompts recollection of a comment by the South African humorist Chris Roper: “Why should women not think with their clitorises? After all, that is what equality is all about. One person, one objectification.”35 Yet it is difficult not to read this passage as rendering, in effect, a male gaze directed towards male virility, with focalization manipulated to (mis)attribute that gaze to a female character. As Bal comments, “the narrative voice associates, then disassociates itself from, characters who are temporarily focalizing.”36 And again, “the character must have both the time to look and a reason to look at an object” (42): how to apply this observation to a novel in which the penis is repeatedly stared at, mostly by a male character? Shortly after this episode, Scorpion arrives at the hotel and there occurs one of the novel’s major retroversions, to Omoniyi and Scorpion’s shared boyhood, which fuses with the impact on Omoniyi of his seduction. In boyhood, Scorpion orders Omoniyi to strip naked, like himself, to teach him how to wrestle. “Omoniyi’s admiration for his friend’s body made him conscious of how uncertain he felt about his own” (230). This notion is developed over several pages, with a painstaking description of the shape of Scorpion’s penis and of Omoniyi’s wish to touch it and his embarrassment at his own arousal, which he doesn’t wish Scorpion to see (this watcher watches compulsively, but is frightened of being watched). The episode with Nduesoh and Omoniyi’s memory of boyhood now combines in a subjective and internal retroversion, one that “occurs within the time span of the primary fabula”;37 Omoniyi felt that [Nduesoh] had taken away his power [...] Scorpion was power. His virility was potent; potent enough to have excited Omoniyi all those years past; potent enough to have given Omoniyi an erection and to have delivered him. (234–35)

Now comes a passage suggesting welcome for the idea of transference: Omoniyi was intoxicated by Scorpion’s body; he wanted to wield its concealed power the same way Scorpion’s loins wielded that massive and hooded penis. (235).

Yet this is preceded by the observation, as the internal retroversion continues to function: “Omoniyi wondered if Scorpion knew that the erection he had that

35

Chris Roper, “Marking time with beefcake in the buff,” Mail & Guardian (10–16 February 2012): 10. 36 Bal, Narratology, 29. 37 Narratology, 89.

126

CHRI S D UNT ON

ጓ

night had nothing to do with him nursing38 any sexual fantasy about him” – a passage that prompts the question, to borrow a phrase from a Denis Hirson novel: if “not, not, well then what, what?”39 This is the point at which Omoniyi decides to help Scorpion secure a room at the hotel, an act that leads to the novel’s bloody denouement, including the death of Nduesoh. At this point, all the energies of the novel rush into one place – a site typifying the greed and brute force the elite employ to ravage the metropolis – and, as the hotel acts as the vortex into which these energies pour, the building quite literally explodes. As he makes his decision to assist Scorpion, Omoniyi realizes: “Scorpion had come to him for help. Scorpion was surrendering to him. And like the night in the bushes, Omoniyi felt his penis hardening.” A final passage on Scorpion’s penis comes after the crisis, and here – as if to project its definitiveness? – the narrator turns to the present tense: For [Scorpion and his kind], physical strength and perhaps exhibiting terror is their [means of self-affirmation]. And for a brief while [Omoniyi] senses that he remains captivated by the brilliance of that masculinity – the power it exudes, the beauty of its character and perfected form. (298)

In both of the two last-quoted passages, Omoniyi is entranced by the penis – or perhaps we should say by the phallus: i.e. that notion of penis that incorporates both the much-admired penis of Scorpion and Omoniyi’s own organ, which up until this point (and despite Nduesoh’s “seeming” entrancement by it), he has underestimated. Further, phrases such as “physical strength” and “exhibiting terror” might be applied to the state apparatus just as appropriately as to a hoodlum such as Scorpion. In taking on Scorpion’s penis-power, Omoniyi takes on the kind of thrust that enables his survival, even domination, in Lagos. In enabling Scorpion to penetrate the hotel, he brings about its destruction (it is left as much of a wreck as the slums that are being bulldozed) and the death of Nduesoh, who he feels has emasculated him: the bloody climax being exacerbated, paradoxically, by the violence of the forces of law and order, who are, in the Marxist sense, structurally more Edward and Nduesoh’s protectors than they are Omoniyi’s.40 The thrust of competing energies in Lagos is, then, penile, and the novel’s concluding, 38

An interesting choice of word. Denis Hirson, The Dancing and the Death on Lemon Street (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2011): 168. 40 As Bertolt Brecht puts it, “Behind the gangs of bandits / Follow courts and judges. / [. . .] / The thieves hide the loot they call profit, wrapped up neatly / in paper with a law written on it”; Brecht, The Measures Takes and other Lehrstücke (London: Methuen, 1977): 52. 39

ጓ The Thrust of the City

127

redemptive episode, which focuses on the healing power of women, does not convincingly counterbalance this. Blackbird has throughout its length an “extradiegetic” narrator.41 Yet, to return to a passage from Bal already quoted, “the narrative voice associates, then dissociates itself from, characters who are temporarily focalizing. This is precisely the reason for a consistent distinction between the two […],” though in Blackbird that distinction is very difficult to track. Further, Bal notes, “whenever events are presented, they are always presented from within a certain ‘vision’. A point of view is chosen, a certain way of seeing things, a certain angle.”42 In Blackbird the point of view, the way, the angle, is both distinctive (the narrative has a very powerful “colouring”) and elusive. One is left with an uneasy feeling that the nominal story in this novel is merely that, and what lies beyond it is a story that is not the story being told. As noted above, because of his publication history, Dibia is less well-known outside Nigeria than are other contemporary Nigerian novelists; partly because of the controversial nature of his subject-matter, in Nigeria he is a familiar figure to those with access to internet and to newspapers, appearing in dozens of interviews and reports on cultural activities. While other third-generation Nigerian novelists – most notably Chris Abani – have explored sexuality and body politics in their work, for Dibia this subject-matter is central. Yet in Blackbird it is oddly de-centred and elusive, largely because of the way it is focalized, resulting in a text that is fascinating and viscerally powerful, yet at the same time decidedly schizophrenic.

W OR K S C I T E D Adesanmi, Pius, & Chris Dunton. “Everything Good is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation,” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (Summer 2008): vii–xii. Apolo, Edia. Lagos Na Waa I Swear (Lagos: Heritage, 1982). Azuah, Unowa Nguemo. Sky-High Flames (Baltimore MD : PublishAmerica, 2005). Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2009). Bandele, Biyi. The Street (London: Picador, 1999). Brecht, Bertolt. The Measures Taken and other Lehrstücke (London: Methuen, 1977).

41

Shlomith Rimmon–Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983): 95. 42 Bal, Narratology, 145.

CHRI S D UNT ON

128

ጓ

Dalley, Hamish. “The Idea of ‘Third Generation Nigerian Literature’: Conceptualizing Historical Change and Territorial Affiliation in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel,” Research in African Literatures 44.4 (Winter 2013): 15–34. Dibia, Jude. Blackbird (Lagos: Jalaa, 2011). ——.“Driver,” Sentinel Nigeria (December 2011), sentinelnigeria.org/online/issue-8november-2011/…driver/ (accessed 21 November 2011). ——.Unbridled (2007; Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008). ——.Walking with Shadows (2005; Lagos: Blacksands, 2007). Dunton, Chris. “Energy and Entropy: Lagos as City of Words,” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (Summer 2008): 68–78. ——. “ ‘Wheyting be Dat?’: The Treatment of Homosexuality in African Literature,” Research in African Literatures 20.3 (Autumn 1989): 422–48. Garuba, Harry. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry,” English in Africa 32.1 (May 2005): 51–72. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Cardinal 1988). Hirson, Denis. The Dancing and the Death on Lemon Street (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2011). Hoad, Neville. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2006). Jimoh, Mike. “Review of Walking with Shadows,” Sunday Sun (Lagos; 11 September 2005): 38. Nnolim, Charles. Issues in African Literature (Lagos: Malthouse, 2009). Omotoso, Kole. The Edifice (London: Heinemann Educational, 1971). Onyeama, Dillibe. Sex is a Nigger’s Game (London: Satellite, 1976). Osha, Sanya. Dust, Spittle and Wind (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Research and Publishing, 2011). Promise, Vintage. In the Middle of the Night (Lagos: Oracle, 2003). Rimmon–Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983). Roper, Chris. “Marking time with beefcake in the buff,” Mail & Guardian (10–16 February 2012): 10. Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters (London: André Deutsch, 1965). ——.Season of Anomy (London: Rex Collings, 1973). Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Uzoatu, Uzor Maxim. “Foreword,” in Jude Dibia, Walking with Shadows (Lagos: Blacksands, 2005): 5. Whiteman, Kaye. Lagos: A Cultural and Historical Companion (Oxford: Signal, 2012). Zabus, Chantal. Out in Africa: Same-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literature and Culture (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester NY : James Currey, 2013).

ጓ

The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights in Contemporary African Women’s Writing C HI E L OZ ON A E Z E

Introduction

D

in Europe and America, there was the need to challenge the moral and cultural arrogance of the West, and culture was effectively used as a tool of resistance against imperialism outside Western countries and in their former colonies.1 Even in our times, in the twenty-first century, people still take recourse in arguments that assume a monolithic conception of culture. They resort to relativism to explain issues that require an open, dialogic approach. One prominent example is that of the justification made by Jacob Zuma, the South African President, for his marriage to four women: “That’s my culture. It does not take anything from me, from my political beliefs including the belief in the equality of women.”2 Implicit in Zuma’s answer is the effort to erect in the African world an impermeable culture that can be grasped as authentic, whole, and unchallengeable by what is largely seen as the whims of Western postmodernism. Given recent South African history, one might be tempted to bring a sympathetic understanding to his defence of his culture. But that would not remove the fact that the argument is fraught with moral flaws, the most obvious of which is that it can foreclose questions about the human rights of certain groups or individuals within a given culture like the one he defends. Susan Moller Okin raises similar moral issues in a provocative book3 The problem with 1

URING THE EARL Y YEARS OF M ULT ICUL TURAL ISM

See, for instance, Bhikhu Parekh, “A Varied Moral World,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? ed. Susan Moller Okin (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 69–75. See also Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 2 “Davos 2010: South Africa’s Zuma defends polygamy,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8485730 .stm (accessed 8 June 2011). 3 Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999).

130

CHIEL O ZON A EZE

ጓ

the phrase ‘my culture’ is that it presumes that cultures are bounded wholes and can be used to justify decisions in intersubjective relationships. It thus thrives on the existence of a dualism that feeds off a perceived essential difference between cultures and peoples. To that effect, Homi Bhabha asked a pertinent question: Is our only way out of such dualism the espousal of an implacable oppositionality or the invention of an originary counter-myth or racial purity? Must the project of our liberationist aesthetics be forever part of a totalizing Utopian vision of Being and History that seeks to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representation? 4

I share Bhabha’s concerns. My reading of contemporary African women’s writings suggests that the writers are no longer satisfied with the “liberationist aesthetics” of their literary predecessors and the anti-imperialist rhetoric of most African politicians. Most of the writers have found out in their own bodies and the bodies of their mothers and sisters that the political liberation of Africa from the West did not translate into their own liberation from the traditional and largely oppressive structures of their cultures. They therefore promote the course of introspection, with the goal of calling attention to human rights in Africa. They seek to achieve this goal especially by situating their narratives in the city as a neutral site in which people can enter into ethical relations without the interference of tradition, heritage or other tropes of autochthony. My discussion of the issues just mentioned centres on the works of three contemporary African women writers: the Ugandan Doreen Baingana (Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe); the Nigerian Lola Shoneyin (The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives); and a further Nigerian, Sefi Atta (Everything Good Will Come). These writers conceive of the city as a place where identities and the rigid moral attitudes of the writers’ ancestors are interrogated by the hyperlinks of encounters with persons of other backgrounds. My analyses of the selected texts will be based on their treatment of characters. I will seek to show how the interaction of characters and the city exposes new opportunities for an examination of the human rights of all especially the weaker members of society. I will discuss the main characters’ relations to others, on the one hand, and to the city, on the other. A central question that will guide my discussion is: To what degree does the narrative invite thoughts about human rights? In Tropical Fish, Christine Mugisha travels from Entebbe to Los Angeles and realizes the immense freedom open to her as an individual. 4

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 19.

ጓ The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights

131

In The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Bolanle takes Baba Segi to Ibadan to have him undergo a fertility test. There he discovers that he is not as potent as he had believed. In Everything Good Will Come, Enitan understands Lagos, the archetypal Nigerian metropolis, as a detribalized place where men and women meet on equal ground to fight for their human rights. In these works, the city is a character. Why is it important in the narratives of these women writers?

The City as a Theater of Social Action Lewis Mumford describes the city thus: a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. 5

This description is as relevant today as it was in Mumford’s times, in the 1930s. Though Mumford appears to place emphasis on the role of architecture, his goal is largely ethical. Of particular relevance is the idea of the city as creating the theatre and being that theatre. He argues: it is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations.6

The city as theatre suggests that it is in the city that the drama of human interaction is displayed in all its colorations. But does this mean that the small town, understood as the opposite of the city, is devoid of drama and man’s purposive activities? Is it without ethics? Ryan Poll’s discussion of America’s notion of the small town in the age of globalization suggests that it is an imaginary space, an imagined community onto which the ideals of cohesion, authenticity, innocence, and other traditional narratives are projected.7 The world, understood in small-town paradigms, eschews drama because reality is thought to be predictable. Its narrative follows the known format that usually favours the status quo. What is said of the American small towns applies to African villages in which culture is thought to be a principle that unifies a people. In the African villages, there is an absence of what Saskia Sassen calls a “new politics” that the city 5

Lewis Mumford, “What is a City?” Architectural Record (1937): 94, http://www.contemporary urbananthropology.com/ (accessed 8 June 2014). 6 Mumford, “What is a City?” 94. 7 Ryan Poll, Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2012): 1–10.

132

CHIEL O ZON A EZE

ጓ

provides.8 By new politics, Sassen means the possibility of the interrogation of the order of things that arises when people from different backgrounds interact. For Sassen, Cities are the terrain where people from many different countries are most likely to meet and a multiplicity of cultures come together. The international character of major cities lies not only in their telecommunication infrastructure and international firms; it lies in the many different environments in which these workers exist.9

Sassen’s suggestion that the city provides opportunity for a new politics supports Mumford’s idea about the city as theatre. Relying on Mumford’s and Sassen’s insights, I argue that the African city is the stage on which inherited mythologies are contested and new moral order formed. Whereas, in the villages, people seek to conserve common narratives of identity and politics, the city allows for a renegotiation of the same. The city delivers the stranger to us and urges us to relate.10 The city is a place in which strangers encounter one another. By reappraising the contours of the interpersonal interaction that the city provides, the African women writers draw attention to the dangers of the conventional conception of culture and identity for the weaker members of society. Part of the understanding of the city as theatre is its unpredictability, particularly with regard to culture. When people from diverse backgrounds interact, there is bound to be tension, which could be creative. The tension of the city gives birth to something new.11 I use the concept of hyperculturality as a term that rightly captures the tensions, challenges, and moral topographies of modern (African) metropolises. As Mumford suggests, it is in the city that the drama of human interaction is played out, and this assumes new ethics and politics. I interpret the ethics provided by the city as a call for human rights. My understanding of human rights is based on a general interpretation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “all human 8 Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: The De-Nationalizing of Times and Space,” http://chtodelat .org/b8-newspapers/12-62/saskia-sassen-the-global-city-the-de-nationalizing-of-time-and-space/ (accessed 8 June 2014). 9 Sassen, “The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier,” American Studies 41.2–3 (Summer–Fall 2000): 89. 10 I use the word “deliver” in the sense that David Palumbo-Liu implies. See The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2012). 11 James Clifford discusses the ever-changing contours of culture and argues that every travel and contact with others leaves its imprint on a culture; it changes the culture. See Clifford, “Traveling Cultures” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson & Paula A. Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992).

ጓ The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights

133

beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,” and that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”12 Jack Donnelly argues that to think about human rights is to think about how abstract values affect one’s relation to others: i.e. how values are translated into social practices;13 it is to provide answers to the question: What are other people to me? It makes no difference whether this other is my relative or a stranger. I understand the abstract, universal values expressed in the U N Declaration of Human Rights to mean that the core idea of human rights lies in treating people as ends, not as means to one’s ends. The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that “it is not the idea of Trans-, inter- or multi-, but that of hyper- that defines the exact contours of modern culture.”14 To explain his notion of hyperculturality, Han relies on the theory of hypertext promoted by the American sociologist Ted Nelson. Hypertexts, to be sure, are displays of texts on electronic devices with links to other texts. There is, therefore, on the computer screen, a wide array of interconnected worlds that can be summoned by a mouse-click. For Nelson, “the world is hypertextual. Hypertextuality is the true structure of things. Everything is […] deeply intertwingled.”15 Han suggests that if culture has now taken the shape of reality on the computer screen, if everything is interconnected and within my reach via a mouse-click, then “no history, theology or teleology can capture it as a homogenous, meaningful whole.”16 Strictly speaking, “the boundaries that have otherwise defined cultural authenticity or autochthony dissolve.” 17 There12

United Nations, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” The United Nations, 1948, www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ 13 Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca NY : Cornel U P , 2003): 11. 14 Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung (Berlin: Merve, 2005): 17. “Nicht das Gefühl des Trans-, Inter- oder Multi-, sondern das des Hyper- gibt exakter die Räumlichkeit der heutigen Kultur wieder.” (My tr.) 15 Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, 15. “Ted Nelson, der Erfinder des Hypertexts, sieht diesen nicht auf der Ebene des digitalen Textes beschränkt. Die Welt selbst ist hypertextuell. Die Hypertextualität ist die ‘wahre Struktur der Dinge’. ‘Everything is’, so Nelsons berühmtes Wort, ‘deeply intertwingled’. “Alles ist mit allem verknotet oder vernetzt.” (My tr.) 16 Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, 16. “Die Kultur verliert zunehmend jene Struktur, die der eines konventionellen Textes oder Buches gleicht. Keine Geschichte, keine Theologie, keine Teleologie läஒt sie als eine sinnvolle, homogene Einheit erscheinen.” (My tr.) 17 Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, 16. “Die Grenzen oder Umzäunungen, denen der Schein einer kulturellen Authentizität oder Ursprünglichkeit aufgeprägt ist, lösen sich auf.” (My tr.)

134

CHIEL O ZON A EZE

ጓ

fore, nothing marks a particular culture as exclusively belonging to a particular space or person. This suggests that even that particular culture has been touched by other influences, and its forms can be practised in other places by other people. For Han, The world, understood as hypertextual is made up of uncountable windows, none of which opens to an absolute horizon […] That world makes it possible for an individual narrative and an individual conception of existence to exist. Where horizon dissolves to multicolored possibility, it is possible to put together a particular identity. In place of a monochromatic self there emerges a multicolored self.18

In the face of the multiplicity of horizons that the hypercultural world offers, identity can no longer be defined with the tropes of blood and soil. Indeed, culture ceases to be an identity marker, because it is no longer traceable to a single place. Just as culture has become hyper and delocalized, so has identity lost its one-dimensional conceptual format. Everything is negotiable. In this constellation, ethics replaces culture as a determinant of identity. What counts are no longer our cultural or ethnic backgrounds, but how we relate to other people.19 The city as a theatre of social action, unlike the village, provides a unique opportunity for the realization of the conditions of hyperculturality.

The Ethical Promises of the City in African Narratives The story “Lost in Los Angeles”20 is about Christine, a young Ugandan woman, who leaves her native country for the U SA . In Los Angeles, she has the feeling that she is lost, yet after a while, she comes to the realization that being lost might, after all, not be a negative thing. In one of the important scenes, she is among her countrymen and -women, and she observes that their attitudes to one another are still controlled by archaic, patriarchal paradigms. After supper, 18

Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, 54. “Die hypertextuell verfasste Welt besteht gleichsam aus unzähligen Fenstern. Keines der Fenster öffnet aber einen absoluten Horizont [. . .] Es gewährt die Möglichkeit einer individuellen Narration, eines individuellen Daseinsentwurfes. Wo der Horizont zur vielfarbigen Möglichkeit zerfällt, kann man aus dieser eine Identität zusammenstückeln. An die Stelle eines monochromen Selbst tritt ein vielfarbiges Selbst, ein colored Self.’ (My tr.) 19 This, of course, does not negate the role of history in a person’s self-reading, nor does it discount history in general. It simply means that history is no longer a sole determinant of identity. 20 I have discussed Doreen Baingana’s short story “Lost in Los Angeles” elsewhere in a different context. For the purpose of situating my argument about the city as a neutral space for negotiations in matters of intersubjective relation, I wish to restate some of the arguments I made there.

ጓ The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights

135

the women begin to clear the dishes. Christine does not help – just as the men do not help. It is then that the single men take note of her un-African self and cancel her “off their lists.”21 The men obviously see the women only in their roles as servers and as subservient to men. But Christine also rejects them and what they represent; she is able to do so because the world of the metropolis in which she finds herself has freed her from the roles that her Ugandan patriarchal world had foreseen for her. Baingana posits Los Angeles as an alternative to Ugandan villages. Her emphasis is on the ethical possibilities open to her characters. Los Angeles is the theatre on whose stage Christine seeks to liberate herself from the narrow authenticist constructs of her Ugandan world. In Los Angeles, she can define herself. She now has alternative perspectives from which she questions the men’s supposed privileges. Christine’s moral world functions on the assumption of equality between men and women. The incident with her Ugandan male compatriots allows Christine to constantly re-evaluate the ideals guiding her world. She no longer takes anything for granted. In another incident, she works for the American oil company ARCO ; she is the only African in that area. She observes people from other ethnicities going about their business and paying hardly attention to her. This allows her to be who she wants to be. She knows they cannot judge her; she cannot be who they are. And she thinks to herself: “Nor do I want to be; there is nothing I need to be, here. Being lost is freeing.”22 The phrase, “there is nothing I need to be” points to the liberatory function of the city in her life. The village, by contrast, is a place where people “need to be” something – they need to play their assigned roles. Christine understands the freedom gained from being in a metropolis as the freedom to create herself because she is not hampered by a common mythology grounded in culture. The same argument is reframed by Iggy, one of the characters in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames. In Los Angeles, there is only “you and what you see and imagine this place and your life in it to be.”23 Abani goes on to explore Los Angeles as a quintessential global city just as he explored Lagos in his earlier novel, Graceland (2004).24 These cities can be seen as sites for opportunities to encounter human beings – not through the

21

Doreen Baingana, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003):

107. 22

Baingana, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe, 115. Chris Abani, The Virgin of Flames (New York: Penguin, 2007): 207. 24 For a discussion of Lagos as a global city in Chris Abani’s Graceland, see Chielozona Eze, “Cosmopolitan Solidarity: Negotiating Transculturality in Contemporary Nigerian Novels,” English in Africa (Spring 2005): 99–112. 23

CHIEL O ZON A EZE

136

ጓ

binoculars of nativist, ethnic or racial mythologies, but largely in hypercultural formats. Like Baingana, Lola Shoneyin is interested in the ethical possibilities open to her characters. She wonders why women cannot have more opportunities to define themselves in ways that go beyond the monochromatic model created for them by their patriarchal cultures. In her Orange Prize-nominated debut novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, four women, Iya Segi, Iya Tope, Iya Femi, and Bolanle are married to one man, Ishola, known as Baba Segi. Ishola is confident in his virility and standing as a patriarch. The apparent barrenness of Bolanle, his beloved and educated fourth wife, causes him much concern, and, in the course of a series of medical tests, he learns that he is, indeed, not as virile as he had claimed. His three other wives had, unbeknownst to him, solved the problems of childbearing in their own unique, crafty ways. But Bolanle insists that Baba Segi go for a test, which can be performed only in Ibadan, a city. When Bolanle insists that she and Baba Segi go for a test, she not only subjects the patriarch to the laws of science but also exposes him to modernity and hyperculturality in the city. Their journey to the city has at least one implication: the patriarch exits the village setting which had been the traditional space of his authority. In the city, a theatre of social action and a space that is not as homogeneous as the village setting, the patriarch will be exposed to forces that will effectively challenge his self-perception. The truth about his impotence will be made known. The basis on which his power rests will therefore no longer hold. Shoneyin layers her story in such a way that before the ultimate truth of Baba Segi’s impotence is known, his otherwise fixed, traditional notion of the world is made to collide with idioms from other parts of the world. He is tested by two doctors not from his ethnic group. Dr Dibia is Igbo;25 his assistant, Dr Usman, is Hausa.26 Shoneyin suggests that Baba Segi’s reality can no longer be judged in the conventional Yorùbá terms he has been used to. His reality is now hypercultural: i.e. it now has links to the outside world. This is made possible by his contact with the city. In order to check Baba Segi’s sperm-count, the doctors subject him to a ritual that would have been unimaginable in his traditional world. He is made to watch a pornographic video. In the first part of the video he watches a man, probably white, dip his tongue into a blond woman’s pubis. That is otherwise an abomination for an African, patriarchal mind, but Baba

25 26

Shoneyin, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, 214. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, 219.

ጓ The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights

137

Segi is “both surprised and disgusted that his member responded.”27 The second part of the video features a naked Chinese man, and a woman dancing around a pole. The Chinese man grabs his penis and strokes it. Baba Segi imitates him.28 The success of Shoneyin’s narrative coup resides in the moment at which Baba Segi’s body responds to the nakedness of European and Asian bodies. He is contaminated in the truest sense of the word by this involuntary intimacy with these otherwise foreign bodies.29 Thus, his world has been permeated and effectively disturbed by elements from other cultures. His otherwise purist structures collapse, particularly when he later learns that he is not the biological father of his children – not the patriarch he has always touted himself to be. Shoneyin’s interrogation of patriarchy enables a redrawing of the order of things. If Baba Segi is not the biological centre of his world, contrary to his claims, how could he be its moral centre? Why should his wives be receiving orders from him? Given that Baba Segi’s argument, his virility, has been deflated by his contact with the world outside of his tradition, there is therefore the need to renegotiate the basis of his moral authority. Rather than his moral trajectory being a one-dimensional affair, it is now multidimensional; it is now a dialogue rather than a diktat. The normative principles of the relationship between a man and a woman no longer lie in the dictates of a certain culture or tradition but, rather, in the ethical demands of intersubjectivity. This, to me, is the consequence of the awareness of our world as a construct, or as a narrative that is made up of strands from differing sources. The typical Zuma excuse “it is my culture” therefore falls apart, given the nature of culture as composite and transitory. And when it falls apart, the individuals involved in the culture step to the fore and begin to define themselves through their relation to others, not through culture. Now that Baba Segi has seen that there is nothing in his world that cannot be negotiated, he is in a better position to finally begin to consider his wives as partners, as individuals with dignity, rather than as objects that help him fulfil the dictates of his culture. Of course, he does not do so. But this is secondary. Of importance is the fact that Shoneyin, like other African women writers of her generation, posits the city as a window onto new horizons, and these include attending to the human rights of women. 27

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, 215. Shoneyin, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, 217 29 I use the word “contamination” in the sense in which it was used by Kwame Anthony Appiah to denote the unavoidable connection that human beings or cultures have with others. See Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 101–13. See also Chielozona Eze, “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 26.2 (2014): 234–47. 28

138

CHIEL O ZON A EZE

ጓ

In Sefi Atta’s novel Everything Good Will Come, women are presented as the custodian of universal ethical norms. The story is about three women, Sheri, Enitan, and Victoria Arinola, Enitan’s mother; these women struggle to save their lives in a world closely guarded by patriarchal norms. Arinola’s world disintegrates when she loses a son, who, she had hoped, would ensure her a permanent place in her husband’s heart and home. Sunny Taiwo, eager to have a male heir, has a concubine who eventually fulfils his wish. The trauma of the loss of her child and Sunny Taiwo’s infidelities is too strong for Arinola to bear; she becomes insane and eventually dies broken-hearted. Another significant incident in the narrative is the rape of Sheri by a group of boys. Failing to recover from the resultant trauma, she learns to cope by being like the rest of the population. Atta raises important questions about the fate of these women. How should we respond to their pains? What should women do in such situations in order to fight extinction? In Everything Good Will Come, Lagos opens new windows for the kind of new politics that Saskia Sassen speaks about in regard to global cities. Victoria Arinola and Sunny Taiwo’s daughter, Enitan, is well educated, and, possessing a good knowledge of her society, she establishes a parallel between the excesses of patriarchy and the abuse of power by the military. Enitan does not succumb to these forces. Rather, she has a new inspiration to fight oppression by entering into solidarity with the other victims of these two forces. She reveals her moral trajectory in her musings about her country, but more specifically about the city in which she was born, and in which she lives. For her, the city is a space that necessarily calls for universal solidarity because it reduces all to a common condition by exposing their vulnerability and negating any nativist claims. She says: “My father was from a town in the middle belt of Nigeria; my mother, from the West. They lived in Lagos. I was born here, raised here.”30 Her musing reveals her as composite. She is aware that she cannot be described as pure, nor can she afford to adopt a tribal attitude in Lagos. Her allegiance is therefore tilted toward a composite, to what is merged. She is disposed to mediate between opposites, to go beyond the one-dimensionality of the world of either/or. This is the source of her understanding of her country that is also a composite of different regions and ethnicities. In this regard, the city is synecdochic of Nigeria as a postcolonial nation, made up of what Mumford has called conflicting and cooperating personalities. It is in Everything Good Will Come that the city truly exhibits its character as a theatre of social action. The section “1995” is about pro-democracy movements 30

Sefi Atta, Everything Good Will Come (Boston M A : Interlink, 2004): 299.

ጓ The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights

139

fighting against the military regime. Enitan had abhorred Peter Mukoro because of his sexism. But Mukoro eventually attracts Enitan’s sympathy for his devotion to democracy. When Mukoro is detained by the army, this detention brings out the good side of Sunny Taiwo, himself an adherent of traditional patriarchal thinking. Sunny, now a victim of military oppression, realizes the need for universal solidarity. He calls for “a national strike”31 and, in so doing, becomes involved in the anti-military movement. The city becomes a catalyst not only for social change but also for the personal interrogation of identity. Solidarity is henceforth understood not along tribal or gender lines, but in the frame of a cosmopolitan model. We begin to understand the workings of Enitan’s mind, and therefore, too, what Sefi Atta does with her narrative when we learn that Peter Mukoro is from an ethnicity different from Enitan’s. He is from the Niger Delta, “the son of an Urhobo farmer.”32 Adversity brings Mukoro and Taiwo together with Enitan, their fiercest critic. Strangers are delivered to one another. The city, a hypercultural space, provides an opportunity for the three to re-align their various moral topographies. This idea of welding a new world is much more apparent when Enitan is imprisoned because of her pro-democracy activities. In prison she and Grace, from different ethnicities, are incarcerated together with other women from various parts of the country.33 Like the city, the prison is another place where individuals are hyperlinked to other individuals. They have to survive together.

Conclusion: Hyperculturality and Moral Topographies in the Age of Globalization The foregoing discussion risks leaving the impression that the city is necessarily a better place than the village. The African women writers, to be sure, do not privilege the city over the village. The city, for them, is a means to unsettle the conventional notions of culture and identity. The Ugandan academic and political commentator Mahmood Mamdani confronts the dangers of authenticist conceptions of culture and identity in Africa, and argues against what he calls bi-polar identities. He enjoins African intelligentsias to actively encourage cultural hybridity: cultural mixing, whether enforced or voluntary, can arise without a biological mixing. From this point of view, I wonder if we should not 31 32 33

Atta, Everything Good Will Come, 193. Everything Good Will Come, 297. Everything Good Will Come, 272.

140

CHIEL O ZON A EZE

ጓ

consider the postcolonial intelligentsia, with one foot in colonial culture and another in that of their ancestors, as culturally creole?34

The main role of creolized postcolonial intelligentsias also consists in debunking the “bipolar identities” that are the core parts of the post-apartheid legacy. By bipolar identities, Mamdani means the ideology of grouping “whites as racial and blacks as ethnic beings,” welding together its beneficiaries – whether Afrikaners, English, German, Greek – into a single identity called white, while fragmenting its victims into so many ethnic minorities.35

Debunking “bipolar identities” and the relativism of African postcolonial cultures invariably reshapes African moral topographies. Charles Taylor used the notion of “moral topography” to designate the structure of the Western sense of self as it has evolved over time. Taylor argues that “what we are as human agents is profoundly interpretation-dependent” and that we exist “essentially in moral space” by means of a master image, a spatial one [and] this inherent spatiality of the self is essentially linked to a moral topography, a sense of where moral source lies. 36

The central idea is that the self is constructed, and the construction is guided by our valuations, our sense of what is good or bad, acceptable or not acceptable. The reality of globalization and world migration is that people can never go back to their supposed origin. The more people interact with one another, whether in cyber- or in geographical spaces, the more their world is perforated with links. They occupy new spaces that influence their valuations. Their windows open not onto an absolute horizon but onto one that yields increased possibilities. This, of course, does not exclude conflict and the formation of new communities or classes.37 But even those communities (of faith, commerce or interest) can no longer lay veritable claim to authenticity. We are therefore 34 Mahmood Mamdani, “There Can Be No African Renaissance Without an Africa-focused Intelligentsia,” in African Renaissance: The New Struggle, ed. Malegapuru William Makgoba (Cape Town: Mafube/Tafelberg, 1999): 129. 35 Mamdani, “There Can Be No African Renaissance Without an Africa-focused Intelligentsia,” 130. 36 Charles Taylor, “The Moral Topography of Self,” in Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory: Interpretive Perspectives on Personality, Psychology and Psychopathology, ed. Stanley B. Messer, Louis A. Sass & Robert L. Woolfolk (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 1989): 299–300. 37 See Peter Marcuse & Ronald van Kempen, “Introduction” to Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?, ed. Marcuse & van Kempen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 1–9.

ጓ The City, Hyperculturality, and Human Rights

141

necessarily already interconnected. In the same vein, the nexus of our relation no longer controlled by a dualism of either/or, good/bad, autochthon/stranger. At the same time as we acknowledge the delocalization of our culture and identity, particularly in the city’s spaces, we are challenged to make room in our lives for the other or the unknown. Hyperculturality reveals to us the contingency of our existence, hence its reliance on the other. It leads us to question absolutism in our valuations and our relation to others. There is an equal demand on the person who sees him- or herself as an autochthon to enter into negotiations with the other such as the migrant or the stranger. The same condition applies to the migrant, who, in the belief of honouring the dictates of multiculturalism, conducts his life in originary, purist paradigms as supposedly practised in his native land. Negotiation implies willingness to give up certain assumptions about life that might stand in the way of weaving a solidarity transcending ethnicity, ‘race’, gender, and religion. It implies the search for what enhances human flourishing. In matters of human rights, empathy can act as a springboard for negotiation. The African women writers who situate their characters in the cities invite us to go beyond the prejudices and myths of racial or tribal allegiance or norms, and to imagine ourselves in the position of women in polygamous marriages, or women who have been raped or denied ownership of property. They invite us to see people as individuals with inviolable dignity.

W OR K S C I T E D Abani, Chris. The Virgin of Flames (New York: Penguin, 2007). Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Atta, Sefi. Everything Good Will Come (Boston MA : Interlink, 2004). Baingana, Doreen. Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe (Amherst: U of Massachusetts, 2003). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson & Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992): 96–116. Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2003). Eze, Chielozona. “Cosmopolitan Solidarity: Negotiating Transculturality in Contemporary Nigerian Novels,” English in Africa (Spring 2005): 99–112. ——. “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 26.2 (2014): 234–47. Han, Byung-Chul. Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung (Berlin: Merve, 2005).

CHIEL O ZON A EZE

142

ጓ

Mamdani, Mahmood. “There Can Be No African Renaissance Without an Africa-focused Intelligentsia,” in African Renaissance: The New Struggle, ed. Malegapuru William Makgoba (Cape Town: Mafube/Tafelberg, 1999): 125–34. Marcuse, Peter, & Ronald van Kempen, ed. Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Mumford, Lewis. “What is a City?” Architectural Record (1937), http://www .contemporary urbananthropology.com/pdfs/Mumford,%20What%20is%20a%20City_.pdf (accessed 8 June 2014). Okin, Susan Moller. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999). Palumbo–Liu, David. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2012). Parekh, Bhikhu. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). ——.“A Varied Moral World,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? ed. Susan Moller Okin (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 69–75. Poll, Ryan. Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization. (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2012). Sassen, Saskia. “The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier,” American Studies 41.2–3 (Summer–Fall 2000): 79–95. ——.“The Global City: The De-Nationalizing of Times and Space,” http://chtodelat.org/b8 -newspapers/12-62/saskia-sassen-the-global-city-the-de-nationalizing-of-time-andspace/ (accessed 8 June 2014). Shoneyin, Lola. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (New York: William Morrow, 2010). Taylor, Charles. “The Moral Topography of Self,” in Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory: Interpretive Perspectives on Personality, Psychology and Psychopathology, ed. Stanley B. Messer, Louis A. Sass & Robert L. Woolfolk (New Brunswick NJ : Rutgers U P , 1989): 298–320.

ጓ

THE ASIAN

AN D

S O UTH AS IAN ME TR OP OLI SES

ON TH E

MOVE

Utopian Sites Re-Inventing the Asian Metropolis B I L L A SHCR OFT

O

N

9 A U G U S T 1965 , Singapore’s independence was marked by a

‘moment of anguish’, by then Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew’s tears at the press conference announcing separation from Malaysia. On 30 June 1997, Hong Kong was handed from one imperial power to another, entering the most ambiguous post-colonial condition of any colonial city. In many ways these two events characterize the subsequent nature of these cities’ identity as postcolonies. All colonies have had to contend with the problems of nation and nationalism after independence, but the people of Singapore and Hong Kong find themselves in a predicament unlike those of any other postcolonial city. Indeed, these two city-states, invented to be strategic and economic hubs, are unique in their populations’ contest with the myth of nation, with their newly authoritarian regimes and with their complicated struggles over language, and the visions of the future they generate. The question this essay asks is: in what way does the literature from these post-colonial cities, financial hubs of global capital, offer a vision of hope grounded in local realities? In particular, what role does the former colonial language play in the complex cultural networks of these cities? Singapore and Hong Kong are colonial inventions, fishing villages appointed to be trading hubs in the Empire’s spread across the world. This is true of many colonial cities, but no others have been founded so manifestly as centres of the global economy, and this raises quite peculiar problems with their populations’ relationship to history, culture, and place. Singapore is a settler nation in which the majority of people are not descendants of the white colonial settlers but of Chinese colonized migrants. It has no deep cultural and economic past that was erased by the colonial power. It began life as a city-state in completely modernist terms of statehood. Its cultural symbol, the chimerical Merlion, initially

146

BILL ASH CR OFT

ጓ

devised by the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board, and installed in 1972, is more Disneyland than cultural mythology. Similarly, Hong Kong has no deep cultural or economic past that was erased by colonialism; rather, refugees transported that past to it from South China, with which its population has no abiding affiliation. Established by the British, Hong Kong is a lingering reminder of the era of Treaty ports in China and a city that, on the one hand, is populated almost entirely by Cantonese speakers, who maintain their own sense of cultural integrity. On the other hand, it is a city that continues to exist for the purpose for which it was founded – a hub of trade and international finance. Consequently, Singapore and Hong Kong present unfamiliar terrain for postcolonial analysis and their literatures have, until recently, flown below the radar of post-colonial studies. But it is their ambiguous relationship with national mythology and the suddenness of their absorption into the fabric of global capitalism that set them apart. The critical feature of post-colonial cities is that they are both the initial stage and the microcosm of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism has set in motion. In this respect, Singapore and Hong Kong share the dynamic mobility that characterizes all postcolonial cities. But the city is not usually the nation itself, a fact that normally allows it a discrepant relationship to nationalist authoritarianism not so easily available to city-states. One of the reasons the city has been neglected by post-colonial studies is that it seems to sit outside the contest between nation and empire. Myths of nation are always located in the rural heartland and the city seems to lack any distinguishing national identity even though the writers and artists who perpetuate these myths live in cities. A classic example is the way in which the Bombay film industry seared the rural image of Mother India on the national consciousness in the film of that name. But because Singapore and Hong Kong have always existed purpose-built as strategic points in the web of empire, this has generated their particular problems with cultural and national identity. Not having a rural myth of nation, they have had to either invent or appropriate their mythology. Singapore’s myth involves the thirteenth-century shipwreck of Prince Sang Nila Utama or Sri Tri Buana on an island on which he discovered a lion-like animal. Believing this to be an auspicious sign, he decided to found a settlement called Singapura, which means ‘Lion City’ in Sanskrit. Consequently, the tourist image of the Merlion has come to stand for an invented historical myth of nation. Hong Kong’s mythology is even more ambiguous; because it has no national myth of its own, the trajectory of its creative arts since 1997 has been towards an appropriation of Chinese ancient history. The difference between Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 film Chung King Express – a brilliant evocation of Hong

ጓ Utopian Sites

147

Kong life – and his latest martial arts film The Grandmaster demonstrates comprehensively the economic and cultural value of Chinese mythology to Hong Kong. Yet the attitude of Hong Kong people to China is deeply ambivalent. Empirical studies have revealed a paradoxical dualism – deep suspicion towards the central government, and a strong attraction to Chinese antiquity.1

Transnational City, Transnation, Utopian Vision As well as being global hubs, Singapore and Hong Kong are transitional spaces, spaces of flow, both either geographically or metaphorically islands, both forms of city-state, societies in which writers must contend in different ways with authoritarian regimes: Singapore with a paternalistic (and virtually) one-party state and Hong Kong with an imperium centred in Beijing. Yet their flows occur on at least two levels, one being that of the global economy – a level that never seems to touch the ground, and the other that of place, the level of people, who experience the consequences but few of the benefits of global finance. Somewhat astonishingly, the Prime Minister of Singapore, Goh Chok Tong, in a 1999 National Day Rally speech endorsed this distinction in derogatory fashion as a distinction between cosmopolitan citizens and “heartlanders”: One group I call the “cosmopolitans”, because their outlook is international. They speak English but are bilingual […]. They produce goods and services for the global market […]. The other group, the heartlanders, make their living within the country. Their orientation and interests are local rather than international. Their skills are not marketable beyond Singapore. They speak Singlish […].2

This goes a long way towards explaining how Singaporeans might see themselves today as stuck in an interstitial space between the global and the national, a space defined in terms of class. While Goh framed it as an implicit distinction between the rural past and the cosmopolitan future, it corresponds to two ways of conceiving the nation, which I term the transnational and the transnation.3 The class dimension of cosmopolitanism is one reason for wariness about the term. Goh saw clearly that the ‘international’ was the domain of 1

Anthony Fung, “Postcolonial Hong Kong Identity: Hybridising the Local and the National,” Social Identities 10.3 (2004): 399–414. 2 Quoted in Angela Mui Cheng Poon, “Constructing the Cosmopolitan Subject: Teaching Secondary School Literature in Singapore,” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 30.1 (2010): 36. 3 Bill Ashcroft, “Transnation,” in Re-Routing the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (London: Routledge, 2010): 72–85.

BILL ASH CR OFT

148

ጓ

the educated ‘cosmopolitan’ elite. Although Singapore is characterized by a widespread desire to enter this cosmopolitan club of wealth and privilege, access to it is denied to a large section of the society, a stratum that despite its occupation of the ‘transnation’ exists below the official political discourse of the city-state. The transnation is the fluid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation, and the role of literature is extremely important in communicating and extending its operations. It apprehends the actual multiplicity of subject-positions that are closed down by the homogenizing ideology of the state. The transnational city is the global hub, the economic and judicial centre, quite distinct from the transnation, because “effective participation in transnationality is restricted for the most part to the elite in various societies.”4 More than any other post-colonial cities, both Singapore and Hong Kong demonstrate the actual distinction between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘transnation’. But there is a further distinction characterized by the contest between a repressive government and the fluid circulation of peoples it administers. The efforts of government to pacify the Singapore population are demonstrated in the close attention paid by Lee Kwan Yew to the English educated. In the words of Singapore’s first foreign minister, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, Lee wanted to leave the “anticolonial nationalism” of independence struggle behind for a “new nationalism” of political quietism in which the people must be “prepared for sustained work, self-denial and for considerable sacrifice.”5 The most interesting thing about Lee’s admonition is that it was directed particularly at the English educated elite, a fact that exposes the strangely subversive potential of the colonial language in Singapore. The result of this “quietist nationalism” was intolerance towards dissent, as Kirpal Singh observes: You cautioned me against being frank Ours, you said, was not a society Tolerant of robust, opposing views We prefer, you advised More public agreement, less public argument.6

4

Arif Dirlik, “Culture Against History? The Politics of East Asian Identity,” Development and Society 28.2 (December 1999): 47. 5 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, “Untitled Speech,” in The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam, ed. Heng Chee Chan & Obaid ul Haq (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1968): 141, 145. 6 Kirpal Singh, “At Lake Balaton” (2004), in Rajeev S. Patke, Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2006): 77.

ጓ Utopian Sites

149

“Public agreement” is a characteristically Singaporean strategy of national homogenization. Singh’s rather mild reflection is a subtle reference to the hysterical reaction that attends any robust critique of government, even from opposition politicians, many of whom have been bankrupted by defamation suits. An example of this hysteria was the arrest and imprisonment of sixteen people on 21 May 1987, mostly members of, or having close connections to, activist groups associated with the Catholic Church. Their crime was an alleged conspiracy to create a ‘Marxist Regime’ in Singapore through the infiltration of civil-society organizations.7 Many, if not most, colonies, on obtaining independence, appear to revert to the oppressive strategies of the colonial state. While this is more familiar in Africa, where writers are gaoled regularly for criticism of their governments, the response of moral panic to the appearance of liberation theology in Singapore is evidence of the fragile sense of state autonomy in this post-colonial metropolis. The arrests and subsequent detention of the activists were carried out through a juridically sanctioned process that did not involve a public trial. The circulation of newspapers that had commented on the affair was restricted and a number of people not connected to the alleged conspiracy were gaoled. The affair has been the subject of two novels, Gopal Baratham’s A Candle in the Sun and Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madam Mao, which demonstrate the subtle but limited ways in which novelistic narrative can contest state power.8 The function of literature in English in this situation is paradoxical, for while it appears at first glance to be a medium of the educated elite, it alerts us to the peculiarly insurgent role played by literature and particularly by the local variety of English. A more recent example of Singapore’s governing hysteria was the arrest of the British author Alan Shadrake on charges of criminal defamation and contempt after the release of his book Once a Jolly Hangman, which criticized Singapore’s application of the death penalty. This shows, among other things, the fear that literature of any kind can arouse in oppressive states. A law professor at the National University of Singapore, Tey Tsung Hang, was gaoled on trumped-up charges and dismissed from the University after publishing articles critical of the Singapore legal system. In some respects, despite its flagrant contravention of democratic processes, this can be seen to be an example of the ‘transnational’ identity of Singapore, because its fear of conspiracy is a function 7

Philip Holden, “Writing Conspiracy: Race and rights in two Singapore novels,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42.1 (2006): 58. 8 Gopal Baratham, A Candle or the Sun (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991); Lau Siew Mei, Playing Madam Mao (Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2000). See a discussion of this controversy in Philip Holden, “Writing Conspiracy,” 58–70.

150

BILL ASH CR OFT

ጓ

of its international relations as much as a demonstration of the culture of obedience. However, the character of both Singapore and Hong Kong as spaces of transition beneath the homogenizing myths, and the carceral judicial power of the state, makes these city-states prime examples of the transnation that occupies all national boundaries. In Singapore and Hong Kong, the transnation finds itself caught between a voracious capitalism invading its island and a nationstate inventing homogeneities that never actually account for the multiplicity of people’s lives. For instance, the French historian of China Jean Chezneaux describes the economy of Hong Kong as an “off ground” economy9 because its operations were divorced from the people that it shaped economically and politically. An expatriate living in Hong Kong can get a very clear sense of this. The “off-ground” economy is largely administered by expatriates and Chinese elites, transnational subjects whose sense of Hong Kong as a place could be quite ambivalent, yet given some measure of authenticity by clichés of pace, vibrancy, and vitality. This is largely, I would add, a matter of language as much as place, for, in a subtle sense, language filters place, and the transnational, offground economy is the domain of English. Nevertheless, English is at the same time the potential idiom of subversion. But the power of the transnation is the capacity to circulate around the structures of the state and global capital. The subject in the “smooth space”10 of the transnation cannot avoid the effects of the transnational whether he or she participates in it or not, but these effects can be manipulated or transformed ‘glocally’. Both cities mediate the distinction between local and global, transnation and transnationality, in different ways, but their distinctiveness lies in the manner in which they define this interstitiality. Both cities have moved directly from colonial occupation to a conflicted relation with the state; citizens of both struggle with the issue of their Chineseness; both societies find in English a medium for balancing some of these pressures. The transnation draws attention to the homogenizing power of the nation-state, which in the case of

9

Quoted in Arif Dirlik, “Globalism and the Politics of Place,” in Globalisation and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories, ed. Peter Dicken, Philip F. Kelly, Lily Kong, Kris Olds & Henry WaiChung Yeung (London: Routledge 2005): 53. 10 Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between the “striated space” of state institutions and state power and the “smooth space” of the social fabric, a distinction between the warp and woof of woven of cloth and the rolled entangled fibres of felt (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi [Mille plateaux – Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1987; London & New York: Continuum, 2004]: 528).

ጓ Utopian Sites

151

Hong Kong is the result of exchanging one empire for another, but in Singapore is the result of an economic success that suppresses critique. How does one assert agency in a country like Singapore shaped by a nationalist discourse that is paranoid about dissent? This is a question Hernando Perera, the protagonist of Gopal Baratham’s A Candle or the Sun, asks himself. Perera chooses first to compartmentalize, to write stories stripped of the contents of everyday life. But he finds that he cannot escape the reality of political oppression. Based loosely on the events described above that became known as the ‘Marxist conspiracy’ of 1987, A Candle or the Sun was refused publication by Singapore publishers. Eventually the writing becomes a guide to everyday life for Perera, and in this way reveals that works of the imagination can offer the vision of a different kind of world. This is the capacity that Ernst Bloch calls VorSchein or anticipatory illumination. Through such illumination, future art and literature assume their utopian function by being the means by which human beings form themselves, conceive their questions about themselves, and convey the possibility of attaining their objectives.11 Although not necessarily optimistic, all art and literature that have anything to say to humankind are utopian because “Literature as utopia is generally encroachment of the power of the imagination on new realities of experience.”12 Vision and critique are deeply implicated. The issue is not what is imagined – the product of utopia, so to speak, the imagined state or utopian place – but the process of imagining. Novels may not change governments, but a different world is not possible unless it is first imagined. The utopian function of art and literature reveals itself in the narratives of both cities’ literatures, but I want to take a different direction and examine the ways in which the future of these two cosmopolitan sites has been tied up with the struggles over language. How does the language of the literature or, more specifically, the literary representation of language practices provide an insurgent vision of the future? How do the struggles over language adumbrate the utopian potential of life on the ground? How might the language of literature ‘re-invent’ the metropolis? The relationship between the languages used in literary writing and government language policies in Singapore and Hong Kong reflect the complexity of their cultural and linguistic landscapes in general. In 11

Jack Zipes, “Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, tr. Jack Zipes & Frank Mecklenburg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988): xxxiii. 12 Ernst Bloch, “Literatur ist Utopie,” in Literatur ist Utopie, ed. Gert Ueding (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978): 7 Quoted in Zipes, “Introduction” to Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature (1988), xxxiii.

BILL ASH CR OFT

152

ጓ

societies such as Singapore where overt criticism can lead to imprisonment, the language of literary works can effect a subtle form of resistance, one that is insurgent in a way that escapes easy detection. The adversarial and transformative relationship with the colonial language is a well-known feature of post-colonial cultural analysis. Very often forced to learn English, colonized subjects throughout the Empire appropriated and transformed the language in the service of self-representation. But whereas this relationship is usually between English and a mother tongue, in these city-states we discover a literature and a language that must perform a double work of establishing identity in relation to two behemoths, Putonghua and English, neither of which may be a mother tongue. Hence, we find the curious situation of English and its transformations being deployed in resistance to the authoritarian language policies of the state. The literature in English plays out some of the peculiar tensions of these cities, placed as they are between the two world languages with the largest number of speakers, which in turn represent the tension operating in them between a rapidly growing Chinese state and the particular location of these cities as transnational spaces. Each of these city-states generates a literature based on a very different historical and cultural context. Both have the historical influence of English usage and have developed a particular character based on the dialectic between centralized top-down language policies and demotic expressions of cultural identity. In turn, this cultural identity, as in all post-colonial situations, is variously hybrid, multiple, and changeable.

Singapore: Language, Nation, and Dissent The doctrine of a homogeneous nation has deep roots in Singapore. Until its separation from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, Lee Kwan Yew campaigned for a ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ in which the cultures of all ethnic groups, while retaining their distinctiveness, would be brought together in a still vaguely defined national culture, centred on the Malay language. “The ideal solution to a united Malayan nation,” he noted in 1960, would be to produce one race, one language, one culture, one religion. Since no one envisages the possibility of this happening, we have to do the next best thing, (i.e.) all speaking one language and sharing common cultural values although of different races and religions.13 13

Lee Kwan Yew, “Talk to the Nanyang University Political Science Society, March 29, 1960,” in Republic of Singapore: Prime Minister’s Speeches, Press Conferences, Interviews, Statements, etc. (Singapore: Prime Minister’s Office, 1960), vol. 1: 3.

ጓ Utopian Sites

153

But after independence Mandarin became the official language of the city-state, and today Singapore has the highest proportion of Mandarin speakers of any country outside China. Yet, at the same time, it also has the largest percentage of English speakers in Asia, particularly among young people. But with the state legislation of Mandarin the question of ‘Chineseness’ became prominent and one in which the position of English is strategic. The issue is symbolized in an event witnessed by Sy Ren Quah, a performance of the play Drift at Singapore Drama Centre. The play, performed in Mandarin, was followed by a heated discussion in English, between mainland Chinese and Singaporeans, centering on the character Gerald, a Singaporean youth who detests the Chinese. This sums up the conflicted relationship between Singaporeans, Putonghua, and China. The issue of Chineseness is prevalent throughout East and South East Asia but particularly so in Singapore, where officially the population is Mandarin-speaking but sees itself as distinct from China. It is clear that ethnicity is performative and, in the Singapore situation, English is a key to this performative distinctiveness, a marker of change, a marker of global modernity, but also a marker of dissent. The link between English and modernity is represented in a fascinating text describing the changes occurring in Singapore – a ‘short story’, if we could call it that, written in 1993 by Xi Ni Er called “Change: Obituaries of Three Generations of the Liu Family in the Late 20th Century.”14 This takes the form of three obituaries.

Figure 1. Xi Ni Er “Change: Obituaries of Three Generations of the Liu Family in the Late 20th Century”

14

Sy Ren Quah, “Performing Chineseness in Multicultural Singapore: A Discussion on Selected Literary and Cultural Texts,” Asian Ethnicity 10.3 (2009): 228.

BILL ASH CR OFT

154

ጓ

The first and most elaborate obituary (on the left) is published in 1973. It is in a basically traditional format, using traditional Chinese characters and semiclassical Chinese. The second obituary (on the top right), published ten years later in 1983 and announcing the passing of a second-generation member of the family, has a simpler format and uses simplified characters and vernacular Chinese. The most drastic change occurs in the third obituary (on the bottom right), published another decade later, in 1993, and written entirely in English. The story is a superbly restrained but evocative discourse on the linguistic and cultural changes occurring in Singapore – not only a comment on burial practices, family size, and religion (from Taoism to Christianity) but also a description of spatial change. In the first obituary, four family members are noted to be in China. In the third obituary, apart from the wife of the deceased all family members are living abroad either in Australia or the U SA . Singapore is a point of transition in the process of change. It signifies not only the continual transition occurring in Asia but, as a city-state balanced between two languages, also embodies a process of post-colonial global transition. While the English obituary signifies the effects of Singaporean modernity, the English language occupies an ambivalent site of resistance indicated by the emergence of Singlish. In a city where the mantra ‘English for utility, mother tongue for culture and values’ is endlessly reiterated, Singlish has a subversive function. Like most subversion, it is generated by the vision of the possibility of resistance to the state. Singlish not only sets up an adversarial relation to Standard English but. much more annoyingly, it disregards the authoritarian state’s quite specific directives about language. Language planning in Singapore is built on three major assumptions:15 1) that language exists in the national interest; 2) that only standardized languages should be used for education; and 3) that highstatus languages are to be encouraged at home. Consequently, we see that Singlish is not just a quaint idiom of local cultural identity but an implicit vehicle of resistance to state power. This is neatly demonstrated in a poem called “The Correctness of Flavour” by Arthur Yap: waiting for the lime sherbert to arrive, mother turned around to her vacuous child:

15

L. Quentin Dixon, “Assumptions behind Singapore’s Language-in-Education Policy: Implications for Language Planning and Second Language Acquisition,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad & Jeff MacSwan (Somerville M A : Cascadilla, 2005): 628–30.

ጓ Utopian Sites

155

boy, you heard what i said earlier? nowadays, they emphasise english. boy rolled his squinty eyes to the ceiling. waitress returned, flustered, and started on her own emphases: lime sherbert today don’t have. mango got. strawberry also don’t have. mother, upset and acutely strident: today DO E SN ’ T have. today DO E S N OT have.16

Here, the mother, the voice of authority, lacks a precise sense of the law she upholds. She is perhaps a metaphor for the state but also a demonstration of the way in which power works through as well as upon subjects. The stipulation, that “don’t have” should be “does not have,” overlooks the other infelicities of the waitress’s language. Like the strictures of the state, the concern about the right word tinkers at the edges of the language as a metonym of cultural identity. It enforces an arbitrary and incomplete rule of correctness. Yet, contrary to this prescription about incorrect English, Singlish may be a means by which Literature can both lift the language from the level of a tool and give it local relevance. More importantly perhaps, its transcription in literature reveals the utopian potential of the transnation. As represented in much Singapore poetry, Singlish is not ‘bad English’ but a language with its own logic, its own rhythm and music. Listen to two mothers talking in Yap’s “2 mothers in a HDB playground”: We also got new furniture, bought from diethelm The sofa is so soft, I dare not sit. They all Sit like don’t want to get up, so expensive Nearly two thousand dollars, sure must be good17

The significance of Singlish in literature is the ease and subtlety with which it functions as a vehicle of social critique. The inscription of the ‘colloquial’ form is an implicit recognition of the multi-dimensional power struggle that may occur in language, a struggle that benefits from its subtlety in a society highly sensitive to political criticism. But at the same time it demonstrates the way in which language, and implicitly the language policies of the state, facilitates class division.

16 17

Arthur Yap, “The Correctness of Flavour,” Straits Times! Life Books (12 February 2001): 15. Arthur Yap, Down the Line (Singapore: Heinemann, 1980): 55.

BILL ASH CR OFT

156

ጓ

Sometimes such critique of the state comes out in the concerns of Singlish speakers, as in Catherine Lim’s “The Taximan’s Story”: Yes, madam, can make a living So so. What to do Must work hard if wants to success in Singapore. People like us, no education, no capital for business, we must sweat to earn money for wife and children. No good, madam. In those days, where got Family Planning in Singapore? People born many, many children, every year, one childs Is no good at all. Today is much better Two children, three children, enough, stop. Our government say stop18

Here is an identifiably home-grown English, a form of English suggesting a different cultural reality in a different but accessible language. Yet, more importantly, the Singlish that antagonizes the state expresses the taximan’s sense of the burden of bureaucratic authoritarianism in its population policy. Apart from this implicit power struggle, something quite significant occurs when the exuberance of the demotic voice is transferred to text. These poems remind us of the great leap that is made from the spoken word to the written. I am not talking here about the huge ontological shifts that occur so often in postcolonial writing in the move from an oral culture to the written text, but of the radical move from speaking to writing, from speech that goes out on the breath to writing that is contained by the page, from the word that disappears once spoken to the word that becomes a thing. Singlish and other vernaculars remind us of the very different kinds of ontological phenomena that are speaking and writing. The spoken word is communal in a way that the written word cannot be, and while the written word has its potentiality, its horizon in the imagination, it presents itself to us on the page in a way that is absolute and uncontestable in its tangibility. The spoken word, by contrast, has its potentiality in its connection with a community. This, more than anything, is the political work of Singlish in Singapore: it establishes itself as an adversary to the structures of the state as well as the structures of the standard language which the state demands as necessary for a prosperous economy. The written word has edges that the spoken word does not. So an interesting thing happens when the spoken word, whose breath is the spirit of a communal connectivity uncontainable by the state, is written down. It has edges but the edges are blurred. This blurring occurs whenever the 18

Quoted in Shirley Lim, “Finding a Native Voice: Singapore Literature in English,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24.1 (1989): 38.

ጓ Utopian Sites

157

vernacular is transcribed in English. The vernacular enacts rather than represents, and its location on the page both confronts and affronts. When transcribed, it unsettles the propositions of the page. It brings uncertainty. It identifies by difference. But the movement from voice to text is political. The text confirms the insurgency of language.

Hong Kong: Between Two Empires Singapore and Hong Kong are both either geographically or metaphorically islands, city-states whose post-colonial identity is characterized by a transfer from one form of imperialism to another. But it is their different character as spaces of transition that determines the condition of the English language within them. As islands, they generate a particular form of ambivalence. This sense of transition is captured in Louise Ho’s iconic 1997 poem “Island” as Hong Kong waits for the handover: We are a floating island Kept afloat by our own energy We cross date lines National lines Class lines Horizons far and near We are a floating island We have no site Nowhere to land No domicile Come July this year We may begin to hover in situ May begin to settle May begin to touch down We shall be A city with a country An international city becoming national19

This process of becoming continues as Hong Kong hovers in a space between colony and nation and many await its conclusion with trepidation. Where will this floating island come to land? Louise Ho is both the most forthright and prescient of Hong Kong poets. In the poem “New Year’s Eve 1989,” written in

19

Louise Ho, New Ends, Old Beginnings (Hong Kong: Asia, 1997): 60.

BILL ASH CR OFT

158

ጓ

1995 as Hong Kong waited for the handover to China, she imagines the dawning hope for democracy that was dashed on 4 June in Tiananmen Square. But think my friend, think: China never Promised a tea party, or cakes For the masses. It is we, Who, riding on the crest of a long hope, Became euphoric, and forgot The rock bottom of a totalitarian state.

Despite this grim caution, she still demonstrates that, apart from the insurgency of critique, poetry can offer a vision of the future: Let the bells of all the years Jingle and jangle To bring in the new. Let them distil Out of their clamorous babel, One single clear note. That it may make sense, And we shall listen.20

The fact that the clear note did not arrive in 1997 does not diminish the importance of the poem to communicate hope. The bells of the years continue to jingle and jangle, and whatever the single note means it lies there in the future waiting to be heard. Unlike Singapore, the major medium in which Hong Kong has been represented has been cinema. In her foreword to City Voices, an anthology of Hong Kong writing, Louise Ho says: Those of us writing in the English language in Hong Kong would know the feeling of isolation, perhaps of functioning in a void. There is no English-language literary community from which to draw some kind of affinity or against which to react. There is insufficient writing in English for a critical mass to have formed.21

This has not been the case in Hong Kong film, but the example of cinema demonstrates the ambivalent space in which Hong Kong finds itself, a space between local Cantonese identity, Chinese imperial control, and global capitalism. For example, the domestic box office for Hong Kong films dropped from $158

20

Ho, New Ends, Old Beginnings, 61. Xu Xi & Michael Ingham, City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English 1945 to the Present (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2003): viii. 21

ጓ Utopian Sites

159

million in 1992 to $36 million in 2006, resulting in a feverish attempt to increase production of joint Hong Kong–mainland films. So Hong Kong demonstrates the relentless absorption of the postcolonial city by globalization. According to Laikwan Pang, What we are seeing in recent Hong Kong cinema, which in a way is symptomatic of postcolonial Hong Kong-at-large, is a utilitarian form of nationalism, facilitated less culturally than economically, so that this nationalization is economically driven and therefore compliant with globalization. As such, Hong Kong cinema in the last ten years is both postcolonial and not. Its postcolonial status allows it to re-embrace the vast Chinese market, permitting Hong Kong cinema to consolidate a ‘national’ market to which Hong Kong is never accessible; but the complex and fraught cultural and political dynamics of this postcolonial encounter very much recede into the dimmed background, replaced by economic strategies that Hong Kong needs in order to triumph in the current global cinema.22

Both Singapore and Hong Kong have a conflicted sense of their own nationality, the one stemming from its separation from Malaysia, the other from a yet unresolved union with China, and both from the vexed question of Chineseness. Both have developed an environment in which literature in English offers a means of resistance to the remorseless absorption into global capital. Louise Ho demonstrates something of the utopian potential of resistance in this situation. But these cities have very different linguistic landscapes, the contest in Hong Kong being between Cantonese and Putonghua rather than English and Chinese. Another difference between Singapore and Hong Kong is that Chinglish is not used in Hong Kong literature, at least nowhere near the extent of Singlish in Singapore. This may be because Chinglish is not a peculiarly Hong Kong phenomenon, but Hong Kong literature in English nevertheless provides a similar demonstration of the cultural and linguistic landscape of the city. Like Singapore, one important aspect of this landscape is the way in which English relates to Mandarin, and this relationship emerges from the city’s identity as transitional space, leading to what I would call a contiguous or contrapuntal cosmopolitanism. The problems with the category of the cosmopolitan are the same for Hong Kong as they are for Singapore. Cosmopolitanism may apply very well to the ‘off-ground’ economy, but not to the rich diversity of life in the city. The ethnocentric cosmopolitanism arranged on a ‘West-and-the-rest’ 22

Laikwan Pang, “Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema: Utilitarianism and (Trans)Local,” Postcolonial Studies 10.4 (2007): 424.

160

BILL ASH CR OFT

ጓ

axis against which Mignolo rails23 is equally inapplicable to Hong Kong. James Clifford coined the phrase ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’24 to circumvent the inevitable implication of a well-travelled elite. But in the transitional space of Hong Kong, travel may not be a factor of even a discrepant cosmopolitanism. The Hong Kong subject may not need to travel the world, since the world travels through Hong Kong. But the contrapuntal cosmopolitanism of which I am talking describes the ambivalence that occurs when the subject faces several directions at once: towards China and Putonghua; towards the world and English; and towards home and Cantonese. Contrapuntal cosmopolitanism is the condition of the transnation and is most evident in Hong Kong’s relations with China, and is represented in the relation between English and Mandarin, the heavyweight contenders of the region. In a sense, the stance of the post-colonial subject in Hong Kong is that between decolonization from the British and re-colonization by Mainland China. This being the case, the things that set Hong Kong apart from Singapore and indeed distinguish it in post-colonial terms are the dominance of a single language, Cantonese, the relative paucity of literature in English, and the virtual absence of a transformed English in the literature. Any analysis of Hong Kong cultural identity must focus on its most potent creative medium – film. The Hong Kong film industry, which has historically been largely in Cantonese, is the most powerful international representation of images of Hong Kong. So the place of English as a conveyor of cultural complexity is uncertain, to say the least, and I address the written text, choosing a model representing the relational cosmopolitanism developed in the transitional city. This is Eddie Tay’s The Mental Life of Cities.25 Tay is most interesting because, as a Singaporean teaching and writing in Hong Kong, he has always been aware of a kind of spatial ambivalence between languages that has followed him from Singapore to Hong Kong – from one post-colonial city-state to another. This may be affected by the fact that ‘Chineseness’ is a more complicated issue in Singapore than Hong Kong and is exacerbated by paternalistic language policies. His poem “A Second Language,” written in Singapore, talks about Mandarin becoming a second language, a language of the past:

23

Walter D. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12.3 (Fall 2000): 721–48. 24 James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson & Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992): 108. 25 Eddie Tay, The Mental Life of Cities (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2010).

ጓ Utopian Sites

161

My Mandarin becomes a second language That fades like the memory of an old textbook […] So now I study Chinese history in English, commanding a feeble tongue.26

Despite his origin in Singapore and his fluency in English, Tay represents the ambivalent space of Hong Kong cosmopolitanism. In the preface to his later series “The Mental Life of Cities,” he says that his bilingual poems “are written from a subterranean sense of unease rather than from a height of creative mastery. It is in this way that I am taking a creative risk, writing from a place of uncertainty.”27 The transitional space of the city is the space of uncertainty, where languages do not so much meet as face one another. In his bilingual poems, Tay installs the Chinese as a kind of possible future – a relational linguistic future. The poem series is a significant meditation on the space of the post-colonial city, and in the movement from one post-colonial city-state to another, the poem locates something very different from the lively adversarial interpolation of Singlish in Singapore. viii. [The moon is my heart, silent as a stone, the birthmark of my island-city.] We can only say look, look, ఼┳㸪 ఼┳ ௚಼ᅾᦐொ஄㸸 ᶞ㊦ᶞᅾ⪵ኳࠋ

Look, look, what are they doing? The trees are talking.

I am homesick in the city of my birth: are these streets real, the lampposts real? We can only say listen, listen ఼ྶ㸪 ఼ྶ ௚಼ᅾ說ொ஄㸪 ኳ㊦ᆅ說ொ஄ࠋ [The moon is my heart, silent as a stone, the birthmark of my island-city.] The flowers are trampled, and we can only ask 26 27

Tay, The Mental Life of Cities: 78. The Mental Life of Cities, Preface.

Listen, listen, what are they saying? What is the sky saying to the ground?

BILL ASH CR OFT

162 ఼▱㐨㊰ୖⓗክ ㊦ክ㔛ⓗ㊰ ᭷ொ஄ศู㸽

ጓ

Do you know the difference, between a dream on the road and a road in a dream?

I am homesick in the city of my birth: are these streets real, the lampposts real? The trees are silent now, and we can only hope. ఼ูᛀグ ఼ἄᛀグ㸪 ఼ูᛀグࠋ

Do not forget you did not forget, do not forget.

[The moon is my heart, silent as a stone, the birthmark of my island-city.]28

I choose this poem to demonstrate what I see to be the hint it gives of a reinvention of the city, a utopian view of the future, a future that exists in a relationship between English and Putonghua. The Chinese characters are visual rather than oral, and they create a stark cultural gap despite the translations in the poem. The spatiality of the poem, the space between Chinese character and translation, means that the lines of translation never really connect with the English text but offer a contrapuntal meditation on its lines. So the relationship between cultures is not the intrusion of a disruptive communal voice such as Singlish or Chinglish into the text but the contiguous placement of the words and characters on the white space of the page. Written words have quite inflexible edges, and, placed permanently on a page, they appear to be complete and stable things. But in their spaces we have a sign of a possible future very different from the transformed English of postcolonial texts. For to whom does the text speak? Unlike a transformed English, the pictograms are inaccessible to the anglophone reader, who, despite the translations, is reduced to an onlooker, left to regard the otherness of the Chinese characters. More subtly, the pictograms disrupt the idea of the linguistically centred subject, caught in the ambivalent space between languages. “The Mental Life of Cities” meditates on the experience of life in the postcolonial city, a city of “pure invention / with official language like flowers fraying at the edges,” languages which echo one another without ever communicating. The poem gives a sense of the ennui and Unheimlichkeit that exist in the cosmopolitan space, but in aligning the English with the Chinese characters the ‘thinghood’ of the text enacts rather than represents the nature of this space as a form 28

Tay, The Mental Life of Cities, 10–11.

ጓ Utopian Sites

163

of contrapuntal cosmopolitanism. The characters enact a cultural reality very differently from Xi Ni Er’s pictograph. Where the Singapore story frames a transition to modernity, Tay’s poem outlines a form of cosmopolitanism in which the spaces between characters, an apparent region of silence, offer the great potentiality of communication. The “page is a place where the delineation of space can make a world of knowledge and difference,”29 says Anne Carson, and the space of the white page, on which the poet aligns text of various character and dimension, is one on which some very significant potentialities are played out. The characters of the poem are both English and Putonghua but the spaces, I would suggest, are Chinese. In a fascinating account of the difference between English and Chinese mores, Austin Coates says that in discussing religion of geomancy just when it seemed that the moment was drawing near when the absolute fundamentals of Chinese belief would be revealed, it was found that these were situated in the empty spaces between two Western words, and could not be brought within tactile grasp.30

However transient those empty spaces may be in the spoken word as they disappear on the breath, the written text installs them as regions of immense possibility. As Tay says, You see the whiteness of this page? This is my love to my country, my flag of surrender.31

In this way, the poem redefines the nature of the cosmopolitan. That cosmopolitan subject who is theoretically ‘at home in the world’ may not be anchored in the particular space of the post-colonial city but may exist in continual contrapuntal relationship with its ambivalent other, the Chinese pictogram that represents both past and future, both unfulfilled history and utopian possibility. Writing can arrest and manipulate time, but in the poem as object it can fuse past and present so that the past of a shimmering but unattainable Mandarin can become the utopian future of speech. Because they are clearly pictographic, the Chinese characters are not so much adversarial as contrapuntal. Rather than interpolate the English, they stand in a textual relationship much like the relationship of the languages themselves, altering each other by their very presence. 29

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1986): 121. Austin Coates, “Myself a Mandarin,” in City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English 1945 to the Present, ed. Xu Xi & Michael Ingham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2003): 223. 31 Tay, The Mental Life of Cities, 18. 30

164

BILL ASH CR OFT

ጓ

In the middle is the curiously dislocated subject who possesses several languages but appears to be possessed by none. Yet, in this contiguity between the Chinese and English script, the future of English in Asia is prophesied, the words and pictograms on the page suggesting both a contrapuntal relationship and the possibility of a form of knowing beyond meaning. Despite their apparent significance as global economic hubs, Singapore and Hong Kong with their ‘above ground economies’ produce a literature that calls out for post-colonial analysis to address the ambivalence of their cultural landscapes. As we have seen, one important subject of this analysis is the complex linguistic situation in the cities, a situation in which English retains, paradoxically, a robust dissenting function. Whether its textual strategies constitute contrapuntal cosmopolitanism or insurgent communal vernacular, the language harbours as much a vision of the future as the stories it tells. If these stories lead us towards a re-invention of the post-colonial in the metropolis, they lead us even more clearly to a re-invention of the post-colonial city as a utopian site.

W OR K S C I T E D Ashcroft, Bill. “Transnation,” in Re-Routing the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millenium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (London: Routledge, 2010): 72–85. ——, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1986). Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson & Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992): 96–116. Coates, Austin. “Myself a Mandarin,” in City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English 1945 to the Present, ed. Xu Xi & Michael Ingham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2003): 221–26. Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Mille plateaux – Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1987; London & New York: Continuum, 2004). Dirlik, Arif. “Culture Against History? The Politics of East Asian Identity,” Development and Society 28.2 (December 1999): 167–90. ——.“Globalism and the Politics of Place,” in Globalisation and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories, ed. Peter Dicken, Philip F. Kelly, Lily Kong, Kris Olds & Henry WaiChung Yeung (London: Routledge, 2005). Dixon, L. Quentin. “Assumptions behind Singapore’s Language-in-Education Policy: Implications for Language Planning and Second Language Acquisition,” Proceedings of

ጓ Utopian Sites

165

the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad & Jeff MacSwan (Somerville MA : Cascadilla, 2005): 625–35. Fung, Anthony. “Postcolonial Hong Kong Identity: Hybridising the Local and the National,” Social Identities 10.3 (2004): 399–414. Ho, Louise. New Ends, Old Beginnings (Hong Kong: Asia, 1997). Holden, Philip. “Writing Conspiracy: Race and rights in two Singapore novels,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42.1 (2006): 58–70. Laikwan Pang. “Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema: Utilitarianism and (Trans)Local,” Postcolonial Studies 10.4 (2007): 413–30. Lee Kwan Yew. “Talk to the Nanyang University Political Science Society, March 29, 1960,” in Republic of Singapore: Prime Minister’s Speeches, Press Conferences, Interviews, Statements, etc. (Singapore: Prime Minister’s Office, 1960), vol. 1: 1-15. Lim, Shirley. “Finding a Native Voice: Singapore Literature in English,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24.1 (1989): 30–48. Mignolo, Walter D. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12.3 (Fall 2000): 721–48. Poon, Angelia Mui Cheng. “Constructing the Cosmopolitan Subject: Teaching Secondary School Literature in Singapore,” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 30.1 (2010): 31–41. Quah, Sy Ren. “Performing Chineseness in Multicultural Singapore: A Discussion on Selected Literary and Cultural Texts,” Asian Ethnicity 10.3 (2009): 225–38. Rajaratnam, Sinnathamby. “Untitled Speech,” in The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam, ed. Heng Chee Chan & Obaid ul Haq (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1968): 139–46. Singh, Kirpal. “At Lake Balaton,” in Rajeev S. Patke, Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2006): 77. Originally in Westerly 49 (November 2004): 186. Tay, Eddie. The Mental Life of Cities (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2010). Xu Xi, & Michael Ingham. City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English 1945 to the Present (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2003). Yap, Arthur. “The Correctness of Flavour,” Straits Times: Life! Books (12 February 2001): 15. ——.Down the Line (Singapore: Heinemann, 1980). Zipes, Jack. “Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, tr. Jack Zipes & Frank Mecklenburg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1988): xi–xiii.

ጓ

A City on the Move: Routing Urban Spaces Literary and Cinematic Representations of Mumbai’s Lifeline, the ‘Local’ Trains M A L A P A N D UR A N G

I

T

HE MEGA-C ITY OF

M U M B A I has been classified as the fifth-largest

urban area in the world today, with a population of approximately twenty-two million people.1 Renamed in 1995 from Bombay,2 the growth of this relatively young Indian city has been directly linked to the vested commercial interests of British colonial enterprise from the eighteenth century onwards. In the early years of expansion, the city’s central commercial area, which included textile mills and dockyards, was concentrated in the downtown area in the southern tip of the city.3 Residential suburbs were largely located in the suburbs in the north and northeastern parts of the city. In the post-independence period, the city witnessed an unprecedented expansion into the greater Mumbai metropolitan areas, creating the newer residential suburbs of Navi Mumbai (New Mumbai) and the Greater Thane districts.4 1 Government statistics in “Population of Mumbai,” indiaonlinepages.com (2015), http://www .indiaonlinepages.com/population/mumbai-population.html (accessed 3 September 2015). To get an idea of the growth-rate, compare the data released by the Government of India for Census 2011, where Mumbai is an Urban Agglomeration coming under the category of Mega City. The census placed the total population of Mumbai UA/Metropolitan region at 18,414; see Government of India for Census 2011, http://www .census2011.co.in/city.php (accessed 29 December 2013). 2 The change in the nomenclature of the city was the result of a political decision taken by the right-wing Shiv Sena–B J P coalition government of Maharashtra. 3 For details on the history of the expansion of the city, see Sharda Dwivedi & Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay – The Cities Within (Bombay: India Book House, 1995), and Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner, Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India (Bombay: Oxford U P , 1995). 4 Most recently, the suburban Bandra Kurla complex ( B K C ) has been developed over the last decade to ease South Mumbai’s concentration of offices and commercial activities.

168

MALA P ANDURAN G

ጓ

The uneven distribution of the city’s population thus necessitates the massive movement of a workforce, crisscrossing the city back and forth. According to a survey on “Mumbai suburban local train travelers,”5 eighty eight percent of this travel to work is by public transport, and the largest maximum load is carried by the Mumbai suburban network system, commonly referred to as the ‘locals’. Spread over four hundred and sixty-five kilometers, the rail system runs a total of two thousand seven hundred plus services and carries approximately six million commuters a day, with a frequency of a train every three minutes during peak hour.6 This is the highest passenger density of any urban railway system in the world. At peak hours,7 the suburban trains go packed with crowds averaging 5,000 people per train, as against the original carrying capacity of 1,700 passengers. This statistic of fourteen to sixteen standing passengers per square meter of floor space is commonly described as a “super dense-crushload.”8 The local trains are the cheapest, fastest, and most reliable mode of public transport in the city. However, the presence of the trains is dangerous to both commuters and those who live in densely populated slums along the tracks. The Mumbai suburban network railway authority reports an average of 3,700 fatalities annually, caused variously by passengers crossing the tracks on foot, sitting on train roofs, being electrocuted by the overhead electric wires, hanging from doors and window bars, and falling, or being pushed, from carriages that travel at 64 km/h. 9 The average time that a local train stops at the stations is a mere forty-five seconds. Commuters must either push their way in or step out of the train in this very brief span of time. As Puja Birla mentions in her blog “Chronicles of the 7:33-Churchgate-Fast Rat,” “one misstep and you could be maimed for life.”10

5

Aditi Abhyankar, Aishwarya Narayanmorthy, Vaishnavi Ramachandran & Mallika Mhapankar, “Survey on Mumbai Suburban Local Train Travelers,” Review of Integrative Business and Economics Research 1.1 (2012), http://www.sibresearch.org (accessed 21 December 2013). 6 Aditi Abhyankar et al., “Survey on Mumbai Suburban Local Train Travelers,” 22. 7 Peak hours in the city are between 9.00 am and 11.00 am in the mornings, and then 5.00 pm and 8.00 pm in the evenings. 8 See, for instance, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Vintage, 2004): 493, and Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan & Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011): 76. 9 According to a report in the national newspaper Times of India, dated 20 April 2012, the Mumbai suburban network has claimed 36,000 lives in the last ten years. 10 Puja Birla, “Chronicles of the 7:33-Churchgate-Fast Rat,” http://iwp.uiowa.edu/91st/vol6-num1 /chronicles-of-the 733-churchgate-fast-rat (accessed 27 December 2013).

ጓ A City on the Move

169

The suburban network thus creates a grid of the city, and the image of the speeding brown and yellow trains (more recently replaced by white- and lavender-painted carriages) is emblematic of the city’s pace of functioning. On the very rare occasions on which the trains in Mumbai do not run, the city almost grinds to a halt.11 To the Mumbaikars,12 the train is more than just a means of transport. Rather, “it is an iconic symbol of the grit and determination of the city.”13 It is not surprising, therefore, that Mumbaikars tend to draw comparisons with the physiology of human body when describing the lifeline of the metropolis. The railway lines are called the “muscular labyrinth,” while the two main corridors are “visualized as two slim arteries cutting through a crowded peninsula.”14 The map of the city has been described as “three claws of a wild animal, with the sharp tips pointing southwards,”15 and the indispensable rail network becomes the “spine of the linear city.”16 The rail system is managed by two zonal bodies, the Western Railways (WR ) and the Central Railways (CR ). These two main lines running north to south “are the lifelines that structure its citizens’ perceptual map of the city.”17 The Western Line commences in the south of the city at Churchgate station18 while the Central Line also runs north to south, begins at Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST ) (formerly known as Victoria Terminus or V.T.). The third line, known as the ‘Harbour Line’, is often described as the “adjunct capillary.”19

11

This may happen due to the failure of the electricity grid or severe flooding during the monsoon season. A series of seven bomb blasts occurred on 11 July 2006, killing 209 people and injuring over 700. The train services, however, resumed within hours, and became symbolic of the Mumbaikars’ resilience to any terrorist attempt to defeat the spirit of the city. 12 Commonly used Marathi word to refer to residents of the city. 13 Phadke et al., Why Loiter, 76. 14 Samanth Subramanian, “Trains!,” http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011 /05/08/train (accessed 12 May 2014). 15 Puja Birla, “Chronicles of the 7:33-Churchgate-Fast Rat.” 16 Rahul Mehrotra, “The Emergent Urbanism of Mumbai,” in Other Cities, Other Worlds. Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 213. 17 Phadke et al., Why Loiter, 76. 18 The Western line from Churchgate to Virar, covering a distance of 60 kilometers and 28 stations, has been extended from 2013 to Dahanu Road with an additional ten stations. The Central line connects Mumbai C S T to the distant suburbs of Kasara, Karjat, and Khopoli. The Harbour Line runs between C S T and Panvel, and C S T and Andheri. http://www.wr .indianrailways .gov.in/view_section.jsp?lang=0&id=0,6. 19 Subramanian, “Trains!”

170

MALA P ANDURAN G

ጓ

II I teach at an undergraduate college located in the suburb of Matunga. 20 I commute to work every day by the local trains, as do most of my undergraduate women students, many of whom spend up to an hour travelling either way and coming from such distant suburbs as Mira Road, Panvel, or Dombivli. This is not unusual, for the long commute is a constant in the life of the average Mumbaikar. For young women in the city, the experience of travelling in crowded local trains, and the accompanying sense of freedom of mobility, marks a rite of passage from dependence to independence. This is a way of life associated with the character of the city, as is perhaps the case in any large metropolitan hub. While the railways provide physical links for the travel of the commuters, it is also responsible for the way in which the latter perceive their city. The train tracks go beyond being just an indicator of geographical location; rather, they contribute to the creation of a series of mind maps. In an ethnographic study of spaces of mass transit in Athens, emphasis is placed on how the modern city has in fact been created by the commute: a city truly becomes so once it has exceeded the size threshold by which her workers must exercise this practice in order to reach their workplace. Longer even commuting times, those that stretch total hours of daily labor to and beyond the limits of human capacity, are exclusive to the metropolis. Commuting, then, is the metropolis’ offspring.21

In 2012, I mentored a group of thirteen undergraduate women students who worked on a project under the Youth Fellowship Program, funded by PU KAR (Promotion of Urban Knowledge and Action Research), a research collective in Mumbai, which focuses on exploring urban mythologies.22 The Youth Fellowship Project encourages cross-disciplinary community-based participatory research on issues pertaining to urbanization and globalization.23 The group drew inspiration from the findings of an earlier research project, also conducted under the aegis of PU KAR , on “Gendered Use of Public Spaces” by three associates – Shilpa Phadke, Samira Khan, and Shilpa Ranade. The study examined 20 Dr. Bhanuben Mahendra Nanavati College (affiliated to S N D T Women’s University) is located in the central suburb of Matunga, and is accessible by both the Central and the Western Lines. 21 The City at a Time of Crisis is a collective project that researches the “effects of the financial, sovereign and social crisis on public spaces in Athens, Greece”; Anon., The City at a Time of Crisis, http://www.crisis-scape.net/blog/item/97-metronome-part-1-of-3 (accessed 20 December 2013). 22 Information about the organization is available at http://pukar.org.in/. 23 Details on the Youth Fellowship Program are available at http://youthfellowship.pukar .org.in/.

ጓ A City on the Move

171

women’s access to public spaces in the city across locations, class, religious, and linguistic affiliations. Importantly, the project also pointed out how women spatially inhabit a city differently from men. Published by Penguin India as Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai’s Streets (2011), this study by Phadke, Khan and Ranade asserts that the situation in the public transportation system in Mumbai is different from that of other Indian metropolitan cities such as New Delhi and Kolkata, in that women in the city can be seen to be travelling in large numbers on the local trains. They estimate that some fifteen to twenty percent of commuters on a daily basis are women. Despite the recent sexual assaults on women in India on public transport systems,24 the Mumbai local is by and large still perceived as a relatively safe space. Drawing on the amount of time the women commuters in distant suburbs spend on the local trains, the group titled their study “An explorative study of groups of working women travelling in local trains of Mumbai.”25 The thrust of the project was to study the formation and dynamics of ‘train groups’ of women travellers, and examine their interaction within a unique gendered space of the ladies compartment. The authors worked on the hypothesis that women who commute on a regular basis soon begin to establish a set routine. They not only take the same route but also start catching a specific train every day. They even also choose to sit in the same section of the compartment. Group formations are initiated through simple gestures such as a nod of recognition, the sharing of a snack, or making room for the fourth person so that she can squeeze into a row of seats meant to accommodate only three passengers (Photograph 1). 26 In order to understand the construct of the ladies compartment, we must understand the anatomy of the Mumbai local. Each wagon contains nine, twelve or even fifteen compartments, which are divided into segments. These include the general compartments (first and second class); ladies compartment (first and second class); a compartment for the handicapped and cancer patients; a luggage compartment; and a reserved compartment for senior citizens. Travel on the local is therefore ordered in accordance with certain notions of inclusion/exclusion as to the space occupied by the average woman commuter. While women are entitled to enter general compartments, they normally do not 24

Particularly in view of the gruesome gang rape of a Delhi student in December 2012, which happened on a public transport bus. 25 I am grateful to Dr Anita Deshmukh (Director, P.U.K.A.R) for allowing me to cite from the (unpublished) project report, which was duly submitted to the organization. 26 I am grateful to Ms Avni Shah, a student of the BSc programme of Dr B M N College of Home Science, for permission to use photographs of the local trains taken in May 2013 and appended to this essay.

172

MALA P ANDURAN G

ጓ

do so, or, rather, cannot do so, given the impossibility of boarding crowded compartments occupied by male commuters, especially during the peak hours. With the increase in numbers of women in the workforce, the railways now run what is termed ‘Ladies Special’ trains in which all the coaches are reserved exclusively for women commuters. At present, there are eight such ‘Specials’ running on the suburban section of the Western Railway. The popular Marathi television serial ‘Ladies Special’ follows the lives of four female protagonists who travel every day on this train and develop deep group bonds. The episodes of this popular serial focus on middle-class working women who meet on a daily basis on the same local train, share their problems on both a personal and a professional level during the commute, and thereby develop a psychological connection which brings the group closer together.27 The student researchers divided themselves into three groups, with each group taking up a different local line. Their work was directed at cross-disciplinary community-based participatory research and they used the methodology of interviews, observation case study, and survey. What emerged from their efforts is a series of self-reflexive narratives of women commuters that centred on a sisterhood of sharing within the space of the compartment, and at the interstices of age, education levels, religion, caste, and class. The photograph of two young girl-vendors with picture-colouring books, which they will sell to working women with school-going children, is suggestive of interaction on the level of age, class, and caste (Photograph 2). Respondents described how the daily commute by train provided structure to their lives. The compartment emerges as a motif of a home away from home, bringing together women of diverse backgrounds who create an intimate space of sharing in the short span of the commute, ranging from half an hour to an hour. Interestingly, rather than viewing the daily commute as adding to their stress level, several of the women respondents gave to understand that the daily commute in fact acted as a stressbuster. What emerges is a bond between commuter and her ‘line’, leading to the formation of a unique gendered urban consciousness, specific to the kinetic space in which the commuter moves day-in, day-out. Women respondents communicated how the public space of the train, demarcated by clusters of seats, compensated for the lack of private spaces in the crowded city. It is useful here to note Phadke’s suggestion that space can be considered as a complex construction and production of an environment – both real and imagined; influenced by socio-political processes, cultural norms 27

Likewise, Ladies’ Compartment, 8.47 Local (2011) is a slim collection of short stories by Suma Narayan on the lives of women whom the author has encountered during her commute.

ጓ A City on the Move

173

and institutional arrangements which provoke different ways of being, belonging and inhabiting.28

Phadke stresses that this space “simultaneously also impacts and shapes the social relations that contributed to its creation.”29 The project report submitted to PUKAR by the undergraduate research group is rudimentary in terms of its structure and theoretical sophistication, but it offers the exciting potential to be developed into a conceptual framework that would permit exploration of the notion of a fluid gendered space in a complex and diverse environment. Challenging issues to be explored further could include the following: What kind of cultural capital gets exchanged in the space of the train compartment? How does commuting contribute to an interstitial space or third place between home and work as far as women are concerned? And what are the codes of conduct governing one’s space and privacy on board the local?

III The above project on groups of working women travelling in local trains sparked my interest in narrative representations of what the renowned Mumbai architect Rahul Mehrotra categorizes as the “kinetic city.” According to Mehrotra, the “kinetic city” represents the city in motion – it is temporal, and a city that is in continuous flux.30 I therefore began to scrutinize literary narratives for imaginative renderings of life in the tempo-spatial context of the commute to and from Mumbai city.31 There is undoubtedly a huge corpus of literary work in English on Mumbai. In many instances, it is the fiction by diasporic writers on their imaginary homelands that tends to be canonized as representative 28 Shilpa Phadke, “Gendered Usage of Public Spaces: A Case Study of Mumbai,” in The Fear that Stalks: Gender-based Violence in Public Spaces, ed. Sara Pilot & Lora Prabhu (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012):52 29 Phadke, “Gendered Usage of Public Spaces: A Case Study of Mumbai,” 52. 30 Mehrotra, “The Emergent Urbanism of Mumbai”:206, 31 There are examples of popular Hindi/Bollywood films that draw from experiences of the Mumbai Suburban Railways. In Saathiya (dir. Shaad Ali), a Mumbai medical college student (Rani Mukherjee) has a chance meeting with a stranger Aditya (Vivek Oberoi) on a morning train to Marine Lines. Mumbai Meri Jaan (Mumbai, My Life) (2008, dir. Nishikanth Kamath) is based on the 11 July 2006 Mumbai train bombings. The film depicts the psychological effect on the lives of two survivors who were in the general compartment of a train when the bomb went off in the first class. Jaago (Please wake up) (2004, dir. Mehul Kumar) is based on the true incident of a mentally challenged ten-year-old girl who was raped by three young men in a local in 2002.

174

MALA P ANDURAN G

ጓ

writing on the city. However, the geo-cultural locations of the fiction of Salman Rushdie or Rohinton Mistry, for instance, are largely confined to the geo-parameters of southern Mumbai, and do not venture into the more recent suburbs. The years since the 1990s have seen the emergence of the popular novels of the ‘underbelly’ of urban-living sprawl such as Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2007),32 Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower (2011),33 and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2012).34 These novels project subcultures of violence, thereby creating a distinct image of the city as inherently aggressive and volatile. However, intimate renderings of the practice of the daily commute on the local trains, with its furious pace and energy so indispensable to the rhythm of people’s lives, remain conspicuous by their absence from fiction written in English.35 Understandably, the idea of Mumbai as a city is bound to be experienced differently by individual writers. One could argue that the interiority of the space, and thereby the experiencing of it, can be articulated only by those who belong to it. Mainly the working classes use the trains; hence, it is important to acknowledge the class factor in acquiring experiential knowledge of extended urban spaces linked by the rail tracks. This is not to suggest that narratives on the city are devoid of references to the locals. There are certain stock images that recur with representational significance. Suketu Mehta describes his onetime trip on a fast local from Virar to Churchgate during evening rush hour in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004). The book’s blurb suggests that Mehta’s work is an “insider’s view of this stunning metropolis.” However, Mehta’s description of the local trains is derived more from experiences of his local informant Girish, who travels with a group of fifteen males who take the same train every day. Their interaction replicates the dynamics of group-formation in the ladies compartment: When he gets on, they make space on their laps for him and have a potluck breakfast together; each of them brings some delicacy from home [...]. They pass the hour agreeable, telling jokes, playing cards, or singing sometimes with castanets on their fingers [...]. Thus the journey is made bearable for those who get a seat, and diverting for those standing. In fact even when Girish changes his line of commute, he still

32

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (New Delhi:HarperCollins, 2007). Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower (New Delhi: HarperIndia, 2011). 34 Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (New Delhi: Penguin, 2012). 35 I have not examined fiction in the regional languages and have therefore not included discussion of the same. 33

ጓ A City on the Move

175

continues to take the train to Bombay Central once a week just for the pleasure of breakfast with his train group.36

Mehta’s discussion of the Mumbai local trains ends with the sense of optimism expressed by Asad bin Saif, an activist who has worked towards saving the secular social fabric of the city. The reference to the “hands from the train”37 that pull a commuter off the platform into an already overcrowded train is an oftrepeated trope used to symbolize an underlying sense of empathy shared by the commuters at large: If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay, and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward from the train like petals.38

It also signifies a bonding that cuts across communal and caste lines, as well as the ability of its citizens to ‘adjust’ or to make space for others despite an extremely demanding environment: And at that moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning, or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York [...]. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.39

Similarly, when asked about the title of her book Fourth Passenger (2012),40 Mini Nair explains how the notion of the “fourth seat” or the “fourth passenger” is a unique metaphor for an event that happens on the local trains: There are seats where three people can sit, but often it happens that a fourth person says, ‘Move, move’ and all the three people move to the side and the fourth person perches – barely perches – at the very end of the seat. And that’s the fourth passenger. And the fourth passenger is a metaphor for the grandness of the city, for the benevolence of the city. The city makes space.41 36

Mehta, Maximum City, 494. Maximum City, 496. 38 Maximum City, 496. 39 Maximum City, 496. 40 Mini Nair, The Fourth Passenger (London: Roman, 2012). 41 Mini Nair, talking about her book in an interview: Anon., “Mini Nair and Mumbai,” momentum (27 February 2012), http://momentumbooks.com.au/blog/blog/mini-nair-and-mumbai/ (accessed 21 December 2013). 37

176

MALA P ANDURAN G

ጓ

Another recurrent image is that of passengers compressed like cattle in train carriages without doors. Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, makes a passing reference to “Human flies [that] hang in thick white-trousered clusters from the trains.”42 The local ride becomes an exotic adventure undertaken by the daring and the brave. Monisha Rajesh, in Around India in 80 Trains (2012), suggests that travelling by train is “a suicidal exercise in survival”43 and not for the “fainthearted.”44 She describes the roof of a local train as “a series of hooked metal handholds that gave the creepy feeling of travelling in a human abattoir.” 45 However, the image captured by the student photographer Avni Shah (Photograph 3) is antithetical to Rajesh’s description, conveying a sense of participation in a more humane space. What emerges is a generalized perspective from authors who examine the local trains in terms of looking ‘outside-in’ rather than ‘inside-out.’ While there may occasionally be a note of admiration, observations are mainly conveyed in a tone of awe, shock, and even horror.

IV I conclude by discussing three Mumbai-based writers and by examining how their narratives project everyday commute strategies as metonymic of life in the city. Twice Written (2012) by K. Sridhar is about three young people (Prahlad, Ananya, and Laila) who try to make sense of their lives in the fast-changing city of Mumbai in the 1980s.46 The second section of the novel is structured by the interesting device of using the platform indicator of train times to suggest the protagonists’ engagement with the history of the city. Numerical symbols such as “BO - 06:57 – Slow’ or ‘N - 08:23 – Fast” are part of the daily language of the commuter.47 Sridhar uses the platform time-indicator to create an historical palimpsest, shifting between the colonial past of the city and the contemporary setting of the novel. He correlates the departure schedule of the local trains with significant landmarks of the city’s history. For example, his protagonists travel on the local trains, which are slated to leave at 18:53 hrs. (i.e. first train run between Victoria terminus and Thane on 16 April 1853); at 19:03 hrs. (i.e. construction of the Taj hotel in 1903 by Jamshetji Tata as a protest against discrimination 42

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 1980): 290. Monisha Rajesh, Around India in 80 Trains (New Delhi: Roli, 2012): 60. 44 Rajesh, Around India in 80 Trains, 61. 45 Around India in 80 Trains, 62. 46 K. Sridhar, Twice Written (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2012). 47 The term ‘Slow’ is used to describe the local train which stops at every suburban station, while a ‘Fast’ local has only select stops, thereby reaching its destination much quicker. 43

ጓ A City on the Move

177

of British-run hotels against Indian patrons); and at 19:42 (i.e. Quit India Movement led by Mahatma Gandhi). This strategy interweaves the temporal with the spatial. In Venus Crossing: 12 Stories in Transit (2009), Kalpana Swaminathan describes how the daily commute by the local electric train is an integral part of the lives of her lower- and middle-class protagonists, who must grapple with survival tactics in an impassive city.48 Swaminathan, a surgeon by profession, draws on her medical experience to correlate the physical states of fatigue, terminal illness, decay, and death with the corresponding mental states of her protagonists. Swaminathan’s focus is on the mind-set of commuters who are used to witnessing death on the tracks on a regular basis. In “A Prostitute,” Shubhada is accused of being an “emotional prostitute” and of “giving herself in homeopathic doses to anyone who asks.”49 Stung by this comment, she remains a mute witness to an incident where a schoolboy dies after falling from a train. “Eclipse” is a disturbing account of female feticide related to us by the girl-child narrator Champa. Champa unknowingly accompanies the midwife Dropdiben, who tips a bag with a female fetus from a running train into Mahim Creek. Jaideep Verma’s Local (2005) draws on the unusual plot of a man who decides to live on a local train. Writing at the time of the liberalization of the Indian economy, Verma offers a complex picture of the significance of the commute to the urban working class. His protagonist Akash Bhasin is a twentyeight-year-old divorcé who works during the day as a copywriter with a multinational advertising agency selling toothpaste. Akash has arrived in the city from Madras, and opts to be “voluntarily homeless”50 rather than paying the rack rent demanded in the city. He comes up with the innovative idea of spending every night in the local on the Churchgate-to-Virar line, which covers a distance of 59.82 km. Akash reflects: “Any Western Line Local was now my home, within its 60 km distance, wherever it ran, whichever direction it ran in, it was my home” (35). The logistics are explained to the reader. Akash takes the last train into Virar, which arrives at 2:30 am, then catches the first train out at 3:26 am. He spends the interval either on the platform or in an empty train waiting for departure. In the transition from the last train to the first train, he experiences “a tangible sense of progression, as if I was making the walk from yesterday to tomorrow” (41). He also makes an arrangement with a lodge near Churchgate station where he can take a bath on a regular basis every morning in exchange 48 49 50

text.

Kalpana Swaminathan, Venus Crossing. 12 Stories in Transit (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009). Swaminathan, Venus Crossing. 12 Stories in Transit, 3. Jaideep Verma, Local (New Delhi: Indialog, 2005): 6. Further page references are in the main

178

MALA P ANDURAN G

ጓ

for a monthly rental. Akash’s action suggests that a home need not have a fixed geographical location. In due time, Akash finds solace in the night train’s rhythm, which creates in him a certain fluidity of being against the urban angst that he experiences during the day. He reflects: “I noticed that when I was on the train, in motion, it was somehow more bearable to tackle those thoughts if they came creeping up on me” (45). Personal and professional situations, which he cannot handle when stationary, now “somehow assumed a lightness of touch, like an ephemeral dream” (45). The rhythm of the train “both physically and aurally envelope[s] him (79), and in due course “everything acquired a sense of lightness when thought of in the empty train at night” (110). The main narrative strand is interspersed with mini chronicles of Akash’s interaction with fellow travellers who enter his life intermittently on the same local. Verma gives these peripheral characters voices of their own, thereby granting us insight into their physical struggles as well personal survival strategies. What emerges from the interactions within the space of the train carriage is an underlying sense of compassion, which bonds the passengers with each other, despite the insane rush and perceived callousness of the city. Having observed the regular travellers on the train, Akash concludes that those who live further and travel the longer distances are as a rule “more even-tempered than the rest” (111). He surmises: “Perhaps, through pure instinct they had learnt to optimize their energy. They were definitely more passive and non-confrontational than the ones who had shorter distances to cover” and goes on to wonder “how it impacted on their lives off the train” (110). R. Sridhar, Kalpana Swaminathan, and Jaideep Verma all draw on instances of transit. The range of characters filling their pages are as varied as the people boarding and disembarking from the local trains, and the reader gets to know them mainly in transience. The narrator’s voice in Verma’s Local reflects: Living on the train was essentially an unobtrusive existence. Everything you saw was in passing. If you caught a beggar-woman wailing in the dead of the night on a station platform, you knew this too would pass [...]. If you saw the man opposite you staring vacantly, you knew he would get off shortly. Nothing was permanent on the train. (111)

The spatial negotiations that these narratives explore are representative of the everyday cosmopolitanism of a city that is constantly on the move. These are indeed frames of reference that deserve to be theorized further in order to expand our understanding of conceptions of place, social order, and power-relations in an ever-expanding urbanscape.

ጓ A City on the Move

179

W OR K S C I T E D Abhyankar, Aditi, Aishwarya Narayanmorthy, Vaishnavi Ramachandran & Mallika Mhapankar. “Survey on Mumbai Suburban Local Train Travelers,” Review of Integrative Business and Economics Research 1.1 (2012), http://www.sibresearch.org (accessed 21 December 2013). Adiga, Aravind. Last Man in Tower (New Delhi: HarperIndia, 2011). Anon. “Mini Nair and Mumbai,” momentum (27 February 2012), http://momentum books.com.au/blog/blog/mini-nair-and-mumbai/ (accessed 21 December 2013). Anon. The City at a Time of Crisis, http://www.crisis-scape.net/blog/item/97-metro nome-part-1-of-3 (accessed 20 December 2013). Birla, Puja. “Chronicles of the 7:33-Churchgate-Fast Rat,” http://iwp.uiowa.edu/91st/vol6 -num1/chronicles-of-the-733-churchgate-fast-rat (accessed 27 December 2013). Chandra, Vikram. Sacred Games (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2007). Dwivedi, Sharda, & Rahul Mehrotra. Bombay – The Cities Within (Bombay: India Book House, 1995). Government of India. Government of India for Census 2011, http://www.census2011.co .in/city.php (accessed 29 December 2013). Mehrotra, Rahul. “The Emergent Urbanism of Mumbai,” in Other Cities, Other Worlds. Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 205–18. Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Vintage, 2004). Nair, Mini. The Fourth Passenger (London: Roman, 2012). Narayan, Suma. Ladies’ Compartment, 8.47 Local (Kolkata: Power, 2011). Patel, Sujata, & Alice Thorner. Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India (Bombay: Oxford U P , 1995). Phadke, Shilpa. “Gendered Usage of Public Spaces: A Case Study of Mumbai,” in The Fear that Stalks. Gender Based Violence in Public Spaces (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012): 51–80. ——, Sameera Khan & Shilpa Ranade. Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011). “Population of Mumbai,” indiaonlinepages.com (2015), http://www.indiaonlinepages .com/population/mumbai-population.html (accessed 3 September 2015). Prakash, Gyan. Mumbai Fables: History of an Enchanted City (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2010). Rajesh, Monisha. Around India in 80 Trains (New Delhi: Roli, 2012). Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 1980). Sridhar, K. Twice Written (Mumbai: Popular, 2012). Subramanian, Samanth. Trains!, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles /2011/05/08/train (accessed 12 May 2014). Swaminathan, Kalpana. Venus Crossing: Twelve Stories of Transit (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009).

MALA P ANDURAN G

180

ጓ

Thayil, Jeet. Narcopolis (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2012). Verma, Jaideep. Local (New Delhi: Indialog, 2005). Films Saathiya. Dir. Shaad Ali (2002). Distributed by Yash Raj Films ( DVD ). Jaago (2004). Dir. Mehul Kumar (2004). Distributed by Venus ( D V D ). Mumbai Meri Jaan (2008). Dir. Nishikanth Kamath (2008). Distributed by U T V (D V D ).

Photograph 1

Photograph 2

ጓ A City on the Move

181

Photograph 3

ጓ

The Experience of Urban Space in the Poetry of Arun Kolatkar R AJ E E V S. P AT K E

Description is revelation. It is not The thing described, nor false facsimile. It is an artificial thing that exists, In its own seeming, plainly visible, Yet not too closely the double of our lives, Intenser than any actual life could be, A text we should be born that we might read, More explicit than the experience of sun And moon, the book of reconciliation, Book of a concept only possible In description, canon central in itself, The thesis of the plentifullest John.1

Introductory

O

N A C E R T A I N L E V E L O F A B S T R A C T I O N , cities (very large cities in particular) can feel rather similar in terms of what Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s called “a sociology of the everyday,” and Rem Koolhaas in the 1980s described as “the generic city.”2 Yet I would like to argue that each city remains unique as a site for the particularity of experience, in terms both of the 1

Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place” (1945), in Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode & Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997): 301. 2 Cf. Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, tr. John Moore, preface by Michel Trebitsch (Critique de la vie quotidienne, 2: Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté, 1961; London & New York: Verso, 2002), and Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli, 1995). In Mumbai Fables, Gyan Prakash appears to agree with

184

R A J E E V S. P A T K E

ጓ

history of changes it has undergone and of what it feels, sounds, and smells like to live in it from day to day. The poetry of cities captures this quality of difference in similarity. It is especially attentive to how individual experience is woven into the web of energies that constitutes the life of a city. In this essay, I would like to address the experience of urban spaces, as represented by Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), an author with a distinctive urban sensibility, whose writing adds up to an oddly insightful chronicle of what it meant to have lived in Bombay (or Mumbai, as it was renamed in 1995) during the latter half of the twentieth century, and, more particularly, to have lived in it during the 1960s and 1970s, before the onset of the episodic ethnic and political violence to which its history has been prone from the 1990s.3 Kolatkar’s twenty-eight Kala Ghoda Poems,4 which take up slightly over a hundred pages of text and were published in 2004, constitute an implicit poetics of urbanism that has much to startle and distract, especially those among us who are more comfortable with a conventional or academic approach to urban studies.5 What, you might ask, are the chief features of Kolatkar’s urban poetics? this view: “It is undeniable that certain generic urban forms and architectural designs are visible in city after city across the world. Shopping malls, cafes, restaurants, multiplex theaters, entertainment complexes, tall office towers, and apartment buildings dot the urban landscape worldwide. These are spaces that invoke a feeling of placelessness”; Prakash, Mumbai Fables (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010): 21. Yet, as I argue with Kolatkar in mind, these generalizations do not take account of the kind of particularity that the Kala Ghoda Poems demonstrate, grounding the sense of the urban in a very specific and unique environment. 3 The city has rung the changes on many names through its history as noted by Suketu Mehta: “It was called Heptanesia – the city of seven islands – by Ptolemy in A.D. 150. The Portuguese called it Bom Bahia, Buon Bahia, or Bombaim – Portuguese for ‘good bay.’ In 1538, they also called it Boa-Vida, the island of good life, because of its beautiful groves, its game, and its abundance of food. Another story about its name concerns the Sultan Kutb-ud-din, Mubarak Shah I, who ruled over the islands in the fourteenth century, demolished temples, and became a demon: Mumba Rakshasa. Other Hindu names for these islands were Manbai, Mambai, Mambe, Mumbadevi, Bambai, and now Mumbai”; Suketa Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006): 15. 4 Arun Kolatkar, Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2010). All quotations from Kolatkar’s poems in English refer to this book. 5 The publication of Kala Ghoda Poems brought together part of Kolatkar’s work in English from the last three decades of his life. He had been writing ambidextrously in two languages (English and Marathi) since the 1950s, but he was habitually reluctant to publish, until persuaded by friends and impending mortality to finally put most of his writing into print in the final year of his life. Six volumes were published in 2004. In Marathi: Chirimiri [“Small Change”]; Bhijki Vahi [“Wet Notebook”]; Droan [name of a character in The Mahabharata]; in English: Kala Ghoda Poems;

ጓ The Experience of Urban Space

185

Let us begin by looking at the title phrase in Hindi: Kala Ghoda Poems (‘Black Horse’ in English): it is a double allusion, which foregrounds a horse, and refers to a specific area of South Bombay associated with that horse, while also reminding us, in more general terms, that a city is as much a home to animals and other living creatures as to humans. The horse in question is a bronze statue, blackened over time since its installation in 1879 during the heyday of British imperialism. It was part of a large public monument, a thirteen-foot equestrian statue of King Edward VII , which stood in the vicinity of Bombay University, the Prince of Wales Museum, the Sassoon Hospital, and the Jahangir Art Gallery (opened in 1952 and chiefly instrumental in giving the neighbourhood its contemporary character of a thriving urban arts scene). The horseman remains nameless in the poetry, except for the penultimate poem in the volume, a dramatic monologue ascribed to a Sephardic Jew from Baghdad, David Sassoon, who became a highly successful businessman and the leader of the Jewish community in Bombay in the mid-nineteenth century. Part of the poem anecdotalizes an incident in which the rider – the Prince – once got almost unhorsed, dragged along the ground with one leg stuck in the stirrup, but managed to heave himself back into the saddle, where he can be still found out in the open, his “head wounds completely healed / by a poultice of bird droppings / on his balding head” (175). The history of colonialism for which the statue once served as grand metonymy is thus both included and elided by the allusion. In 1965, in the aftermath of public protests at the retention of colonial symbols in a postcolonial nation, the statue was moved to a less prominent location, in the Byculla Gardens, where it survives as a belated reminder of historical change, unrepressed but marginalized. The statue enables the poet to foreground the complicated yet complicitous difference between the present and its past. The monologue from Sassoon chronicles the difference through a series of vehicular metonymies, horsedrawn carriages succeeded by trams succeeded by “a plague of motor cars” (174) in “a sick city” “that gets / more and more unrecognisable / with every passing year,” “A cement-eating, bloodguzzling city / pissing silver, shitting gold / and choking on its vomit” (173).6 Sarpa Satra [“Snake Sacrifice”]; The Policeman: A Wordless Play in Thirteen Scenes. Posthumous publications include, in Marathi: Arun Kolatkarchya Char Kavita, 2006; Jejuri, 2011; and in English: The Boatride and Other Poems, 2009; and Collected Poems, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 2010. 6 “The black horse is long gone, yet the name Kala Ghoda persists thanks to peoples collective memory. The area in south Bombay was named after a grand 12-foot-9-inch bronze equestrian statue of King Edward V I I that once stood here. Sculpted by Sir Edgar Boehm and then worth over 12,500 [Rupees], the statue was donated to the city in 1876 by industrialist and philanthropist, Sir Albert Sassoon to commemorate the King’s visit to the city as Prince of Wales in 1875. In the mid-

186

R A J E E V S. P A T K E

ጓ

The Particular Let us now consider the opening poem of the volume, “Pi-dog”, an animal poem, in which, like the telepathic dog in Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog (1969), a domesticated animal becomes a focalizing device for the author to communicate a disconcerting yet uncanny perspective on Bombay as a particular instance of a common contemporary urban reality.7 Every Indian village and city has its population of stray dogs. This dog contemplates his city at a predawn hour, before the bustle of the day has begun. He sprawls on all fours, his body providing an incidental representation of the seven islands which, the poet reminds us, was what Bombay was like in the seventeenth century. The dog sprawls in an area, adjoining a very busy road, where cars are ordinarily parked during the day – a triangular traffic island marked out by embedded white-painted bollard-like stones. Adopting a characteristically whimsical and self-indulgent tone, the poet would have us know that he is no ordinary dog. A fantastical genealogy is invoked – with a pirate’s regard for accuracy – linking him on the mother’s side to the last surviving bitch from a pack of thirty foxhounds imported, rather quixotically, to Bombay in the nineteenth century by the British colonial administrator, Sir Bartle Frere.8 On the father’s side, this dog claims as ancestor the one animal allowed into heaven with his master Yudhishthira, the sole surviving Pandava from the five brothers who climbed the Himalayas after the battle that occasioned the epic of the Mahabharata.9 In addition, his name alludes to another famous dog in 60s, this statue along with many others of British personalities were damaged and removed by political activists. The Kala Ghoda was then placed in the zoological gardens of the Jijamata Udyan in Byculla”; Artists’ Centre, “Kala Ghoda: Changing Vistas,” http://www.artists centre.org/theartdistrict.htm (accessed 16 April 2013). 7 Harlan Ellison’s novella was published in 1969; an expanded version appeared that same year in The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, and the story was developed further in Vic and Blood: The Chronicles of a Boy and His Dog (1989) as a graphic novel in collaboration with Richard Corben. 8 Sir Bartle Frere (1824–84) was an administrator in the British colonial civil service whose long association with India began in 1834. He held office in many capacities during this service, including that of private secretary to the Governor of Bombay (1842–48), and Governor of Bombay (1862–67). Kolatkar’s anecdote picks up on one of his more quixotic ventures in India, and he may also have had a role to play in the financial crisis that overtook the Bank of Bombay in 1866; but he was also responsible for initiating many reforms in India. The Flora Fountain, situated not far from the Kaka Ghoda area of Bombay was commissioned in his honor. 9 The seventeenth and penultimate book of The Mahabharata, the Mahaprasthanika Parva, brings the narrative close to its end as follows: “They crowned Parikshit, son of Abhimanyu, as emperor and the five brothers left the city with Draupadi. They went out on a pilgrimage, visiting

ጓ The Experience of Urban Space

187

South Indian mythology, the guru of Kallidevayya’s dog, the preceptor whose student could recite the four Vedas backwards. Armed with a fantastical tradition that deliberately conflates the colonial and the pre-colonial ancient past, this dog shows that he, like any good Brahmin, can recite the Gayatri mantra, a solemn aubade greeting the sun as Savitri.10 The Indic traditions may seem to have been invoked in mock-heroic terms, but not without serious intent, since it is not the heritage that is mocked, though it is decentred by the motif of dogs (as done more recently in Derek Walcott’s rearrangement of central and peripheral vision in his poem-sequence Tiepolo’s Hound).11 Kolatkar’s dog is proud to display his piebald tradition as he composes his magnum opus, a triple sonata based on three themes, the sound of a robin, an ambulance, and a rock-drill. Such is the music of the city, and this its composer. It is through this music – as dawn breaks – that the city is re-created. Stones and trees now begin to assume their normal semblance, and the sociology of the everyday resumes its routine. The city is surrendered to its denizens. The dog has had his say from the margins: he can indulge the notion that he conjures the city into existence. It would be hasty to dismiss the poem as little more than a whimsical fantasy. It accomplishes a serious end by playful means. We are given holy places and finally reached the Himalayas. A dog joined them somewhere and kept them company all along. And the seven of them climbed the mountain on their last pilgrimage. As they toiled up the mountain path one by one fell exhausted and died. [. .. ] The dog still followed Yudhishthira. [.. .] Finally, when he reached a great height, Indra appeared in his chariot [.. . ] when Yudhishthira went up to take his seat in Indra’s chariot, the dog also climbed up. ‘No, no,’ said Indra. ‘There is no place for dogs in swarga,’ and pushed the dog away. ‘Then there is no room for me either,’ said Yudhishthira, and refused to enter the heavenly chariot if he had to leave his faithful companion behind. Dharma had come to test Yudhishthira’s loyalty and he was pleased with his son's conduct. The dog vanished from sight. Yudhishthira reached swarga”; C. Rajagopalachari, Mahahabharata Retold by C. Rajagopalachari, International Gita Society, ed. Jay Mazo http://www.gita-society.com/bhagavad-gita-section3/mahabharata.pdf (accessed 17 April 2013). 10 The Gayatri Mantra, a chant originating in The Rig Veda, translates as follows: “May we attain that excellent glory of Savitar the God: / So May he stimulate our prayers” (Hymn 62, Verse 10); Rig Veda, sun-gazing.com/pdf/hinduism/RigVeda.pdf (accessed 17 April 2013). 11 Walcott’s poem Tiepolo’s Hound (I. 3) enacts the process of surprise (“my awe of the ordinary”) when looking at a painting with fresh eyes once he has noticed a dog that appears incidental to the main human drama of the feast represented in Paolo Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: “I remember stairs in couplets. The Metropolitan’s / marble authority, I remember being // stunned as I studied the exact expanse / of a Renaissance feast, the art of seeing. // Then I caught a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound entering the cave of a table, // so exact in its lucency at The Feast of Levi, / I felt my heart halt”; Derek Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001): 7.

188

R A J E E V S. P A T K E

ጓ

a dog’s-eye view of a city: an assemblage created or imagined by a humble dogsbody of an urban Apollo strumming a half-facetious lyre, making room for himself in a city whose life thrust him willy-nilly to its margins.

The General Let me stand back now from the particular to attend to the general, and return to my initial question: what are the chief features of an urban poetics implied by such a poem? First, it is oblique in approach and manner. These are words spoken sotto voce, more like thoughts overheard than words spoken aloud; and they are certainly not offered as a definitive or permanent way of saying or seeing things. They imply that a city, and all it has to provide by way of experience, is interesting if seen as involuntary, non-purposive, impermanent, and fortuitous: a trouvaille, a found object. In this context, the trivia are minima moralia.12 Moreover, such writing implies a willingness to blur the edge between art and non-art, between words offered to resist time and words willing to float on or sink in the flow of forgetting and decay. If such writing is postcolonial (in always keeping a sense of history in its peripheral vision), they are also postmodern (in always letting the present moment in all its transitoriness prevail over the impulse towards any kind of fixity). As writing, such poems blur the distinction between scribbling in a diary, reporting to a bystander, and keeping posterity in mind. Second: this is a poetics of the casual. It affirms, confirms, and celebrates chance, accident, coincidence, contingency, and the merely happen-chancy nature of occurrences. It is premised on a willingness to accept as something – as something considerable – much that many might see as a set of nothings. It is a poetics of the tiny against the mighty, the unofficial against the official, subversive in place of asseveration, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern rather than Hamlet: that is to say, a poetics of the obverse side to everything, the negative of the image that most people accept too readily as the desired image of things, whether in cities or in themselves living in cities. 12

The subtitle of Adorno’s book, “reflections from damaged life,” along with its allusion to “a melancholy science,” is apt in relation to aspects of Kolatkar’s writing, regardless of, or because of, its many overt assertions of delight at life’s minimal trivia, and the attentiveness of notation he deploys could find no better description than Adorno’s focus on an underlying estrangement: “He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses”; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflection from Damaged Life, tr. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; London & New York: Verso, 1974): 15.

ጓ The Experience of Urban Space

189

Third: it is a poetics of the lower-case carnival.13 That is to say, in the first part, it is about little people, ignored and unkempt people, beggars and layabouts and tramps, the ones who barely make a living, who crowd a city but get ignored when a city is measured in terms of property or power or position or class or rank or caste. For the second part, it is about the little people busy in their marginalized lives, shown here to be full of self-possession, unaware but intent on living their lives fully, utterly unmindful that the so-called better-offs might see them as unenviable, pitiful, or contemptible. Conjoined, the two parts give us a poetics of urban spaces always crowded with people – specifically, with street-people, the poor, the hard-done-by but hardy as they lead lives which, the poet is intent on showing us, are rich in affect. This richness does not, like beauty, lie merely in the eye of the beholder. It is fully presented as a property of the objects seen, and seen voyeuristically by the poet but reported as an endowment in how these people lead their lives from moment to moment, as when “The Bare-feet Queen of the Crossroads” (120–22) suns her wet hair in full view of passers-by, which our Bombay Degas presents to us as a lady at her toilet, full of self-possession, intent on being herself, living her life to the fullest, unmindful of watchers, and uncaring that you or I might think her bereft of home, shelter, propriety, or decency. The spaces marked by this poetics are the road and the pavement and the traffic-island: all those things that a motorist busy in getting from here to there might miss or dismiss as no part of a ‘proper’ urban purpose. The carnivalesque element in Kolatkar’s urban poetics celebrates the lower segments of society as a community, especially through the agency of food, as in the routine of eating idlis for breakfast in the Kala Ghoda neighbourhood. The event is given the treatment of a secular rite: joyous, invested with goodness, and cherished by all who have the good fortune to feast on the Goan woman Annapurna’s idlis, while the poet treats the occasion of “Breakfast at Kala Ghoda” (the longest poem in the book, 125–44) as a tour de force, an op13

Bakhtin’s classic emphases on the significance of carnival in writing and culture in Rabelais and his World (1965/1984) apply fully to what Kolatkar discovers in his Bombay motley: “carnival images closely resemble certain artistic forms, namely the spectacle” (7); “carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it” (7); “While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom” (7); “Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, renewal” (10); “free, familiar contacts were deeply felt and formed an essential element of the carnival spirit. People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations” (10); “The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience” (10); “Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival's participants” (11). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (1965; Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1984).

190

R A J E E V S. P A T K E

ጓ

portunity to survey what people are eating in various parts of the world, as well as various parts of Bombay, a gourmet feasting on the cultural geography of difference in sameness, the appeasing of hunger – a hunger for life itself – through a rich variety of dishes, of which the humble roadside idli is made the centrepiece. Naturally, therefore, and fourth, this is a poetics of joy. As the American poet Marianne Moore once remarked, “satisfaction is a lowly thing, how / pure a thing is joy.”14 This poetics proffers joy – and what is unusual about this joy is that it is evoked spontaneously by the most fortuitous of aperçus: the delicate wariness with which a crow lands near an object it carefully confirms is a twig which it might or might not use for its nest (91–93); or the way in which the fronds of a low-lying branch of a coconut tree resemble and differ from the dried-leaf broom with which a girl or woman sweeps the street below, while above her the fronds play their own visual game of touch with breeze, birds, moon, and shadows below, or the way in which this same garbage-collecting girl or woman tramples and compacts the rubbish she has collected, much as a girl in a vineyard might crush grapes in a tub, the olfactory emanations from one pressing comparable to the other, though indeed the smell of wine might differ from the smells of a city like Bombay, growing larger and more crowded and more messy by the day. The simple delight in how a wizened and disfigured old crone will bathe every street urchin on her knees, releasing along with the affirmation of her common humanity, from her hapless but washed victim, “a perfect arc of piss,” “lusty / and luminous / in the morning sun” (98). The simple delight in animating objecthood so that an old bicycle-tyre speaks of what it would prefer as its way of being useful in the city even after being discarded as useless (104–107). This type of mischievous delight is leavened with sobriety – in Kolatkar’s own case, often also with something akin to sadness. It is a joy that can be tinged with wryness because life is other and maybe both less and more than what one had supposed, especially in a large and chaotic city, suggesting that better alternatives to frustration, exasperation or disappointment can be found when room is made instead for the sardonic, the ironic, and the satirical. All this remains within the province of delight because its elements of critique stop short of bitterness or hatred or the desire to dominate others or to practise violence

14

Marianne Moore, “What Are Years”: “So he who strongly feels, behaves. The very bird, grown taller as he sings, steels his form / straight up. Though he is captive, his mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly thing, how / pure a thing is joy. This is mortality, this is eternity”; Moore, Complete Poems (New York: Viking, 1981): 95.

ጓ The Experience of Urban Space

191

against others – other people, other ways of being and thinking, or other values. It is wary of only two things: sentimentality and self-deception as distinguished from playfulness, whimsicality, or the freedom of fancy to mix being (what the eye sees) with seeming (what the imagination makes of what is seen, heard, smelt, and felt). It is above all the delight of the eye, Kolatkar as graphic artist– poet, sharing with us the felicities of happenchance and fancy as in “Knucklebones,” which skirts close to being sly and coy without actually falling into either trap, while acknowledging its own full complicity in the act of gendered voyeurism. You get up with a big smile on your bum. Your sari wears a grin where your buttocks have sucked it in. Which sets us all back a good ten seconds. It isn’t just your sari; it’s time itself that feels the pinch. […] Time unpuckers when you smooth your behind. The earth resumes its normal rate of spin. No harm done. […] (116)

That brings us to the fifth property of this poetics: it foregrounds margins. It offers resistance to the imperialism of the obvious, the intended, the overt, the allegedly central, and the manifestly official in everything to do with a city and its denizens’ way of accumulating metonymies of selfhood towards affirming self-identification. This is a city whose life is experienced in the streets and on the sidewalks and garbage dumps rather than in houses, museums, public offices, banks or schools. It is a liminal city space, a space where heterotopia is turned inside-out, and we live inside its mirror spaces.15

15 In a 1967 lecture, “Of Other Spaces” (French text published 1984, translated into English 1986), Michel Foucault spoke of an interest in spaces “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types”: utopias and heterotopias. He defined the latter as follows: “real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are

192

R A J E E V S. P A T K E

ጓ

Sixth, it is a poetics of the mind. Its operations affect sensibility rather than events. It is not about how to do things but about how we might think or rethink things, how we might view or re-view phenomena. It might change our disposition towards things or ourselves, or ourselves living in cities, but it is not interested in what we might do as such. The English poet W.H. Davies lamented, in the early decades of the twentieth century, that we have no time to stand and stare.16 Well, this poetics clearly has a lot of time to stand and sit or sprawl and stare, talking loquaciously to itself all the time! These six properties combine to suggest a seventh, overarching feature: the power to re-valorize living, the capacity to extend a new sympathy – not a new sentimentality or a new romanticism –towards ordinariness, rubbish, dirt, dereliction, and ugliness; to empathize (not merely to sympathize) with the stray, the abandoned, the desultory, the solitary as well as the lonely, the inconsequential, the insignificant, and the unprepossessing.17 In that sense, it offers a new self-possession and a new sense of self as this might inhabit a city: warily, sceptically, gingerly, yet receptively, with a watchful twinkle in the eye, and a willingness to be surprised – and pleasantly surprised – by the underwhelming in cities and in ourselves.

Of Closure, Foreclosure, and Disclosure What I hope my examples will have suggested can be used to reformulate Kolatkar’s urban poetics of space in terms of the notions of enclosure, foreclosure, and disclosure. The idea of enclosure begins but does not end with the simple sense in which the inhabitants of a city are fenced in by it. It extends to all the ways in which our perceptions as humans are contained by our sense of being urban (that is, in how most of us are city-born, city-bred, and happy to visit the countryside for vacations but relieved to be back in cities as the default norm for daily life). Enclosure refers to the ways in which space is contained as place,

absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias”; Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces” (“Des Espaces Autres,” 1967), tr. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 24. Examples include cemeteries, libraries, airport transit lounges, and to this series we could add busy streets and pavements – spaces we go through as through a means to an end, without treating them as ends in themselves, or spaces where life gets lived. 16 W.H. Davies’ “Leisure” begins: “What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare”; Collected Poems (London: A.C. Fifield, 1916): 19. 17 Part of the sixth section of this seven-part poem is quoted as the epigraph to this essay.

ጓ The Experience of Urban Space

193

circumscribed by place, trapped in a condition from which a poetics seeks to rescue it. The American poet Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem titled “Description Without Place.”18 This poem enables one to recognize a sense in which a description both is and is not about place, because it is about a possibility still young on the horizon of becoming. The poem also enables one to distinguish between place and space, and stresses the sense in which a poetics of urban space both is and is not about a specific place, such as Kolatkar’s Bombay, because its scope is somewhat different, to the degree to which it addresses the realm of the incipient or the potential as that may be occluded by the real and the actual in all its mutable propensity towards decay. I bring Stevens’s poem into the discussion because the allusion enables me to remind us that an individual poetics is indeed about space and not place, though place is included in the idea of space, and constitutes the enclosure from which the poetry invites us to step out. The same poem by Stevens is used by Alain Badiou in his 2006 essay on “Drawing”: The work of art is a description which has no immediate relationship with a real that would be outside the description, like in the romantic conception, the absolute idea is outside its sensible glory.19

Likewise, each of the Kala Ghoda Poems evokes a possibility that we might apply to our own places and times. To read them in that spirit would be to greet our own cities with a similar but different – because our own – sense of stepping out from our enclosures. Next, let us briefly consider foreclosure. The general sense of the word entails anticipation and prevention of a particular likelihood: a pre-emptive act. The specific legal sense refers to the recovery of whatever can be salvaged from a loan on whose repayment the borrower has defaulted. How might these denotations apply figuratively in the context of Kolatkar’s implied poetics? One begins with a foundational recognition: he lives in a world of experience rather than innocence. Foreclosure is always already accepted as a fact of urban life. He is in Blake’s camp on this, not Wordsworth’s. The Blakean realm of experience is different from the Wordsworthian, in that the former foregoes or renounces 18

As remarked a long time ago by Georg Simmel, “isolation, insofar as it is important to the individual, refers by no means only to the absence of society. On the contrary, the idea involves the somehow imagined, but then rejected, existence of society”; Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. & tr. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe I L : Free Press, 1950): 118–19. 19 Alain Badiou, “Drawing,” lacanian ink 28 (Fall 2006) http://lacan.com/symptom12/?p=65 (accessed 17 April 2013).

194

R A J E E V S. P A T K E

ጓ

innocence and the latter reverts to it (in the sense in which, as Wordsworth puts it, “the Child is father of the Man”20). That is to say, the metaphor of foreclosure is premised on some assumptions specific to the affective dimension of urban experience. It is not to be denied that a city is (in part) an unwilling conglomeration of people and energies and resources and practices and institutions and structures. In part, a city could almost be treated as a symbol of dystopia, the inversion of the utopian impulse towards a happy life. How else did the pastoral genre in Western literature arise? How else could a poet say, as William Cowper did, that God made the country while man made the town? Many of us may love people in the singular and the collective, but how many of us truly love crowds? And traffic jams? And pollution? And the continual invasion of privacy that is life in the public spaces of which a city is partly comprised? A city is an assemblage despite itself, a kind of Hobbesian compact in which we give up a lot to gain some things.21 This is where foreclosure comes in. How might we rescue for ourselves that about life which brings joy and delight when living in cities, when there is so much by way of depredation to suffer through living in cities? Of course, we should not be so naive as to deny the security, the comforts, and the pleasures that a city does afford: a host of amenities and conveniences; roads and sewers, garbage disposal and post offices and banks, schools and jails; the pleasures of gardens, markets, concerts, and museums; the reassurance of police and the rule of law, the internet and the café, and so on and so forth. But it all comes at a price. The material and psychic costs of living in cities are high, not to mention the occasional likelihood of urban violence and the sheer press of humanity in the mass on the human as individual or family. Foreclosure has to do with how we balance our book of urban experience. And that is where Kolatkar’s poetics is at its most useful: in his world, small things go a long way, because he knows (and shows) unusual ways of making the small things work for you, especially when the large things (success, wealth, power, fame) are buses that do not often stop where the urban majority live and work. Let us move, finally, to disclosure, whose import has in some ways been anticipated by how enclosure and foreclosure have been described above. It is

20

Wordsworth (1802), “My heart leaps up when I behold”: “The Child is father of the Man; / I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.” William Wordsworth, The Major Works: Including The Prelude, ed. Stephen Gill (1984; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000): 246. 21 As Thomas Hobbes remarks in the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan, the life of mankind would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” if we did not agree to give up some of our rights and freedoms in order to be able to live together in relative peace; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tucker (1651; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1991): 89.

ጓ The Experience of Urban Space

195

relevant to note here that, in writing deconstructively of Christianity, Jean–Luc Nancy coins the term “dis-enclosure”: Dis-enclosure denotes the opening of an enclosure, the raising of a barrier [...] Closure is the completion of this totality that conceives itself to be fulfilled in its self-referentiality.22

The terms foreclosure and disclosure, as I use them here, combine to produce a similar effect. It is not true, either in life or in the specific case of urban experience, that we have only to look in order to see. A lot depends on how we are disposed towards noticing or not noticing what there might be to see, hear, touch, or feel about the city as its own disjecta membra. That is what Kolatkar’s poems reveal in all their wry but cheery obliqueness.

W OR K S C I T E D Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflection from Damaged Life, tr. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; London & New York: Verso, 1974). Artists’ Centre. “Kala Ghoda: Changing Vistas,” http://www.artistscentre.org /theart district.htm (accessed 16 April 2013). Badiou, Alain. “Drawing,” lacanian ink 28 (Fall 2006), http://lacan.com/symptom12 /?p=65 (accessed 17 April 2013). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (1965; Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1984). Davies, W.H. Collected Poems (London: A.C. Fifield, 1916). Ellison, Harlan. A Boy and His Dog (New York: Avon, 1969). Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces” (“Des Espaces Autres,” 1967), tr. Jay Miskowiec, diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tucker (1651; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1991). Kolatkar, Arun. Collected Poems in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2010). Koolhaas, Rem, & Bruce Mau. S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli, 1995). Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, tr. John Moore, preface by Michel Trebitsch (Critique de la vie quotidienne, 2: Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté, 1961; London & New York: Verso, 2002). Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006). 22

Jean–Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, tr. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant & Michael B. Smith (La déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, 1, 2005; New York: Fordham U P , 2008): 6.

R A J E E V S. P A T K E

196

ጓ

Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems (New York: Viking, 1981). Nancy, Jean–Luc. Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, tr. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant & Michael B. Smith (La déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, 1, 2005; New York: Fordham U P , 2008). Prakash, Gyan. Mumbai Fables (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010). Rajagopalachari, C. Mahahabharata Retold by C. Rajagopalachari, International Gita Society, ed. Jay Mazo, http://www.gita-society.com/bhagavad-gita-section3/maha bharata.pdf (accessed 17 April 2013). Rig Veda. sun-gazing.com/pdf/hinduism/RigVeda.pdf (accessed 17 April 2013). Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. & tr. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe IL : Free Press, 1950). Stevens, Wallace. “Description Without Place” (1945), in Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode & Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997): 296–303. Walcott, Derek. Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). Wordsworth, William. The Major Works: Including The Prelude, ed. Stephen Gill (1984; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000).

ጓ

The Metropolis in the Province Interrogating the New Postcolonial Literature in India R. R AJ R AO

T

I H OMA S

B A B I N G T O N M A C A U L A Y , 1 in his famous Minute on Education of

1835, envisaged a class of persons in India who were Indian by birth and Indian in the complexion of their skin, but English in manners and customs. The creation of this body of Homo sapiens was the administrative need of the day, because it was becoming cost-ineffective for England to import ‘babus’ from home to run their jewel in the crown. But here I would like to mix my metaphors. I would like to think of the India of that time as an Orwellian animal farm where, ostensibly, all the animals were equal, but in truth some were more equal than others. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, it became clear that Macaulay’s English-educated segment of the population were more equal than their non-English-educated brethren. Their knowledge of English was itself facilitated by the presence of Christian missionaries who set up schools on the soil, and later by the establishment of the presidency universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1853. Orwell imaginatively chose the species to which his unequal animals belonged. They were pigs with all the characteristics that these vile creatures possess, and pigs, let us remember, are offensive to some religions such as Islam. My metaphor would imply that Macaulay’s English-educated Indians, too, were ‘pigs’. This would become evident a few years later, in 1857, during the country’s Great Uprising,2 which some historians refer to as the War of Independence. During the Uprising, English-educated Indians did not support the rank and file in the British Indian 1

Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Education” (1835), in Macaulay, Poetry and Prose Selected, ed. G.M. Young (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1952): 729. 2 For a detailed account of the Uprising, see Pramod K. Nayar, The Great Uprising (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007).

198

R. R A J R A O

ጓ

army who had initiated the revolt. The revolt itself was allegedly triggered off by a new set of cartridges introduced by the British in India, greased with cow fat and pig fat, which required being bitten into before they could be used (the cow is a sacred animal to the Hindus). India’s unequal English-educated pigs did not back the soldiers of the Great Uprising in 1857 for a simple reason: they did not want freedom from British rule. Why would they, when Britain had proved to be their milk-cow? Development in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India is akin to today’s development in the globalized world. Under British tutelage, India rapidly transformed from an agricultural into an industrialized nation. However, it is common knowledge that the transformation, like the globalization of today, benefitted the classes (or, in India, the privileged castes) more than it did the masses. When Independence finally arrived in 1947, it did so under the stewardship of Gandhi, who had voluntarily relinquished his own status as a ‘pig’ ever since he was thrown out of a First-Class train carriage in South Africa for racist reasons. Gandhi then joined the lesser breeds on the animal farm. Macaulay’s ‘pigs’ were a great force to reckon with in post-Independence India. They had proved Orwell’s prophecy to be true, and had come to replace their English masters in all spheres of life: social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural. But what was the profile of the ‘pigs’? The postcolonial cultural theorist Aijaz Ahmad calls them the “‘national’ intelligentsia”3 and points out that they hailed predominantly from the upper and middle castes (as opposed to the lower and untouchable castes). They were also from occupations and sectors familiar to the colonizer such as the bureaucracy, education, English-language journalism, the law, and trade and commerce. Ahmad suggests that English in the colonies led to a sort of hierarchical bifurcation of the intelligentsia, with the national branch characterized by its facility in the language, and the regional branch marked by its unfamiliarity with it, though they did possess a mastery of indigenous languages. This divisiveness, in Ahmad’s formulation, was watertight; thus, bilingualism, according to him, was on the decline. However, I wish to refute this point later on in my essay when referring to two bilingual Indian poets, Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar, who wrote with equal élan in English and Marathi. Both of them straddled the worlds of the two intelligentsias with ease. And what I attempt to show is that, while our animal farm is essentialist, both

3

Aijaz Ahmad, “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” in Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Swati Joshi (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1994): 206–63.

ጓ The Metropolis in the Province

199

Chitre and Kolatkar attempted through their bilingualism to anti-essentialize and dismantle the status quo. But Ahmad’s real concern is with novelists rather than poets. As he acknowledges, one of the peculiarities of the postcolonial era is that it has witnessed not the decline but the incredible proliferation of literary texts composed and published in ex-colonial countries but in languages that had initially been imported from Europe, mainly English and French,”4

However, he does not mince his words in affirming that such “proliferation” of literary texts is restricted to prose fiction. The writers he cites as examples are proof of this: Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Chinua Achebe, and Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o, among others.5 As for poetry, he confidently asserts that “one cannot say the same about poetry.”6 So Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nissim Ezekiel, and A.K. Ramanujan figure nowhere in his configuration. Where Ahmad expected English, the language of the colonizer, to be on the decline after independence, he is surprised that it proliferated. He attributes this to the “deeper penetration of the state into all aspects of civil society.” 7 English, by this measure, is a centralizing language. The novel, though not poetry in English, has crystallized into a “countercanon”8 or alternative canon. However, as I argue in my essay, this fictional counter-canon is not a monolith. It stands, in relation to certain kinds of postcolonial fiction, exactly as canonical European and English literature once stood towards it; that is to say, in a superior–subordinate relationship. Writers who make it into the canon are those who, like Rushdie, have emigrated to the Metropolis. Those who have stayed back in the Province are deemed provincial. It is as black-and-white as this: if the canon is white, the counter-canon is black (pun unintended). There is no room for an in-between space that we may tentatively call the Metropolis-in-the-Province. And it is to this space that I should like to turn in the next section of my essay.

ጓ 4

Ahmad, “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” 232. True enough for Ngˤƨɉ’s earlier oeuvre, but not for his more recent writings with their turn away from English and his championing of indigenous languages. 6 Ahmad, “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” 233. 7 “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” 233. 8 “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” 232. 5

200

R. R A J R A O

ጓ

II My ‘partition of India’ does not refer to the historic Partition of 1947, when India was split into two countries, the predominantly Hindu India and the predominantly Muslim Pakistan, itself divided into West Pakistan (the erstwhile state of Punjab) and East Pakistan (the erstwhile state of Bengal). The author Salman Rushdie, satirically commenting on the Lilliputian smallness of the two Pakistans, refers to them as merely the West Wing and the East Wing of the country in his novel Shame.9 In time, East Pakistan, the smaller of the two Pakistans, would break free from West Pakistan with Big Brother India’s military aid, and emerge as an independent nation, Bangladesh, in 1971. No, my ‘partition’ does not refer to this historic and tumultuous turn of events. But my ‘partition’ is also historical, and also involves two Indias; one where, in Rushdie’s formulation, the homeland is real, and the other where it is imaginary. The latter India is, of course, the India of the diaspora, where several more than equal English-educated Indians, and some less than equal non-English-educated ones, migrated, as pointed out above, and relocated after Independence. The nations to which the diaspora relocated may themselves be loosely termed ‘the West’, which included, for the most part, 10 the anglophone world of the U SA , the U K , and Canada. The history of the latter half of the twentieth century is the history of mass immigrations from the so-called Third World (the postcolonial world) to the West, resulting in the postcolonial binary of Province/Metropolis. But in such a formulation, there is an invisible (and invincible) in-between space, a no man’s zone that resists binarization. That space is what I would like to call the Metropolis-in-the-Province, to which, as far as writers are concerned, a large number of us, me included, belong. The relationship of the Metropolis-in-the-Province, with the Province on the one hand and the Metropolis per se on the other, is complex, complicated. It cannot be defined in terms of a simple Orientalism, or subalternity, or hybridity, or counter-discursiveness. Helen Tiffin’s view, for example, that all ‘post-colonial’ literature is “constituted in counter-discursive rather than homologous practices,”11 would render inauthentic (and invalid) a text where the non-counter-discursive strategies in terms of subject-matter, 9

Salman Rushdie, Shame (New Delhi: Rupa, 1983): 179. Before the convulsion of Independence, of course, there was also the kala pani of migration (‘across the black water’) to Fiji, Trinidad, and British Guiana during the nineteenth-century’s indenture phase, and a substantial presence in other settler colonies such as New Zealand and South Africa. 11 Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse” (1987), in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 96. 10

ጓ The Metropolis in the Province

201

language, narrative structure, plot, and characterization outweigh the counterdiscursive strategies. A postcolonial gay novel with linear narration (such as the novels I write) is particularly prone to being regarded as inauthentic by this formulation, because the articulation of postcolonial gayness is probably not felt to be counter-discursive discourse. Instead, it is regarded as discourse that originated in Europe and America, post-Stonewall. True, homosexuality may have existed in the Province since pre-colonial times, but positive representations of it in the contemporary sense did not. In its relationship with the Province, the Metropolis-in-the-Province sometimes displays ‘internal’ Orientalism, while in its relationship with the Metropolis proper it reveals a desire to merge with the centre. The Metropolis-in-theProvince is thus a colonial by-product with features of both the Province and the Metropolis. Its geo-political spatiality was engendered by imperialism’s power to transform the shape of languages, cultures, and societies by striking at their very resilience. In India, Macaulay’s Minute on Education not only introduced English into the curriculum, which some more-than-equal authors made their language of expression, but it also ‘modernized’ India’s numerous indigenous languages and bhashas, which no longer looked the same, possibly thereby somewhat bridging the gap between the less than equal and the more than equal without intending to do so. The desire of the Metropolis-in-the-Province to merge with the centre notwithstanding, it continued to be invisible to all concerned. Its internal Orientalism did not liberate it from its provincial taint and grant it the autonomy it yearned for. On the contrary, Orientalism (in Edward Said’s sense12) continued to apply to it as it did to the Province, for, from the perspective of the Metropolis proper, the Province and the Metropolis-in-the-Province were indistinguishable. They were both a part of the Third World. Thus, the Metropolis-in-the-Province was no less a “dangerous”13 zone than the Province, as Bruce King describes it in his book Modern Indian Poetry in English, which deals with the work of urban Indian poets who possess an urban sensibility. The former were, at the end of the day, nothing but the “inferiorized”14 Other of the Western metropolis. If, in Said’s formulation, Orientalism inherently existed in the representation of the East in English literature, which “delivered”15 the Orient to imperialism, 12 13 14 15

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). King, Modern Indian Poetry in English (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2001): 91. Ahmad, “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” 226. “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” 226.

202

R. R A J R A O

ጓ

that representation covered not just the small towns and district places such as Chandrapore and Mau (not to speak of the Marabar Caves) invoked by E.M. Forster in his novel A Passage to India,16 but, by extension, the presidency towns as well. In other words, the presidencies could not claim exemption from Orientalist ways of seeing. If colonialism was the Original Sin, the Province became in the twentieth century a poor post-lapsarian replica of the Metropolis. I use the term ‘replica’ on purpose, in order to bring out the ‘fake’ and ‘imitative’ nature of the Metropolis-in-the-Province. A presidency city like India’s Bombay, for example, an island city like Manhattan, with a population far exceeding that of the latter, 17 is a metro as far as its geographical area, its tower blocks, its vehicular traffic, its industries, its railway systems, its harbour, its stock exchange, its trade and commerce, its banks and financial institutions, its film industry (named ‘Bollywood’, which derives from Hollywood), and its environmental pollution are concerned. But the mind-set of most Bombayites (or Mumbaikars, for the city was renamed Mumbai in 1996) is as yet pre-modern. This is broadly manifest in their attitude to lifestyle, within the purview of which I would include value-systems or sanskar, religion, marriage, relationships, housing, diet, fashion, entertainment, environmental awareness, sanitation, and the English language. Perhaps no single literary text encapsulates this ambivalence better than Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1976). Jejuri is a village in the heartland of the Province and can be reached by road and railroad from the metropolises of Bombay and Pune. There are two shrines here, one several centuries old and a newer one built much later. The presiding deity in both shrines is Lord Khandoba, said to be an incarnation of Lord Shiva, the god of destruction in the Hindu trinity along with Lord Brahma, the god of creation, and Lord Vishnu, the god of preservation. The followers of Lord Khandoba are mostly illiterate shepherds who do not speak English. They live either in Jejuri itself or in small towns and villages around it. They also live in Bombay and Pune, to which urban migration for reasons of employment has driven them. Arun Kolatkar, too, lived in Bombay and wrote in English. As pointed out earlier, he was a bilingual poet and composed poetry both in English and Marathi. Jejuri, however, is written in English. The poem takes shape in the mid-1970s when Kolatkar visits Jejuri for a day. It is unclear why Kolatkar, as a non-believer, goes to Jejuri in the first place.

16

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1936). Roughly 20.7 million according to the 2011 census: “India stats: Million plus cities in India as per Census 2011,” Press Information Bureau, Mumbai (Press release), Press Information Bureau, Government of India. 31 October 2011. 17

ጓ The Metropolis in the Province

203

Is it for the specific purpose of writing the poem, or is it a mock-pilgrimage or, worse still, a picnic? Or is it a combination of all three motives? Whatever the reason, the portrait of Jejuri that emerges in Kolatkar’s poetry, at least on the face of it, is hardly flattering. There is hostility from the word go. Kolatkar dislikes the old, bespectacled man with a caste mark on his forehead who is seated across him in the dilapidated State Transport bus that takes them from Bombay to Jejuri.18 On reaching the place, he is greeted by an avaricious Brahmin priest as soon as he steps off the bus, and this makes him see himself as a “live, ready-to-eat pilgrim” in the eyes of the priest.19 When Kolatkar enters the shrine, he is offended by the general desecration that he witnesses all around him. The things that contribute to the desecration, from his point of view, are a pair of shorts that are left to dry on the ornate temple door;20 a sickly female dog and its litter of puppies inside the temple;21 a carved fallen pillar now lying horizontally on its side;22 the abundance of saffron paste smeared all over the walls and the sculpture of the temple, which the poet sees as defacement;23 and so on. These and other allied things induce a classic response in the poet, who exasperatedly writes: “every other stone / is god or his cousin” and “scratch a rock / and a legend springs.”24 Clearly, then, the poet is against legends and myths. Instead, he approaches the place as an artist and an aesthete. Surrealism becomes his chosen mode of telling, for had he not had recourse to surrealism, the poem would have been no more than a piece of socio-religious or socio-cultural criticism. As explained above, one of the key premises of Said’s Orientalism is that this mode of seeing delivered the Orient to the imperialists. In other words, the colonial enterprise begins with the representation of the colony as the inferior Other in literature; the actual fact of colonialism comes much later. To the extent that an ‘internal’ Orientalism operates in Kolatkar’s text (I have used this phrase earlier), with the Bombay–Jejuri equation being the objective correlative of the England–India binary as it existed in the nineteenth century, Jejuri may be said to have delivered the Province to the Metropolis-in-the-Province. The poem decides beforehand, for generations of English major students in Indian

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Arun Kolatkar, “The Bus,” Jejuri (Bombay: Clearing House, 1976): 9. Kolatkar, “The Priest,” Jejuri, 11. “The Door,” Jejuri, 15. “Heart of Ruin,” Jejuri, 12 “The Doorstep,” Jejuri, 13. “Chaitanya,” Jejuri, 16. “A Scratch,” Jejuri, 28.

204

R. R A J R A O

ጓ

universities (and now in universities abroad as well, for it has been re-issued in America as a New York Review of Books edition with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri), that the place is arid, barren, and wrapped in superstition and religious exploitation. There is hardly anything that can be said to be redeeming about Jejuri, except that it is exotic. If there’s anything that Kolatkar’s text has succeeded in doing, it is in widening the gulf between urban and rural India. This forms the crux of the attack on Jejuri by proponents of a school of critical thought known as nativism.25 Stated simply, nativism holds that English, the language of the colonizer, should not be used for literary expression after Independence. Indigenous, regional languages should replace English (one recalls here Ngˤƨɉ’s later cultural revolt along these lines). Kolatkar’s poem infuriates his critics on two counts: one, that it is written in English; and, two, that it ventures out unnecessarily into rural terrain. This, to them, makes Kolatkar no different from the colonial explorer out to usurp and appropriate native territory. If anyone had to write about Jejuri, it should have been the people of Jejuri and the followers of Lord Khandoba themselves, rather than a Bombay-based poet who worked in an advertising agency with a fat pay-cheque, and spent his afternoons at a swanky downtown restaurant in the city, known as the Wayside Inn, voyeuristically gazing at the pavement-dwellers who lived just outside the glass window of the café. But Arun Kolatkar is too intelligent to allow the Orientalist model to swamp and co-opt him. There are enough poems in Jejuri that indicate his affiliations with the underdog; affiliations that the European Orientalist was wholly incapable of. Poems about little children playing in the temple complex;26 the priest’s school-going son;27 an old woman who asks him for fifty paise, not as a beggar, but for a service she will provide by taking him to the horse-shoe shrine;28 and about young men and women (known respectively as vaghayas and muralis) enlisted for life in the service of the Lord, but often harnessed for sex work;29 these and other poems imply that the manipulation of the subaltern by the upper-caste religious establishment angers Kolatkar. He finds the answer to his predicament in insect and bird life, as he sees a yellow butterfly merrily fluttering about,30 and a bunch of cocks and hens involved in a harvest ‘dance’ in 25

For a collection of critical essays on nativism, see New Quest 45, ed. M.P. Rege (special issue May–June 1984). 26 Kolatkar, “The Pattern,” Jejuri, 18. 27 “The Priest’s Son,” Jejuri, 26. 28 “An Old Woman,” Jejuri, 21. 29 “A Song for a Vaghya” and “A Song for a Murali,” Jejuri, 33 and 35 respectively. 30 “The Butterfly,” Jejuri, 27.

ጓ The Metropolis in the Province

205

a field of jowar.31 Although the American critic Bruce King describes the poem as “divine dynamism,”32 it is actually political activism. Yet Kolatkar himself is modest and sophisticated enough to acknowledge the ambiguity and ambivalence of his stance. He admits to returning from Jejuri in a state of uncertainty, with “a few questions knocking about” in his head.33 Even so, the ample presence of poems that redeem him from the charge of Orientalism make his position anti-essentialist. Kolatkar moves with ease between English and Marathi, and between the polished world of downtown Bombay and the rustic world of Jejuri, and this is how his bilingualism helps him dismantle the status quo. And I would submit that to write about an indigenous shrine in English in a negotiated manner is itself a bilingual act. In contrast, it is the nativist critics of his poem who stand exposed as statusquoists.34 The seeming sympathy of the nativists for the downtrodden devotees of Lord Khandoba whom Kolatkar apparently sniggers at really turns out to be a plea to keep caste hierarchies intact, for the shepherd people who worship at Jejuri are, after all, from the lowest of castes.

III Theory’s deficiency in accounting for the Metropolis-in-the-Province, a point I noted earlier, is possibly on account of the ‘counterfeit’ nature of this geo-political zone. To the inhabitants of this ‘counterfeit’ space, however, the prescriptive fake becomes the descriptive real. This means that, just as there are ‘englishes’ and ‘english’ with a small ‘e’ as opposed to a single unified English, a point that Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin note in their seminal work The Empire Writes Back,35 there are metropolises, as opposed to a single unified Metropolis. In the Indian subcontinent, attempts to pluralize the idea of the Metropolis, though by no means developed to its logical conclusion, have been made by a coterie of resident Indian scholars. These include Meenakshi Mukherjee, Harish Trivedi, G.N. Devy, E.V. Ramakrishnan, Makarand Paranjape, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Susie Tharu, and Jasbir Jain, to name but some of them. Rushdie himself acknowledges this pluralism when he calls his India “a version 31

“Between Jejuri and the Railway Station,” Jejuri, 50. King, Modern Indian Poetry in English, 169. 33 “Between Jejuri and the Railway Station,” Jejuri, 50. 34 For a collection of critical essays on Jejuri, see Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri: A Commentary and Critical Perspectives, ed. Shubhangi Raykar (Pune: Prachet, 1995). 35 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989): 8. 32

206

R. R A J R A O

ጓ

and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions.”36 However, while the immigrant, to Rushdie, perceives his homeland through fallible memory,37 the resident, it must be remembered, does not suffer from such memory lapses or amnesia. Thus, while the immigrant writer, in Rushdie’s formulation, “is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost,”38 the resident writer has his mirrors intact. As an immigrant writer, Rushdie, of course, makes a special plea for himself and for others like him when he says: “The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed.”39 A few paragraphs later in the essay, Rushdie speaks of fragmentation in superlative terms, calling it “evocative,” with “greater status” and “greater resonance.”40 These ways of seeing are generally contested by scholars and writers in India. G.N. Devy’s premise in After Amnesia41 directly challenges Rushdie’s in “Imaginary Homelands,” because it suggests that the end of colonialism is a period of recovery of memory, and not of a further loss of it, either totally or partly. Devy derives the title of his book from a poem by the Indian-English poet A.K. Ramanujan.42 To Devy, recovery of memory implies a radical prelapsarian shift to the study of bhasha literatures that belong neither to ancient and medieval India’s upper-caste Sanskritic tradition nor to the modern-day literary traditions of the West, which arrived in India post-Macaulay. Amnesia, as we know, is a sickness; pathologically speaking, Rushdie’s advocacy of the fallibility of memory (which reminds me of the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s, since both share a concern with an irreversible loss of memory), is perverse, since it appropriates a phenomenon usually spoken of in pejorative terms and reconfigures it as a creative practice. And, as the biographer of the Indian-English poet Nissim Ezekiel, 43 who suffered from Alzheimer’s, I know what I am talking about. But then, I find myself in disagreement with Devy, too, because his idea of a recovery from amnesia suggests 36 Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 10. 37 Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 12. 38 “Imaginary Homelands,” 11. 39 “Imaginary Homelands,” 11. 40 “Imaginary Homelands,” 12. 41 See G.N. Devy, After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992). 42 See the poem “No Amnesiac King,” in A.K. Ramanujan, Second Sight (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1986): 16. 43 See my book Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography (New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 2000).

ጓ The Metropolis in the Province

207

a return to, as I have said, a prelapsarian, pastoral, Provincial world, to which I cannot subscribe, either. In such a world, there is, of course, no place for as hybridized an entity as the Metropolis-in-the-Province, which Devy would dismiss as inauthentic. Devy’s purism is thus as problematic to me as Rushdie’s endorsement of partial amnesia. The English language would be the first casualty of Devy’s formulation, and Indian-English writers such as Ezekiel or Ramanujan or myself would have to pack our bags and go.

IV In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians, barely six inches tall, are unaware of their minuscule size until Gulliver the Englishman arrives in Lilliput, and affords them, by his very presence, a yardstick, so to speak, with which to measure their own puniness. Dwarves though they were, the Lilliputians had gigantic egos that even triggered a civil war among them over the trivial issue of whether eggs had to be broken on their smaller or larger end. The former faction was known as the Little Enders, and the latter as the Big Enders. To the Lilliputians, Lilliput was the world. To me, Lilliput is an excellent metaphor for the Metropolis-in-the-Province. As in Lilliput, there are fratricidal wars among inhabitants here, their infinitesmal size notwithstanding. And I would attribute the wars to the failure of postcolonial studies to acknowledge this overcrowded, paradox-ridden, in-between space. The paradox is symptomatically expressed in Nissim Ezekiel’s famous line, “My backward place is where I am.”45 Ezekiel is here referring to his native city, the city of Bombay, where he was born. But Bombay isn’t backward, unless, as pointed out earlier, one is judging it merely by the mind-set of its inhabitants. In other respects, Bombay is India’s wealthiest and most modern city, and has been compared to great cities all over the world. Why, then, does Ezekiel call it backward? Is the postcolonial binary co-opting him? Moreover, it is ironic that he should describe his environment as backward, when he writes monolingually in English, and even becomes a target of attack by the nativists. To the nativists, to elaborate on a point I made earlier, to write in English in the postcolonial world is to write in a language that does not possess a literary tradition or a memory, in the way, say, Tamil or Swahili does. The formulation, however, overlooks the fact that in India’s caste-dominated and multi-religious context, 44

44

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726; Mineola N Y : Dover, 1996) Nissim Ezekiel, “Background, Casually,” in Collected Poems 1952–1988 (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1989): 181. 45

208

R. R A J R A O

ጓ

converts to non-indigenous religions like Christianity and Islam, religious minorities like the Jews and Zoroastrians, as well as the shudras and ‘untouchable’ castes, were frequently denied access to the Sanskritic, Brahmanical, and Indo-European languages. Thus, Ezekiel might legitimately ask, as an Indian Jew, what his native language is. Rushdie might legitimately ask, as an Indian Muslim, what his native language is. And Rohinton Mistry might legitimately ask, as a Zoroastrian (or Parsi), what his native language is. The trivialization of issues inherent in the war between the Big Enders and Little Enders in Lilliput over the breaking of eggs finds its counterpart in postcolonial discourse in accusations made against authors who write in English in several critical articles published since Indian independence by Bhalchandra Nemade, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Jyotirmoy Dutta,46 Rajeev Patke et al. These authors are said to write in English not because it is the language of their subconscious but, perversely, for the financial gain and the international readership that it brings. One writer who has challenged the accusations is the bilingual Marathi poet Dilip Chitre. In an unpublished lecture, Chitre has equated his bilingualism with bisexuality. The languages in which Chitre writes are Marathi and English. While equating bilingualism with bisexuality (Chitre is not known to have been bisexual), Chitre spoke of his Marathi poetry as seeming to represent his ‘straight’ side, and of his English-language poetry as seeming to represent his ‘queer’ side. What this implies is that, to him, writing in English marginalizes him. It is not difficult to see why this is so. Chitre’s Marathi poetry, in terms of its ethos, subject-matter, and readership, belongs to the Province that is an essentialist construct, whereas his English-language poetry belongs to the Metropolisin-the-Province, which is anti-essentialist. However, what Chitre stated on the spur of the moment in a somewhat lighthearted manner needs to be pondered over seriously. His words are pure queer theory that has the power to alter forever the way we look at bilingualism. If Marathi represents Chitre’s ‘straight’ side, it indicates that it is the normative language for him. To Aijaz Ahmad, on the other hand, it is English, bewilderingly, as opposed to any regional language, that is the centralized, pan-Indian language. The opposite positions taken by them are, of course, on account of the different genres of literature that they speak about; Dilip Chitre speaks of poetry, while Aijaz Ahmad speaks of the novel. Yet how a single language – English – can be the normative language in the case of one genre, and the non46

See, for example, Jyotirmoy Dutta, “On Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Parrots,” in The Best of Quest: Essays, ed. Arshia Sattar et al. (New Delhi: Tranquebar, 2011): 42–52.

ጓ The Metropolis in the Province

209

normative language in the case of another genre, is an issue that demands attention. Chitre’s description of his English-language poetry as ‘queer’ may seem to some to echo the nativist position that one must abstain from writing in English. For who in his senses would wilfully want to call himself queer? But his remark must not be taken as an endorsement of heteronormativity and homophobia. Chitre was proud that he wrote poetry in English and that he was bilingual. To the extent that homosexuality is still a taboo subject in many parts of the world, and led, in Oscar Wilde’s case, to one of the most sordidly conducted trials of a writer in nineteenth-century England, it has the potential to antiessentialize and dismantle. Jonathan Dollimore explains in his book Sexual Dissidence how out-of-the-closet homosexuality of the kind practised by Wilde has the power to bring about a paradigm shift in value systems. In a startling inversion of the binary, non-normative values such as ‘artifice’ take their position on the left-hand side of the binary, while normative ones such as ‘authenticity’ are consigned to the right-hand side.47 It is in this light that we must interpret Chitre’s remark. What he was really saying was that, while monolingualism maintains the status quo, bilingualism upsets it.

V As the Metropolis-in-the-Province waits to be re-invented and rendered visible to the postmodern world, an extension of the scope of existing theories can validate and valorize its existence. It has already been pointed out that a type of ‘internal Orientalism’ underscores the relationship of the Metropolis-in-theProvince to the Province proper, brought out, for example, in Ezekiel’s description of the city of Bombay as “backward.” Likewise, Spivak’s theory of subalternity, applied originally to tribal cultures in rural Bengal, and to women, must be stretched to cover other victim-categories on the axes of race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality. Bhabha’s idea of hybridity, directly relevant to an understanding of the identity of second-generation diasporic populations all over the world, must be employed to locate allied types of hybridity on the various axes of race, caste, class, gender, and sexuality. A monolingual English-language Indian writer of Jewish origin in Bombay (such as Nissim Ezekiel) is no less hybridized than a second-generation immigrant Indian writer in America (such 47

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991): 15.

210

R. R A J R A O

ጓ

as Jhumpa Lahiri). The former is as much a victim of purism as the latter. Yet the geo-political location of the former in the Third World somehow disqualifies him, makes him an unfit case history. The disqualification arises from the postcolonial theoretical insistence on the metropolitan’s being restricted to the enlightened West, and not to the immediate binary. The Orientalized East is located entirely within a discourse of deprivation and impeded growth. Ezekiel is thus forced to be a part of the Provincial monolith. It is only through a dismantling of the myth of the Province that we can truly be said to have reinvented the postcolonial in the Metropolis.

W OR K S C I T E D Ahmad, Aijaz. “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” in Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Swati Joshi (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1994): 206–63. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Devy, G.N. After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992). Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Dutta, Jyotirmoy. “On Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Parrots,” in The Best of Quest: Essays, ed. Arshia Sattar et al. (New Delhi: Tranquebar, 2011): 42–52. Ezekiel, Nissim. “Background, Casually,” in Collected Poems 1952–1988 (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1989): 181–82. Forster, E.M. A Passage to India (1924; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1936). King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2001). Kolatkar, Arun. Jejuri (Bombay: Clearing House, 1976). Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute on Education” (1835), in Macaulay, Poetry and Prose Selected, ed. G.M. Young (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard U P , 1952): 729. Nayar, Pramod K. The Great Uprising (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007). Ramanujan, A.K. Second Sight (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1986). Rao, R. Raj. Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography (New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 2000). Raykar, Shubhangi, ed. Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri: A Commentary and Critical Perspectives (Pune: Prachet, 1995). Rege, M.P., ed. New Quest (special issue, 45, May–June 1984). Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands,” in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 9–21. ——.Shame (New Delhi: Rupa, 1983).

ጓ The Metropolis in the Province

211

Tiffin, Helen. “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse” (1987), excerpts in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 95–98.

ጓ

‘No One Is India’ Literary Renderings of the (Postcolonial) Metropolis in Salman Rushdie and Indra Sinha R OMAN B AR T OSCH

Some Thoughts on Reading Other(ed) Cities

W

ITH MOR E TH AN H ALF OF THE WOR LD ’S PO PUL AT IO N

living in cities by now, it is no surprise that literary and cultural studies should show an avid interest in the ways in which texts, discourses, and praxes engage with and are connected to urban environments. For a postcolonial engagement with cities, however, one might expect a slightly more ambiguous notion: on the one hand, it is in those parts of the world that used to be under colonial rule that researchers find their models of urbanity writ large: megacities and megalopolises are to be found in Asia and Africa, while European and U S -American metropolises more often than not grow smaller. On the other hand, the centre–periphery dualism that underlies the notion of ‘capital’ or ‘urban centre’ also makes for the rather enthusiastic celebration of what is considered ‘urban’ by researchers of cities, thus giving the focus on the postcolonial metropolis a somewhat problematic aftertaste. My essay seeks to trace this ambiguity in two successive steps: first, it will explore the diverging imaginaries that come with ‘Western’ and ‘postcolonial’ cities, especially in the cultural negotiation of the complexities of cityscapes, which has “long been recognized as a key characteristic of urban life.”1 By emphasizing the aesthetic strategies by means of which literary experiences of the cities are created, it will, secondly, endeavour to introduce a way of reading the city and its fiction that opposes – or at least adjusts – the common stance of urban

1

Jens Martin Gurr & Wilfried Raussert, “Introduction” to Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, ed. Gurr & Raussert (Trier: W V T , 2011): 1.

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

214

ጓ

studies and overcomes the dualism between Western and postcolonial imaginaries of urbanity. I will start with the contention that literary studies – and literary readings of the city – have much to contribute to the general task of researching the concept of urbanity. Particularly because ‘urbanity’ is as much a reality as it is an imaginative concept with which people associate cultivation as well as chaos, and progress as well as profligacy, it is the focus on discursive renderings that may help shed light on the complicated relationship of material reality and its appearance through discourse. In other words, cities are always both real and fictional because, as Victor Burgin suggests, the city in our actual experience is at the same time an actually existing physical environment, and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, a city in a comic strip, a city in a pie chart, and so on.2

In addition, it is not only the imagination that permeates cityscapes; the opposite is also true: cities are inextricably linked to the very nature of the modern novel: “Cities are so integral to literature [...] that many great works of literature almost depend on the city for their existence:”3 That ‘the city’ and ‘the text’ share interesting parallels is therefore not a particularly new insight, as Richard Lehan, among others, notes. In The City in Literature, he argues that since “the ways of reading literary texts are analogous to the ways urban historians read the city [...], reading the text has been a form of reading the city.”4 For me, this is a bit too facile, however, for when scholars claim that cities and texts are interrelated, it does not follow that both are to be treated as being identical. It is, rather, their co-constitutive functions that may be allowed for: as Jeri Johnson puts it with regard to the Modernist prose of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, novels “interrogate the effect of the metropolis on the mental life of the individuals.”5 But in doing so, novels are active rather than receptive. Not only do novelists register what is going on in the modern

2

Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley & Los Angeles:

U of California P, 1996): 28, quoted in Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson, “Introduction: Reading City

Imaginations,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2007): 3 (emphasis in original). 3

Bridge & Watson, “Introduction,” 7. Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1998): 8. 5 Jeri Johnson, “Literary Geography: Joyce, Woolf and the City” (2000), in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2007): 61. 4

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

215

cities, but novels engender modern subjectivity “by means of those very material cities.”6 The postcolonial context arguably helps to underscore some of the points that I think must be discussed in this respect: first, the difference between the scientific grasp of urban studies and the alternative approaches suggested by literary fiction; second, the role of the subject as a potentially precarious body inhabiting the city; and, third, the problem of ambiguity that is part and parcel of both the city and the text about the city. As it were, the most striking parallel between city and text is that both cannot be pinned down, scrutinized, and defined in any definite, mandatory sense because the closer you look at ‘the’ text or ‘the’ city, demarcation lines and clear-cut boundaries begin to dissolve and point to the complexities of their respective, impossible ontologies: What is a text? What is a city? In the postcolonial context, the significance of ways of perceiving the elusive phenomenon – be it text or city – is even more important. While an increasing interest in urban studies in general, and literary and cultural studies of the city in particular, has taken to describing urban phenomena in terms of their complexity, interrelatedness, and diversity, in the postcolonial context these aspects often result in claims about the megalopolises’ excessive, chaotic, and even frightening character. And while ‘growth’ still informs Western notions of progress, the very same trope turns into nightmares of overpopulation and extreme disorder if applied to the postcolonial city: as Paul Ehrlich puts it, writing of New Delhi, The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. [...] People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people.”7

Why is this so? Studies of the literary representation of and engagement with urban imaginaries have shown that claims of overcomplexity often result from an inability to read the semiotics of the city, and they accordingly grapple with strategies of reading the city.8 In literary fiction, according to Richard Lehan and others, the 6

Johnson, “Literary Geography,” 68. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Cutchogue: Buccaneer, 1971): 1. 8 Out of the many examples, see, for instance, Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1960), Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” (1968), in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson (1968; Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2007): 367–74, Frank Eckardt, Die komplexe Stadt: Orientierungen im urbanen Labyrinth (Wiesbaden: Verlag für 7

216

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

ጓ

difficulties involved in reading a city and the resistance of the urban environment to being read are closely connected with textual meaning and the function and effect of the fictional work. Arguably, this holds true as well for postcolonial cities and postcolonial literatures – but matters are remarkably more complicated. While postcolonial city fictions, too, are “constituting a new world literary space and [...] a site of articulation,”9 the role of its subjects differs once these texts are distributed and read in what Sarah Brouillette calls the “global literary marketplace.”10 It is worth following this uneven line of counter-discursive potentiality by looking at a tension caused by the fact that, on the one hand, acts of postcolonial resistance are articulated deliberately and – one could say – inevitably. On the other, however, the “contradiction between the real and the image”11 is endemic to these literary texts, too, as is the quandary of commodification: even if there might be a huge difference between a literary text and, say, just another pair of running shoes, books are goods, and it is in the postcolonial and world-literary context in particular that this connection needs to be considered, since the possibility of commodification is intrinsically tied to various forms of literary exoticization – the celebrations of alterity and foregrounding of cultural difference.12 The question, therefore, is how to engage with the counter-discursive potential of literary fictions of the city and at the same time address the problems that “marketing the margins” entails. Such an approach does not – and could not, even if it wanted to – rely on the assumption that it is worthwhile or possible to retrieve “authentic subjects within city spaces.”13 Rather, it will be necessary to challenge and possibly revive the notion of authenticity with regard to one’s own, subjective reading-position in ways I will outline now. The staging of such a subjective position, I will argue, reflects the subject’s position in a (postcolonial) city and contradicts the notion of the city as a disembodied entity constituted by ‘flows’, ‘bits’, or ‘networks’ alone, as Sozialwissenschaften, 2009), Dieter Hassenpflug, “Once Again: can Urban Space be Read?,” in Reading the City: Developing Urban Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Hassenpflug, Nico Giersig & Bernhard Stratmann (Weimar: Bauhaus Universität, 2011): 49–58. 9 Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (New York & London: Routledge, 2012): 1. 10 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 11 Varma, The Postcolonial City and its Subjects, 3. 12 See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). 13 Varma, The Postcolonial City and its Subjects, 5.

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

217

some urban theorists maintain.14 It moreover calls into question the distinction between Western and postcolonial city experience as it relies on a shared counter-discursive negotiation of subjectivity rather than the dualistic view that sees the metropolis as either buzzing with life or teeming with chaos. For even in postcolonial studies, the problematic binary of the city as hell and the city as paradise – what Varma calls the “double-edgedness of colonial urbanity”15 – is upheld when scholars maintain that the city is the site “of fragmented and derivative modernity and hybridity on the one hand, and the chaos and degradation of postcolonialism on the other.” 16 Of course, the blame has been shifted and political normativism has been added; but still, from the perspective of modes of aesthetic apprehension, there seems to be good reason in challenging the persistence of such binary ways of thinking. Part of my argument is therefore informed by what Franco Moretti describes as ‘distant reading’. This concept, as I have argued elsewhere,17 is both inspiring and troubled (how does it work? for whom?). However, what seems clear and worth investigating is his idea that, in learning “how not to read,”18 one is asked to challenge or interrogate dominant modes of interpretation – which is what I will be doing by contemplating a reading practice that is not interested in ‘unveiling’ or ‘authenticating’ either postcolonial character or postcolonial subject. Instead, reading postcolonial fiction for me is a challenge to my own subjectivity, framed

14

See, for example, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, “Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets: The History and Theories of Networks and What They Tell Us about Urbanity in the Digital Age,“ in Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment (R E A L 26), ed. Stefan L. Brandt, Winfried Fluck & Frank Mehring (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2010): 55–74. With regard to the idea of a cybernetic organization of the city as a “space of flows” that ultimately leads to a “vanishing of space” through “electronic circuits linking up information systems in distant locations,” Manuel Castells asserts the relevance of “new forms of spatial arrangements.” These forms have been, and still are, as Richard Sennett has shown, dependent on “the ways people experience their bodies” – an experience that, he avers, is grounded on our experience of the difference and sameness of others. See Castells, “An Introduction to the Information Age” (1997), in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2007): 125–34; here: 128, and Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1996): 370. 15 Varma, The Postcolonial City and its Subjects, 17. 16 The Postcolonial City and its Subjects, 17. 17 Roman Bartosch, “Das postkoloniale Tier zwischen den Zeilen der Weltliteratur,” in Just Politics: Ökokritische Perspektiven im postkolonialen Raum, ed. Lina Fricke, Elisabeth Nechutnys, Anna von Rath & Christoph Senft (Münster: Unrast, 2014): 167–79. 18 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, N S 1 (2000): 57 (emphasis in original).

218

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

ጓ

and shaped by urban experiences and fictions as it is. While reading literature always means that I have to enter an imaginary world whose strangeness I must accept to a certain degree, I will try to foreground my readerly reliance on narrative patterns with which I am so familiar that an exploration of postcolonial cityscapes becomes possible in the first place. Since this will ultimately throw into sharp relief the necessary limitation of my individual hermeneutic situation, I hope to show that this approach is no act of cultural imperialism but an interpretative attempt grounded on modesty and humility.

Orientations in the Postcolonial Metropolis From such a perspective of humility and in accepting that as a reader I am as complicit in the marketing of ‘marginal’ literature as anybody, it becomes possible for me to analyse literary renderings of postcolonial cityscapes in the light of the question of how these texts help (my own) readerly orientation –in the diegetic world as well as in terms of the semiotics of real human dwellingplaces. As it were, it does away with – sublates, if you will – the dichotomy between buzzing, complex modern life-worlds, on the one hand, and the chaotic postcolonial Moloch, on the other. To make this point, I will briefly discuss what I think are recurring tropes and motifs in the fictions of and about the city: the idea of the city as palimpsest, the role of flânerie, and the negotiation of urban complexity.19 I start from the contention that the resistance of ‘foreign’ urban semiotics hinders understanding. In literary fiction, however, such resistance is closely connected with hermeneutic practice as such and, thus, quite vital. And since it can be shown that literary renderings of the postcolonial city rely on the same, or on comparable, narrative strategies as other, ‘Western’ urban texts, and since they do so for various reasons that include deliberate or forced affiliation with a colonial cultural heritage and the material reality of cityscapes all over the world, literary discourse on the city exemplifies a specific and highly relevant potential for (urban) comprehension. Seen in this way, reading helps to understand not only the city depicted but also the nexus of sameness/difference underlying many debates in postcolonial 19

For discussions of urban texts with regard to complexity and flânerie, respectively, see Jens Martin Gurr, “The Representation of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inventory of Strategies,” in Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, ed. Jens Martin Gurr & Wilfried Raussert (Trier: W V T , 2011), and Cecile Sandten, “‘ Metroglorification and Diffuse Urbanism’: Literarische Repräsentationen des Postkolonialen im Palimpsestraum der ‘neuen’ Metropolen,” Anglia 130.3 (2012): 344–63.

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

219

studies and elsewhere. Thus, urban literature reintegrates different discourses on the city; not necessarily in the world-literary sense, however, of Pascale Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” which relies on a strange and static conception of centre and margin.20 Neither does it have to be understood in the strictly materialist sense of many world-economic discussions of world literature and what Graham Huggan has called the postcolonial alterity industry. These elements are relevant, certainly, but so is a close inspection of the actual narrative means of engaging with the city. A close look at the inherent aesthetic ambivalences can take into account not only the fact that readers in the global literary sphere lack the ability to judge the degree of authenticity of literary representations – it also considers the fact that authors may. For the city is more than a subjective perspective can grasp – but without such a perspective, urbanity is unthinkable. Therefore, such close looks – and distant readings – that I have in mind will thrive on the ambivalences and necessary moments of disorientation rather than providing a complete mapping of the (postcolonial) city. In E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, a glimpse of the relevance of such moments of incomprehensibility informs much of the narrative dynamics – from the sound in the Marabar Caves to the cross-cultural anxieties and misunderstandings that generate much of the plot. In a remarkable passage, we find an authorial comment on Miss Quested’s ignorance towards Aziz: “she regarded him as ‘India’, and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate, and that no one is India.”21 This definitely holds true for a vast continent such as India. But it also holds true for a hyper-complex microcosm such as the city.

The City as Palimpsest That a city’s semantics relies to a great extent on its palimpsestic nature is as obvious as the palimpsestic character of literary fiction. The question is: what specific function does this intertextual dialogue have in the case of urban fiction?22 In the extratextual world, the visibility of older stages of urban existence and the interaction of these traces with contemporary semiotic informa20

Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise (La République mondiale des Lettres, 1999; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2004). See Frank Schulze–Engler, “Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural World Literature,” in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. Lars Eckstein (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2007): 29. 21 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; Harmondsworth & New York: Penguin, 2007). 22 See also Tobias Wachinger, “Stadträume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche: Schichtung als Paradigma des zeitgenössischen britischen ‘Großstadtromans’,” Poetica 31 (1999): 263–301.

220

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

ጓ

tion serve primarily as a means of vitalizing the cityscape, as Jane Jacobs was already arguing in the 1960s. In the literary text, moreover, the palimpsest establishes a sense of the complexity of the city with which the text is concerned and frames “a controlling sensibility within the maze.”23 By this token, the palimpsest not only represents an extraliterary, complex enmeshment of past and present but it also structures it warrants orientation. In Salman Rushdie’s fiction, as in other urban texts from Virginia Woolf to Teju Cole, the organizing consciousness structures and discloses the confusingly complex cityscape. For a postcolonial novel circulating in the global market, this becomes even more important, because the novel addresses a readership often unfamiliar with the ‘real’ cityscape. It is thus not surprising that Saleem, the protagonist of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, should walk through an almost Dickensian city. As a matter of fact, Rushdie even explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to the Western tradition when he applauds “Dickens for his great, Bombay-like city.”24 Rushdie consequentially appropriates ‘Western’ strategies of narrating an urban environment – for example, when, in Midnight’s Children, the “Hummingbird” is assassinated and the murder is staged in the “voyeuristic terms” of de Certeau’s “gigantic rhetoric of excess”:25 Abdullah’s hummings rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying, there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call.26

Narratologically speaking, Rushdie in this passage employs one of the strategies for narrating urban complexity as identified by Gurr: “synechdochic representation,” “suggesting that there would have been innumerable [other stories] that would also deserve to be told.”27 This narrative gesture is by no means limited to narrating urban issues but serves, rather, to illustrate the difficulty of narrating simultaneity. But as simultaneity is one of the crucial characteristics of urban experience in general and serves, in particular, to emplot the otherwise overwhelming experience of city life, it highlights the relevance of this narrative technique for my discussion of emplotments of the postcolonial metropolis. 23

Lehan, The City in Literature, 107. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage, 2008): xiv. 25 Michel de Certeau, “Walking the City” (1974, tr. 1984), in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2007): 383. 26 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 58. 27 Gurr, “Urban Complexity,” 18. 24

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

221

Such synechdochic forms of representation can be achieved by other narrative strategies as well. In Animal’s People, one of the decisive strategies for bringing to life “other stories that deserve to be told” is what could be called ‘inhuman’ agency. An accident in a chemical factory has turned Khaufpur, a city closely resembling Bhopal, into an apocalyptic nightmare, causing human and animal bodies to become deformed – in the figure of Animal, this deformation is represented as a literal dehumanization that mirrors the dehumanized, inhumane behaviour of the Western neo-colonialists responsible for the catastrophe.28 But given the opportunity for medical treatment, Animal deliberately decides against being human. Forced to walk on all fours, he lives proudly and regards himself as an “animal fierce and free.”29 What used to be a slur with which other children had made him an outcast, even within the unprivileged class they all belong to, ultimately helps Animal to refuse passive suffering by turning the other children’s mockery into his essential characteristic. In the end, Animal becomes a hero for the whole area he is living in – but remains ‘Animal’ as well. On all fours, as it were, is the best way to explore and navigate the labyrinthine ways of Khaufpur’s cityscape. His picaresque power, his knowledge of the innumerable stories of Khaufpur’s poor, and his ability to save a young friend by letting her ride on his back – they all rely on Animal’s deep familiarity with the city that, again, could be called Dickensian. It is remarkable that Dickens’ London, Rushdie’s Bombay, and Sinha’s Bhopal/ Khaufpur are brought into existence via a comparable set of narrative strategies that allow a global readership to follow the characters’ tracks through their environment. Moreover, it is important to note that through the narrative means it relies on, Animal’s story becomes a “street-level testimony [that] does not start from the generalized hunger of the wretched of the earth, but from the devouring hunger in an individual belly”30 – thus attesting to the importance of subjective encounters with a cityscape.

The Role of Flânerie Walking the cityscape seems particularly apt for such individual encounters as well as for forging complicities with the readership. In Midnight’s Children, for instance, we walk the city together with Saleem’s mother and suddenly leave 28

For a thorough discussion of the numerous connections between Animal’s claim not to be human and the inhumane behaviour of the neo-colonialists, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2011): 45–67. 29 Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (London: Pocket, 2007): 217, 366. 30 Nixon, Slow Violence, 66.

222

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

ጓ

the ‘official’ tracks, plunging into a kind of urban confusion that we now recognize as an element not of postcolonial chaos but of mundane economic and political injustice: [Saleem’s] mother enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a drought, where people lead their invisible lives [...]. Under the pressure of these streets [...] she has lost her ‘city eyes’. When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don’t impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don’t look like dormitories.31

This is very close to what Animal testifies to when he recalls his own experience of Bhopal. He thus maps what often remains hidden from view – only from a quadrupedal perspective: The world of humans is meant to be viewed from eye level. Your eyes. Lift my head I’m staring into someone’s crotch. Whole nother world it’s, below the waist. Believe me, I know which one hasn’t washed his balls, I can smell pissy gussets and shitty backsides [...].32

His animal view is in fact the privileged view; his becoming animal actually is the key to understanding the subalterns and their environment. To follow this line of understanding, to assume that Animal’s is a view we as readers can accept easily and are capable of understanding, is another matter. That I am talking of ‘view’ while Animal takes in the city through the olfactory stimuli of “pissy gussets and shitty backsides” underscores the difficulty of such an attempt. Just as Saleem’s mother loses her “city eyes,” our readerly ability to really see the city is called into question. For Animal, to “identify as an animal is to be free of the narrow ontological views that frame human perception”33 while, at the same time, the reader, an outsider to this community and tellingly addressed as “Eyes,” is connoted as voyeuristic spectator.34 This accusation must be taken seriously, of course, and the reader is forced to learn to negotiate this problem in the course of the novel. That this readerly cooperation is, at least in parts, grounded on Sinha’s decision to present the narrative in the form of an environmental picaresque is no less important. It is in this form that the story asks complex questions about the “foreign burden” and a globalized “slow violence,” as 31

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 105. Sinha, Animal’s People, 2. 33 Heather Snell, “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Postcolonial Text 4.4 (2008): 8. 34 See Snell, “Limitations of Laughter,” 5. 32

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

223

pointed out by Rob Nixon, who introduced the term ‘environmental picaresque’ in his discussion of the novel. Animal’s People thus challenges the ideas of belonging to a species and adhering to humanist ideals by virtue of the “elaborate pun subverting any ethical correlation between moral and physical erectness.”35 Ultimately, its negotiations of the posthuman condition36 rely on Sinha’s picaresque discourse, which, after all, evokes readerly expectations and hybridizes postcolonial and ‘Western’ narrative tones, rendering the discourse polyvalent, ambiguous, and complex. At the same time, it links up intertextually with the picaresque tradition, using the perspective of the picaro to engender a form of ambiguity that is neither ‘Western’ nor ‘postcolonial’ alone. Notably, it is the walking pace that permits an experience of such ambiguities and the complexity of the cityscape – instead of becoming acquainted with the city in any abstract, exhaustive sense, it is the act of walking, the flâneur’s pace, that engenders new ways of seeing one’s environment. As Catrin Gersdorf argues, the flâneur “is someone who brings the skills of the naturalist to the city”37 – but, most importantly, the flâneur negotiates his or her subject-position via the subjective speed of individual movement, as “the unsettling experiences of the modern metropolis as a visual pandemonium and spatial labyrinth are mitigated.”38 This is, of course, not to say that the postcolonial flâneur can turn unsettling urban experiences into peaceful, contemplative encounters with a harmonious cityscape – quite the contrary, as Cecile Sandten points out: for the postcolonial flâneur, the preferred places are the lower-class, nightmarish, and abject sites of urban disorder.39 However, and notwithstanding the choice of locale, the point of both nineteenth-century flânerie and contemporary walks through the postcolonial city is that the individual pace allows a negotiation of an individual position – which is what the reader is invited to share and understand via a shared set of narrative strategies.

Narrative Patterns and the Negotiation of Complexity This brings me to my last point and also, in a way, to the starting point of my exploration of the functions of city fiction with regard to the reading subject: the 35

Nixon, Slow Violence, 56. This is discussed in more detail in Roman Bartosch, “The Postcolonial Picaro in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People: Becoming Posthuman Through Animal’s Eyes,” Ecozon@ 3.1 (2012): 10–19. 37 Catrin Gersdorf, “Flânerie as Ecocritical Practice: Thoreau, Benjamin, and Sandilands,” in Ecology as Life Writing, ed. Alfred Hornung & Zhao Baisheng (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013): 43. 38 Gersdorf, “Flânerie as Ecocritical Practice,” 42. 39 Sandten, “‘Metroglorification and Diffuse Urbanism’,” 359. 36

224

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

ጓ

issue of complexity. Complexity, I stated at the beginning, can be understood either as a vital energy flowing through the city or as a chaotic force threatening stability and order in the postcolonial megalopolis. The strategy that urban narratives suggest is, maybe unsurprisingly, to literally read the city: What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book.40

Ultimately, the Midnight’s Children conference, Saleem’s ability to use his telepathic powers as “all-India radio,”41 can also be read in terms of the engagement with an overcomplex reality of India in general and urban India in particular. It is because Saleem can control the voices in his head that he is able to establish a connection with no fewer than 1,001 children of different regions, dialects, and political persuasions – an urbane dream come true, as it were. However, this utopian experience is soon disturbed by the sheer complexity that Saleem not only recounts but emplots in what Gurr calls “experiential strategies” in representing urban complexity42 – strategies by which complexity and simultaneity are [...] freely enacted by means of a suggestive asyndetic sequence of impressions simulating the chaotic [...] which allows readers to ‘experience the sense of being overpowered by [...] multiple impressions,43

This is quite in the sense of Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life”: 44 imagine yourself inside me somehow, looking out through my eyes, hearing the noise, the voices, and now the obligation of not letting people know, the hardest part was acting surprised, such as when my mother said Hey Saleem guess what we’re going for a picnic to the Aarey

40

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 133. Rather than providing advice on how to read the city as a text, which is, as I have argued above, not possible by mere analogy, this passage engages in what Gurr calls “experiential strategies” for the representations of urban complexity; notably, the “ambulatory urban writer-reader” shares with the “readers [.. .] efforts at attempting to comprehend the urban text.” Such a move, he argues, “strikingly [literalizes] de Certeau’s notion of urban” walkers; one might add Benjamin’s ideas about flânerie as discussed above by Gersdorf and Sandten. See Gurr, “Urban Complexity,” 22. 41 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 229. 42 Gurr, “Urban Complexity,” 19. 43 “Urban Complexity,” 20. 44 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall & Iain Borden (London: Routledge, 2004): 12–19.

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

225

Milk Colony and I had to go Ooo, exciting!, when I had known all along because I had heard her unspoken inner voice And on my birthday seeing all the presents in the donors’ minds before they were even unwrapped And the treasure hunt ruined because there in my father’s head was the location of each clue.45

The way in which this confusion and overpowering is staged over three pages is almost Joycean and clearly recounts Modernist experiments with the narration of urban space, as is clearest when Saleem recounts the falling of a bomb: the whining came, and I should have known there was no need to go looking elsewhere for death, but I was still in the street in the midnight shadow of the mosque when it came, plummeting towards the illuminated windows of my father’s idiocy, death whining like pie-dogs, transforming itself into falling masonry and sheets of flame and a wave of force so great that it sent me spinning off my Lambretta, while within the house of my aunt’s great bitterness my father mother aunt and unborn brother or sister who was only a week away from starting life, all of them all of them squashed flatter than rice-pancakes, the house crashing in on their heads like a waffle-iron.46

Here, the indebtedness to Joyce is even made explicit when, at the end of the three pages, Molly’s enthusiastic approval of Leo Bloom’s proposal is echoed in the moment Saleem loses his memory: before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting, but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free.47

Both reading the city and reading the text that deals with the phenomenological experience of the urban have a tendency to convey an over-complex, overwhelming whirl of semiotic information. Without a consciousness actively negotiating this input, neither cities nor texts could be read, and fiction seems to have a vital ancillary function in teaching how to read cities – both in the postcolonial context and elsewhere.

Conclusion: An Ecology of the City In an essay on the “phantasmagorical representations of postcolonial cityscapes,” Cecile Sandten, drawing on Walter Benjamin in particular, sums up the 45 46 47

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 235. Midnight’s Children, 475–76. Midnight’s Children, 477.

226

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

ጓ

imaginative concepts on which urban discourse has been relying: metropolises “have – especially in literary modernity – been associated with images of the labyrinth, forest, and oceanic torrents and, above all else, chaos.”48 These “phantasmagorical representations,” however, are by no means restricted to the postcolonial context: as “representations of Western cities [...] testify,”49 such imaginations of the city always rely on specific “aesthetic transformations of a real metropolis into a fictitious one” whereby the imagined city “functions as a microcosm of society, illustrating possibilities for experiencing and representing the cityscape.”50 What, then, could it mean if postcolonial writers deliberately assume a narrative code of Western modernity when they engage with the experience of living in and writing about the postcolonial city? I think that, first of all, the parallel depiction of urban characteristics such as “intensification of urban life through the constant flux of people and technologies” and the subsequent authorial decision to break up narrative structures51 are a successful means of coping with the fact that, on the one hand, the history of urbanization has come to be understood as a history of success – civilizatory, technologically, teleologically. On the other hand, the urban metropolis as an experience remains intimidating. It is certainly no coincidence that a great number of texts dealing with urban environments have focused on the chaotic and overwhelming nature of living in the city – the subject is always under threat of either being overcome by the stimuli around it or of developing some kind of “blasé attitude” or “anomie.”52 It would therefore be one-sided to read descriptions of postcolonial cities and the disorder encountered there as mere critiques of colonial influence. While such critiques have their rightful place in engaged fiction, it is likewise probable that the experience of the city as a hypercomplex cultural achievement fosters comparable emotive responses in individuals within it, regardless of cultural origin and living space.

48

Cecile Sandten, “Phantasmagorical Representations of Postcolonial Cityscapes in Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2002) and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004),” in Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Culture in English, ed. Rainer Emig & Oliver Lindner (Cross/Cultures 127, A S N E L Papers 16; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010): 125–26. 49 Sandten, “Phantasmagorical Representations,” 128. 50 “Phantasmagorical Representations,” 129. 51 “Phantasmagorical Representations,” 129. 52 See Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 15, and Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, ed. George Simpson, tr. John A. Spaulding & George Simpson (Glencoe I L : Free Press, 1951): 357 and passim.

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

227

But, notably, in the context of postcolonial world literature, ‘we’ as Western, academic readers and, by extension, readers interested in postcolonial fiction – and the critical apparatus behind it that serves to legitimate these literatures in the academic environment of literary and cultural studies – find it more difficult to ‘read’ the depictions of chaos without being intimidated by the amount of strangeness and disorder staged in the texts. That is to say, because we read noise, pollution, and overpopulation differently in the postcolonial context, and because postcolonial authors, well aware of the ‘postcolonial alterity industry’ of which they are part, deliberately engage in the play with otherness, reader and writer collaborate in rendering this city fiction ‘strange’. If this strangeness is read in terms of deliberate estrangement, however, the consequences are twofold: while, on the one hand, the narrative strategy of employing a modernist discourse to shape postcolonial fiction of the city could be ascribed to the influence of the ‘global literary marketplace’,53 it also opens up a literary, intertextual dialogue that feeds back into our ways of reading the imagined communities of the (fictional) city. The postcolonial city is not so different, after all, these texts suggest; and they invite us on a tour after which we will have mapped the strange lands they have allowed us to enter, and to see that actual difference (diaspora, slow violence, extreme poverty) is just as socioeconomically produced and constructed as narrative sameness is construed through patterns and strategies common in the “world republic of letters.” Thus, it does away with the binary of intercultural difference and suggests a transcultural view of literary imaginaries, as Frank Schulze–Engler describes it: the main interest no longer lies in the problem how cultures shape social groups and their perceptions, but in the question of what individuals and groups do with culture in an increasingly globalised world.54

In cities all over the world, so much is clear, these individuals walk, narrate, and interpret their environments through topographies of excess and erudite maps of complexity in equal measure and invite us to join them in their explorations.

53 54

See fn 10 above. Frank Schulze–Engler. “Theoretical Perspectives,” 28.

228

R O M A N B A R T OS C H

ጓ

W OR K S C I T E D Bartosch, Roman. “The Postcolonial Picaro in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People: Becoming Posthuman Through Animal’s Eyes,” Ecozon@ 3.1 (2012): 10–19. ——.“Das postkoloniale Tier zwischen den Zeilen der Weltliteratur,” in Just Politics: Ökokritische Perspektiven im postkolonialen Raum, ed. Lina Fricke, Anna von Rath, Elisabeth Nechutnys & Christoph Senft (Münster: Unrast, 2014): 167–79. Bridge, Gary, & Sophie Watson. “Introduction: Reading City Imaginations,” in The Blackwell City Reader (2007), ed. Bridge & Watson, 3–10. ——, ed. The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford & Malden MA : Blackwell, 2007). Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Burgin, Victor. In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1996). Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise (La République mondiale des Lettres, 1999; Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2004). Castells, Manuel. “An Introduction to the Information Age” (1997), in The Blackwell City Reader (2007), ed. Bridge & Watson, 125–34. Certeau, Michel de. “Walking the City” (1974, tr. 1984),” in The Blackwell City Reader (2007), ed. Bridge & Watson, 383–92. Durkheim, Émile. Suicide. A Study in Sociology, ed. George Simpson, tr. John A. Spaulding & George Simpson (Glencoe IL : Free Press, 1951). Eckardt, Frank. Die komplexe Stadt: Orientierungen im urbanen Labyrinth (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009). Ehrlich, Paul. The Population Bomb (Cutchogue: Buccaneer, 1971). Forster, E.M. A Passage to India (1924; Harmondsworth & New York: Penguin, 2007). Freyermuth, Gundolf S. “Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets: The History and Theories of Networks and What They Tell Us about Urbanity in the Digital Age,” in Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment, ed. Stefan L. Brandt, Winfried Fluck & Frank Mehring ( R EA L 26; Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2010). 55–74. Gersdorf, Catrin. “Flânerie as Ecocritical Practice: Thoreau, Benjamin, and Sandilands,” in Ecology and Life Writing, ed. Alfred Hornung & Zhao Baisheng (Heidelberg: Winter, 2013): 27–53. Gurr, Jens Martin. “The Representation of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inventory of Strategies,” in Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond (2011), ed. Gurr & Raussert, 11–36. ——, & Wilfried Raussert, ed. “Introduction” to Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, ed. Jens Martin Gurr & Wilfried Raussert (Trier: W V T , 2011): 1–9. Hassenpflug, Dieter. “Once Again: Can Urban Space be Read?,” in Reading the City: Developing Urban Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Hassenpflug, Nico Giersig & Bernhard Stratmann (Weimar: Bauhaus Universität, 2011): 49–58.

ጓ ‘No One Is India’

229

Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Johnson, Jeri. “Literary Geography: Joyce, Woolf and the City” (2000), in The Blackwell City Reader (2007), ed. Bridge & Watson, 60–70. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford & Malden MA : Blackwell, 1991). ——.“The Right to the City” (1968),” in The Blackwell City Reader (2007), ed. Bridge & Watson, 367–74. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P , 1998). Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City (Cambridge MA : MIT Press, 1960). Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, NS 1 (2000): 54–68. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2011). Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage, 2008). Sandten, Cecile. “‘Metroglorification and Diffuse Urbanism’: Literarische Repräsentationen des Postkolonialen im Palimpsestraum der ‘neuen’ Metropolen,” Anglia 130.3 (2012): 344–63. ——.“Phantasmagorical Representations of Postcolonial Cityscapes in Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2002) and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004),” in Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English, ed. Rainer Emig & Oliver Lindner (Cross/Cultures 127, AS N E L Papers 16; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010): 125–44. Schulze–Engler, Frank. “Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural World Literature,” in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. Lars Eckstein (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2007): 20–32. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1996). Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall & Iain Borden (London: Routledge, 2004): 12–19. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People (London: Pocket, 2007). Snell, Heather. “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Postcolonial Text 4.4 (2008): 1–15. Varma, Rashmi. The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (New York & London: Routledge, 2012). Wachinger, Tobias. “Stadträume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche: Schichtung als Paradigma des zeitgenössischen britischen ‘Großstadtromans’,” Poetica 31 (1999): 263– 301.

ጓ

The Glocal Metropolis1 Tokyo Cancelled, The White Tiger, and Spatial Politics P IA F LOR E NCE M ASUR CZAK

Introduction Each social formation constructs objective conceptions of space and time sufficient unto its own needs and purposes of material and social reproduction and organizes its material practices in accordance with those conceptions.2

T

H E C O N S T R U C T I O N O F S P A C E according to our own needs, values, demands, and restrictions, as David Harvey observes, is a quotidian practice. This practice not only helps us in ‘finding the way’ (both literally and figuratively), it is also “a primary means of both individuation and social differentiation.”3 Access to certain places is restricted to certain people by norms that create ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, members of the ‘family’ and strangers, those who are worthy of entry and those who are not. In return, these practices produce affiliations and identification.4 In this article, I attempt to show how, in The White Tiger (2008) and Tokyo Cancelled (2006) respectively, Aravind Adiga and Rana Dasgupta conceptualize these constructions and negotiations of spatial identity by depicting the interplay between the local and global spaces their characters are confronted with.

1

I am grateful for Miriam Nandi’s and Svenja Hohenstein’s contributions to this article. David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80.3 (September 1990): 419. 3 Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” 419. 4 For Harvey, this inclusion/exclusion dichotomy is driven by capitalist forces. As Doreen Massey remarks, such a materialist approach is hardly sufficient as it ignores virtually all forms of experience formed by gender, ethnicity, and so on. Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis et al. (London & New York: Routledge 1996): 60. 2

232

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

ጓ

Both novels, although very different in structure and tone, reveal interstices that challenge traditional social roles and at the same time enable the re-shaping of spatial identity. The airport in Dasgupta’s episodic novel, for example, is such a paradigmatic interstice or, rather, as Marc Augé puts it, a non-place.5 As such, it does not hold any individual significance apart from what is characteristic of any airport, but instead offers the possibility (and apparently the necessity) to experiment with identity. With their stories, the characters, nameless and without origin or destination themselves, attempt to re-gain a sense of place. 6 Balram, the eponymous White Tiger of Adiga’s novel, by contrast, consciously looks for and uses these interstices in which social background and identity may be transgressed. In Bangalore, he finds a city constructed for a globalized market that, to a certain extent, is able to level out social hierarchies. As the White Tiger tries to strip from his life the remnants of home, the passengers in Tokyo Cancelled are portrayed as filling the vacuum of the airport by constructing imaginative places through their stories. These two opposing currents of seeking and fleeing a fixed spatial identity are what make the two novels such prime examples of spatial politics. Instead of reading the texts as particularly South Asian (within the vast geographical variety of anglophone literature, the national container is rarely the most convincing one7), I focus on how they use concepts of space and place as means of self-identification. For Harvey and Massey, as well as for Sarah Upstone,8 space basically denotes a social construct which is realized in specific local dimensions. These are informed by social practices and thus also by mechanisms of power, (il)legitimacy, and creativity. Relations to space are a fundamental anthropological category of appropriating the world, and they reflect and reproduce social, financial, political, and cultural relations. Place, then, to Doreen Massey, is a specific realization of spatial relations at a specific time.9 5

See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la supermodernité, 1992; London & New York: Verso, 1995): 77–79. 6 On a traditional and a progressive sense of place, see Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 63–64. 7 Dasgupta argues against being called an ‘Indian writer’ in a similar manner: “The phrase is not used as a matter-of-fact description. It is used to form a bridge between my work and a much larger, and completely separate, narrative, usually of India’s growing economic power.” Shakti Bhatt, “‘ India Seems a Greater Abstraction to Me than Europe.’ A Conversation with Rana Dasgupta,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42.2 (November 2006): 206. 8 See Sarah Upstone, Spatial Politics and the Postcolonial Novel (Farnham & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2009): 3–6. 9 Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 66.

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

233

Michel de Certeau argues from a different angle when he discusses how place (including the social practice of creating it) is the quotidian subversion of the strategic enclosure of space.10 In all four approaches, however, there is a (sometimes disconcerting) notion of enclosure, of defined, fixed, and impenetrable container space that affirms power-relations. The (colonial) map is such a spatial gesture, as Upstone rightly observes.11 Marc Augé takes a different tack here when he observes the construction of ‘non-places’ – places with a clearly defined meaning (such as the airport or the mall), but without the possibility or desirability of human interaction, hence of history.12 As in de Certeau’s term lieu, there is an element of strategic power in this conception as well, but it follows much more subtle rules than in Harvey’s decidedly materialist argument, for example. Fundamental to all of these approaches to space, however, is an element of identity-defining and -creating practice inherent in the (successful or unsuccessful) appropriation of space. Dasgupta’s and Adiga’s novels attribute such an essential quality to space as well. Space or, more particularly, the possibilities of spatial practices in and of the metropolis are the defining parameters in terms of the experience of identificatory practices.

Airport as Limbo – Tokyo Cancelled Dasgupta’s début novel is, as the author himself states, “about the feeling of globalization,”13 about how global mobility shapes our lives. Tokyo Cancelled is an account of a night of storytelling between strangers at an anonymous airport. The passengers share stories that are enclosed in the extradiegetic frame of their spending the night in this liminal zone. The reader never learns where this airport is, which country or even region it belongs to. There are some vague hints to the outside – a slum bordering on the premises, horrible traffic in the city – but the place remains without any recognizable quality. Reflecting this setting, the passengers who are compelled to wait at the airport for their flight are almost all rendered without any attributes by the narrator; the transience of their meeting and the lack of connection to 10 See Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (L invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P, 2011): 98–99. 11 Upstone, Spatial Politics and the Postcolonial Novel, 4–6. 12 Augé, Non-Places, 94, 104–105. 13 Rana Dasgupta, “Global Enchantment: Travis Elborough Talks to Rana Dasgupta,” in Tokyo Cancelled (London: HarperPerennial, 2006): 386.

234

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

ጓ

this place render this an entirely un-marked space in terms of locale. This lack of place, I would suggest, sets off a more existential insecurity than they would feel, were they simply tourists in a foreign city. The great windows of the building revealed nothing but blackened copies of the hall where they stood, with a huddle of thirteen in each one. They felt an inexplicable need to stay close, as if during the reconstruction of themselves around this new situation a sort of kinship had emerged. They moved towards the chairs like atoms in a molecule, no closer but also no further apart than their relationship dictated. 14

“The reconstruction of themselves around this new situation” includes the need to locate themselves at least in a fictional place: the metropolises of their stories. The reader never learns whether the narrators’ origins chime with the places they evoke. They are not given any names, and only few of them are identified, such as “the Japanese man” (381). Yet each of the stories is set in a very particular place, of which many are described in some detail at least. There is a notion of horror vacui, a fear of the emptiness of space,15 in the attempt to create specificity from within a non-place. Gerhard Stilz, summarizing the debate on the reassertion of space against time, states: the crucial problem, especially for identity building, lies in the question of who has (and is able to use) the privilege and the power of ascribing meaning to a space.16

It is interesting to note that, while as a group certainly privileged in terms of mobility, the thirteen passengers share equally the power to create and define space: each tells a story, but the reader does not learn the name or other details of any of the narrators. Rather, it seems that the vacuum of locale in the airport creates a situation in which anonymity is not perceived as threatening to social status but as enabling a very transient and delicate balance. In Marc Augé’s approach, the airport is a dynamic and ahistorical place with people merely passing through, one that is unable or at least not meant to bear any meaning at all.17 The non-place, to Augé, thus suffers from communicative neglect. There is only

14

Dasgupta, Tokyo Cancelled,5–6. Further page references are in the main text. See Gerhard Stilz, “Introduction: Territorial Terrors – Home to Cosmopolis,” in Territorial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007): 3. 16 Stilz, “Introduction: Territorial Terrors – Home to Cosmopolis,” 5. 17 Augé, Non-Places, 103–104. 15

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

235

a “silent dialogue”18 between the individual and the non-place. Not so in Tokyo Cancelled. Forced to stay there for the night, the remaining passengers try to counteract such neglect by imagining meaningful space. They create fragile and ephemeral social relations in a situation of crisis, thus, as de Certeau suggests, subverting the initial spatial logic of the airport and appropriating this nonplace for their own needs: There had been a long time for them to look at each other. To find depths in faces that had seemed conventional a few hours ago [...]. One man followed the patterns in the hair on the forearm of the woman next to him; he stole glances at the curve of her breast, the shape of her lips; he wondered what life lay behind the strange story she had told. Was it his imagination or did her body creep closer to his as the night progressed? Was there not some significance in the way their eyes had met? Was it accident or design that made her hand brush his again on the armrest that lay between them? Where was she going what was she doing in Tokyo? (255)

The extradiegetic frame with its sense of “a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus,”19 its transience, ends with sunrise. The night spent together at the airport appears to have a dreamlike quality that has to dissipate at dawn. This quality is further emphasized through a shift in language. What has been a gathering in “the dead of the night: yesterday seemed weeks ago and tomorrow still aeons in the future” (293) is suddenly conveyed in a highly poetic voice. Sleep lapped seductively against the shores of Certainty until its outer reaches crumbled and were submerged in warm, insensible depths. Diminished senses played tricks: were those bats fluttering outside the windows or just the twitching blind spots of minds too slowed to render reality in all its detail? (293)

The language seems to adapt to the changed quality of the place as well. What used to show “nothing but blackened copies of the hall where they stood” (6) now reveals apparitions of animals. Similarly, faces of people who were strangers a few hours before are now “reminiscent of someone you had known long ago” (293). These shifts in relations to place and the other passengers are indicative of the social, hence dynamic, quality of place; even a non-place may come to bear meaning. Interestingly, in Tokyo Cancelled, this can only happen at a time

18 19

Augé, Non-Places, 100. Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 66.

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

236

ጓ

of momentary stasis:20 as soon as the other passengers re-appear the next morning, the intimate circle of the thirteen is broken up. Suspended during the night, “through the windows the airport began to respond to time” (379). The thirteen storytellers could no longer hear each other speak, and the stories themselves, that had provided their stepping stones through the night, started to fade like dreams. Their group, too, was taken over by the repetition of actions, unzipping and unlocking in order to verify again and again the reassuring presence of passports, tickets, keys, visas, wallets, cameras... (380, ellipsis in original)

In this passage, the symbols of global mobility simultaneously serve to reassure the group and destroy its particular condition: passports and tickets take over the role that the stories had performed. Eloquent and resourceful in their tales, the passengers now seem to struggle for words with which to address their company: “Does anyone have a business card? Email or something. I mean – after all those stories… Maybe…” (381, ellipses in original). Yet the ensuing reluctance to exchange business cards or other ways of maintaining contact instantly destroys the vision that the last night could have formed lasting relationships among the thirteen passengers. This isolating undercurrent is present in several of the intradiegetic stories as well. While the cities form a counterpart to the airport, many of them are governed by what the extradiegetic frame conveys. Probably most graphically, Lagos (“The Flyover”) echoes the demands made on individuals and their role in society by the effects of global mobility. Some of the protagonists of these stories serve as counterparts to the privileged (in terms of their relation to global mobility) storytellers, yet they appear to be affected by the same isolation. Marlboro, in “The Flyover,” for example, is literally walled in and thus cut off from the Balogun market where he used to work as a snitch for the local mob. All that remains for him is to watch the flyover from underneath (167–68).

Cartographic Ir/resolution A particularly interesting story with respect to space is “The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker.” What is negotiated in this story is the attempt to absolutize a specific, panoptical conception of space. It features Klaus, a German 20

In this sense, the novel underlines the tension in de Certeau’s equation of walking and narration. The first necessitates an actual movement in space so as to re-define it, while the second already constitutes movement and inherently prefers this process over the stasis of pre-defined spatial functions.

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

237

geographer, whose only ambition is to create a new kind of map – a map showing speed as the single most important parameter: The entire epic surface was coloured in various microshades of steely grey with no distinction between land and sea: for this was not a map of earth and water, but of speed. [...] The particular genius of this system was the recognition that every piece of information about a place could be reduced to a single parameter – what he called ‘velocity’ [...]. He calculated the speed of everything from the spread of ideas to the movement of oil and subjected it to a complex algebra that allowed him to find a unique value for every point on the globe. (112)

This conception of “time–space-compression,”21 as Harvey puts it, interprets the world: “For four hundred years,” Klaus would say in his many presentations to corporations and governments, “people have been taught to believe that Mercator’s canny distortions show the world as it truly is. But we have no more need of his deceitful coastlines: we are not a people bobbing about in the unknown looking for land. [...] The world is already ours, and what we truly care about is not its shape, but its speed.” (112)

Klaus transcends ideas of container spaces and re-invents a cartographic representation of what he considers to be the actual nature of the world. On one of his trips, he meets Deniz, a beautiful Turkish girl who comes to live in his house in Offenbach, leading an illegalized life in Germany.22 On both of the occasions on which Deniz enters the scene, however, first when Klaus meets her in Anatolia and then when she arrives at his house, his maps fail Klaus in – to him – incomprehensible ways. Early in the story, Klaus, on one of his field trips, drives through a very hot and arid part of Anatolia without realizing the danger this poses to his life. When his car breaks down, his satellite navigation system cannot inform him about the climatic conditions of the region or help him find water. His mobile phone does not work, either. He survives only because Deniz’s mother finds him and takes care of him. 21

Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” 426. The connection between Deniz and Klaus evokes the particular relationship between West Germany and the Turkish migrant community that was largely incepted by the Gastarbeiter agreement in 1961. People with Turkish citizenship and/or migrant background today form the largest single group of foreign nationals in Germany. See Statistisches Bundesamt, “Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund – Ergebnisse des Mikrozensus – Fachserie 1 Reihe 2.2,” Statistisches Bundesamt (19 September 2012), https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch /Bevoelke rung/MigrationIntegration/Migrationshintergrund2010220117004.pdf?__blob=publicationFile (accessed 8 November 2013): 56. 22

238

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

ጓ

Similarly, when coming to Germany, Deniz has to avoid official or public routes. Instead, when Klaus asks her how she managed to get to Frankfurt – a place she had never heard of before – and find him, she replies: Oh let us not go into that! The details are unimportant and they have burdened me for too long. I have spent much time underground, much time soaked with foul-smelling water, much time not seeing the lands I am passing through. Let us just say that my journey could not be traced on your map! (105, italics in original)

There are conceptions of space and mobility in space that cannot be traced on an official map, and Klaus is unable to comprehend how Deniz subverted these (his) normative descriptions. Although she lives in Germany illegally, the story questions the validity and ability of a cartographic resolution of people’s lives. This subversion of regularized (container) space corresponds neatly to Michel de Certeau’s ideas about how the act of walking in the city subverts the logic of control that is laid down in the city map.23 Deniz undermines Klaus’s “objective conceptions of space”24 by shunning the sanitized channels of mobility and constructing a conception of space sufficient to her own needs; she also represents the physical (bodily) evidence for the connectivity of place 25 which Klaus could only envisage through his map. Her actual physical appearance – young, dark-haired, slender, and almost mystically beautiful – is not only a reminder of how little Klaus’s absurd cartographic rigidity can convey about the world, but also an obvious example of almost colonial exoticism. She eludes the panoptical, correcting gaze that Klaus exercises through his profession. Yet, at the same time, Klaus’s map, as Deniz discovers, does display her route: “and was that not even the dark underground route that she had taken to get here?” (113). He, however, was not able to read his own map in a way that would have disclosed Deniz’s route. What is necessary in order to understand this aspect of the map is the practical knowledge she gained by travelling in this particular way. Doreen Massey argues that different and unequal positions in relation to mobility reflect and reinforce power: For different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t. Although

23 24 25

See de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 94. Harvey, “Between Space and Time Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” 19. See Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 65–66.

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

239

that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement.26

Indeed, when Deniz tries to find her home in Turkey on Klaus’s velocity map, she can “find nothing except menacing mosquitoes that signified malaria” (114). Her mother’s place is surrounded by a sea of apparent nothingness in a world in which mobility is the key factor. Klaus is literally in control of mobility27 while Deniz has to use dangerous and illegal channels of migration. They are, from the beginning, placed in unequal positions vis-à-vis mobility, as Deniz’s mother understands: “Borders do not open very frequently for people like us” (102). With his map, however, Klaus captures (and perverts) one of Massey’s main points, which is acknowledging the dynamic of place: In this interpretation [of place], what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus.28

Klaus’s definition of place is basically modelled to fit economic demands. Although it captures everything from “air routes and sea routes by which steel and rubber and glass find themselves part of a car, the migrations of birds and whales, monkeys and rats, fleas and bacteria” (112–13), its application is decidedly market-oriented. “This Kaufmann Velocity Integer (KVI ) had already become a vital index for investors and policymakers in determining the rate at which a place was delivering returns” (112). What the reader (along with Deniz, the focalizer) encounters is an absolutely rationalized mode of thinking place. In an imperial gesture, such a conception of space re-organizes ‘the map’ in terms of a specific capitalist order.29 It is with the sudden invasion of those inexplicable and almost surreal monkeys in the city of Frankfurt that a sense of irrationality enters the story. Their appearance has neither cause nor goal and thus undermines and even violates the regulating gesture of Klaus’s map. ጓ

26

Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 61 (italics in original). He actually is not only in control of mobility but also able to put a price on it in selling his maps. 28 Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 66. 29 See also Upstone, Spatial Politics and the Postcolonial Novel, 4–5. 27

240

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

ጓ

The Territory of Darkness and Light – The White Tiger In the case of The White Tiger, there has been a focus on the portrayal of the Indian poor, the relationship between master and servant, and the metaphor of the “Rooster Coop.”30 I find these readings of The White Tiger as a realistic novel rewarding, but not entirely convincing. Balram Halwai, the homodiegetic narrator in what could be classified formally as an epistolary or picaresque novel, tells his story to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, through a series of letters composed in a couple of consecutive nights in Bangalore. From the very beginning, the text hints at the probable unreliability of its narrator: Although “neither you [Wen Jiabao] nor I can speak English, […] there are some things that can be said only in English.”31 The reader starts off with this obvious breach of the conventions of the realistic mode, a notion that intensifies further as the story evolves. Similarly interesting is the way in which the novel portrays the spatial makeup of Indian society. The binary opposition of Darkness and Light, and the protagonist’s way from Laxmanghar, his village, to Delhi and finally to Bangalore is fertile ground for analysing the way in which the novel makes use of spatiality. The story can be divided into three parts: Balram grows up in the Darkness, and for much of the story he and others tie his identity to this place. Yet, when moving to Delhi to work as a driver for young and wealthy Mr Ashok, Balram starts questioning this relation between (spatial) descent and his identity. It is in Bangalore that he finally re-invents himself as a social entrepreneur, as “Ashok Sharma,32 The White Tiger of Bangalore” (321). Apart from this division into three different spatial arrangements, there is the overwhelmingly graphic metaphor Balram employs for the two Indias he conceives, the India of Light and the India of Darkness: You see, I am in the Light now, but I was born and raised in Darkness. But this is not a time of day I talk about [...]. I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and

30

See Barbara Korte, “Can the Indigent Speak? Poverty Studies, the Postcolonial and the Global Appeal of Q & A and The White Tiger,” Connotations 20.2–3 (2010–11): 293–313; Sarah D. Schotland, “Breaking Out of the Rooster Coop: Violent Crime in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Richard Wright’s Native Son,” Comparative Literature Studies 48.1 (2011): 1–19. 31 Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (London: Atlantic, 2008): 3. Further page references are in the main text. 32 This originally is his murdered employer’s name.

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

241

chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in the place call it the Darkness. (14)

Spatial identity is fixed in the beginning – Balram is born in the Darkness, and, being a Halwai – coming from the sweetmakers caste – is destined to work in the village tea shop.33 He expects to be sucked in by Mother Ganga in the end, just like his mother’s body at the burning ghat (17–18). Benares, where the burial ceremony takes place, is not the symbol of salvation, of escape from life, but of the apparent impossibility of escaping one’s fate. “Every man must make his own Benares” (304) is Balram/Ashok’s34 final moral of absolute individualism. The Darkness, as the narrator depicts it, initially stands for all that is abject in the imaginary of India: filth, oppression, violence, corruption, poverty, and so on. Balram’s voice conveys some sense of compassion for the oppressed, but, more conspicuously, it communicates his disgust.35 His is “a tour of the Darkness without a proper tour guide.”36 The Darkness sticks to him, wherever he goes, yet he learns how to utilize it: looking for a position as driver, Balram meets one of the landlords from his village and persuades him to employ him: “I am from your village, sir. I am from Laxmanghar! The village near the Black Fort. Your village!” (60). Upstone’s suggestion that place works as text – something that can be read, overwritten, and deconstructed, but not fixed.37 – aptly describes the narrator’s deft reaction. Balram understands how the spatial construction of an India of Light and Darkness works, and, in order to escape the Darkness, he uses its discursive function. The landlord replies: “‘Ah… the old village.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Do people still remember me? It’s been three years since I was there’” (61). This scene in particular satirizes fiction of rural India as the ‘real’ and authentic India. His employers trust Balram, because they know, or at least think they know, how the Darkness produces the same kind of loyal servant over and over again. Stupid they may be, “half-baked” (10) indeed, but loyal.

33

He does not, however, as Toral Gajarawala points out, “suffer untouchability, atrocity or social segregation” (22), but is ‘simply’ not part of the aspirations of new middle-class India. See Gajarawala, “The Last and the First,” Economic and Political Weekly 44.50 (2009): 21–23. 34 I argue that Balram transcends his ‘old’ identity (or at least insists he does) in coming to Bangalore. The name ‘Ashok’ serves as a symbol for this transcending and his new middle-class habitus. For this reason, I included both names in those cases that deal with this conflation. 35 See, for example, Miriam Nandi, “Beyond Authenticity of Voice: A Response to Barbara Korte,” Connotations 23.1 (2013–14): 153–71. 36 Gajarawala, “The Last and the First,” 22. 37 Upstone, Spatial Politics and the Postcolonial Novel, 6.

242

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

ጓ

Once in Delhi, Balram exploits every possibility he gets to subvert such spatial conditioning. The malls of Guargon,38 according to Augé one of the nonplaces,39 allow him to practise stripping himself of the Darkness and of his old spatial identity. The malls are guarded and thus closed to the majority of the urban population, who, as Balram reports, are easy to spot: What was happening [...] was one of those incidents that were so common in the early days of the shopping mall, and which were often reported in the daily newspapers under the title ‘Is There No Space for The Poor in the Malls of New India?’ The glass doors had opened, but the man who wanted to go into them could not do so. The guard at the door had stopped him. He pointed his stick at the man’s feet and shook his head – the man had sandals on his feet. But everyone who was allowed into the mall had shoes on their feet. (148)

Balram, however, rather than being interested in changing the circumstances of this discrimination, utilizes what he has learnt from watching Darkness and Light and accordingly dresses in a white shirt and black shoes – and manages to enter the mall. This comparatively facile transformation is yet only a role play and not a substantial alteration of his subaltern status. Delhi, the metropolis, is at the same time liberating and oppressing – it offers Balram the possibility to be perceived differently, but it never transcends the old dichotomy. Urban space here is as aggressively divided and restrictively connoted as is the countryside; if the metropolis is considered denoting ‘new India’, this newness reproduces similar structures of disenfranchisement as the seemingly backward country. The mall scene in particular and Delhi in general, however, offer a foreshadowing of what will be Balram’s “inauguration into light.” 40 In Gerhard Stilz’s definition, the metropolis functions in an inverted colonial mode, making “the home your world,” something in which there is a place for all who “comply with a minimum ethic and contribute to the metropolis.”41 This is a decidedly normative definition that conceives of the metropolis as the essential ‘home’ for the cosmopolitan citizen. Adiga’s novel, however, depicts Delhi as an almost segregated place in which those who can afford it – the citizens – create their own spatial arrangements according to their needs, culminating in

38 Guargon is a wealthy and westernized suburb of Delhi (although administratively belonging to Haryana) known for its comparatively quiet and comfortable lifestyle. 39 See, for example, Augé, Non-Places, 94, 99–100. 40 Ines Detmers, “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘condition-of-India novel’,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (2011): 536. 41 Stilz, “Introduction: Territorial Terrors – Home to Cosmopolis,” 13.

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

243

the wealthier population’s relocation to Guargon. What the metropolis does enable is the strict and relentless individualism of which both Balram and his master are examples. Stilz acknowledges that ghettoization, partisan politics, and imbalances of power threaten the cosmopolitan metropolis, yet he does not bring up the strong sense of locality that must inform any metropolis and that insists on a more conventional set of rules. It is in Bangalore that Balram finally transcends his old spatial identity, because the city is, to some extent at least, an interstice, a place that has been destabilized to such an extent that it allows existences like Balram/Ashok’s. When I drive down Hosur Main Road, when I turn into Electronics City Phase 1 and see the companies go past, I can’t tell you how exciting it is to me. General Electric, Dell, Siemens – they’re all here in Bangalore. And so many more are on their way. There is construction everywhere. [...] The entire city is [...] under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like? (317)

Bangalore, in Balram/Ashok’s observation, is being reconstructed, and he is a part of this “new Bangalore for a new India” (317–18). Just as new as the metropolis are its inhabitants: “That was another of the attractions of Bangalore. The city was full of outsiders. No one would notice one more” (296). The city is experiencing the same kind of re-invention that Balram/Ashok is going through. Only in this place, whose conventional hierarchies have been shaken, can he complete his transformation into a “social entrepreneur” (177).

Imaginative Place So far, I have outlined how, on the story-level, spatial practices offer and negotiate identity for the protagonists. In both novels, however, there are approaches to identity outside of the story as well. In Tokyo Cancelled, the intradiegetic stories are announced by one of the passengers: “When I was a student we used to tell stories in the evenings. I’d love to hear some stories again. It calms you down to think of other worlds” (7). These “other worlds” indicate yet another level on which identity can be constructed in the novel. Its structure overtly refers to quite a number of canonical literary texts: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,42 Boccaccio’s Decamerone, and the Arabian Nights, all with a similar structure of a narrative frame that introduces and loosely connects the intradiegetic stories. These stories have neither a common subject nor a common narrator; instead, 42

As Dasgupta has pointed out himself in the interview with Travis Elborough, in Dasgupta, “Global Enchantment,” 386.

244

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

ጓ

they deal with completely distinct matters and persons. And Dasgupta’s novel, by using this classical form, creates what I would call a site of memory (not to be confused with Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire), a culturally significant space to which both the reader and the protagonists have access and which they can connect with their own listening/reading. The narrative form already offers the possibility of relating to some sort of cultural identity. These “other worlds” are thus not only places on the level of intradiegetic narration but also refer to a shared cultural space43 that makes an identificatory offer. Between the separate stories, one passenger ‘remembers’ similar situations: Was it not at times like this, when life malfunctioned, when time found a leak in its pipeline and dripped out into some hidden little pool, that new thoughts happened, new things began? (255)

Clearly, there is no specific event or memory to which this “at times like this” refers; rather, what is conveyed is a more general sense of heritage – be it fictional or ‘real’. Put as a rhetorical question, the sentence confirms this somewhat vague expectation. As briefly mentioned before, one might refer to The White Tiger as a picaresque novel, with Balram relating a number of episodes that have led him to the position from which he is now telling his story: When you have heard the story of how I got to Bangalore and became one of its most successful (though probably least known) businessmen, you will know everything there is to know about [...] entrepreneurship. (6)

Instead of assuming that the mode of Adiga’s text is a realistic one, I would suggest that there are a number of surreal and narratological characteristics that undermine such a straightforward reading.44 Toral Gajarawala analyses this very convincingly in his brief but excellent essay “The Last and the First.” The tone clearly is satirical (though decidedly bitter and sometimes cruel), employing all kinds of degrading nicknames and habits for the characters such as “the Stork,” who has his feet washed and massaged every evening by a servant,45 while 43

To a certain extent, however, access to this cultural space is governed by the kind of cultural background and formal education the reader (and protagonists) has had. While the Arabian Nights are adapted for television and the cinema rather often and thus popularized, this is not the case with Chaucer and Boccaccio (with such notable exceptions as Pier Paolo Pasolini). What is more, the conception of storytelling as an essential cultural practice evokes a sense of cultural ‘authenticity’ that might not be unproblematic in its own terms. 44 See, for example, Nandi, “Beyond Authenticity of Voice,” 160–63. 45 Adiga, The White Tiger, 70.

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

245

Balram could very well be interpreted as a typical rogue character who lives by his wits. Read in this way, the novel evokes picaresque features and thus a long (European) ancestry. This is not to say that The White Tiger is the quintessential Indian picaresque – I would, however, propose that it uses some of these features on the level of diegesis to refer to ‘cultural memory’, allowing the reader to identify Balram as a conventionally unreliable but nevertheless legitimate narrator.

Conclusion As I have pointed out in this essay, the mutual interference of the global and the local is a spatial gesture that I find prevalent in The White Tiger and Tokyo Cancelled. In both cases, the appearance of interstices such as the airport or Guargon’s malls – both, at the same time, deliberately created as such and, coincidentally, reconceptualized by the protagonists – is experienced as a crisis which triggers some sort of reaction: they offer possibilities of experimenting with the self and (social) identity. In the case of Balram/Ashok, this leads to the obliteration of his old identity, although, paradoxically, this is only possible because the protagonist’s notion of individuality is so thorough. For the passengers in Tokyo Cancelled, the only grade of individuality can be obtained by narrating the specificities of a certain place. They, unlike Balram/Ashok, prereserve their anonymity throughout the extradiegetic frame. Yet theirs, quite like Balram/Ashok’s, is a play with their (possible) identities. While human beings exercise their social, technical, and imaginative capacities […] they literally produce the environments within which they function […] including the city scale.46

The difference between playfulness and necessity in such an appropriation may, however, be difficult to grasp. The glocal metropolis, in which local and global spaces interact, functions in different yet essential ways in both novels: Balram/Ashok experiences Delhi (or at least the narrating ‘I’ does) as a space that reproduces social restrictions, which he in turn may subvert. There is a notion of the liberating force of metropolitan space as well in this “maximum city.”47 For the passengers in Tokyo 46

Arjun Appadurai, “How Histories Make Geographies: Circulation and Context in a Global Perspective,” Transcultural Studies 1 (2010): 9. 47 Rana Dasgupta, “Maximum Cities,” New Statesman (27 March 2006), http://www.new statesman.com/node/152859 (accessed 8 November 2013).

246

P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K

ጓ

Cancelled, the metropolis is the imaginary realm of their game of identity. They revert to cities, each of which enables certain assumptions and images to be evoked in their listeners (and the reader): New York, Paris, Buenos Aires allow them to use the associations they offer, providing them with a spatial (local) specificity which the airport, a symbol of the global, as their place of temporary residence does not offer. In both cases, however, the protagonists (both extradiegetic and intradiegetic) are competent users of the spatial make-up they encounter; their (potential) agency in the novels is as evident as the notion that, as Massey and Harvey argue, space is a social construction.

W OR K S C I T E D Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger (London: Atlantic, 2008). Appadurai, Arjun. “How Histories Make Geographies: Circulation and Context in a Global Perspective,” Transcultural Studies 1 (2010): 4–13. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la supermodernité, 1992; London & New York: Verso, 1995). Bhatt, Shakti. “ ‘India Seems a Greater Abstraction to Me than Europe’: A Conversation with Rana Dasgupta,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42.2 (November 2006): 206–11. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (L& invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980; tr. 1984; Berkeley: U of California P , 2011). Dasgupta, Rana. “Global Enchantment: Travis Elborough Talks to Rana Dasgupta,” in Tokyo Cancelled (London: HarperPerennial, 2006): 385–92. ——. “Maximum Cities,” New Statesman (27 March 2006), http://www .newstatesman .com/node/152859 (accessed 8 November 2013). ——. Tokyo Cancelled (London: HarperPerennial, 2006). Detmers, Ines. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘condition-of-India novel’,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (2011): 535–45. Gajarawala, Toral. “The Last and the First,” Economic and Political Weekly 44.50 (2009): 21–23. Harvey, David. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80.3 (September 1990): 418–34. Korte, Barbara. “Can the Indigent Speak? Poverty Studies, the Postcolonial and the Global Appeal of Q & A and The White Tiger,” Connotations 20.2–3 (2010–11): 293–313. Massey, Doreen. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures. Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 59–69. Nandi, Miriam. “Beyond Authenticity of Voice: A Response to Barbara Korte,” Connotations 23.1 (2013–14): 153–71.

ጓ The Glocal Metropolis

247

Schotland, Sarah D. “Breaking Out of the Rooster Coop: Violent Crime in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Richard Wright’s Native Son,” Comparative Literature Studies 48.1 (2011): 1–19. Statistisches Bundesamt. “Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund – Ergebnisse des Mikrozensus – Fachserie 1 Reihe 2.2,” Statistisches Bundesamt (19 September 2012), https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Bevoelkerung/MigrationInt egration/Migrationshintergrund2010220117004.pdf?__blob=publicationFile (accessed 8 November 2013). Stilz, Gerhard. “Introduction. Territorial Terrors – Home to Cosmopolis,” in Territorial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007): 1–21. Upstone, Sara. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (Farnham & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2009).

ጓ

Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities  A GN E S S.L. L AM

Introduction

A

SIAN PO ETRY IN

E N G L I S H may include poetry written by learners of

English in Asian societies as well as the writings of poets who have relocated themselves to Asia from elsewhere.1 Too often, perceptions of Asian writing from postcolonial communities are unnecessarily politicized. In this essay, I would like to demonstrate that most poets writing in these communities at the present time, like poets in other parts of the world, address a wide range of universal concerns beyond history, politics or nation. Asian poetry deals with life as it is. Asian poets write about the inner consciousness subsuming everyday external life. They write about relationships. They write about their families. They write about social ills. They write about the milieux they live in. Postcolonial concerns in contemporary poetry from ‘postcolonial’ Asian cities form only one of the several themes that may emerge, not the overriding one. While postcolonial issues may give rise to somewhat polarized stances, most other themes in Asian poetry tend to reflect fairly universal values. For example, readers from any clime are likely to abhor cruelty to children and respect love for mothers. Hence, the values captured in Asian writing on these and other similarly universal themes tend to be applicable to people in other parts of the world as well. Given the universality of the Asian poetic 

This essay is part of a project fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the People’s Republic of China, Project No. HKU 745908H. The generous support of the poets, their publishers, and other friends and advisers as well as the dedication of the research assistants for the project and the support from G N E L / A S N E L are gratefully acknowledged. 1 Agnes S.L. Lam, & Candice S.P. Ng, “Defining Asian Poetry in English: Corpuses, Communities and Identity,” in Imagined Communities Revisited: Identity, Nationalism and Globalization, ed. Faridah Manaf & Mohammad A. Quayum (Kuala Lumpur: International Islamic U of Malaysia P, 2012): 49.

250

AGNE S S.L. LAM

ጓ

vision, learners of English are best served by teachers if a cosmopolitan worldview upholding the commonality of human experience is adopted and labels like ‘postcolonial’ are abandoned and not re-invented, as they tend to restrict a full appreciation of the poetry. My essay proceeds as follows: first, some background information on the project detailed in my initial footnote, providing the data for analysis and briefly defining ‘cosmopolitanism’. This is followed by a thematic analysis of Asian poetry and consideration of some pedagogical implications.

The Asian Poetry in English Project This essay draws on data collected for a project entitled ‘Asian Poetry in English: The Development of Poets and their Voices’ 2 funded by a generous grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. The project involved interviewing fifty poets, ten from each of the following places: Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines (Manila) and India (Mumbai and New Delhi), and studying their works. All five places were colonized for various time-spans. Macao (formerly Macau) was ruled by Portugal from 1887 but returned to China in 19993 (English is not a postcolonial language in Macao but plays an important role in education). Hong Kong was ceded by China to the British in 1842 but reverted to Chinese rule in 1997. Singapore was ruled by the British from 1819 but became a republic in 1965. The Philippines were colonized by the Spanish and then the Americans from 1901 before achieving independence in 1946. India was under British hegemony for almost two centuries before it became a republic in 1947.4 Field interviews were mostly conducted face-to-face in two-week spells between October 2009 and November 2010. Towards the end of the interview (lasting about an hour), the poet was invited to name three to five poems and to talk briefly about them. This essay focuses on the first three poems selected by the fifty poets themselves during the interview: thirty poems from each location and 150 poems in total. While the sample is too small to be truly representative of the poets’ various individual voices, the analysis of these poems can provide a 2

Full research report in Agnes S.L. Lam, Becoming Poets: The Asian English Experience (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). 3 Agnes S.L. Lam, “Language Education Policy in Greater China,” in Encyclopedia on Language Education: Vol. 1: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, ed. Stephen May & Nancy H. Hornberger (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2008): 414. 4 Agnes S.L. Lam, “Race in Asian Poetry in English: Ethnic, National and Cosmopolitan Representations,” in Narrating Race: Asia, (Trans)Nationalism, Social Change, ed. Robbie Goh (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011): 254.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

251

brief overall indication of the thematic concerns among contemporary Asian poets writing in English.

Cosmopolitanism Before I begin analysing the poems, it is useful to define cosmopolitanism briefly. For the purpose of discussion, cosmopolitanism goes beyond the superficial economic trappings of globalization, as it is often understood, emphasizing instead the common humanity of the voices of the poets writing in these places, even if their poetic works may range from the local through the regional to the international or universal in the sense of place, the use of imagery or the renderings of cultures or philosophies. It is argued that a cosmopolitan approach is essential for a realistic and comprehensive appreciation of Asian writing. Otherwise, the interpretation may be unnecessarily exoticized and not conducive to the enhancement of universal human empathy, which as teachers we are obliged to try to inculcate. Kwame Anthony Appiah traces the use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ back to the Cynics of the fourth century BC , the first to use the expression ‘cosmopolite’ or ‘citizen of the world’.5 Today, when most national borders are fairly well defined, the cosmopolitan perspective emphasizing the one-ness of mankind is not entirely uncontroversial, the suspicion being that it might undermine “the sovereignty of the nation and the relevance of national borders.” 6 The position taken in the present essay is that advocating cosmopolitan ideals does not entail a negation of nations or of diversity. The type of cosmopolitan idealism expounded here respects national boundaries and opposes national aggression of any kind, be it political, military, economic or cultural. It must be differentiated from globalization in the sense of how the term has often been used to refer to a type of economic neo-imperialism. Cosmopolitanism is conceived of “as a ‘Third Way’ between rampant corporate globalization and reactionary traditionalism or nationalism.”7 The emphasis is not on abandoning one’s home culture but on

5

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): xiv. 6 Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington & Young Craig, “Introduction: Grounding Cosmopolitan Urbanism: Approaches, Practices and Policies,” in Cosmopolitan Urbanism, ed. Binnie, Holloway, Millington & Young (London: Routledge, 2006): 6. 7 Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Debating Cosmopolitics, ed. Daniele Archibugi (London: Verso, 2003): 91.

252

AGNE S S.L. LAM

ጓ

moving between two or more cultures.8 Cultural duality or multiplicity, rather than singularity or homogeneity, is the hallmark of cosmopolitans. Transcending cultural sharing, cosmopolitanism is essentially a matter of ethics. It “refers to those normative ethical theories that advocate a universal (or ‘world’) ethics for all human beings as members of a single moral community.”9 Applied to the study of Asian poetry, a cosmopolitan approach has no preconceptions from any culture but appreciates the poetry from any land as it is. For poetries written in English, the poetics of traditionally English-speaking countries are not strictly applied to the evaluation of poetries from ‘post-colonial’ places, as that would amount to literary colonialism. In the study of World Englishes, for example, each variety of English is studied on a par with other varieties. In the same vein, each poetry in English, regardless of its provenance or age, is to be appreciated in its own right as it contributes to the world poetic vision.

Thematic Concerns The thematic analysis is based on the following broad categorization: 1.

the self: awareness and inner consciousness, inspiration, creativity, identity; 2. personal ties: family, love, friendship and relationships (including pets); 3. society, country and the world: one’s society, city, nation, history and politics, the environment (including Nature); and 4. spiritual realms: death, faith, religion, transcendence This list is, of course, not definitive or exhaustive and a poem could fit into more than one category. When in doubt, the poet’s comments from the interview on the theme addressed by the poem were relied upon in the categorization. What follows is a brief discussion of the thirty poems from each location. It will be seen that postcolonial concerns are generally not prevalent.

8

Gita Rajan & Shailja Sharma, “New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the United States at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” in New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the U S , ed. Gita Rajan & Shailja Sharma (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2006): 2–3. 9 Iain Atack, The Ethics of Peace and War: From State Security to World Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 40; this section is abridged from Lam, “Race in Asian Poetry in English: Ethnic, National and Cosmopolitan Representations,” in Narrating Race: Asia, (Trans) Nationalism, Social Change, ed. Robbie Goh (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011): 255–56.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

253

Macao Granted that the categorization in Table 1 is not absolute, it serves to indicate that poetry from Macao covers a broad spectrum from personal selves (16.7%) to relationships (23.3%), the society, country and the world (40.0%), and spiritual realms (20.0%). There is no poem in the thirty from Macao that makes reference to colonialism or addresses postcolonial issues. Perhaps it is worth repeating that English is not a postcolonial language in Macao to begin with, though it has played an important role in education in Macao. 1 Christopher (Kit) Kelen Debbie Sou Vai Keng Lili Han

Jennifer Oliveros Lao Agnes Vong

Elisa Lai

Amy Wong

Petra Seak

Hilda Tam

Iris Fan

2 Tai Mo Shan Macao: Apostrophe Updating Liu Yuxi The quicker the better Funerals cannot bury Tram ghosts Of death Monsoon When a dragonfly hit the window Spotless glass Drowning Dickinson’s gentlemen The moment Home Yingyang hotel Morning parting Egg tea at eleven A walk in the woods A bite Ghost in the Maritime Offices Squeezing in a bus Bamboo Temple At the Tin Hou Temple Dissociation My whore at Rua de Cantão Smile Crying over onions Lost in the afternoon A sinking fish After The weeping meadow

3

4

Communing with a mountain (3) Macao identity (3) Classical poetry in modern Macao (3) Pace of life (3) Inner consciousness (1) Self and other selves (1) Possible plane crash (4) Emotional loss (1) Nature and machine (3)

No No No No No No No No No

No privacy (1) Intangible nature of life (4) The allure of death (4) Smiling photos, funeral photo (4) Mother and daughter (2) Prostitutes and workers (3) Death of a loved one (2) Street vendor (3) Solitude (1) Dog and dog-eater (3) Bygone wartime (3)

No No No No No No No No No No No

Proximity with strangers (3) The city as a censer (4) Then and now (3) Four souls after death (4) Prostitution (3)

No No No No No

End of happy times (2) Betrayal in a relationship (2) End of a relationship (2) Distance in a relationship (2) Loneliness in love (2)

No No No No No

Table 1 Themes in poetry from Macao.10 Code: 1 = poet; 2 = poem title; 3 = main theme; 4 = postcolonial reference? (These codes apply likewise to subsequent Tables.) 10

See the appended listing and Contemporary Asian Poetry: Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and India, ed. Lam & Tse (Singapore: Math Paper), forthcoming.

AGNE S S.L. LAM

254

ጓ

While all the poems reflect life in the city of Macao, let us focus on some of the poems depicting the city more specifically. In Kelen’s “Macao: Apostrophe,” the persona would like Macao “to smoke less / not to spit the bones out on the table/” and for the mobile not to go off in a concert, so that “we might then all hear the song.”11 Sou’s “The Quicker the Better” underscores the fast pace in this modern city, “as if 100 ghosts were stalking behind.”12 Vong’s “Yingyang Hotel”13 juxtaposes prostitutes gasping inside the hotel with construction workers renovating the hotel outside, while Hilda Tam’s “My Whore at Rua de Cantão” 14 describes the shame of someone planning to visit a prostitute but who ends up with just looking at the advertisement of the prostitute instead. Petra Seak’s “Bamboo Temple” asks, “isn’t the city itself / a censer?”15 Yet, in the midst of the bustling city, Lai in “Egg Tea at Eleven” can still find a quiet street vendor selling bowls of dessert soup with eggs in it at eleven o’clock at night: face down at the sea of tea his way of looking up, perhaps to have a glimpse at the full moon tonight16

This dessert is a traditional recipe that has thrived in Chinese cities such as Macao, a World Heritage city.17

Hong Kong While the categorization in Table 2 below is not definitive, as a poem can be categorized in more than one way, it shows that the themes in Hong Kong poetry go far beyond history, politics or postcolonial concerns and are as broad 11

Christopher (Kit) Kelen, “Macao: Apostrophe,“ in I roll the Dice: Contemporary Macao Poetry, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 128. 12 Sou Vai Keng, Take a Break – Debby Sou Vai Keng’s Ink Paintings (Macao: Keng San Painting and Calligraphy Association of Macao, 2009): 30. 13 Agnes Vong, “Yinyang Hotel,” in Glitter on the Sketch (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 30. 14 Hilda Tam, “My Whore at Rua de Cantão,” in I roll the Dice: Contemporary Macao Poetry, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 326. 15 Petra Seak, “Bamboo Temple (Chok Lam Si),” in Macao Temple Poems (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 8. 16 Elisa Lai, “Egg Tea at Eleven,” in Souvenir of an Australia-Macao Poetry Evening, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Hilda Tam (Macao: English Department U of Macau, 2007): 53. 17 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (U N E S C O ) (2013). Historic Centre of Macao http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1110 (accessed 14 March 2013).

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

255

as those in any poetry around the world. Although the setting of some poems might be in Hong Kong, most of the poems address universally human issues such as the self (20.0%), personal ties (23.3%), society, country and the world (43.3%), and spiritual realms (13.3%). Only three poems, two by McKirdy, “Abroad in England”18 and “Ancestral Worship,”19 and one by Tammy Ho, “Glory, Repentance,”20 illustrate some aspect of postcolonialism. Transplanted to Hong Kong from the U K at a young age, McKirdy now seems to identify more with the Chinese community than ‘post-empire’ England. By contrast, Tammy Ho is learning to love China, the country Hong Kong has returned to. The poems in Hong Kong are generally less focused on the ‘city-state’ as a place, perhaps partly because it is so cosmopolitan that some of its poets also seem to be in frequent transit and write about nearby places in the China hinterland such as Shenzhen or even places further away from Asia. Nevertheless, there are still poems depicting some aspect of life in the city itself. “Tai Tai Bodhisattva” by Elbert Lee describes the lifestyle of the quintessential ladies of leisure in Hong Kong, often hailed as the city of high fashion in East Asia where all the brand names adorn stars in the television and movie industry in Hong Kong and on the China mainland.21 Another aspect of Hong Kong, the bicultural ethos, is illustrated in “Passage” by Madeleine Slavick, which describes the peaceful life of a foreign daughter-in-law in a Chinese family.22 A third metropolitan feature – the fast pace in the development of the city – acts as the backdrop to the personal drama in “Tung Chung Line” by Jennifer Wong.23 Other less salient aspects of city living are portrayed in Kaiser’s poems “Lunch hour detention with Little Ming” and “Waiting for 107,” which describe respectively the helplessness of a latch-key child24 and the pathos of a blind bus passenger25 taking care of themselves in this city of strangers; and Leung’s “I Take

18 David McKirdy, “Abroad in England,” in Accidental Occidental (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2005): 12. 19 McKirdy, “Ancestral Worship,” in Accidental Occidental, 45. 20 Tammy Lai-ming Ho, “Glory, Repentance,” Asia Literary Review 13 (Autumn 2009). 21 Elbert Lee, “Tai Tai Bodhisattva,” in Poetry Macao 2 (2008). 22 Madeleine Marie Slavick, “Passage,” in Round: Poetry and Photographs of Asia, Madeleine Marie Slavick & Barbara Baker (Hong Kong: Asia 2000, 2004): 21. 23 Jennifer Wong, “Tung Chung Line,” in Summer Cicadas (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2006): 50. 24 Tim Kaiser, “Lunch Hour with Little Ming,” in Food Court: Poetry by Tim Kaiser (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2003): 42–43. 25 Kaiser, “Waiting for 107,” in Food Court: Poetry by Tim Kaiser, 46–47.

ጓ

AGNE S S.L. LAM

256

No Pills” captures the impersonal psychology of a person about to throw bottles of acid at innocent pedestrians from a high-rise building.26 1 Gillian Bickley

Louise Ho

Elbert Lee

David McKirdy Judy Keung

Madeleine Slavick Timothy Kaiser

Arthur Leung

Jennifer Wong Tammy Ho

2 Ching Ming Festival, April the fifth, 1991 The photograph Roman stones A veteran talking Cock-a-doodle-doo Colours of Corot Masseuse in Shenzhen Tai Tai Bodhisattva The state of my house Abroad in England Ancestral worship Digging Heaney Martie my mate Tenacious hold I dance with my shadow North Passage When he said My father-in-law at twenty

Lunch hour detention with Little Ming Waiting for 107 Left eye What the pig mama says I take no pills Statue’s Square Affinity Tung Chung line The Famine, 1959-62 I lay curled on the sofa Glory, repentance

3

4

Ancestor worship and forest fire (3)

No

Memories of a loved one (2) Tombstones from the past (4) The Rape of Nanking (3) A corrupt academic (3) Art and communication (4) Sensuality, human dignity (3) Leisurely rich women (3) Embracing disorder (1) Alienation in England (1) Acquired Chinese identity (1) Seamus Heaney reading (3) Memories of a pet dog (2) Fragile clinging to life (4) Communing with oneself (1) Communicating with China (3) Foreign daughter-in-law (3) The death of a relationship (2) Father-in-law’s youth/secret (2)

No No No No No No No No Yes Yes No No No No No No No No

Child left alone at home (3)

No

A blind bus passenger (3) A moment of awareness (1) Humans consuming pigs (4) Throwing acid from a high-rise building onto pedestrians (3) Chance to go abroad (1) Missing home while away (2) A past relationship (2) The Famine in China (3) Mother and daughter (2) Loving a country and hurting (3)

No No No No No No No No No Yes

Table 2 Themes in poetry from Hong Kong27

Singapore Though the grouping in Table 3 is not watertight, it indicates that the themes in the poetry from Singapore range from the self (26.6%), personal ties (10.0%), society, country and the world (46.6%), and spiritual realms (16.6%). Only two 26

Arthur Leung, “I Take No Pills” (revised from the poem “Psycho,” exhibited at Art Talents Pop Up! Poemography Exp. 2009, Swire Organization for Youth Arts, Hong Kong.) 27 See the list at the end of this essay and also Lam & Tse, forthcoming.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

257

poems, one by Leong (“Forever Singlish”)28 and one by Pang (“Candles”),29 reveal some aspect of postcolonialism. These two poems make reference to Singlish, the colloquial variety of Singaporean English – a language mixed with phrases from indigenous languages and dialects, in itself a legacy from colonial times. Most of the other poems address universally human issues. 1 Leong Liew Geok

Kirpal Singh

Madeleine Lee Heng Siok Tian Felix Cheong Gwee Li Sui

Aaron Lee

Alvin Pang

Eddie Tay

Aaron Maniam

2 Forever Singlish Sestina – Of mothers I think particularly American geography Mad about green Making omelettes Black and white Autumn in New Jersey Paris Blue Technique A friend of the scholar gypsies I’ve got mail I’ll make this knife talk I watch the stars go out Broken by the rain 17 December 1994 (or The taking of the Grail) Kenosis Incan dream A visitation of sunlight Notes from a diary Newton discovers gavity at 12 Candles In transit Other things Sichuan, May 2008 Letter to my baby daughter born in Hong Kong My other Remembering Jalan Kayu Standing still White poems

3

4

Singaporean identity (3) Mother and daughter (2)

Yes No

American football (3) Appreciation of diversity (3) Metamorphosis in people (3) A distant but close relationship (2) The chill of autumn (3) Violence in a genteel life (3) Beauty of eggs/pet birds (2) Sadness in everyday life (1) Inspiration coming/going (1) Loneliness in America (1) Domestic violence (3) Loss of belief (4) A broken poetic self (1) Soccer and national identity (3)

No No No No No No No No No No No No No No

Pain in loving a city (3) Loss of a country (3) A moment of awareness (1) Loss is life (4) The gravity of words (1) Stealing church candles (3) Travel as life (4) Faithlessness is faith (4) The Sichuan earthquake (3) Living between two cities (3)

No No No No No Yes No No No No

The writing self (1) Bygone times (3) Wordless communion with a place (4) Happy poems (1)

No No No No

Table 3 Themes in poetry from Singapore30

28

Leong Liew Geok, “Forever Singlish,” in Women Without Men (Singapore: Times Books International, 2000): 130–31. 29 Alvin Pang, “Candles,” in Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, ed. Alvin Pang (Iowa City I A : Autumn Hill Books and International Writing Program, 2009): 117. 30 See the appended listing and Lam & Tse, forthcoming.

258

AGNE S S.L. LAM

ጓ

A good number of the poems from Singapore also speak of other lands, which is not surprising, as almost all the poets spent some time studying abroad. Perhaps that in itself is a feature of metropolitan inhabitants who can feel at ease even in “the blameless country of air travel,”31 as portrayed in Pang’s “In Transit.” In the poems on Singapore as a city, the transition it is undergoing is especially salient. Gwee’s two poems, “Kenosis” and “Incan Dream,” describe how deeply the persona loves his “City of / Endless Energies”32 but how painful it is for him to do so, as Singapore seems to be losing its own identity, perhaps from globalization, so that in this “City of [his] white bread,”33 he can only resort to books, which, sadly, are “knots of writing [he] cannot read.”34 A more comforting rendering of the transition is offered by Maniam’s “Remembering Jalan Kayu,” in which memories of bygone times console rather than leave a void.35 Cheong’s “I’ll make this knife talk” draws a stark picture of domestic violence and the response to it.36 Most poignant is Eddie Tay’s “Letter to My Baby Daughter Born in Hong Kong”; sojourning in Hong Kong, Tay prays that somehow his daughter will “find this cauldron of a city good enough,”37 Hong Kong being similar to and yet different from Singapore.

The Philippines Even if the analysis in Table 4 is not indisputable, it helps to exemplify that the themes in the poetry from the Philippines are very varied: the self (6.6%), personal ties (30.0%), society, country and the world (36.6%), and spiritual realms (26.6%). Only four poems, one by Abad, two by Banzon, and one by Cruz, make some marginal reference to colonialism or its aftermath. Abad’s “Jeepney” uses the common vehicle in the Philippines, the jeepney, as an image for the rough

31

Alvin Pang, “In Transit,” in City of Rain (Singapore: Ethos, 2003): 96. Gwee Li Sui, “Kenosis,” in No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry, ed. Alvin Pang (Singapore: Ethos, 2000): 34. 33 Gwee, “Kenosis,” 34. 34 Gwee, “Incan Dream,” in Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, ed. Alvin Pang (Iowa City I A : Autumn Hill Books and International Writing Program, 2009): 47. 35 Aaron Maniam, “Remembering Jalan Kayu,” in Morning at Memory’s Border: Poems by Aaron Maniam (Singapore: Firstfruits, 2005): 16–20. 36 Felix Cheong, “I’ll Make This Knife Talk,” in Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems (Singapore: Ethos, 2009): 58. 37 Eddie Tay, “Letter to my Baby Daughter Born in Hong Kong,” in Fifty on 50, ed. Edwin Thumboo (Singapore: Ethos, 2009): 122. 32

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

259

ride that Filipinos have had through their partly colonial history.38 Banzon’s “In the Fifties”39 and “Rindu”40 as well as Cruz’s “Geography Lesson”41 all refer to being acculturated into the English language and English worlds. The other poems as a whole convey universally human issues unrelated to colonialism. 1 Gémino Abad Alfred Yuson

Marne Kilates Marjorie Evasco Isabela Banzon Danton Remoto

Dinah Roma Sianturi Paolo Manalo Conchitina Cruz Marc Gaba

2 I teach my child Jeepney Where no words break Pillage Father Andy Warhol speaks to his two Filipino maids Children of the snarl Sitting Bulul Mostly in monsoon weather Dancing a spell Is it a kingfisher? Kunstkammer In the fifties Rindu Globalization on a budget Poem prompted by lines from Ungaretti Rain Tariqa Unseen photographs Calligraphy Manyulangin na Tua-Tua Yours, etcetera Via Crucis Family reunion Dear city Inventory of a year Geography lesson Study of Copernicus, 1514 The house of love believed Seven lines

3

4

Values embedded in language (3) Symbol of the Philippines (3) Justice in non-violent revolution (3) War (3) Death of his father (2) Domestic helpers overseas (3)

No Yes No No No No

Poverty and its merchants (3) Rural religion/culture (4) Love (2) Primeval longing in a dance (4) A moment of actualization (1) Life in art (4) Young minds colonized (3) Love that is not possible (2) Globalization in a developing country (3) The Philippines during Martial Law (3)

No No No No No No Yes Yes No No

Missing someone dear (2) Islamic mysticism (4) Understated love (2) Restraint in language (2) Feeding ritual connecting lives (4) Fragments of identity (1) Trappings of religion (4) Family at a funeral (2) A flooded city (3) Secret lives (2) Another reality in books (3) Science and faith (4) Emotional home (2) Constructed facts (4)

No No No No No No No No No Yes No No No

Table 4 Themes in poetry from the Philippines42

38

Gémino H. Abad, “Jeepney,” in In Ordinary Time (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P, 2004): 123–24. 39 Isabela Banzon, “In the Fifties,” in Lola Coqueta (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P, 2009): 5. 40 Banzon, “Rindu,” in Lola Coqueta, 35–36. 41 Conchitina Cruz, “Geography Lesson,” in Dark Hours (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P, 2005): 9–10. 42 See the appended listing and Lam & Tse, forthcoming.

AGNE S S.L. LAM

260

ጓ

While the poets listed in Table 4 were all based in Manila at the time of the interviews, a good number had earlier spent some years outside Manila. Some poems, such as Evasco’s “Is it the kingfisher?,”43 were clearly set in rural areas. Of the poems on the urban landscape, Cruz’s prose-poem is the darkest: what comes from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is not rain. [...] Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead leaves and plastic. [...] What have you done to its beauty, its graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass? [...] We look for someone to blame and turn to you, wretched city, because we are men and women of honor, we feed our children three meals a day, we never miss an election. The only explanation is you, dear city. This is the end of our discussion. There is no other culprit.44

While Manila is made responsible for the flood, various cities around the world have been blamed for all kinds of other social ills. Kilates’ “Children of the Snarl”45 describing the desperate poverty of children weaving between the traffic to sell flowers and lottery tickets could well be set in another city with similar levels of poverty. Likewise, Banzon’s “Globalization on a Budget”46 is applicable not just to the development of Manila but also to other cities in developing countries.

India Even if the identification of main themes in Table 5 is not unquestionable, it demonstrates that there is much thematic variation in the poetry from India: the self (23.3%), personal ties (20.0%), society, country and the world (40.0%), and spiritual realms (16.6%). Only six poems, one by Daruwalla, one by Nair, one by Thayil, one by Subramaniam, and two by Thakore, make some reference to colonialism. Daruwalla’s “The Ghana Scholar Reflects on his Thesis”47 tells the story of a Ghanaian who writes about the history of cocoa in Ghana (formerly

43

Marjorie Evasco, “Is It the Kingfisher?” in Skin of Water: Selected Poems (Manila: Aria, 2009):

38. 44

Cruz, “Dear City,” in Dark Hours: 3. Marne Kilates, “Children of the Snarl,” in Children of the Snarl and Other Poems (Manila: Recon, 1998): 123. 46 Banzon, “Globalization on a Budget,” in Lola Coqueta, 33–34. 47 Keki N. Daruwalla, “The Ghana Scholar Reflects on His Thesis,” in Collected Poems 1970–2005 (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006): 325–26. 45

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

261

known as the Gold Coast when it was a British colony) but dares not mention slavery, as he wants his PhD from Oxford. Nair’s “A Haiku History of the World”48 includes nineteenth-century colonialism as one of the twenty-one centuries of violence in world history. Thayil’s “2007”49 and Subramaniam’s “To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian”50 address the issue of identity and the use of English. Thakore’s “Nineteen Forty-Two”51 and “The Kohi-noor”52 refer to colonial times respectively only as part of the history of India and of an Indian diamond now part of the British Crown Jewels. Most of the other poems deal with universally human issues unrelated to colonialism. Wide-ranging as the poetry from India is, there are some that focus on the city or its inhabitants. Thayil’s “Spiritus Mundus” tells of his growing up in cities where he longed for vision but “couldn’t tell it,”53 a place where The heat vaporized thought and order, drained the will, obliterated reason.54

Mathai’s “Night and the Children of the Slums,”55 Pinto’s “Incident at Chira Bazaar,”56 and Nair’s “Hermaphrodite Longings”57 paint pictures of poverty, rough streets with beggars, and castrated men longing to be women. 1 Anna Sujatha Mathai

Keki N. Daruwalla

48

2 Families Night and the children of the slums Goddess without arms Dialogues with a third voice Of Mohenjo Daro at Oxford

3

4

Woes and joys of family (2) Poverty and social ills (3)

No No

Pain of poetic creation (1) Myth, poetry and tragedy (4) The passing of a culture (3)

No No No

Rukmini Bhaya Nair, “A Haiku History of the World,” in Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004): 135–38. 49 Jeet Thayil, “2007,” in These Errors Are Correct (New Delhi: Tranquebar, 2008): 118–20. 50 Arundhathi Subramaniam, “To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian,” in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2009): 53–54. 51 Anand Thakore, “Nineteen Forty-Two,” in Elephant Bathing (Mumbai: Paperwall Media and Publishing, Poetrywala, 2012): 19–20. 52 Anand Thakore, “The Koh-i-noor,” in Mughal Sequence (Mumbai: Paperwall Media and Publishing, Poetrywala, 2012): 67–68. 53 Thayil, “Spiritus Mundus,” in These Errors Are Correct: 31. 54 Thayil, “Spiritus Mundus,” 31. 55 Anna Sujatha Mathai, “Night and the Children of the Slums,” in The Attic of Night (New Delhi: Rupa, 1991): 21. 56 Jerry Pinto, “Incident at Chira Bazaar,” in Asylum and Other Poems (Mumbai: Allied, 2003): 22–24. 57 Nair, “Hermaphrodite Longings,” in Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems, 4–9.

AGNE S S.L. LAM

262 Keki N. Daruwalla Sukrita Kumar

Rukmini Bhaya Nair

Jeet Thayil

Rachna Joshi

Sudeep Sen

Jerry Pinto

Arundhathi Subramaniam

Anand Thakore

The Ghana scholar reflects on his thesis Seasonal sadness Mothers and daughters Forest deliverance Hermaphrodite longings A haiku history of the world Bedtime story Spiritus Mundus Flight 2007 Jageshwar The death of my grandmother Jade earrings Bharatanatyam dancer Durga puja Distracted geography Incident at Chira Bazaar Bedside Rain To the Welsh critic who doesn’t find me identifiably Indian Heirloom Black oestrus Chandri Villa Nineteen Forty-Two The Koh-i-noor

ጓ

Slavery in the Gold Coast, a British colony (3) The other in oneself (1) Mother and daughter (2) Self-renewal through forest walks (1) In-between sexualities (1) Conflict in human history (3) Death (4) Faith, India, life and poetry (4) Wanting not to be in India (3) Personal trauma (1) Confronting one’s identity (1) Grandmother, a traditional woman (2)

Yes

Painful love (2) Dance and art (4) Religion, life force (4) Nature observed (3) Class and caste in India (3) A sick mother (2) Slow decay (3) Indian identity while using English (3)

No No No No No No No Yes

Grandmother’s world (2) Selfhood and dark fertility (1) Bygone times (3) Political/personal histories (3) An Indian diamond (3)

No No No Yes Yes

No No No No Yes No No No Yes No No

Table 5 Themes in poetry from India58

Overall Discussion and Pedagogical Implications It is evident from this brief review that postcolonialism is quite marginal to the poetry emerging currently from Asian societies with a colonial past. Only fifteen (10.0%) out of the 150 poems have colonial references (Table 6). Generally speaking, perhaps postcolonialism in contemporary Asian poetry in English lies only in the choice of writing in English per se but, for many of the poets writing in English from these places, especially those from the Philippines and India, English is their first language, the language they are most comfortable in. So the issue of language choice is more theoretical than real.

58

See the list at the end of this essay and also Lam & Tse, in press.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities Location Macao Hong Kong

Singapore The Philippines

India

263

Poem

No. of poems (%)

No poem with postcolonial reference(s) Abroad in England Ancestral worship Glory, repentance Forever Singlish Candles Jeepney In the fifties Rindu Geography lesson The Ghana scholar reflects on his thesis A haiku history of the world 2007 To the Welsh critic who doesn’t find me identifiably Indian Nineteen Forty-Two The Koh-i-noor

0 (0%) 3 (10.0%)

2 (6.6%) 4 (13.3%)

6 (20.0%)

Total

15 (10.0%)

Table 6 Poems with postcolonial reference(s)59

The portrait of the Asian city that has emerged from this brief review is not one that is particularly flattering. It seems to support the common vision of cities: fast-moving, rapidly developing, materialistic, helpless in the face of social ills such as prostitution, violence, and poverty. But these characteristics might apply not just to Asian cities and probably not just to cities, since rural areas are often poorer. Thematic category

Number of poems (%) Macao

1. The self 2. Personal ties 3. Society, country, and the world 4. Spiritual realms Total

Singapore

The Philippines

India

Total

5 (16.7%) 7 (23.3%) 12 (40.0%)

Hong Kong 6 (20%) 7 (23.3%) 13 (43.3%)

8 (26.6%) 3 (10.0 %) 14 (46.6%)

2 (6.6%) 9 (30.0%) 11 (36.6%)

7 (23.3%) 6 (20.0%) 12 (40.0%)

28 (18.6%) 32 (21.3%) 62 (41.3%)

6 (20.0%) 30 (100%)

4 (13.3%) 30 (100.0%)

5 (16.6%) 30 (100%)

8 (26.6%) 30 (100.0%)

5 (16.6%) 30 (100.0%)

28 (18.6%) 150 (100.0%)

Table 7 Thematic categorization of Asian poetry

59

The percentages are based on thirty poems from each location.

AGNE S S.L. LAM

264

ጓ

Regardless of how applicable the image of Asian cities may be to cities in other places, it is the empathy with which the Asian poets have created their visions of their cities that is universal. It is useful to remember that the poems discussed here form only a small percentage of the poetry emerging from these communities. Many of the poems are not about the city or even specifically about Asia but address universally human issues related to the self, personal ties, art, culture, nature, and spiritual realms (Table 7).60 Ultimately, all writing is political in the sense that all writing takes a stance, but it is important not to politicize writing unnecessarily. Poetry, as the ultimate voice of humanity, should not be inadvertently politicized, because to do so is to minimize the power of poetry from any land and of the world as a whole. I would therefore recommend restricting the term ‘postcolonial’ to its descriptive chronological sense of ‘after colonial times’ (as differentiated by Bill Ashcroft into ‘post-colonial’) and to present poetries from different places without labelling them ‘postcolonial’ or not. In the cosmopolitan approach, just as every ethnic group is to be treated equally, the poetry emerging from any community is to be appreciated on its own terms. That a poetry is written in English is quite incidental and not significant in itself, because languages are innocent. If a language is useful for a purpose, use it; no one has the right to tell another that to use English is to be unpatriotic. This is not to say that students’ own languages are not to be maintained for creative expression. Bilingualism or multilingualism in creative expression is probably the best way to move forward, not just for individual learners or writers but also for the world at large.

Conclusion In this essay, I have tried to analyse 150 poems from fifty Asian poets with three aims. First, I have tried to show that postcolonial references are only marginally present in contemporary poetry in Asia. Secondly, I have discussed some of the poems focusing on the city to construct a picture of urban Asia. Finally, I have tried to argue in statistical terms that there is much in the poetry that is of universal human relevance. That is why it is important to approach Asian poems not as ‘postcolonial’ curiosities, to see how they can help us track the passing of history or the effects of politics in the aftermath of colonialism, but to approach them as we do all literatures in all languages. To be a true son or daughter of the cosmos, there is no other way but to hear all the voices in poetry as voices

60

See also the selected anthologies listed at the end of this essay.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

265

beyond poetry in the universe around us. And, in hearkening to these multifarious voices, each of us may find ourselves individually and collectively.

W OR K S C I T E D Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Atack, Iain. The Ethics of Peace and War: From State Security to World Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Binnie, Jon, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington & Craig Young. “Introduction: Grounding Cosmopolitan Urbanism: Approaches, Practices and Policies,” Cosmopolitan Urbanism, ed. Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington, & Craig Young (London: Routledge, 2006): 1–34. Calhoun, Craig. “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Debating Cosmopolitics, ed. Daniele Archibugi (London: Verso, 2003): 86–116. Lam, Agnes S.L. Becoming Poets: The Asian English Experience (Bern: Peter Lang), 2014. ——.“Language Education Policy in Greater China,” in Encyclopedia on Language Education, vol. 1: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, ed. Stephen May & Nancy H. Hornberger (New York: Springer, 2008): 405–17. ——.“Race in Asian Poetry in English: Ethnic, National and Cosmopolitan Representations,” in Narrating Race: Asia, (Trans)Nationalism, Social Change, ed. Robbie Goh (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011): 253–72. ——, & Candice S.P. Ng. “Defining Asian Poetry in English: Corpuses, Communities and Identity,” in Imagined Communities Revisited: Identity, Nationalism and Globalization, ed. Faridah Manaf & Mohammad A. Quayum (Kuala Lumpur: International Islamic U of Malaysia P , 2012): 46–56. ——, & Kelly Y.N. Tse, ed. Contemporary Asian Poetry: Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and India (Singapore: Math Paper), in press. Rajan, Gita, & Shailja Sharma. “New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the United States at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” in New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US, ed. Gita Rajan & Shailja Sharma (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2006): 1–36. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( U NE S CO ). Historic Centre of Macao, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1110 (accessed 14 March 2013). Selected Anthologies Abad, Gemino H., ed. A Habit of Shores: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, 60’s to the 90’s (Diliman, Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 1999).

266

AGNE S S.L. LAM

ጓ

——, ed. A Native Clearing: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English since the ’50s to the Present: Edith L. Tiempo to Cirilo F. Bautista (Diliman, Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 1993). Chang, Tina, Nathalie Handel & Ravi Shankar, ed. Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and beyond (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Chaudhuri, Amit, ed. The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (New York: Vintage, 2004). Dharwadker, Vinay, & A.K. Ramanujan, ed. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1994). Kelen, Christopher (Kit), & Agnes Vong, ed. I Roll the Dice: Contemporary Macao Poetry (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008). Kumar, Sukrita Paul, & Malashri Lal, ed. Speaking for Myself: An Anthology of Asian Women’s Writing (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009). Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. The Oxford Indian Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (Calcutta: Oxford U P , 1993). Paine, Jeffrey, ed. The Poetry of Our World: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (New York: HarperPerennial, 2000). Pang, Alvin, ed. Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (Iowa City IA : Autumn Hill, 2009). Paniker, K. Ayyappa, ed. Modern Indian Poetry in English (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1991). Paranjape, Makarand, ed. An Anthology of New Indian English Poetry (Calcutta: Rupa, 1993). Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, & Robert O’Clair, ed. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, vols. 1 & 2 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). Thayil, Jeet, ed. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2008). Thumboo, Edwin, Isa Kamari, Hwee Pheng Chia & K.T.M. Iqbal, ed. Fifty on 50 (Singapore: National Arts Council, 2009). Thumboo, Edwin, Yoon Wah Wong, Kah Choon Ban, Naa Govindasamy, Shaharuddin Maaruf, Robbie Goh, & Petrina Chan, ed. Journeys: Words, Home and Nation: Anthology of Singapore Poetry (1984–1995), tr. Chee Lick Ho, Ye Min Chao, Chunshen Zhu, Zhiming Bao, Alan Hunter, Shaharuddin Maaruf, & Elangovan (Singapore: Singapore U P , 1995). Thumboo, Edwin, Yoon Wah Wong, Tzu Pheng Lee, Masuri bin Salikun & V.T. Arasu, ed. The Poetry of Singapore (Singapore: Singapore National Printers, 1985). Xu Xi, & Mike Ingham, ed. City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English, 1945 to the Present (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2003). Poems Cited in Table 1 – Macao Fan, Iris. “After The weeping meadow,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 348.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

267

——.“Lost in the Afternoon,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 343. ——.“A Sinking Fish,” in Lost in the Afternoon (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao): 86. Han, Lili. “Monsoon,” in Winter Story (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 29. ——.“Of Death,” in Winter Story (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 53. ——.“When a Dragonfly Hit the Window,” in Winter Story (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 51. Kelen, Christopher (Kit). “Macao: Apostrophe,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 128. ——.“Tai Mo Shan/Big Hat Mountain,” in China Years: Selected and New Poems (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2010): 18–35. ——.“Updating Liu Yuxi,” in In Conversation with the River (Chicago: Virtual Artists Collective, 2010): 60. Lai, Elisa. “Egg Tea at Eleven,” in Souvenir of an Australia-Macao Poetry Evening, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Hilda Tam (Macao: English Department, U of Macau, 2007): 53. ——.“Morning Parting,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 284. ——.“A Walk in the Woods,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 283. Lao, Jenny Oliveros. “Dickinson’s Gentlemen,” MS , 2012. ——.“Drowning,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 260. ——.“Spotless Glass,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 262. Seak, Petra. “Dissociation,” in Macao Temple Poems (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 55. Sou Vai Keng. “Funerals Cannot Bury,” in Everybody Has a Pet (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 32. ——.“The Quicker the Better,” in Take a Break – Debby Sou Vai Keng’s Ink Paintings (Macao: Keng San Painting and Calligraphy Association of Macao, 2009): 30–31. ——.“Tram Ghosts,” in Everybody Has a Pet (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 28–29. Tam Hio Man. “Crying Over Onions,” in The Green Here was Pink (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 6. ——.“Smile,” in The Green Here was Pink (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2009): 15. Tam, Hilda. “My Whore at Rua de Cantão,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 326. Vong, Agnes. “Home,” in Glitter on the Sketch (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 42.

268

AGNE S S.L. LAM

ጓ

——.“The Moment,” in Glitter on the Sketch (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 60. ——.“Yinyang Hotel,” in Glitter on the Sketch (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 30. Wong, Amy. “A Bite,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 303. ——.“Ghost in the Maritime Offices,” in I Roll the Dice, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen & Agnes Vong (Macao: Association of Stories in Macao, 2008): 304. ——.“Squeezing in a Bus,” MS , 2012. Poems Cited in Table 2 – Hong Kong Bickley, Gillian. “Ching Ming Festival, April the fifth, 1991,” in For the Record and Other Poems of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Proverse Hong Kong, 2003): 56–59. ——.“The Photograph,” in Moving House and Other Poems from Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Proverse Hong Kong, 2005): 88–89. ——.“Roman Stones,” Sightings: A Collection of Poetry (Hong Kong: Proverse Hong Kong, 2007): 99–100. Ho, Louise. “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” in Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2009): 139. ——.“A Veteran Talking,” in Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2009): 134–35. ——.“Colours of Corot,” in Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2009): 54. Ho, Tammy Lai-ming. “The Famine, 1959-62,” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore 7.2 (2008), http://www.qlrs.com/poem.asp?id=609 (accessed 17 June 2010). ——.“Glory, Repentance,” Asia Literary Review 13 (Autumn 2009), http://www.asia literaryreview.com/web/article/en/92 (accessed 17 June 2010). ——.“I Lay Curled on the Sofa,” in Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women: A World Poetry Anthology, ed. Kate Rogers & Viki Holmes (Hong Kong: Haven, 2009): 79. Kaiser, Timothy. “Lunch Hour Detention with Little Ming,” in Food Court: Poetry by Timothy Kaiser (Hong Kong: Chameleon P , 2003): 42–43. ——.“My Father-In-Law at Twenty,” in Food Court: Poetry by Timothy Kaiser (Hong Kong: Chameleon P , 2003): 18–19. ——.“Waiting for 107,” in Food Court: Poetry by Timothy Kaiser (Hong Kong: Chameleon P , 2003): 46–47. Keung, Judy. “I Dance With My Shadow” (revised from the poem by the same title), in Imprint 2007, ed. Carol Dyer, Henna Bawaby & Wendy McTavish (Hong Kong: Women in Publishing Society): 85–87. ——.“Martie My Mate” (revised from the poem by the same title), in Imprint 2010, ed. Carol Dyer (Hong Kong: Women in Publishing Society, 2012): 81. ——.“Tenacious Hold,” in Imprint 2010, ed. Carol Dyer (Hong Kong: Women in Publishing Society, 2010): 79.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

269

Lee, Elbert. “Masseuse in Shenzhen,” Poetry Macao 2 (2008) http://poetrymacao.comuf .com/PM_issue2/main.htm (accessed 11 June 2010). ——.“The State of My House,” in Hong Kong: Poems/Gedichte, ed. Louise Ho & Klaus Stierstorfer (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2006): 254. ——.“Tai Tai Bodhisattva,” Poetry Macao 2 (2008) http://poetrymacao.comuf.com /PM_issue2/main.htm (accessed 11 June 2010). Leung, Arthur. “I Take No Pills” (revised from the poem “Psycho,” exhibited at Art Talents Pop Up! Poemography Exp. 2009, Swire Organization for Youth Arts, Hong Kong.) ——.“Left Eye,” Smartish Pace 15 (2008): 114. ——.“What The Pig Mama Says,” http://edwinmorganpoetrycompetition.co.uk/vital synz.co.uk/uploads/poetry/arthur-leung.pdf (accessed 8 August 2012). McKirdy, David. “Abroad in England,” in Accidental Occidental (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2005): 12. ——.“Ancestral Worship,” in Accidental Occidental (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2005): 45. ——.“Digging Heaney,” Asia Literary Review 13 (Autumn 2009) http://www.asialiterary review.com/web/article/en/93 (accessed 20 September 2011). Slavick, Madeleine. “North,” in Shimao Shinzo & Madeleine Marie Slavick, Something Beautiful Might Happen (Tokyo: Usimaoda, 2010): 96. ——.“Passage,” in Madeleine Marie Slavick & Barbara Baker, Round: Poems and Photographs of Asia (Hong Kong: Asia 2000, 2004): 21. ——.“When He Said,” Delicate Access (Hong Kong: Sixth Finger, 2004): 54–55. Wong, Jennifer. “Affinity,” in Summer Cicadas (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2006): 21. ——.“Statue’s Square,” in Summer Cicadas (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2006): 10. ——.“Tung Chung Line,” in Summer Cicadas (Hong Kong: Chameleon, 2006): 50. Poems Cited in Table 3 – Singapore Cheong, Felix. “Broken by the Rain,” in Broken by the Rain (Singapore: Firstfruits, 2004): 46. ——.“I Watch the Stars Go Out,” in I Watch the Stars Go Out (Singapore: Ethos, 1999): 9. ——.“I’ll Make This Knife Talk,” in Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems (Singapore: Ethos, 2009): 58. Gwee Li Sui. “17 December 1994 (or The Taking of the Grail),” in Gwee Li Sui, Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (Singapore: Landmark, 1998): 31–33. ——.“Kenosis,” in No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry, ed. Alvin Pang (Singapore: Ethos, 2000): 34–35. ——.“Incan Dream,” in Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, ed. Alvin Pang (Iowa City IA : Autumn Hill Books and International Writing Program, 2009): 47. Heng Siok Tian. “A Friend of the Scholar Gypsies (I) (1986),” in Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (Singapore: Unipress, 1993): 34–35. ——.“I’ve Got Mail,” in Contouring (Singapore: Landmark, 2004): 43–44.

270

AGNE S S.L. LAM

ጓ

——.“Technique,” in Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (Singapore: Unipress, 1993): 2. Lee, Aaron. “Newton Discovers Gravity at 12,” in Five Right Angles (Singapore: Ethos, 2007): 40. ——.“Notes from a Diary,” in Five Right Angles (Singapore: Ethos, 2007): 12. ——.“A Visitation of Sunlight,” in A Visitation of Sunlight (Singapore: Ethos, 1997): 57. Lee, Madeleine. “Autumn in New Jersey,” in A Single Headlamp (Singapore: Firstfruits, 2003): 70. ——.“Blue,” in Synaesthesia (Singapore: Firstfruits, 2003): 22–23. ——.“Paris,” in Fiftythree/zerothree (Singapore: Firstfruits, 2004): 50–57. Leong Liew Geok. “American Geography,” in Women Without Men (Singapore: Times Books International, 2000): 18. ——.“Forever Singlish,” in Women Without Men (Singapore: Times Books International, 2000): 130–31. ——.“Sestina – Of Mothers I Think Particularly,” in Women Without Men (Singapore: Times Books International, 2000): 58–59. Maniam, Aaron. “Remembering Jalan Kayu,” in Morning at Memory’s Border: Poems by Aaron Maniam (Singapore: Firstfruits, 2005): 16–20. ——.“Standing Still,” in Morning at Memory’s Border: Poems by Aaron Maniam (Singapore: Firstfruits, 2005): 90–91. ——.“White Poems,” in Fifty on 50, ed. Edwin Thumboo (Singapore: Ethos, 2009): 132. Pang, Alvin. “Candles,” in Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, ed. Alvin Pang (Iowa City IA : Autumn Hill Books and International Writing Program, 2009): 117. ——.“In Transit,” in City of Rain (Singapore: Ethos, 2003): 96–97. ——.“Other Things,” in Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, ed. Alvin Pang (Iowa City IA : Autumn Hill Books and International Writing Program, 2009: 112. Singh, Kirpal. “Black and White,” in Cats Walking and the Games We Play (Singapore: Ethos, 1998): 11. ——.“Mad about Green,” in Cats Walking and the Games We Play (Singapore: Ethos, 1998): 30. ——.“Making Omelettes,” in The Best of Kirpal Singh (Singapore: Epigram, 2012): 35–36. Tay, Eddie. “My Other,” in A Lover’s Soliloquy (Hong Kong: Sixth Finger P , 2005): 70–71. ——.“Letter to my Baby Daughter Born in Hong Kong,” in Fifty on 50, ed. Edwin Thumboo (Singapore: Ethos, 2009): 122. ——.“Sichuan, May 2008,” Asia Literary Review 9 (Autumn 2008) http://www.asia literaryreview.com/web/article/en/9 (accessed 15 December 2011). Poems Cited in Table 4 – The Philippines Abad, Gémino H. “I Teach My Child,” in In Ordinary Time (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2004): 33–35. ——.“Jeepney,” in In Ordinary Time (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2004): 123–24.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

271

——.“Where No Words Break,” in In Ordinary Time (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2004): 72–73. Banzon, Isabela. “Globalization on a Budget,” in Lola Coqueta (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2009): 33–34. ——.“In the Fifties,” in Lola Coqueta (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2009): 5. ——.“Rindu,”in Lola Coqueta (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2009): 35–36. Cruz, Conchitina. “Dear City,” in Dark Hours (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2005): 3. ——. “Geography Lesson,” in Dark Hours (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2005): 9–10. ——.“Inventory of a Year,” in Elsewhere Held and Lingered (Quezon City: High Chair, 2008): 44–51. Evasco, Marjorie. “Dancing a Spell,” in Skin of Water: Selected Poems (Manila: Aria Edition, 2009): 36. ——. “Is It the Kingfisher?” in Skin of Water: Selected Poems (Manila: Aria Edition, 2009): 38. ——.“Kunstkammer,” Asia Literary Review 12 (Summer 2009) http://www.asialiterary review.com/web/article/en/28 (accessed 23 December 2011). Gaba, Marc. “The House of Love Believed,” in Noveau Bored (Quezon City: High Chair, 2009): 20. ——.“Seven Lines,” in Have (North Adams MA : Tupelo, 2011): 15. ——.“Study of Copernicus, 1514,” in Have (North Adams MA : Tupelo, 2011): 13. Kilates, Marne. “Children of the Snarl,” in Children of the Snarl and other Poems (Manila: Recon, 1998): 123. ——.“Mostly in Monsoon Weather,” in Mostly in Monsoon Weather: Poems New & Revisited (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2007): 84. ——.“Sitting Bulul,” in Poems En Route (Manila: U of Santo Tomas P , 1998): 129–30. Manalo, Paolo. “Family Reunion,” Kritika Kultura 13 (2009): 161 http://150.ateneo .edu/kritikakultura/images/pdf/kk13/poems.pdf (accessed 23 December 2011). ——.“Via Crucis,” in At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English, ed. Neil C. Garcia (Manila: Philippine PEN /U of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2007): 79. ——.“Yours, etcetera,” in Jolography (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 2004): 58. Remoto, Danton. “Poem Prompted by Lines from Ungaretti,” in Skin Voices Faces: Poems (Quezon City: Office of Research and Publications, School of Arts and Sciences, Ateneo de Manila U , 1998): 27–28. ——.“Rain,” in Skin Voices Faces: Poems (Quezon City: Office of Research and Publications, School of Arts and Sciences, Ateneo de Manila U , 1998): 56. ——.Tariqa, Pulotgata: The Love Poems (Pasig City: Anvil, 2004). Roma, Dinah. “Calligraphy,” in A Feast of Origins (Manila: U of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2004): 61–62.

272

AGNE S S.L. LAM

ጓ

——.“Unseen Photographs,” in A Feast of Origins (Manila: U of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2004): 19. Roma-Sianturi, Dinah. “Manyulangin na Tua-Tua,” in Geographies of Light: Poems (Manila: U of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2011): 17–18. Yuson, Alfred A. “Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipino Maids,” in Mothers Like Elephants: Selected Poems and New (Manila: Anvil, 2000): 43. ——.“Father,” in Sea Serpent (Manila: Monsoon, 1980): 15. ——.“Pillage,” in Poems Singkwenta’y Cinco (Manila: Anvil, 2010): 9. Poems Cited in Table 5 – India Daruwalla, Keki N. “Dialogues with a Third Voice,” in Collected Poems 1970–2005 (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006): 58–67. ——.“The Ghana Scholar Reflects on His Thesis,” in Collected Poems 1970–2005 (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006): 325–26. ——.“Of Mohenjo Daro at Oxford,” in Collected Poems 1970–2005 (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006): 220–22. Joshi, Rachna. “The Death of My Grandmother,” in Configurations (Calcutta: Rupa, 1993): 16–17. ——.“Jade Earrings,” in Crossing the Vaitarani: Journeys (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 2008): 56. ——.“Jageshwar,” in Configurations (Calcutta: Rupa, 1993): 9–10. Kumar, Sukrita Paul. “Forest Deliverance,” in Sweet and Sour Dreams: An Anthology of Poetry, ed. Ajeet Cour (New Delhi: Foundation of S A A RC Writers and Literature, 2010): 137. ——.“Mothers and daughters,” in Folds of Silence (New Delhi: Kokil, 1996): 43–45. ——.“Seasonal Sadness,” in Apurna (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1988). Mathai, Anna Sujatha. “Families,” in The Attic of Night (New Delhi: Rupa, 1991): 13–14. ——.“Goddess without Arms,” in Life – On My Side of the Street and Other Poems (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005): 8. ——.“Night and the Children of the Slums,” in The Attic of Night (New Delhi: Rupa, 1991): 21. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya. “Bedtime Story,” in Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004): 53. ——.“A Haiku History of the World,” in Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004): 135–38. ——.“Hermaphrodite Longings,” in Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004): 4–9. Pinto, Jerry. “Bedside,” in Asylum and Other Poems (Mumbai: Allied, 2003): 52–54. ——.“Incident at Chira Bazaar,” in Asylum and Other Poems (Mumbai: Allied, 2003): 22–24. ——.“Rain,” in Asylum and Other Poems (Mumbai: Allied, 2003): 20.

ጓ Cosmopolitan Poetry from Asian Cities

273

Sen, Sudeep. “Bharatanatyam Dancer,” in Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997): 40–41. ——.“Distracted Geography,” in Distracted Geographies: An Archipelago of Intent (San Antonio T X : Wings, 2003): 51–56. ——.“Durga Puja,” in Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997): 176–78. Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Black Oestrus,” in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2009): 100–101. ——.“Heirloom,” in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2009): 12. ——.“To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian,” in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2009): 53–54. Thakore, Anand. “Chandri Villa,” in Waking in December (Bombay: Harbour Line, 2001): 2. ——.“The Koh-i-noor,” in Mughal Sequence (Mumbai: Paperwall Media and Publishing, Poetrywala, 2012): 67–68. ——.“Nineteen Forty-Two,” in Elephant Bathing (Mumbai: Paperwall Media and Publishing, Poetrywala, 2012): 19–20. Thayil, Jeet. “Flight,” in These Errors Are Correct: Poems (New Delhi: Tranquebar, 2008): 95–96. ——.“Spiritus Mundi,” in These Errors Are Correct: Poems, 31–33. ——.“2007,” in These Errors Are Correct: Poems, 118–20.

ጓ

REFRAMING

THE

A U S T R A L I A N / C A N A D I A N (S E T T L E R ) M E T R O P O L I S

City of Words Haunting Legacies in Gail Jones’s Five Bells S U E K OSSE W

I

that the city is a space produced both by material practices – such as the interactions of history and geography, social relations and institutions, practices of government and regulation, as well as architecture and design – and by representational or imaginative practices in literary, visual, and cultural texts. As such, visual, spatial, and literary representations of the city intersect with these material practices of power and ideology to produce what one critic has called “sites of contestation and interaction.”1 Spatial theory has prompted us to consider the presence not only of these underlying and sometimes competing ideologies and value systems but also of human interactions in the cultural spaces of the city. For Michel de Certeau, the “Concept-city” is the realm of the rational and the planned, whereas the “metaphorical city” is that of everyday living that undermines the call to order of the Concept-city.2 In other words, ordinary people produce a resistant grammar of city living (‘space’) that subverts the city authority’s attempt to regulate them (‘place’); the story or narrative disrupts the map. The resistant nature of the agency of ordinary people and the patterns of their everyday lives was a basic tenet, too, of the Situationists, the group of urban theorists led by Guy Debord in the late 1950s and 1960s. In their manifesto, a people’s aesthetic replaces the commercialism of the spectacular city, thereby undermining the rules of consumerism and undoing the strict hierarchy of

1

T IS G ENERALLY ACCEPTED

Nkiru Nzegwu, “Bypassing New York in Re-Presenting Eko: Production of Space in a Nigerian City,” in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: New York U P , 1996): 111. 2 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (L& invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P, 1984): 91–110.

278

SUE KOSSEW

ጓ

rational city spaces with more democratic and disorderly modes of negotiating space. In postcolonial terms, there is a similar emphasis on the contemporary postcolonial city as multifarious rather than unitary. Postcolonial London, for example, is described as a “diachronic and heterogeneous location of migration, mobility and instability”;3 a “space of flows” rather than a “space of place.”4 The modern global city is a space of “transnation”: i.e. as Bill Ashcroft suggests, negotiable and shifting, “demonstrating the actual agency of people as they navigate the structures of the state, [a space of] fluidity, of porous boundaries, of travel between subject positions.”5 In this way, the postcolonial city is not only a place from which the subjects of the state are disarticulated “from its own nationalist ideology” but also the place from which “we may best understand the increasing global movement of peoples” from postcolony to metropolis.6 Gail Jones has drawn attention to her own engagement with the work of Guy Debord and the Situationists, with particular emphasis on the aesthetic nature of the city. In an interview with Catherine Keenan, Jones uses a number of key terms associated with contemporary psychogeography when she states: Our life in cities isn’t just this apprehension of spectacles and the moment of consumption [...]. It’s intersected by a lot of aesthetic moments [...]. I’m really interested in what [the Situationists] say about space and bodies and the reinvention of aesthetic apprehension for a kind of liberating, emancipatory end.7

In literary terms, this “aesthetic apprehension” of the topography of the city saturates the text, which, in turn, like the Situationists’ transgressive walking practices in the city, becomes a space of liberatory transformation. In similar fashion, the reading process itself can be said to mimic the psychogeographers’ 3

John McLeod, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London & New York: Routledge, 2004): 9. 4 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996): 225. 5 Bill Ashcroft, “Transnation,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2010): 78. 6 Bill Ashcroft, “Urbanism, Mobility and Bombay: Reading the Postcolonial City,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (2011): 504. 7 Gail Jones, “Interview with Catherine Keenan,” Sydney Morning Herald (5–6 February 2011): 30. For a detailed discussion of Jones’s deployment of Situationist ideas and the novel’s links to Virginia Woolf, see Rob Dixon’s essay “Invitation to the Voyage: Reading Gail Jones’s Five Bells,” J A S A L 12.3 (2012): 1–17.

ጓ City of Words

279

concept of subversive walking. To quote Ashcroft again, a postcolonial reading, like the text, has the capacity “to dissolve the boundary between past and future through acts of memory that paradoxically imagine a different world.”8 Literary and other cultural texts, in other words, have the potential, as cities do, to provide a cross-cultural meeting space in which both “host” and “guest” (text and reader) accept “the uncomfortable and sometimes painful possibility of being changed by the other.”9 This transformative aesthetic is particularly evident in those texts that explore the spatial implications of city-place. In this essay, I want to focus particularly on the idea of Gail Jones’s novel as an example of literary and cultural texts in contemporary Australia that perform such postcolonial acts of memory by imagining Sydney as a city of contemporary global and intercultural exchanges that is also always haunted by its past. In the interview with Catherine Keenan referred to above, Jones makes explicit the connection between Five Bells and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway10 (as well as James Joyce’s Ulysses).11 In re-reading Woolf’s diaries, Jones was “fascinated by the architectural metaphors Woolf uses, about excavating the spaces behind the present.”12 In addition to the more obvious links with Woolf’s novel, whereby Jones’s “characters’ pasts balloon out as they take their familiar walk around the ferries and souvenir shops,”13 there is another important Woolfian connection. Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” is a classic walking narrative where she reflects on the potential for the walker/ writer to delve below the “smooth stream” of city surfaces into imagining the lives of others as she walks the streets of London on a winter’s night in search of, appropriately, a pencil with which to write.14 For Woolf, walking the streets of London enables the self to deviate into the lives of others, to “penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind.”15 Not only does she use her walking to project herself into these other lives, including “this maimed company of the halt and blind,”16 but she 8

Ashcroft, “Transnation,” 84. Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2001): 170. 10 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1992). 11 James Joyce, Ulysses (1920; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). 12 Jones, “Interview with Catherine Keenan,” 30. 13 Jones, “Interview,” 31. 14 Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930), in Woolf, The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942): 21. 15 Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 28. 16 “Street Haunting,” 22. 9

280

SUE KOSSEW

ጓ

represents the more seedy aspects of the city as lodged within “crevices and crannies,”17 needing to be sought out by the eye that is all too easily tempted and seduced by surface beauty. Throughout this essay, Woolf uses spatial images of journeying and diving below the surface to connect with her own recounting of the stories of others. Similarly, psychogeographers, through the practice of “alert reverie,”18 are concerned not just with observing and noting what they see and experience in their walking of the city but also with being alert to absences and hidden clues that may reveal multiple layers of history and uncover past forms of inhabiting and belonging to the city. Thus, Jones’s reference to “excavating the spaces behind the present” is a telling image that links place and time in what may be called “chronotopography,” where Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, the treatment of time and space in literary works, is linked with topographical practices which foreground the “spatialising [of] feelings, beliefs and activities.”19 Jones’s use of the term “excavation” to refer to both space and time captures both the method and the themes of her novel. This novelistic excavation of spaces is textualized in Jones’s novel by its geographical focus on the historic site of Sydney Cove, now known as Sydney Harbour, the tourist hub of the city, a site where, in the words of one historian, “histories meet,” and one that exemplifies the “entanglement of, and interactions between, these various pasts and presences.”20 It is important to acknowledge at the outset that, as Joanne Tompkins suggests in her book on Australian theatr e, “place and space are, in Australia, […] heavily contested at a basic level of ownership and interpretation.”21 For her, Australia is a “spatially unstable nation.”22 In theorizing this contestation, she refers to Una Chaudhuri’s concept of geopathology and the term “polytopianism” as useful responses: the former emphasizes “the double-edged problem of place – and place as problem”;23 the 17

Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 22. This phrase is used by the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair in his book Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta, 1997): 4. The sentence reads: “Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping [. . .] in alert reverie.” 19 See Rob Shields, “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory,” in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: New York U P , 1996): 239. 20 Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005): 4–5. 21 Joanne Tompkins, Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006): 5. 22 Tompkins, Unsettling Space, 5. 23 Una Chaudhuri, “Geopathology: The Painful Politics of Location,” in Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995): 55; quoted (wrong book/date and page) in Tompkins, Unsettling Space, 4. 18

ጓ City of Words

281

latter, as “the combination and layering, one on top of another, of many different places, many distinct orders of spatiality,”24 a palimpsestic sense of both place and history. Both the Harbour and the Opera House bear traces of their contested pasts, despite their deployment as iconic and spectacular tourist images of Sydney. For example, one of the city’s newest tourist attractions, ‘Climb the Mast’, like its rival ‘Bridge Climb’, exhorts visitors to “brave the heights, the sway of the ship and the open elements” by climbing the mast of a tall ship rigged out with billowing sails that is anchored in the Harbour “for the challenge of a lifetime.”25 Here, history is being co-opted into the discourse of tourism as the history of colonial invasion. The “unique view” of Sydney Harbour that the tourist will experience is from the perspective of the early British arrivals of the First Fleet. It is therefore a ‘white’ history, a history of invasion. It is only fairly recently that Indigenous historians have pointed out that the site of the Opera House, Bennelong Point,26 was once the location of two vast Aboriginal middens composed of discarded shells. They have suggested that Jørn Utzon, the Danish architect of the Opera House, had this image in mind when he designed its shell-like structures. Similarly, the Aboriginal artist Gordon Syron has foregrounded the often-repressed history of tourist views of Sydney in his paintings. He has said of his art: I use satire and raw imagery to send a message that Australian History has left out the Aboriginal people and their stories. Art is a way to convey and tell these stories […] it makes people understand and comprehend history in a different way.27

Syron’s painting “The Way it Was”28 (undated) contests the pattern of representation of the tourist view of Sydney with its embedded colonial perspective. It does this by making visual what the historian Grace Karskens has described as 24

Chaudhuri, “The Places of Language,” in Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995): 138; quoted (wrong book/date) in Tompkins, Unsettling Space, 4. 25 All quotations are from the “Sydney Harbour Tall Ships” website, http://www.sydneytallships .com.au/mast-climb.html#.U09RF8Zbpj4/ (accessed 2 February 2013). 26 Bennelong Point itself is named for Bennelong, who was the first Aboriginal person to live with the European settlers, adopt European ways, and travel to Europe. His friendship with Governor Phillip and his attempt to teach the colonizers the local language and traditions have made him an ambivalent figure in Indigenous history. 27 Gordon Syron website, http://www.gordonsyron.com/ (accessed 2 February 2013). 28 Available at Gordon Syron’s website, http://www.gordonsyron.com/gallery/view/all/p/23/ (accessed 2 February 2013).

282

SUE KOSSEW

ጓ

Sydney’s Aboriginal history, “not located safely in the distant past, but unbroken, and still throbbing insistently today.”29 Here a pre-colonial history and an ongoing indigenous presence are made part of the contemporary present, with Aboriginal mimi-spirits encircling the iconic Sydney Opera House and Bridge, and traditional Indigenous warriors represented in the foreground of the painting. This act of memory and recuperation – painted as if the whole city were under water – reconstitutes an Indigenous perspective in the heart of tourist Sydney, reminding viewers that there is more to be seen than meets the eye. In another of Syron’s paintings, “The Way it Was and Way it Is” (2001),30 the modernity of contemporary Sydney is overwritten (or overpainted) by the ghosting of tall ships in the Harbour and the presence of Indigenous figures either waving in greeting or gesticulating in a more antagonistic way on the shoreline. The ambiguity of their gesturing perhaps embodies Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘hostipitality’ – the concept that any welcome is also performative of ownership and resentment of intrusion, as performed by the combination of the words hostility and hospitality in the term ‘hostipitality’ itself. 31 In Syron’s two paintings of Sydney Harbour, the past is still there in the present, as in the title, and the contested nature of arrival, welcome, and ownership is made visually explicit by their juxtaposition.32 There are two important metaphors here associated with Sydney Harbour that are also deployed in Gail Jones’s novel Five Bells (2011) – those of water and of the haunting presence of time and memory. The novel is, of course, named for Kenneth Slessor’s iconic 1939 poem that mourns the presumed drowning of his best friend and colleague, Joe Lynch, who disappeared into the water while crossing Sydney Harbour on a ferry after a particularly heavy night of drinking.33 29

Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009): 33. Available at Gordon Syron’s website, http://www.gordonsyron.com/gallery/view/all/p/24/id /68/The-Way-It-Was-and-Way-It-Is/ (accessed 2 February 2013). 31 Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki: Journal of the theoretical Humanities 5.3 (2000): 3– 18. 32 The ambiguous nature of this Aboriginal welcoming of European strangers is characterized, too, in the figure of Bungaree, who, dressed in British military clothing, greeted successive waves of arrivals with the words: “I welcome you to my land, past and present. This is my land. These are my people.” Like Bennelong, he can be regarded as an ambivalent figure – either as ‘sell-out’ or as resister. Indigenous artists were invited to “critically reinterpret” Bungaree as subject in the exhibition “Bungaree: the First Australian,” held at the Mosman Art Gallery in Sydney in September 2012. See http://mosmanartgallery.org.au/exhibitions/bungaree-the-first-australian (accessed 3 March 2013). 33 An interesting footnote is that Slessor’s birthname was Kenneth Adolphe Schloesser before his father anglicized it on the outbreak of the Great War; his father was German-Jewish, so he was 30

ጓ City of Words

283

Slessor’s poem begins and ends with an image of Sydney Harbour bathed in moonlight with warships at anchor, and ships’ bells marking the passing hours. The sound of the bells reminds the poet of his friend, of the passage of time and of mortality: sound, too, is at the heart of Jones’s evocation of the city. One of its more cynical characters, James, opines that it “was the curse of his generation to have a soundtrack enlisted for everything.”34 So the Harbour provides Jones with a complex site, both material and metaphoric, that has become an important Australian cultural signifier of place, identity, loss, and belonging. With drowning a key metaphor and thematic link with Slessor’s poem, Jones’s novel evokes Sydney as a contemporary postcolonial metropolis, with Circular Quay as a site of entry and arrival, and as an iconic tourist hub. The novel traces the arrivals in Sydney at Circular Quay and the journeys, past and present, of its four main characters: Ellie, who has come to live in Sydney in order to take up a postgraduate scholarship; her childhood sweetheart, James deMello, whom she has agreed to meet in Sydney, not having seen him since they were both fourteen; Dublin-born Catherine, who has come to Sydney from London and is mourning her brother’s death; and Pei Xing, who migrated to Sydney from Red China to be, like other migrants, in the words of the novel, “pulled from another history and cast up at the bottom of the world” (42). All of these character bring with them preconceptions, memories, and expectations, as well as their own individual and national pasts. Set over the course of one day, the novel recalls both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway: the city is a literary object, too, a “city of words,” that is brought into existence through interconnected walking narratives. Moreover, the characters are intimately linked to each other as readers themselves, people passionately committed to words. Certain books, like certain city sites, form the stitch-work of this connectedness: Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, for example, and other texts are threaded throughout the narrative. Similarly, the characters’ separate pathways through the city form a narrative web of chance and planned connections and encounters. The novel’s structure alternates focalization through interspersed third-person narration, and loops backwards in time to gradually reveal the pressure of the past on each character, beginning with the words (which we find out are those of Ellie and which are repeated later): himself a migrant. A comprehensive analysis of the aspects of Slessor’s poem that are relevant to a reading of the novel can be found in Rob Dixon’s essay “Invitation to the Voyage: Reading Five Bells.” There is, of course, also a John Olsen mural inspired by the poem to be found in the Sydney Opera House. 34 Gail Jones, Five Bells (North Sydney: Vintage, 2011): 7. Further page references are in the main text.

284

SUE KOSSEW

ጓ

Circular Quay: she loved even the sound of it. Before she saw the bowl of bright water […] she knew from the lilted words it would be a circle like no other, key to a new world. (1)

The circularity denotes a non-linear sense of arrival and return; and the key/ quay homophone marks it as a site of new beginnings, the opening of a door to a new life. Even the familiar sight of the Harbour Bridge speaks to Ellie of optimism and the Opera House that could have been perceived as “the banal thrill of a famous city icon” instead reminds her of “circuit and flow” (3), a familiar trope of transnational discourse. The characters are measured against their responses to Circular Quay, the Bridge, and the Opera House; they project their own emotions onto these iconic city sites, bringing with them their own “hidden histories” (178). Thus, a depressed James DeMello sees the Opera House as an anti-climax, a second-hand image too pre-empted to be singular. It appeared on T-shirts, on towels, even trapped in plastic domes of snow; it could never exist other than as a replication, claiming the prestige of an icon. Its maws opened to the sky in a perpetual devouring. (5)

The emphasis on violence is predictive of his eventual fate – he, like Slessor’s Joe Lynch, falls off a ferry and drowns in Sydney Harbour in a presumed suicide, haunted as he is by guilt at the death by drowning of one of his students when on a school excursion. He thus re-enacts the theme of Slessor’s poem, whose ghostly narrative haunts the novel. Pei Xing’s view of the Opera House, on the other hand, echoes both her own specific cultural aesthetic sensibilities and the anchoring of the image as part of her new life: There it was, jade-white, lifting above the water. She never tired of seeing this form. It was a fixture she relied on. The shapes rested, like porcelain bowls, stacked on upon the other, fragile, tipped, in an unexpected harmony. (12)

Later in the novel, she sees it as the folded paper of children’s origami shapes (186). Each character is haunted by the past. For James, this is evoked through disappointment and guilt. Glancing at the hands of an old woman sitting next to him on the train, he is reminded of his mother’s hands, “the sign of a history he did not want” (4). For Pei Xing, the past is embodied in the form of a woman who was one of her torturers in Shanghai and who, ironically, has also migrated to Sydney; Pei Xing regularly visits her at the North Shore nursing home where

ጓ City of Words

285

she is now confined. For Pei Xing, this unlooked-for reconnection with the trauma of her past is not a penance but a kind of reconciliation, at a time when there is an “aura of forgiveness” (113). Catherine is fleeing her “obdurate mourning” of her brother’s death and the effect of her grief on her partner Luc, with whom she lived in London (17). Ellie is reconnecting with the past through a meeting with James, who “was pressed into her life” and from whom “she will never escape” (20) as a consequence of their teenage love. These personal histories are set against a national coming-to-terms with the past in the form of Kevin Rudd’s formal apology to Aboriginal people. Thus, as in the great Russian novels, with whom a number of the characters are associated, novels are able to accommodate both “the consequential and the inconsequential. They are not afraid of history; or the smallest human endeavour. Side by side” (128). Or, as Pei Xing is to suggest later, life incorporates both “the tremendous histories of nations” and the “more subtle and modest measures of life” (185). The city, like these novels, is a meeting-place both for the public memorialization of the past in its grand architectural structures and for the private histories of the ordinary people who traverse these spaces. The writer seeks out what lies beneath in an excavation of spaces akin to Woolf’s delving into “crevices and crannies.”35 The network of criss-crossing paths in the city is evoked by the way several characters encounter not just the same city landmarks but also the same people. Thus, both Ellie and Catherine notice what for Ellie is the “human statue in pale robes resembling something-or-other classical” (3) and for Catherine is “stiffly inhuman, posing as a Roman god” (14). Both Pei Xing and Catherine hear a man telling a child, “Careful now, sweetheart” as he helps her on the escalator. For Pei Xing, there is something “tentative in her [the little girl’s] movements” as if she is seeing a city for the first time (9). Her hair is perceived as “divided in plaits in Chinese style” (9), whereas Catherine notices “sparkly pink clips in her divided hair” (14). Their quite different perceptions and descriptions of these shared spaces and encounters evoke the ways in which personal histories and memories inflect how we interact with our environment and how the city is able to accommodate all these different reactions and perspectives. The dark side of the “bright” city emerges later (“every large city has its region of darkness,” 180), with the story of a child being abducted, and doubt is cast on the nature of this relationship between presumed father and child. Both Catherine and Pei Xing are witnesses, but each has quite a different version for the police. This episode emphasizes the contingent nature of such chance urban

35

Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 22 (see fn 15 above).

286

SUE KOSSEW

ጓ

encounters and our inability to always read them accurately, as well as what the narration terms “the terrible forces beneath the everyday” (178). Jones’s novel is a complex, poetic, and evocative representation of what she calls “all this complicated history” (personal and national) (141) that cities contain. The metaphors of water and time coalesce in two particular images: that of the wake, evoked as both a response to death and as a pattern in the water left by the ferry (165); and that of the clepsydra, the ancient Chinese water clock through which time is “rendered continuous” (211). Finally, we are left with the important concept of the “peculiar duration of reading when time loses its authority” (214) and of how novels like Ulysses are able to render a city in words by reconstituting the interactions between people, places, and history. Like Syron’s paintings, the Sydney that Gail Jones evokes is more than its physical presence; it is also made up of the many layered narratives of a postcolonial metropolis. These narratives are not just the histories of the people who have ended up there but also the cultural memories they bring with them and that they share across different cultures, all of which connect and coalesce so that the past insists on meeting the present in sometimes unexpected ways. The sound of the didgeridoo is one that recurs throughout the novel, haunting, like Syron’s ghostly figures, the contemporary metropolis and its urban soundscape.36 For each character, the sound has particular significance. For Ellie, it implies “inner worlds and the dimensions of deserts” (95), while Catherine, watching the Aboriginal musician, is surprised by the beauty of the sound with its intimations of “a long history and a secret sacred purpose” (123). The player’s “circulating breath” that makes “such continuous sound” (135) later signifies for Ellie the perseverance of people who just “keep on, and on” (135), the constant reminder of an all-too-easily effaced Indigenous presence in a self-consciously global and cosmopolitan city. Other characters glimpse a pattern of Aboriginal presence beneath the city’s colonial structures. James, wandering “in dwindling light,” sees a “native garden, marked with a placard that acknowledged that the land was first possessed by the Cadigal people” (203). And while Catherine is “humbled” by the patterns she sees in Aboriginal paintings that suggest “deeply responsive notations of the

36

This sound, while specific in Jones’s novel to an Aboriginal presence in the city, can be compared to Virginia Woolf’s references in Mrs Dalloway to the sounds of Big Ben that recur throughout the narrative and that function both as a part of an urban soundscape but also as a metaphorical reminder of the irrevocability of time. An example early in the novel is: “There. Out it [Big Ben] boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (1925; Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1992): 4.

ጓ City of Words

287

world” while also being “in a strict sense incomprehensible” (161) to her eyes, she feels their power: She was addressed by these paintings as a stranger, but it was a welcoming address. […] When at last she moved on she realized she had felt, or had imagined, a fellowship with the images. (162)

This conditional hospitality that, in Derrida’s terms, both asserts ownership and exclusion and performs welcome and inclusion at the same time, constitutes an appropriately ambiguous operation of power that inevitably greets intrusion onto contested ground. At the same time, the possibility of “fellowship” is offered, so that the city is imagined not so much as a place where cultures clash as one, like the novel form itself, where they interact and meet. The transformational potential of this cultural exchange or convergence is described in Virginia Woolf-like style towards the end of the novel: “Everything was converging, everything was ample and ablaze. This was one of those parts of a city that passes for a myth” (205). The final sections are in the present tense (the “herenow”) and evoke, in an intensely poetic way, the notion of the characters’ shared experience: “And they are sinking now, all of them, into the wet sleep of the city. Rain is falling all over Sydney” (215). While the absence of the voice of the fourth character, James, who, unbeknownst as yet to Ellie, has drowned, is a mark of this loss, Ellie’s repetition of the phrase “ever and ever and abiding” is a poetic evocation of his memory. The city is the site of these haunting legacies, both national and personal, a city that is “rendered into words” (214). Yet Diana Brydon has argued that, in a number of contemporary Canadian and Australian fictions, including Jones’s Five Bells, “urban and global imaginaries have replaced national imaginaries” in their representation of cityscapes.37 She continues: Immigrants carry a national identity with them to Toronto and Sydney, but once in the new city, they adopt its identity rather than that of the country of which it is a part.38

While it is hard to entirely separate the identity of the city from that of the nation, there is a section of Jones’s novel that could be read as indicative of this perspective. Ellie is remembering the year 1988 when she and James were fourteen-year-olds. It was the year of Australia’s bicentennial commemorations of 37

Diana Brydon, “Walking and Thinking in Toronto, Winnipeg and Sydney in the Twenty-First Century,” http://myuminfo.umanitoba.ca/Documents/5323/Brydon_WalkingThinking.pdf (accessed 5 May 2013): 15. 38 Brydon, “Walking and Thinking in Toronto,” 15.

SUE KOSSEW

288

ጓ

Captain Phillip’s landing with his first fleet at Sydney Cove. Ellie recalls the “farcical forms of celebration” organized by their Western Australian town council: “patriotic rituals and historical pageants” (135). Ironically, for a re-enactment of the landing, a group of ethnically mixed teenagers were chosen as ‘natives’: it was their role to welcome the arriving colonizers, to bow, to remain silent, to be ceremonially obsequious. (136)

While the historical spectacle is in process, Ellie’s attention is drawn to the migratory birds from Siberia that “swooped in arcs over the sober proceedings” (136). Their teacher, Miss Morrison, had once “drawn on the blackboard their route from the Arctic Circle […]. ‘These birds curve around the planet’, she had announced” (136). Distracted by the birds, Ellie notes their “Russian intervention and their international assertion […] the way they appeared, then vanished” (136). While Miss Morrison had expressed her admiration for the birds’ “arduous and poetic” migratory achievement, in the historic re-enactment of colonial arrival, the ‘ethnic’ teenagers are co-opted into acting out the nation’s projected desire of an Indigenous welcome. By juxtaposing the absurd nationalism of the historical “farce” with the internationalist freedom of the birds, Jones is perhaps pointing to a more utopian future where an urban and global imaginary enables a more fluid and borderless identity. The Sydney of her novel constitutes an urban space that accommodates just such an ebb and flow of arrivals and departures, pasts and presences.

W OR K S C I T E D Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). Ashcroft, Bill. “Transnation,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2010): 72–85. ——.“Urbanism, Mobility and Bombay: Reading the Postcolonial City,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5 (2011): 497–509. Brydon, Diana. “Walking and Thinking in Toronto, Winnipeg and Sydney in the TwentyFirst Century,” http://myuminfo.umanitoba.ca/Documents/5323/Brydon_Walking Thinking.pdf: 1–16 (accessed 5 May 2013). Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (L& invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P , 1984). Chaudhuri, Una. “Geopathology: The Painful Politics of Location,” in Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1995): 55–90.

ጓ City of Words

289

——.“The Places of Language,” in Chaudhuri, Staging Place (1995), 137-72. Derrida, Jacques. “Hostipitality,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.3 (2000): 3–18. Dixon, Rob. “Invitation to the Voyage: Reading Gail Jones’s Five Bells,” JA S AL 12.3 (2012): 1–17. Jones, Gail. Five Bells (North Sydney: Vintage, 2011). ——.“Interview with Catherine Keenan,” Sydney Morning Herald (5–6 February 2011): 30–31. Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009). McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). Nugent, Maria. Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005). Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Bypassing New York in Re-Presenting Eko: Production of Space in a Nigerian City,” in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: New York U P , 1996): 111–36. Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford CA : Stanford U P , 2001). Shields, Rob. “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory,” in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: New York U P , 1996): 227–52. Syron, Gordon. Gordon Syron Website, http://www.gordonsyron.com/ (accessed 2 February 2013). Tompkins, Joanne. Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway (1925; Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1992). ——.“Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930), Woolf, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942): 19–29.

ጓ

Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog History and Identity in the Metropolis of Melbourne M A R IJ K E D E N GER

Australia was LA, it was London; and then it was not. Here there was the sense that everything modern might be provisional: that teenagers, news crews, French fries might vanish overnight like a soap opera with poor ratings. The country shimmered with this unsettling magic, which raised and erased it in a single motion. The past was not always past enough here.1

I

N H E R N O V E L T H E L O S T D O G , first published in 2007 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008, the Sri Lankan-Australian author Michelle de Kretser paints a picture of Australia as a nation constantly moving along the dividing line between its aspiration to form an integral but essentially faceless part of globalized modernity and its geographical and historical uniqueness, which is perceived as an impediment to its up-to-dateness. The comparison, quoted above, between Australia, Los Angeles, and London indicates that this tension is best expressed in urban space. My essay therefore focuses on the impact of the dynamics between past, present, and future on the formation of identity in and of Melbourne, as it features in The Lost Dog.2 In several ways, de Kretser’s Melbourne exemplifies Australia’s fraught relation to temporality.3 For one thing, the country’s anxious desire to fit “effort1

Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog (2007; London: Vintage, 2009): 102. Further page references are in the main text. 2 For further analyses of the Australian search for a national identity, see, for example, Catriona Elder, Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2007), and Ken Gelder & Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 1998). 3 For an historical analysis of how different approaches to time have shaped Australia from the pre-colonial era to the postmodern age, see Graeme Davison, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1993).

292

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

ጓ

lessly into a global script” (101) of skyscrapers, shopping malls, and fast-food outlets is manifested in the city’s contemporary architecture and infrastructure. At the same time, its buildings testify to the willingness to replace problematic history with cosy heritage and painful individual experience with globalized anonymity. In short, Melbourne’s cityscape betrays a dual temporal pull: towards the future, envisaged as a “keeping up with the great elsewhere” (101), and towards the past, consigned to “official memorials scattered through the streets” (221). De Kretser draws a parallel between the novel’s main setting and its protagonist, who worries about the hindering effect that his provenance might have on his capacity to fit into his twenty-first-century surroundings. The Lost Dog is set in 2001 and focuses on the life of Tom Loxley, a university lecturer in English. Within that time-frame, the narrative shifts between the present and the past, including Tom’s early childhood in Mangalore with an English father and Indian mother and the family’s migration to Melbourne in the 1970s. The novel opens in the countryside, to which Tom has retreated in order to complete a long-standing research project. Tom’s only companion there is his dog, a relic from his failed marriage to an Australian solicitor. Shortly before Tom’s return to the city, the animal runs away and disappears into the bush. This occurrence is the starting point for the novel’s exploration of Tom’s personal history and the tragicomic challenges he faces on a daily basis. These include a halting academic career, his widowed mother’s deteriorating health, and his relationship with the enigmatic Chinese-Australian artist Nelly Zhang. In what follows, I will focus on Tom’s relationship with Nelly and the impact of her work, which highlights the intertwining of different timescapes in urban space, on his perception of his Indian and Australian past, and on his initially unalluring future. The triad consisting of Tom, Nelly, and her artistic construction of Melbourne forms the basis of the analyses undertaken in this essay. Drawing mainly on Marc Augé’s concept of the non-place and Jacques Derrida’s notion of spectrality, I will explore Melbourne’s status as a twenty-first-century postcolonial metropolis and expound the relation between Tom, Nelly, and their mutual surroundings. Ultimately, I see Tom’s engagement with the images that Nelly retrieves from and produces in Melbourne as giving him a way of reconfiguring his sense of self in relation to his Indian history and Australian environment. Thus, I aim to show that The Lost Dog establishes Melbourne as a space in which urban structures, although they seem to represent a conclusive collective identity, can be appropriated by the characters for the fashioning of individual approaches to the city and their lives in it.

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

293

Controlling Individual and Urban Pasts From the moment he meets her in an art gallery near his flat, Tom conceives of Nelly Zhang in relation to urban space: When [Tom] sought to represent [Nelly] to himself, there came into his mind the image of a great city: anomalous, layered, not exempt from reproach; magnificent. (46)

It is not difficult to understand why Tom thinks of Nelly as “anomalous” and “layered.” Although her family has been in Australia for several generations, and despite her artistic success, she feels excluded from society by “the ones who think they own the place” (44). Owing to her multi-ethnic ancestry, Nelly is endowed with physical features that render her conspicuously foreign in the eyes of many of her fellow Australians. Even Tom is cautioned by one of her housemates that “she is not some kind of sign for you to study, you know” (45). In fact, the warning directed at Tom points to Nelly’s strategy of appropriating the stereotypes associated with her background and exploiting them to her advantage. Adorning herself with “a red glass bindi” (45) or having “her chin painted with geometric tattoos” (45), Nelly fashions a self-image that is “not for the taxonomy-minded” (45). An artist celebrated across Australia, Nelly bases her choices of attire on the amount of provocation necessary to heighten the marketability of her work. She is not an “innocent [signifier] of an otherness which [is] simply exotic, […] carrying no meaning other than that imposed by the [individuals surrounding her].”4 Rather, because she only grants the public access to photographed copies of her work, Nelly turns the tables on the historical logic behind the concept of the exotic and the benefits to be reaped from its “introduction […] from abroad into a domestic economy.”5 Her enigmatic persona complements that of her paintings, whose value increases insofar as the demand for them is only scantily satisfied. Whether it is her own appearance or her artistic output that is studied like a sign of some “stimulating or exciting difference,”6 it is Nelly who controls and profits from the presence of the supposedly exotic in the market economy of Australia. Nelly’s playful manipulation of images holds an unnerving allure for Tom, because it is intertwined with his fear of not fitting into his twenty-first-century surroundings: 4

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman, “Re-Inventing the New World: Cooper and Alencar,” Comparative Literature 36.2 (Spring 1984): 132. 5 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London & New York: Routledge, 1998): 94. 6 Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, 94.

294

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

ጓ

Nelly was open to youth, novelty, the stir of their times. […] And then, more potent than any sign, was [Tom’s] sense that, as an artist, she inhabited the modern age, the age of the image, while he was marooned in words. (71)

For Tom, the visual is connected to Western consumer culture, represented by the billboards and logos that dazzled him in Melbourne after emigration from “austere India” (115). In this situation, it was language that unlocked the city’s topography – which, for Tom as a boy, situated Melbourne in the historical network of imperialism – and enabled him to regain control over his life: The [...] city was a grey and brown place sectioned by a grid of chilling winds. From time to time, when he should have been at school, Tom wandered its ruled streets: King, William; Queen, Elizabeth. Within a familiar history he was finding his place in a new geography. [...] It was [...] a flight into modernity. (116)

Tom has been hurled by his parents from the familiarity of early childhood into urban surroundings that demand his adoption of a literally and figuratively streetwise poise if he is not to become a negligible outsider. As his pursuit of “a flight into modernity” indicates, it is therefore crucial for Tom to forge a location for himself in which to feel safe from the supposed backwardness of his place of origin. Whether as a child or as an adult, traversing the city on foot is important for Tom’s reconfiguration of his sense of self. In a manner reminiscent of that of Michel de Certeau’s “Wandersmänner,”7 Tom, by exploring Melbourne’s geography on foot, appropriates pre-structured place for his individual needs. However, Tom is given the opportunity to discard his concerns about the potentially inhibiting effect of his personal history on his Australian future only when Nelly attunes him to the spectral quality of Melbourne’s architecture and infrastructure. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida conceptualizes time in terms not of chronology but of “anachrony”:8 time as the intertwining of past, present, and future. Each generation that inherits from the past is “seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross.”9 As we are haunted by the spectres of our predecessors, the chronology of inheritance becomes non-linear. The spectre,

7

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (L&invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980;, tr. 1984; Berkeley: U of California P, 1988): 93 (emphasis in original). 8 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Spectres de Marx, 1993, tr. 1994; New York & London: Routledge, 2006): 6. 9 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 7.

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

295

which is the figure of this specific philosophical approach to time, “is nothing visible,” signalling a “reapparition of the departed” that “disappear[s] right away in the apparition.”10 In her artistic representations of Melbourne, Nelly highlights how past, present, and future are indelibly intertwined in the cityscape. As I will elaborate below, she thus shows Tom that different versions of the city and its history can be retrieved from urban space and encourages him to rethink his relation to an environment in which he generally feels out of sync. Throughout the novel there are ample indications of Tom’s self-consciousness regarding his Indian background. For example, at Camberwell flea market, he feels ashamed of Nelly’s bargaining – something that he never does, for fear of “appear[ing] typically Asian” (73, emphasis in original). Described as “slight, dark-skinned, bad at sport” (40), he has accepted early on that he will never live up to the Australian athletic ideal. He overcompensates for this perceived lack, most importantly by constructing his mother, the living link to his Indian heritage, as the foil against which to establish everything he does not want to be: overanxious, dependent, archaic. Language has provided Tom with a means of constructing a different sense of self: He had invented himself through the study of modern literature, and it had provided him with a mode; the twentieth-century mode. [...] Among the things he was ashamed of was seeming out of date. (238)

His fear of being associated with a past that impedes the future is conspicuously similar to the novel’s description of the ideal of a settler colony: Forward motion: it was the engine of settler nations, where there was no past and a limitless future [...]. What claim does a new world have on our imagination if it falls out of date? (101)

The “forward motion” engrained in Australia’s self-image is manifested in Melbourne’s contemporary architecture. When Nelly begins to take Tom along on her explorations of the city, during which she gathers inspiration for her artwork, Tom becomes aware that his urge to gloss over his past and prove himself up-to-date is reflected in his own neighbourhood: The marvellous city built by gold and wool had once voided its filth in these parts. [...] Tanneries set up beside the river; later, factories. They were symbols of a great metropolis, signs that the colonial city was no longer raw material but an up-to-the-minute artefact.

10

Specters of Marx, 5 (emphasis in original).

296

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

ጓ

Now the echoing shells of these industrial molluscs promised Prestigious River Frontage; or what one copywriter called An Envious Lifestyle. [...] Wealth was inserting itself into this newly fashionable terrain, as decoration accrues on a renovated façade. (75–76, emphasis in original)

The question of how many layers of history are covered up by the “renovated façade[s]” remains deliberately unanswered. What gradually does become clear, however, is that the trade which immediately preceded industrialization is celebrated as a stepping-stone on the path towards the nation’s contemporary lifestyle. By contrast, what Melbourne’s cityscape does not highlight is that trade, industrialization, and modernization were founded on violence, displacement, and the near-eradication of the much older Aboriginal civilization. During one of Tom and Nelly’s strolls through their suburb, the process by which the city reins in the past and assigns controllable aspects of it to specific locations is made apparent. Tom and Nelly come across plaques that commemorate righteous immigrants and their craftsmanship. Equally, they encounter “inscriptions in parks that [signal] a site pregnant with meaning for the people who […] lived here first” (76). Although they acknowledge different aspects of Melbourne’s past, the various plaques distributed across the city do not reflect on the violent relation between different moments in Australia’s history. In other words, what is disconcerting about them is that “they [displace] history with heritage, plastering over trauma with a picturesque frieze” (76). Interestingly, in a non-literary context, the significance of a specific conception of heritage for the construction of a distinctly Australian self-image can be gathered from the website of the Australian Government’s Department of the Environment, which states the following: Heritage is all the things that make up Australia’s identity – our spirit and ingenuity, our historic buildings, and our unique, living landscapes. Our heritage is a legacy from our past, a living, integral part of life today, and the stories and places we pass on to future generations.11

As an adaptable concept, heritage becomes a tool for determining what forms part of “all the things that make up Australia’s identity” and what does not. This is not to suggest that the country’s Aboriginal and convict past are not acknowledged as constituents of the nation’s history. However, what de Kretser’s depiction of Melbourne highlights is the way in which specific “stories and places” can be consciously marketed as aspects of a comfortably consumable history, which is eligible for “pass[ing] on to future generations” in a way that a 11

Commonwealth of Australia, “Heritage,” Australian Government, Department of the Environment, http://www.environment.gov.au/topics/heritage (accessed 29 October 2013).

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

297

differently compiled history is not. The arbitrary plaques encountered by Tom and Nelly must therefore be understood as literary comments on a specific process of gentrification, in which the uncomfortable foundations of the contemporary postcolonial city, conceptualized as representative of the nation as a whole, are ignored in order to construct a picturesque sense of the past. The relation between the multifaceted concepts of history, heritage, and identity is particularly precarious in Australia, considering that the country has “used the term [multiculturalism] as part of [its] rhetoric of the nation for some decades.”12 The issue at stake in this regard is the appropriation of context-sensitive notions of multiculturalism for the “strategic ‘top-down’ imposition of state policies and narratives.”13 In The Lost Dog, the plaques in Tom and Nelly’s neighbourhood invite reflection on this process. Reminding passers-by that “William Merton, bootmaker, conducted business on this site in 1899” (76) or that “Alice Corbett ran a bakery here in 1920” (76), they are telling in their irreproducible immortalization of, most probably, white British settlers or their offspring. By contrast, the history of the Aboriginal inhabitants of what is now one of Australia’s most populous cities is marked by romanticized references to “tree[s] where corroborees [were] held, or […] whose bark […] served to fashion boats” (76). For that matter, non-Aboriginal Australians with a non-European or multiethnic background are altogether absent from the commemorative landscape of Melbourne as it is represented in de Kretser’s novel. The narrative told by memorial tablets and the like is therefore not one of a multicultural collective identity. Rather, it is one of “multicultural difference,”14 where one’s story is passed on in accordance with one’s degree of affiliation with an “English ethnicity [that is constructed] as European modernity and civilization [and pitted] against the differences of […] the indigenous peoples”15 as well as various nonBritish immigrants. The matter of multicultural difference raises questions regarding the representation of Melbourne as a postcolonial metropolis and the conceptualization of Australia as a postcolonial nation in The Lost Dog. In this regard, Stuart Hall’s enquiry into the temporal and conceptual relation between colonialism, postcolonialism, and difference is of particular interest:

12 Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London & New York: Routledge, 2004): 38. 13 Gunew, Haunted Nations, 38. 14 Haunted Nations, 37. 15 Haunted Nations, 34.

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

298

ጓ

If post-colonial time is the time after colonialism, and colonialism is defined in terms of the binary division between the colonisers and the colonised, why is post-colonial time also a time of ‘difference’?16

One response to the question of postcolonial difference in Australia lies in the fact that the nation’s history of colonization and decolonization is intertwined with that of the Indigenous population’s brutal subjugation by predominantly white settlers and the challenges posed by the coexistence of different immigrant groups in society. These issues are interlinked, but do not function according to the same dynamics and to the same effect. This may account for the paradox alluded to above: instead of contributing to the “breaking down [of] the clearly demarcated inside/outside of the colonial system,” 17 a specifically construed notion of multiculturalism helps to perpetuate uneven power-relations in a supposedly postcolonial society. In The Lost Dog, the complex cluster of issues surrounding the representation of different individuals and their narratives in Australia is given a further nuance. Specifically, the novel questions whether the architecture and infrastructure designed to manifest a collective “forward motion” (101) ideal in urban space can provide access to the “limitless future” (101) to which the nation is depicted as striving. Limiting one part of Melbourne’s population to a narrowly defined history, associating others with generalizing notions of Australia’s past, and failing entirely to commemorate the experiences of a significant number of its inhabitants, Melbourne’s cityscape represents a restrictive conception of national identity. It would perhaps go too far to argue that the Australian metropolis makes tangible and thus sustains aspects of a colonial world-view in urban space. However, what does transpire in the course of de Kretser’s novel is that, rather than encompassing the ostensibly future-oriented mind-set of Melbourne’s inhabitants, the postcolonial moment in the city is one of being trapped in “an amnesiac and exclusive concern with the present,”18 in which efforts to keep the past at bay may well obstruct the progressiveness around which a distinctly Australian self-conception revolves. ጓ

16

Stuart Hall, “When Was ‘The Post-Colonial’? Thinking At The Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers & Lidia Curti (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 242 (emphasis in original). 17 Hall, “When Was ‘The Post-Colonial’?,” 247. 18 Gunew, Haunted Nations, 41.

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

299

From Non-Places to a Spectral City The state-of-the-art façades with which Melbourne heralds its New World success manifest a selective history. By extension, the city’s self-image as a twentyfirst-century, Western metropolis can be questioned depending on the angle from which one approaches the city’s past. Therefore, it is pertinent to take a closer look at the referential frame that Melbourne offers fictional characters like Tom, who find it difficult to reconcile their non-Australian past with the supposedly forward-looking nature of Australian society. In this regard, Nelly’s artwork comes into focus. As Tom notices when he begins to research her career in more detail, Nelly’s paintings of Melbourne’s cityscape highlight and appropriate the process of construction that underlies the self-image of the metropolis: Tom examined images of freeways, multi-storey car parks, supermarkets, fast-food outlets. Nelly painted the strange, assertive beauty of constructions essential to the functioning of large cities. She painted hospitals, those non-places where modern lives begin and end. [...] She lived in a city deficient in visual icons, a place without a bridge or harbour or distinctive skyline. It lacked an image. From that lack, Nelly had fashioned a style. (154–55)

In her artwork, Nelly produces her own version of the city in which she lives, literally and figuratively reframing the Australian metropolis according to her artistic needs. Her subject-matter is the urban materiality that situates Melbourne in the global network of essentially generic skylines to which it aspires to belong. Nelly overlays this materiality with imagery and thus retrieves her own representations of visual icons from a city that, arguably, lacks them. What is more, after she finishes a painting, Nelly has it photographed and then destroys it. In effect, her exhibitions feature copies of representations of constructed urban images. Thus, Nelly’s work displays how the purportedly fixed reception of what constitutes Melbourne as a particular kind of Australian city can be amended and re-invented. Nelly’s fictional paintings and their photographed copies are only ever literarily represented in The Lost Dog. Accordingly, in the ekphrastic scenes in which Tom engages with them, the narrative also “paus[es] […] for thought before […] [her] nonverbal work[s] of art.”19 This allows the voice of the heterodiegetic narrator to expound the strained relation that Tom, the character– focalizer, has to the visual as well as his surroundings. For Tom, Melbourne “lack[s] an image” (155) because it abounds in images that are central to the 19

Valentine Cunningham, “Why Ekphrasis?,” Classical Philology 102.1 (January 2007): 57.

300

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

ጓ

market economy in which he feels unable to prove his worth. As he puts it, “we live in an age where everything’s got to be now, because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow” (132, emphasis in original). Considering Tom’s unease about the immediacy of the visual and the way of life it furthers, it is unsurprising that his engagement with Nelly’s view on “constructions essential to the functioning of large cities” (154) should be addressed with reference to “non-places” (154). Indeed, the concept of the nonplace provides a fruitful basis on which to further explore Tom’s existence in the Australian metropolis. In Non-Places, Marc Augé establishes that place is constituted by various temporalities. First, there is the historical development of a place, which is bound up with “the passage and continuation of time.”20 This chronological foundation is supplemented by the temporal characteristics of various actions performed by the inhabitants of a place in order to create a mutually acknowledged communal environment. By contrast, a non-place lacks these multiple temporalities: If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.21

Non-places do not incorporate their past but instead outsource it “to a circumscribed and specific position.”22 The fictional plaques discussed earlier ostensibly provide such a position for the commemoration of individuals and events of Melbourne’s past. However, rather than offering platforms for the manifestation of history in urban space, the plaques make tangible a national identity constructed around a particular conception of heritage. Failing to interweave different historical moments and actors, the plaques lack the relational and multi-temporal qualities that are central to Augé’s definition of place, and become mere extensions of non-places. Non-places are also spaces of transience. They do not invite inhabitation or in-depth engagement with their geographical and historical context. Thus, according to Augé, they do not nurture the establishment of individual identity or social cohesion. Rather, an individual briefly dwelling in or travelling across a

20

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992; London & New York: Verso, 1995): 77. 21 Augé, Non-Places, 77–78. 22 Non-Places, 78.

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

301

non-place is subjected to a “solitary contractuality”23 that furthers a consumption-based relation between him/her and the respective non-place. This relation is fuelled by “the mediation of words, or even texts”24 and their interaction with the visual. For one thing, language serves to conjure up images connected to certain locations – for example, famous holiday destinations, which in turn enhance the location’s desirability and thus its economic value. Furthermore, locations that can be conceptualized in terms of non-places “have the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and texts they offer us.”25 For example, when Tom walked Melbourne’s streets as a schoolboy in order to get his bearings, the linguistic markers of urban topography did more than sooth him with their familiarity. They also signalled to him the allure of progressiveness, a notion that is as elusive as the glassy façades of the city that purportedly represent it. Ever since his arrival in Melbourne, the language used to signpost urban space has mediated between Tom and an ideal of whose existence he was unaware in India but that initiated his lasting unease regarding the impact of his past on his future. Considering the intertwining of urban space, its linguistic and visual representation, and the ideals it manifests, it is unsurprising that de Kretser should relate Tom’s desire for “a modern life […] that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities” (145) to the architectural characteristics of his urban surroundings: The city as [Tom] experienced it was glassily new. That was its allure. In Mangalore, when he walked down a street [... he] trailed genealogies. [...] In Australia, he was free-floating. Architecture expressed the difference in material form, the bricks and beaten earth of childhood exchanged for superstructures of glass and airy steel. (221)

Tom has adopted the forward-motion maxim represented by the urban structures of the former settler colony. One could therefore argue that he has successfully appropriated the relation between the linguistic markers of his surroundings and their visual reference to a future-oriented collective identity in order to construct a sense of self in relation to the non-places of his environment. This would be a premature conclusion. After all, Tom’s notion of what it means “to lead a modern life” (145) does not completely overlap with the ideals underpinning the architecture and infrastructure on which the “modern lives” (154) of Melbourne’s inhabitants depend. Tom and the city mirror each other’s 23 24 25

Augé, Non-Places, 94. Non-Places, 94. Non-Places, 96.

302

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

ጓ

eagerness to dismiss those aspects of the past that might render them unable to keep up with their respective contemporaries. However, their means to this end have noticeably different starting points. Tom has “invented himself” (238) as a citizen of Australia “through the study of modern literature” (238), by which is meant that of the (early) modernist twentieth-century writers. By contrast, Melbourne’s “superstructures of glass and airy steel” (221) befit a postmodern metropolis that competes in the globalized marketplace of the twenty-first century. Although the adjective ‘modern’ is used in the novel to describe both Tom and Melbourne’s anxiety to be up-to-date, its imprecise definition and differing connotations stand in the way of the former’s contented existence in the latter. Thanks to his involvement with Nelly and her artistically constructed city, Tom does not remain caught up in Augé’s contractual relationship between language, (imaginary) images, and the desires they incite. Rather, the images with which Nelly overlays urban materiality and the past that she thereby retrieves from Melbourne’s cityscape come to stand in-between Tom and his surroundings: Nelly’s version of the city was a palimpsest. A ruin. It was layered like memory. Tom thought of history mummified and dismembered in the official memorials scattered through the streets; and how effortlessly Nelly conjured the living slither of time. (221)

Through Nelly’s view of Melbourne, the history that Tom and the city aim to regulate becomes connected to the future to which both strive. In particular, Nelly’s work brings to the fore Melbourne’s highly specific form of multi-temporality, which is most readily approachable through Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality.26 Manifesting the past before us in the spatial and temporal sense of the word, the anachronous spectre makes clear that the prefix ‘post-’ also implies anter26

The pertinence of analysing Melbourne, as it is represented in The Lost Dog, through the critical lens of Derrida’s concept of spectrality is supported by an interview given by Michelle de Kretser on the A B C Radio National programme The Book Show on 6 November 2007. In the interview, de Kretser addresses the fact that the setting of her novel, Melbourne, is easily recognisable but never explicitly named: “one of the reasons for doing that was that I wanted it on the one hand to be completely grounded in a real place but also [. .. a] sign of modernity, a sign of a fairly anonymous, spectral city that could be anywhere in the west.” Robert Dessaix & Michael Shirrefs, “Michelle de Kretser Talks to Robert Dessaix for The Book Show about her New Novel, The Lost Dog,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National (6 November 2007), http: //www.abc .net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/michelle-de-kretser-the-lost-dog/3217380#transcript (accessed 11 October 2013).

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

303

iority. Because the spectre thus transcends the symbolic divisions between past, present, and future, it defies “that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge”27 and harbours a large amount of creative, liberating potential. The term used by Derrida for the operating principle of the spectre’s incongruous temporality is “hauntology.”28 Thus, Derrida conceptualizes the spectre as a means of disrupting the self-assuredness of ontology: i.e. the establishment of presence through the exclusion of absence. The possibility of redefining the parameters within which social existence is regulated as well as the role of absence for individual and communal presence is the main source of the spectre’s liberating potential. It is this potential that one can tap into when confronted with a spectral conception of time. The creativity and liberation inherent in anachrony are visualized in Nelly’s paintings of Melbourne’s cityscape. For example, an image Nelly keeps returning to in her work is that of the skipping girl, a 1930s advertisement for a vinegar factory. As one of Nelly’s favourite motifs, the skipping girl is the subject of “a series in which a painting of the neon sign ha[s] been photographed, then smeared while the paint was still wet, photographed again, smeared again, and so on” (199). Fading in with its urban surroundings, the advertisement comes to represent the presence of the past in the non-places of Melbourne, from which history is supposedly absent: When the vinegar factory relocated to a different suburb, the skipping girl was left behind. By then neon was no longer glamorous, no longer a sign of the times. [...] Eventually, as buildings were demolished and the streetscape altered, she was shifted along the road to a different rooftop. There she froze in a deathly sleep. (200)

As a persistent remnant of the past in the present, the skipping girl haunts Melbourne’s self-assured twenty-first-century appearance. She points to a future in which present novelties will become as defunct as her own neon-lit skipping rope. Although she is an emblem of consumer culture, and thus a fitting attribute for a non-place, the skipping girl offers a platform for different timescapes to intersect and manifests a spectral conception of time in urban space. By reproducing the skipping girl in different sizes, colours, and settings, Nelly highlights the liberation that comes with her disuse. As an engaging “landmark” (200), she is no longer at the disposal of the market in which she once functioned: “she ha[s] fallen out of fashion and into a life of her own” (201). In other words, in becoming the subject of Nelly’s work, the skipping girl no longer 27 28

Derrida, Specters of Marx, 5. Specters of Marx, 10 (emphasis in original).

304

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

ጓ

represents a vinegar brand but the creative potential of her spectral state. Conversely, by representing the skipping girl as an urban object that is at once defunct and free to be artistically appropriated, Nelly succeeds in producing an image of the city that is not externally imposed, but tailored to her personal needs. Crucially, it is through Nelly’s intervention that the spectral quality of the skipping girl is teased out of a now purposeless artefact. Indeed, by searching for and creating paintings of everyday urban locations that are beyond the limits of regulated history, Nelly constructs a spectral city. In this regard, her decision to exhibit photographs of her destroyed paintings is not only a clever marketing strategy. It is also part of her technique of highlighting the dynamics inherent in the presence of absence. For example, one evening, Nelly leads Tom to a newly constructed house that enables its predecessor to remain present in Melbourne’s cityscape: The glass panels that covered the façade of the house contained the lifesize image of a low, wooden dwelling with finials and decrepit fretwork. “It’s a photograph of the house that used to be here,” said Nelly. “A digital print on laminated glass. Isn’t it brilliant? Don’t you love it?” When a building has been demolished, the memory of it seems to linger awhile, imprinted on the eye. Here, before them, was that phantom rendered material. (264)

Similar to the skipping girl, an object from the past that foreshadows the future course of what is presently considered up-to-date, the house that fascinates Nelly displays how the past is conditional for a future in which it lingers long after it has supposedly been concluded. In a wider sense, the demolished building thus exemplifies how absence is a constituent of presence. One can assume that this particular historical house has been allowed to resurface on a contemporary façade because of its congruity with the restrictive understanding of heritage manifested by the cityscape represented in The Lost Dog. However, the fact that the past is present in urban space at all indicates that it can be appropriated by characters like Nelly for a first step towards the deconstruction of that very cityscape and the collective identity it promotes. More than sensitizing Tom to the interplay between different temporal environments in urban space, Nelly, with her access to a particular version of Melbourne, is a prerequisite for the spectral city. On the one hand, to Tom, Nelly’s command of images associates her with the contemporary Western world, whose requirements he has always believed himself to fail. On the other hand, it is Nelly who is attuned to the constructed nature of the history manifested in

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

305

urban space and who retrieves the connection between past, present, and future from interchangeable twenty-first-century façades. Nelly’s complex character, her versatile appearance, and her ambiguous behaviour liken her to the above-mentioned building: The house that was there and not might have been a metaphor for what passed between them. Tom thought of what his relations with Nelly lacked: sex, answers. Straightforward things. Instead, she offered ghosts, illusion, imagery, a handful of glass eyes. (264)

Through the character-focalizer of Tom, the heterodiegetic narrator here highlights the fact that, for the protagonist of The Lost Dog, Nelly’s spectral quality hinges on an urban image that is meaningful because of her artistic view on her surroundings. In other words, Nelly and the city depend on each other for acquiring the characteristics that are crucial for their eventual function of allowing Tom to reconnect with his past and future environment. In a wider sense, Nelly’s interdependence with the city on which she reflects in her work allows her to turn the role of outsider into a means of empowerment. After all, de Kretser’s Melbourne not only invites reflection on challenges faced by (postcolonial) metropolises worldwide. It is also an apt space for illustrating concerns that are central to the self-image of the Australian nation. By becoming intertwined with the city, Nelly shapes and represents the core characteristics of a society that does not consider her an integral part of it. With this ironic twist, the spectral liberation that Nelly draws from urban materiality comes full circle.

Conclusion As Tom’s engagement with Nelly’s pictures of the city intensifies alongside his infatuation with her, familiar urban sceneries acquire new associations for him. For example, when he pays a visit to the skipping girl again for “the first time in years” (202), Tom is struck by a construction site in her vicinity: Across the road, a multi-storey shopping centre was rising from a hole in the earth. With its empty window-sockets and fragmentary stairs, it might have been archaeological; a ruin from the future. (202)

Tom conceptualizes the new shopping centre in terms of the intertwinement of the past and the future in his present surroundings. In other words, “Nelly’s image-making” (202) has come to mediate between Tom and his perception of his environment. Nelly’s approach to the city points up two significant matters: the constructed nature of the collective history and identity represented by Melbourne’s

306

MARIJ KE D ENG ER

ጓ

cityscape and the interplay between presence and absence in its ‘non-places’. Nelly’s artistic view of the city makes it clear that the narratives that are conspicuously absent from urban space contribute as much to the sense of self of Melbourne and its inhabitants as its official memorials and contemporary architecture. In a wider sense, Nelly’s artwork invites reflection on the conceptualization of the Australian metropolis as a postcolonial and multicultural space. Regarding the representation of Melbourne in The Lost Dog, the latter adjective addresses the precarious relation between the public commemoration or elimination of the histories of individual groups of Australians and the creation of racial, social, and cultural differences between them. The former adjective, for that matter, points towards the paradoxical condition of a nation whose fear of “seeming out of date” (238) not only produces a competitive twenty-firstcentury metropolis but also consigns its citizens to a present of policies and practices at least partly reminiscent of an historical world order. Ultimately, neither Melbourne nor Tom can prevent the past from prefiguring the future in the present. Because the urban subject-matter of Nelly’s paintings relates to Tom’s concrete experience of urban space, they make him aware that “the past is not what is over but what we wish to have done with” (264). For Tom, it is vital to realize that striving for modernity is futile – not only because the meaning of the adjective is manifold and changeable, but also because, eventually, everything and everyone falls out of fashion in one way or another. However, as the skipping girl indicates, transience can become a means of liberation from predetermined conceptions of one’s function in and for society. To conclude, Nelly’s spectral city provides Tom with the tools with which to dispel his anxieties about the impact of his past on his future. When, at the end of the novel, Tom’s dog finally returns, the animal signifies Tom’s cautious reconciliation with the painful aspects of his past – in this case, his failed marriage. Relieved to have his beloved pet back, Tom reintegrates the dog, and with it an important part of his personal history in Australia, in his present and future life. Furthermore, in the novel’s final scene, Tom promises his ageing and confused mother not to let her come to any harm. This indicates his budding awareness of his responsibility towards the Indian part of his history. The end of The Lost Dog does not present Tom as a newborn individual, confident of the role of his Indian past in his Australian future. Rather, the novel establishes how urban structures can be artistically adapted in order to reveal unseen aspects of the city’s self-image and thereby mediate between the individual and his/her sense of self. Through the characters of Tom and Nelly, The Lost Dog thus represents Melbourne as an environment that can be appro-

ጓ Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

307

priated for the construction of new approaches to history and identity in and of the Australian metropolis.

W OR K S C I T E D Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992; London & New York: Verso, 1995). Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (L& invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980;, tr. 1984; Berkeley: U of California P , 1988). Commonwealth of Australia. “Heritage,” Department of the Environment, http://www .environment.gov.au/topics/heritage (accessed 29 October 2013). Cunningham, Valentine. “Why Ekphrasis?,” Classical Philology 102.1 (January 2007): 57–71. Davison, Graeme. The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1993). De Kretser, Michelle. The Lost Dog (2007; London: Vintage, 2009). Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Spectres de Marx, 1993, tr. 1994; New York & London: Routledge, 2006). Dessaix, Robert, & Michael Shirrefs. “Michelle de Kretser Talks to Robert Dessaix for The Book Show about her New Novel, The Lost Dog,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National (6 November 2007), http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pro grams/bookshow/michelle-de-kretser-the-lost-dog/3217380#transcript (accessed 11 October 2013). Elder, Catriona. Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2007). Gelder, Ken, & Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 1998). Gunew, Sneja. Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). Hall, Stuart. “When Was ‘The Post-Colonial’?: Thinking At The Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers & Lidia Curti (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 242–60. Mautner Wasserman, Renata R. “Re-Inventing the New World: Cooper and Alencar,” Comparative Literature 36.2 (Spring 1984): 130–45.

ጓ

Indigenous Urbanities Representations of Cities in Native Canadian, Aboriginal Australian, and Mǎori Literature F R A N K S CH U L ZE –E N GL E R

I

N A S T A R T L I N G L Y B R I E F S T O R Y with the telling title “A Short History of Indians in Canada,” Thomas King recounts the exploits of a bored visiting businessman in Toronto who, in the small hours of a sleepless night, witnesses a most amazing spectacle in Toronto’s central banking district:

Bob Haynie catches a cab to Bay Street at three in the morning. He loves the smell of concrete. He loves the look of city lights. He loves the sound of skyscrapers. Bay Street. Smack! Bob looks up just in time to see a flock of Indians fly into the side of the building. Smack! Smack! Bob looks up just in time to get out of the way. Whup! An Indian hits the pavement in front of him. Whup! Whup! Two Indians hit the pavement behind him. Holy Cow! shouts Bob, and he leaps out of the way of the falling Indians.1

Stunned by the Indians falling out of the sky, Bob comes across Bill and Rudy, whose business it is to take care of the tumbling natives and clear up the city. Bill and Rudy have expert knowledge on the Indians (they have a field guide

1

Thomas King, “A Short History of Indians in Canada,” in King, A Short History of Indians in Canada: Stories (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005): 1–2. Further page references are in the main text.

310

F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

ጓ

that allows them to determine their ethnic origins “by the feathers”), and they provide Bob with a scientific explanation of the dazzling spectacle: Some people never see this, says Bill. One of nature’s mysteries. A natural phenomenon. They’re nomadic, you know, says Rudy. And migratory. Toronto’s in the middle of the flyway, says Bill. The lights attract them. [...] Bill and Rudy pull green plastic bags out of their pockets and try to find the open ends. The dead ones we bag, says Rudy. The live ones we tag, says Bill. Take them to the shelter. Nurse them back to health. Release them in the wild. Amazing, says Bob. A few wander off dazed and injured. If we don’t find them right away, they don’t stand a chance. Amazing, says Bob. (3–4)

The story ends with the wistful comment of the hotel doorman who had suggested to Bob that he visit Bay Street: Bob catches a cab back to the King Eddie and shakes the doorman’s hand. I saw the Indians, he says. Thought you’d enjoy that, sir, says the doorman. Thank you, says Bob. It was spectacular. Not like in the old days. The doorman sighs and looks up into the night. In the old days, when they came through, they would black out the entire sky. (4)

The crucial irony in King’s story lies in the fact that “the history of Indians in Canada” can indeed be told on three and a half pages: what King is after is, of course, not the ‘real’ history of Native Canadians, but the central tropes that have constituted ‘Indians’ in Canadian history and public discourse from the beginnings of white settlement onwards. All these tropes are there, in a nutshell: Indians belong to nature and to wilderness, they fall organically into different tribes, they are an endangered species that needs care, protection, and social benefits in order to survive in the modern world, and they are a dying race whose greatest moments lie in the past. By the same token, King’s “Short History” also provides a terse account of indigenous urbanity: it is an oxymoronic contradiction in terms, something that cannot exist. While Bob can enjoy downtown Toronto by savouring “the smell of concrete,” “the look of city lights,” and “the sound of skyscrapers” (1), the idea that Indians colliding with the city’s

ጓ Indigenous Urbanities

311

high-rise buildings could be associated with an indigenous urbanity is patently absurd: they are thrown out of their natural habitat, tumble into an alien world, and wander in a daze through city streets where they have lost their bearings. In contrast to the skydivers found in native North American mythology who dive from the sky into water to eventually create the world as we know it, the involuntary skyplungers in King’s short story crash onto solid urban concrete, lose their agency, and become objects of public welfare. There are at least two modes in which we can read the ironic staging of indigenous urbanity as an impossible object in King’s “Short History.” In the first of these modes, we can focus on the critical debunking of ‘white’ myths originating in long-standing practices of colonial ‘othering’ of indigenous people, and we can follow a critical tradition established some twenty-five years ago with Terry Goldie’s path-breaking comparative study Fear and Temptation. As Goldie put it, the indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the white signmaker. [...] Whether the context is Canada, New Zealand, or Australia becomes a minor issue since the game, the signmaking, is all happening on one form of board, within one field of discourse, that of British imperialism.2

From this perspective, we can read the irony-laden categorical denial of indigenous urbanity in King’s story as a dismantling of one of several tropes designed to constitute the ‘Indian’ as the Other of white civilization. Given the persistence of stereotypes originating in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial discourse in the twentieth- and twentieth-first-century world, there is much to be said for such a reading, but there are also obvious limitations to this approach. Colonial discourse analysis can easily become a substitute for critical engagement with contemporary literature: in his study written in the heyday of poststructuralist exuberance in literary studies, Goldie in fact combined critical sophistication with regard to the analysis of colonial discourse figures with a breathtaking methodological gullibility concerning ‘other people’s cultures’. Goldie questioned “the right of any person to judge another’s representation of his or her own culture,” and matter-of-factly noted that “with very few […] exceptions, indigenous writers are not examined in this book.” 3 A quarter of a century later, such cultural essentialism clearly will no longer do. Indigenous literary studies have, in fact, developed along very different 2

Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1989): 10. 3 Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 217.

312

F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

ጓ

trajectories: they have engaged in critical dialogue with contemporary indigenous writers and artists, they have explored the cultural complexity and transculturality of indigenous literatures in a globalized world, and they have moved beyond politically well-meant but methodologically flawed notions of indigenous writers as ‘natural’ representatives of ‘other cultures’. In Trans-Indigenous, Chadwick Allen describes the indigenous writers from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand analysed in his study in the following manner: In different ways, each of these individuals contradicts and complicates any reductive assumption that “authentic” Indigenous writers worthy of scholarly attention are (only) those who are born into and then maintain unbroken affiliations with the Indigenous communities, languages, and cultures from which they are genealogically descended, or that, over the course of their lives and careers, “authentic” Indigenous writers represent and advocate on behalf of (only) those specific communities, languages, and cultures. [...] their multidimensional works in multiple genres evoke the transformative power of lived experience and imagined exploration across multiple categories of the local and global Indigenous.4

Taking our cue from the key terms in Allen’s “trans-indigenous” account of indigenous literature – transformation, imagination, exploration, and multiplicity – a second reading of the oxymoronic indigenous urbanity in King’s “Short History” becomes possible: a reading that does not restrict the short story’s irony to the dismantling of colonial and racist heterostereotypes of Indians lost in the city. Such a reading broadens the scope of our understanding of that irony to encompass the autostereotypes of cities as alien space to be found in much of contemporary indigenous literature. It also countermands the anxiety about the ‘authenticity’ of indigenous cultures as purported alternatives to ‘Western modernity’ that haunts both liberal and supposedly more radical (‘post’- or ‘de’-colonial) perceptions of contemporary indigeneity. The brilliantly staged ‘flight’ of the imagination in King’s story can then be read as an ironic textual performance that underscores what is in fact a colossal lack of imagination with regard to indigenous urbanity. This lack of imagination can arguably not only be found ‘out there’ in the realm of colonial discourse and its legacies or in the contemporary social imaginary of former settler colonies turned multicultural societies that we – as conscientious scholars – so elegantly dissect, but also much closer to some of our own cherished beliefs and scholarly practices and perhaps even ‘in here,’ at the conferences we attend. The call for 4

Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012): xxxi–xxxii.

ጓ Indigenous Urbanities

313

papers for the 2013 ASNEL conference in Chemnitz offered a plenitude of concepts for re-inventing the metropolis and revisualizing urbanity, from palimpsests and diffuse urbanism to flânerie and festival cultures, but only indicated a possible trajectory “from indigenous environment to urban slum dwelling” with regard to ‘indigenous’ matters.5 This comment is, of course, not meant as an exercise in epistemological one-upmanship with regard to a wide-ranging call for an equally wide-ranging (and highly successful) conference but, rather, as a pointer to what is arguably a fairly wide-spread attitude in literary studies towards indigenous urbanity as a puzzling non-subject. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey puts it in her comparative study Routes and Roots, “In the rare instances when the popular imagination positions the indigenous subject in urban space, cultural death and ‘fatal impact’ are assumed.”6 It is, however, not only the popular but also the scholarly imagination that seems to be drawn to a categorical denial of indigenous urbanity. Consider the following passage from Eva Rask Knudsen’s The Circle & the Spiral, for example: A disturbingly high percentage of both Aboriginal and Mǒori people are mixed-blood fringe-dwellers who live in landscapes of unbelonging. According to statistics, 68 per cent of the Aboriginal population and 75 per cent of the Mǒori population live in urban environments. Despite possible ties with the tribal areas to which they or their ancestors belong, most Aboriginals and Mǒori live in a physical and psychological borderland: neither truly inside their own culture nor outside of it, neither truly visible to the surrounding society nor invisible.7

Although a large majority of Aboriginal and Mǒori people live in cities (the same is, of course, true for Native Canadians), their presence there is above all ‘disturbing’; indigenous people seem primarily to ‘belong’ to tribal areas, and while they are undoubtedly ‘in’ the city, they apparently are not ‘of’ it. This deficit model of indigenous urbanity seems characterized primarily by a (politically well-meant, but unfortunate) emphasis on social deprivation that produces an overall effect of designating indigenous people collectively to urban “landscapes of unbelonging.” In an essay on “The Urban Aboriginal Landscape,” 5

“(Re-)Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis,” Call for Papers, 24th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, Chemnitz University, 9–11 May 2013, http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/englit/gnel2013/images/call-for-papers.pdf (accessed 10 November 2013). 6 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2007): 197. 7 Eva Rask Knudsen, The Circle & the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand ǎori Literature (Cross/Cultures 61; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004): 73.

314

F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

ጓ

Larissa Behrendt, the well-known Australian writer and Aboriginal legal activist, highlights the unfortunate effects of this deficit model of indigenous urbanity in the following manner: I often get asked, “How often do you visit Aboriginal communities?” And I reply, “Everyday, when I go home.” The question reveals the popular misconceptions that “real” Aboriginal communities only exist in rural and remote areas. [...] This is perhaps compounded by the view that those Aboriginal people who do live within a metropolis like Sydney are displaced, not from here, and therefore do not have special ties here. This view can remain even if the Aboriginal family has been living here longer than the observer’s family. While it is true that an Aboriginal person’s traditional land has fundamental importance, it is also true that postinvasion history and experience has created an additional layer of memory and significance for other parts of the country. [...] little attention is paid to the vibrant and functional Aboriginal communities throughout the metropolitan area. There is no media coverage of the successful – and rather uneventful – day-to-day-lives of Aboriginal people that see participation in a broad range of community activities. [...] These community-building activities and organisations are hidden by images of out-of-control and violent Aboriginal people who are seen as lawless, without a sense of community responsibility, as dangerous. [...] These images also reinforce the impression that no cohesive Aboriginal community exists in urban areas and we once again become invisible.8

This invisibility is not only the result of a widespread heterostereotype of indigenous people circulated in popular media, however, but is also fostered by a pervasive autostereotypical anti-urbanism in indigenous writing. From Archie Weller’s Perth, where black young men lose their soul in stories such as “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”9 or “Stolen Car”10 to the cold, glittering metro-

8

Larissa Behrendt, “The Urban Aboriginal Landscape,” in After Sprawl: Post-Suburban Sydney. EProceedings of ‘Post-Suburban Sydney: The City in Transformation’ Conference, ed. Kay Anderson, Reena Dobson, Fiona Allon & Brett Neilson (Sydney: Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, 2006) http://www.uws.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/6928/Behrendt _Final .pdf (accessed 10 November 2013). 9 Archie Weller, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” in Weller, Going Home: Stories (1986; St. Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1990): 44–67. 10 Archie Weller, “Stolen Car,” in Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writing, ed. Jack Davis, Stephen Muecke, Mudrooroo Narogin & Adam Shoemaker (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1990): 128–40.

ጓ Indigenous Urbanities

315

polis that sucks Mǒori people dry in Patricia Grace’s “Electric City”11 or the traffic-infested, hostile town which the surviving indigenous First World War veteran must leave behind in order to be cured in the forests of the Canadian North in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road,12 indigenous literature abounds in tropes juxtaposing the social alienation and spiritual obliteration of indigenous people in stony, hostile cities with the life-enhancing energy of a nurturing, nonurban ‘backhome’. This obliteration of urban indigenality is only one mode of representation, however, and there are numerous literary counter-examples that present very different images of indigenous people in the city. The second part of this essay now looks at selected examples of indigenous texts from Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand that do move beyond the deficit model of indigenous urbanity and explore the complex, contradictory realities of indigenous city life as constitutive part of, rather than as categorical obstacle to, modern indigenality. This, in fact, seems to me to be the distinctive feature of non-deficitdriven representations of indigenous urbanities: their refusal to fall into a binary diegetic structure of the ‘authentic’ traditional and the ‘inauthentic’ urban and their insistence on thinking of (actual or imaginary) homelands beyond and away from the city in conjunction with indigenous urban lifeworlds and experiences. As the Australian Aboriginal artist Lin Onus puts it, A dilemma that confronts numerous Aboriginal artists comes with the descriptive terminology ‘urban’ or ‘traditional’. There is currently within the Aboriginal artistic movement some considerable agitation to redefine the categories. The word ‘urban’, of course, refers to a city dweller and evokes thoughts of a chromium and glass environment. ‘Traditional’, in the aboriginal arts sense, seems to refer to a practitioner in a remote area, untainted by external influence. There are also large numbers of artists who are working in neither of these areas. Existing terminology is no longer adequate.13

11

Patricia Grace, “Electric City,” in Grace, Electric City and Other Stories (1987; Auckland: Penguin New Zealand, 1989): 37–39. 12 Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (2005; London: Phoenix, 2006). 13 Lin Onus, “Language and Lasers,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michèle Grossman (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2003): 92. On the complex location of the urban Aboriginal artist, see also Suzanne Spunner, “Neither Dots nor Bark: Positioning the Urban Artist,” in Urban Representations: Cultural Expression, Identity and Politics, ed. Sylvia Kleinert & Grace Koch (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [A I A T S I S ], 2012): 91–100.

F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

316

ጓ

What emerges, I believe, is an imaginary continuum where urbanity as a necessary condition for important modes of contemporary indigenality is linked to the acknowledgement of non-urban locations as resources of self-identity, knowledge, and hope. In the first example to be discussed here, this continuum is 400 kilometres long. Drew Hayden Taylor’s play 400 Kilometres14 is the third and final part of a trilogy revolving around Janice Wirth (alias Grace Wabung), an Ojibway woman taken away from her mother as a baby in the wake of Canada’s notorious indigenous child-removal policy, raised by loving Anglo-Scottish middle-class parents in London, Ontario, and confronted with her suppressed indigenality in her early thirties in the midst of a successful urban professional career in Toronto. In the concluding play of the trilogy, Janice is pregnant by her Native spouse, Tonto, who wants her to return to Otter Lake Reserve, 400 kilometres from London, where Janice grew up, and to raise their child there. Urbanity and city life are not major topics in the play, which is centrally concerned with the legacies of the forced child-removal policy for native and nonnative characters alike, yet they figure as a default context for the identity tribulations that Janice/Grace is going through. When Tonto first hears of Janice’s pregnancy, he insists on bringing the child ‘home’ to be raised on the reserve, which results in an increasingly heated argument between Tonto and Janice’s foster-mother Theresa: TON TO

I was actually hoping Janice would consider bringing up the baby in Otter Lake. TH ER E SA

Good heavens, why would you want to raise the baby there? TON TO

Because it’s my home. Janice’s home too. TH ER E SA

You’re standing in Janice’s home. Don’t you think this city would be a better place for the child? It has better medical facilities, education… TON TO

There are different kinds of medicine and education. (79)

Later on, Tonto reconsiders his position, however, and develops a more flexible and less binary perspective on ‘city’ and ‘reserve’ that eventually comes to be shared by Janice/Grace. How precisely Janice and Tonto will arrange their lives 14

Drew Hayden Taylor, 400 Kilometres (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005). Further page references are in the main text.

ጓ Indigenous Urbanities

317

(and that of their child) remains open at the end of the play, but a likely option is a scenario that will include living on the reserve as well as living in London. As Drew Hayden Taylor puts it in his introduction to the play: “The story is now closed. Janice has found her niche in the world. Hers is about 400 kilometres long” (7). The next text I would like to look at, Patricia Grace’s Tu,15 also stresses the links between urbanity and ‘homelands’ beyond the city, but also provides an intriguing example of urbanity as a catalyst of contemporary Mǒori culture and self-identity. Once again the text is not chiefly concerned with the representation of indigenous urbanity, but follows the life stories of three brothers who volunteer to become soldiers in the famous Maori Battalion during World War Two. An important episode in these life stories is, however, the move from a remote rural area to Auckland that the family of the three brothers undertakes after the death of the father. Pita, the eldest of the three brothers, who is weighed down by his responsibilities as the male head of the family, at first feels rejected and alienated in what he experiences as ‘the white man’s city’, but this perspective changes when Pita becomes part of a cultural group performing ǒori songs and dances in the city. Led by the charismatic Kingi, the group maintains close links to Mǒori cultural traditions in rural locations, but at the same time produces a new type of ‘Pan-Mǒori’ culture in the city that – just like the formation of the Maori Battalion and the common experience of the Mǒori soldiers on the battlefields of North Africa and Europe during World War Two – overrides ethnic specificities and divisions that characterize more traditional modes of Mǒori culture. Participating in this urban performative transformation of Mǒori culture, Pita begins to see the city in a different light: It was like a homecoming even though his feet stood in a different place, a place Pita had been trying to make his home for more than a year. For the whole of that year it was as though he’d been immobilised. Now he could feel himself being warmed and brought back into action. It was as though his heart had suddenly begun beating in time with the city and now he could begin to be himself again. [...] ‘We mustn’t forget those living up country, our home people,’ Kingi said, ‘otherwise they might leave us in this city when we die, might forget to come for us.’ Kingi had long soft cheeks that creased and flapped and gathered in folds like flags, skin as black as flax pods. ‘New voices will be a welcome addition, add strength to our singing,’ he said. ‘We’ve been in

15

Patricia Grace, Tu: A Novel (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2004). Further page references are in the main text.

318

F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

ጓ

such demand round our city that we’ve begun to think our engagements will never end.’ Our city? It was a new thought. (87–88)

By intertwining the story of Mǒori participation in World War Two with the transformation of Mǒori culture engendered by urbanization, Tu sensitizes the reader to the political, social, and cultural complexity of twentieth-century indigenous modernity. As a recent essay on Mǒori urban migration puts it, the struggle for ‘rangatiratanga’ (Mǒori sovereignty) was decisively strengthened by this shift, since the “reorganizing of collective indigenous endeavours in the cities embodied a particularly sharpened way of expressing rangatiratanga within modernity.”16 Far from ‘losing their culture’ in the city, urban Mǒori thus contributed significantly to the resilience of Mǒori social organization and cultural identity, albeit in new, ‘Pan-Mǒori’ modes where “tribal identity was increasingly supplemented by an emergent national Maori identity” 17 and closely linked to experiences of modernization: Instead of or as well as joining Pakeha community activities, migrant Maori organized for social, cultural, sporting and political purposes as Maori. Overarching all such collectivized activity, the tribal members who had come to the city continued to seek that to which their counterparts in the tribal homelands had long aspired: to determine their own destinies, to achieve forms of collective autonomous control of their lives, a goal shared by indigenous peoples in former settler colonies around the globe.18

By highlighting the involvement of the three soldier protagonists and their family in this urban struggle for Mǒori sovereignty, Grace thus links the story of the Maori Battalion – which provides the central focus of the narrative in Tu – to a wider story of sociocultural transformation and the emergence of indigenous urbanity as a major constituent of modern Maoriness. An example of what might be called ‘indigenous urbanity by default’ can be found in Larissa Behrendt’s Home.19 Behrendt’s epic novel traces the extended family history of Garibooli, a young Aboriginal girl abducted by white ‘caregivers’ 16 Richard S. Hill, “Maori Urban Migration and the Assertion of Indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1945–1975,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14.2 (2012): 276. 17 Hill, “Maori Urban Migration and the Assertion of Indigeneity,” 269. 18 “Maori Urban Migration and the Assertion of Indigeneity,” 260. 19 Larissa Behrendt, Home (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2004). Further page references are in the main text.

ጓ Indigenous Urbanities

319

on Dungalear Station in 1918 as part of the notorious Australian child removal policy. The novel traces the life of Garibooli, her siblings, her children and grandchildren through almost a century of Australian (family) history, much of which takes place in small towns across Australia, in cities such as Sydney or Townsville, and even in London and Paris. It is in these urban locations that most members of Garibooli’s family struggle to survive and to find their place, and while Home engages in a rigorous critique of racist attitudes towards Australia’s Aboriginal population that not only formed the backdrop to Garibooli’s abduction but which her children and grandchildren continue to experience in their widely diverse lives, there is no indication in the novel that this racism is more pervasive in urban space than in Australia’s outback or that city life in itself is detrimental to the Aboriginal struggle for recognition. The first-person frame narrative of the novel focuses on a journey that Candice, Garibooli’s granddaughter who lives in Sydney and has become a successful lawyer engaged in Aboriginal land-rights claims, undertakes together with her father, Bob, to the old, long-abandoned camp on Dungalear Station where Garibooli was once abducted. Both Candice and her father want to find out more about their family history by visiting the place that had been ‘home’ to their mother/grandmother as a young girl, and finally standing on the very spot where part of their family history began has a profound effect on them. Yet ‘home’ is a complex concept in Behrendt’s novel that cannot simply be identified with the place where Garibooli once lived. In a casual conversation with Candice, Danielle, a distant cousin who lives in a small, unnamed country-town near Dungalear, describes her daily life in the following manner: “What do you do around here for fun?” I change the topic. “I like sports. Basketball and touch footie, anything like that. I’d like to visit Sydney, ’cause sometimes it gets boring here. But I wouldn’t want to stay there all the time. This is home.” “The pace in the city is pretty hectic. It’s not to everyone’s liking.” “Must be cool being a lawyer. I’ve never met a Murri lawyer before. My brother could have used you a couple of weeks ago.” “I do mostly land claims and heritage protection. I like it but it’s not as glamorous as it might seem from the television. It’s lots of reading and years of training.” (21–22)

Re-establishing contact with the wider family that still lives near Dungalear Station is certainly important for Candice, but there is no indication whatsoever in the novel that the small country town that Danielle and her relatives now live in could also be ‘home’ to Candice, or that her work as an activist lawyer in Sydney has somehow made her ‘homeless’. What is at issue, however, is the long-

320

F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

ጓ

standing racialization and marginalization that all members of Garibooli’s family have experienced throughout the generations, and that is as virulent in rural New South Wales as it is in Australia’s big cities. If standing on the campsite where her grandmother once lived as a child is a kind of ‘homecoming’ for Candice, it is so not because the alienated urban Aboriginal woman has finally found her spiritual centre but because the confrontation with her family history allows Candice new insights into herself and gives her new strength to find her place as an Aboriginal lawyer-activist in Sydney: As we head back to town, I recognize the landmarks we drove past to reach the place where the rivers meet. Granny turns to me. “You are too uptight,” she says bluntly. “Where’s all that going to get you?” “And one more thing,” she says curtly before I can answer. “It’s what’s in here that matters.” She taps on her skeletal chest, “Not how dark this is.” She pinches the limp skin on her arm. “You’d do well to remember that,” she says, peering into me and at all of my shortcomings – my insecurity, my seriousness, my inability to trust. I know that she has cut into truths, yet I feel as though the worst parts of me, the weakest, most confused and insecure parts of me, have been shed on the soil, on a spot where grief had begun to bleed generations ago. My thoughts turn to Christoph and I suddenly feel the urge to call him, to tell him to catch a plane to Sydney as he has wanted to do since I left Paris almost a year ago. (317)

Visiting what used to be Garibooli’s home thus enables Candice to – at least partly – overcome the inhibitions and insecurities that her own experiences of racism have given rise to, and to live her own aboriginality in the new – urban – contexts that she has chosen for herself. Having made her peace with her grandmother, Candice can now also make peace with herself – and her French lover, whom she left behind in Paris, because she did not have the courage to introduce him into her Aboriginal family life. To conclude these brief observations on the representation of urbanity in indigenous writing, it may be salutary to recall a fairly recent debate on representations of urbanity in African literary studies. The comparison with African literature is instructive, I believe, not because the latter should also somehow be considered as an expression of indigenality, but because until fairly recently, just as in indigenous studies, urbanity and experiences of city life have also had a notoriously bad press in African literary studies. As Ranka Primorac put it in her introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on ‘African City Textualities’, African cultural and literary studies need to move beyond

ጓ Indigenous Urbanities

321

deficit models of African urbanity and to sensitize themselves to the specificities of African urban modernities that have habitually been rendered invisible by a critical rhetoric focusing on the alleged ‘westernization’ entailed in African urbanities. As this structural invisibility of urban modernity has arguably also become a downbeat hallmark of critical responses to indigenous urbanities, Primorac’s call for critical engagement with African city textualities may also help to open up new perspectives in indigenous studies. “Instead of conceiving of African urban identities and locations in terms of misdirected or truncated modernity,” Primorac argues, critics should “tease out some of the complex shifting and travelling of meanings involved in the making of African city subjectivities and senses of the modern.”20 As I hope to have shown in this essay, contemporary indigenous writing has already begun to explore ‘indigenous city subjectivities and senses of the modern’ and to provide alternatives to the drab and unproductive images of indigenous urbanity that have been predominant so far. I would like to end with a poem by Samuel Cruickshank from Aotearoa New Zealand that ironically enumerates a wide variety of urban Mǒori lifestyles from moko spirals in cappuccino cups to power-steered wakas 21 on Auckland’s roads and ends with a celebratory clarion call to finally recognize the viability of urban Mǒorihood: urban iwi,22 may we rise up and be counted. may our voices be heard in this whenua,23 that is Our home. may we pull the mana24 of our tupuna25 from within our globalised selves, and breathe again. Tihei Mauri Ora!26 There is life within us!27 (46)

20 Ranka Primorac, “Introduction: City, Text, Future,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.1 (2008): 1. 21 Moko: (facial) tattoo; waka: canoe, moving vehicle. 22 Iwi: extended kinship group, tribe, nation, people. 23 Whenua: land. 24 Mana: power. 25 Tupuna: ancestor, grandparent. 26 Tihei Mauri Ora!: Behold there is Life! 27 Samuel Cruickshank, “urban iwi: tihei mauri oha!” in Whetu Moana, ed. Albert Wendt et al. (Auckland: Auckland U P , 2013): 46.

322

F R A N K S C H U L Z E –E N G L E R

ጓ

W OR K S C I T E D Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2012). Behrendt, Larissa. Home (St. Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2004). ——.“The Urban Aboriginal Landscape,” in After Sprawl: Post-Suburban Sydney. E-Proceedings of ‘Post-Suburban Sydney: The City in Transformation’ Conference, ed. Kay Anderson, Reena Dobson, Fiona Allon & Brett Neilson (Sydney: Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, 2006), http://www.uws.edu.au/__data /assets/pdf_file/0007/6928/Behrendt_Final.pdf (accessed 10 November 2013). Boyden, Joseph. Three Day Road (2005; London: Phoenix, 2006). Cruickshank, Samuel. “urban iwi: tihei mauri oha!” in Whetu Moana, ed. Albert Wendt et al. (Auckland: Auckland U P , 2013): 46. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2007). Goldie, Terry. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1989). Grace, Patricia. “Electric City,” in Grace, Electric City and Other Stories (1987; Auckland: Penguin New Zealand, 1989): 37–39. ——. Tu: A Novel (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2004). Hill, Richard S. “Maori Urban Migration and the Assertion of Indigeneity in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, 1945–1975,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14.2 (2012): 256–78. King, Thomas. “A Short History of Indians in Canada,” in King, A Short History of Indians in Canada: Stories (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005): 1–4. Knudsen, Eva Rask. The Circle & the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Mǎori Literature (Cross/Cultures 68; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004). Onus, Lin. “Language and Lasers,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michèle Grossman (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2003): 92–96. Primorac, Ranka. “Introduction: City, Text, Future,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.1 (2008): 1–4. “(Re-)Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis.” Call for Papers, 24th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, Chemnitz University, 9–11 May 2013, http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/englit /gnel2013/images/call-for-papers.pdf (accessed 10 November 2013). Spunner, Suzanne. “Neither Dots nor Bark: Positioning the Urban Artist,” in Urban Representations: Cultural Expression, Identity and Politics, ed. Sylvia Kleinert & Grace Koch (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AIA TS IS ], 2012): 91–100. Taylor, Drew Hayden. 400 Kilometres (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005).

ጓ Indigenous Urbanities

323

Weller, Archie. “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” in Going Home: Stories Archie Weller (1986; St. Leonards, NS W : Allen & Unwin, 1990): 44–67. ——.“Stolen Car,” in Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writing, ed. Jack Davis, Stephen Muecke, Mudrooroo Narogin & Adam Shoemaker (St. Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1990): 128–40.

ጓ

S E N S E S , S O U N D S , A N D L A N G U AG E S POSTCOLONI AL METR OPOLI s

IN THE

From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture Multimedial Reflections on Metropolitan Space R OL F J. G OE B E L

O

UR T IMES A RE , PE RH AP S M ORE TH A N EVE R BE FOR E ,

characterized by a rapidly accelerated change of cultural paradigms. This trajectory urges us to redefine postcoloniality for our late-capitalist consumer postmodernity in the age of global media technology. The traditional domains of the hermeneutic deciphering of the world as text – discourse, script, material book culture – are continually challenged to re-legitimate their authority vis-àvis the audiovisual hegemony of digital mass media. Their technologies tend to substitute the interpretative depth of symbolic signification by surface imagery, immediate soundscapes, and performative spectacles. In this situation, Homi K. Bhabha’s classical definitions of postcoloniality in The Location of Culture (1994) reveal their historicity through their adherence to poststructualist notions of culture as an effect of differential language. He questions the critical theory of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jean–François Lyotard as a typical Western enterprise because it transforms other – foreign or colonial – cultures from actual sites of indigenous self-articulation into textual phantasms, into sets of citations serving the “internal critique of the Western logocentric sign,” rather than the Other’s power “to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse.”1 In contrast to this eurocentric enterprise, Bhabha’s own theory promotes the non-hegemonic notion of hybridity as a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonial disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition.2 1 2

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 31. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 114.

328

ROLF J. GOEBEL

ጓ

Here, the colonial voice is allowed to inscribe itself into the dominant discourse as an irreducible sign of difference that subverts the master’s self-appointed authority. In the context of hybridity, this counter-discourse maintains its Otherness, refusing to be domesticated as a mere effect of colonial power. However, what Bhabha’s own position shares with the critical theory of Derrida and others is the allegiance to the paradigm of deconstructive textuality. For him, the “encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within ‘colonial’ textuality” have anticipated “many of the problematics of signification and judgement that have become current in contemporary theory – aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy” and so forth.3 Yet even Bhabha’s emphatically textual theory opens itself, if only in passing, to other technological media. Thus, he mentions that the Algerian people, as described by Frantz Fanon, “construct their culture from the national text translated into modern Western forms of information technology, language, dress,”4 and he stresses that culture is always “translational” because the “spatial histories of displacement” – slavery, indenture, civilizing missions, Third-World migration, and economic or political refugees – are “now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of ‘global’ media technologies,” which “make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue.”5 Pursuing these intermedial cues further, I want to ask how Bhabha’s notion of (post)colonial textuality can be re-inscribed in today’s media technologies, which combine text with image and sound in ways that go beyond the language-centred assumptions of deconstruction and poststructuralism. In his study Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung (Hyperculturality: Culture and Globalization, 2005), the Korean-German cultural philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes that Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity, interstitial passages, and the subversive inscription of the Other remain too entrenched in the agonistic and dialectical paradigm of colonizer and colonized, oppression and resistance, centre and periphery.6 For this reason, Han believes Bhabha’s theory is no longer able to capture the more radically liberating spirit of today’s hyperculturality, which, according to Han, supersedes postcolonial hybridity by constructing a network of free-floating links, overlapping spaces, and time zones unfolding beyond the notions of cultural authenticity, origins, and localities:

3

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 173. The Location of Culture, 38. 5 The Location of Culture, 172 (italics in the original). 6 Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung (Berlin: Merve, 2005): 29–30. Translations from this edition are mine. 4

ጓ From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture

329

“Not the sense of trans-, inter-, or multi-, but that of hyper- represents more precisely the spatial conditions of today’s culture.”7 Han departs resolutely from Bhabha’s model of the world as a signifying textuality, redefining it in terms of global media technologies. As he proposes, culture increasingly loses the structure of a conventional text or book (16). Life in the age of the worldwide web, according to Han, resembles an ocean devoid of uncertainties and abysmal depth, where the log-ins or logo-s have replaced the classical Logos (72–73). Akin to the digital hypertext, Han’s hyperculture denotes a rhizomatic space of de-substantialized dispersal (33); it is without memory (34); it features a post-auratic placelessness (41), where forms of cultural expression coexist beyond their historical affiliations in the simultaneity of a timeless hyperpresent (42), and where the hypercultural tourist surfs freely from one ‘here’ to another (46). By going beyond Bhabha’s postcolonial resistance as a strategy of political action conceptualized as textual subversion, Han broadens the methodological horizon for the digital society in the global age. But in so doing, his own concept of rhizomatic hyperculturality seems to turn Bhabha’s politically committed theory of postcolonial emancipation into an aestheticist celebration of abstract freedom: Han concedes that the dissolution of conceptual horizons brought about by hyperspace may be experienced by many as a painful void and a narrative crisis, but he celebrates this development chiefly as a new practice of freedom enabling individualized designs of patchwork identities (54–55).8 Although he concedes that hyperculture does not transcend power-relations, he claims that it opens up spaces that are not accessible in terms of power economics but can be enjoyed aesthetically by participating in the “Reich des Spiels und des Scheins” (30; ‘domain of play and beautiful appearance’) that Friedrich Schiller opposed to the domain of power and law. Focusing on the seemingly 7

“Nicht das Gefühl des Trans-, Inter- oder Multi-, sondern das des Hyper- gibt exakter die Räumlichkeit der heutigen Kultur wieder”; Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, 17. Further page references are in the main text. 8 In his critique of Han’s theory and his response to Bhabha’s concept of cultural hybridity, Volker C. Dörr rightly points out that Han’s argument is informed by the privileged perspective of the highly educated denizens of the Western-European metropolis, who are able to indulge in their culinary liberty in the ‘supermarket of identities’, as Feridun ZaimoȪlu has called it, in Kanak Sprak. 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995): 12. Dörr also argues that Han’s attempt to uncouple the concept of culturality from the structures of colonialism may meet less social consensus that Han presupposes. See Dörr, “Multi-, Inter-, Trans- und Hyper-: Kulturalität und (deutsch-türkische) ‘Migrantenliteratur’,” in Zwischen Provokation und Usurpation: Interkulturalität als (un)vollendetes Projekt der Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaften, ed. Dieter Heimböckel, Irmgard Honnef–Becker, Georg Mein & Heinz Sieburg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010): 83–84.

330

ROLF J. GOEBEL

ጓ

free movement of the human subject within the boundless network of simultaneous positions, Han’s theory seems to replicate rather than undermine the consumer fetishism of postindustrial, late-capitalist commodity society, which he lauds as a “Hypermarkt der Kulturen” (59; ‘hypermarket of cultures’). He dehistoricizes the present by neglecting today’s cultural amnesia and the dangers or possibilities offered by an open-ended future. He also disregards the rather obvious fact that the capitalist system that promotes social mobility and technological intercommunication across geopolitical boundaries benefits economically privileged people while disadvantaging marginalized subjects, even though the internet increasingly aids political uprisings. Rather than addressing such factual inequalities, Han proposes idealistically that the Far East has a very natural relationship with technological networking (57). Finally, he also seems to underestimate the legitimacy of the desire for re-auratization, historical commemoration, and cultural authenticity that today seeks to assert itself against the pervasive presence of spectacles, performativity, and consumer fads, even if such desire may itself be an effect of hyperculturality. Having lost (or blissfully liberated ourselves from) the hermeneutic depths of the (Western or eurocentric) world as a decipherable book, we have entered, via Bhabha’s Third Spaces of cultural translation, Han’s networks of infinite dispersal, where the hypercultural tourist is neither the classical hermeneutician nor the multiculturalist stuck in memories of origins, descent, ethnicities, or places (59). Today’s hyperculturality, as Han stresses, rests on a dynamic “Nebeneinander unterschiedlicher Vorstellungen, Zeichen, Symbole, Bilder und Klänge” (59; ‘simultaneity of diverse ideas, signs, symbols, images, and sounds’). Going beyond Bhabha’s predominantly textual and discursive notion of culture, Han conceives of the global scenario as a multiply signifying network of intermedial technologies. Methodologically, this is a productive step, but, one may ask, how do we negotiate our lives meaningfully and responsibly in the seemingly infinite web of hypertexts, image series, and soundscapes? Having accepted the increasing deterritorialization of culture – the media-induced separation of cultural significations from material locality9 – how do we redefine (or find again) places of enunciation from where we may articulate our identities, memories, and aspirations? How do we come to understand Bhabha’s notion of the subversive inscription of the Other in the dominant discourse or Han’s vision of free-floating cosmopolite when we are told that locality doesn’t matter any longer?

9

For a theoretical discussion of cultural deterritorialization, see John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999): 106–49.

ጓ From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture

331

Han’s concept of a delocalized and ahistorical hyperculture seems to present a thoroughly idealized version of Jean Baudrillard’s vision of the “fatal strategy of the trans-digitization of the world into pure information, of [the] cloning of the real by Virtual Reality, of [the] substitution of a technical, artificial universe for the ‘natural’ world.”10 For this reason, Han cannot account for the negative aspects of today’s digital society. In Open Sky (1995), Paul Virilio, perhaps the most outspoken critic of the postmodern acceleration of social life, warns that telecommunication technologies and ubiquitous remote-control devices will lead to an “ultimate state of sedentariness where real-time environmental control will take over from the development of the real space of the territory.” 11 This inertia will produce the possibility of a “civilization of forgetting” without a future or past, living in a timeless state of being “telepresent to the whole world.”12 As a result, the traditional traveller’s tale and its interpretations and memories will fade away, yielding to a “paradoxical immediate memory linked to the allpowerful nature of the image.”13 The void left by the loss of a hermeneutic depth-reading of the world and its historical traditions is filled by visual surface signifiers whose seemingly immediate presence presumably requires no deciphering. This electronic interconnectivity, according to Virilio, effects the erasure of physical space and material location: While the topical City was once constructed around the ‘gate’ and the ‘port’, the teletopical metacity is now reconstructed around the ‘window’ and the teleport, that is to say, around the screen and the time slot. (26)

However, as Virilio insists, authentic experience relies on one’s “true presence” in the “living present,” since it is predicated on the “existence of one’s own body living in the here and now.”14 By drawing attention to bodily aspects of experience, which seem to be erased by electronic communication, Virilio urges us to reconsider the significance of physical space and actual locality in which all bodily experiences must occur. Therefore, I’d like to relocate postcolonial subversion, global media technology, the movement of the human subject, and the impending loss of historical memory within the signifying space of the postmodern metropolis of 10

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, tr. Chris Turner (Le pacte de lucidité ou I intelligence du Mal, 2004; Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005): 32. 11 Paul Virilio, Open Sky, tr. Julie Rose (La Vitesse de libération, 1995; London & New York: Verso, 1997): 25. 12 Virilio, Open Sky, 25 (italics in original). 13 Open Sky, 26 (italics in original). 14 Open Sky, 38.

332

ROLF J. GOEBEL

ጓ

global media culture. I do so because I believe that the materiality of topographic space – the lived environment of human subjects and their interactions – continues to offer enabling conditions for communicating in the cyberspace of digital technologies across geographical and political boundaries. As Saskia Sassen has proposed, “the digital and the global are deeply imbricated with the material and the local in the case of global cities.”15 Seeking to overcome undialectical notions that simply pit the digital against the physical, material, or actual, she argues: These either/or categorizations filter out the possibility of mediating conditions, thereby precluding a more complex reading of the impact of digitization on material and place-bound conditions.16

One of Sassen’s examples is international finance: While it is a “highly digitized activity,” its “electronic financial markets and digitized financial instruments” rely heavily on the physical properties of material and people, such as “conventional infrastructure, buildings, airports, and so on.”17 Relocating global media technologies in the material space of the city opens up the suggestive possibility of reinscribing the generalities of postcolonial/ global theory in the signifying space of particular texts, especially works of art, such as the city novel. For it is in such artifacts that the intersections of global digitization and material topography are paradigmatically exemplified in individual narratives that may reveal the human ramifications of these issues more palpably and insightfully than abstract theory. I’d like to support this claim by turning to Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003). Set in a Western metropolis clearly modelled on New York City, the narrative traces one day in April, 2000, of the life of Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old financial asset manager and multi-billionaire taking a stretch limousine ride on 47th Street across midtown Manhattan to get a haircut at his father’s old barbershop. At the end of the novel, Eric has contemptuously speculated away his and his client’s fortunes against the rising Yen, has depleted his wife’s bank account by hacking into it, has gratuitously killed his bodyguard, and will meet his own death during a shoot-out with an insane former employer, whom he has ruthlessly fired.18 Variously disrupted by a sequence of uncontrollable encounters – the U S 15

Saska Sassen, “Reading the City in a Global Digital Age: Between Topographic Representation and Spatialized Power Projects,” in Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age, ed. Linda Krause & Patrice Petro (New Brunswick N J & London: Rutgers U P , 2003): 15. 16 Sassen, “Reading the City,” 19. 17 “Reading the City,” 19. 18 DeLillo’s novel has received a methodologically diverse range of reviews and interpretations.

ጓ From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture

333

President’s visit to town, an anti-capitalist riot, a funeral procession for a Sufi rap artist, sexual encounters, and a medical examination of his irregular prostate – Eric’s trip captures the vicissitudes of late-capitalist globalization through its simultaneous movement in the material topography of the teeming metropolis and the digital space of international finance. Predicated, as Eric puts it, on the “interaction between technology and capital,”19 this space is a Baudrillardian universe “where capital flows are unrelated to commodity exchange” and where “money becomes an even stranger hyperreality.”20 As we shall see, Eric Packer inhabits a highly unstable und shifting space, shaped by the transition from the traditional, territorially defined concept of empire (and its dialectical other, the postcolonial) to the contemporary information society of transnational cyber capitalism.21 This transitional space, set in the Western metropolis but extending beyond its traditional boundaries, defines Eric’s perverse type of cosmopolitanism, which combines amorally individualistic aggression, hubris, and greed in his financial manipulations with a seemingly boundless mobility in the digital data and information traffic that

For instance, David Cowart discusses it as an implicit response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and subsequent anxieties about the future, destruction, the ephemerality of technology, and the insufficiency of language to register such sentiments. See Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens: U of Georgia P, rev. ed. 2002): 210–26. For a reading of Cosmopolis as a “critique of the world of cyber capital that invokes, and is indeed framed by, the long-standing Euro-American republican contrast of virtue and corruption,” see Russell Scott Valentino, “From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body,” Modern Fiction Studies 53.1 (Spring 2007): 141. Although Aaron Chandler agrees that reading the novel as a “critique of the oligarchs of global capitalism” has its merits, he focuses instead on the “philosophical foundations” of the protagonist’s “cosmopolitan solipsism,” which he explores “through the work of Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of Heideggerian existentialism.” See Chandler, “‘An Unsettling, Alternative Self’: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50.3 (Spring 2009): 242. 19 Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003): 23. Further page references are in the main text. 20 Baudrillard, Intelligence of Evil, 29–30. 21 See also Rita Raley, “eEmpires,” Cultural Critique 57.1 (2004): 111, 115–37; repr. (excerpts) in Literature and Globalization: A Reader, ed. Liam Connell & Nicky Marsh (London, New York: Routledge, 2011): 231–43. I am following her theoretical account of this shift, which suggests “that the old imperial paradigm is no longer applicable precisely because that stage of capitalist and territorial accumulation and that episteme (with an attendant understanding of race and nation) has given way and mutated into a ‘global networked and information society’. In the new mode of Empire, power may be consolidated by transnational corporations, but the logic of power is capitalist and not territorial” (235).

334

ROLF J. GOEBEL

ጓ

sustains globalization today.22 In many ways, but incompletely, Eric personifies Han’s concept of hypercultural mobility while at the same time raising the spectres of Baudrillard’s vision of the cloning of the real by virtual reality and Virilio’s universe of disembodied digital remote controls.23 His illusory sense of limitless freedom in cyberspace, however, is limited by his encounters with, and inability to assimilate, Bhabha’s subversive inscriptions of (post)colonial difference. Thus, his topographical mobility and the restlessness of his privileged lifestyle reflect the vicissitudes of his liminal subject-position in-between various sociohistorical paradigms that intersect in the present without offering Eric any existential belonging or cognitive certainties. Eric’s professional and private universe is almost wholly determined by the electronic apparatus installed in his limo: his hand organizer, “dashboard computer screens and a night-vision display on the lower windshield, a product of the infrared camera situated in the grille” (11). Reflecting the uncontrollable acceleration of global capitalism, this technology is always already on the brink of historical obsolescence: “The hand device itself was an object whose original culture had just about disappeared” (9). Eric feels, and Vija Kinski, his hyperintellectual Chief of Theory, asserts: “Computers will die. […] They’re just about dead as distinct units” (104).24 Nonetheless, the infinite quantity of data provided by digital technology has not simply displaced “unruly human energies”; rather, it has become the new universal subject: In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. (24)

Han proposes that hyperculture in the global age of (digital) reproducibility deconstructs the traditional aura and the notion of authenticity.25 Despite his hypercultural mobility, however, Eric’s electronic technology actually re22 For a detailed reading of Cosmopolis in the context of theories of cosmopolitanism, see Karin Ikas, “Weltbürgertum ohne Weltbürger in der Stadtlandschaft New Yorks? Globale Fragmentierung und gewaltintensive Desorientierung in Don DeLillos Cosmopolis,“ in Stadt der Moderne, ed. Cecile Sandten, Christoph Fasbender & Annika Bauer (Trier: W V T , 2013): 257–69. 23 Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard are also referenced by Randy Laist, “The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51.3 (Spring 2010): 257–75. The article situates the novel in the post-9/11 context of electronic data and global capitalism. 24 See also Cowart, Don DeLillo, 214–16. 25 Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, 41–43.

ጓ From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture

335

auratizes the world through the ubiquitous presence of its visual surface signifiers beyond hermeneutic depth interpretation: “We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable” (80). It also reintroduces authenticity – not as the opposite of digital simulacra, but as an effect of its regime: As Kinski believes, to pull back from recklessly speculating again the rising Yen “would not be authentic”: It would be a quotation from other people’s lives. A paraphrase of a sensible text that wants you to believe there are plausible realities, okay, that can be traced and analyzed. (85)

As if turning Virilio’s fears concerning the substitution of actual experience by remote communication gadgets into a fetishistic fantasy, global cyber-capital technology filters Eric’s entire perception of the city topography around him and of the global scene at large. He watches the assassination of the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which has been recorded in live action on the Money Channel, “in obsessive replays” on his monitor (33). Seeing the echocardiogram taken in his car by his attending physician, Eric is not “sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself” (44). In this “world city” (88), the difference between reality and digital spectacle is reversed, to the extent that the image on the monitor becomes more comprehensible than the actual events simultaneously occurring outside the limo. About the anti-capitalist riot Eric feels: “It made more sense on TV ” (89). To his surprise, he even watches his own image on the screen recoil in shock several seconds before the detonation of a bomb has actually occurred (93–95), giving new and almost parodistic meaning to Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. In the present, the philosopher maintains, the sign has lost its classical function as a representation of a preceding reality (or even to mask the real or its absence); instead, hyperreal simulacra, which no longer denote “a territory, a referential being, or a substance,” precede the real.26 As Kinski maintains, the international protesters and anarchists, who come to resemble a “form of street theater” (88), are not actually oppositional forces but a mere effect of global capitalism: These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside. (90)

26

Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994): 1.

336

ROLF J. GOEBEL

ጓ

Rather than allowing the protesters to undermine its all-pervasive regime, capitalism, aided by its electronic communication technologies, co-opts and resignifies their action as a “form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating.” Thus, capitalism demonstrates “its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it” (99). But Kinski also acknowledges something that Han’s theory of hyperculture disregards: that the capitalist system and its communication technologies do not benefit global users equally and justly, but rely on inherent inequalities: The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. (90).27

Eric’s own nostalgic aspirations to identify some sort of authenticity in this spectacle are thoroughly disappointed. Watching a protester’s self-immolation, he suggests: “The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act.” But Kinski corrects him by pointing out that the victim’s action is “not original,” because it is a mere “appropriation” of Vietnamese monks “in all their lotus positions. […] Immolating themselves endlessly” (99–100). Thus, DeLillo’s reference can be seen as questioning Bhabha’s concept of the subversive inscription of the antagonist Other in the dominant Western discourse. In the climate of global capitalism and its digital media technologies, such subversive hybridity seems to be displaced and superseded by the co-optations of the financial market and its digitized culture of visual fantasies that dissolve the oppositional force of all authentic speech-acts and political actions into endlessly reproducible image series, simulacra, and reproductions of the same. There is, however, a postcolonial counter-narrative partly refuting such totalizing regimes of the system and refusing to be conquered by Eric’s power strategies. He witnesses the funeral procession for Brutha Fez, a famous Sufi rap artist. Following the hearse with Fez lying in state, his mourners enact a veritable parody of multicultural diversity, where politically antagonistic positions are momentarily united in the shared sentiments of mourning: Family and friends came next, in thirty-six white stretch limousines, three abreast, with the mayor and police commissioner in sober profile, and a dozen members of Congress, and the mothers of unarmed blacks 27

For an analysis of these riots in the context of the pact between globalization and capitalism, see Suman Gupta, “Movements and Protests,” in Globalization and Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2009): 13–31; repr. (excerpts) in Literature and Globalization: A Reader, ed. Liam Connell & Nicky Marsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2011): 345–47.

ጓ From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture

337

shot by police, and fellow rappers in the middle phalanx, and there were media executives, foreign dignitaries, faces from film and TV , and mingled throughout were figures of world religion in their robes, cowls, kimonos, sandals, and soutanes. (134–35)

Representatives of Western metropolitan power intermingle with subalterns in a ritual that for Eric brings about “a joy of intoxicating wholeness” (135). But unlike the anti-globalization protesters, Brutha Fez cannot be fully assimilated into Eric’s digital universe of Western metropolitan power. The reason is that the rapper inhabits a kind of Third Space of overdetermined hybridity in which the First World of record labels, commercialized music production, and elevator music is infused with Fez’s eclectic borrowings from Third-World musical traditions: the “qawwali model of devotional rhythms and improvisations” (131), the “vocal adaptations of ancient Sufi music, rapping in Punjabi and Urdu and in the blackswagger English of the street” (133). Born in apparently rather mundane circumstances – as one “Raymond Gathers in the Bronx” (133) – the extravagant rapper has managed to re-invent himself as a spectacular virtuoso who “mixed languages, tempos and themes” (134), liked to surround himself “with an imam and two white boys from Utah in suits,” and once lived in a Los Angeles minaret (135). Fez’s music, accompanying his funeral through loudspeakers, transcends representation and the interpretative regime of language, appealing instead to subliminal sensations of the unreflective body: His voice was going ever faster, in Urdu, then slurry English, and it was pierced by the shrill cries of a female member of the chorus. There was rapture in this, fierce elation, and something else that was inexpressible, dropping off the edge, all meaning exhausted until nothing was left but charismatic speech, words sprawling over themselves, without drums or handclaps or the woman’s pitched cries. (135–36)

Blending in with the pure materiality of audible signifiers, the visual poignancy of the funeral subverts Eric’s irrational self-confidence: “Here was a spectacle he could clearly not command” (136). Although thoroughly intrigued by it, Eric recognizes that Brutha Fez remains alien to him because he cannot assimilate and master all the strange elements of the rapper’s art – the Sufi tradition, the deliberately impoverished lifestyle, his “anti-matter rap” – which for Fez, of course, are utterly “natural […], not sealed in mystery and foreignness” (137). In many ways, then, Brutha Fez personifies an updated, multimedia version of Bhabha’s theory of the uncanny appearance of postcolonial alterity in the heart of the Western capitalist metropolis, whose multicultural topography the rapper simultaneously energizes and disrupts through the multiply coded signifiers of his musical self-articulation. But Fez also seems to represent Han’s

338

ROLF J. GOEBEL

ጓ

rhizomatic notion of forging one’s individual identity in collage-like fashion from the endless archive of heterogeneous lifestyles and practices, thus forming a kind of mirror-image of Eric. The importance of Brutha Fez emerges from his multiply coded subject-position exemplifying a partial paradigm shift from postcoloniality to global/digital hyperculturality, both as a contested concept and, according to Han, as an actual condition of contemporary society. Recently deceased, Fez is absent as a person, yet very real as a revered object of collective mourning and popular admiration. His funeral procession becomes a ghostly spectacle that transcends the ordinary boundaries between presence and absence, then and now, the physical body and the endurance of posthumous fame. His passing – in the double sense of being dead and of being paraded before the eyes of his followers – only enhances the aura of his irresistible appeal to the masses. Adopting many masks concealing his lowly local origins, he effortlessly crisscrosses the boundaries between authenticity and self-promotional phantasmagoria. Even the loudspeaker presentation of his music partakes of Brutha Fez’s ambiguity, as it simultaneously preserves his art through technological reproduction while underscoring the sad fact that the beloved rapper will never be heard live again. Fittingly, Eric’s only strategy for dealing with the funeral, therefore, is to try to turn it into yet another reproducible set of visual data on his computer screens: “He wanted to see the hearse pass again, the body tilted for viewing, a digital corpse, a loop, a replication” (139). While Eric’s striving for the free-wheeling lifestyle of Han’s hypercultural tourist is subverted by his inability to fully assimilate Brutha Fez’s Third-World masks and postcolonial performativity, his digital mobility is also limited by his attachment to the materiality of metropolitan topography. In many ways, DeLillo’s novel enacts Sassen’s dialectic of digital circuitry and material topography; both are often antagonistic to one another yet ultimately intertwined to constitute the space of the global metropolis. Although Eric feels that the traditional term “skyscraper” seems anachronistic when referring to the brutal banality of his residential high-rise, the tower nonetheless gives him “strength and depth.” He senses in its surface an “aura of texture and reflection” to which he feels connected, “sharing the surface and the environment that came into contact with the surface, from both sides” (8–9). Similarly, he relishes the sight of actual pedestrians among the buses in the street – construction workers, women in sandals and floppy shorts, tourists, “schmucks with cell phones”: These were scenes that normally roused him, the great rapacious flow, where the physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds shape every anecdotal moment. (41)

ጓ From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture

339

Although shielded from reality by his digital imagery streaming into his limo, Eric feels attracted to actual space and the real people inhabiting it. Towards the end of his journey, he even joins three hundred naked people lying in the street – extras being filmed for a movie: He felt the presence of the bodies, all of them, the body breath, the heat and running blood, people unlike each other who were now alike, amassed, heaped in a way, alive and dead together. (174)

And although, as Kinski argues, the “present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential” (79), the metropolis remains a space for genuine commemoration. Thus, the barbershop that already served Eric’s father takes on an aura of lived memory, albeit vicariously: “Eric was compelled to come and let the street breathe on him. He wanted to feel it, every rueful nuance of longing.” What matters “wasn’t his longing or yearning or sense of the past”; rather, Eric “was feeling what his father would feel, standing in this place” (159). Against Han’s celebration of globally mobile hyperculture predicated on seemingly unlimited digital connectivity and the ahistorical fetishization of the present, DeLillo re-legitimates the quest for authenticity, memory, origins, and the bodily experience of human subjects in the material actuality of the metropolis, reinscribing them as narratives of the individual subject in the domain of optical data displays, visual images, and other surface signifiers proliferating in electronic communication media. And against Virilio’s exaggerated fear that electronic remote-control devices reduce their users to passive couch potatoes hanging out in consumerist cyberspace, DeLillo grounds any digital mobility in the material movements and actions of actual people in experiential time– space coordinates, thus siding with Virilio’s claim that authentic experience presupposes the presence of the living body in material reality. What conclusions can we draw from these competing theoretical and artistic positions? I have traced what I see as an important paradigm shift from the deconstructive theory of postcoloniality – exemplified by Bhabha’s notion of the subversive inscription of non-Western voices in the dominant discourse of the metropolitan centre – to the digital media society of late consumer capitalism today, as represented by Han’s philosophy of global hyperculture, Baudrillard’s theory of the disappearance of the real in the simulacra generated by digital media, and Virilio’s theory of interactive media in the age of acceleration. This paradigm shift, however, does not simply constitute a linear replacement of an older theory by newer ones; rather, it is partial and uneven, preserving, modifying, and critiquing fragments of postcolonial theory within competing models

340

ROLF J. GOEBEL

ጓ

that are themselves revealed as limited and incomplete. In many ways, it seems to me, we have moved historically beyond Bhabha’s project of employing poststructuralist theory to “rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial.”28 Although postmodernity continues to wrestle with the inscription of the alternative voices of migrants, subalterns, minorities, and displaced peoples in the dominant space of the Western metropolis, its cultural topography can no longer be fully described by means of the strategies of textual deconstruction provided by the poststructuralist premises of postcolonial theory. As DeLillo’s novel shows, the global metropolis of today produces, and is shaped by, a wide spectrum of individual subject-positions, political ideologies, economic transactions. It may not be appropriate to identify this space as a ‘topography’– literally, a written place. Instead, one ought to call it a ‘topo-medium’ – a space in which urban life articulates itself through digital-media technologies combining topographic narratives with visual signifiers and soundscapes that are insufficiently representable through the textual strategies of deconstructive postcoloniality alone.29 Thus, it seems to me, the postmodern – if it is to retain its validity as the defining condition of the present – can only be named from the position of a postcoloniality that goes beyond itself, re-inventing its advocacy of political resistance and socio-economic emancipation within the intermedial parameters of digital globalization. The postmodern, then, is the time of the present that always already refuses to be summoned by a single name alone.

W OR K S C I T E D Baudrillard, Jean. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, tr. Chris Turner (Le pacte de lucidité ou I intelligence du Mal, 2004; Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005). ——. “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1994): 1–42. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Chandler, Aaron. “ ‘An Unsettling, Alternative Self’: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50.3 (Spring 2009): 241–60. 28

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 175. I am partly following Friedrich A. Kittler’s suggestion that the modern city can be understood as a medium because in the age of information technologies, it constitutes a “network made up of intersecting networks” that stretches from the center to the periphery, encompassing the transfer of information through the telephone, radio, and television, or of energy through systems of water supply, electricity, or highways. See Kittler, “The City is a Medium,” N L H : New Literary History 27.4 (Autumn 1996): 718. 29

ጓ From Postcoloniality to Global Media Culture

341

Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens: U of Georgia P , rev. ed. 2002). DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003). Dörr, Volker C. “Multi-, Inter-, Trans- und Hyper-: Kulturalität und (deutsch-türkische) ‘Migrantenliteratur’,” in Zwischen Provokation und Usurpation: Interkulturalität als (un)vollendetes Projekt der Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaften, ed. Dieter Heimböckel, Irmgard Honnef–Becker, Georg Mein & Heinz Sieburg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010): 71–86. Gupta, Suman. “Movements and Protests,” in Globalization and Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2009: 13–31; repr. in Literature and Globalization: A Reader, ed. Liam Connell & Nicky Marsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2011): 344–57. Han, Byung-Chul. Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung (Berlin: Merve, 2005). Ikas, Karin. “Weltbürgertum ohne Weltbürger in der Stadtlandschaft New Yorks? Globale Fragmentierung und gewaltintensive Desorientierung in Don DeLillos Cosmopolis,” in Stadt der Moderne, ed. Cecile Sandten, Christoph Fasbender & Annika Bauer (Trier: W V T , 2013): 257–69. Kittler, Friedrich A. “The City is a Medium,” NL H : New Literary History 27.4 (Autumn 1996): 717–29. Laist, Randy. “The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51.3 (Spring 2010): 257–75. Raley, Rita. “eEmpires,” Cultural Critique 57.1 (2004): 115–37; repr. (excerpts) in Literature and Globalization: A Reader, ed. Liam Connell & Nicky Marsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2011): 231–43. Sassen, Saskia. “Reading the City in a Global Digital Age: Between Topographic Representation and Spatialized Power Projects,” in Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age, ed. Linda Krause & Patrice Petro (New Brunswick N J & London: Rutgers U P , 2003): 15–30. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1999). Valentino, Russell Scott. “From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body,” Modern Fiction Studies 53.1 (Spring 2007): 140–62. Virilio, Paul. Open Sky, tr. Julie Rose (La Vitesse de libération, 1995; London & New York: Verso, 1997). ZaimoȪlu, Feridun. Kanak Sprak. 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995).

ጓ

Between Ghetto and Utopia London as a Postcolonial Metropolis in Recent British Music Videos O L IV E R L I N DN ER

Introduction

I

N T O D A Y ’ S I N C R E A S I N G L Y G L O B A L I Z E D and globalizing world, London is regarded as one of the “leading migrant cities”1 or even the “paradigmatic world city.”2 Recently, London has cemented its status as a cosmopolitan city by hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. With its much-celebrated cultural diversity, Great Britain’s capital also plays an outstanding role in the realm of popular culture, not only as a place where it is produced but also as a topos within its texts. Besides newspapers, magazines, documentaries, television shows, installations, the realm of advertising, feature films, and soap operas, pop music and its audiovisual format of the music video are a genre in which the role of London as Britain’s creative centre features prominently. In fact, music video’s combination of text, image, and music, its function as a commercial text showcasing the star, as well as its characteristics of non-narrative structures and short form, make possible modes of expression and interpretation unique to the genre. With the demise of MTV as a music video channel a few years ago, some even predicted the end of the music video as we know it. They were wrong. Music videos are more popular than ever.3 With nine of the ten most popular

1

Blair Ruble, “Introduction: Renegotiating the City,” in Immigration and Integration in Urban Communities: Renegotiating the City, ed. Blair A. Ruble, Lisa M. Henley & Allison M. Garland (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2008): 3. 2 Panu Lehtovuori, Experience and Conflict: The Production of Urban Space (Farnham & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2010): 95. 3 Jason Middleton & Roger Beebe, “Introduction,” in Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphone, ed. Roger Beebe & Jason Middleton (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2007): 3.

344

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

clips on YouTube music videos, the genre has escaped the narrow confines of television, re-invented itself, and now attracts a global audience in the era of web 2.0.4 Its persistent attraction is part of a much wider pattern of the dominance of the visual in contemporary popular culture which, as Diane Railton and Paul Watson summarize, is not simply reducible, however, to the emergence and development of personal mobile media but is, rather, a part of the more general penetration of screens and screen technology into virtually all aspects of contemporary life.5

Apart from the ubiquitous availability of music videos through the rise of web 2.0 and its various global video platforms, Railton and Watson also point to another interesting shift in the distribution and reception of music videos: instead of being merely carriers of the primary product, the music, they now have become products ‘in their own right’, owing to the decline of the importance of radio and the rise of the audiovisual.6 Having arguably gained unprecedented significance, music videos are, especially for their putative target groups of young people, primary sites of representation of social relationships, social groups and their rituals, ideals and ideologies. Not surprisingly, the city has always been a favourite setting for music videos. London, as the undisputed creative centre of the U K , has maintained a prominent position as a location in all sorts of British music videos throughout the history of pop music from the 1980s onwards. Since many contemporary British pop stars have a global appeal, their music videos are likewise distributed globally, and along with this their videos’ images of London. Moreover, foreign pop stars also use the dynamic image of the British metropolis in their videos – for example, Britney Spears’s “Criminal” (2011) or will.i.am’s “This is Love (2012). In most of these videos, the ideas that constitute London as signifier can be merged into a fashionable, glitzy backdrop to the star’s performance so that the artist’s image benefits from the cosmopolitanism and urbanity of the British metropolis (recent examples include Cher Lloyd’s “With Your Love [2011], Kylie Minogue’s “Timebomb” [2011], Crystal Fighters’s “I Love London” [2011], Lady Antebellum’s “Just a Kiss” [2012], Dizzee Rascal’s “Goin’ Crazy” [2013] or One Direction’s “One Thing” [2012] and “Midnight Memories” [2014]).

4

Cf. Wikipedia, “List of Most Viewed YouTube Videos” (accessed 2 April 2013). Diane Railton & Paul Watson, Music Video and the Politics of Representation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2011): 7. 6 Cf. Railton & Watson, Music Video and the Politics of Representation, 7. 5

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

345

Whereas the most obvious representation of London in British and international music videos is that of a vibrant metropolis that is recognized easily by the global viewer because of its iconic buildings, the following investigation will be concerned with the presence of postcolonial issues in the depiction of London, once the metropolitan centre of British colonialism and “the metonym for imperial power itself.”7 Generally, literary representations of postcolonial London, a much-explored field for postcolonial scholars, usually only reach those who are aware of and interested in postcolonial issues anyway. The music videos the essay will focus on, however, introduce the postcolonial city to the mass market, and to an audience with significantly less knowledge of or reflection on this aspect: namely, teenagers, the main consumers and target groups of the music-video format. My claim is that looking at these videos is important, since they open up the rich territory of popular culture and its discursive practices, so far largely neglected by postcolonial scholars, despite the wide appeal of popular culture and its influence on ‘inventions’ of the postcolonial metropolis.8 ‘Postcolonial space’ will be understood in this essay as space containing important visual elements that can be linked to Britain’s colonial and postcolonial history, most notably in the presence of diasporic communities and their cultural influence on British society. I will be will introducing three stagings of postcolonial London in recent British music videos: the ‘Fourth-World ghetto’; the ‘all-inclusive postcolonial utopia’; and the ‘site of (post-)postcolonial resistance’. It will investigate how artists from different scenes and groups such as black British hip-hop music, British-Asian bhangra music, and the more commercial mainstream pop scene have developed strategies of lending the city narrative weight and thereby negotiating its rich and diverse postcolonial texture. Moreover, the essay will argue that while some music videos display ethnic minority groups carving out their spatial and cultural territory or show urban space as a site of resistance, videos featuring commercial pop stars, in particular, seek an all-embracing inclusivity that erases frictions and implies the presence of multicultural urban space as a twenty-first-century utopia. The essay, further, seeks to demonstrate how the representation of London as a postcolonial space in music videos is closely tied to the formal and aesthetic techniques most suited to generating and maintaining both the specific performer’s image and the generic conventions of the musical style and its visual expression. 7

John Clement Ball, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004): 4. 8 Cf. Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005): 8.

346

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

London as a Fourth-World Ghetto: Ghetts’s “In a Zone” (2012) British hip-hop music has established itself as a vibrant and profitable musical genre over the last decade, ranging from best-selling stars like Dizzee Rascal, Rizzle Kicks, and Tinchy Stryder to a diverse local hip-hop scene in the urban centres of London, Manchester, Bristol or Birmingham.9 Due to the emergence of web 2.0 with its many video platforms and interactive features, low-budget productions of hip-hop videos have found new channels of distribution, so that innumerable videos of such rappers as Maxsta, Ghetts, G-Money, Bitty, and others can be found on the web, competing for the attention of their target groups. Similar to other established musical genres such as r&b, teen pop or alternative, rap videos display a number of generic conventions that have to be considered when investigating the representation of urban space.10 The overwhelming majority of black British hip-hop videos are low-cost productions that feature a staged performance by the rappers. The playing of musical instruments is usually absent, so that the entire focus is on the oral performance of the artist. With their celebration of male bonding, comradeship, and a nonnarrative structure, the aesthetic of a great number of black British hip-hop videos puts the performers in the centre of focus.11 The ‘street’ and other urban outdoor areas are of crucial importance, since they show the performer in an ‘authentic’ environment; moreover, “by recalling the block parties and sidewalk performances with which hip hop began, they symbolize rap’s origins, keeping it close to its roots.”12 As Carol Vernallis observes, rap is the single genre consistently committed to creating a sense of place: the videos often feature identifiable housing projects, small businesses, and street signs.13

In the flourishing scene of black British hip hop, especially in its ‘underground’ branch, space is aestheticized in a carefully staged environment. Council estates, parking lots, buses, street signs, and other spatial signifiers of the local neigh-

9

See Alexis Petridis, “What’s so special about the British rap pack?” The Guardian Online (18 November 2011). 10 See Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia U P , 2004): 80–83. 11 Oliver Lindner, “Black Urban Gang Culture and the Media in Britain,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (Z A A ) 59.3 (2011): 285–87. 12 Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, 77. 13 Experiencing Music Video, 78.

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

347

bourhood are indispensable set-pieces that contribute to the street-credibility of the performer. In the following, the music video to the black British rapper Ghetts’s song “In a Zone” will be investigated to examine its representation of postcolonial London. Released in February 2012, the video is directed by Benjamin Rose and Konstantin Ermakov. It is located firmly within the boundaries of the hip-hop genre. Keeping to convention, most of the shots feature the staged performance of the rapper; other musicians or musical instruments are absent. Apart from this, the video employs a remarkable range of filmic techniques, such as blackand-white filming or tiny texts inserted into the image. The title’s ‘technical’ term ‘zone’ is significant: it denotes an entity of regulated space that is determined by an authoritative administration and thus imposed from above, leaving the subject in a passive position. This technical spatial concept is the very opposite of the positively connoted ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘home’ as space that is appropriated by the subject and invested with special social meaning, where “particular kinds of social relations and activities are composed, accomplished and contextualized.”14 There are also no interior shots, so that any notion of private dwelling-space is absent. Since the song’s lyrics employ the word ‘zone’ again and again in the singer’s technically distorted voice, the impression of ‘non-human’ space is intensified by both the auditory and the visual representation of the city. The star is standing on what appears to be a flat roof or field, surrounded by a bleak, grey cityscape. The fact that the singer remains in a static position throughout the song powerfully supports the message of the lyrics. He appears imprisoned in this ‘zone’, an impression that is also achieved by showing only the upper part of his body, so that his legs are literally absent. He therefore constitutes the very antithesis of the figure of the flâneur, the consumer of urban sights, who, by walking, discovers and also appropriates metropolitan space. Shots of fast trains show the London Overground passing by, and this only enhances the feeling of stasis expressed by the lyrics. In one shot, the bleak cityscape even morphs into the figure of the singer, so that both space and human are in the same condition (02:36). The performer’s isolation is augmented by the representation of other people in the video. Several brief close-up shots of young men are shown, and the video also contains some shots of a freerunner, a person engaged in the sport of running and performing acrobatic movements in urban environments. What they 14

James A. Tyner, Space, Place, and Violence: Violence and the Embodied Geographies of Race, Sex, and Gender (New York: Routledge, 2012): 28.

348

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

all have in common is their isolation, as the video does not contain any interaction and focuses exclusively on young men. The person depicted running and jumping from buildings is not embedded in a narrative, so that the viewer is left wondering about the role of this figure in the video. However, the shot of a police sign points to illegal activities as a means of existence and survival in the ‘zone’ (02:08). From the angle of the representation of London as a postcolonial city, the short close-up shots of the young men are particularly revealing. Belonging to black British and British Asian ethnicities, the men look directly into the camera, challenging the viewer to respond. We also find out where they come from via texts inserted in the image. Croyden (01:55), Tottenham (02:02), East Ham (02:03), and Brixton (00:51) appear with their respective post-code numbers, another reference to the relegated space of the ‘zone’. The video suggests that these individuals share the singer’s despondency about being caught in his environment. Thus, London seems to be full of ‘zones’, all exhibiting the visual signifiers of ethnically coded poverty, stasis, and exclusion. The aestheticized depiction of impoverished urban space in “In a Zone” derives its power to a large extent from being filmed either in black and white or in otherwise cold hues. Council blocks, graffiti walls, and railway tracks are the visual ingredients of the video’s representation of East London, which, as Michael Keith has put it, represents “the decaying metropolitan heartland of old capitalism.”15 Moreover, the video contains numerous close-up images of parts of buildings with a high symbolic value. Dysfunctional electric cables (00:32), a metal fence (00:25), or barbed wire (03.03) all highlight the hostile nature of the ‘zone’ and its policed borders. Although TV satellite bowls (01:18) and the railway tracks suggest an elsewhere, a connection to another place outside the ‘zone’, the lyrics reject the idea of escape. The imagery of the city as a prison is taken up in the very first shot when the camera pans along a scene of graffiti-covered brick buildings and a tower block, both viewed through a wire-mesh fence (00:06). The shot moves from right to left, which is contrary to the general habit of scanning images from left to right,16 thus depriving the viewer of that ‘natural’ mode of visual perception. The following shots are equally bleak, with a bridge behind the wire-mesh fence, which is filmed from below and thereby dwarfs the viewer (00:07), a passing train, and a close up of a CCTV camera. In a later shot, a hooded figure is shown from behind, looking through iron bars out into the street so that the person 15

Michael Keith, After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (London & New York: Routledge, 2005): 98. 16 See Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, 213.

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

349

and the viewer appear as if in a cage (01:25). The frequent imagery of fences, walls, and even barbed wire highlights urban spaces that cannot be entered or exited. They appear restricted and defined predominantly by their borders, displaying the “micro-geography of fortification,” a major characteristic of contemporary cities.17 This repressive quality of urban space in “In a Zone” is further elaborated by the ubiquitous presence of state violence, objectified in the frequent shots of CCTV cameras, which give the impression of constant surveillance. The lyrics match the visual rendering of urban space, expressing the singer’s apathy and indifference towards his environment. Corresponding to the visual imagery of borders and fences, they also deny the possibility of change: “I don’t wanna leave so an exit is irrelevant, I’ve been in the zone so long I’m a resident” (01:12). The spatial construction of the city in “In a Zone” features only one ‘postcard’ view: a shot of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament (02:51). However, the building’s iconic tower is half-hidden by a bridge, which stretches horizontally across the screen so that the viewer is barred both from the view of the building and from the possibility of crossing the bridge and thus being offered access to the city’s ‘touristy’ and administrative realm. Moreover, the long-distance shot and the worm’s-eye view render that part of London even more out of reach. The City of London appears as the antagonist of the ‘zones’ of Brixton, East Ham, and other deprived urban areas within the metropolis. To sum up, the video to Ghetts’s “In a Zone” delineates urban spaces as a prison, in which, as the video accentuates, non-white residents are relegated to impoverished areas from which they cannot escape. The pessimistic, albeit somewhat self-indulgent lyrics, the visualization of impoverished inner city space, the screeching sounds in the musical texture, and the reverb effects on Ghett’s voice: all three basic levels of the music video work together to generate a mood of hopelessness. It also presents a vision of a postcolonial metropolis that has, despite spatial proximity, kept the economic and social divide of former colonial relationships intact. In other words, the city has established ‘neo-colonial’ zones within its boundaries that continue the colonial patterns of marginalization of its non-white population. Reading the video in the light of Britain’s imperial history, one could argue, moreover, that its patterns of mobility have remained intact, with the formerly ‘colonial subjects’ in a static position, the antagonist of the (absent) mobile elite. From a postcolonial angle, it highlights what Paul Gilroy describes as “the export of many social and econo17

Nezar AlSayyad, “Foreword,” in Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities, ed. Christoph Lindner (London & New York: Routledge, 2010): xvi.

350

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

mic relations associated historically with colonial societies into the heartlands and hubs of overdevelopment.”18 Indeed, a glance at other black British hip-hop videos shows that their representations of the postcolonial metropolis are often similar to that of “In a Zone” and can be subsumed under the term ‘Fourth-World ghetto’. In his study on the global phenomenon of gangs, John Hagedorn claims that “the fourth world,” deprived urban areas of social exclusion and slum-like conditions, has also arrived in Europe.19 Although Hagedorn exemplifies this with the Parisian suburbs, many areas of London, social-housing estates in particular, share these characteristics, while other studies point out that today young working-class people suffer from a “more pronounced social exclusion in the UK than most of the rest of Europe.”20 Urban space in Ghetts’s video also corresponds to what urban geographers and sociologists describe as a result of the increase in social inequalities in twenty-first-century cities: the tendency for these metropolises to become “cities of walls, where a great deal of effort is spent on policing, surveilling, and gating.”21 Of course, this depiction of London has to be viewed with respect to the tenets of the genre of hip hop, in which the underdog status of the performer resonates with and requires the depiction of the aesthetic spectacle of impoverished urban space. This setting is employed as a site of ethnic and social exclusion that underlines the position of the star, which can be described as a form of ‘staged marginality’22 destined for consumption by a mainstream audience. This commodification of urban space, however, does not preclude the video’s articulation of disturbing trends. With their generic conventions of portraying the ‘authentic’ space of the neighbourhood and ‘life in the streets’, music videos of (black) British hip-hop artists will continue to provide versions of postcolonial urban space that can perhaps be regarded as the city’s dark underbelly, the antithesis to shiny images of multiculturalism so prevalent in the marketing of twenty-first-century London, as the following analysis will show.

18

Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004): 48. John M. Hagedorn, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008): 45. 20 Cecile Wright, Penny Standen & Tina Patel, Black Youth Matters: Transition from School to Success (New York & London: Routledge, 2010): 26. 21 AlSayyad, “Foreword,” xvi. 22 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 20. 19

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

351

London as All-Inclusive Postcolonial Utopia: Olly Murs’s “Heart Skips a Beat” (2011) The video to the X-Factor contestant Olly Murs’s single “Heart Skips a Beat,” directed by Corin Hardy, was filmed in July 2011 at the Mile End Skate Park in East London. The song and the video have been immensely successful, with the song occupying the number-one spot in chart lists around Europe and the video attracting massive attention on YouTube and other online platforms in summer 2011. With its ska-driven melody, its reggae beats, and raps from the group Rizzle Kicks, the song stands in the tradition of Caribbean reggae and U S old school hip hop. The video itself centres on Murs’s staged performance of the song and contains many close-ups of the star. In the following, I will show that the portrayal of London in “Heart Skips a Beat” evokes a form of urban space that is inhabited by the vision of an all-inclusive and ‘postethnic’ community. By choosing a skating park as its setting, the video capitalizes on the coolness and trendiness of both skating and its various associations in fashion and music. It uses a venue of London that is linked with youth culture, but also with leisure and fun. Hugely popular with adolescents and adults alike, the skater culture is a global phenomenon that viewers all over the (Western) world will instantly recognize. A wall of graffiti, introduced to the viewer in the second shot (00:06), is perhaps the most powerful spatial image in the video. Similar to skating, graffiti art arouses strong associations of American urban youth culture, a signifier of rebellious black youth and its appropriation of urban spaces. This token of black youth is then further intensified by a black breakdancer, who, together with the prop of the spinning record, gives the clip a distinctive 1980s feeling. The presence of graffiti-covered walls, in particular, is imbued with high symbolic value. As Keith argues, for youth in socially deprived areas, graffiti tags constitute a “mechanism for self expression and resistance in the context of their social marginalization and disenfranchisements.”23 Moreover, Keith also claims that, because of their own rules of visualization and typography, these forms of expression and allusion constitute a hidden semiological realm and a kind of alternative public sphere which operates beyond the understanding of both liberal and radical commentators.24

It can be argued that, thanks to the prominent visual incorporation of these graffiti-covered walls into the representation of the setting, the video includes this ‘alternative public sphere’ and, by extension, all of its members. It not only 23 24

Keith, After the Cosmopolitan?, 140. After the Cosmopolitan?, 140.

352

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

profits from graffiti’s ‘rebellious chic’, but this appropriation of black youth culture by the white performer also erases its subversive potential, thus contributing to the utopian notion of multi-ethnic fun time, as embodied by the characters and their interactions. In the topography of London, the venue of “Heart Skips a Beat” is part of the ‘notorious’ Tower Hamlets area, which has gained notoriety as a run-down and economically underprivileged space in London’s East End. Mile End itself is populated to a large extent by ethnic minorities, and is also considered to be one of the most problematic areas in London. For example, in 2010, it was decided to reroute the marathon-race events of the 2012 Olympic Games away from East London, while recently the area made the headlines because of homophobic abuse arising from some groups among its predominantly Muslim population. Both events sparked much debate in the press and highlighted the precarious status of Tower Hamlets as a powder-keg of contradictions and ‘problems’ generally associated in the public mind with immigration.25 It is, of course, important to consider this image of the area when investigating its representation in the video, since it offers the opportunity to examine to what extent the clip confirms, neutralizes or even subverts these general notions of Mile End. Although the Skate Park is the only location in “Heart Skips a Beat” and although most shots are filmed at one site, the clip produces the impression of a dynamic urban space, which is achieved by panning, changing camera angles, and fast cuts. These techniques convey continual movement, which, in music videos, functions to “maintain the flow of the image against that of the music”26 and also lets space appear as boundless. Furthermore, Murs is pictured in front of an ever-changing background. Because of the many fast-changing camera perspectives, the viewer gains privileged access to the setting (and the star), being empowered to approach it from all directions, distances, and heights. Thereby, we as viewers are invited to immerse ourselves in the space and to share it with the star and the other characters, an impression which fosters the perception of this space as non-threatening and positive. This is further strengthened by the upbeat atmosphere and the cheeky, playful interactions between the characters. The visitor is encouraged even further to join the party space and ‘co-participate’ in various sportive and musical activities which promote

25

See Anon., “Anger in the East End as London 2012 Lord Coe confirms Olympic Marathon will not pass through Tower Hamlets,” Daily Mail (4 October 2010); B B C News, “Muslim vigilantes: Peter Tatchell on homophobic abuse” (30 January 2013). 26 Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, 45.

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

353

the idea of ‘choice’, a token both of common notions of carefree youth culture and hegemonic neoliberalism with its celebration of endless possibilities. 27 It is interesting to look closely at the ensembles of urban space that are shown in various shots. A tower block nearby (00:08), a passing train on an adjacent bridge (00:29), and the above-mentioned graffiti walls all point to the spatial character of the main venue. These are signifiers of impoverished urban space, so that the singer is clearly located in a working class-environment. There is no tracking shot and no panoramic view of the whole venue; the viewer is given only fragments of space, which in turn leads to the perception of urban space as generic rather than specific. Through this mode of representation, the Mile End Skate Park turns into prototypical inner-city space, a setting that is used in music videos to furnish the star with ‘street-cred’, thereby making him or her attractive to specific sections of the potential audience. The structure of the video as well as its content convey the idea of a multiethnic utopia. It depicts a day in the Mile End Skate Park from morning to dusk. When it ends with all the participants collapsing after the party, as if to sleep, the story implies that there will be another day like this, full of fun and leisure in an enclosed space (03:25). The urban utopia in the clip is all-inclusive, breaking down barriers of age, gender, and ethnicity. Olly Murs dances with children, teenagers, adults, and grandmothers alike, and is also surrounded by skaters and bmx riders of various ethnicities, while the non-white rappers from the Brighton hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks are also constantly in evidence. Murs acts not only as detached observer and singer but also as participant in several sports activities, so that the boundaries between the star and his environment are erased (cf. 02:10). Two adjacent shots have Murs seemingly imitating the movements of a black dancer (01:17). The expertise of the cyclists, dancers, and skaters also helps to neutralize Murs’s dominance as the singer, since, to the viewer, both are performers and audience alike. The exuberant dancing and movements in sync style the star as part of a group of friends who are having fun together, a fixed set-piece of teen pop videos and images that also invites “identification with and participation in a notional community of teen pop.”28 There is no regulation of access to and required membership in this collectivity, although most of the characters practise 27

Jeremy Gilbert, “Against the Commodification of Everything: Anti-Consumerist Cultural Studies in the Age of Ecological Crisis,” in Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter, ed. Sam Binkley & Jo Littler (London & New York: Routledge, 2011): 37. 28 Peter Bennett, “Teen Pop and Teenage Identity in Britain,” in Youth Identities: Teens and Twens in British Culture, ed. Gerd Stratmann, Merle Tönnies & Claus–Ulrich Viol (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000): 67.

354

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

some form of sport. Multiple identities are brought together in an innocent gathering of a large all-inclusive community, a philosophy that is “now part of the common sense of neo-liberal culture”29 and that is by many regarded as a “market-driven pastiche of multiculture that is manipulated from above by commerce.”30 The video thereby creates the multi-ethnic working-class neighbourhood as a space of fun, but also of acceptance and respect. By using a London East End setting and by appropriating elements of black youth culture, the video aims at winning over the adolescent inhabitants of inner-city areas and thereby to enlarge the star’s mainstream teenage fan base. Interestingly, Murs has issued two different videos for the song in the U SA , where the multi-ethnic utopia is replaced by a boy-meets-girl story and by a sports event respectively, thus catering to the American market in the hope of establishing himself as a star there.31 Thus, the production and distribution of the music videos to “Heart Skips a Beat” show how videos are tailored to specific regional markets. The idea of placing the star in a ‘postethnic’ version of a London inner-city area seemed not convincing enough to the record company (Rizzle Kicks were also replaced in the song by the American rappers Chiddy Bang). Finally, the British version of a multi-ethnic utopian harmony was not allowed to enter into ‘official’ global circulation.

London as Post-Postcolonial Space: Cornershop’s “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” (2011) A wholly different view of London, when taking into consideration its status as a postcolonial city, is provided by the videos to songs of the British Asian band Cornershop’s recent album “Cornershop and the double-o groove of” (2011), a collaboration with the female Punjabi singer Bubbley Kaur. Whereas the video to their single “The United Provinces of India” (2011)32 is shot in Hoxton, London and features traditional dance scenes with Indian women in colourful saris, their overtly political video “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” takes on an altogether more serious issue.33 A joint-project with the Free Tibet organization, the video 29

Gilbert, “Against the Commodification of Everything,” 43. Gilroy, After Empire, 163. 31 Scott Shetler, “Olly Murs Pursues Cute Girl in New ‘Heart Skips a Beat’ Video,” Pop Crush (1 October 2012). 32 Cornershop feat. Bubbly Kaur, “The United Provinces of India” (https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=V-S_plBC1BQ&list=PL93D751812449EFF1) (accessed 20 March 2013). 33 Cornershop feat. Bubbley Kaur, “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” (http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=M01VjQRI7zo&list=PL2EEDA64C236802D6 (accessed 20 March 2013). 30

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

355

was released in 2011 to mark the 60th anniversary of China’s invasion of Tibet. The song is a fusion of electronic and traditional Indian music, and since the lyrics of the song are in Hindi, it is, rather, the non-verbal and visual elements of the video that afford access to the non-Indian viewer. Clearly, by not using the band’s star appeal in the video and by letting the song, the commercial product, step back behind the political message of the state of Tibet, “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” is situated on the margins of the conventions of the music-video format. The video offers ambiguous and contradictory readings in relation to the postcolonial, and it also provides a highly contentious version of postcolonial London: its position as a site of ‘post-postcolonial’ resistance. As a central feature of the video’s spatial construction, iconic landmarks of London are used to repeatedly stress the demonstration as taking place in the British capital. For example, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament serve as a backdrop to waving Tibetan flags, and the “Downing Street” sign is suddenly brought into sharp focus (01:09). In coupling images of the demonstration with clearly discernible visual symbols of British politics, the video has various strands of interpretation. First, there is the contrast between these British institutions and the protesters, signifying the top-down versus bottom-up currents of political expression. In this regard, the demonstration represents a political demand: namely, for adjustments in British foreign policy to consider the plight of Tibet. However, the banners and posters in front of Downing Street or the Houses of Parliament may also signify less an antagonism than a recognition of the democratic traditions of Britain, where it is precisely the parliamentary system, as represented by the above landmarks, that guarantees freedom of expression on domestic and foreign issues. This reading of Great Britain as a place of freedom is augmented by examining the role of state violence in both London and Tibet. Footage of Chinese oppression features many shots foregrounding China’s military apparatus in action as it brutally attacks civilians and leaves mutilated bodies. The highly aestheticized representation of the 2011 demonstration in London also contains many scenes that show the police, who, in their bright-yellow vests, appear as an essential feature of the whole setting and even share a sartorial affinity with the colourful clothing of the residents of Tibet (cf. 01:11). However, their presence as an entirely non-violent, unobtrusive entity stands in marked contrast to the appearance of the Chinese soldiers in the historical footage. Chinese oppression in Tibet is mediated primarily through the depiction of the naked and mutilated body. Various images display the human body in horizontal positions, either being kicked down by the police or arranged in a position for torture. This strategy exposes the most vulnerable side of Tibetan

356

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

society to the viewer, since, as Wolfgang Sofsky has elaborated, it is possible for the victim to relinquish social status or commodities, but he or she cannot escape his or her own body, so that bodily violation is the ultimate form of domination.34 The video also features a depiction of the apex of Chinese violence, crystallized in a row of dead bodies as the most shocking footage of state violence, which again bears important implications for the role of London as a ‘postpostcolonial’ space. Besides that of the British police and the Chinese soldier, it opens up another dichotomy – that of the intact, vertical body of the exiled Tibetans and their British sympathizers in London, powerfully enhanced by vertical buildings such as Big Ben or the Houses of Parliament in the background, and the fractured, horizontal body of China’s victims in Tibet. Reflecting on political activism in the West on behalf of non-Western victims, Paul Gilroy writes: Where the lives of natives, prisoners and enemies are abject and vulnerable, they must be shielded by others, endowed with those more prestigious, rights-bearing bodies that can inhibit the brutal exercise of colonial governance.35

Although this ‘shielding’ takes place only on a symbolic level, at a demonstration in the ‘safe’ environment of the ‘post-postcolonial’ metropolis and in the shape of a subsequent medial representation of it, the dynamics of body politics are similar. Moreover, in recent years the presence as well as the methods of torture have been frequently addressed in the media, from the footage of Islamist extremists and their treatment of captives via the notorious torture chambers of the U S Army in Iraq’s Abu-Ghraib prison to the questionable methods used by the CI A in Guantánamo Bay.36 Consequently, the graphic images of the mutilated body in Cornershop’s video reverberate with a powerful discourse on political injustice and human rights in the twenty-first century. The sections depicting violence are also at odds with the upbeat music and Kaur’s gentle, bright voice, and this divergence of audio and visual content is particularly powerful as an aesthetic effect. London, in this reading, appears as a place of safety for political refugees. It is not just a metropolis with firmly established communities from former British colonies, but it even receives foreigners seeking to escape tyrannical regimes all

34 35 36

Wolfgang Sofky, Traktat über die Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996): 19. Gilroy, After Empire, 89. Julian Borger, “U S military in torture scandal,” The Guardian Online (30 April 2004).

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

357

over the world. In his survey of representations of London as a postcolonial city, John C. Ball has noted: As London undergoes political, demographic, and discursive ‘processes of postcolonializing’, it becomes a transnational city: the less it is constituted by its imperial past, the more it is constituted by a ‘world’ to which it formerly reached out and which is now grabbing hold of it.37

Cornershop’s video can be regarded as a powerful example of this process that opens up spaces beyond a ‘traditional’ postcolonial perception. Of course, the portrayal of the demonstration and its aesthetic rendering allow various interpretations, ranging from an accusation of the unwillingness of political circles in Britain to rebuke China to an affirmation of London as a space of freedom of expression. Nevertheless, to the viewer it appears rather obvious that in Cornershop’s “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” Great Britain as a postcolonial power is juxtaposed favourably to neo-colonial China (arguably, this positive reading of the U K also corresponds to the band’s use of the Union Jack on its website). On the level of visual aesthetics, this is achieved by the technique of montage, which creates a binary opposition around the categories of ‘safe space’ versus ‘unsafe space’, including the sub-dichotomies of ‘free/unfree’, ‘non-violent/ violent’, ‘dressed/naked’, ‘liberal/oppressive’ and ‘just/unjust’. Britain’s role of providing shelter to representatives of a colonized region, one could argue, can be read as a minimization of the status of Britain as a former colonial power or even a revisionist one, giving the “illusion that Britain has been or can be disconnected from its imperial past.”38 The fact that it is another global power that is being attacked by the demonstration even reinvents London as a ‘post-postcolonial’ city. It is a city past grappling with its own colonial horrors and, as expressed by the demonstrators, it is ready and willing to take on a neo-colonial regime and, by extension, political injustice all over the world. This is underlined, for example, by the shot showing Cornershop’s megaphone-bearing frontman Tjinder Singh, who, as a British Asian, takes part in the demonstration for the freedom of another state (03:14). The mixture of British citizens and Tibetans at the demonstration implies British solidarity with the cause of a repressed people and, from the angle of cultural space, invests London with the aura of a true ‘world city’ that guarantees universal human rights. The video’s depiction of the city also captures what is claimed as a decisive characteristic of twenty-first-century London: its “trans-

37 38

Ball, Imagining London, 17. Gilroy, After Empire, 2.

OLIVER LINDNER

358

ጓ

national decentredness.”39 In doing so, the video taps into a lively debate on Britain’s role in the world. The sentiment that the country, on account of its colonial past, has a special responsibility to foster global justice has been expressed repeatedly and has become a hallmark of political rhetoric since the turn of the century, as stated by Tony Blair, David Cameron, and others.40 Moreover, this reading of the video also raises the problematic question of Western universalism in any attempt to intervene in the politicies of non-Western states, which is seen by many intellectuals as a neo-colonial strategy of bringing the whole globe under corporate capitalist structures, as claimed, for example, in Hardt and Negri’s influential book Empire (2003).41

Conclusion Representations of London as a postcolonial space in recent British music videos, as the foregoing analysis reveals, oscillate between the microcosm of local neighbourhoods as repertoire in British hip-hop videos and the fashioning of global urbanity by bands like Cornershop. Produced for consumption by an audience familiar with the particular codes of spatial expression of the respective genres, they reflect and also enter into dialogue with broader economic, cultural, and social issues of a postcolonial metropolis whose spatial universe entertains numerous contesting visions of the global and the local. As products of representational practices, the videos commodify urban space, and these constructions of postcolonial London are closely intertwined with the image of the stars and the different genres of popular music they promote. Whereas, in Ghetts’s “In a Zone,” inner-city urban space is employed to convey the authentic habitat of the ‘underdog’, the celebrated star image in the discursive realm of hip hop culture, Olly Murs’s rendering of the ‘postcolonial utopia’ in “Heart Skips a Beat” aims at convincing the teenage audience of the star’s universal appeal by feeding “the popular hunger for a world purged of racial conflicts.”42 London as a space of popular protest in “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” furnishes Cornershop with the aura of the liberal intellectual with an honourable and selfless agenda. It also shows the band as a political agent uninterested in generating profit, an image that has a fixed place in pop and rock

39 40 41 42

Ball, Imagining London, 5. Gilroy, After Empire, 68. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2003): 145. Gilroy, After Empire, 163.

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

359

music, as represented by the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, and others.43 There are some significant connections between Ghett’s “In a Zone” and Murs’s “Heart Skips a Beat.” Both videos employ representations of socially impoverished areas of East London and therefore seemingly exchangeable settings. However, whereas “In a Zone” marks that space as belonging to the particular group of underprivileged black youth, Murs’s clip does not imply ownership, which, of course, also has to do with the fact that the singer cannot credibly claim it as his own neighbourhood. Thus, when relating the setting to the persona of the star, in Murs’s video, even the run-down area of Mile End participates in a circulation of spaces available to the globally mobile. In stark contrast, Cornershop’s video “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” employs the documentary mode and utilizes the official spaces of postcolonial London in its representation of political protest. It also moves furthest away from the usual territory of the music-video format. However far apart in terms of putative target group or political affiliation, in their functionalization of the postcolonial metropolis common ground is to be found between Murs’s and Cornershop’s clips: both videos have a utopian impetus of a pluralistic, conflict-free urban space either enabling conviviality across social and ethnic barriers or even offering opportunities for global political intervention in the name of ‘humanity’. In this, one could argue, they are both supportive of dominant ideologies of an unproblematic diversity of the Western postcolonial metropolis, resembling the multiethnic self-fashioning of London in the opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympic Games. Their instrumentalization of city space encompasses a contribution to a hegemonic version of the city, which by no means undermines their artistic credibility or ability to sell their music. Finally, whether as a Fourth-World ghetto, a postcolonial utopia, or a site of ‘post-postcolonial’ resistance – in recent British music videos, London appears as a city that, accommodating these diverging and commercialized representations, gathers in many aspects of the early twenty-first century and its tendencies of increased migration, globalization, and a growing intermingling of spaces in the contemporary postcolonial metropolis. This representation of London is also a testament to the presence of music video as a vital media format that negotiates meanings of (un)belonging. Finally, it is capable, especially by cater-

43

Claus–Ulrich Viol, “A Crack in the Union Jack? National Identity in British Popular Music,” in Youth Identities: Teens and Twens in British Culture, ed. Gerd Stratmann, Merle Tönnies & Claus– Ulrich Viol (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000): 95; see also David Machin, Analysing Popular Music: Image, Sound, Text (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2010): 87.

360

OLIVER LINDNER

ጓ

ing to teenagers as its primary target group, of enriching our understanding of the multiple meanings attached to postcolonial urban spaces and their commodification.

W OR K S C I T E D AlSayyad, Nezar. “Foreword,” in Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities, ed. Christoph Lindner (London & New York: Routledge, 2010): xv–xvi. BBC News. “Muslim vigilantes: Peter Tatchell on homophobic abuse,” 30 January 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21260383 (accessed 28 March 2013). Ball, John Clement. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2004). Bennett, Peter. “Teen Pop and Teenage Identity in Britain,” in Youth Identities: Teens and Twens in British Culture, ed. Gerd Stratmann, Merle Tönnies & Claus–Ulrich Viol (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000): 59–79. Borger, Julian. “U S military in torture scandal,” The Guardian Online (30 April 2004), http://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/apr/30/television.internationalnews (accessed 25 October 2013). Cornershop feat. Bubbley Kaur. “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free),” http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=M01VjQRI7zo&list=PL2EEDA64C236802D6 (accessed 20 March 2013). Cornershop, feat. Bubbly Kaur. “The United Provinces of India,” https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=V-S_plBC1BQ&list=PL93D751812449EFF1 (accessed 20 March 2013). Daily Mail. “Anger in the East End as London 2012 Lord Coe confirms Olympic Marathon will not pass through Tower Hamlets,” 4 October 2010, http://www.dailymail .co.uk/sport/olympics/article-1317697/London-2012-Olympics-Lord-Coe-confirmsmarathons-wont-Tower-Hamlets.html (accessed 28 March 2013). Featherstone, Simon. Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005). Ghetts. “In a Zone,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ath53fChx3k (accessed 2 April 2013). Gilbert, Jeremy. “Against the Commodification of Everything: Anti-Consumerist Cultural Studies in the Age of Ecological Crisis,” in Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter, ed. Sam Binkley & Jo Littler (London & New York: Routledge, 2011): 33–48. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). Hagedorn, John M. A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2008). Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2003). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001).

ጓ Between Ghetto and Utopia

361

Keith, Michael. After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (London & New York: Routledge, 2005). Lehtovuori, Panu. Experience and Conflict: The Production of Urban Space (Farnham & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2010). Lindner, Oliver. “Black Urban Gang Culture and the Media in Britain,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (Z A A ) 59.3 (2011): 273–88. Machin, David. Analysing Popular Music: Image, Sound, Text (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2010). Middleton, Jason, & Roger Beebe. “Introduction” to Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, ed. Beebe & Middleton (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2007): 1–12. Olly Murs. “Heart Skips a Beat,” http://www.myvideo.de/watch/8404397/Olly_Murs _Heart_ Skips_A_Beat (accessed 20 March 2013). Petridis, Alexis. “What’s so special about the British rap pack?” The Guardian Online (18 November 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/nov/18/british-rap-packdizzee-tinie-tinchy (accessed 28 March 2013). Railton, Diane, & Paul Watson. Music Video and the Politics of Representation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2011). Ruble, Blair A., Lisa M. Hanley & Allison M. Garland. “Introduction: Renegotiating the City,” in Immigration and Integration in Urban Communities: Renegotiating the City, ed. Ruble, Hanley & Garland (Baltimore MD : Johns Hopkins U P , 2008): 1–16. Shetler, Scott. “Olly Murs Pursues Cute Girl in New ‘Heart Skips a Beat’ Video,” Pop Crush (1 October 2012), http://popcrush.com/olly-murs-heart-skips-a-beat-video/ (accessed 18 March 2013). Sofsky, Wolfgang. Traktat über die Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996). Tyner, James A. Space, Place, and Violence: Violence and the Embodied Geographies of Race, Sex, and Gender (New York: Routledge, 2012). Vernallis, Carol. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia U P , 2004). Viol, Claus–Ulrich. “A Crack in the Union Jack? National Identity in British Popular Music,” in Youth Identities: Teens and Twens in British Culture, ed. Gerd Stratmann, Merle Tönnies & Claus–Ulrich Viol (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000): 81-106. Wikipedia. “List of Most Viewed YouTube Videos,” 2 April 2013, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/List_of_most_viewed_YouTube_videos (accessed 5 April 2013). Wright, Cecile, Penny Standen & Tina Patel. Black Youth Matters: Transition from School to Success (New York & London: Routledge, 2010).

ጓ

The Sounding City Soundscapes and Urban Modernity in Amit Chaudhuri’s Fiction C HRIST IN H OE N E

T

H I S E S S A Y E X P L O R E S T H E A U R A L R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S of postcolonial Calcutta in Amit Chaudhuri’s novels A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), Afternoon Raag (1993), and Freedom Song (1998).1 Occasional references will also be made to Chaudhuri’s 2009 novel The Immortals. The central argument here will be on on the interrelations between sound, place, and modernity in a city that Chaudhuri, in his essay collection Clearing a Space, describes as “India’s one great modern city,”2 where ‘modern’ is defined both by Calcutta’s 150-year-old tradition in literature and by the arts and traumas of its colonial past. Chaudhuri’s descriptions of the city in his novels focus to a large extent on the sonic events and information that act upon the texts’ characters and that constitute what Raymond Murray Schafer in The Tuning of the World (1977) terms a ‘soundscape’.3 This soundscape influences the characters’ experiences of Calcutta as a place and of themselves in relation to that place, and it characterizes the city itself as a place of technology, industry, decay, and the conundrum of modern life. Chaudhuri’s conceptions of how listening constitutes space mark a reflection on the acoustic turn in critical theory, whereby the 1

These three novels are often referred to as the ‘Freedom Song trilogy’, although they were originally published independently and not written as a trilogy. Parenthetical page references to these three novels in the running text and footnotes will be to the 2001 Picador–Pan Macmillan edition, Three Novels: A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song (London: Picador, 2001), which features all three novels in one volume. Page spans for each individual novel can be found in the Works Cited listing. 2 Amit Chaudhuri, Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008): 183. 3 References will be to the 1994 edition, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester V T : Destiny, 1994).

364

CHRI STIN HOENE

ጓ

relation between the objectivity of sight versus the subjectivity of hearing plays on the relation between the self and the other. Sound is thus implicated in questions of colonial power and postcolonial agency, which I will explore in detail below with reference to Marshall McLuhan's “mythology of modern Western visuality”4 and Leigh Eric Schmidt's criticism thereof, among others. To exemplify this dichotomy between colonial seeing and postcolonial hearing, I will then analyse the colonial soundscapes to be found in E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India and in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (first published in serialized form in 1899) and compare them with Chaudhuri’s postcolonial soundscapes. The soundscapes in Forster and Conrad undermine the colonizers’ gaze and his attempts to exert imperial control, because the sounds render the places they signify incomprehensible to the Western characters. Sounds de-familiarize places in Forster and Conrad and familiarize places in Chaudhuri. Thus, Chaudhuri’s characters aurally appropriate places and reclaim them not only for themselves but also for a postcolonial modernity that is rendered in sound. Instead of being merely “perpetual consumers of modernity,” as Partha Chatterjee writes,5 Chaudhuri’s soundscape of postcolonial Calcutta constitutes a re-imagining of the city and a reclamation of urban modernity.

Soundscapes As defined by the Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer in The Tuning of the World, the term ‘soundscape’ describes the sonic environment of our everyday surroundings and is, hence, an intrinsic part of our lives. Schafer traces the development of that soundscape in step with the development of human life and civilization, arguing that, in the contemporary Western world, we have experienced an ever-increasing complexity of our sonic surroundings. With the development of civilizations, new sounds and noises of mechanical production and industry have come into being, and Schafer provides a half-page list of eighteenth-century inventions alone that fundamentally altered people’s aural perception of their environment,6 including the steam engine “as prime mover”

4

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962): 20. 5 Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996): 216. 6 Raymond Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester V T : Destiny, 1994): 73.

ጓ The Sounding City

365

(invented 1781–86), the gas engine (1791), and the signal telegraph (1793). Moving on to the modern age of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century and the noise of factories, city streets, and airports, Schafer speaks of “sound imperialism” and its effects on the human ear: the soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known.7

In his book Victorian Soundscapes (2003), John M. Picker elaborates on the causes and effects of this aural transition in the Victorian era and in Victorian literature.8 Applying Schafer’s concept of the soundscape to literary analysis, Picker’s study is representative of the recent surge in sound studies in the humanities,9 and briefly looking at his main thesis will allow me to build my own categories for analysing the literary soundscapes in Chaudhuri’s novels. Picker shows how sonic events and inventions, such as the telegraph (patented in 1837), the microphone (invented by David Hughes in 1878), and the phonograph (invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison), “opened up new areas of acoustic inquiry”10 and heavily influenced George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad, among others. Picker describes the Victorian era as an age “alive as well with the performance of the literary figures who struggled to hear and be heard above or through all of this,” where “this” denotes the Victorian soundscape of “technological developments and natural forces as wildly different as the microphone and Krakatoa,” which marked the era as “a period of unprecedented amplification, unheard-of-loudness.”11 From this brief description we can already derive five crucial ways in which sound can enter the predominantly visual domain of literature and how novels can thus evoke sound: first, as characters’ auditory perceptions (they hear, listen); second, as characters’ vocal actions (they talk, speak, scream, shout, sing); third, as descriptions of environments with predominantly auditory terms and a focus on auditory sensations; fourth, when sound itself is the subjectmatter (e.g., musical events, noise, attention to sound, silence as the absence of sound); and, fifth, when objects and technologies of auditory perception are the subject-matter (such as the phonograph or the microphone, both of which are 7

Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 3 John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). 9 For a comprehensive overview of and introduction to the field, see The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012). 10 Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 3. 11 Victorian Soundscapes, 4. 8

CHRI STIN HOENE

366

ጓ

often discussed as symbols of modernity).12 We can add to these a sixth domain of literary sounding: namely, linguistic sound effects such as onomatopoeia, assonance and consonance, different dialects and voices, or language perceived as sound without semantic meaning (in the case of an unfamiliar foreign language, or when sound is heard from a child’s perspective, as with Sandeep in A Strange and Sublime Address, who is listening to the adults talking and believes “every word of it, that is, the tone of the words rather than the words themselves, because they were said with such confidence, such superior conviction,” 24). My own focus in this essay will be on the first four ways of literary sounding – hence, on how characters in Chaudhuri’s novels and, to an extent, in Forster’s and Conrad’s as well, experience, interpret, and interact with their sonic surroundings.

Sounding the Familiar in Chaudhuri’s Novels It might seem paradoxical that a mode so obviously suited to the visual act of reading as the novel should apply itself to aural rather than visual description and perception, but Chaudhuri’s texts do precisely that. And in their appraisal, in this conflict between eye and ear, they open up a new possibility of perception, a way of knowing the world, as it were, with our ears. Sound plays a crucial role in all of Chaudhuri’s novels, as his characters perceive their surroundings to a large extent aurally: fans hum in the background, cars honk and “create an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent,”13 trams screech, people wake to household noises, bells chime, phones ring, birds sing, characters sing as well, pigeons do not sing but hoot constantly and obsessively, mothers shout, babies scream, crowds roar, and the muezzin at the beginning of Freedom Song calls Muslims to prayer and the reader to attention. Descriptions of situations and objects are loaded with aural sensations and musical metaphors, such as the kick-starting of a car in A Strange and Sublime Address: then there was a sudden throbbing in the distance, culminating in a long drawn-out roar, an affirmative crescendo at the end of a tiresome musical. The engine had come to life. (30)

Rooms have their own sound and rhythm, such as the bathroom in the same novel, which “echoed with a strange rhythm” (9), and from where 12

See, for example, Sam Halliday’s Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P ), in particular Halliday’s introduction as well as pp. 64–72 and 138–47. 13 Chaudhuri, The Immortals (London: Picador, 2009): 1.

ጓ The Sounding City

367

one could hear mynahs and shaliks singing outside, though one could hear their fragmentary chorus more clearly from the toilet, which was next to the bath. An obsessive, busy music repeated itself behind the frosted glass. Sometimes, one heard the shrill cries of their young, and felt surrounded and safe. (8)

Sound is so pervasive that it is conspicuous by its absence. The narrator in A Strange and Sublime Address remarks about a scene in which nothing much remarkable happens that “it was a strange scene because, in spite of the number of people who had congregated together, there was scarcely any noise” (49). Where sound makes the characters feel “surrounded and safe,” silence, as its opposite, is loaded with a whole array of signification. Silence is not only unusual but unnatural, in that it suggests the natural surroundings of the characters coming to a standstill: for example, in the early afternoon heat – the “two hours of golden stillness” (81) when there is “not a movement in the corridors, no noise” (79) – or during a curfew: any sign of abnormality made her worry and wonder, and this new silence outside and proximity within brought to her awareness what she probably hadn’t noticed before. (374–75)

Silence is disconcerting and marks situations that are out of the ordinary. Moreover, where life resounds, death is silent, like the “dead calm of the sea” that surrounds the Thacker Towers in The Immortals.14 Through this interplay of sound, noise, and silence, Chaudhuri creates a soundscape of his characters’ everyday lives and of the city in which they live, which is usually either Bombay or Calcutta. Chaudhuri writes the space of the city in sound: The day after the explosions [in Bombay, exact date not specified in the novel] no one wanted to go out but found themselves at work anyway, the usual noises surrounding them.15

Also, earlier in the same novel: the sound of the radio came from outside; and from a side-table Mini picked up her spectacles; it was morning and the moment of waking; the consciousness which meant a return to these sounds of the building and further away the noises of Chitpur Road.16

14 15 16

Chaudhuri, The Immortals, 90. Chaudhuri, Freedom Song, 414. Freedom Song, 379

368

CHRI STIN HOENE

ጓ

Chaudhuri thus imbues the places he writes about with a distinct aural flavour that is recognizable to his characters, who use this soundscape for orientation and identification. The sounds are part of their lives and thus part of themselves. Changes in sounds indicate changes in place and vice versa, which often also show a character’s dislocation and alienation. The narrator in Afternoon Raag observes about his lover’s room that “Mandira lived in a college among undergraduates. The rhythms and inflections, the sounds, were different here from those of graduate life.”17 More poignantly, Nirmalya in The Immortals, while away from India to attend college in England, finds himself both alienated and isolated, a sense that is conveyed by the absence of sound: From the beginning, he was struck by the excess of silence; and he began to realize that his famous love of solitude was not real, that he loved company and noise much more than his own thoughts.18

Again, where sound signals company and instils a feeling of familiarity with the environment, silence and unfamiliar sounds cause Nirmalya distinct discomfort by disturbing his sense of self in relation to his surroundings: And just when he’d grown used to listening to the silence and its thin, unvarying pitch, he heard, one grey afternoon, his neighbour in the next room, coughing. Nirmalya was trapped; he froze at his table; his heart plummeted suddenly. [...] For an interminable fifteen minutes after hearing the solitary, but astonishingly candid, cough, Nirmalya kept very quiet, newly aware of every sound.19

Soundscapes thus suggest a strong link between a place, its sounds, and the identity of the people inhabiting this place. To analyse the specific characteristics of a particular soundscape more closely, Schafer devises the concepts of keynote, signal, and soundmark, which he regards as the significant features of a soundscape. For my own analysis, I will focus on keynote sounds, although the concept and function of signal sounds will crop up briefly later on. Schafer derives the concept of keynote sounds from musical theory, where a keynote “identifies the key or tonality of a particular composition.”20 He explains that keynote sounds are the reference point of a soundscape and that they do not require conscious listening but are often perceived subconsciously:

17 18 19 20

Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag, 230. Chaudhuri, The Immortals, 361. The Immortals, 362–63. Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 9.

ጓ The Sounding City

369

Keynote sounds do not have to be listened to consciously; they are overheard but cannot be overlooked, for keynote sounds become listening habits in spite of themselves.21

Keynote sounds thereby deeply affect the people living in a place constituted by a particular soundscape. As Schafer puts it, “the keynote sounds of a given place are important because they help to outline the character of men living among them.”22 Keynote sounds therefore possess “archetypal significance; that is, they may have imprinted themselves so deeply on the people hearing them that life without them would be sensed as a distinct impoverishment.” 23 Accordingly, in Chaudhuri’s novels, the city sounds can be identified as keynote sounds that characterize the urban space from which they emanate, as in A Strange and Sublime Address: Outside, rickshawallas sang tunelessly and clapped their hands in the cold, with a small wood fire before them. Their tuneless song and their clapping hands were also a part of this other existence, this bottomless being. (95–96)

“This bottomless being” marks the city itself in the novel. Moreover, these keynote sounds characterize the city as a place of human habitation: when dawn came, and the first sounds of the city, immemorial sounds, rose in the sky, and the sun shone on the beads of frost, and the newspaper-box and the men at the underground resumed their work, and Saraswati could be heard tinkering remotely in the kitchen, and the crow cawed at the window, then they [the children] felt safe and calm, they slept happily in the first busy and noisy hours of daylight. The noise of the city drowned out the noise in their heads and lulled them to sleep. (101)

To the characters, the keynote sounds of the city possess “archetypal significance,” because they suggest a feeling of security and of being at home, a familiarity with their surroundings. Listening to the city, Chaudhuri’s characters make it their own, appropriating it into their sense of self.

ጓ

21 22 23

Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 9. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 9. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 10.

370

CHRI STIN HOENE

ጓ

Aural Misperceptions of Empire in E.M. Forster and Joseph Conrad This auditory appropriation of space is implicated with the politics of sound and listening, seeing that the question of hearing versus seeing is one not only of sensory perception but also of knowledge, power, and agency. As Jonathan Sterne writes in his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader (2012), there are several presumptions that underlie our understanding of seeing versus hearing. One is that while “hearing immerses its subject, vision offers a perspective,”24 or, similarly, “sounds come to us, but vision travels to its objects.”25 Broadly speaking, seeing is considered as active, and hearing as passive. Also, sight is understood to be objectifying: there is an ‘outside’ object world constituted by the seeing subject. Seeing makes a subject and an object, a here and a there; hence, the act of seeing constitutes the subject, a knowing subject external to what it sees. Seeing is thus caught up in questions of knowledge and of mastery; the concept of the defining gaze, which is usually male/Western and objectifies a female/Eastern other, is a case in point here.26 In other words, it is not only beauty that lies in the eye of the beholder, but also judgment and power over the object that is being beheld. Following this logic, listening (aural experience) offers a different form of perception, hence a different notion of subject and object. Listening takes place over time and is far harder to conceive of in terms of a separation of object and subject. To quote Sterne again: “hearing is a primarily temporal sense, vision is a primarily spatial sense.”27 The listening subject is immersed in what it hears, is always already part of it. Hence, the constitutive division of subject and object is not at work here. Notably, Sterne finds the binary opposition between the visual and the aural problematic inasmuchas it “elevates a set of cultural prenotions about the senses (prejudices, really) to the level of theory.”28 Yet, in the context of the 24

Jonathan Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012): 9. Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader, 9. 26 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 27 Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader, 9. 28 The Sound Studies Reader, 9. The debate around seeing versus listening is philosophical as well as anthropological, and other authors who have discussed – and questioned – this hierarchy of perception and the senses include Jean–Luc Nancy in Listening, tr. Charlotte Mandell (À l’écoute, 2002; tr. New York: Fordham U P , 2007); David Hendy in Noise: A Human History of Sound & Listening (London: Profile, 2013); Philippe Lacoue–Labarthe in his chapter “The Echo of the Subject” from his book Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1989): 139–207; and Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000), who is profoundly suspicious of the idea that one form of sensory experience is ‘better’ than, or at least is valorized over, another. 25

ጓ The Sounding City

371

history of Western enlightenment and modernity, seeing remains the dominant and domineering sense. As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes, the “mythology of modern Western visuality”29 was propagated most prominently in the midtwentieth century by Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan traces the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century.30 Likewise, Schafer: in the West the ear gave way to the eye as the most important gatherer of information about the time of the Renaissance, with the development of the printing press and perspective painting.31

The written – and printed – word becomes the herald of Western enlightenment and modernity and at the same time acts as the harbinger of the demise of orality and audition. This, then, accounts for the fact that vision is the dominant sense of modernity, the other senses being comparably repressed (such as smell) or vestigial (such as hearing’s former centrality in oral cultures).”32

The opposition of visual to aural perception as propagated by McLuhan is imbued with colonial binaries of the developed modern West versus the primitive pre-modern other. For Schmidt, such a narrative of the hierarchy of the senses is highly problematic, because it implies a hegemony of the enlightened, seeing West versus a supposedly primitive, hearing other: the identification of visuality as supremely modern and Western has also been sustained (most notably in the work of Marshall McLuhan) through the othering of the auditory as ‘primitive’ or even ‘African’. The equation of modernity with its gaze has often upheld some of the most basic cultural oppositions of us and them.33

To go into this argument in slightly more detail: Schmidt states that in order for McLuhan to construct his “mythology of modern Western visuality,”34 he needs the other as a rhetorical referent. For McLuhan, this other is the “ear culture” of tribal, nonliterate peoples in which spoken words had “magical resonance.” With an unreflective colonialist lens, McLuhan 29

Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): 20. 30 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. 31 Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 10. 32 Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, 16. 33 Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, 7. 34 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 20.

372

CHRI STIN HOENE

ጓ

made Africa his imaginary for constructing through black-and-white contrast a sense of who modern Europeans and North Americans were at their epistemic core. “The African” lived in “the magical world of the ear,” while modern Western “typographic man” lived in “the neutral visual world” of the eye. The one was a world of vision, objectification, and progress; the other a world of sound, magic and timelessness.35

This world of “sound, magic and timelessness” cannot be trusted, because it has the power to escape the imperial eye and thus undermine the power of the colonizer’s gaze to objectify the colonial subject, an argument I want to substantiate by briefly analysing the role of soundscapes in Forster’s A Passage to India and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.36 In A Passage to India, Forster depicts his characters’ experience of Indian sounds and music from the colonizer's viewpoint. The soundscape Adele Quested and Mrs Moore encounter is foreign and disorienting, and it ultimately challenges the characters’ sense of themselves. As the main musical event in the novel, Professor Godbole’s performance is described as baffling to the ears of Western listeners,37 who try to understand the Indian music in terms of Western paradigms, comparing it to familiar harmonic or melodic elements. However, the overall effect remains that of noise, not of music: “noises, none harsh or unpleasant,” but also, significantly, “none intelligible.”38 Because the listeners fail to place Godbole’s song in the context of standard Western music, his performance is instead deemed to be mere noise. For Forster's characters, who fail to comprehend India and its culture due to their own limitations of understanding and perception, Indian music embodies chaos that threatens Western rationality. The episode in the Marabar Caves is another case in point here. As Mi Zhou argues, the English character Adela Quested yearns to experience India but ultimately fails to do ao, because it is too vast a country to be comprehended visually: Adela’s desire to ‘see the real India’ hence was always doomed. The act of looking will always exclude her from what she looks at; she will always remain the viewer of the spectacle of Indian life before her.39 35

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 21; page references to McLuhan not given in the original.) 36 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, intro. Pankaj Mishra (1924; London: Penguin Classics, 2005); Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (1899; New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 37 Forster, A Passage to India, 72. 38 A Passage to India, 72. 39 Mi Zhou, “Sublime Noise: Reading E.M. Forster Musically” (doctoral dissertation, Cambridge University, 2009): 150–51.

ጓ The Sounding City

373

Instead, Zhou writes, the characters’ experience of India is mainly aural and not visual: “In A Passage to India, the central event of the novel is sonic: the echo in the Marabar Caves.”40 Crucially, this episode marks utter disorientation for Adela, who afterwards wrongly accuses Dr Aziz of sexually assaulting her, and for Mrs Moore, who suffers “from aural horror.”41 The caves not only look alike, but the echo distorts any means of orientation by collapsing the acoustics into one indistinguishable noise. In the caves, sound is disembodied, and the echo “is a sound with no semantic content, an unstable signifier (boum, bou-oum, or ou-boum) that seems to have no relationship to a signified.”42 For the characters, this experience is highly disorienting, marking a break-down of imperial procedure and logic, as sound cannot be contained, which in turn means a loss of control and power. India is thus rendered incomprehensible and unrepresentable. In a similar fashion (and Picker touches upon this in Victorian Soundscapes), Conrad’s Congo confronts Marlow with the often disembodied (hence, invisible) sounds of the jungle (just as the novel’s first-person narrator is confronted with the voice of Marlow, who tells his story at night and is thus himself rendered invisible, “a disembodied voice”43). Picker describes Heart of Darkness as a novel that is “deeply invested in attempting to record an aural landscape of fierce mutterings and menacing silences.”44 Although Picker calls Kurtz “a kind of phonographic god, one ultimately revealed to be nothing more nor less than a ‘wicked and ambitious’ voice of manipulation and conquest,”45 thereby asserting power and ascribing control to Kurtz’s voice, Marlow is constantly struggling to make sense of the sounds around him as he journeys through the jungle to get to Kurtz. Marlow is surrounded by a “violent babble of uncouth sounds,”46 “the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild,”47 “a frightful clatter,”48 and by silence, which suggests – variously – mystery, death, and the impenetrable jungle: “the

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Zhou, “Sublime Noise: Reading E.M. Forster Musically,” 151. “Sublime Noise: Reading E.M. Forster Musically,” 181. “Sublime Noise: Reading E.M. Forster Musically,” 184. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 141. Victorian Soundscapes, 136. Victorian Soundscapes, 139. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 19. Heart of Darkness, 20. Heart of Darkness, 29.

374

CHRI STIN HOENE

ጓ

silence of the land went home to one’s very heart, – its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.”49 And a bit later on: We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, and exuberant and entangled mass of trunk, branches, leaves, bought, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, read to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. (30)

The soundscapes of Forster’s India and Conrad’s Africa are uncontrollable and incomprehensible and thereby defy colonial control as executed by visual appropriation. India is too vast to be visually taken in and comprehended, and the “great wall of vegetation” of the Congo jungle is impenetrable to the eye. The colonizers’ gaze is thereby disabled and further undermined by the foreign soundscapes, which have profoundly disorienting effects on the novels’ characters and thus also escape colonial appropriation. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali observes: for twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.50

To substantiate this, Attali argues that sound organizes human societies in ways that visual elements cannot: More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. [...] In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of purpose and power, of the dream – Music. It is at the heart of the progressive rationalization of aesthetics, and it is a refuge for residual irrationality; it is a means of power and a form of entertainment.51

Overall, Attali’s book goes in a different direction from my present purpose when he charts the development of society alongside the development of music and proclaims music a herald of social change. However, his basic 49

Heart of Darkness, 26. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, tr. Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson, afterword by Susan McClary (Bruits: essai sur l’économie politique de la musique, 1977; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985): 3. 51 Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 6. Capitalization in the original. 50

ጓ The Sounding City

375

understanding of how sound is implicated in questions of knowledge, power, and control is crucial for understanding the difference between ‘colonial seeing’, on the one hand, and ‘postcolonial hearing’, on the other, which in the end comes down to a question of agency and, in the case of Chaudhuri’s city soundscapes, a question of reclaiming not only formerly colonized places with sound but also modernity itself. This I will now explore in the last part of my essay.

Sounds of the City and Modernity The soundscapes in A Passage to India and Heart of Darkness are not only disorienting and incomprehensible, they are also distinctly pre-modern: they are the sounds of the ‘savage’ native and of nature, of rural and ‘archaic’ environments. Both in his fiction and his non-fiction, Amit Chaudhuri challenges this imperial denial of an Indian modernity and instead redefines Calcutta, the former capital of British India, as a place of urban modernity. If Western modernity was predominantly visual, as argued by McLuhan and contested by Schmidt, Sterne, and Attali, then the Indian modernity that Chaudhuri sets out to reclaim in his novels is predominantly aural. Recalling the city soundscapes explored above and looking more closely at Chaudhuri’s non-fictional account of his city, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013), we find that sound and modernity are interlinked on multiple levels. Calcutta is a city of modern technology and industry, which is explored in the urban soundscapes of traffic, public transport, and the hub and hubbub of human habitation. In A Strange and Sublime Address, the family visits relatives who live on the outskirts of the city in a much more rural area where people eat food stored in “pots of red earth” and from plates “made of leaves” (52). It is a visit “backward in time” into a “folk-tale Bengal,” remote from the city, where “myths and ghosts and Bengal tigers roamed” (53). Arriving in the small village by car, the relatives are already awaiting them, because they have heard the distinct approaching presence of the car in the otherwise silent night, which is usually only punctuated by the nocturnal sounds of nature: The night had been silent except for the questioning cry of an owl and the continual orchestral sound of crickets in the bushes. The throbbing of the engine had, therefore, travelled through the silence to the old man’s listening ear, and to his wife’s ear, even when the car was relatively far away and beyond their range of vision. (54)

An intimate part of the keynote sounds in modern urban Calcutta, the car’s noise becomes a signal sound, so defined by Schafer as a “foreground” sound

376

CHRI STIN HOENE

ጓ

that is “listened to consciously,”52 in the rural pre-modern soundscape of the small village. When Chaudhuri talks about Calcutta as a modern city (as he did in his keynote lecture for the 2013 GNEL/ASNEL conference), he does not offer a clear definition but instead evokes a sense of modernity. He talks about contemporary Calcutta and New York in the 1970s, linking these places by a sense of shared modernity as expressed in architecture, the other arts, and, indeed, in sound. Modernity is thereby evoked through what Chaudhuri calls convergences, such as red-tiled floors in Brussels which, in a moment of epiphany, evoke the style of mid-twentieth-century Calcutta interior design and thereby render foreign places recognizable, instilling a feeling of familiarity and athomeness across time and place, situating different parts, different cities, of the world alongside each other in their state of shared modernity. Modernity is thereby evoked as something that is immediately familiar, an idea that, evading clear definition, relies instead on this recognition to convey meaning. In Calcutta, Chaudhuri writes: The Calcutta I’d encountered as a child was one of the great cities of modernity; it was that peculiar thing, modernity, that I first came into contact with here (without knowing it), then became familiar with it, and then was changed by it. By “modern” I don’t mean “new” or “developed,” but a self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life. By “modern” I also mean whatever alchemy it is that changes urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even beautiful.53

Modernity for Chaudhuri, then, is urban. It resides in the city itself, in its houses and everyday objects, which not only look familiar but also sound familiar, not only to his characters (as argued above) but also to their author: Childhood flooded back, mainly because of the stillness that I only ever used to encounter in this city in December. The temperature falls to a level that makes the fan unnecessary. And the child in me begins to attend to details – the pinpricks of sound, of voices and televisions in other apartments, for the rest of the year made fuzzy by or mediated through the fan’s shuttling.54

Here, Chaudhuri echoes his characters when, like Nirmalya in The Immortals and the numerous characters in the Freedom Song trilogy, he constructs his 52 53 54

Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 10. Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (London: Union, 2013): 8. Calcutta: Two Years in the City, 62.

ጓ The Sounding City

377

surroundings and the spaces he inhabits aurally. Where sounds mark alienation in Forster and Conrad, they open up a path to recognition for Chaudhuri: he remembers the stillness, the child in him attending to “the pinpricks of sound” that are suddenly audible again due to the absence of the fan’s noise. In contrast to the aurality in Forster and Conrad, sound in Chaudhuri’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, structures places and endows them with meaning, thus making them recognizable, familiar, and memorable. While Adela and Marlow are baffled and disoriented by the alien soundscapes that surround them, Chaudhuri’s characters in the Freedom Song trilogy and their author in Calcutta appropriate spaces through listening and making these soundscapes their own. Sounds thus trouble the objectifying power of the colonial gaze. Moreover, while the colonial soundscapes in Forster and Conrad must remain the sounds of the perpetually pre-modern, Chaudhuri’s postcolonial soundscapes render Calcutta a city that is alive with sounds that mark a modernity that is urban, familiar, and reclaimed from the colonizer’s eyes and ears.

W OR K S C I T E D Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, tr. Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson, afterword by Susan McClary (Bruits: essai sur l’économie politique de la musique, 1977; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1985). Chatterjee, Partha. “Whose Imagined Community?” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996): 214–25. Chaudhuri, Amit. Calcutta: Two Years in the City (London: Union, 2013). ——.Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). ——.The Immortals (London: Picador, 2009). ——.Three Novels: A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song (London: Picador, 2001): 5–174, 175–278, 279–454. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Forster, E.M. A Passage to India, intro. Pankaj Mishra (1924; London: Penguin Classics, 2005). Halliday, Sam. Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2013). Hendy, David. Noise: A Human History of Sound & Listening (London: Profile, 2013). Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000). Lacoue–Labarthe, Philippe. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1989).

CHRI STIN HOENE

378

ጓ

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1962). Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. Nancy, Jean–Luc. Listening, tr. Charlotte Mandell (À l’écoute, 2002; New York: Fordham U P , 2007). Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (The Tuning of the World, 1977; Rochester V T : Destiny, 2nd ed. 1994). Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2000). Sterne, Jonathan, ed. The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012). Zhou, Mi. “Sublime Noise: Reading E.M. Forster Musically” (doctoral dissertation, Cambridge University, 2009).

ጓ

Pidgin Goes Public Urban Institutional Space in Cameroon 1 E RIC A. A N CH I MB E

Introduction

F

O R A L O N G T I M E I N C A M E R O O N , Pidgin was linked to non-literates, street dwellers, market vendors, and the lower classes of society. It was banned in formal contexts, schools, and administrative offices, as well as in some middle- and upper-class homes where English and French were preferred as mother tongues, especially for children. Alobwede refers to the use of English in these homes as a status mother tongue: i.e. the children’s use of English as a mother tongue or first language is a status marker for them and their parents.2 Although these children may have English or French as their mother tongue in the early stages of their lives, they quickly learn other languages, especially Pidgin, as soon as they are exposed to the larger society after leaving secondary school. For many people, Pidgin was not a prestigious marker of sociolinguistic identity. It was supposedly detrimental to children’s performance in school and especially their competence in English. For school authorities, it marked the disintegration of the moral and educational system, given that it was associated with street-dwellers and under-achievers. The University of Buea still has numerous placards on its campus banning Pidgin or, put euphemistically, advising students to avoid the use of Pidgin, since it is “taking a toll” on their English and is not relevant for international opportunities as English is (Figure 1).

1

Some of the issues expanded upon in this essay were initially recorded in Eric A. Anchimbe, Language Policy and Identity Construction: The Dynamics of Cameroon’s Multilingualism (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 2013). I thank John Benjamins for permission to use the data here. 2 D’Epie C. Alobwede, “Banning Pidgin English in Cameroon?,” English Today 14.1 (January 1998): 54–60.

380

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

ጓ

Figures 1a/b. The University of Buea and its anti-Pidgin signposts

These negative attitudes and steps to forbid Pidgin in the public domain in Cameroon abound on almost all levels of society. But in the last decade, the public image of Pidgin has been changing for the good. In spite of these negative attitudes and its prohibition in public domains, Pidgin has been gaining new functions in the public official and institutional domains normally monopolized by the official languages English and French, and is attracting increasing numbers of users, some of whom work in official institutional domains where Pidgin is normally forbidden and where English and French are the default languages. It is in this light that this essay investigates some of the new institutional domains in which Pidgin is now used. I try to illustrate how Pidgin, formerly a highly non-institutionalized language, is gaining additional functions in formal public and institutional contexts normally reserved for the official languages. I show how it has now spread and is used extensively on public and private radio, on television, in regional administration, in religious contexts, and in civil society, particularly by NG O s. The use

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

381

of Pidgin in these public and institutional contexts is engendering marked prestige in the language. The data used here come from various sources: television and radio broadcasts, court weddings in city councils, Bible translation into Pidgin, and the electoral code, which has now been translated into Pidgin. Speakers’ linguistic or communicative needs, I suggest here – while often also contradicting their attitudes towards, and conceptualizations of, languages – are determinant in the spread and use of certain often disenfranchised languages in hugely multilingual contexts like the Cameroonian. Overall, the essay accentuates people’s choices and adaptations under conditions of multilingualism, urbanization, and glocalization in complex postcolonial metropolises. Pidgin, which for long played only informal, social interactional roles, now also plays informational roles in the wider pluricentric community.3 The constantly expanding nature of African metropolises, marked by their inescapable multilingualism and rapid mediatization, accounts for the (positively) changing status of languages as people cope with these societal transformations.

Prohibiting Pidgin in the Public Space: A Plethora of Negative Attitudes Having emerged in what is known today as Cameroon long before the introduction of the English and French languages, and aided in various ways by waves of Christian missionaries and colonialists, the life history of Pidgin has been marked by extreme negative attitudes towards it, its banning or prohibition in formal contexts, and its inculpation in the falling standards of English among school children and students. On both individual (home) and institutional levels, Pidgin has been treated as the undesired language. At the individual level, Pidgin is identified with the lower tiers of society, and especially with non-literates – as can be seen in (1). In the following dialogue taken from interviews conducted in Cameroon by Anne Schröder, Pidgin is placed somewhere between the official languages – identified with formal education and white-collar jobs – and the indigenous languages – identified with informal and non-official communication. 3

It is true that Pidgin is now also extensively used in electronic discourse (for instance, in online forums), but there it still performs interpersonal functions. Nigerian Pidgin is already being used online for informational purposes by the SuperSport platform Tori for Pidgin (www .supersport.com /football/africa-nation-cup/news). Here, news on sports and livestream of sports events, especially football matches, are provided in Pidgin.

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

382

Question: Answer:

ጓ

(1) And what language do you speak with your close friends? Mostly English. Mostly English for those who are educated. Then for those who are not, we speak either the native language or Pidgin.4

Slightly over a decade ago (i.e. in 2001, when the interview was conducted), Pidgin was still treated as a marker of, and a code for communicating with, nonliterates or the uneducated. The anglophone Cameroonian teacher interviewed in (1) above, though switching to Pidgin with certain interlocutors, certainly does not consider it a marker of his own linguistic identity and social status but, rather, of the uneducated friends to whom he talks in Pidgin. Among students, similar negative attitudes also exist. These attitudes are either passed down from parents or teachers or have been developed as a result of the general rejection of the language by certain sections of society. For the anglophone high-school student resident in Bamenda interviewed by Schröder in (2), Pidgin is simply a “very dirty” language. She would, therefore, not teach it to her children. Question: Answer:

Question: Answer:

(2) Which language would you like your children to know first? The first language I would like my children to know is English; then second French before any other language, but not Pidgin. I would not like them to even know Pidgin. Why not? I think it’s very dirty!5

It is interesting to note how deep-rooted the prohibition of Pidgin is, also at the level of youth. Even though this respondent is still in high school, her stance towards Pidgin in the long future when she will have children is already known. She does not place Pidgin in the category of “any other language” but clearly identifies it as the unwanted code. Similar and even more overt repudiations have been expressed towards Pidgin by individuals in the public domain. In 1996, Bonny Kfua wrote the following statement in a letter to the editor published in The Herald newspaper (Cameroon) entitled “Time is up for Pidgin English”: 4

Anne Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English: An Empirical Approach to Language Dynamics in Cameroon (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003): 126. 5 Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 208

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

383

Whatever might have pushed the British and Catholic Church to use pidgin as a vehicle of communication, it is high time someone courageously put an end to the widespread use of Pidgin English in Cameroon.6

Bonny Kfua’s article openly calls for the prohibition of Pidgin in a bid to stop its widespread use because, as he claims in the article, Pidgin is destroying the standard of English in Cameroon and children’s and students’ competence in it. At home, as discussed by Alobwede, Kouega, and Anchimbe,7 many parents forbid the use of Pidgin by their children. For some, Pidgin destroys the social status of these children who are brought up with English as their mother tongue. In a survey conducted in 2001 in Yaounde, Kouega sought to determine where exactly Pidgin was prohibited. Focusing on three domains, schools, offices, and the home, as well as the use of Pidgin as a medium of education, the results revealed high percentages in the rejection of Pidgin in all these domains and functions. Some of the results of his survey are summarized in Table 1 below. Questions Are you prohibited from using Pidgin in school or office? Do you prohibit the use of Pidgin by your children? Should Pidgin become a language of instruction?

Yes 57

% 31.3

No 125

% 68.7

161

84.2

28

14.8

38

20

151

80

Total 182 (100%) 189 (100%) 182 (100%)

Table 1. Prohibition of Pidgin in various contexts8

Of the 189 respondents surveyed, 161 (84%) reported that they forbid their children to speak Pidgin. Equally high is the number of respondents who are against the use of Pidgin as a medium of instruction in schools – 151 (80%). Interestingly, only 57 (31.3%) respondents say Pidgin is prohibited in school or office. This trend should be considered carefully, because the respondents did

6

Bonny Kfua, “Time is up for Pidgin English,” The Herald (10 September 1996): 21. See Alobwede, “Banning Pidgin English in Cameroon?”; Jean–Paul Kouega, “Pidgin English facing death in Cameroon,” Langscape 21, Terralingua Newsletter, 2001 www.terralingua.org/lit /langscape (accessed 20 June 2008); Eric A. Anchimbe, Language Policy and Identity Construction: The Dynamics of Cameroon’s Multilingualism (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 2013). 8 Culled from Jean–Paul Kouega, “Pidgin facing death in Cameroon,” Langscape 21 (2001): 20. 7

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

384

ጓ

not say whether they worked in the informal or the formal sector. In the former, Pidgin is very often the lingua franca but hardly ever so in the latter. However, if we take into account the use of Pidgin in the civil service in Table 29 and at work in Table 310 below, we can say that there was already a positive attitude towards Pidgin in 2001 in institutional settings – a change of attitude that continued later, as I illustrate below. Most of the negative attitudes above are at the individual level. Pidgin has also been prohibited at institutional level, especially in educational settings. An example that has been repeatedly quoted in previous research is the University of Buea. Buea, Anchimbe explains, has since its creation in 1993 “maintained a no-tolerance approach to the language [Pidgin] evident through signposts placed on campus to discourage students from using it.”11 Figures 1a/b above show two of these signposts and their anti-Pidgin messages. The signs emphasize the (negative) consequences of speaking Pidgin, especially for Standard English. The choice of words to describe Pidgin or its impact is also very negative and judgmental (here, “worse,” and, on other campus signs, “heavy toll” and “shun”). That the University of Buea has a department of linguistics, and that linguists12 working in this department carry out research on Pidgin, is ironic. Pidgin is also prohibited at the lower levels of education. Pupils or students who speak it are often punished. The punishment ranges from carrying a placard with an anti-Pidgin message on it around their neck to manual tasks like cutting the lawn, sweeping the classroom, or cleaning the blackboard. The following excerpt (3) from an interview with the principal of a secondary school in Bamenda reveals the methods used by the institution to enforce the ban on Pidgin in school. Answer:

(3) In fact in this school compound, if you look around, we put a lot of signboards: ‘No speaking of Pidgin in the campus’. We

9 Sammy Beban Chumbow & Augustin Simo Bobda, “The life cycle of post-imperial Eng¬lish in Cameroon,” in Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies 1940– 1990, ed. Joshua A. Fishman et al. (Berlin: Mouton, 1996): 420. 10 Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 181. 11 Eric A. Anchimbe, Language Policy and Identity Construction: The Dynamics of Cameroon’s Multilingualism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013): 175. 12 See, for instance, Ayu’nwi N. Neba, Evelyn F. Chibaka & Gratien G. Atindogbé, “Cameroon Pidgin English (C P E ) as a tool for empowerment and national development,” African Study Monographs 27.2 (July 2006): 39–61, and Gratien G. Atindogbé & Evelyn F. Chibaka, “Pronouns in Cameroon Pidgin English,” in Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting, ed. Eric A. Anchimbe (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012): 215–44.

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

385

punish children, you know, whenever we catch. But it is impossible to stop it. You know, back at home they speak Pidgin. Out of the school campus they speak Pidgin. And when we are not around they speak Pidgin. But in the class, you know, with us, they may not use [it] because they know that they will get a punishment.13

In spite of these negative attitudes and prohibitions, Pidgin has continued to spread into other institutional domains and is used by more and more people. As explained by Atindogbé and Chibaka (2012) and Anchimbe (2013), it has become the mother tongue for many Cameroonians and has stabilized in grammar, orthography, and the lexicon.14 Since the publication of Bonny Kfua’s call for a ban on Pidgin in 1996, researchers have taken up the issue investigating the domains in which Pidgin is banned,15 predicting its future faced with these prohibitions,16 explaining its usability in education and development,17 and illustrating its potential as the ultimate unifying language in the country.18 The bottom line in these investigations is that, although Pidgin might be facing serious bans in various contexts – as illustrated by Alobwede and Kouega19 – it is not facing death or dying, as they suggest, but, rather, gaining ground in the country, and it could, as claimed by

13

Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 134. For more on Pidgin as a mother tongue, see Paul N. Mbangwana, “Kamtok is achieving its lettres de noblesse,” Lore and Language 10.2 (1991): 59–65. For more on grammatical stabilization of Pidgin, see Susanne Mühleisen & Eric A. Anchimbe, “Gud Nyus fo Pidgin? Bible translation as language elaboration in Cameroon Pidgin English,” in Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting, ed. Eric A. Anchimbe (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012): 245–68, and Bonaventure M. Sala, “Reduplication in Cameroon Pidgin English: Formal and functional perspectives,” in Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting, ed. Eric A. Anchimbe (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012): 191–214. 15 See Alobwede, “Banning Pidgin English in Cameroon?”; Kouega, “Pidgin English facing death in Cameroon”; and Anchimbe, Language Policy and Identity Construction. 16 See Kouega, “Pidgin English facing death in Cameroon”; Miriam Ayafor, “Kamtok (Pidgin) is gaining ground in Cameroon,” in African Linguistics and the Development of African Communities, ed. Emmanuel Chia (Senegal: C O D E S R I A , 2006): 191–99; Samuel Atechi, “Is Cameroon Pidgin flourishing or dying?,” English Today 27.3 (September 2011): 30–34; and Aloysius Ngefac, “Globalising a local language and localising a global language: The case of Kamtok and English in Cameroon,” English Today 27.1 (March 2011): 16–21. 17 See Neba, Chibaka & Atindogbé, “Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) as a tool for empowerment and national development.” 18 See Ayafor “Kamtok (Pidgin) is gaining ground in Cameroon.” 19 Alobwede, “Banning Pidgin English in Cameroon?” and Kouega, “Pidgin English facing death in Cameroon.” 14

386

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

ጓ

Neba et al., be empowered to become “a pedagogical language in cities and other urban centres in Cameroon.”20

Initial Uses of Pidgin in Public Space In the 1990s and early 2000s, the use of Pidgin was recorded in certain semiinstitutional contexts hitherto dominated by the official languages. It was thus beginning to play other roles beyond the interactional or interpersonal communication roles it was limited to in the past. These initial encroachments of Pidgin on public institutional space have increased progressively, lending the language more overt prestige as a marker of linguistic identity. Two surveys conducted in 1996 by Chumbow and Simo Bobda and in 2003 by Anne Schröder identify some of these new semi-institutional and official contexts in which the use of Pidgin was attested. Table 2, taken from Chumbow and Simo Bobda, captures the domains in which Pidgin was used in the 1990s. Interestingly, its use was not attested on radio and television, in novels, newspapers, or schools. However, it was attested in the civil service, especially in government offices. Although we are not told why, Chumbow and Simo Bobda signal that “there is a lot of encroachment of Pidgin on the domain traditionally reserved for Standard English.” 21 Domain Civil service Parliament Court Radio and television Newspapers Novels Records (music) Traffic and road signs Advertising Conversation with friends Conversation with colleagues Conversation with relatives Teacher-students interaction in class Teacher-students interaction outside class Doctor-patient interaction

20

Standard English + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Pidgin English + + + + + + + + +/-

Neba, Chibaka & Atindogbé, “Cameroon Pidgin English (C P E ) as a tool for empowerment and national development,” 39. 21 Chumbow & Bobda, “The life cycle of post-imperial English in Cameroon,” 419.

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

387

Large-scale business transaction Language of petty trade Political campaigning Traffic police-coach driver Traffic police-private driver

+ +/+ + +

+ + + + -

Table 2. The use of English and Pidgin in various domains in the 1990s 22

Three domains in which the use of Pidgin was not attested in the 1990s are attested in the 2000s, as illustrated in Table 3, taken from Anne Schröder. In her survey, Pidgin was used, albeit to various degrees, in the mass media, education, and literature – domains in which Pidgin was not used in the 1996 survey. As Schröder explains, in the 2000s Pidgin was not limited to the functioning as a means of anglophone–anglophone communication but serves also as a language of intra-group and intergroup communication for both anglophones and francophones, although to different degrees.23

Clearly, its range of speakers and functions had increased significantly between the 1990s and the 2000s. Language domains Education Mass media Political campaigns Administration Work Religion Trade Literature and performing arts Science and technology Literary topics Politics Humour Intimacy Secrets National and cultural identity

In general . .. ... . ... ... ... . . . . .... ... ... .

Anglophones .. .. ... .. .... . . . .. . . . .. .. ... ... .. . . . .. .... ... .

Francophones . . . . .. .. .. .

.... .. .. .

Table 3. The use of Pidgin in various domains in 200324

22

Chumbow & Simo Bobda, “The life cycle of post-imperial English in Cameroon,” 420. Schröder, Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 181. 24 Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English, 181. Code: . . . .. very high, . . .. high, . . . medium, .. low, . very low. 23

388

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

ጓ

Some of the institutional or official domains identified in 1996 are also attested in 2003, among them work and administration (possibly civil service) but also others – for instance, national and cultural identity; this indicates that Pidgin – though not recognized by the constitution of the country – is an icon for national identification and in the mass media, especially radio and TV . The use of Pidgin in religion in Table 3 is significantly high. This is possibly because, more than a century ago, religious missionaries adopted Pidgin as a medium of religious evangelization and education. Today, the Catholic Church has not only been involved in various translations of the Bible into Pidgin but has also actively used Pidgin catechisms and Bibles in the Mass (see below). It becomes obvious from Table 3 that Pidgin gained some new functions in the 2000s, but the most significant uses are still in the non-institutionalized domains. The values for institutionalized domains range from low (education, mass media, administration, etc.) to medium (literary topics, science and technology, work) among the anglophones. The highest functions for Pidgin are attested for the non-institutional, interpersonal, and interactional contexts, especially humour, intimacy, and trade. In spite of the new applications of the language, it is still, as shown in Table 3, only minimally represented in the public space. Has anything changed since Schröder’s survey? The next section tries to answer this question by taking into account the 2000s and 2010s.

Pidgin Goes Public: New Institutional Functions Since Schröder’s survey, the use of Pidgin has expanded significantly into institutionalized domains. In this section, I focus on the institutional uses of Pidgin on radio and television, in government administration at urban-council level, in civil society for bringing government laws closer to the people, and in Bible translation into Pidgin. These illustrative cases indicate that Pidgin could also be used for informational and written purposes rather than just interactional and entertainment purposes as in the past. It also places it on a similar functional platform with the official languages. Worthy of note in the discussion below is the importance of the Cameroonian sociocultural background in the choice and acceptance of Pidgin as an informational code in these institutional contexts. Radio broadcasts: Interactional and informational functions In the English-speaking part of Cameroon, the use of Pidgin on radio (both public and private) started in the 1980s. Although no entire programme was broadcast exclusively in Pidgin, it was at least used (mostly for entertainment)

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

389

in other programmes. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Radio Bamenda – the government-owned CRTV Bamenda25 – broadcast the favourite weekend entertainment programme Taking Care Business (TCB ). In it, jokes and funny stories were told in both English and Pidgin. Some of these stories were contributed by listeners. However, as the examples below show, today Pidgin is more prominent on both government-owned and privately owned radio and is no longer used only for entertainment but also extensively for information and interaction. In the 1990s, CRTV Bamenda introduced Pidgin News, broadcast entirely in Pidgin. Since then it has been a regular feature on its schedule. Besides Pidgin News, there are two other informational Pidgin programmes on CRTV Bamenda: Agric Diary and E Fine for Sabi (It is good to know) (see 5 below). Another Pidgin programme on CRTV Bamenda that is both interactional or for entertainment and informational is Happy Birthday, initiated by the late Kum Set Ewi. According to the design of the programme, the presenter visits hospitals and talks to women who have just given birth. The women are given the chance to talk about their lives, their other children, and to send greetings to friends and family on the air. As example (4) from the programme shows, it is often bilingual in English and Pidgin and sometimes also multilingual, using English, French, and Pidgin. The default language is English, but for the following reasons the host decides, or is forced by circumstance, to use another language: 1) the interlocutor may not understand English, leaving the host no other choice but to switch to another language; or 2) the presenter decides to play a social role easily fulfilled through the use of Pidgin, as in (4); or 3) the host and the interviewee, both of whom speak English fluently, feel closer when they use Pidgin.26 The interactional function of Pidgin in public space can be illustrated by (4) below, taken from the radio programme Happy Birthday of 20 June 2009. After introducing the programme in English, the host suddenly switches to Pidgin even though it is apparent that the 28-year-old mother she is talking to can effectively speak English. Pidgin apparently offers them a more intimate atmosphere in which personal questions about age, number of children, marital status, etc. can be easily asked without a potential threat to face or privacy.

25

C R T V – Cameroon Radio and Television Corporation. For more on the social significance of this switch to Pidgin, see Eric A. Anchimbe and Richard W. Janney, “Postcolonial Pragmatics: An introduction,” Journal of Pragmatics 43.6 (May 2011): 1457. 26

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

390

Radio: Interactional Function of Pidgin (4) Presenter:

Presenter: Lady: Presenter:

Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter: Woman: Presenter:

(Introducing the programme) The cry of that baby announces the arrival of the mother of all children at the postnatal section of St. Mary of Solidad Hospital Nchobo. Please, don’t go away. (music) Our first mother on today’s edition is on bed 56 and she is the mother of a baby girl. Good morning Madame Morning. (switches to CP E without any prior warning). Weti be your name? What is your name? My name na A.N.N My name is A.N.N You be woman from where? Where are you from? From Bafut How old you fi be? How old could you be? 28 years. Na your first born this? Is this your first child? Yes You think say you fi add how many pikin them? How many more children do you think you will have? This one pass me. This one is more than me. Only this one so? Yes hmmn True, hahahaha Yes humnn So you go end for this one? So, you will not have any more children? Na so I seeam. That is what I see. Weh! You di do anything for life? You di do anything in life? Do you do anything in life? me… Weti you di do? What do you do?

ጓ

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public Woman:

391

I be seamstress I am a seamstress.

From this excerpt, we see the new social character of radio today, achieved in this case through the use of Pidgin. Many more people identify with the topic and the joys and woes of the interviewee because she uses Pidgin – a language they feel closer to than the education-linked English and French official languages. Today, Pidgin is also used on radio for informational purposes. It is used to teach listeners, inform them of important issues and news, and sensitize them on socio-political events in the immediate township context and the entire country. The excerpt in example (5) below is taken from the CRTV Bamenda Pidgin programme E fine for sabi of 22 August 2009. The aim of the programme, as this example shows, is to inform people about diabetes and kidney problems and how they can be detected early enough and treated. Experts on particular topics are invited to the studio to talk to listeners from a professional perspective in Pidgin. In the edition in (5), the guest expert is a medical doctor. In order to stay within the address norms of Pidgin and the traditional sociocultural system, she is addressed as Mamy Phoebe rather than Dr. Phoebe. By doing so, she ceases to be a white-collar expert but becomes a maternal figure who takes on the role of advising others on health-related issues. Here again, the social structure of society is played out in the public sphere, bringing radio closer to the people in this informational role. Radio: Informational function of Pidgin (5) Grace Che:

Dear listeners, I di salute wuna. Na another day for C R T V Bamenda and the programme ‘E fine for sabi’ weh we di bringam for wuna this morning. My guest na wuna mamy weh e di always come talk for wuna here, Mamy Phoebe. And today we go di look about the kidney weh na one of the complications of diabetes. But before we go for the tori proper, I want sey make yi salute wuna. Mamy Phoebe: Good morning ma brothers and sisters. How wuna dey? I hope sey the lectures weh we be repeatam last week about how you get for take care of your foot, we no be doam so because of mistake, we be di doam because that foot palaver na serious matter and we be want say make wuna hearam fine so that tomorrow when you

392

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

ጓ

want go into problems make you no talk say you no be understand because we be passam only one time. Grace Che: And so today, dear listeners, na for kidney plaba we go toucham today weh e di come as a result of diabetes for some cases. Mamy Phoebe: Yes, kidney problem na one of the complications weh we di getam for diabetes and once you don get this kidney problem, it be very difficult for manageam. And so today I be think say make we look at our kidneys. Diabetes and hypertension, them be among the leading causes of chronic kidney disease and we want for thank A E S -S O NE L say them be do some quick, how them di callam?, them be test some people free of charge last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And we be discoveram say plenty people them get diabetes and hypertension and serious hypertension weh them no know. And so when them get this serious hypertension weh them no know and they get diabetes weh them no know, by the time weh them go want reach for hospital their kidneys them don be damaged…

In the past, it was argued by Kfua and others that Pidgin cannot sustain the technical vocabulary of certain professions. But from (5) it is evident that this is not a problem at all, since Mamy Phoebe switches eloquently between medical technical terms and the common daily vocabulary of Pidgin. Since the bulk of the population in the English-speaking areas of Cameroon use and understand Pidgin, informational programmes on radio such as E fine for Sabi find it the most suitable medium for informing people. This informational potential of radio through Pidgin had been used extensively in the past for commercial advertising but is now also gradually being used by political actors for their campaigns and other messages. Thus, not only is the amount of time dedicated to Pidgin on radio increasing but so are the purposes for which it is used on radio – a fact that contrasts with the public status of the language in the past. Television broadcasting – Pidgin news: informational function Before the liberalization of the audio-visual sector in Cameroon in the mid2000s, Pidgin was never heard on the only state-owned television channel that existed then. Now, with three local private-owned television channels, Pidgin seems to have found its way into this public utility. This is certainly because, as opposed to state-owned television, which prioritizes reports on state policy and

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

393

the activities of the government in its broadcasts, the private channels go in for content that is attractive to viewers. This keeps them in business. Pidgin seems to offer them the means of attracting more viewers through its broad dissemination and its appeal as a code for social closeness. The privately owned television channel Equinoxe TV Douala uses Pidgin for highly informational purposes. Its daily Pidgin News broadcast has become very prominent and is watched across the country even in French-speaking towns. Interestingly, Equinoxe TV is located in Douala, a town in the French-speaking part of the country. On its programme schedule (see www.equinoxetv.com /programme), Pidgin News – the only programme in Pidgin – is broadcast daily according to the schedule in Table 4. According to Anchimbe, Equinoxe TV allocated 30–60 minutes of broadcast time to Pidgin in 2009–12. But today, this has increased to over ninety minutes daily.27 With as many as 495 minutes (eight hours) a week allocated to Pidgin programmes, the importance of the language in the success of this channel cannot be over-emphasized here. Days Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Friday Saturday Sunday Total

Time 12:45-1:30 13:00-13:30 12:45-1:30 13:00-13:30 12:45-1:30 13:00-13:30 14:00-14:15 12:45-1:30 13:00-13:30 14:00-15:00 08:30-09:30

Pidgin Programme Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news Pidgin news

Duration (in mins) 45 30 45 30 45 30 15 45 30 60 60 495 (8.25 Hrs)

Table 4. Equinoxe T V ’s Pidgin News programme (2014)28

To understand the evolution of Pidgin in the public domain, we see that the only Pidgin programme on Equinoxe TV is an informational one. If we had to follow the trends in the past, it would have been expected that an entertainment or interactional programme would be prioritized. Thus, Pidgin is effectively encroaching on domains and functions previously monopolized by the

27

Eric A. Anchimbe, Language Policy and Identity Construction: The Dynamics of Cameroon’s Multilingualism (Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA: John Benjamins, 2013): 184–85. 28 Culled from www.equinoxetv.com/programme (accessed 2 March 2014)

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

394

ጓ

official languages, even in French-speaking towns where French would have been expected to play this role exclusively. Government administration – Court weddings: Informational and procedural function In Tables 1 and 2 above, Chumbow & Simo Bobda and Schröder indicate that Pidgin is used in the civil service and at work, respectively. They explain, however, that it is not the medium of work but, rather, a code used by workers among themselves. On that account, therefore, Pidgin still serves simply as an interactional code limited to interpersonal communication in these contexts. By 2008, this seemed to have changed, as example (6) illustrates. Although operating in an official institutional setting in which English and French are the official languages, mayors of urban and rural councils often also use Pidgin to preside at court weddings in the English-speaking areas of Cameroon. The role of Pidgin as a code for wider communication most probably accounts for this. In (6), taken from a wedding ceremony at the Bamenda II Urban Council in September 2008, the mayor decides to use Pidgin in order to reach more people. Pidgin moves the proceedings closer to the people, who normally do not all belong to the white-collar social class indexed by English. In the excerpt below, the lady who opts to pray sticks to English, since it is the official language in such formal institutional settings, but the mayor is not influenced by this and so continues in Pidgin after her prayer. Administration – court wedding by mayor (6) Mayor:

Audience: Mayor:

Audience: Lady:

Welcome for Bamenda II Council. We glad say wuna dey here plenty for celebrate these marriages and as usual na public house this. This house e no belong for Catholic Church, it no belong for Presbyterian Church, it no belong for Muslim. For here even man wey e no bi Christian or Muslim e get right for come here, no be so? (variously) Na so. Yes. So, we no di like for impose. But if wuna likeam say make we pray, then wuna talk and then one person e go fit pray for we. Do you accept that we pray? (variously) Yes. (praying) Father, you are the alpha and the omega. Father, we thank you for gathering us today, father and we know you know the reason why we are here. Father, we are begging you for your blessings; we are begging you for your

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

Audience: Mayor:

395

protection; now do it for us all, for we are your children. Father, we are begging you for your forgiveness. Forgive us all and do what we are here for. Bless it father for it to work well. King of glory, we praise and thank you for you are the alpha and omega. Jesus we thank you for this whole day. We thank you for our lives. We ask all these through Christ our Lord. Amen! So once again I di welcome all man for here and for talk say generally when we come for married e fine say we give some small talk so that make wuna know precisely weti wey wuna di go in for. We understand say plenty people wey them di come here maybe for come sign marriage certificate in order to give their marriage a real legal binding, wey na fine thing [...].

Besides documenting the spread and use of Pidgin in institutional settings, the above passage shows that Pidgin can be used effectively as a medium of institutional transaction: i.e. it can be used for local or regional government administration and procedures. The electoral code in Pidgin: Informational function Another public domain in which Pidgin has been used recently is civil society – for instance, in attempts to bring government policy closer to the people. A case in point is the translation of the electoral code into Pidgin and six indigenous languages: namely, Bassa, Duala, Lamnso, Fufulde, Ewondo, and Bulu, in 2004. Carried out by an NG O , the Cameroon League for Human Rights, and funded by the American Embassy in Cameroon, this translation puts state documents into Pidgin. The document indirectly gives Pidgin some official recognition since it awards it a place in the official public sphere. Besides the fact that Pidgin plays a high informational role through this translation of the electoral code, it is also consolidating its status as a written language – a status often given only to the official languages.

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

396

ጓ

Figure 2. Pidgin as intermediary of state policy

As Figure 2 shows, Pidgin is gradually becoming an intermediary language between the government and the people. Similar to radio and television, NG O s, foreign agencies, and elite associations are also using the widespread nature of Pidgin to pass on important items of information to the population, including government policies. Bible translations into Pidgin Translations of the Bible or parts thereof and other religious documents into Pidgin have been around for many decades. The Catholic Church, for instance, uses Pidgin actively in its masses. In Cameroon, the first major religious translation into Pidgin was Monsignor Plissoneau’s Catholic catechism, Catéchisme (1926). Later, other religious documents were translated into or written in Pidgin, among them Kerkvliet’s The Sunday Gospels and Epistles with Short Explanations in Pidgin English29 as well as his Pidgin English Catechism30 and Bishop Awa’s Sunday Lectionary in Pidgin English.31 In the last decade, the spread of Pidgin into the public sphere has seen the entire New Testament, Gud Nyus fo ol Pipul: Nyu Testament fo Pidgin, translated into it in 2000 by the Bible Society of Cameroon (Yaounde). It is a good addition to the catechisms published hitherto, and is now read in Catholic churches that offer masses in Pidgin. It is also used on other platforms – for instance, on the internet platform Faith Comes by Hearing,32 where audio recordings of the Bible in Pidgin are made using this translation. This Pidgin New Testament has significantly increased the number and types of publications available in Pidgin.

29 Arnold Kerkvliet, The Sunday Gospels and Epistles with Short Explanations in Pidgin English (Buea: Catholic Missions, 1956). 30 Arnold Kerkvliet, Pidgin English Catechism (Rome: Sodality of St. Peter Claver, 1957). 31 Pius Awa, Sunday Lectionary in Pidgin English (Rome: Vatican Polyglot, 1984). 32 For more on this, visit www.faithcomesbyhearing.com. The aim of the organization is to make the Bible available in as many languages as possible.

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

397

Conclusion From the discussion above, the status of Pidgin has changed in the last two decades on three main levels: 1) domains of use: institutional vs. non-institutional; 2) functions or purposes of use: interactional or interpersonal vs. informational; and 3) prestige: covert vs. overt. As the domains in which it is used increase, so, too, do the functions for which it is used and the extent to which people are ready to identify overtly with it. Its presence on radio and television shows that the plethora of negative attitudes and bans it has suffered are now a matter of the past. It is gradually losing its negative attachment to non-literates and under-achievers and effectively becoming the language for wider communication and cross-strata social outreach. Figure 3 captures the evolution of the functions of Pidgin over time.

Figure 3. Evolution of functions of Pidgin

Today, as opposed to the 1980s where Pidgin was used on radio only for entertainment, it is now used in call-in programmes, for all types of advertisements, and for newscast on both radio and television. Using Pidgin in these contexts and media creates a sense of inclusion and ensures that messages passed (in Pidgin) are understood by more people. Given that most African metropolises are constantly expanding and becoming complex through phenomena of globalization and (internet) communication, language is central to how these metropolises define themselves, align with other metropolises, and construct identities and in-groups. The expansion of Pidgin into the public official and institutional domains studied here is the outcome of the expanding metropolis and corresponding adaptations to it by people who now have to cope with increased multilingualism and multiculturalism. Moreover, grassroots awareness of, and participation in, governance,

398

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E

ጓ

media, and civic processes has been instrumental in the extent to which Pidgin has gone public in Cameroon. With the current trends, will it eventually become the ultimate unifying language for Cameroon as predicted by Miriam Ayafor,33 or will it be used as a medium of instruction, as suggested by others? Although a clear answer is not available, what is evident is that its evolution in functions has been steady: EntertainmentᏉInteractionalᏉInformationalᏉInstitutionalᏉEducational(?) For the moment, what seems important is the fact that Pidgin has surmounted institutional interdiction and is gradually being treated as a ‘normal’ language. What will happen next is, therefore, only a matter of the natural evolution of the language.

W OR K S C I T E D Alobwede, d’Epie C. “Banning Pidgin English in Cameroon?,” English Today 14.1 (January 1998): 54–60. Anchimbe, Eric A. Language Policy and Identity Construction: The Dynamics of Cameroon’s Multilingualism (Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA : John Benjamins, 2013). ——, & Richard W. Janney. “Postcolonial pragmatics: An introduction,” Journal of Pragmatics 43.6 (May 2011): 1451–59. Atechi, Samuel. “Is Cameroon Pidgin flourishing or dying?,” English Today 27.3 (September 2011): 30–34. Atindogbé, Gratien G., & Evelyn F. Chibaka. “Pronouns in Cameroon Pidgin English,” in Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting, ed. Eric A. Anchimbe (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012): 215–44. Awa, Pius. Sunday Lectionary in Pidgin English: Complete Pidgin English Lectionary for Sundays and Major Feastdays throughout the Year (Rome: Vatican Polyglot, 1984). Ayafor, Miriam. “Kamtok: The ultimate unifying language for Cameroon,” The Carrier Pidgin 28.1–3 (2000): 4–6. ——.“Kamtok (Pidgin) is gaining ground in Cameroon,” in African Linguistics and the Development of African Communities, ed. Emmanuel Chia (Senegal: C O DE S R IA , 2006): 191–99. The Bible Society of Cameroon. Gud Nyus fo ol Pipul: Nyu Testament fo Pidgin (Yaounde: The Bible Society of Cameroon, 2000). Chumbow, Beban Sammy, & Augustin Simo Bobda. “The life cycle of post-imperial English in Cameroon,” in Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and

33

Miriam Ayafor, “Kamtok: The ultimate unifying language for Cameroon,” The Carrier Pidgin 28. 1-3 (2000): 4–6.

ጓ Pidgin Goes Public

399

American Colonies 1940–1990, ed. Joshua A. Fishman et al. (Berlin: Mouton, 1996): 401– 28. Kerkvliet, Arnold. Pidgin English Catechism (Rome: Sodality of St. Peter Claver, 1957). ——.The Sunday Gospels and Epistles with Short Explanations in Pidgin English (Buea: Catholic Missions, 1956). Kfua, Bonny. “Time is up for Pidgin English,” The Herald (10 September 1996): 21. Kouega, Jean–Paul. “Pidgin English facing death in Cameroon,” Langscape 21 (Terralingua Newsletter, 2001) www.terralingua.org/lit/langscape (accessed 20 June 2008). Mbangwana, Paul N. “Kamtok is achieving its lettres de noblesse,” Lore and Language 10.2 (1991): 59–65. Mühleisen, Susanne, & Eric A. Anchimbe. “Gud Nyus fo Pidgin? Bible translation as language elaboration in Cameroon Pidgin English,” in Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting, ed. Eric A. Anchimbe (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012): 245–68. Neba, Ayu'nwi N., Evelyn F. Chibaka & Gratien G. Atindogbé. “Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE ) as a tool for empowerment and national development,” African Study Monographs 27.2 (July 2006): 39–61. Ngefac, Aloysius. “Globalising a local language and localising a global language: The case of Kamtok and English in Cameroon,” English Today 27.1 (March 2011): 16–21. Plissonneau, Jean. Catechisme (Metz: Louis Hellenbrand, 1926). Sala, Bonaventure M. “Reduplication in Cameroon Pidgin English: Formal and functional perspectives,” in Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting, ed. Eric A. Anchimbe (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012): 191–214. Schröder, Anne. Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English: An Empirical Approach to Language Dynamics in Cameroon (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003).

ጓ

Emancipation from and Re-Invention of the Linguistic Metropolis in a Postcolonial Speech Community * M I CH AE L W E STP HAL

T

of processes of linguistic emancipation away from the linguistic metropolis of Britain in the postcolonial speech community of Jamaica. The U K as linguistic metropolis still enjoys high prestige in Jamaica but has been re-invented – has acquired new social meaning – in specific linguistic settings. The study is set in the theoretical context of Edgar Schneider’s Dynamic Model of postcolonial English1 and reassesses this model by means of a context-sensitive analysis of language use and language attitudes in the setting of Jamaican radio newscasting. The theoretical grounding and the analyses are predominantly sociolinguistic in nature, but the results are important in the wider framework of postcolonial studies, as the linguistic developments discussed are one aspect of broader processes of identity renegotiation in postcolonial settings. HIS ESSAY A DDRE SSES THE ISSUE

Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial English: From Exonormativity to Endonormativity Schneider takes a bird’s-eye view of new varieties of English and proposes a uniform sociolinguistic evolution for all postcolonial Englishes from exonormativity – a tendency to look outwards and reliance on foreign norms – towards endonormativity: i.e. a tendency to look inwards and rely on local norms. This * I would like to acknowledge a short-term fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (D A A D ) for the field trip to Jamaica I undertook in 2012. I would further like to thank all the students at the University of the West Indies and the University of Technology in Mona, Kingston, Jamaica who took part in my survey, patiently answered all my questions, and supported the project in many ways. 1 Edgar Schneider, Postcolonial English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007).

402

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

ጓ

linguistic norm reorientation is formulated as a linear emancipation of all anglophone postcolonial speech communities away from the British Isles as former colonial metropolis.2 This process is not restricted to language but is linked to processes of political emancipation and is essentially driven by underlying rewritings of group identity in postcolonial settings – “of who constitutes ‘us’ and who the ‘other’.”3 Schneider adopts an evolutionary perspective on new varieties of English, drawing on Mufwene’s concept of “linguistic ecologies”:4 colonial settings of intensive language contact create linguistically complex situations covering a wide range of different linguistic variants available to speakers, which Mufwene calls the “feature pool.”5 This feature pool consists of all the individual linguistic items and forms brought to the contact settings by all the parties involved. Mufwene puts the individual at the centre of the evolutionary process of new varieties, as the theory rests on the assumption that, by selecting specific features from the pool, speakers are constantly redefining and expressing their linguistic and social identity: i.e. they perform linguistic “acts of identity.” 6 By choosing a particular form or item, they align themselves with other individuals or distance themselves from others. New varieties of English emerge and develop in this process of selection and competition, which is motivated by a sequence of identity rewritings and associated linguistic changes affecting the parties involved in a colonial-contact setting.7 This sequence of identity rewritings evolves in five phases: in the foundation phase, English is transplanted by settlers to a new locality. Language contact in the newly founded colonies is caused by interactions between settler and indigenous groups or, in the case of Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, primarily by the interaction between British settlers and enslaved and transported Africans. From the phase of exonormative stabilization, the colony and all parties involved go through a period of substantial social, political, and linguistic change, and a new variety of English emerges. This turmoil in the stage of nativization is eventually resolved with a renewed phase of (endonormative) stabilization, where the new variety asserts its authority. In the differentiation 2 3 4

Except for the Philippines, which is a former colony of the U S A . Schneider, Postcolonial English, 29. Salikoko Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001): 145–

66. 5

Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution, 4–6. Robert LePage & Andrée Tabouret–Keller, Acts of Identity: Creole Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985): 180–86. 7 Schneider, Postcolonial English, 29. 6

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

403

phase, new varieties emerge from the newly established postcolonial English as carriers of new group identities. Along these five phases, all groups involved increasingly reorient themselves towards the emerging shared nation-state in their identity-formation. Language is one strong indicator of shifting identities, which can be observed to describe historical and current processes of realignment in postcolonial settings. The fourth phase of endonormative stabilization is the focus of this investigation of language use and attitudes in the context of Jamaican radio. The phase presupposes political independence, with the newly formed nation-state establishing a new cultural self-reliance increasingly distinct from the U K as metropolis. On a sociolinguistic level, the variety that has emerged in the previous phases is gaining prestige, as there is an elaboration of its functions into new formal and also written speech domains, such as education and literature. The new variety, which is fairly homogeneous at this stage, is also subject to linguistic codification, through dictionaries, grammars or guides to usage. Furthermore, there is increasing acceptance of the new variety as the new norm in formal contexts, while there is also a receding complaint tradition calling for the maintenance of British norms and deprecating the local variety of English.

Schneider’s Case Study of Jamaica The sociolinguistic situation in Jamaica is more complex than in former settler colonies like the U SA or Australia, which serve as prime examples for the Dynamic Model. On a highly idealized level, two languages, English and Jamaican Creole (locally called Patois or Patwa), coexist in Jamaica. English is the sole official language of the country, while a variety of Jamaican Creole is the mother tongue of the majority of the population. The relationship between the two codes is most commonly described as a ‘creole continuum’ on a linguistic level8 and, on a functional level, as a diglossic situation,9 with a separation of English as the ‘high’ variety reserved for all public and formal domains and Jamaican Creole as the ‘low’ variety dominating informal contexts.

8

John Rickford, Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: History, Texts, and Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1987). The notion of ‘continuum’ also applies to the frequent code-switching that can occur within a speaker’s discourse, depending on precise sociocultural context. 9 Hubert Devonish, “Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia in the ‘Anglophone’ Caribbean,” in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Christian Mair (Cross/Cultures 65, A S N E L Papers 7; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 157–78.

404

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

ጓ

Jamaica gained its independence from Britain in 1962 and is currently in the phase of endonormative stabilization along Schneider’s model.10 There is a growing sense of national identity which incorporates Jamaica’s African heritage and its Jamaican cultural manifestations, such as reggae music. Schneider states that Jamaican Creole has increasingly become part of this process, acquiring new prestige. Jamaican Creole pushes into new domains which were formerly reserved for English – for example, political speeches or radio but also written domains such as the newspaper and literature. Schneider further argues that there are first steps of codification via the Dictionary of Jamaican English and the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage.11 Alongside the growing acceptance of Jamaican Creole, a conservative linguistic ideology, which discriminates against Jamaican Creole as a broken or corrupt version of English, is still in existence but is increasingly receding. This discussion of endonormativity in Jamaica focuses mainly on Jamaican Creole, while the emerging standard variety of English, Jamaican English, is largely overlooked. For English language use, Schneider states that the theoretical target is still British English, while in practical use an educated Caribbean accent dominates. To support this endonormative focus on Creole, he quotes Christie, who argues that Jamaican Creole is a symbol of Jamaican identity, whereas Jamaican English is a mere sign of it.12 In this line of argument, only linguistic choices of Jamaican Creole over any variety of English, whether local or foreign, index a truly endonormative orientation. This view of endonormativity in Jamaica is problematic, as it presupposes that a Jamaican identity is expressed only by Jamaican Creole linguistic choices in all domains of language use. Thus, the potential value of Jamaican English for a Jamaican identity is neglected.

Methodology and Informants This study re-assesses Schneider’s description of the current sociolinguistic situation in Jamaica and endonormativity in one specific formal context: radio newscasting. Radio newscasts have their own linguistic conventions and characteristics: the text is scripted, the news is presented as a monologue, and there 10

Schneider, Postcolonial English, 227–38. Frederic G. Cassidy & Robert LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2nd ed. 1980); Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996). 12 Pauline Christie, Language in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak, 2003): 63. 11

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

405

is no listener interaction. This setting leaves little to no space for an opposing interpretation of the narrated events and the newscaster becomes the voice of authority of these events.13 Newscast speech is very formal and associated with high prestige. Bell describes newscast language as “the embodiment of standard speech.”14 Hence, newscasts are one of those domains which are important in connection to Schneider’s argument about changing and solidifying norms. Although newscasts can be seen as an important indicator of endonormative stabilization, results cannot be easily generalized or transferred to other speech domains with other conventions and characteristics. The current study combines an analysis of language use with an attitude study. Language use and attitudes are two hallmarks besides codification in Schneider's discussion of endonormative stabilization. With this mixed approach, I provide two viewpoints on the sociolinguistic situation and endonormativity in Jamaican radio newscasting – one linguistic and another from the perspective of the users. Specifically, the study aims to answer the following research questions: (1) Which (accent) varieties are used by newscasters in Jamaican radio newscasts? (2) Do the potential listeners hold different attitudes towards these (accent) varieties? (3) What is the status of JE and JC in this context? (4) What are the implications from the context of radio newscasting for the notion of endonormativity and for Schneider’s Dynamic Model? First, different newscasts were recorded via online streaming from three Jamaican radio stations, RJR, IrieFm, and Newstalk 93 FM, and the governmental Jamaican Information Service (JIS). Through a preliminary qualitative analysis of language use, seven newscasts, which essentially cover the range of linguistic diversity of Jamaican radio newscasts and have both male and female announcers, were selected for further investigation. A qualitative phonetic analysis was carried out to identify the accent varieties used by these newscasters. The overall corpus of recorded newscasts was checked for the identified accent varieties in order to get a broad picture of variety frequency. The results from this phonetic analysis were used to plan a language-attitude study which combines a quantitative questionnaire-based survey with qualita13

Susan McKay, “Language and the Media,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. Rajend Mesthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2011): 396–412. 14 Allan Bell, “Broadcast News as a Language Standard,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 40 (January 1983): 29.

406

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

ጓ

tive metalinguistic interviews. The questionnaire included direct-attitude questions and an accent rating of the seven selected newscasts. Informants listened to forty-second excerpts (vocal stimuli) from the seven newscasts and judged these samples on twelve rating criteria. The informants were asked how “correct,” “natural,” “standard,” “proper,” “authentic,” “refined,” and “clear” they perceived the newscasters’ pronunciation. They indicated whether they thought the newscaster was “twanging” (Jamaican for putting on an inauthentic or foreign accent). They were asked whether the newscaster gave the impression of being “professional” and “modest,” and whether they perceived the newscaster’s voice as “pleasant” and “suitable for broadcasting.” For the attitude assessment of these traits, six-point unidirectional scales with semantic labelling of the options (e.g., “not at all correct,” “not correct,” “rather not correct,” “rather correct,” “correct,” “very correct”) were used. The rating criteria are based on previous studies15 and on a pilot study where the seven samples were played to Jamaicans who evaluated these vocal stimuli freely. This quantitative part was complemented with a folk-linguistic approach: i.e. the collection of conscious and openly voiced language attitudes,16 via metalinguistic interviews, where the news clips were again used as vocal stimuli. The questionnaire was filled out by 187 Jamaican students at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, and the University of Technology in Kingston, Jamaica in spring 2012. Most of the informants are in the age group eighteen to twenty five (89.2%) and most are also female (73.7%). Metalinguistic interviews were carried out with twelve informant groups. These young and well-educated informants are not representative of Jamaican society at large, as previous research has found significant effects of age and occupational status on attitudes towards Jamaican Creole.17 However, they are an important demographic group for future endonormative stabilization processes.

Results: Language Use All newscasts are scripted in Standard English and show variation on a phonetic level only. By means of a phonetic analysis of the seven newsclips, three accent varieties used by Jamaican newscasters were identified: Jamaican English ( JE ), 15

Dagmar Deuber & Glenda Leung, “Investigating Attitudes towards an Emerging Standard of English: Evaluations of Newscasters’ Accents in Trinidad,” Multilingua 32.3 (2013): 289–319. 16 See Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, ed. Dennis Preston (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1999). 17 Jamaican Language Unit, “The Language Attitude Survey of Jamaica,” Jamaican Language Unit (2005).

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

407

British-influenced English (BI E ) and American-influenced English (AI E ). Table 1 shows the distribution of accents for the seven newscasts and table 2 shows the phonetic differences which distinguish the three accent varieties. However, phonetic differences are often not categorical but preferential, and there is substantial variation among the newscasters classified as using Jamaican English. British- and American-influenced English share many features with RP 18 and General American19 but are still to be treated as stylizations of a British and American accent. Newscasters receive speech training, where they are trained to speak in a certain way suitable for broadcasting. Media-studies students can take speech-training courses at the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication at the University of the West Indies, and there is also the Media Technology Institute, which offers speech training and has a strong exonormative orientation, as reported by two speech trainers. Some accent features indicate the stylized character of British-influenced English – for example, the use of the alveolar tap [ε], a feature of old-fashioned RP but also taught as correct, especially in performance.20 Besides these three accent varieties used by Jamaican newscasters, British and American English accents appear via British and American newscasters in imported newsclips, which report exclusively on non-Caribbean topics. newsclip 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

station Newstalk 93 FM JIS Newstalk 93 FM RJR Irie FM RJR Irie FM

date gender of newscaster 18 May 2011 female – male 18 May 2011 male 19 May 2011 male 06 Sept. 2011 female 30 May 2011 female 13 Sept. 2011 male

variety

label

JE

J E F1

JE

J E M1

BIE

BIE M

AIE

AIE M

JE

J E F2

BIE

BIE F

JE

J E M2

Table 1: Newscast samples overview

GOAT FACE CUP

18

JE

BIE

AIE

[oࢤ] [e:]] [o]

[̓Ѐ/ [eͮ] [Ђ]

[oЀ] [eͮ] [Ђ]

Clive Upton, “Received Pronunciation,” in Varieties of English: The British Isles, ed. Bernd Kortmann & Clive Upton (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008): 237–52. 19 William Kretzschmar, “Standard American English Pronunciation,” in Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, ed. Edgar Schneider (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008): 37–51. 20 Beverley Collins & Inger Mees, Practical Phonetics and Phonology (London: Routledge, 2003): 45.

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

408 [a ~ ̤] [a ~ ̥] [̥ ~ ̧] [d ~ ð] ø ~ [α]

TRAP PALM LOT THi s

aRm

[a] [̥] [̧] [ð] ø

ጓ

[æ] [̥] [̥] [ð] [α]

Table 2: Phonetic differences between accent varieties

Jamaican Creole pronunciations21 – for example, H-dropping or TH-stopping of voiceless dental fricatives – are avoided by the newscasters. Differences between Jamaican English and the two exonormative accent varieties are most salient on the level of vowels. Consonantal accent features of Jamaican English 22 – for example, TH-stopping of voiced dental fricatives – are infrequent in the newscast data. The following orthographic and phonetic transcriptions of three excerpts of the samples used in the accent-rating study illustrate the three accent varieties of Jamaican newscasters. newsclip 6: JE F2 Minister of Justice Delroy Chuck says he knows there are currently many corrupt practices being employed which seek to pervert the course of justice in Jamaica.  ࢟Ƹͮƹͮst̓Ζv ࢟ƢϪostͮs ࢟delαΖͮ tϱЂks sæs hͮ noࢤz d̓α̥ࢤ࢟koἀntlͮ mænͮ k̓࢟αopt ࢟ƻαakt̓ƾͮz ࢟biࢤͮn ͇Ƹ࢟plΖͮd wࡴͮƿϱ siࢤk t̓ p̓࢟ǁ̓t d̓ kΖࢤs Ζv ࢟ƢϪЂstͮs ͮn ƢϪ̓࢟meࢤka Therefore eradicating corruption in the justice system and Jamaica is at the top of his agenda and that of this administration.  ࢟Ϻ͇ƤΖࢤἀ࢟αadͮkeࢤƿͮn k̓࢟αopϱ̓n ͮn d̓࢟ƢϪostͮs ࢟sist̓m æn dϪ̓࢟meࢤƴ̓ͮs æt d̓ ƿ̧p ̧v hͮz ̓࢟ƢϪ͇nd̓ æn ðæt Ζv hͮs ̓ƢࢠƸͮƹͮ࢟stαe:ϱ̓n Speaking to members of state of the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption recently the Justice Minister says he wants Jamaica to be in the top twenty of the Worldwide Corruption Perceptions ranking of countries.  ࢟spi:kin t̓࢟memb̈́s ̧v steࢤt ̧v d̓ k̓࢟Ƹͮϱ̓ƹ੥ f̓ d̓ pαͯ࢟ǁ͇ƹϱ̓n Ζv k̓࢟αopϱ̓n ࢟αis̓nlͮ ðͯ࢟ƢϪostͮs ࢟Ƹͮƹͮst̓ sæz hͮ w̧nts dϪ̓࢟meࢤƴ̓ tЀ bi ͮn d̓ ţp ࢟tw͇ntiࢤ ̧v d̓ ẅ́ld waͮd k̓α࢟opϱ̓n p̈́࢟ƾ͇ƻϱ̓ns ࢟αankͮn ̧v ࢟kontαͯz

21

Hubert Devonish & Otelemate Harry, “Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English: Phonology,” in Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, ed. Edgar Schneider (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2008): 256–89. 22 Devonish & Harry, “Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English: Phonology,” 281–85.

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

409

newsclip 5: BIE F Meetings have got under way between Jamaican and American officials regarding the revocation of the US visa of former Minister of Energy and Mining James Robertson.  ࢟miࢤƿͮΓz hæv ģt ࢟Ђnd̓ weͮ bͮ࢟twiࢤn dϪƞ࢟meͮƴ̓n ̓n ̓࢟Ƹ͇αͯƴ̓n ̓࢟Ƥͮϱ̓ls αͯƨ̥ࢤƢͮΓ ð̓α͇ǁ̓࢟keͮϱn ̓v ð̓ juࢤ͇࢟s ࢟vi:z̧̓v ࢟ƤΖࢤƸ̓࢟Ƹͮƹͮst̓̓v ͇࢟ƹ̓ƢϪͮ æn ࢟maͮƹͮΓ dϪƣͮmz α̧Ɵ̓࢟ts̓n Minister of foreign affairs Doctor Ken Baugh told RJR news last night he has held talks with US ambassador to Jamaica Pamela Bridgewater  ࢟Ƹͮƹͮst̓̓v ࢟Ƥ̧αͯn ̓࢟fe̓z ࢟Ƣ̧kt̓ ken b̧஀ t̓Ѐld ̥ᄘ࢟ƢϪƣ̥ͮࢤ nju:z l̥ࢤs naͮt hi: hæz h͇ld tΖࢤks wͮð ðͮ ju:͇࢟s ̓Ƹ࢟bæs̓Ƣ̓ t̓ dϪ̓࢟meͮƴ̓࢟pam̓ƶ̓࢟ƟαͮƢϪࢠǂΖࢤƿ̓ He disclosed that a meeting took place on Thursday and he’ll be reporting back to Prime Minster Bruce Golding. hi: dͮƾ࢟kl̓Ѐzd ðæt ̓࢟miࢤƿͮΓ tЀk pleͮs ̧n ࢟஘͇ࢤࡸzdeͮ æn hͮl bͯαͯ࢟ƻΖࢤƿͮΓ bæk ƿЀ pαƞͮ࢟Ƹͮƹͮst̓ bαЀࢤs ࢟ƨ̓ЀldͮΓ Doctor Baugh said in the interim he will not make any public statements on the issue.  ࢟Ƣ̧kt̓ b̧஀ s͇d ͮn ði ࢟ͮnt̓αͮm hi: wͯl ņt meͮk æni ࢟ƻЂblͮk ࢟steͮtm̓nts ̧n ði ࢟ͮϱu:

newsclip 4: AI E M Caricom leaders are to meet in Guyana this weekend to discuss a number of issues including a possible successor to Sir Edwin Carrington as Caricom secretary general.  ࢟kæαk஀m ࢟li:d̈́s aα t̓ mi:t in ࢟gaͮjæn̓ ðͮs ࢠwiࢤƴ͇࢟nd t̓ dͮ࢟skЂs ̓࢟ƹЂmb̓α ̓v ࢟ͮϱǀࢤs ͮƹ࢟kluࢤƢͮΓ ̓ ࢟ƻ̥s஀Ɵ̓l s̓ƴ࢟ƾ͇ƾ̓ t̓ s͇ࢤα ࢟̓dwͮn ࢟kæαͮΓƿ̓n æz ࢟kæαͮƴ̓m ࢟ƾ͇ƴἀƿαͯ࢟ƢϪ͇n஀ἀl The two day retreat starts tomorrow. ð̓ tЀ deͮ࢟αitαͮt st̥αts t̓࢟Ƹ̥ἀࡸ The leaders will also be discussing other issues such as intraregional trade movement of skills and movement of financial resources. ð̓ ࢟liࢤƢ̓z wͮʆ ̥࢟ʆƾ̓ bͯ dͮ࢟skЂƾͮΓ ࢟ЂϺ̓α ࢟ͮϱЀs sЂƿϱ æz ࢟ͮntἀࢠαͮƢϪ̓n஀l tαƣͮd ࢟muvm̓nt ̓v skͮʆz ænd ࢟muvm̓nt ̓v fͮ࢟nænϱ̓ʆἀ࢟ƾΖࢤαƾ̓z

In terms of accent frequency, Jamaican English dominates Jamaican newscast speech by far, followed by British-influenced English, while only one newscaster with an American-influenced English accent could be found. Jamaican Creole is not part of Jamaican newscasting. It only appears in newscasts in interviews with victims or witnesses.23 As an exception, Irie FM experimented with newscasts in Jamaican Creole in the early 1990s in cooperation with the 23

See, for example, Axel Bohmann, “Nobody canna cross it: An Interactional Perspective on Discourse in Motion,” ISLE linguistics (2013): 9–18.

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

410

ጓ

University of the West Indies, but the project had to be stopped owing to a lack of funding.24

Results: Direct Attitude Questions Direct questioning overall shows a strong preference for Jamaican English over British and American English in the newscasting context, while there is little to no support for the use of Jamaican Creole. Results for the language preference of the respondents are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Language preference for newscasts: Which language do you prefer in a newscast? (multiple answers possible)

Furthermore, the informants held rather negative views about Jamaicans using a British or American accent on the radio, as they associated this linguistic performance more with the negative adjectives “fake,” “twanging,” and “speakyspoky”: i.e. “a pejorative label for hyper-correct speech in Jamaica” 25 than with the positive adjectives of “articulate,” “educated,” and “proper” (Figure 2).

24

Alma Mockyen, Rewind: My Recollections of Radio and Broadcasting in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak, 2003): 336. 25 Bohmann, “Nobody canna cross it: An Interactional Perspective on Discourse in Motion,” 1.

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

411

Figure 2: How does it sound to you when Jamaicans use a British/American accent on the radio? (multiple answers possible)

Results: Accent Rating Study The results of the accent-rating study are less straightforward than those from the direct language-attitude questions. Figure3 shows the mean scores of the ratings for the seven newscasts for all twelve individual rating categories. Mean scores from one to three indicate negative and four to six positive rating means. To identify differences in the ratings, an analysis of variance using a two-way repeated measurement ANOVA with newscast (seven levels) and category (twelve levels) was carried out. All effects are reported as significant at p < 0.001. There was a significant main effect of the newscast stimulus with a large effect,26 F(4.7; 333.4) = 38.6, ஗² = 0.35 and of the rating category also with a large effect F(6.6; 471.3) = 29.5, ஗² = 0.29. There was also a significant interaction between the newscast stimulus and the rating category with a small effect, F(24.4; 1736.9) = 5.5, ஗² = 0.07. All the average ratings are positive, which means that the language used by the newscasters was overall perceived as, e.g., “proper” or “standard” but also as “natural.” In addition, they all gave the impression of being, e.g., “professional” and their voices were all perceived as, e.g., “suitable for broadcasting.” The mean 26

On effect sizes, see Jacob Cohen, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (Hillsdale N J : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2nd ed. 1988).

412

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

ጓ

ratings for “not twanging,” recoded from “twanging,” are all between five and six. Hence, none of these newscasters was judged as putting on a foreign accent.

Figure 3: Mean scores for the ratings of seven newscast clips in twelve categories on six-point scales

In order to get a clearer picture of the ratings, factor analyses on the twelve categories were carried out for each individual newscast. A factor analysis determines the correlations between the individual rating categories and identifies bundles of these categories, called factors. Results for the seven individual factor analyses were analysed for recurring adjective bundles. Adjectives which loaded inconsistently onto factors across the seven factor analyses were excluded. In this procedure, two relatively consistent factors were identified across all newscast: The adjectives “proper,” “standard,” “correct,” “professional,” and “suitable for broadcasting” loaded most consistently onto the first factor, which was labelled ‘standardness’. The adjectives “natural” and “authentic” loaded most consistently onto the second factor, which was labelled ‘authenticity’. For each respondent, mean scores were calculated from these two sets of adjectives to represent standardness and authenticity factor values. The Britishand American-influenced English newscasts were summarized into an exonormative accent varieties group and the Jamaican English newscasts into an endonormative accent varieties group. Table3 shows the mean scores and standard deviations of the standardness and authenticity ratings for the seven newscasts and for the two condensed accent varieties groups.

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

newscasts* standardness Mean

SE

authenticity Mean

SE

AIE M BIE F BIE M JE F1

4.99 5.42 4.71 4.52

0.05 0.04 0.06 0.07

4.71 5.06 4.22 4.40

0.07 0.08 0.08 0.08

JE F2 JE M1 JE M2

3.94 4.99 4.34

0.07 0.05 0.07

3.73 4.79 4.02

0.09 0.06 0.09

413

accent variety group

standardness

authenticity

Mean

SE

Mean

exonormative accent varieties

5.04

0.03 4.67

0.0 4

endonormative accent varieties

4.45

0.04 4.24

0.0 4

SE

*

male (M); female (F) Table3: Mean scores and standard error for standardness and authenticity (N = 187)

All average ratings for the seven different newscasts are in the positive area, which means that the language of all newscasters is perceived as ‘standard’ and ‘authentic’. A-priori grouping of accents on the basis of the phonetic analysis shows an overall broad pattern of exonormative accent varieties being evaluated as more positive than the endonormative accent varieties for both factors. This difference is by no means categorical, as there is substantial variation in the evaluation of the ungrouped seven newscasts. Nevertheless, this illustrates a broad tendency in the data.

Results: Metalinguistic Interviews The results of the folk-linguistic assessment show definite attitudes towards Jamaican Creole, while the perception of English is multifaceted in the context of radio newscasts. The respondents judged the use of Jamaican Creole as highly inappropriate for newscasts. Many respondents explained this opinion by stating that it was not possible to relate complex issues reported in newscasts in a precise and intelligible way by using Jamaican Creole. Of all the questions asked in the interviews, the question whether the informants could imagine a newscast in Jamaican Creole sparked the most emotionally charged answers. All respondents agreed that the appropriate language for newscasts is English or, more specifically, Standard English. When asked about which specific variety they thought best for radio newscasts, answers varied: the first type of answer was that any variety of English, mostly adding British and American as two options, would be fitting, so long as it is Standard English. As a second type of answer, many informants referred to Jamaican English as the preferred variety

414

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

ጓ

of English for newscasts, often also using the specific term ‘Standard Jamaican English’. As a third type of answer, many respondents said that they thought British English or ‘the Queen’s English’ was the best variety for newscasting. Many explained this view by referring to British English as the traditional norm in Jamaica, to Jamaica’s colonial past, and to current links to the U K . Respondents were less ready to name American English as the best variety but many expressed a feeling of cultural and linguistic influence from the U SA due to its close proximity, mass-media availability, and the U SA ’s economic power. To elicit specific attitudes towards the actual linguistic diversity of Jamaican radio newscasts, newsclips from the accent-rating study were played to the informants and then discussed with them. Informants who stated Jamaican English to be the best variety of English for newscasts also identified Jamaican English newsclips as typical examples of Standard Jamaican English. When confronted with the samples of American- or British-influenced English, many informants associated the language in these samples with a high level of education or with the way newscasters are trained to speak. Many stated that this was the way some Jamaican newscasters sounded and then added that there may by some British or American influence but that, after all, these were typical Jamaican newscasts. Thus, the informants perceived the American- and British-influenced English accents as natural parts of the everyday linguistic reality they encounter in the context of radio news.

Discussion: Reconsidering Schneider’s Case study of Jamaica and the Notion of Endonormativity These overall mixed results, on the one hand, confirm Schneider’s broad prognosis for rising endonormativity, but, on the other hand, call for an expansion of endonormativity in Jamaica and also for a context-sensitive approach to emancipation processes. The results of the analysis for language use and the direct language-attitude questions show a strong preference for Jamaican English over exonormative influences but also an exclusion and disapproval of Jamaican Creole in the context of radio newscasts. The strong support for the local standard variety of English in the direct-attitude part is similar to results of direct language-attitude studies from other norm-developing speech communities.27 The Jamaican informants openly preferred local English linguistic choices of newscasters, which project a professional but also authentic Jamaican newscaster identity. 27

See, for example, Tobias Bernaisch, “Attitudes towards Englishes in Sri Lanka,” World Englishes 31.3 (September 2012): 279–97.

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

415

At first sight, the results of the accent-rating study seem to contradict those of the direct language-attitude part and those for language use. There is a tendency to evaluate the exonormative varieties of English as better than the Jamaican English newsclips along both factors – standardness and authenticity. Nevertheless, all newsclips were evaluated positively along all categories and factors respectively. However, the insights gained from the folk-linguistic perspective help to understand the results from the accent-rating study: The informants did not necessarily rate the British- or American-influenced English newscasts as British or American English but, rather, as specific accent varieties of Jamaican newscasts, which they perceived as especially “professional” or “proper.” This is supported by the ratings for the “twanging” category and the authenticity factor, where all newscast clips were rated positive. This means that, in the context of radio newscasts, foreign influences have become localized from the perspective of the informants. The informants did not perceive a newscaster with a British-influenced accent as projecting a British identity, a practice which is disliked according to the direct language-attitude data, but as simply performing a very professional and educated newscaster identity. Besides this more open notion of what is Jamaican in the context of radio newscasting, the informants also affirmed the dispreference for Jamaican Creole in the folk-linguistic data. Despite the perception of the British- and Americaninfluenced clips as part of the local linguistic variation, the informants nevertheless confirmed the importance of British English for newscast speech and thus Standard English in Jamaica. Based on the associations with tradition, colonization, and the Queen, British English could be viewed as a conservative standard which still holds prestige in Jamaica. From this perspective, Britain as linguistic metropolis is still exerting exonormative pressure on Jamaica. However, what emerges from the combined results is that British English has been ‘nativized’ in Jamaica as a conservative standard and is no longer perceived primarily as British. From this perspective, a simple treatment of exonormativity is questionable, as the linguistic metropolis Britain has been locally reinvented and invested with new social meaning. From the mixed approach to Jamaican radio newscasts, endonormativity and exonormativity turn out to be rather vague concepts. In the twenty-first century, exonormativity includes not only British but also American influences. On the one hand, these two poles do exert exonormative pressure on Jamaican radio newscasts; on the other, these influences have acquired a certain endonormative quality from an attitudinal viewpoint. Thus, the strict dichotomy between exo- and endonormativity, used in the phonetic classification of the accent varieties, is blurred in the perception of users in a given context. How-

416

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

ጓ

ever, in a different more locally oriented context, such as popular Jamaican music,28 the foreign-influenced varieties of English would be perceived differently – probably as inauthentic and as British and American respectively. All study components show that in the context of radio newscasts Jamaican English dominates as the preferred and most commonly used endonormative variety over Jamaican Creole. This means that Jamaican English is another endonormative linguistic choice for Jamaicans, which also has the potential to index a Jamaican identity. It is very important to extend this finding to the wider language situation in Jamaica – given the linguistic diversity available to Jamaicans it needs to be acknowledged that different linguistic choices from the rich feature pool, incorporating Jamaican English and Creole can all index a specific Jamaican identity. However, the linguistic choices and the particular identity work they do again depend on the context. Figure4 illustrates how the different accent varieties, along the phonetic classification, meet in Jamaican radio newscasting. The sizes of the different bubbles indicate their relative importance: Jamaican English dominates, while the British influence remains stronger than the American, and Jamaican Creole is absent. This norm interplay in Jamaican newscast speech verifies Mair’s description of standard speech in postcolonial settings which emerges in a tripartite norm competition of British, American, and local norms.29 In the context of radio newscasts, the feature pool which arises from this competition cannot clearly be classified into exo- and endonormative linguistic choices when including an attitudinal perspective. A Jamaican newscaster identity can be expressed with a variety of different accent items of English but not with Jamaican Creole.

Figure 4: Jamaican newscasting speech 28

See, for example, Carolyn Cooper, Soundclash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 29 Christian Mair, Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006): 158.

ጓ The Linguistic Metropolis

417

On a wider level, these results call for a specification of linguistic emancipation processes in Jamaica and other postcolonial speech communities. Linguistic emancipation does not proceed linearly from exo- to endonormativity but is more complex because the dynamics of these processes are context-specific. This means that future research can draw on general formulations, like the Dynamic Model, and investigate these proposed developments in specific domains of language use. This call to investigate specific contexts with their very own conventions and dynamics extends well beyond linguistic analyses but calls for wider interdisciplinary work to better understand identity renegotiations in postcolonial settings. For example, linguists should draw on Carolyn Cooper’s cultural-studies work on Jamaican dancehall30 when analysing the sociolinguistics of Jamaican popular music. Similar to the mixed approach of this study, researchers may be faced with a variety of potentially different results, but I believe this challenge needs to be taken up in order to gain a deeper understanding of people and cultures affected by colonization and globalization.

W OR K S C I T E D Allsopp, Richard. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996). Bell, Allan. “Broadcast News as a Language Standard,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 40 (January 1983): 29–42. Bernaisch, Tobias. “Attitudes towards Englishes in Sri Lanka,” World Englishes 31.3 (September 2012): 279–97. Bohmann, Axel. “Nobody canna cross it: An Interactional Perspective on Discourse in Motion,” I S L E linguistics (2013), http://www.isle-linguistics.org/resources/bohmann 2013.pdf (accessed 15 October 2013). Cassidy, Frederic G., & Robert LePage. Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2nd ed. 1980). Christie, Pauline. Language in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak, 2003). Cohen, Jacob. Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (Hillsdale N J : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2nd ed. 1988). Collins, Beverley, & Inger Mees. Practical Phonetics and Phonology (London: Routledge, 2003). Cooper, Carolyn. Soundclash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

30

Cooper, Soundclash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large.

MICHAEL W ES TPH AL

418

ጓ

Deuber, Dagmar, & Glenda Leung. “Investigating Attitudes towards an Emerging Standard of English: Evaluations of Newscasters’ Accents in Trinidad,” Multilingua 32.3 (2013): 289–319. Devonish, Hubert. “Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia in the ‘Anglophone’ Caribbean,” in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Christian Mair (Cross/ Cultures 65, A S NE L Papers 7; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 157–78. ——, & Otelemate Harry. “Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English: Phonology,” in Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, ed. Edgar Schneider (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008): 256–89. Jamaican Language Unit. “The Language Attitude Survey of Jamaica,” Jamaican Language Unit (2005) http://www.mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/projects/report%20for%20 language%20attitude%20survey%20of%20jamaica.pdf (accessed 15 October 2013). Kretzschmar, William. “Standard American English pronunciation,” in Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, ed. Edgar Schneider (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008): 37–51. LePage, Robert, & Andrée Tabouret–Keller. Acts of Identity: Creole Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985). McKay, Susan. “Language and the media,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. Rajend Mesthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2011): 396–412. Mair, Christian. Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006). Mockyen, Alma. Rewind: My Recollections of Radio and Broadcasting in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak, 2003). Mufwene, Salikoko. The Ecology of Language Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2001). Preston, Dennis, ed. Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology (Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA : Benjamins, 1999). Rickford, John. Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: History, Texts and Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1987). Schneider, Edgar. Postcolonial English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007). Upton, Clive. “Received Pronunciation,” in Varieties of English: The British Isles, ed. Bernd Kortmann & Clive Upton (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008): 237–52.

ጓ

Notes on Contributors and Editors

E R I C A. A N C H I M B E is a lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth. Among his recent publications are the monograph Language Policy and Identity Construction (2013), the special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics entitled Postcolonial Pragmatics (ed. with Dick Janney, 2011), Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting (ed. 2012), and Postcolonial Linguistic Voices (ed. with S.A. Mforteh, 2011). Among his research interests are world Englishes, linguistic identity construction, and postcolonial pragmatics. B I L L A S H C R O F T is a renowned critic and theorist, founding exponent of postcolonial theory, co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to offer a systematic examination of the field of postcolonial studies. He is author and coauthor of sixteen books and over 170 articles and chapters, variously translated into six languages, and he is on the editorial boards of ten international journals. Representative works include The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and PostColonial Studies: The Key Concepts (both with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin), Edward Said; Post-Colonial Transformation; On Post-Colonial Futures; and Caliban’s Voice. He holds an Australian Professorial Fellowship at the University of New South Wales, working on the project ‘Future Thinking: Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures’. R O M A N B A R T O S C H is a senior lecturer at the University of Cologne, where he teaches anglophone literature and literary and cultural theory. His research interests include postcolonial and posthumanist theory, environmental criticism, (zoo)narratology, and transcultural ecology. He is the author of Environ Mentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction (2013) and Teaching Environments: Ecocritical Encounters (ed. with Sieglinde Grimm, 2014), and is currently working on a monograph on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban fictions and the senses. A N N I K A B A UE R received her MA in English literatures at the Technische Universität Chemnitz, with a thesis titled German Preschool Children Encountering Postcolonial Picture Books in English (2012). She is a research assistant and

420

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

doctoral candidate in the Department of English Literatures at the TU Chemnitz. Her dissertation project deals with representations of characters’ negotiations of heterotopian living spaces in the metropolis in Indian-English fiction. She is co-editor of and contributor to the collection Stadt der Moderne (City of Modernity; 2013). She also contributed to the collection Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging (2015). M A R C B R O S S E A U is a full professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Ottawa. Since the publication of his book Des romans-géographes (1996), he has published many articles and book chapters examining ways of conceptualizing the relationship between geography and literature. His research also deals with the history of geography in Quebec, and various topics in cultural geography. He has co-edited a book on the everyday experience of cultural minorities on the Ontario–Quebec border. His most recent books are Les manuels de géographie québécois: Images de la discipline, du pays et du monde – 1800–1960 (2011) and La frontière au quotidien: Expériences des minorités à Ottawa–Gatineau (with Anne L. Gilbert and Brian Ray, 2014). D A N Y E L A D E M I R is currently writing her PhD on contemporary South African literature, entitled ‘Post-Apartheid Melancholia in Contemporary South African Novels’, at the University of Augsburg. Her fields of interest include South African literature and theory, postcolonial theories, trauma studies, psychoanalytical theories, world literature, intersectionality, and contemporary English drama. She is the co-editor, with the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, of the onetime publication R CG : Magazin zu Intersektionalität (see http: //heimatkunde .boell.de/2014/10/06/rcg-magazin-zu-intersektionalitaet). M A R I J K E D E N G E R is affiliated with the English Department of the University of Bern, where she is completing a doctorate on liminal communities in contemporary postcolonial novels. Her research interests include theories of space and time, especially the notion of hauntology, and the relation between ethics and community in (postcolonial) literatures. E N D A D U FF Y is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Subaltern Ulysses (1994) and The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (2009), and co-editor, with Maurizia Boscagli, of Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism (2011). He has also brought out an edition of Ulysses as well as the short stories of Katherine Mansfield. His latest projects are an emigrant people's history of modern Irish literature and a book on human energy in modernity.

ጓ Notes on Contributors and Editors

421

C H R I S D U N T O N was born in the U K and took his BA and PhD degrees at Oxford. He is currently Professor of Literature in English at the National University of Lesotho, and worked previously at universities in Nigeria, Libya, and South Africa and as a freelance writer in Cameroon and Peru. His research interests include West African literature, rhetoric studies, and the history of Lesotho newspapers. His most recent book, due out in 2016, is Alienation: The Life and Work of Ferdinand Oyono. C H I E L O Z O N A E Z E is an associate professor of anglophone African literature and cultural studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. His research areas are located at the intersection of philosophy and literature. He is specifically interested in concepts of identity, community, cosmopolitanism, and empathy. R O L F J. G O E B E L is Distinguished Professor of German at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures there. His areas of research include: German modernism and contemporary literature; representations of metropolitan space, especially Berlin; and literary theory and cultural studies (cultural hermeneutics, postcolonial theory, intermediality, media competition, media transfer, music and literary aesthetics, sound studies). He has published three books: Kritik und Revision: Kafkas Rezeption mythologischer, biblischer und historischer Traditionen (1986); Constructing China: Kafka’s Orientalist Discourse (1997); and Benjamin heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (2001). He is also co-author of A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (2005) and has edited A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin (2009). C H R I S T I N H O E N E is a temporary lecturer in British cultural studies at the University of Potsdam. She previously worked as assistant lecturer in English literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin and as a teaching assistant at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature (2015). In her research, she approaches twentiethcentury and contemporary literature from a variety of critical and interdisciplinary angles, including word and music studies, postcolonial studies, and the intersections between literary modernism and imperialism. She is currently working on a project titled ‘The Power of Sound/The Sound of Power: Modernism, Imperialism and Non-Western Acoustics’. Together with Emily Petermann (University of Konstanz), she is currently preparing an edited collection on word and music studies aimed at undergraduate students in the field. V E R E N A J A I N –W A R D E N is affiliated with the Department of English, American and Celtic Studies at the University of Bonn, where she is completing a doc-

422

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

torate on representations of pain and pleasure in contemporary South African literature. She is also currently teaching in the English Department of the University of Hannover. Her research interests include drama, gender studies, and postcolonial studies with a focus on anglophone African literatures. M E L I S S A K E N N E D Y lectures in English literature, culture, and media studies at the University of Vienna. Along with several articles published in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of New Zealand literature, she has published a monograph on the Mǒori writer Witi Ihimaera (Striding Both Worlds, 2011) and is a contributing author to the forthcoming Cambridge History of New Zealand Literature and the MLA ’s Approaches to Teaching series. Her current project, for which she is preparing a postdoc and monograph, ‘Postcolonial Economics’, applies economics to postcolonial considerations of poverty and inequality in colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal eras. S U E K O S S E W is Chair of English and Literary Studies at Monash University. Her research is in contemporary postcolonial literatures, particularly on the work of J.M. Coetzee and on contemporary women writers. Her books include Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink (1996), Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee (1998), Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives (ed. with Dianne Schwerdt, 2001), and Writing Woman, Writing Place: Australian and South African Fiction (2004). She has edited Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville (2010) and co-edited (with Chris Danta and Julian Murphet) Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011). In 2014, she co-edited, with Dorothy Driver, a special issue of Life Writing entitled ‘Reframing South African Life Narratives’. She is currently working on a research project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled ‘Rethinking the Victim: Gendered Violence in Australian Women’s Writing’ with Anne Brewster (University of New South Wales). A G N E S S. L . L A M retired as Professor from the University of Hong Kong in 2012). Representative works include Woman to Woman and Other Poems (1997), Water Wood Pure Splendour (2001), and A Pond in the Sky (2013). Her book Becoming Poets: The Asian English Experience was published in 2014. O L I V E R L I N D N E R is Professor of British Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig. His research interests include eighteenth-century culture and literature, Daniel Defoe, British youth cultures, and science fiction. He has published two monographs, “Solitary on a Continent”: Raumentwürfe in der spätviktorianischen Science Fiction (2005) and “Matters of Blood”: Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (2010), and three edited collections of essays, Teaching India (2008),

ጓ Notes on Contributors and Editors

423

Commodifying (Post)Colonialism (with Rainer Emig, 2010), and Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation (with Pascal Nicklas, 2012). He is currently working on a research project titled ‘London 2010plus’. P I A F L O RE N C E M A S U R C Z A K has been working as a research assistant in the Collaborative Research Centre 1015 ‘Otium/Leisure’ at the University of Freiburg since 2013. In her dissertation project she analyses eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury discourses of leisure, idleness, and indolence in colonial India through travelogues and photographs. Publications include articles on the practice and use of colonial photography in the nineteenth century and on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. She is also co-editor of the biannual journal Muße. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, migration studies, photography, and ecocritical studies. A N N I K A M C P H E R S O N is Juniorprofessor for New English Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Augsburg. Her research and teaching areas include: postcolonial studies; theories, policies, and literary representations of cultural diversity in comparative perspective; Caribbean and South African literatures in English; diaspora studies; and Rastafari. Her current projects include a study of the representation of Rastafari in literature and film as well as a genre critique of the notion of ‘neo-slave narratives’ in relation to contemporary novels on slavery set in the Caribbean. She is also compiling a collection of sources and resources for anglophone Caribbean literatures. M A L A P A N D U R A N G is Vice-Principal and Head (Department of English) at Dr. BMN College, Mumbai. She is the book reviews editor of the Journal of South Asian Diaspora and series editor of Postcolonial Lives. Her areas of research include postcolonial writing, diaspora theory, and gender studies, and she has published seven books in these areas. Her most recent publication is Reading “Things Fall Apart”: A Students’ Companion (2014). She has recently completed a major research project funded by the University Grants commission (India) titled ‘Wives, Mothers and Others: A Socio-Literary Reconstruction of Migration Experiences of Women from the Indian Subcontinent to East Africa (1890– 1960)’. R A J E E V S. P A T K E is Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Division of Humanities at Yale–NU S College, Singapore, and Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include poetry in English, postcolonial studies, and the relation between music and literature. He is the author of Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2014), Postcolonial Poetry in English (2006), and The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (1985, 1999). He

424

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

has co-authored The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (2009), and co-edited Southeast Asian Writing in English: A Thematic Anthology (2012), and A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (2008), Complicities: Connections and DivisionsLiteratures and Cultures of the Asia-Pacific Region (2003), The European Legacy (Special Issue, ‘Europe in Post-Colonial Narratives’, 2002), and Institutions in Cultures: Theory and Practice (1996). R. R A J R A O is Professor and former Head of the English Department at S.P. Pune University, Pune, India, where he has been teaching creative writing, queer studies, and Indian writing in English. He has written four collections of poetry, Slideshow (1992), BomGay (2005), For Hire (2012), and The Canada Album (2013).His fiction comprises a collection of short stories, One Day I Locked My Flat in Soul City (2001), and three novels, The Boyfriend (2003), Hostel Room 131 (2010), and Lady Lolita’s Lover (2015). He has also written The Wisest Fool on Earth and Other Plays (1996) and Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography (2000), is co-editor of Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-One Queer Interviews (2009; with Dibyajyoti Sarma) and of Image of India in the Indian Novel in English (1960–1985) (1993; with Sudhakar Pandey), and is the joint translator, with P.G. Joshi, of Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s autobiography Me Hijira, Me Laxmi (2015). C E C I L E S A N D T E N holds the Chair of English Literature at the Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany. Her research interests are in postcolonial theory and literature, postcolonial children’s literature and literature for young adults, Indian English literature, black and Asian British literature, Shakespeare and comparative perspectives, as well as adaptation studies, media transfer, and urban studies. Her publications include the monographs Broken Mirrors: Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt (1998), Shakespeare’s Globe, Global Shakespeares: Transcultural Adaptations of Shakespeare in Postcolonial Literatures, and, among other edited volumes, Industrialization, Industrial Heritage, De-Industrialization: Literary and Visual Representations of Pittsburgh and Chemnitz (2010). She has also edited books on the ‘city of modernity’, Stadt der Moderne (2013) (with a contribution on Indian graphic novels), Detective Fiction and Popular Visual Culture (2013) (with a contribution on Indian Sherlock Holmes rewrites), and Palimpsestraum Stadt (2015) (with a contribution on the concept on the unhomely woman in the South African metropolis of Cape Town). She is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project titled ‘Postcolonialism in the Metropolis’. F R A N K S C H U L Z E – E N G L E R is Professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University

ጓ Notes on Contributors and Editors

425

Frankfurt. His publications include his doctoral dissertation on East African literature, co-edited volumes of essays on African literature, postcolonial theory and globalization, and the teaching of the New Literatures in English, as well as numerous essays on African, Asian, and indigenous literature, comparative perspectives on the New Literatures in English, Indian Ocean studies, postcolonial Europe, postcolonial theory, and transculturality in a world of globalized modernity. He is currently joint project leader of ‘Africa’s Asian Options’ (AFRASO ), a major collaborative research project involving more than forty researchers from six faculties at Goethe University Frankfurt. His most recent book publications include Beyond ‘Other Cultures’: Transcultural Perspectives on Teaching the New Literatures in English (co-ed. with Sabine Doff, 2011), African Literatures (coed. with Geoff Davis, 2013), and Habari ya English – What about Kiswahili? East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone (co-ed. with Lutz Diegner, 2015). D A V I D T A V A R E S holds a PhD in cultural geography from the University of Ottawa. His research concentrates on the representation of places and spaces in novels, travel writing, creative non-fiction, and other such texts. His primary interest lies in how such representations generate and circulate images, ideas and narratives that shape how readers come to understand socio-spatial phenomena and identities on various scales, including urban, regional, and national. He has published a number of articles on this topic with a focus on South America, Central Asia, and the global cities of Toronto and London. M I C H A E L W E S S E L S is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His research interests include orality, indigenous studies, South African literature, Indian literature in English, and the literary representation of place, nature, and spirituality. He is the author of the monograph Bushman Letters, co-editor of San Representation: Politics, Practice and Possibilities, and the author of numerous journal articles on San orality, the politics of interpretation, and contemporary South African writing. M I C H A E L W E S T P H A L is affiliated with the Chair of Variationist Linguistics in the English Department of the University of Münster, where he is working on his PhD project, ‘Linguistic Variation in Jamaican Radio’. He holds an MA (with a thesis on “A History of Jamaican Creole in the Jamaican Broadcasting Media,” 2010) from the University of Freiburg. His research interests include varieties of English with a focus on the Caribbean, language attitudes, and language in the media.

ጓ

Index

Abad, Gémino H., “Jeepney” 259 Abani, Chris 116, 127, 135, 136; Graceland 136; The Virgin of Flames 135 Abhyankar, Aditi et al. 168 Aboriginal Australians 11, 12, 281, 282, 285, 286, 287, 296, 297, 313, 314, 315, 318–20 Abrahams, Peter, Mine Boy 10, 87 “Abroad in England” (McKirdy) 255 Achebe, Chinua 199 Adesanmi, Pius, & Chris Dunton 116 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 116, 117 Adiga, Aravind 12, 174, 231, 232, 233, 240—43, 244, 245; Last Man in Tower 174; The White Tiger 12, 231, 232, 240–43, 244, 245 Adorno, Theodor 188 Africa 320, 321 Africa, sub-Saharan 129–41 —See also: South Africa Afternoon Raag (Chaudhuri) 363, 368 Ahmad, Aijaz 198, 199, 201, 208 Albertazzi, Silvia 34, 35, 45, 46 Algeria 328 Ali, Monica, Brick Lane 42 Ali, Shaad, dir. Saathiya 173 Allen, Chadwick 312 Alobwede, D’Epie C. 379, 383, 385 AlSayyad, Nezar 349, 350 Amin, Ash 38 Ananthamurthy, U.R. 208 “Ancestral Worship” (McKirdy) 255 Anchimbe, Eric A. 379, 383, 384, 393; & Richard W. Janney 389 Angels in America (Kushner) 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112

Animal’s People (Sinha) 221–23 Apolo, Edia, Lagos Na Waa I Swear 117 Appadurai, Arjun 6, 37, 245, 278 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 137, 251 Arabian Nights 243, 244 Armstrong, Stephen 9 Arrighi, Giovanni 20 Ashcroft, Bill 72, 76, 147, 278, 279; Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin 71, 72, 205, 293 Asian poetry in English 249–65 “At Lake Balaton” (Singh) 148 Atack, Iain 252 Atechi, Samuel 385 Atindogbé, Gratien G., & Evelyn F. Chibaka 384 Atkinson, Rowland, & Gary Bridge 6 Atta, Sefi 116, 130, 138–39; Everything Good Will Come 130, 131, 138–39 Attali, Jacques 374, 375 Attree, Lizzy 61, 67 Auckland 317 Augé, Marc xviii, 62, 232, 233, 234, 235, 242, 292, 299, 300, 301, 302 Australia 277–88, 291–307, 318–20 —See also: Aboriginal Australians Awa, Pius 396 Ayafor, Miriam 385, 398 Azuah, Unowa Nguemo, Sky-High Flames 119 “Background, Casually” (Ezekiel) 207 Badiou, Alain 193 Baghdad 185 Baingana, Doreen 130, 134–36; “Lost in Los Angeles” 134–35;Tropical Fish 130, 135

428

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 189, 280 Bal, Mieke 115, 117, 122, 125, 127 Ball, John Clement xi, 345, 357, 358 “Bamboo Temple” (Petra Seak) 254 Bandele, Biyi, The Street 119 Bangladesh 200 Banzon, Isabela 258, 259, 260; “In the Fifties” 259; “Rindu” 259 Baratham, Gopa, A Candle or the Sun 149, 151 “Bare-feet Queen of the Crossroads, The” (Kolatkar) 189 Barris, Ken 77 Barthes, Roland 327 Bartosch, Roman 217, 223 Baudrillard, Jean 331, 333, 334, 335, 339 Beckett, Lois 13 Behrendt, Larissa 314, 318–20; Home 318–20 Beijing 5 Bell, Allan 405 Benang: from the heart (Scott) 11, 12 Bengal 200, 209, 375 Benjamin, Walter xii, xv, xvi, 23, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 224, 226, 347 Bennelong 281, 282 Bennelong Point (Sydney) 281 Bennett, Peter 353 Berardi, Franco Bifo 29 Bernaisch, Tobias 414 “Between Jejuri and the Railway Station” (Kolatkar) 205 Bhabha, Homi K. 84, 130, 209, 327, 328, 329, 330, 334, 336, 337, 339, 340 Bhatt, Shakti 232 Bhijki Vahi (Kolatkar) 184 Bible 75, 84, 381, 385, 388, 396 Binnie, Jon, Julian Holloway et al. 251 Birla, Puja 168, 169 Bitty 346 Blackbird (Dibia) 115, 122–27 Blair, Peter 63 Blake, William 194

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

ጓ

Bloch, Ernst 151 Boatride and Other Poems, The (Kolatkar) 185 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decamerone 243, 244 Bohmann, Axel 409, 410 Bollywood 173, 202 Bombay 167 —See: Mumbai Boo, Katherine 12, 13 Borger, Julian 356 Boy and His Dog, A (Harlan Ellison) 186 Boyden, Joseph, Three Day Road 315 Boyle, Danny, dir. Slumdog Millionaire 13 Brahmanism 175, 187, 203, 208 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 199 “Breakfast at Kala Ghoda” (Kolatkar) 190 Brecht, Bertolt 126 Bregin, Elena 57, 60, 61 Brick Lane (Ali) 42 Bridge, Gary, & Sophie Watson 214 British Asians 33–50 Brooding Clouds (Mpe) 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68 Brosseau, Marc 5 Brouillette, Sarah 216 Brussels 376 Brydon, Diana 287, 288 Bubbley Kaur 354, 355 Bungaree 282 Burgin, Victor 214 Burke, Jason 13 “Bus, The” (Kolatkar) 203 “Butterfly, The” (Kolatkar) 205 Bystrom, Kerry 98 Calcutta 363–77 Calhoun, Craig 251 Cameroon 379–98 Canada 309–11, 316–17 —See also: Native Canadians Candle or the Sun, A (Baratham) 149, 151 “Candles” (Alvin Pang) 257

ጓ Index Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 243 Cape Town - 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112—See also: Duiker Carson, Anne 163 Casanova, Pascale 219 Cassidy, Frederic G., & Robert LePage 404 Castells, Manuel 217 Catch a Fire (dir. Noyce) 59 Certeau, Michel de 72, 220, 224, 233, 235, 236, 238, 277, 294 „Chaitanya” (Kolatkar) 203 Chamoiseau, Patrick, Texaco 10 Chandler, Aaron 333 Chandra, Vikram 12, 174; Sacred Games 12, 174 “Change: Obituaries of Three Generations of the Liu Family in the Late 20th Century” (Xi Ni Er) 153 Chapman, Michael 73 Chatterjee, Partha 364 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales 243, 244 Chaudhuri, Amit 204, 363–69, 375–77; The Immortals 363, 366, 367, 368, 376; Afternoon Raag 363, 368; Freedom Song 363, 366, 367, 376, 377; A Strange and Sublime Address 363, 366–67, 369, 375 Chaudhuri, Una 281 Cheng, Anne Anlin 90 Cheong, Felix, “I’ll Make This Knife Talk” 258 Chezneaux, Jean 150 Chibber, Vivek 18 Chiddy Bang 354 “Children of the Snarl” (Kilates) 260 China 146, 147, 150, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 250, 255, 256, 283, 355, 356, 357 Chinglish 159, 162 Chirimiri (Kolatkar) 184 Chisholm. Dianne 104 Chitre, Dilip 198, 199, 208, 209 Christianity 154, 195, 208 Christiansë, Yvette 98 Christie, Pauline 404

429 Chumbow, Sammy Beban, & Augustin Simo Bobda 384, 386, 387 Chung King Express (dir. Wong Kar-Wai) 146 Circular Quay 283, 284 “Circus Animal’s Desertion, The” (Yeats) 26 Clarkson, Carrol 62, 63, 67, 74, 76, 77 Clifford, James 132, 160 Coates, Austin 163 Coetzee, J.M., Life and Times of Michael K 12 Cohen, Jacob 411 Cole, Teju 116, 220 Collins, Beverley, & Inger Mees 407 Collins, Michael 23 Conrad, Joseph xii, 21, 364, 365, 366, 372, 377; Heart of Darkness 364, 373–74, 375; “An Outpost of Progress” xii Cooper, Carolyn 416, 417 Cooper, Frederick 10 Cornershop, “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” 354– 58, 359; “The United Provinces of India” 354 “Correctness of Flavour, The” (Yap) 154, 155 Cosmopolis (DeLillo) 37, 38, 234, 242, 332–40 Cousins (Grace) 12 Cowart, David 333, 334 Cowper, William 194 Creole, Jamaican 402, 403, 404, 406, 408, 409, 410, 413, 414, 415, 416 C R T V Bamenda 389, 391 Cruickshank, Samuel, “urban iwi: tihei mauri oha!” 321 Cruz, Conchitina, “Geography Lesson” 259 Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton) 87 Crystal Fighters 344 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler 25 Cunningham, Valentine 299 Dalley, Hamish 115 Daruwalla, Keki N., “The Ghana Scholar Reflects on His Thesis” 260 Dasgupta, Rana 231, 232, 233; “The Flyover” 236; “The House of the Frankfurt

430

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

Mapmaker” 236–39; Tokyo Cancelled 231, 232, 233–39, 243, 244, 245, 246 Dass, Minesh 76 Davies, W.H., “Leisure” 192 Davis, Mike xiv, 3, 9, 10 Davison, Graeme 291 Dawson, Ashley, & Brent Hayes Edwards xiv, 49 Day of the Dog (Weller) 12 de Kretser, Michelle, The Lost Dog 291–307 “Dear City” (Evasco) 260 Debord, Guy 277, 278 Decamerone (Boccaccio) 243 Degas, Edgar 189 Deleuze, Gilles 25, 27; & Félix Guattari 150 DeLillo, Don 332–40; Cosmopolis 37, 38, 234, 242, 332–40 Dell, Christopher xi, xii DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 313 Derrida, Jacques 282, 287, 292, 294, 302, 303, 327, 328 “Description Without Place” (Stevens) 193 Detmers, Ines 242 Deuber, Dagmar, & Glenda Leung 406 Devonish, Hubert 403; & Otelemate Harry 408 Devy, G.N. 206, 207 Dhaliwal, Nirpal Singh 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43–46, 50; Tourism 39, 41, 42, 43–46, 50 Dharavi (Mumbai) 12, 13 Dibia, Jude 115–27; Blackbird 115, 122–27; “Driver” 120; Unbridled 117, 121, 122; Walking with Shadows 117–21 Dickens, Charles 4, 7, 220, 221, 365 Dickinsen, Jen, Max J. Andrucki et al. 36, 38 Dirlik, Arif 148, 150 Dixon, L. Quentin 154 Dixon, Rob 278, 283 Dizzee Rascal 344, 346 Dollimore, Jonathan 209 “Don’t Shake it (Let it Free)” (Cornershop) 354–58, 359

ጓ

Donnelly, Jack 133 “Door, The” (Kolatkar) 203 “Doorstep, The” (Kolatkar) 203 Dörr, Volker C. 329 Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell) 7, 8 Down the Line (Yap) 155 Dr Zhivago (Pasternak) 283 Draupadi 187 “Driver” (Dibia) 120 Droan (Kolatkar) 184 Duff, Alan, Once Were Warriors 12 Duiker, K. Sello 101–12; The Quiet Violence of Dreams 101–12 Dunton, Chris 117, 119 Durkheim, Émile 226 Dust, Spittle and Wind (Osha) 120 Dutta, Jyotirmoy 208 Dwivedi, Sharda, & Rahul Mehrotra 167 East End (London) 4, 7, 352, 354 “Easter 1916” (Yeats) 26, 27, 28 Eckardt, Frank 215 Edifice, The (Omotoso) 118 Edison, Thomas 365 Edward VII, King 185 “Egg Tea at Eleven” (Elisa Lai) 254 Ehrlich, Paul 215 Elder, Catriona 291 “Electric City” (Grace) 315 Eliot, George 365 Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 28; The Waste Land 28 Ellison, Harlan, A Boy and His Dog 186 Engels, Friedrich 4, 7, 9, 14, 22 Evasco, Marjorie, “Dear City” 260; “Is It the Kingfisher?” 260 Everything Good Will Come (Atta) 130, 131, 138– 39 Eze, Chielozona 136, 137 Ezekiel, Nissim 199, 207, 208, 209, 210; “Background, Casually” 207

ጓ Index Fanon, Frantz 20, 328 Farías, Ignacio, & Susanne Stemmler xiii Feast in the House of Levi (Veronese) 187 Featherstone, Simon 345 Felski, Rita 14 Ferguson, Jesse 71 Fine Balance, A (Mistry) 12 First Fleet (Australia) 281 “Fisherman, The” (Yeats) 30 Five Bells (Jones) 279, 280, 282, 283–88 “Five Bells” (Slessor) 283 “Flyover, The” (Dasgupta) 236 “Forever Singlish” (Leong Liew Geok) 257 Forster, E.M. 202, 219, 364, 366, 377; A Passage to India 202, 219, 364, 372–73, 374, 375 Foster, R.F. 23, 27 Foucault, Michel 104, 191, 192 400 Kilometres (Taylor) 316–17 Fourth Passenger, The (Mini Nair) 175 Freedman, Jonathan 111 Freedom Song (Chaudhuri) 363, 366, 367, 376, 377 Frenkel, Ronit, & Craig MacKenzie 91 Frere, Sir Bartle 186 Freud, Sigmund xvi, 88, 90 Freyermuth, Gundolf S. 217 Fung, Anthony 147 Gagiano, Annie 112 Gajarawala, Toral 241, 244 Gandhi, Mahatma 198 Garuba, Harry 115 Gastarbeiter (Turkish, in Germany) 237 Gaylard, Rob 57 Gelder, Ken, & Jane M. Jacobs 291 Genette, Gérard xvi Gentleman, Amelia 9 “Geography Lesson” (Conchitina Cruz) 259 George, Susan 18 Gersdorf, Catrin 223 “Ghana Scholar Reflects on His Thesis, The” (Daruwalla) 260

431 Ghetts 346, 347–50; “In a Zone” 347–50, 359 Ghosh, Amitav 199 Gilbert, Jeremy 353, 354 Gilroy, Paul 34, 49, 349, 350, 354, 356, 357, 358 Gleick, James 118 “Glory, Repentance” (Tammy Ho) 255 G-Money 346 Goebel, Rolf J. xii Goh Chok Tong 147 Goldie, Terry 311 Gomes, Paulo Cesar Da Costa 38 Goux, Jean–Jacques 23 Grace, Patricia 12, 315, 317–18; Cousins 12; “Electric City” 315; Tu 317–18 Graceland (Abani) 136 Graeber, David 21 Grandmaster, The (dir. Wong Kar-Wai) 147 Granqvist, Raoul J. xiv Great Uprising (Indian Mutiny) 198 Greene, Solomon J. 8 Griffith, Arthur 23 Grunebaum, Heidi, & Steven Robins 98 Guantánamo 356 Guargon (Delhi) 242, 243, 245 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 207 Gunew, Sneja 297, 298 Gunkel, Henriette 102 Gupta, Suman 336 Gurr, Jens Martin 218, 220, 224; & Wilfried Raussert 213 Gwee Li Sui, “Incan Dream” 258; “Kenosis” 258 Habila, Helon 116 Hagedorn, John M. 350 “Haiku History of the World, A” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair) 261 Halberstam, Judith 102, 103 Hall, Stuart 298 Halliday, Sam 366 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 188 Han, Byung-Chul 133, 134, 328–31, 334 Hannerz, Ulf xii

432

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri 11, 358 Hardy, Corin, dir. 351 Harvey, David 5, 6, 9, 20, 231, 232, 233, 237, 238, 246 Hassenpflug, Dieter 216 Haussmann, Georges–Eugène 5, 9 “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (Yeats) 26 Head, Bessie, When Rain Clouds Gather 57 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 364, 373–74, 375 “Heart of Ruin” (Kolatkar) 203 “Heart Skips a Beat” (Olly Murs) 351–54, 359 Hendy, David 370 “Hermaphrodite Longings” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair) 261 Heywood, Christopher 87 Hill, Richard S. 318 Hillbrow (Johannesburg) 57–68, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 111 Hinduism 47, 198 Hirson, Denis 126 Ho, Louise 157, 158, 159, 256; “Island” 157; New Ends, Old Beginnings 157, 158; “New Year’s Eve 1989” 157 Ho, Tammy Lai-ming, “Glory, Repentance” 255 Hoad, Neville 59, 68, 119 Hobbes, Thomas 194 Holden, Philip 149 Holston, James, & Arjun Appadurai 37 Home (Behrendt) 318–20 Hong, Terry 42 Hong Kong 145–64 Hong Kong, poetry in 254–56 Houellebecq, Michel, Plateforme 45 “House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker, The” (Dasgupta) 236–39 Howes, Marjorie 25 Hubbard, Phil 33 Huggan, Graham 216, 219, 350 Hughes, David 365

ጓ

Hunger Eats a Man (Sithole) 73, 81, 82, 83, 86 Hunter, Mark 102 “I Take No Pills” (Arthur Leung) 256 “I’ll Make This Knife Talk” (Felix Cheong) 258 Ikas, Karin 334 “Imaginary Homelands” (Rushdie) 206 Immortals, The (Chaudhuri) 363, 366, 367, 368, 376 “In a Zone” (Ghetts) 347–50, 359 “In the Fifties” (Banzon) 259 In the Middle of the Night (Promise) 119 “In Transit” (Alvin Pang) 258 “Incan Dream” (Gwee) 258 “Incident at Chira Bazaar” (Pinto) 261 India 146, 167–78, 184–95, 197–210, 231–46, 363–77 India, poetry in 260–62 —See also: Arun Kolatkar Indian Mutiny 198 Indians in the U K 33–50 Indra 187 Ingold, Tim 370 International Monetary Fund 29, 335 Interpreters, The (Soyinka) 119 Ireland 23–28 “Is It the Kingfisher?” (Evasco) 260 Isin, Engin Fahri 36, 37, 38; & M. Siemiatycki 37; & Patricia K. Wood 37, 38 “Island” (Ho) 157 Ivanchikova, Alla 105, 110 Jaago (dir. Mehul Kumar) 173 Jacobs, Jane M. xi Jain, Jasbir 206 Jamaica 401–17 Jamaican English 401–17 Jameson, Fredric 20, 374 “Jeepney” (Abad) 259 Jejuri (Kolatkar) 185, 202–205

ጓ Index Jejuri (Maharashtra state) 202–205 Jimoh, Mike 120 Johannesburg 4, 99 —See also: Hillbrow Johnson, Jeri 214, 215 Jones, Emrys xi Jones, Gail 278, 279, 282, 283–88; Five Bells 279, 280, 282, 283–88 Jones, Megan 79, 80, 81 Joyce, James 214, 225, 279; Ulysses 279, 283, 286 Judin, Hilton, & Ivan Vladislaviǰ xii Julios, Christina 49 Kaiser, Tim, “Lunch Hour with Little Ming” 255; “Waiting for 107” 255 Kala Ghoda (south Mumbai) 186 Kala Ghoda Poems (Kolatkar) 184–95 Kallidevayya 187 Kamath, Nishikanth, dir. Mumbai Meri Jaan 173 Kan, Toni 117 Karskens, Grace 282 Keith, Michael 348, 351 Kelen, Christopher, “Macao: Apostrophe” 254 “Kenosis” (Gwee Li Sui) 258 Kerkvliet, Arnold 396 Keynes, John Maynard 8 Kfua, Bonny 382, 383, 385, 392 Kilates, Marne, “Children of the Snarl” 260 King, Anthony D. xii King, Bruce 201, 205 King, Thomas, “A Short History of Indians in Canada” 309–12 Kittler, Friedrich A. 340 Knapp, Adrian 61, 63, 64, 67 “Knucklebones” (Kolatkar) 191 Knudsen, Eva Rask 313 “Koh-i-noor, The” (Thakore) 261 Kolatkar, Arun 184–95, 202–205; “The Barefeet Queen of the Crossroads” 189; “Between Jejuri and the Railway Station”

433 205; Bhijki Vahi 184; The Boatride and Other Poems 185; Breakfast at Kala Ghoda” 190; “The Bus” 203; “The Butterfly” 205; “Chaitanya” 203; Chirimiri 184; “The Door” 203; “The Doorstep” 203; Droan 184; “Heart of Ruin” 203; Jejuri 185, 202–205; Kala Ghoda Poems 184–95; “Knucklebones” 191; “An Old Woman” 204; “Pi-dog” 186, 188; The Policeman 185; “The Priest” 203; “The Priest’s Son” 204; Sarpa Satra 185; “A Scratch” 203; “A Song for a Murali” 204; “A Song for a Vaghya” 204 Koolhaas, Rem, & Bruce Mau 183 Korte, Barbara 240 Kouega, Jean–Paul 383, 385 Kretzschmar, William 407 Kumar, Amitava 18 Kumar, Mehul, dir. Jaago 173 Kurtz, Hilda, & Katherine Hankins 36 Kushner, Tony 101, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112; Angels in America 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112 Lacoue–Labarthe, Philippe 370 Lady Antebellum 344 Lagos 236 Lagos Na Waa I Swear (Apolo) 117 Lagos novel 116, 122, 123, 136, 138 Lahiri, Jhumpa 210 Lai, Elisa, “Egg Tea at Eleven” 254 Laing, Olivia 41, 42 Laist, Randy 334 “Lake Isle of Innisfree, The” (Yeats) 28 Lam, Agnes S.L. 250, 252; & Candice S.P. Ng 249 Larkin, Brian xiv Last Man in Tower (Adiga) 174 Lawless, Jill 43 Lazzarato, Maurizio 21, 22 Lee Kwan Yew 145, 148, 152 Lee, Elbert, ‘Tai Tai Bodhisattva” 255 Lee, Joseph 23 Lee, Tara 42 Lefebvre, Henri 37, 72, 183, 215

434

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

Lehan, Richard 214, 215, 220 Lehtovuori, Panu 343 “Leisure” (Davies) 192 Leong Liew Geok, “Forever Singlish” 257 LePage, Robert, & Andrée Tabouret–Keller 402 “Letter to my Baby Daughter Born in Hong Kong” (Eddie Tay) 258 Leung, Arthur, “I Take No Pills” 256 Lewis, David, Dennis Rodgers & Michael Woolcock 5 Life and Times of Michael K (Coetzee) 12 Lilliput 207, 208 Lim, Catherine 156 Lim, Shirley, “The Taximan’s Story” 156 Lindner, Oliver 346 Liska, Vivian 107 Lloyd George, David 23 Lloyd, Cher 344 Local (Verma) 177–78 Lodging Houses Act 8 London 4, 5, 7, 14, 28, 33–50, 343–60 London, Jack 7, 8; The People of the Abyss 7 London, Ontario 316 Londonstani (Malkani) 40–43, 46–49, 50 Los Angeles 134, 135 Lost Dog, The (de Kretser) 291–307 “Lost in Los Angeles” (Baingana) 134–35 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot) 28 “Lunch Hour with Little Ming” (Kaiser) 255 Luxemburg, Rosa 20 Lynch, Kevin 215, 283 Lyons, F.S.L. 23 Lyotard, Jean–François 327 Macao, poetry in 253–54 “Macao: Apostrophe” (Christopher Kelen) 254 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 197, 198, 201, 206 Machin, David 359 Magona, Sindiwe, Mother to Mother 12

ጓ

Mahabharata 184, 186 Mair, Christian 416 Malaysia 145, 152, 159 Malkani, Gautam 35, 39–43, 46–49, 50; Londonstani 40–43, 46–49, 50 Mamdani, Mahmood 139, 140 Manchester 7 Mandarin 153, 159, 160, 161, 163 Mandel, Ernest 20 Maniam, Aaron, “Remembering Jalan Kayu” 258 ǒori 12, 313, 317–18, 321 Maori Battalion 317 Marabar Caves 202, 219, 372, 373 Marathi 169, 172, 184, 198, 202, 205, 208 Marcuse, Peter, & Ronald van Kempen 141 Marx, Karl 4, 21, 22, 294 Massey, Doreen 231, 232, 233, 235, 238, 239, 246 Mathai, Anna Sujatha, “Night and the Children of the Slums” 261 Maxsta 346 Mbangwana, Paul N. 385 Mbembe, Achille 81, 93 McCann, Eugene J. 37 McKay, Susan 405 McKirdy, David, “Abroad in England” 255; “Ancestral Worship” 255 McLeod, John 34, 278 McLuhan, Marshall 364, 371, 372, 375 Medalie, David 99 Mehrotra, Rahul 169, 173 Mehta, Suketu 168, 174, 175, 184, 226 Melbourne 291–307 “Memories of Silence” (Mpe) 65 “Mental Life of Cities, The” (Tay) 160, 161, 162, 163 Middleton, Jason, & Roger Beebe 343 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 176, 220, 222, 224, 225 Mignolo, Walter 11, 160

ጓ Index

435

Mine Boy (Abrahams) 10, 87 Minogue, Kylie 344 Mistry, Rohinton 12, 174, 208; A Fine Balance 12 Mitchell, Don 37, 215 Mockyen, Alma 410 Moele, Kgbletsi 87–99; Room 207 87–99 Moore, Marianne, “What Are Years” 190 Moretti, Franco 217 Morrison, Donald 41 Mother to Mother (Magona) 12 Mpe, Phaswane 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 87, 99; Brooding Clouds 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68; “Memories of Silence” 65; “Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition” 63, 64, 66; “Our Missing Store of Memories” 57, 58; “The Role of the Heinemann African Writers Series” 68; “Sol Plaatje, Orality and the Politics of Cultural Representation” 67; Welcome to Our Hillbrow 57–63, 66–67, 73, 74, 76–77, 81–82, 85; & Monica Seeber 67 Mrázek, Rudolf xiv Mrs Dalloway (Woolf) 279, 283, 286 Mufwene, Salikoko 402 Mühleisen, Susanne, & Eric A. Anchimbe 385 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 206 Mulvey, Laura 370 Mumba Rakshasa 184 Mumbai 4, 12, 14, 167–78, 184–95, 367 Mumbai Meri Jaan (dir. Kamath) 173 Mumford, Lewis 131, 132, 139 Munro, Brenna M. 111, 112 Murray, Sally–Ann 96 “My Whore at Rua de Cantão” (Hilda Tam) 254 Myambo, Melissa Tandiwe 59, 60 Mzobe, Sifiso 73, 78; Young Blood 73, 78, 81, 82, 85

Nancy, Jean–Luc 195, 370 Nandi, Miriam 241, 244 Narayan, Suma, Ladies Compartment, 8:47 Local 172 Narcopolis (Thayil) 174 Native Canadians 309–11, 315, 316–17 “Naturally These Stories Lost Nothing by Repetition” (Mpe) 63, 64, 66 Nayar, Pramod K. 197 Neba, Ayu'nwi N., Evelyn F. Chibaka & Gratien G. Atindogbé 384, 385, 386 Nemade, Bhalchandra 208 New Ends, Old Beginnings (Louise Ho) 157, 158 “New Year’s Eve 1989” (Ho) 157 New York City 4, 5, 332–40, 376 New Zealand 317–18, 321 —See also: Mǒori Ngefac, Aloysius 385 Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o 199, 204 Nietzsche, Friedrich 17, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29 Niger Delta 139 Nigeria 115–27, 130 —See also: Lola Shoneyin, Sefi Atta “Night and the Children of the Slums” (Mathai) 261 “Nineteen Forty-Two” (Thakore) 261 Nixon, Rob 221, 223 Nnolim, Charles 116, 117 “No Amnesiac King” (Ramanujan) 206 “No Second Troy” (Yeats) 26 Nora, Pierre 244 Noyce, Phillip, dir. Catch a Fire 59 Nugent, Maria 280 Nuttall, Sarah 78, 93 Nwaubani, Adaobi Tricia 116 Nwosu, Maik 117 Nzegwu, Nkiru 277

Nair, Mini, The Fourth Passenger 175 Nair, Rukmini Bhaya 260, 261; “A Haiku History of the World” 261; “Hermaphrodite Longings” 261

Ogborn, Miles 38 Okin, Susan Moller 129 “Old Woman, An” (Kolatkar) 204 Olly Murs, “Heart Skips a Beat” 351–54, 359

436

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

Omaar, Rageh 43 Omotoso, Kole, The Edifice 118 Once Were Warriors (Duff) 12 One Direction 344 Onega, Susana xi Onus, Lin 315 Onyeama, Dillibe, Sex is a Nigger’s Game 118 Orientalism 200, 201, 203, 205, 209 Orwell, George 7, 8, 9, 14, 197, 198; Down and Out in Paris and London 7, 8; The Road to Wigan Pier 9 Osha, Sanya, Dust, Spittle and Wind 120 “Our Missing Store of Memories” (Mpe) 57, 58 “Outpost of Progress, An” (Conrad) xii Painter, Joe, & Chris Philo 36, 37 Pakistan 200 Palumbo–Liu, David 132 Pang, Alvin, “Candles” 257; “In Transit” 258 Pang, Laikwan 159 Paranjape, Makarand 206 Parekh, Bhikhu 49, 129 Paris 5 Partition of India 200 Partition of Pakistan 200 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 244 Passage to India, A (Forster) 202, 219, 364, 372– 73, 374, 375 “Passage” (Slavick) 255 Pasternak, Boris, Dr Zhivago 283 Patel, Sujata, & Alice Thorner 167 Patke, Rajeev S. 208 Paton, Alan 87, 89, 95; Cry, the Beloved Country 87 People of the Abyss, The (London) 7 Petridis, Alexis 346 Phadke, Shilpa 173; Sameera Khan & Shilpa Ranade 168, 169, 171 Philippines, poetry in 258–60 Phillip, Captain Arthur 288 Phillips, Lawrence xii Picker, John M. 365, 373

ጓ

Pidgin (Cameroonian) 379–98 “Pi-dog” (Kolatkar) 186, 188 Pinto, Jerry, “Incident at Chira Bazaar” 261 Plateforme (Houellebecq) 45 Playing in the Light (Wicomb) 99 Playing Madam Mao (Siew Mei) 149 Policeman, The (Kolatkar) 185 Poll, Ryan 131 Poon, Angela Mui Cheng 147 Prakash, Gyan 183 Pratt, Mary Louise xiii Preston, Dennis 406 “Priest, The” (Kolatkar) 203 “Priest’s Son, The” (Kolatkar) 204 Primorac, Ranka xii, 320, 321 Promise, Vintage, In the Middle of the Night 119 Ptolemy 184 Pucherová, Dobrota 109, 111 Punjab 39, 200 Putonghua 152, 153, 159, 160, 162, 163 Q and A (Swarup) 12 Quah, Sy Ren 153 “Quicker the Better, The” (Sou Vai Keng) 254 Quiet Violence of Dreams, The (Duiker) 101–12 Railton, Diane, & Paul Watson 344 Rajagopalachari, C. 187 Rajan, Gita, & Shailja Sharma 252 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder 206 Rajaratnam, Sinnathamby 148 Rajesh, Monisha 176 Raley, Rita 333 Ramakrishnan, E.V. 206 Ramanujan, A.K., “No Amnesiac King” 206 Ramesh, Randeep 9 Rao, R. Raj 207 Rastafarianism 40 Raykar, Shubhangi 205 Rege, M.P. 204 “Remembering Jalan Kayu” (Maniam) 258 Rickford, John 403

ጓ Index Rig Veda 187 Rimmon–Kenan, Shlomith 127 „Rindu” (Banzon) 259 Rio de Janeiro 5 Rizzle Kicks 346, 351, 353, 354 Road to Wigan Pier, The (Orwell) 9 “Role of the Heinemann African Writers Series, The” (Mpe) 68 Romanow, Rebecca Fine 103, 104, 105, 106, 111 Room 207 (Moele) 87–99 Roper, Chris 125 Rosello, Mireille 279 Ruble, Blair 343 Rudd, Kevin 285 Rushdie, Salman 174, 176, 199, 200, 206, 207, 208, 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226; “Imaginary Homelands” 206; Midnight’s Children 176, 220, 222, 224, 225; Shame 200 Ruvani, Ranasinha 47 Saathiya (dir. Shaad Ali) 173 Sacred Games (Chandra) 12, 174 Saha, Anamik 42, 46 Said, Edward W. 201, 203 Sala, Bonaventura M. 385 Samuelson, Meg 77 Sandercock, Leonie 37, 38 Sandhu, Sukhdev 42 Sandten, Cecile xii, 218, 223, 226; Ines Detmers & Birte Heidemann xii Sarpa Satra (Kolatkar) 185 Sassen, Saskia xii, 132, 138, 332, 338 Sassoon, David 185 “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (Weller) 314 Savitri 187 Sayyid, Salman 35 Schafer, Raymond Murray 363–65, 368, 369, 371, 375, 376 Schmidt, Leigh Eric 371 Schneider, Edgar 401–405, 414 Schotland, Sarah D. 240

437 Schröder, Anne 382, 384, 385, 387 Schulze–Engler, Frank 219, 227 Scott, Kim, Benang: from the heart 11, 12 “Scratch, A” (Kolatkar) 203 Seak, Petra, “Bamboo Temple” 254 Season of Anomy (Soyinka) 118 Secor, Anna 36, 37, 38 Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, The (Shoneyin) 130, 131, 136–38 Sennett, Richard 217 “September 1913” (Yeats) 26 Sex is a Nigger’s Game (Onyeama) 118 Shadrake, Alan 149 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet 188 Shame (Rushdie) 200 Sharma, Kalpana 13 Sherman, Ranen Omer 109 Shetler, Scott 354 Shields, Rob 280 Shoneyin, Lola 130, 136–38; The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives 130, 131, 136–38 “Short History of Indians in Canada, A” (King) 309–12 Siew Mei, Lau, Playing Madam Mao 149 Simmel, Georg 23, 193, 224, 226 Simone, AbdouMaliq xiv Sinclair, Iain 280 Singapore 145–64 Singapore, poetry in 256–58 Singh, Kirpal, “At Lake Balaton” 148 Singlish 147, 154, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 257 Sinha, Indra, Animal’s People 221–23 Sithole, Nkosinathi 73, 82, 83, 84; Hunger Eats a Man 73, 81, 82, 83, 86 Situationists 277, 278 Sky-High Flames (Azuah) 119 Slavick, Madeleine Marie, “Passage” 255 Slessor, Kenneth 283, 284; “Five Bells” 283 Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Boyle) 13 Snell, Heather 222 Sofky, Wolfgang 356

438

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS

“Sol Plaatje, Orality and the Politics of Cultural Representation” (Mpe) 67 “Song for a Murali, A” (Kolatkar) 204 “Song for a Vaghya, A” (Kolatkar) 204 Sou Vai Keng, “The Quicker the Better” 254 South Africa 10, 12, 57–68, 71–86, 87–99, 101–12, 198 South China 146 Soyinka, Wole 118, 123; The Interpreters 119; Season of Anomy 118 Spears, Britney 344 “Spiritus Mundus” (Thayil) 261 Spunner, Suzanne 315 Sridhar, K. 176, 178; Twice Written 176 Staeheli, Lynn A. 37, 38 Steingo, Gavin 93 Sterne, Jonathan 365, 370 Stevens, Wallace, “Description Without Place” 193 Stilz, Gerhard 234, 242 “Stolen Car” (Weller) 314 Strange and Sublime Address, A (Chaudhuri) 363, 366–67, 369, 375 “Street Haunting” (Woolf) 279, 280, 285 Street, The (Bandele) 119 Sturcke, James 13 Subramaniam, Arundhathi 260, 261; “To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian” 261 Subramanian, Samanth 169 Swaminathan, Kalpana 177, 178; Venus Crossing 177 Swarup, Vikas, Q and A 12 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels 207 Sydney 320, 279–88 Sydney Cove 280, 288 Sydney Harbour 280, 281, 282, 284 Sydney Opera House 281, 282, 283, 284 Syron, Gordon 281, 282, 286 ‘Tai Tai Bodhisattva” (Elbert Lee) 255 Tam, Hilda, “My Whore at Rua de Cantão” 254

ጓ

Tanner, Tony 117 Taoism 154 Tavares, David, & Marc Brosseau 36 “Taximan’s Story, The” (Lim) 156 Tay, Eddie 160, 161, 162, 163; “Letter to my Baby Daughter Born in Hong Kong” 258; “The Mental Life of Cities” 160, 161, 162, 163 Taylor, Charles 140 Taylor, Drew Hayden, 400 Kilometres 316–17 Texaco (Chamoiseau) 10 Tey Tsung Hang 149 Thakore, Anand 260, 261; “The Koh-i-noor” 261; “Nineteen Forty-Two” 261 Tharu, Susie 206 Thayil, Jeet 174, 260, 261; Narcopolis 174; “Spiritus Mundus” 261; “2007” 261 Three Day Road (Boyden) 315 Tiananmen Square 158 Tibet 355, 356, 357 Tiepolo’s Hound (Walcott) 187 Tiffin, Helen 200 Tinchy Stryder 346 Titlestad, Michael 72 “To Ireland in the Coming Times” (Yeats) 28 “To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian” (Subramaniam) 261 Tokyo Cancelled (Dasgupta) 231, 232, 233–39, 243, 244, 245, 246 Tomlinson, John 330 Tompkins, Joanne 280, 281 Toronto 309, 310, 311, 312 Tourism (Dhaliwal) 39, 41, 42, 43–46, 50 T R C (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) 60, 90, 91, 97, 98, 99 Trivedi, Harish 206 Tropical Fish (Baingana) 130, 135 Tu (Grace) 317–18 Tucker, Andrew 101, 109, 110 “Tung Chung Line” (Jennifer Wong) 255 Tutu, Desmond 90 Twice Written (Sridhar) 176 “2 mothers in a HDB playground” (Yap) 155

ጓ Index “2007" (Thayil" 261 Tyner, James A. 347 Uganda 130 — See: Doreen Baingana Ulysses (Joyce) 279, 283, 286 Unbridled (Dibia) 117, 121, 122 “Under Ben Bulben” (Yeats) 29 “United Provinces of India, The” (Cornershop) 354 University of Buea (Cameroon) 379, 380, 384 Upstone, Sarah 232, 233, 239, 241 Upton, Clive 407 “urban iwi: tihei mauri oha!” (Cruickshank) 321 Utzon, Jørn 281 Uzoatu, Uzor Maxim 117 Valente, Joseph 25 Valentino, Russell Scott 333 Varma, Rashmi xii, xiv, 216, 217 Vedas 187 Vendler, Helen 25 Venus Crossing (Swaminathan) 177 Verma, Jaideep, Local 177–78 Vernallis, Carol 346, 348, 352 Veronese, Paolo, Feast in the House of Levi 187 Viljoen, Shaun 112 Viol, Claus–Ulrich 359 Virgin of Flames, The (Abani) 135 Virilio, Paul 331, 334, 335, 339 Vong, Agnes, “Yinyang Hotel” 254 Wachinger, Tobias xv, 220 “Waiting for 107” (Kaiser) 255 Walcott, Derek 187, 199; Tiepolo’s Hound 187 Walking with Shadows (Dibia) 117–21 Wallerstein, Immanuel 11 War of Independence, Indian 197 Wasserman, Renata R. Mautner 293 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 28 Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe) 57–63, 66–67, 73, 74, 76–77, 81–82, 85

439 Weller, Archie 12, 314; Day of the Dog 12; “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” 314; “Stolen Car” 314 Westgate, J. Chris 111 Wetherell, M. 35 “What Are Years” (Moore) 190 When Rain Clouds Gather (Head) 57 White Tiger, The (Adiga) 12, 231, 232, 240–43, 244, 245 Whiteman, Kaye 117, 123 Wicomb, Zoë, Playing in the Light 99 Willemse, Hein 87 Williams, John 41 Wong Kar-Wai, dir., Chung King Express 146; The Grandmaster 147 Wong, Jennifer, “Tung Chung Line” 255 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 4 Wood, Michael 25 Woolf, Virginia 214, 220, 278–80, 285–87; Mrs Dalloway 279, 283, 286; “Street Haunting” 279, 280, 285 Wordsworth, William 194 Wright, Cecile, Penny Standen & Tina Patel 350 Xi Ni Er 153, 163; “Change: Obituaries of Three Generations of the Liu Family in the Late 20th Century” 153 Yap, Arthur, “The Correctness of Flavour” 154, 155; Down the Line 155; “2 mothers in a HDB playground” 155 Yeats, W.B. 19, 25–28, 29; “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” 26; “Easter 1916” 26, 27, 28; “The Fisherman” 30; “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” 26; “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” 28; “No Second Troy” 26; “September 1913” 26; “To Ireland in the Coming Times” 28; “Under Ben Bulben” 29 “Yinyang Hotel” (Agnes Vong) 254 Young Blood (Mzobe) 73, 78, 81, 82, 85 Younge, Gary 41, 43 Yudhishthira 186, 187

440 Zabus, Chantal 118 ZaimoȪlu, Feridun 329 Zhou, Mi 372, 373

R E -V ISITIN G

THE

P OSTCOLONIAL ( IN THE ) M ETROPOLIS Zipes, Jack 151 Zuma, Jacob 129, 137

ጓ