The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South [Illustrated] 0810140403, 9780810140400

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: The Papier-Mâché Parrot
Chapter 1. Writing Aporia: Aesthetics and Politics in the Dictator Novel of the Global South
Chapter 2. Tabula Rasa: Juan Manuel de Rosas and the Emergence of the Dictator as a Literary Figure
Chapter 3. Fathers of the Fatherlands: Writing, Politics, and Literary Form at the End of the Latin American "Boom"
Chapter 4. Mésaventures: The Politics and Poetics of the Dictator Novel in the African Postcolony
Chapter 5. The Dictator in the Corpolony: On the Dictator Novel in the Time of Transition
Afterword: Moving Outward and Forward
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Citation preview

The Dictator Novel

The Dictator Novel Writers and Politics in the Global South

Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2019 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2019. All rights reserved. This book was supported in part by the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Fund of the American Comparative Literature Association. Quotations from the writings of Carlos Fuentes are copyright © Carlos Fuentes and are drawn from the Carlos Fuentes Papers, Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Manuscripts Division. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Armillas-Tiseyra, Magalí, author. Title: The dictator novel : writers and politics in the global South / Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra. Description: Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018058331 | ISBN 9780810140400 (paper text : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810140417 (cloth text : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810140424 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Dictators in literature. | Developing countries—Literatures— History and criticism. | Developing countries—Politics and government—In literature. Classification: LCC PN56.5.D53 A76 2019 | DDC 809.933581091724—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058331

Contents

Introduction: The Papier-​Mâché Parrot

3

Chapter 1 Writing Aporia: Aesthetics and Politics in the Dictator Novel of the Global South

25

Chapter 2 Tabula Rasa: Juan Manuel de Rosas and the Emergence of the Dictator as a Literary Figure

47

Chapter 3 Fathers of the Fatherlands: Writing, Politics, and Literary Form at the End of the Latin American “Boom”

77

Chapter 4 Mésaventures: The Politics and Poetics of the Dictator Novel in the African Postcolony

111

Chapter 5 The Dictator in the Corpolony: On the Dictator Novel in the Time of Transition

145

Afterword: Moving Outward and Forward

175

Acknowledgments

179

Notes

183

Index

221

The Dictator Novel

Introduction

The Papier-​Mâché Parrot

When a chancellor opens the dictator’s casket toward the end of the funeral procession in Jorge Zalamea’s novella El Gran Burundún-​Burundá ha muerto (The Great Burundún-​Burundá Has Died, 1952), the body is missing. There lies in its place an enormous parrot wrapped in or fashioned from the quotidian memoranda of the state: newspapers, annals, public announcements, and so on. The discovery incites chaos, and the army opens fire on the crowd. But, like the dictator, the people have changed: when shot, they only bleed a dull, watery substance. In panic, everyone flees the city. Writing in response to his exile from Colombia, Zalamea aimed to convey the dehumanizing effects of dictatorship as well as to describe its mechanics.1 The fictional Burundún-​Burundá rose to power through his rhetorical prowess, destroying his opponents with words. Once in power, however, he mysteriously lost the capacity for speech, and so he decided to abolish language by progressively restricting the number of permitted words and phrases. Against those who would not comply, Burundún-​Burundá mobilized the full strength of the security forces. Such attacks on language are a recurring motif in narratives about dictators and dictatorship. In the short story “Lexicographicide” (2013) by the South Sudanese and Ugandan writer Taban Lo Liyong, for instance, a frustrated writer imagines becoming the “total dictator” of his island. Once in power, he too will create an official dictionary and reduce the number of permitted words with each yearly edition.2 Just as dictators are hostile to writing and writers, so too do writers mobilize the written word against tyranny. The dictator novel is a literary response to the political phenomenon of dictatorship, where the term “dictator” and its cognates tyrant, despot, and autocrat—­or, for that matter, caudillo (Latin America) and Big Man (Africa)—­carry a pejorative charge.3 Following the writers themselves, I define “dictator” as a ruler who is neither chosen by nor represents the interests of the majority of people over whom he wields power.4 Dictator novels satirize or parody the authoritarian leader, condemn his collaborators, and register experiences that are elided in the official record. In so doing, these works propose to uncover and dislodge the practices of authority and violence on which dictatorship relies. Dictator novels are part of the

3

4 Introduction

culture of writing and resistance and are, in this broad sense, works of politically committed literature or what Jean-​Paul Sartre called littérature engagée. But this is only part of the story. To read the dictator novel solely for its attack on the dictator obscures its examination of the systems within which dictatorship takes shape. Such readings risk overlooking the complex ways in which novels about dictators also intervene in larger debates, whether on the internal difficulties of national consolidation, the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, or even the political function of writing itself. Similarly, while the trope of the vulgar or “barbarous” dictator abounds in representations of dictatorship—­and particularly of dictators in the Global South—­it is rarely the only focus of critique. These narratives are also deeply concerned with the mechanics of dictatorship, and because of this they pay close attention to the dictator’s reliance on the written word. As Zalamea’s image of the dictator as a papier-​mâché parrot suggests, the dictator is nothing without language. Dictatorship is itself predicated on the cultivation of tropes and motifs that are not wholly dissimilar from the work of fiction, so that the writer and the dictator share the written word as both a vehicle and a weapon. This is a central paradox for the literary representation of the dictator. If the dictator’s relationship to writing is complex, so too is his relationship to the writer. Fidel Castro’s comments on his longtime friend Gabriel García Márquez offer a suggestive illustration. Here Castro, the foremost Latin American political figure of the twentieth century, celebrates García Márquez, its preeminent novelist: As a public man compelled to compose speeches and narrate events, I share the illustrious writer’s [García Márquez’s] delight in searching for the precise word, a sort of shared obsession that is unappeasable until the phrase is just right, faithful to the sentiment or idea we wish to express, even as we remain firm in the belief that it can always be improved. I admire him above all when, if the exact word does not exist, he calmly invents it. How I envy that license of his!5

Castro credits García Márquez with convincing him not only that he would want to be a writer in his next life, but a writer “like Gabriel García Márquez, with that obstinate and persistent attention to detail that supports, like a philosopher’s stone, all the credibility of his dazzling exaggerations.”6 García Márquez was equally appreciative of Castro, praising his gifts as a thinker, writer, and rhetorician.7 The intimacy of writer and politician is comprised of admiration and identification, as well as envy and competition. In naming this affinity, Castro suggests that the writer and the politician are doubles. Both, to borrow a phrase from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “trade in words.”8 Or, as Yunior, the narrator of Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) puts it: “[Salman] Rushdie claims that tyrants and

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

5

scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.”9 Yunior’s proposition is the point of departure for this book. To read the dictator novel solely for its attack on the dictator is to miss its constitutive tensions and the underlying ambivalence conveyed in the unsettling suggestion that the writer and dictator are somehow alike. The dictator novel is first and foremost an analytic endeavor. I take as my touchstone Ángel Rama’s reading of the Latin American dictator novel, where Rama makes a strong distinction between what he calls anti-​dictator “diatribes” (works whose primary purpose is to enumerate a dictator’s crimes) and the dictator novel as a work that examines the dictator as an individual, together with the historical and social contexts that make his regime possible.10 Central to this analysis is what Rama terms a “leap into the void,” the (creative) effort to bridge the chasm that separates the ruler from the ruled. Although rooted in historical precedent, the dictator novel’s critical heft inheres in its very literariness. I argue that the dictator novel is also the space in which writers grapple with their motivations for and the difficulties of writing about the dictator, interrogating the limits of committed literature as such. The dictator novel in this reading is a site of crisis. But crisis is also the condition of possibility for new ways of thinking. The political phenomenon of dictatorship, therefore, serves as the occasion for the self-​conscious and even self-​critical theorization of the relationship between literature and politics. The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South brings together a cross-​regional and multilingual archive that spans the textual cultures of postindependence Spanish America and twentieth-​ century Hispanophone Latin American literature and extends to the emergence of the dictator novel in postindependence Anglophone and Francophone African literatures up through the turn of the twenty-​first century. Not only do Latin America and Africa share a history of dictatorship, one unevenly spread across the many nations that comprise each continent; they have correspondingly rich traditions of literary engagement with the dictator and the problem of dictatorship at large. The juxtaposition of works from these two continents illuminates the ways in which African dictator novels both evoke and amend their Latin American counterparts, transforming understanding of the dictator novel from a “local” phenomenon that responds to national political questions into a transnational literary genre. More precisely, and to borrow a term from Fredric Jameson, the dictator novel in the Global South functions as a “generic series,” rather than a clearly defined or “set” genre, and is characterized by discontinuity (substitution, transformation, or repression of elements in the preceding texts) as much as continuity.11 Comparative analysis of the dictator novel across time and place yields an understanding of what the dictator novel “is” (the contours of the genre, including recurring tropes,

6 Introduction

themes, and critical motifs), and also generates analysis of the complicated intersections of writing and politics in the Global South. Understanding the dictator novel in this way entails reading across often-​ asynchronous political and literary histories. In Latin America, the tradition of writing about and against authoritarian regimes—­whether in the form of caciquismo, caudillismo, dictatorship, or a military junta—­stretches back (at least) to the political turmoil that followed the achievement of independence from Spain in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Here, to talk about the dictator as a problem of national consolidation was also to talk about the desired political community of the new nation. Although these conversations took place across many genres, in the early decades of the twentieth century the novel emerged as a primary venue and the dictator as a key figure for understanding Latin American reality. This lineage reached an apex at the end of the Latin American literary “boom” in the early 1970s. The generic series (in Jameson’s sense) of dictator novels continues to expand, comprising literary engagements with the postdictatorship period in Latin America and the aftereffects of state violence.12 On the other side of the Atlantic, the dictator novel emerged in West and Central African literatures in the 1970s and 1980s as a subset of the broader category of the literature of political disillusionment, which followed the anticolonial and nationalist literature of the independence period. Here the dictator, as the prototypical Big Man, stands alongside the larger complex of issues facing newly independent nations. These issues include the lasting effects of colonization, the forces of neocolonialism, and the collaboration of what Frantz Fanon called the “national bourgeoisie” with those external forces; all are part of what Achille Mbembe would later term the “postcolony.” More recent African dictator novels have increasingly turned their attention to the global dimensions of dictatorship, putting pressure on the formal and conceptual limits of the genre as it enters the twenty-​first century. Reading the dictator novel in this trans-​historical and trans-​continental perspective shifts the emphasis away from the possible historical referents of a given work (the question of which real-​world regime or dictator is under attack in a novel) to the unifying concerns of the dictator novel as a genre that recurs throughout the literatures of the Global South. My use of the term “Global South” to describe the regions covered in this study is not just a placeholder for the formerly colonized or what used to be called the Third World. The Global South is not, properly speaking, a place. Following Alfred López, Vijay Prashad, and Anne Garland Mahler, I mobilize the Global South as a discursive formation, composed in the mutual recognition of shared circumstances by those groups that are disadvantageously positioned within the capitalist world system.13 From here it becomes possible to speak of a “South” within the North, as in the marginalization of indigenous or otherwise racialized populations, and vice versa. In their attention to the uneven distributions of global political, economic, and cultural power, all of which

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

7

create the conditions of possibility for the dictatorships that are their immediate concern, the novels I discuss in this book index and even expose the dynamics that define the Global South as a transnational collectivity in the present. In short: reading the dictator novel across time and place also tells the story of the emergence of the Global South as a political consciousness at the turn of the twenty-​first century. Authoritarianism and dictatorship are by no means specific to the Global South; a fact often acknowledged in the novels, where references to European totalitarianism and imperialism, or even ancient Roman dictators and other classical tyrants, serve as both analogy and counterpoint. And yet, a particular type of autocratic ruler—­vain, cruel, incompetent, given to excess—­is immediately recognizable as the iconic “Latin American,” “African,” or simply “Third World” dictator. The pervasive phenomenon of dictatorship here appears endemic and might be presumed the symptom of an underdeveloped political culture or, worse, an underdeveloped political imagination. The dictator novel of the Global South responds by calling attention to dictatorship as a historical formation that is constituted in the imbrication of local political struggles with the unequal distribution of global power; including, but not limited to, histories of colonization, neocolonialism, ongoing economic peripheralization, and proxy battles between more powerful nation-​states. In this sense, the dictator novel of the Global South is fundamentally about power, understood at both the national and global scale, as well as power in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. In this configuration, literature itself becomes a mode of knowledge and interpretation. Attention to these multiple and interlocking scales is a perspective that is specific to the dictator novel of the Global South. I separate what I am calling the “dictator novel of the Global South” from a larger body of literature about tyranny or fascism that spans the globe. I also separate the works discussed in this study from novels about dictatorship in the Global South that are by or focus on people who, recognizing the inadequacy of the term, I will call “outsiders.” This appellation is not a question of the author’s national origin—­many, like Joseph Conrad or V. S. Naipaul, do not fit cleanly within a single literary-​historical tradition—­so much as of perspective. These works center the experiences of external actors over and above imaginative engagement with the dictator. For example, in Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), set in the fictional Latin American republic of Costaguana, or Graham Greene’s The Comedians (1966), set in Haiti under the rule of François (Papa Doc) Duvalier, the focus is on the foreigners who become embroiled in but eventually escape local political turmoil.14 In counterpoint to Conrad and Greene, V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) illuminates the experiences of the descendants of South Asian traders in an unnamed Central African country, whose lives are jeopardized by the rise of authoritarian regimes in the region. Here, the protagonist’s options for “escape” (global mobility) are complicated by a generational history of migration and marginalization.

8 Introduction

While all three novels have a lot to say about the intersection of global interests with local political questions, the dictator and dictatorship function largely as a backdrop to the protagonists’ stories. To the extent that these kinds of works constitute a “category” in and of themselves—­a claim I find debatable, but perhaps provisionally useful as a starting point—­they require analysis on their own terms, separate from the immediate project of this book. Although I limit my analyses to Latin American and African literatures, the propositions I draw intend to offer a starting point for reading dictator novels elsewhere in the Global South. This is not a claim for uniformity across time and place. Just as the particularities of the political situations with which individual novels engage vary, so too do the thematic and aesthetic concerns of each text. I do not postulate nor do the works themselves sustain a genealogical relationship between the dictator novel in Latin America and Africa. Examples of transcontinental influence or allusion do exist; Sony Labou Tansi, for one, parodies elements of García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975) in L’État honteux (The Shameful State, 1981). However, these are less proof of wholesale borrowing than instances of repurposing that expand the representative vocabulary and grammar of the dictator novel. Paradigms of importation or imitation do not sufficiently explain the occurrence of this type of novel, nor do they properly account for the formal and thematic variations introduced in African dictator novels. And there is immense variance. The anti-​dictator writings of the European-​descended (criollo) lettered elites in Argentina during the 1840s and 1850s are distant from Ngũgĩ and Ahmadou Kourouma’s literary renderings of the crises faced by African dictators at the turn of the twenty-​first century. Yet, beyond the common question of dictatorship, Latin American and African dictator novels share an investment in remaking the contours of literary form in order to account for new political and cultural realities. The challenge, then, is one of method: of how to read comparatively across Latin American and African literatures without subordinating one to the other. My project rests on two intertwined assertions: first, that dictator novels across contexts share critical and formal conventions that make it possible to identify them as a group; and second, that those conventions overlap with and borrow from other textual and narrative sources, which vary depending on the political context and the literary-​historical moment of production, thereby introducing significant differences into the generic series. These claims are not mutually exclusive; but to recognize them as compatible requires a multifocal mode of reading. I term this a “constellated comparison,” where “constellation” functions as a figure for the relationship of individual texts or textual features to each other (a loose configuration or grouping), while also accounting for each text’s relationship to contextually specific political questions and literary traditions. It is a mode of comparison that proceeds

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

9

via paratactic juxtaposition rather than a more rigid hierarchical systematization. Contrast the constellation to the tree as a tool for visualizing an expansive literary field. Following Franco Moretti, the tree is an evolutionary (and fundamentally teleological) paradigm.15 While I am, in part, telling the story of the emergence or development of the dictator novel, this narrative is not merely evolutionary. I am interested, instead, in mapping the agglomeration of formal and thematic features that comprise, rather than strictly define, the dictator novel across time and place. Yet some measure of typology, even if provisional, is a necessary starting point for the work of comparison. With this in mind, I outline here four constitutive features of the dictator novel in the Global South, offering these as the preliminary coordinates for the constellation I will map in this book. These characteristics range from the formal to the thematic and, as the case studies will show, vary in importance across time and place. First, I distinguish the dictator novel from the broader category of “dictatorship novels” for its attention to the dictator as a character in the text, up to and including focalization through the dictator (narrating from the dictator’s perspective or point of view). The latter, which capitalizes on the novel’s aptness for exploring the psychology of individual characters—­recall Georg Lukács’s assertion that the novel “tells the adventure of interiority”—­is the most explicit mobilization of the dictator novel for an analysis of the internal workings of political power.16 The dictator’s definitional importance is emphasized in the Spanish and French names for the genre, novela del dictador and roman du dictateur, where the pronouns del and du suggest possession, as in “the novel of the dictator” or “the dictator’s novel.”17 But the definitional function is not unidirectional: just as “dictator” defines “novel,” the novel comes to define the dictator, as a literary figure separate from its immediate historical referents. The centrality of the dictator to the dictator novel holds even in cases where he makes only a brief physical appearance in the text. For instance, the dictator is largely in the background of novels such as Martín Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Strongman, 1929), Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (The President, 1946), Ousmane Sembène’s Le Dernier de l’Empire (The Last of the Empire, 1981), or Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987). But he looms over and determines the actions of those in his service—­his immediate circle—­who remain in the thrall or “shadow” of the dictator. By contrast, dictatorship novels focus on the social, interpersonal, and psychological consequences of living under a dictatorship, and they tend to take place very far from the center of power. These narratives often unfold within the context of a romantic relationship or the nuclear family, where the smaller unit is a synecdoche for the nation and where the dictator or dictatorship are the background against which this drama plays out. Occasionally, these two tendencies intertwine within a single work, as in

10 Introduction

José Mármol’s Amalia (1855), Asturias’s The President, or Ngũgĩ’s Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow, 2004−2007; 2006); but again, what distinguishes the dictator novel is the presence of the dictator as a character in the text. Second, the dictator of the dictator novel is fundamentally a literary figure, even when there is a discernible historical referent or set of referents for the dictator. In the most immediate terms, recourse to fiction is a tactical response to the dangers of writing about a present political reality. Yet fiction also makes available new critical, narrative, and aesthetic possibilities, which require attention on their own terms. My emphasis on the dictator’s essential fictionality rests on the conviction that literatures from the Global South, to echo an argument made by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Death of a Discipline (2003), must not be reduced to evidence from the field or “cultural information.” It is necessary to attend to these texts as literature, shot through with what Spivak calls “undecideability.”18 In other words, the actual dictator or dictators the writer has in mind matter much less than the development of the figure within the text, which is in dialogue with other fictional representations as much as with any possible historical referent. Literary representations of the dictator have a common vocabulary of tropes, themes, and critical motifs that recur across time and place. These include the dictator’s “barbarity” (lack of education, cruelty, vulgarity), solitude (as both isolation and family dysfunction, where the dictator’s family stands for the larger national unit), and subservience to foreign powers, as well as attention to the broader problems of corruption, social hypocrisy, and the moral or tactical failings of the opposition. The third feature—­and one crucial to my argument about writing and politics in this book—­is the dictator novel’s tendency toward self-​reflexivity; that is, to refer to and reflect on itself as a work of literature. The dictator novel is acutely concerned with the writer’s relationship to the dictator, as indicated by the proliferation of writer-​figures in these works; these include journalists, historians, biographers, storytellers, secretaries, and artists, who are either in the dictator’s service or are aligned against him. There is also a recurrent concern with the dictator’s skill with language, even when expressed as a lack thereof, as in the trope of the barely literate dictator. This self-​consciousness or, more precisely, self-​reflexivity produces a turn inward, toward the question of the writer’s affinities with the dictator, and away from questions of political futurity. The degree of self-​reflexivity and self-​criticism necessarily varies: dictator novels are certainly not all works of postmodern metafiction. But anxiety about the possible similarities between the writer and dictator is a vital part of the dictator novel and is, in fact, an unease that lies only partially hidden at the heart of the genre. The dictator novel, therefore, is as much about writing the dictator, and the writer writing the dictator, as it is about the dictator himself. What I am broadly calling “self-​reflexivity” has important implications for reading these works as politically committed literature. Sartre’s theorization

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

11

of littérature engagée rests on two assertions: first, that the writer is invariably “situated” in and responsible to their time; and second, that the task of the writer is to disclose a political situation or social injustice, which implicates and thereby compels further action on the part of the reader.19 This understanding of commitment has been deeply influential in postcolonial theory and criticism. It informs, for instance, Frantz Fanon’s notion of national literature as revolutionary or “combat literature” in Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961), for which Sartre wrote an introduction.20 It is also in the background of the analogy that Ngũgĩ draws between writers and politicians in the opening lines of the essay “Writers in Politics,” where he argues that politics and literature necessarily reflect as well as act upon one another.21 Drawing on Ángel Rama’s distinction between anti-​dictator novels (less generously, “diatribes”) and the dictator novel, the work of the dictator novel is not as straightforward as this preliminary gloss of commitment might suggest. While the dictator novel has its roots in advocacy for the oppressed, it is also the space in which such models of advocacy are put into question. Henri Lopès’s Le Pleurer-​rire (The Laughing Cry, 1982), which follows the debates between a dictator’s former butler and an exiled government functionary who hopes to use the butler’s account of his time in the presidential palace to aid the opposition, is one outstanding example. The government functionary repeatedly attempts to discipline the estwhile butler’s account to fit his political ends; the butler actively resists these programmatic imperatives by returning to such apparently frivolous subjects as his own sexual escapades. In such moments, the novel delights in disrupting programmatic models of literary commitment. Perhaps paradoxically, few dictator novels imagine an end to dictatorship, alternate political futures, or even viable platforms for opposition. What sense of futurity there is in the dictator novel tends to center on the problem of the persistence or cyclical repetition of dictatorship. Even when the dictator dies or is ousted, another one often takes his place. This is not political fatalism. Rather, it suggests that the objectives of the dictator novel extend beyond the attack on or even the analysis of the dictator, to the question of commitment itself. There is, of course, immense variation across historical contexts, most often contingent upon an individual writer’s political leanings, as I will discuss. What holds these divergent examples together, however, is a shared interest in the complicated relationship between political content or intent and the (generative) strictures of literary form. Finally, the dictator novel in the Global South also attends to the external or global forces that support and benefit from the existence of dictatorial regimes. This unfolds alongside exploration of the challenges of national consolidation—­both in the broad sense of national unity and as the concentration of sovereignty in the state—­be it following independence, under conditions of neocolonialism, or in the entrenchment of neoliberal globalization toward the end of the twentieth century. Even when a narrative pays little

12 Introduction

explicit attention to the larger geopolitical context of a given (fictional) dictatorship, it registers the influence of international forces. Foreign advisors, diplomats, security experts, and other operatives lurk in these novel-​worlds. Very rarely are these outsiders seen as viable support for opposition to the dictatorship. This is true even in nineteenth-​century Latin American iterations of the genre. In Mármol’s Amalia, for instance, the U.S. ambassador aids the protagonists, while his British counterpart colludes with the dictator; in Juana Manso’s Los misterios del Plata (The Mysteries of the Plata, 1855), the guards of the dictator’s pontoon prison are a teetotaling American and a drunken Englishman. In the twentieth century, the “gunboat diplomacy” of the United States in Latin America and the involvement of multinational companies such as the United Fruit Company are vital points of reference. Later, the Cold War becomes the framework for discussing the role of the United States and Soviet Union in sustaining dictatorships in Africa as well as Latin America. As more recent dictator novels suggest, opposition to dictatorship must take the form of transnational resistance to the forces that sustain and benefit from such regimes. It is in these latest iterations of the dictator novel that the emergent Global South consciousness of the genre is most explicitly manifest. Dictator novels written around the turn of the twenty-​first century pay increasing attention to the transnational dimensions of dictatorship in its imbrications with global capital and finance. Attention to the role of global political and economic forces offers a distinct image of the dictator, who must placate external interests to remain in power. The resulting disjuncture between the dictator’s apparent omnipotence at home and his servility abroad is often the subject of derision and comedy. Dictatorship in these novels is never simply a local question. This is not to say that the dictator is merely the puppet of a foreign power; rather, the complex interplay of internal tensions and external interests increasingly becomes the topic of interest for these works.

The Dictator Novel in Latin American and African Literary Criticism The histories of postindependence dictatorship in Latin America and Africa have long invited comparison. In The Wretched of the Earth, for instance, Fanon frequently refers to Latin America for examples of the challenges (mésaventures) that await newly independent African countries. Latin America exemplifies the dangers of neocolonialism, the transformation of the national bourgeoisie (elite) into a servant class for foreign interests, and the rise of dictatorship as “the dialectical result of the semi-​colonial State which has prevailed since independence.” But Latin America is not merely a precedent. Along with Africa and Asia, it forms part of what Fanon calls the world’s

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

13

“underdeveloped countries”—­or the “formerly colonized countries”—­and of a nascent Third World consciousness to which Fanon makes forceful appeal in his book’s conclusion.22 In a similar vein, the Nigerian critic Chinweizu, writing in the journal Okike in 1975, called on his fellow writers and critics to turn away from Europe and toward Latin American writers. “Their works,” he argued, “are vibrant, alive, deal powerfully with experiences under imperialized histories and conditions that are, in many significant ways, quite similar to ours in Africa.”23 A decade later, Tchichellé Tchivéla traced the influence of Latin American novelists on Congolese writers of his generation. Noting the comparable histories of Latin America and Africa, Tchivéla argued that Latin American novelists demonstrated that it was possible to write meaningful, locally oriented works in the language of the European colonizer, offering new models for what the novel could do. In literature as in politics, he added, strategy and expertise flow from a broad variety of sources.24 The literature, too, sustains such associations by invoking the intertwined histories of postindependence dictatorships in Latin America and Africa. For instance, in Lopès’s The Laughing Cry the dictator worries about rumors that a mysterious “Tché” or “Chez” has infiltrated the country.25 This reference to Ernesto “Che” Guevara points to actual histories of exchange as well as symbolic associations between the two regions during the Cold War. Such lateral connections among regions of the Global South not only contravene the colonial relation, contrasting a hierarchical center-​periphery orientation to that of horizontal relations among different locations on the (so-​called) periphery, they also supply instructive models and opportunities for solidarity in the future. Much of the comparative scholarship on Latin American and African literatures has focused on the Caribbean, the Atlantic slave trade (both north and south), and the consequent emergence of Afro-​Latin American cultural forms. But there are also instances of comparison that proceed from the kinds of connections anticipated by Fanon. Such work analyzes, to quote Edna Aizenberg, “the way comparable, yet not identical circumstances of colonization and ‘third-​worldliness’ have affected literature.”26 These comparisons draw on analogous yet discontinuous and asynchronous histories of colonization and exploitation, rather than instances of material exchange. From approximate histories, the argument goes, there arise similarities between texts from the Third (or formerly colonized) World, distinct from their possible similarities to those of the West or First World. This is what Josaphat Kubayanda has in mind when he argues that dictator novels in Latin America and Africa “pinpoint an unfinished business of decolonization.”27 The comparisons put forward by Kubayanda and Aizenberg do not require a mutual recognition of shared circumstances, past or present, within the texts themselves. It is the critic who identifies the thematic, morphological, and contextual similarities between texts. Yet the category “Third World” does assume a common identification of shared circumstances and goals in

14 Introduction

the present; see, for instance, Fanon’s call for the Third World to “start over a new history of man” in the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth.28 I raise this distinction to signal the slippage between political movements as transnational frameworks and the use of these frameworks as the bases for comparison in literary criticism, which comes to bear on my invocation of the Global South. Here, earlier debates about the category of “Third World literature” are instructive. Jameson’s notorious argument for Third World literature as national allegory in the essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986) assumed the Third World as a stable, already described category on which to base his claims.29 In his response to this essay, Aijaz Ahmad criticized Jameson’s suppression of significant differences among and within regions of the Third World in the service of establishing a functional comparative analogy, which undermines the argument as a whole. As Ahmad insists: “there is no such thing as a ‘third-​world literature’ which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge.”30 Roberto Schwartz said much the same in response to a survey in 1980: “there is no such thing as the aesthetic of the Third World.”31 To assume a necessary sameness of texts within large-​scale comparative frameworks such as the Third World or Global South elides crucial differences between texts as well as contexts, and the differences are as instructive as the similarities. Not only do Latin American and African dictator novels emerge from distinct historical contexts and literary traditions, but they have very different critical histories. This book aims to bring these into conversation. Latin American criticism generally reads the dictator novel in a trans-​ historical perspective. This tendency emerges from the eruption of critical attention that followed the near-​simultaneous publication of Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (Reasons of State, 1974), Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme, 1974), and García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). Scholars assembled histories of the dictator novel, identifying precursors from earlier decades, the nineteenth century, and even the colonial period, and declared the dictator a uniquely Latin American myth or archetype. The emphasis on the contrast between successive periods sustains an evolutionary model of increasing formal and thematic complexity. The Latin American dictator novel is generally organized into three major phases. The first phase begins in the nineteenth century; in these novels the historical referent is clear, and the principal concern of the anti-​dictator argument is with the ways in which the dictatorship destroys the emerging nation. The second phase unfolds in the early to mid-​twentieth century and includes texts such as Guzmán’s The Shadow of the Strongman, Asturias’s The President, and Zalamea’s El Gran Burundún-​Burundá ha muerto; the dictator here represents the rotten core of national political life, but the historical referent is more heavily fictionalized. The third phase includes the novels of the 1970s, in which the dictator is not just a central character but the focalizer

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

15

for substantial portions of the novel; the critique centers on themes such as the dictator’s vanity, solitude, and decadence.32 Such taxonomic schema are useful for identifying the dictator novel as an object of study, and they can productively synthesize a variety of genres (novels, theater, essays, poetry) and narrative modes (realism, romance, farce, modernism, postmodern pastiche, and so on).33 However, because of an emphasis on what constitutes the dictator novel—­a classification based on the presence or absence of a particular set of formal features—­much of this work tends to stop short of in-​depth analysis of the conceptual work of those formal features. Here, Rama’s attention to the critical function of focalization in his study of the dictator novels of the 1970s, Los dictadores latinoamericanos (The Latin American Dictators, 1976), is instructive. For Rama, Asturias’s The President and Zalamea’s El Gran Burundún-​Burundá ha muerto, in their attention to the mechanics of authoritarian power, are positive examples of the critical potential of the dictator novel. But, according to Rama, Carpentier, Roa Bastos, and García Márquez go further: Not only do they enter the [presidential] palace, sniff around its corners, survey the dictator’s various guards, [and] his European residences, they skillfully install themselves in the very consciousness of the character and in that manner occupy the center from which power is exercised and see the surrounding world [universo] through its specific operations. It is a matter of a drastic inversion of perspective [una drástica inversión de la visión].34

Focalization through the dictator makes it possible to interrogate authoritarian power from within, uncover overlooked motivations, and map out the mechanisms that drive the obstinate and apparently illogical persistence of dictatorship. This kind of analysis, Rama maintains, is the necessary starting point for the transformation of political realities. It is also, fundamentally, an imaginative endeavor facilitated by narrative mechanics. Simply put: this kind of critique is only possible in and as literature. More recent work on the Latin American dictator novel and the novel of dictatorship attends to their ideological dimensions, reopening this archive to contemporary critical concerns. In Cosas de hombres: Escritores y caudillos en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX (The Affairs of Men: Writers and Caudillos in Twentieth-​Century Latin American Literature, 2008), for instance, Gabriela Polit-Dueñas argues that even as narratives about authoritarian political figures critique the dictator, these works can also help to consolidate the hegemony of patriarchal, authoritarian, and classist systems.35 In both Latin America and Africa, there are relatively few dictator novels written by women, and women characters are most often peripheral in the dictator novel. When present, they generally serve as the vehicle for the most visceral elements of the critique, whether as victims or proxies. The

16 Introduction

exclusion of women from the dictator novel is frequently justified as an extension of their more general exclusion from the political sphere; as Kourouma commented to one interviewer: “You know that for us [chez nous] dictatorship is a masculine thing [la dictature est quelque chose de masculine].”36 This characterization is pointedly disputed by the work of women writers such as Juana Manso, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Aminata Sow Fall, as I will discuss. The relative absence or exclusion of women, moreover, does not obviate the need for gender as an analytical lens. Rather than treat the scarcity of women characters and writers as a necessary reflection of the modus operandi of authoritarian regimes as male (or masculinist) spaces, I read it as an “enabling fiction”—­a narrative that, to quote Rita Felski, “engenders a sense of collective identity but is achieved only by obscuring actual material inequalities and political antagonisms among its participants.”37 In this case, the “fiction” is the idea that opposition to dictatorship benefits all those oppressed by the dictator in the same way (here I have in mind women as well as groups marginalized on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on) even as the specific nature of their oppression is not directly addressed. Although the critical fervor that followed the dictator novels of the 1970s has cooled, novels about Latin American dictators and dictatorship continue to appear and circulate internationally. Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which explores the long afterlives of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora, traces new vectors for the dictatorship novel as a transnational form. As Jennifer Harford Vargas elaborates, the Americas have a common literature of dictatorship. The genre (loosely defined) travels with exiled (Latin American) populations and is taken up by the next (Latinx) generation to account for a history of displacement and U.S. imperialism, as well as marginalization and oppression in the present.38 Dictators and dictatorships are also a recurring motif in recent work by diasporic African writers—­see, for instance, the discussion of African dictatorships between the characters in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)—­although this remains to be explored.39 Such texts offer diaspora as a spatial and temporal axis for reading the literatures of dictatorship that is complementary to my own focus on the Global South, because they too embed dictatorship and its aftermaths within broader global relations. Despite Gitahi Gititi’s call for such scholarship over two decades ago, there is as yet no other large-​scale study of the dictator novel as a transnational and multilingual tradition in the literatures of the African continent.40 Responding to this absence is part of my task in this book, particularly in the fourth chapter. Studies of African dictator novels frequently reference the Latin American dictator novel and, less often, its criticism.41 These comparisons draw on historical analogy, following Fanon, as much as thematic and morphological

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

17

similarities. There is also a tendency to read dictator novels alongside a much larger body of social scientific scholarship on dictatorship in Africa.42 The implication here is that the prevalence of dictatorship explains the prevalence of literature about dictatorship. Without disputing this basic claim, I see such work as a contemporary iteration in the African context of the tendency in Latin American criticism to treat the dictator as a uniquely Latin American archetype. In both cases, the emphasis on historical referentiality—­as argued above—­threatens to foreclose a closer analysis of the work as literature as well as in relation to other literary works. Which is to say: while dictator novels and social scientific scholarship on dictatorship may respond to the same historical phenomenon, their projects and methods diverge significantly. Only in the most recent scholarship has there been an attempt to differentiate the African dictator novel from a broader archive of African novels about dictatorship. Here, the critical emphasis is on the ways in which dictator novels disrupt the dictator’s hegemony or apparent omnipotence, enabling the reader to see past the dictator’s claims to absolute power.43 In such instances, focalization through the dictator receives less attention than the moments in which alternate sources of authority (rumor, for example) and the perspective of those either working with the dictator or living under his rule are mobilized in the service of critique. This is a reflection of the kinds of formal experimentation common to these texts. While focalization, heteroglossia, and shifts in narrative perspective play an important role in African dictator novels, these texts also tend to draw on a much wider array of narrative tactics—­including pastiche, allusion, and intertextuality—­that can inform and even revitalize readings of the Latin American dictator novel. Indeed, if existing scholarship on the African dictator novel is piecemeal, it is also instructively comparative in spirit. This is where my project takes its lead: if we cannot fully understand the African dictator novel without reference to the Latin American novels and criticism, the reverse is also true; and this holds as we expand the argument outward to include other literatures of the Global South.

The Dictator Novel and the Global South: A Framework for Comparison I have, to this point, used the term “Global South” to name the South–South comparative axis of this study. However, as suggested above, this is not a fixed or internally homogeneous category. The term “Global South” originated in development discourse and the social sciences, and has more recently emerged in conversations about literature and culture. It is most often used to refer to the same areas of the globe as the term “Third World” once did; in such usage, it generalizes the association of economic underdevelopment with the Third World and correlates this with a global North-​South divide.

18 Introduction

This particular connotation of “South” emerged from post–­World War II discourses of modernization and was in widespread use by the 1970s. The phrase “Global South” came into circulation around the turn of the twenty-​ first century, in the wake of discussions of globalization in the 1990s, taking on the word “global” to address the enlarged scope of issues that had previously been treated in national or regional terms.44 Increasing scholarly interest in the Global South is also a response to the post–­Cold War proliferation of transnational movements that have been working collaboratively across national and regional boundaries. In this sense, as Anne Garland Mahler observes, the Global South functions as a critical category that both refers to “the resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation” and offers “a model for the comparative study of resistant cultural production.”45 However, the use of the term “Global South” frequently elicits ambivalence, as in the phrase “so-​called Global South.” When thus invoked, the Global South serves as a placeholder or temporary designation for something that it announces but does not properly describe. At issue are the difficulties presented by the apparent geographical specificity of the term, which is undermined by the conflictive combination of the generalizing “global” with the delimiting “South.” Much of the territory to which the term refers lies well north of the equator, up to and including the designation of marginalized groups within countries of the global North as part of the Global South. The Global South also overlaps with regions that have traditionally been the purview of postcolonial studies—­although there is long-​standing debate about Latin America’s place in that paradigm—­and it shares the same lineage of anti-​imperial thinking, which suggests that it is redundant or, worse, the intended displacement of an established field.46 Finally, critics such as Spivak have recently accused current definitions of the Global South of perpetuating essentialist notions of identity, effectively ignoring what she calls “the largest sector of the electorate in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, below the radar of nongovernmental organizations and below the class apartheid in education.”47 Such skeptical responses indicate the extent to which the convoluted origins and associations of the term “Global South” complicate its function as a literary-​critical framework. But they also tend to take “locational” definitions of the Global South at face value, without acknowledging its wider conceptual (that is, political) and figurative potential for the comparative analysis of cultural production. Both “global” and “South” are heavily freighted terms—­think here of debates around the categories of “world” versus “global” literature or Spivak’s own proposition of “planet” as a figure to overwrite “globe” as the space of capital-​driven abstraction.48 For my purposes, to speak of the “global” is less a claim for world-​covering totality (as in the “global” of “globalization”) than a name for the desire to think expansively and therefore comparatively beyond established national, regional, or subdisciplinary boundaries. The term “South” requires further elucidation.

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

19

Figure 1. Independent Commission on International Development Issues, North-​South: A Program for Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980); cover image reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press.

The 1980 publication of North-​South: A Program for Survival marked the consolidation of “South” as a synonym for underdevelopment. The report was prepared by the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, which was convened by the World Bank and chaired by the former West German chancellor, Willy Brandt. Written in response to growing concerns about the possible political consequences of increasing inequality, the Brandt Report (as it is more generally known) presented North-​South relations as “the great social challenge of our time.” Its orientation was decidedly global—in the sense outlined above—with an emphasis on shared interests and the need for coordinated action. Emerging economic, social, and environmental challenges, the authors argued, could only be confronted at the global scale. Accordingly, it was necessary to restructure international relations, giving the Third World a share in decision-​making and facilitating North-​ South as well as South–South cooperation. Although the report’s authors acknowledged the flaws of separating the world into two camps, their propositions nevertheless depended on a bipartite division of the globe enshrined in the report’s cover image, which features a map of the world cleaved in two (figure 1). This delineation, commonly referred to as the “Brandt line,” also

20 Introduction

distinguishes the developed from the developing world. The choice of map was important: the editors used the Gall-​Peters map, an “equal area” projection aimed at rendering a more accurate representation of the earth’s surface, rather than the more recognizable Mercator projection, which privileges Europe and North America.49 Yet, even as the authors endeavored to give the South its due by drawing attention to the economic, political, and cultural forces that produce “South-​ness,” its visualization reifies and perpetuates a spatialized notion of the South. Similarly, despite its ambitions, the Brandt Report’s recommendations would quickly prove to be out of date and out of step with a changing global economy.50 Its influence is instead discernible in the ongoing preoccupation with “South” as an improperly descriptive term, as reflected in the later work of the South Commission (formed within the Non-Aligned Movement and chaired by Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania) and its report, The Challenge to the South (1990), as much as in current criticisms of the Global South.51 The term “South” has a much longer lineage in Marxist criticism, stretching back (at least) to Antonio Gramsci’s “Alcuni temi della questione meridionale” (“Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” 1926). This unfinished essay is an extended meditation on the divide between the northern proletariat and southern peasants, understood as the “Southern question” in Italian communism and a major topic in Italian political, economic, and cultural thought. Gramsci takes as his starting point the Turin communists’ articulation of the (Italian) South as the space that the North has reduced to exploitable colonies; in the process, the North ascribes the problems of the South to “Nature” (“laziness,” “backwardness,” and so on) rather than to the demands of capital.52 In short, the “South” is an idea produced by and for the North. Without disputing this claim, but acknowledging Northern communists’ limited success in fostering solidarity and successful collective action, Gramsci lays out the bases for a closer analysis of the various strata of Southern society that is intended to account for the political affiliations of the peasantry, the interests of the elites, and the role of the intellectuals. His essay is exemplary for thinking seriously about the need to attend to conditions on the ground, while acknowledging that “South” is itself a conceptual category. Such non-​locational understandings of “South-​ness” and attention to the importance of internal differentiation provide a working model for thinking the “South” in Global South today. In development circles, the term “Global South” is most often invoked to spur cooperation between developing countries.53 Something similar is true of the Global South understood in political terms. In this sense, the Global South is a successor to, rather than a post–­Cold War substitute for, the Third World.54 Beyond and, indeed, before its association with underdevelopment, the Third World was imagined as an alternative to existing models and grew into a contestatory political project. This vision of the Third World was rooted in anticolonial movements and nurtured by gatherings such as the Afro-​Asian

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

21

Conference held in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955 and the Tricontinental Conference for Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in Havana (Cuba) in 1966, as well as by the creation of cultural networks and associations such as the Afro-​Asian Writers Bureau and the Organization for Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was also the basis for such transnational organizations as the Non-​Aligned Movement and the formation of the Group of 77 at the United Nations.55 Despite the Global South’s political energy, it does not yet have an easily definable political direction comparable to its predecessor.56 But the very unwieldiness of the term “Global South” does allow for wide-​ranging and flexible frameworks of association rooted in the identification of processes and shared experiences rather than location, which is where I locate my own project. Having outlined the historical specificity of the term’s emergence, it would seem ahistorical to apply the label “Global South” to most of the texts discussed in this book. In fact, I only make an explicit connection between the Global South and the novels analyzed in the fifth chapter. I do, however, argue that much of what has come to characterize the Global South in the present—­from the involvement of foreign powers in recently independent countries and their continued marginalization in the world system, to the interest in horizontal vectors of solidarity—­are long-​standing and constitutive topics of concern for the dictator novel. Hence my assertion that dictator novels anticipate or express the dynamics that define the Global South in the present. This proposition draws on the more theoretical or abstract invocations of the Global South, which nuance the aforementioned emphasis on recognition as its central constituting force. In Epistemologies of the South (2009), for instance, Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes the Global South as “a metaphor for the systemic and unjust human suffering caused by global capitalism and colonialism.”57 The term “metaphor” implies a relation of resemblance, rather than a call for active recognition. The Global South here “exists” in and as the space of multi-​scalar comparison, where points of connection might be drawn and where recognition and collaboration become possible. It is another example of “constellation”: a speculative and even provisional formation that only takes on concrete form as the connections or collectivities it makes visible are channeled into action. As such, it can accommodate incommensurability and difference while facilitating the kinds of comparison across time and place I undertake in this book. The case studies that comprise the core of The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South are four key junctures in the unfolding of the dictator novel as a generic series; these are moments in which the dictator novel comes to the fore and elaborates new thematic and formal features, expanding the representative vocabulary and grammar of the genre. My readings follow a temporal arc from the mid-​nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-​first century. This chronological arrangement makes it difficult

22 Introduction

to avoid an evolutionary argument, one that would seek to prove increasing formal and thematic complexity across time and space. The dictator novel certainly develops across the four junctures I identify. But I use the term “develop” with the older senses of “unfurl” or “open outward” in mind, and as a counterpoint to its more linear and teleological associations. This sometimes-​muddled unfolding produces unexpected coincidences, which I highlight in the diachronic comparisons between chapters as much as in the synchronic comparisons within the chapters themselves. The first chapter takes a synthetic approach in order to elaborate the critical questions that undergird the project as a whole. Using Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow as a point of reference, I explore the question of politically committed literature in its theoretical and contextually specific dimensions. Key here are writers’ own reflections on the purpose and difficulty of writing about the dictator. This brings me, first, to what I call the aporia of the dictator’s vulgarity, drawing on Mbembe’s theorization of the aesthetics of vulgarity in authoritarian regimes of the African postcolony. Per Mbembe, the obscene and the grotesque are two essential characteristics of dictatorship and its representation. But these are not exclusive to the dictator. Both ruler and ruled participate in the complex symbolic economy that sustains the regime. This mutual imbrication is the apparent impasse that each dictator novel must confront, and it forms the basis for a symptomatic reading of key tropes in the representation of the dictator. Second, I consider the formal dimensions of the dictator novel’s political project, and highlight the wide range of narrative modes that are mobilized in this expansive body of texts. These observations form the basis for a discussion of comparison and the elaboration of my own comparative method in this book. The second chapter turns to the first of four case studies: the diverse textual cultures that developed under the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1835–52) in mid-​nineteenth-​century Argentina. Here, writing about the dictator served as a forum for envisioning alternative political futures for the emerging nation. Alongside debates about the dictator, I will show, there raged much more complicated arguments about what type of subject and which kinds of experience were to be counted—­that is, acknowledged and included—­in the new nation. I juxtapose the work of anti-​Rosas writers (Esteban Echeverría, José Mármol, Juana Manso, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento) with that of his official supporters (Pedro de Angelis), as well as the mobilization of the vernacular poetic form of the gauchesca (gaucho poetry) on both sides of the political divide. From this archive there emerged a constellation of tropes and ideas that were formative for the Latin American dictator novel and continue to shape the literary representation of dictators in both formal and ideological terms. Having established this point of departure, the third chapter takes up the resurgence of the dictator novel at the height and into the waning years of the Latin American literary “boom” in the 1960s and 1970s. The

The Papier-Mâché Parrot

23

near-​simultaneous publication in 1974−75 of dictator novels by Carpentier (Cuba), Roa Bastos (Paraguay), and García Márquez (Colombia) was not coincidental. In the late 1960s, all three of these writers were involved in a literary project about Latin American dictators titled “Los padres de las patrias” (“The Fathers of the Fatherlands”). Organized by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), this was to have been a collection of short texts authored by prominent writers of the moment, but it never materialized. Using the archive of correspondence surrounding the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project—­material unexplored in existing criticism—­I highlight three key issues that the authors confront in their respective texts. These problems are neither dismissed nor fully resolved; they form part of the self-​reflexive dimensions of each novel. The first problem is the difficulty of making literature out of the historical facts of dictatorship, which pits fiction against the seemingly incredible extremes of history. This proved an obstacle in successive drafts of García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and drives the formal experimentation of the final version. Second is the difficult relationship between art and politics that is subsumed in the category of “committed literature,” which Carpentier foregrounds in Reasons of State, suggesting and then systematically subverting an alignment between art and politics. The final challenge is anxiety about the possible parallels or even complicity between the writer and the dictator. Here, Roa Bastos’s narration of the bulk of I the Supreme from the dictator’s perspective, I will show, brings about a collapse of the oppositional logic that had previously structured the genre. The fourth chapter, which moves from Latin America to West and Central Africa in the decades following independence (1960s–80s), is the comparative hinge of this book. The first part of the chapter lays out what I call the “local” origins of the dictator novel in African literatures: the dictator novel emerges as a concentration of the critical concerns of the literature of political disillusionment into the figure of the dictator. I demonstrate this through analysis of a series of works by Ousmane Sembène (Senegal) and Chinua Achebe (Nigeria). For both Sembène and Achebe, foregrounding the dictator necessitated a reworking of the existing textual idioms of disillusionment. The second part of the chapter reads the above observations back into the generic series of the dictator novel; this is not a simple progression, but rather one in which the nascent conventions of the dictator novel cross with other genres (narrative conventions, modes, and so on) and critical concerns in a way that expands the critical and literary vocabulary of the dictator novel. Examples here include novels by Aminata Sow Fall (Senegal), Henri Lopès, and Sony Labou Tansi (both Republic of the Congo). In the final chapter, I move forward to the post–­Cold War period on the African continent, in which long-​standing dictatorships were displaced (if not exactly toppled) by the larger operations of global capital. This chapter examines the ways in which African dictator novels have responded to this

24 Introduction

shift. The analysis centers on En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, 1998) by Ahmadou Kourouma (Côte d’Ivoire) and returns to Wizard of the Crow (2004−2007; 2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya). At issue in these novels is the nature of the so-​called transition: the political and economic liberalization that was to have followed the apparent triumph of capitalism and democracy signaled by the end of the Cold War. I read Kourouma and Ngũgĩ’s works, first, as dictator novels in continuity with earlier examples of the genre in African literatures; second, as critical uses of the dictator novel to account for global political and economic transformations; and ultimately, as explorations of the possible limits and futures of the dictator novel at the cusp of the twenty-​first century.

Chapter 1

Writing Aporia Aesthetics and Politics in the Dictator Novel of the Global South

Myriad studies of the dictator novel have begun with the observation that, whether in Latin America or Africa, dictatorship is an endemic and seemingly intractable problem to which writers respond. The purpose of this chapter is to establish protocols for reading those literary responses beyond their historical referentiality. The central contention of this book is that, across time and place, the dictator novel of the Global South evinces a common constellation of critical concerns and formal characteristics that distinguish it as a genre. But I am after more than taxonomy. In what follows, I will unpack the larger theoretical and contextually specific dimensions of these shared features, developing the vocabulary that undergirds my analysis of the heterogeneous groupings of texts that comprise the case studies in this book. My touchstone for this discussion will be Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow, 2004−2007; 2006), to which I return in the final chapter. Wizard of the Crow is a sweeping exploration of postindependence Kenyan (and African) history. The narrative follows the decline and fall of the Ruler, the dictator of the fictional country of Aburĩria. But the novel does not limit its attentions to the head of state. It has two intertwined plots: the first concerns the Ruler and his henchmen; while the second follows Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra, a young couple, within a larger ensemble of everyday people living under the dictatorship. Together, Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra create the Wizard of the Crow as a decoy while fleeing a policeman. When the policeman returns to seek the mysterious Wizard’s help in furthering his career, the character takes on a life of his own. What begins as an improvisation develops into a complex set of rituals combining stagecraft, psychoanalysis, and Kamĩtĩ’s extensive knowledge of herbology. As his fame grows, the Wizard is called in to help several members of government, including the Ruler himself, while the regime becomes increasingly unstable. By the novel’s end, the horizon of political action has shifted from questions of national organization and

25

26

Chapter 1

sovereignty to calls for transnational solidarity and mobilization against global forces of oppression. In short, Ngũgĩ looks toward the driving forces of the Global South as a political consciousness in the present. It is fitting, then, that this novel provides both the starting and end point for my unfolding of the argument in this book. During a visit to the United States, the Ruler learns that the Global Bank (the novel’s version of the World Bank) has denied him a loan. Struck dumb with frustration, he begins to swell. This “Self-​Induced Expansion (SIE),” as the phenomenon is diagnosed, continues even after the Ruler regains his speech and returns home. Eventually, the Ruler becomes buoyant and must be secured so as not to float away. To assuage the Ruler’s embarrassment, one of his subordinates devises an elaborate mural and costume, accompanied by a smoke machine, which cast the Ruler as God looking down on his people. Arrayed in this way, the Ruler continues to conduct the affairs of state. He is pleased with the illusion, because it transforms a thing of shame into one of “power and glory.” “Here,” thinks the Ruler, “was a good example of committed art.”1 This episode evinces key features of the dictator novel of the Global South: a seemingly omnipotent dictator is shown to be subordinate to foreign powers, with comic consequences. The Ruler’s costume and staging are at once an illustration of his exaggerated self-​regard and a canny example of the improvisation and tendency to excess that Achille Mbembe identifies with the aesthetics of vulgarity characteristic of authoritarian regimes in the African postcolony. The joke in this scene turns on the Ruler’s use of the phrase “committed art,” which suggests confusion and calculation at once. The Ruler’s apparent misapprehension elicits laughter, pointing to the ways in which authoritarian regimes work to assimilate the rhetoric of the political opposition. Even if clumsy, such efforts have real consequences. They also depend on the collaboration of artists who are willing to produce the kind of art that is pleasing or useful to the dictatorship. The man who devised this display, Kaniũrũ, has long sought the Ruler’s patronage; the Ruler later grants Kaniũrũ the governorship of Aburĩria’s Central Bank as a reward. Comically self-​serving and desperate for recognition, Kaniũrũ is an archetype of the complicit artist, a recurring trope in the dictator novel. Finally, through its occupation of the dictator’s perspective, this scene also points to the potentially programmatic nature of commitment, which demands of art that it have immediate (and political) utility. By putting this language in the dictator’s mouth, Ngũgĩ undercuts the critical tendency to celebrate dictator novels as works of politically committed art. “Commitment,” understood as both an explicit position taken by an author and the political inflection of the work itself, is neither a stable nor necessarily a positively coded category. It is, at best, unwieldy. Within Wizard of the Crow, ambivalence around the question of commitment is part of Ngũgĩ’s call for a new politics of opposition.

Writing Aporia

27

More broadly, it raises the crucial question of what exactly “commitment” means for the dictator novel. Given that one of the defining features of the dictator novel is its opposition to the dictator, its political project would seem unambiguous: criticism of the dictator and enumeration of his crimes as a mode of exposure. But the intersection of politics and aesthetics is rarely so straightforward. Indeed, it is striking how often writers themselves express frustration with this project, finding the dictator an elusive target. This brings me to what I term the aporia (or paradox) of the dictator’s vulgarity in the dictator novel. Vulgarity, as both physical excess and propensity to violence, is perhaps the most consistent trope in representations of the dictator: he is boorish, brutal, even barbaric. However much such a characterization might be justified by historical precedent, I am interested in its persistence a literary trope. As I will argue, “vulgarity” is not a neutral term; it enfolds a set of social values that themselves require interrogation. With this in mind, I place emphasis on the dictator’s vulgarity as an instructive symptom, indicating the difficulty of writing about the dictator and the conceptual challenge of commitment itself. Recourse to the trope of vulgarity, therefore, signals a representative impasse in the dictator novel and, possibly, a crisis of its ostensible political project. Finally, while this scene in Wizard of the Crow suggests a self-​reflexive interrogation of commitment, it also relies on a generic sleight of hand, substituting one art form (theater, invoked in the use of staging, costuming, and set design) for another (the novel). Although scenes of performance are crucial to the critique of authoritarianism in Wizard of the Crow, access to the dictator’s interiority depends on narrative mechanics specific to the novel. The distinction is important. While anti-​dictator works exist across all forms of cultural production, the novel allows a particular kind of engagement with and analysis of dictatorship. This chapter, then, combines its discussion of political commitment with close attention to the dynamics of novelistic form and narrative technique. I will argue that the terms in and through which the dictator is described do cultural and political work that goes far beyond the anti-​dictator project of a given text. In the dictator novel of the Global South, this includes attention to the foreign political and economic powers that sustain and benefit from dictatorship. My own engagement with the Global South emphasizes its capacity as a comparative framework for understanding the dictator novel as a generic series that unfolds across time and place. Accordingly, I will close this chapter with a consideration of comparative method as the organizing logic of this study as a whole.

The Dictator Novel and the Question of Political Commitment For would-​be authors of dictator novels on both sides of the Atlantic, the dictator presents an exceptional representational challenge. As Carlos Fuentes

28

Chapter 1

observed in a description of the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project, which was to have included texts on Latin American dictators by Latin American writers: “[Latin American dictators] pose tremendous problems for Latin American novelists: How to compete with history? How to create characters richer, crazier, more imaginative than those offered by history?”2 Reality, Fuentes suggests, threatens to exceed the inventive capacities of literature, because the behavior of actual dictators outstrips the typical tools—­exaggeration or parody, for instance—­available to the writer. Thinking along these same lines in a 1966 letter about what would become El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), Gabriel García Márquez worried that his fictional inventions could never surpass reality and might even lead to errors of interpretation.3 In the face of extraordinary violence and repression, it is unclear what exactly the writer can, or should, add in his representation of dictatorship. Ngũgĩ offers a different approach, framing the problem as a question of audience and its solution as a matter of literary form. Describing the process of writing his first Gikuyu-​language novel, Caitaani Mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross, 1980) in the essay “The Language of African Fiction” (1986), Ngũgĩ asks: How does a writer, a novelist, shock his readers by telling them that these [the African dictators and other collaborators with the forces of neocolonialism] are neo-​slaves when they themselves, the neo-​ slaves, are openly announcing the fact on the rooftops? How do you shock your readers by pointing out that these are mass murderers, looters, robbers, thieves, when they, the perpetrators of these anti-​ people crimes, are not even attempting to hide the fact? When in some cases they are actually and proudly celebrating their massacre of children, and the theft and robbery of the nation? How do you satirize their utterances and claims when their own words beat all fictional exaggerations?4

In Devil on the Cross, first drafted during his yearlong detention by the Kenyan government (1977–­78), Ngũgĩ sought to produce a work that spoke to Kenyan workers and peasants of their present reality in a familiar language. Reaching a new audience was not just a matter of language choice (choosing to write in Gikuyu), but of creating what Ngũgĩ calls a new “fiction language” intended for an audience that was not necessarily familiar with the strategies of novelistic discourse. Fiction language is, Ngũgĩ explains, “fiction itself taken as a form of language, with which to effectively communicate with one’s targeted audience: that is, in my case, the people I left behind.”5 Ngũgĩ’s comments here point to the formal dimensions of commitment, which in the dictator novel often produces texts that are not easily assimilated to clearly defined literary-​critical categories. Such intermixture comes at a risk. In a prefatory letter to his own dictator novella, Jorge Zalamea described El Gran

Writing Aporia

29

Burundún-​Burundá ha muerto (1952) as a combination of narrative, poem, and pamphlet best read (or “declaimed”) aloud to the masses it intended to reach. However, he remained unsure of how audiences would receive this experiment.6 Concurrently, several of the writers discussed in this study have avoided or explicitly rejected being identified as “committed.” In general terms, the concern is that such a designation might constrain the writer or overdetermine the interpretation of the work. This is why Ahmadou Kourouma, to give one example, insisted that he was not engagé. “I write things that are true,” he asserted in one interview, “I do not write in order to support a theory, a political ideology, a revolution, etc.”7 Instead, in another interview, Kourouma presents himself as a witness (témoigne).8 This claim emphasizes the writer’s fidelity to historical analysis rather than to a specific (and already decided) political program, even as other articulations of commitment—­Alejo Carpentier in conversation with Jean-​Paul Sartre, for instance—­treat the act of bearing witness as a fundamental part of such a program.9 Such comments, whether understood as prevarication or meaningful critical intervention, point to the perceived antagonism between the precepts of commitment and the very literariness of the text. This apparent impasse has its nexus in the figure of the dictator, hence the difficulties that writers encounter in confronting this subject. With all of this in mind, I put forward four propositions for the theorization of commitment in the dictator novel: first, literary form, and specifically experimentation in form, is the expression of the analytic function of the dictator novel (think here of Ángel Rama’s emphasis on focalization). Second, this analytic function includes consideration of the limits of its anti-​dictator project, particularly as it pertains to the ambivalent position of the writer within the class structure. Third, while many of the writers discussed would not describe their works as politically committed literature, with commitment understood as an explicit political stance on the part of the writer, it is possible for a text to undertake the analytic work of commitment without a commensurate declaration on the part of the writer. And fourth, the dictator novel ultimately complicates programmatic definitions of commitment, and thereby functions as the discursive space in which to interrogate commitment itself. It is necessary to acknowledge here that the specific valences of commitment or engagement vary across time and place. As Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier observe, in the Francophone world commitment is equated with engagement (être engagé) and directly associated with Sartre; while in Anglophone contexts, commitment is treated with another set of analytical tools and is often “appended” to postcolonial theory.10 These divergences are compounded by the increasingly transnational circulation and translation of ideas. Yet a discussion of specific thinkers and disputes highlights key issues in the theorization of committed literature that will come to bear on my discussion of individual works in the later chapters of this book.

30

Chapter 1

The central tension in debates about politically committed literature is the difficult balance between form and content. Sartre’s famous rejection of poetry in his description of littérature engagée is a manifest flashpoint. He begins Qu’est-​ce que la littérature? (What Is Literature? 1948) by drawing a strong distinction between literature (prose) versus painting, sculpture, and music; “One does not paint meanings; one does not put them to music,” Sartre writes. “On the other hand, the writer deals with meanings.”11 Because the poet dwells on language rather than utilizing it, Sartre groups poetry with painting. But this position was not invariable. In “Orphée noir” (“Black Orpheus”), the foreword to the collection Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de la langue française (Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry in French, 1948), edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sartre takes a very different attitude. In the colonial context, he argues, poetry serves a different and more social function: the “rediscovery” and celebration of blackness.12 Writing in partial response to Sartre, Theodor Adorno offers a means for thinking commitment beyond explicit (or stated) authorial intent. In the essay “Commitment” (1961), Adorno emphasizes the importance of what he calls the inherent ambiguity—­or, elsewhere, the necessary polyvalence—­of the work of art. For Adorno, this is something that both Sartre’s littérature engagée and Bertolt Brecht’s plays overlook.13 Brecht’s work, Adorno continues, tends toward a simplification that trivializes the very situations in which his works aim to intervene, reducing their political effect. Of Brecht’s play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), which narrates the ascendance of a fascist dictator recast as a Chicago gangster seeking control of the cabbage trade, Adorno writes: “The true horror of fascism is conjured away; it is no longer a slow end-​product of the concentration of social power, but mere hazard, like an accident or a crime.”14 Commitment, for Adorno, is not a matter of disclosure but of analysis, recalling Rama’s distinction between the (ideal) dictator novel and anti-​dictator diatribes. As Adorno would later argue in Aesthetic Theory (1970): “Commitment aims at the transformation of the preconditions of situations, not at merely making recommendations.”15 Fuentes, García Márquez, and even Ngũgĩ’s comments on writing about the dictator all take notice of the fact that, for those living under dictatorship, the “recommendations” themselves are likely self-​evident. But Adorno does concur with Sartre that the work of art is fundamentally embedded in the society from which it emerges and to which it responds. Because of this, even works that are not explicitly “political” can function as committed works of art. Citing Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett as positive examples whose work has the effect of making “officially” committed works look like “pantomimes,” Adorno writes: “By dismantling appearance, they explode from within the art which committed proclamation subjugates from without, and hence only in appearance.”16 They compel, rather than merely demand, a change of attitude.17 There is, this argument goes, no narrative mode or genre

Writing Aporia

31

that is necessarily amenable to commitment, and commitment itself is more than just the intention of the author or the content of the work. In representing and reflecting on society, a transformative process rendered through the work of form itself, the work of art necessarily intervenes. Such theoretical debates play out in situ in twentieth-​century Latin American and African literatures, where these questions intersect with immediate political realities. In Latin America, conversations coalesced around hemispheric geopolitics and the Cuban Revolution (1959). On the African continent, these debates were of a piece with anticolonialism and the work of decolonization, which followed the wave of nations gaining independence in the late 1950s and through the 1960s.18 That these debates were roughly contemporaneous is important: they unfolded within the larger framework of the Cold War and share, with varying degrees of refraction, several critical touchstones. After its assumption of power, the Cuban revolutionary government made prodigious investments in culture, cultural institutions, and the expansion of literacy.19 The intention was that the democratization of culture would cleave the arts and artists from their bourgeois associations, making them fully part of the revolution. The subsequent decade saw a wealth of writing and debate on these questions, understood in regional terms as well as within the broader context of the Third World.20 The legacies of cultural imperialism were of central concern; and while there were calls for a radical break with the cultures of imperialism, the editors of the Cuban magazine Casa de las Américas (to give one example) also heralded the appropriation of the instruments of cultural subjugation in the service of the project of liberation.21 Cuba became a central reference point for intellectual life in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1960s. This same decade also saw the rise of Latin American literature to unprecedented international prominence, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the “boom,” which was propelled as much by the furor surrounding the Cuban Revolution as by the consolidation of the Latin American new novel (nueva novela, after the French nouveau roman), later simply known as the “boom novel.” The formal innovations of these works—­which are not all reducible to magical realism, although this has become a predominant literary-​critical term—­strove to represent the particularity of Latin American history and lived experience, drawing on vernacular cultural sources as well as the modernist or avant-​garde movements of the first part of the twentieth century.22 But what began as writers’ optimistic collaboration with or support for the Castro government slowly grew into heated debate and hostility.23 Literature or art that was experimental, abstract, or otherwise formally challenging risked being judged as “individualistic,” elitist, and outside of the revolution. The leitmotif in these arguments was Castro’s much-​repeated declaration, “within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing,” from the 1961 speech “Words to the Intellectuals.”24 An ambivalent formulation

32

Chapter 1

at best, the phrase suggested tolerance while leaving much room for prohibition. In 1971, the arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla caused an international uproar that included two open letters signed by Latin American and European writers, publishers, and artists.25 That year also marked the beginning of the quinquenio gris (1971–­76), a five-​year “gray period” of repression of artistic and sexual freedoms on the island. Many Latin American writers and intellectuals turned away from Castro and Cuba at this point, although García Márquez remained a notable exception until the end of his life. As Jean Franco has observed, the Padilla Affair made visible the distance between the revolutionary vanguard and avant-​garde writing; in truth, “the marriage of aesthetics and revolutionary politics was a difficult one.”26 Debates among writers during this period frequently grappled with the question of a properly revolutionary aesthetics. As Óscar Collazos argued in the Uruguayan magazine Marcha in 1969, echoing Sartre’s dismissal of poetry, some writers seemed to be so caught up in language as to forget the reality to which words refer.27 Julio Cortázar countered that such calls for a literature that properly attended to Latin American “reality” relied on a simplistic reduction of the term to its sociocultural dimensions, failing to consider that ostensibly non-​“realist” works were products of those same sociocultural conditions. The question of a revolutionary literature would remain a theoretical impasse, Cortázar insisted, as long as revolutionaries neglected to develop a sufficiently revolutionary understanding of literature itself. Not only is literature not escapist, it offers the means to think critically about and beyond present reality. The Latin American writer—­and, as Cortázar emphasized, the Third World writer—­must enact a revolution of form and language analogous to that of the revolution on the ground.28 Questions of praxis play out in very different terms in writers’ private correspondence. Here, García Márquez offers writing advice to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, drawing on his own process for crafting the “fiction language” (to borrow Ngũgĩ’s phrase) of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). As he explains, the crucial step was to abandon positivist notions of literary commitment: Committed art, the novel as a weapon [fusil] to bring down governments is a kind of steamroller [aplanadora de tractor] that cannot lift a pen even a centimeter from the ground. And worse (worse!) it doesn’t bring down any governments either. The only thing that makes it possible for a woman to rise [to heaven], is good poetry.29

Rather than dismiss the political import of literature, García Márquez here repudiates the strictures that existing models—­later compared to a chastity belt (cinturón de castidad)—­have imposed on literary creation. In order to write and write well, García Márquez argues, one must start from the world as one sees it. The lines quoted above are private remarks between friends,

Writing Aporia

33

but they express something often elided in public declarations: the hard work of writing at that difficult intersection of literature and politics. García Márquez’s comments suggest that committed literature begins not with politics per se, but with the commitment to bend existing literary language and grammar in order to represent local realities. The Latin American debates, particularly in their public dimension, illuminate a key point of tension in discussions of commitment on both sides of the Atlantic; that is, the uncertain or ambivalent position of the writer-​ intellectual within the class structure, and how this comes to bear on understanding of the role of the intellectual and intellectual practices in the Global South. Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of the intellectual—­developed with specific reference to Italian society, but which has had fruitful afterlives in both Marxist and postcolonial theory—­is a useful reference point here. As Gramsci argues, intellectuals are not an autonomous or independent social group; each social group creates its own stratum of intellectuals. Yet, to paraphrase, while all (men) are intellectuals, not all (men) have the social function of intellectuals.30 Intellectuals undergo the most extensive elaboration within, or in connection to, the dominant social group, and they may even pass from one dominant group to another, helping to sustain or expand the hegemony of whichever group prevails. The alliance of the intellectual with the new dominant class is not a given because, structurally, that same intellectual was also imbricated with the previous ruling class. Nor, for that same reason, is it possible to rely on the writer-​intellectual’s alliance with the working class. But this is not to say that the writer-​intellectual is necessarily or exclusively complicit with the ruling class. As Edward Said would later argue, the role of the intellectual is also to “uncover and elucidate” the contest between powerful interests and “less powerful interests threatened with frustration, silence, incorporation, or extinction by the powerful.”31 Frantz Fanon takes up these same questions in his description of the colonized intellectual in Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961). Because of his education or formation, Fanon argues, the colonized intellectual is fundamentally alienated from the masses. The colonized intellectual must overcome this separation and work to produce a national culture that will not merely be the province of the upper classes. This is not a matter of returning to an idealized precolonial past, but instead of seeking out the masses in the “zone of hidden fluctuation” that is the present.32 Hence Fanon’s argument for the reciprocal foundations of national culture and the liberation struggle. But, as Fanon makes clear, it is also imperative that the writer join the struggle: “To fight for national culture first of all means fighting for the liberation of the nation, the tangible matrix from which culture can grow.”33 Fanon’s ideas—­inflected by his exchanges with Sartre—­were deeply influential for the generation of African writers that followed independence. The role of the writer in African society was the subject of much and heated argument. See, for instance, the proceedings of the 1967 African-​Scandinavian Writers’

34

Chapter 1

Conference, where Wole Soyinka—­speaking in the wake of Nigeria’s first coup (1966) and mere months before the outbreak of civil war (the Biafran War, 1967–­70)—­opened his keynote with the provocative question, “Does he exist at all, the writer in a contemporary Africa?”34 These debates gave rise to calls for transnational solidarity, as well as for the development of new forms to accommodate revolutionary content.35 To give one example of the latter, in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980), the Nigerian critics Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ichechukwu Madubuike called for the destruction of all “encrustations of colonial mentality” and the elaboration of new cultural models, which would be the foundation for a properly African modernity. This task, they wrote, requires “a deliberate and calculated process of syncretism” that would draw on both autochthonous cultural forms and new influences in order to revitalize the literary tradition.36 In formal terms, commitment requires works that are broadly accessible and which explore themes that are germane to the writer’s community or intended audience. This is the educational dimension of committed literature. But formal experimentation is key, since the writer will have to develop a new literary (or fiction) language to reach this audience. As such, the writer expresses commitment in their orientation toward society and in their dedication to producing (aesthetically) innovative works.37 This interpretation of commitment concurs with Ngũgĩ’s understanding of the writer’s political function, as elaborated in essays such as “Writers in Politics” (1981, 1997) and “The Language of African Fiction,” as well as in his literary work. In Wizard of the Crow, debates about political commitment unfurl in conversations between Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra. Kamĩtĩ, who studied economics and business management in India, struggles to find work in the increasingly constricted economy of Aburĩria. Nyawĩra, the estranged child of wealthy parents, works as a secretary and, as is revealed toward the end of the novel, is the leader of the Movement for the Voice of the People. While Nyawĩra’s political commitments are clear, Kamĩtĩ is slower to formally align himself with the cause. Early on, he flees the city for the forest and begins to carve a pantheon of pan-​African deities. Yet, as Nyawĩra points out, there is no real escape from the forces of oppression: greed threatens even the forest.38 When Kamĩtĩ does officially join the Movement at the end of the novel, he returns to the forest where the Movement has built its base; this includes a library and the collection of Kamĩtĩ’s carved figures. “For us they stand for a dream,” his guides explain. “We were hoping that you can complete them and even add the gods of all the other black and related peoples.” It will be, Kamĩtĩ imagines, “a global conversation of the deities,” and the beginning of a newly global movement of resistance to oppression.39 Kamĩtĩ’s carved figures are a model of artistic production that is not a priori committed to an explicit political program, but whose very nature anticipates new political possibilities for the future. This is, in turn, the kind of committed work that Ngũgĩ’s dictator novel aims to embody.

Writing Aporia

35

In invoking the political work of literature before the conscious fact of commitment, I have in mind what Jacques Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible). This is a system of divisions that establishes the kinds of activity and experience that are deemed perceptible (visible versus invisible) and are thereby understood as part of what is common to the community. Politics, Rancière argues, “revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”40 The political aspect of the work of art, then, has to do with the ways in which it structures perception of the social, determining what is common to the community as well as that which is to be excluded. Rancière’s goal is to articulate the relationship between aesthetics and politics in terms otherwise than explicit content or authorial affiliations—­counter to what he terms “vain debates over the autonomy of art or its submission to politics”—­ turning attention to the ways in which regimes of representation delimit political possibilities before the work of politics as such takes place.41 While a similar notion of the interpenetration of aesthetics and politics underlies my analysis, as a critical framework for the dictator novel, Rancière’s model of the distribution of the sensible risks deviating attention from the real interest in and uncertainty about the relationship between aesthetics and politics evinced in the novels themselves. His model is instead useful as a starting point for reading the political work of the dictator novel beyond its anti-​dictator project. Writing about the dictator is also the space in which unfold debates about the state and contours of the nation, its (desired or desirable) inhabitants, and possible political and cultural futures. As becomes particularly clear in my analysis of anti-​ dictator writing in nineteenth-​ century Argentina in the following chapter, these works are also engaged in the delimitation of the demos (populace) of a democracy to come.42 In such cases, the dictator is the metonymy for an “undesired” nation against which to define an alternative, desirable future. The terms used to describe the dictator therefore require closer attention. Here I arrive at what I will call the aporia (or paradox) of the dictator’s vulgarity. Learning to read the representation of the dictator with a measure of skepticism—­taking writers’ own concerns about writing about the dictator as direction and license—­moves to the heart of my critical project.

The Dictator’s Vulgarity and the Limits of Denunciation “Vulgarity,” in the sense of being unrefined, coarse, and even grotesque in body and actions, is a predominant trope in the representation of the dictator. Political disgust finds its literary expression in the dictator novel’s fascination with the dictator’s body, where vulgarity is an amenable register for denunciation. In novels where the focus is on the dictator’s sexual excesses

36

Chapter 1

and violence (sexual assault and, not entirely counterintuitively, the dictator’s impotence are frequent motifs), the dictator’s vulgarity is meant to elicit horror, and points to the many abuses that undergird authoritarian power. Conversely, in Wizard of the Crow the dictator’s bodily transformations receive a comic touch. Following his Self-​Induced Expansion (SIE), rumors begin to circulate that the Ruler is pregnant, much to his horror. The Ruler eventually releases the gas that has caused the swelling; this explosive flatulence kills several people and is initially mistaken for a coup. The Ruler emerges from this ordeal prepared to implement a program of limited democratization nicknamed “Baby D,” to which he claims to have given “birth.”43 The dictator’s crude (and exaggerated) bodily functions provoke critical (and knowing) laughter from the reader, and Ngũgĩ here plays on the metonymic identification of the Ruler’s body with the body politic. Whether presented for laughs or to provoke disgust, attention to the dictator’s body and its vulgarity requires closer attention. To refer back to Adorno’s somewhat ungenerous comments on Brecht—­ whose work had profound influence on writers such as Ngũgĩ and Ousmane Sembène—­it might be easy to dismiss many instances of recourse to vulgarity as “trivialization.”44 However, such a reading obscures the specific implications, and complications, of the term. The first meaning of “vulgar,” derived from its Latin root vulgus, refers to the common people, hence its association with the vernacular (the “vulgar tongue”). To be vulgar, then, is to not have advanced beyond that which is common. It is in this ambivalent sense of the term that Achille Mbembe elaborates his theory of the “aesthetics of vulgarity” in the postcolony. For Mbembe, vulgarity does not just describe the aesthetics or practice of authoritarian power; it points to the conviviality or “banality” of power as something produced between the ruler and the ruled. This is not to say that registering the dictator’s vulgarity cannot play a role in denunciation, but rather that attention to the dictator’s vulgarity is necessarily ambivalent. Mbembe lays out these ideas in a chapter of the same name—“Esthétique de la vulgarité”—in De la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (On the Postcolony, 2000), but they underwent more than a decade of elaboration. This history is important because, first, the concrete realities to which Mbembe refers are from earlier decades (the 1970s and 1980s); and, second, there are variations in Mbembe’s terminology that indicate the density and unwieldiness of his key terms and phrases.45 The word “vulgarity” (vulgarité) appears far less in the chapter than in his earlier essays.46 Not only is the term freighted with moralistic implications, but it collapses into stereotypical representations of Africa and African politicians. To say that all (African) dictators are vulgar risks merely satisfying the prevailing pessimism about political life in the region.47 I use the term “vulgarity” with full acknowledgment of this risk; but I insist on its usefulness for thinking about the difficult work of the dictator novel. To simply point to the dictator’s vulgarity or excesses functions as

Writing Aporia

37

denunciation, but it does not suffice as critique. In fact, it misses the ways in which the dictator’s subjects, too, participate and find purchase in the symbolic and idiomatic system of which the dictator is the center; once again, the “vulgar” is also common (popular). The term “postcolony” in Mbembe’s articulation refers to societies emerging from relations of colonial domination and violence. The postcolony is chaotically pluralistic but has an internal coherence, “characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation.” This is sustained by a distinctive regime of violence, comprised of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery dedicated to keeping that system in place. Power (commandement) in the postcolony institutionalizes itself in the form of a fetish: its symbols “are officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge.”48 Much of this is continuous with the practices of authority and violence that characterized the colonial period. However, the postcolony is not entirely a continuation; it is best understood as a palimpsestic coexistence in which new forms of domination operate behind the façade of the old ones.49 Mbembe’s definition of the postcolony seems fitting for a variety of the Latin American contexts discussed in this book. But this elides the specificity of Mbembe’s project, which was born of frustration with analyses of African politics that were both ahistorical and oversimplified. The term “postcolony” itself bridges the postindependence decades (roughly, the 1960s and 1970s) with the late and post–­Cold War period (1980s and 1990s), in which relations of power underwent another period of reconfiguration on the African continent. I take Mbembe’s concept of the postcolony, then, as an instructive model for thinking about the complex afterlives of oppression and its many entanglements in the present, rather than as a yoke for drawing together disparate contexts in the name of comparative expediency. Mbembe begins his description of the aesthetics of vulgarity by acknowledging that the obscene and the grotesque are two essential characteristics of authoritarian regimes, so much so that they become commonplace. The dictator is purposefully and explicitly vulgar, and this is both an expression of his power and a performance of his affinity with that which is “common.” The target of this argument is what Mbembe sees as the critical tendency to overvalue recourse to the grotesque and vulgarity in popular culture as instances of resistance and opposition, with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the “carnivalesque” in medieval Europe.50 The postcolonial relation, Mbembe argues, is one of conviviality: of living together in and sharing a system of signs, particularly in acts of public ceremony and festivity. The popular imagination borrows and expands on the signs of officialdom. The body, and in particular the dictator’s body, is the fulcrum of this symbolic economy. Orifices such as the mouth or anus, the belly, and even the

38

Chapter 1

ruler’s penis are not obscene so much as they are the idiom for representing, acknowledging, and desiring power. Ruler and ruled are bound together and mutually invested in the production and maintenance of this system; it is, to quote Rita Barnard, “a kind of mutual seduction,” or, as Michael Syrotinski puts it, a “bond of co-​dependency.”51 This is why laughter is not necessarily a sign of resistance and can even signal intimacy, or, to push Mbembe’s language further, complicity, where “complicity” refers to the state of being mutually involved more so than direct collaboration. However, this does not mean that resistance or opposition to the dictator is impossible. As Mbembe acknowledges, the dictator’s body also provides the metaphors by which the popular imagination might subvert the discourses of power. Such inversion takes place when the ruled, in their desire for “majesty,” attempt to reproduce the codes of power and inadvertently destabilize them.52 An early scene in Wizard of the Crow stages the destabilizing effects of such imperfect reproduction: called to the podium during a ceremony for the Ruler’s birthday, an old man struggles to call the dictator by his Swahili title, Mtukufu Rais. Instead, he calls the Ruler “Cheap Excellency” (Mtukutu Rahisi) and then, growing flustered, “Cheap Arsehole” (Rahisi Mkundu). The crowd breaks out in laughter and the old man, still confused, is removed from the stage; “as he was led back into the crowd, he let out a stream of Rahisi Mkundu, Mtukutu Takatifu Mkundu, Mtukutu, any combination of cheap and holy arseholes he thought might work, gesturing toward the Ruler as if begging for his divine intervention.”53 The old man’s insults are all the more pointed for being unintentional. The system of signs constituted in the exchanges between ruler and ruled, therefore, is never stable and always vulnerable to alteration and permutation. Once the dictator enters the popular consciousness, the mechanisms for representation and exhibition are no longer solely under the control of the state. To return to my argument about the dictator novel: because vulgarity is more often than not central to the dictator’s praxis of power, to denounce the dictator as “vulgar” or “obscene” does not suffice as critique. As in the postcolony, representations that amplify the dictator’s obscenity or vulgarity also intensify his presence in the lives of his subjects.54 I have elaborated Mbembe’s insights at length in order to circle back to the concerns raised by Fuentes, García Márquez, and Ngũgĩ at the beginning of this chapter. Each of these writers expresses the unsettling intimation that in writing about the dictator it is very possible to simply end up repeating the dictator’s terms, thereby extending the reach of the symbolic economy that keeps his regime in place. I propose to read the dictator’s vulgarity as a symptom of the double bind at the heart of the dictator novel: the writer must at once move toward (or to use Rama’s phrase, “leap into”) and condemn (move away from) the dictator. Hence, my description the dictator is an aporia. I use this term to designate a thing of perplexity or difficulty as well as—­drawing on its Greek root and Jacques Derrida’s elaboration of the term—­to signal an impasse

Writing Aporia

39

or space of non-​passage.55 It is the place where the writer becomes stuck. My subsequent case studies will illuminate the processes by which writers grapple with the difficulties laid out here, as these generate the myriad and distinguishing features of the dictator novel as a generic series. In so doing, I will demonstrate that it is possible to read productively against the grain of the dictator novel, not as a contradiction of its anti-​dictator project, but with an understanding of the fundamental ambivalence of art and with attention to the critical function of literary form itself.

Genre, Narrative Mode, and the Literary-​Critical Categorization of the Dictator Novel This book treats the dictator novel as a transnational literary genre, illuminating its unfolding across time and place. Genre is a troublesome concept, because it insists on distinctions even as I argue for the porosity of those boundaries. I therefore use the term “genre” with caution and intend to modulate its definitional force. Fredric Jameson’s historical-​materialist repurposing of genre criticism in The Political Unconscious (1981), through which Jameson generates the concept of the generic series, offers a vocabulary and method for thinking about the relationship between form, intertextuality (as the development of a tradition), and history. His central claim is that genre—­a category that, Jameson writes, is inexorably flawed but which literary analysis cannot seem to do without—­is useful only as a provisional (that is, temporally bound) construct.56 This critique is of a piece with other poststructuralist assessments of genre as a classifying principle, including what Jacques Derrida called the “madness” of genre, hidden by genre’s role as an ordering principle or “law.”57 Yet, ­and this is where Jameson’s argument is crucial for my project, ­some sense of and critical investment in genre persists, buoyed by the resemblance between individual texts as well as the repetition of themes, tropes, and plots over space and time. Eventually, repetition, while accommodating a certain degree of variation, coheres into convention and becomes, to quote Josefina Ludmer’s work on the gaucho genre (el género gauchesco), the “received ideas” (idées reçues) of a genre.58 Following Jameson, the generic series is not a simple progression in which successive texts contribute to the overall evolution of a single genre, as in the movement from a straightforward to a more complex treatment of a given theme. The sequence requires synchronic as well as diachronic comparative analysis, in which attention to difference (the discontinuities or divergences between texts) as well as similarity (whether thematic or morphological) yields a dialectical understanding of the work. Rather than assimilate a given text to an existing series, the critic must attend to the substitute codes and raw materials that are pressed into service as older elements or mechanisms fall away.59 Texts are unities—­or, to substitute my own

40

Chapter 1

term, “constellations”—­of structurally heterogeneous elements, patterns, and discourses, and they belong to multiple generic series at once.60 Attention to the differences born of this heterogeneity is the basis from which the critic returns her attention to the historical specificities that shape a given dictator novel. What I am describing is, to quote Jameson, “a kind of x-​ray technique designed to reveal the layered or marbled structure of the text.”61 More recently, Wai Chee Dimock has laid out a “fluid” conception of genre, which acknowledges these as open rather than closed sets constituted through family resemblance. For Dimock, too, genre is a necessarily self-​obsolescent system, “for what genre is dealing with is a volatile body of material, still developing, still in transit, and always on the verge of taking flight, in some unknown and unknowable direction.”62 Genre cannot be fixed because the literary field as a whole is always as yet incomplete. Any organizing system will always be subject to local variation (across space) and large-​scale transformation over time. This understanding of genre aims to better accommodate the instances of incommensurability that undermine more inelastic models, and it provides the starting point for my own engagement with the dictator novel. That generic series is, I will argue, a volatile body of material, the boundaries of which are necessarily indefinite. This is why any comparison that aims to rigidly systematize the dictator novel as a genre will always fall short. The remainder of this book, then, proceeds with the conviction that while some sense of taxonomy is necessary, this is inevitably provisional and subject to revision as new examples are incorporated into the series. To this end: if for the writer the dictator is a seemingly insurmountable challenge to represent, for the literary critic the dictator novel is a wide-​ ranging and unwieldy object of study. Opposition to dictatorship has found expression across a variety of narrative and non-​ narrative art forms. In nineteenth-​century Argentina, for instance, these forms included pamphlets, essays, short allegorical narratives, poetry, theater, cartoons, and serialized novels. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo o civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas(Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 1845), which is discussed in the following chapter, combines much of this material and is an exemplary work of generic hybridity. The same remains true in the twentieth century, where, to give one example, theater is a key vehicle for anti-​dictator work in African literatures. But my focus is on the novel, broadly defined. As noted in the introduction, the novel is uniquely suited to the exploration of a character’s interiority, achieved through devices such as interior monologue, stream of consciousness narration, and free-​indirect style. Each of these devices contributes to the exploration of the dictator from “within,” to refer back to Rama. I am specifically interested in the novel as an omnivorous narrative form, signaled by its propensity to absorb other genres of discourse. This is also what Mikhail Bakhtin called “plasticity.” The novel, Bakhtin

Writing Aporia

41

writes, is “a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review. Such, indeed, is the only possibility left often to a genre that structures itself as a zone of direct contact with developing reality.”63 The novel is therefore better understood—­to paraphrase Jameson on Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827)—­as an attempt to harmonize heterogeneous narrative paradigms, each with its own and possibly contradictory ideological underpinnings, rather than as an organic unity.64 This is particularly true for the dictator novel, which must combine the task of anti-​dictator critique with the work of building a narrative. Viewed in this frame, Sarmiento’s Facundo—not itself a novel—is an instructive exemplar for understanding the dictator novel’s overlapping relationship with other, often more argumentative, textual genres. It represents one extreme of the dictator novel’s internal heterogeneity, which produces unwieldy and even chimerical works. This tendency is not without risk; dictator novels are often criticized for tending too far toward the political pamphlet or propaganda. But, to recall Ngũgĩ’s discussion of the difficulties of writing about dictatorship, the novel’s plasticity facilitates the formal experimentation that is the expression of his political commitment. In “The Language of African Fiction,” Ngũgĩ discusses at length his return to the novel after his work with the Kamĩrĩĩthũ theater group.65 The novel, Ngũgĩ asserts (with the Latin American new novel in mind), was still a vital form in the late 1970s, although a truly African novel (as opposed to the Afro-​European novel) had yet to emerge.66 Ngũgĩ’s commitment is to the elaboration of a novel that will not only properly address current political realities, but—­drawing on the conventions of Gikuyu orature, or oral literary traditions—­will do so in a way familiar to his intended audience, the workers and peasants who constitute the dispossessed masses in the Kenyan postcolony. In composing Devil on the Cross, the challenge was to write for an audience that was not necessarily familiar with the strategies of novelistic discourse. Devil on the Cross relies on the simplified narrative structure of the journey, a plot line into which Ngũgĩ inserts digressions and other authorial interventions. Ngũgĩ borrows the conversational tone and recourse to fable, proverbs, and songs of Gikuyu oral and vernacular traditions, and he also incorporates biblical elements such as the parable, which were likely familiar to his readers.67 To convey the political reality he wished to examine, Ngũgĩ chose the figure of the ogre (marimũ) from Gikuyu orature as a heuristic for the rapacious and exploitative national bourgeoisie. The net effect is a marked departure from the critical realism of earlier works such as Petals of Blood (1977). In Devil on the Cross, a group of strangers receives invitations to the “Devil’s Feast,” a competition in “Modern Theft and Robbery.” The banquet is presided over by a delegation from the International Organization of Thieves and Robbers, headquartered in New York, which has come to promote “the democracy of theft and robbery, the democracy of drinking the blood and eating the flesh of our workers.”68 The distorted

42

Chapter 1

physical appearance of various characters in the novel (protuberant bellies, two mouths, and so on) is the outward manifestation of their crimes. But Ngũgĩ does not limit himself to vernacular sources, and the process of combination itself generates new forms and associations. In Wizard of the Crow, several characters undergo startling physical transformations in addition to the Ruler’s Self-​Induced Expansion (SIE). The ministers of Foreign Affairs, State, and Information, for instance, received their posts after undergoing surgery to enlarge their eyes, ears, and tongue, respectively. Another character, Titus Tajirika—­a businessman, later the minister of finance, then defense, and eventually the self-​proclaimed emperor of Aburĩria—­attempts to transform himself into a white man. These moments of physical transformation carry critical heft. I will return to Tajirika’s partial transition in the final chapter of this book. For the moment, the ministers’ physical augmentations parody the surveillance apparatuses of the authoritarian state, while the Ruler’s SIE expresses his vanity and, quite literally, deflates the dictator’s claim to sovereignty. In attributing several of these transformations to technological intervention, Ngũgĩ also rewrites the vernacular figure of the ogre as the kind of monstrous hybrid that is the stuff of science fiction.69 To recall Eileen Julien’s analysis of Devil on the Cross, again in Wizard of the Crow the process of combining different narrative traditions—­in this case, bringing orature as well as science fiction into the dictator novel—­is mutually transformative and represents a dynamic (ongoing) renovation of the novel form.70 I have discussed Ngũgĩ’s work at length in order to illustrate not just the plasticity of the dictator novel, but the critical value of attending to its form. As Jennifer Harford Vargas argues in her analysis of Latinx dictatorship novels, dictatorial power is both a trope and an aesthetic problem. Form matters as much as content and theme, “because these novels wrestle so centrally with questions of authority and how authoritarian regimes manipulate reality through structures that are themselves forms of power.”71 Harford Vargas’s socio-​formal analysis draws on the work of Caroline Levine and her emphasis on the continuities between aesthetic form and sociopolitical structures. Forms do political work, Levine argues, “because they shape what it is possible to think, say, and do in a given context.”72 The analysis of form in the dictator novel, I add, must follow two tracks: first, it must attend to the contextually specific dimensions of formal experimentation, as a response to local debates about the nature and function of the novel. Second, it should locate these dimensions within the constellation of tropes and ideas that characterize the dictator novel across time and place. Wizard of the Crow does not simply repeat the formal tactics of Devil on the Cross. It extends these into the representation of the dictator and molds them to the analysis of the larger contexts within which dictatorship unfolds. The dictator novel is an open-​ended system that continually incorporates new materials, transforming these and itself in the process.

Writing Aporia

43

The range of hybrids produced by this formal experimentation, however, poses a challenge for literary-​critical categorization. There is no singular narrative mode that is characteristic of the dictator novel. Despite the close association of realism with the culture of writing and resistance—­critical realism is just one of the dictator novel’s many narrative modes—­recourse to the fantastic or departures from a recognizable empirical reality governed by familiar physical laws are a recurrent feature of the dictator novel. The literary critical shorthand for the combination of the demystifying and critical functions of realism with the fantastic, the supernatural, or the non-​ mimetic is “magical realism,” a term most strongly associated with the Latin American boom and frequently (if hastily) applied to African works. But the convoluted history of this term and its transcontinental extensions means that it often occludes the actual textual and cultural dynamics at work.73 This is why I earlier used the term “fantastic” to describe the Ruler’s SIE (Wizard of the Crow). It would not suffice to designate the dictator novel as “magical realism” any more than as “critical realism”; both are narrative modes common to the dictator novel and, in some cases, may even occur within the same text. The dictator novel also incorporates elements of a range of other narrative genres, including romance, mystery, and historical fiction. Recourse to a given narrative genre has as much to do with the particular context or moment of production as it does with the overarching elaboration of the dictator novel. Indeed, whether in terms of narrative mechanics, mode, or genre, the study of the dictator novel continually points to the limitations of rigid literary-​critical categories. Hence my use of the figure of the “constellation” in the introduction, which privileges paratactic juxtaposition rather than hierarchical or evolutionary systematization. What is at stake here is a question of method: of how to compare across the literatures of Latin America and Africa (and, by extension, of the Global South) without subordinating one to another. Comparison as a method is the subject of perennial (and often productive) debate, whether under the aegis of periodic discussion of the state of the field in comparative literature, or as a practice that cuts across disciplines.74 Discussions of comparison have taken on particular urgency with the rise of large-​scale (implicitly, if not always explicitly) comparative frameworks such as world literature, the global Anglophone, global modernisms, and indeed, the Global South, all of which draw together disparate materials and histories. If, as Joseph Slaughter has recently argued, we must always attend to the political contingencies and historical locations of comparison, part of this work involves attention to the operative theories of comparison, which are themselves historically situated.75 Viewed in this way—­following Slaughter, who draws here on Rey Chow—­the project of comparison is always necessarily speculative or incomplete. Not only is the archive always expanding, but our understanding of the materials themselves is historically bound and shifts over time.76

44

Chapter 1

Such theorizations of comparison are born of frustration with earlier models. Chow, for instance, critiques the notion of parity inscribed in many approaches to comparison, a utopian idea that “runs aground in practice.”77 Other critics highlight comparison’s historical imbrication with colonialism and Eurocentrism, as well as its positivist origins as a tool for classification, differentiation (the institution of hierarchy), or assimilation (the erasure of difference).78 To compare, in this sense, is to decontextualize and to institute misrecognition. Yet comparison can also be productively used to establish connections across divergent contexts, as it does within the political framework of the Global South, and to rethink literary-​critical categories, as I aim to do. Decontextualization, Susan Stanford Friedman suggestively argues, is also potentially illuminating.79 Against hierarchy, models of comparison capable of accommodating discrepancy, in the form of apparent incomparability, have emerged. In summarizing this shift, Friedman points to the recurring use of the rhetoric of juxtaposition to describe the act of comparison. She herself expands on the notion of collage as a comparative methodology that “maintains the particularity of each, refuses hierarchy and instrumentalism, and fosters identification of new generalities based on what texts share.”80 Rather than assimilate texts to each other via an insistence on homology, juxtapositional comparison reads texts together in their incommensurability. There is also a burgeoning language of comparison as relation, which looks to the underlying connections and correspondences between texts and contexts. Shu-​mei Shih, drawing on Édouard Glissant, offers the concept of a “relational comparison” that approaches texts within a framework of their world-​historical interconnectedness.81 Relation as the grounds for comparison calls upon the sometimes spectral networks of global and historical being-​in-​relation. This requires a different understanding of community and interconnection across cultures, one which exceeds even the world-​historical frame, because this too is a way of organizing and fixing events in time. For Glissant, “Relation” (the term is capitalized in his work) is the condition of existing in co-​presence; it connects and transforms all things, and it is never static. There are no “prime” elements that can be separated out because Relation is a process of constant movement, interaction, and change, which precludes the clear delineation of totality.82 Relation is, in short, not a schematic within which diverse elements might be organized and from which taxonomies can be derived, because all descriptions are provisional. As Natalie Melas usefully points out, “[Glissant’s] Relation expresses at one and the same time the realization of a cultural logic of decolonization and also the depropriating world of late capitalism in which that logic is apprehendable and describable.”83 Comparison is in a similar position: it has the potential to illuminate and strengthen interconnections that are part of the cultural logic of decolonization (the Global South as a political consciousness, for instance), but at the same time it remains an expression of the hierarchical and taxonomic logic of late capitalism (the Global South as a designation

Writing Aporia

45

equivalent to the Third World, understood simply as a synonym for underdevelopment). The challenge is to outline a mode of comparison that does not inevitably slide back into taxonomy and hierarchy. Comparison as relation, then, is both a model for working in the Global South as well as for understanding the constitution of the Global South itself. The project of this book admittedly bends toward comparative morphology, because to propose the dictator novel as a transcontinental genre is to rely or insist on the recurrence of a degree of similarity sufficient to make this claim. But the scales of my project are different. I am not aiming for a total systematization here. To recall Glissant, totality is only ever arrested Relation, and such a systematization is necessarily imperfect or, at best, provisional. My own comparisons function through paratactic juxtaposition, in which I place side by side literary examples that are already in relation (analogous topic, analogous textual features, analogous political concerns, analogous world-​historical context, and so on) without presuming coordination or subordination. I am not interested here in “trees,” as the evolutionary metaphor par excellence. Nor do I, to invoke David Damrosch’s model of world literature as produced through the circulation of texts, trace the global circulations of the dictator novel as a genealogy of influence.84 Rather, I read these texts in and as relation so as to identify a necessarily provisional but nonetheless instructive constellation of features of the dictator novel of the Global South as a transcontinental, trans-​historical, and never static generic series.

Chapter 2

Tabula Rasa Juan Manuel de Rosas and the Emergence of the Dictator as a Literary Figure

In 1887, long after the publication of Facundo o civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas (Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 1845), the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas, and his own tenure as president of Argentina (1868–­ 74), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento celebrated his early text in a letter: “All of this to tell you that a work of literature can do more than armies [puede más que los ejércitos], and that Facundo, in painting the barbarism of Rosas with the colors of the literary brush [pincel literario], moved the world’s opinion and brought about his fall.”1 Although ostensibly a biography of the caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga (1788–­1835), Facundo is actually a sweeping denunciation of Rosas. In historical terms, Sarmiento overstates his claim: despite years of widespread, active struggle against Rosas, it was Justo José Urquiza (a federalist provincial governor, like Rosas) who overthrew the dictator’s regime in 1852. Moreover, Facundo was not an exceptional success, despite Sarmiento’s tireless promotion of the book.2 It was just one piece of a profuse network of writing against and in support of Rosas that extended from Buenos Aires to exile communities in Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, and Europe. However, for my purposes, historical accuracy is secondary to the instructive value of the underlying assumptions Sarmiento illuminates, which continue to animate critical engagement with writing about dictatorship and the dictator novel in particular. The principal assumption here is that writing, and specifically “literary” writing, can bring down authoritarian regimes. I will pressure this assumption by insisting on a more fundamental question: what exactly are these anti-​dictator texts talking about? Anti-​dictator texts catalog and organize the violence and abuses of a given dictatorship. But the terms in which they articulate their opposition are as important as the terms of opposition itself. This chapter examines the fractious archive of writing produced in response to the Rosas regime (1835–­52) in order to untangle the broader social, cultural, and political work in which these texts were involved. While critique or support of Rosas was the explicit

47

48

Chapter 2

goal, these texts were also engaged in arguments about the state and contours of Argentina, its desired or desirable inhabitants (the delimitation of the demos), and its possible futures. My thinking moves along the lines of what Jacques Rancière has termed the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible). This is the system of forms that establishes the kinds of activity and experience deemed perceptible (visible versus invisible) and therefore understood as part of what is common to the community. Art, in this reading, sets the horizon of possibility for politics by structuring perception of the social and political spheres. To write about the dictator, as indicated by Sarmiento, is also to write about the place of writing in politics, and thereby to stake a claim for the writer’s role in these debates. But the immediate political project of an anti-​dictator text and the larger cultural work in which it is engaged do not always comfortably align. In mid-​nineteenth-​century Argentina, this disjuncture became an animating friction across a variety of fictional and nonfictional texts, which were aimed at diverse reading publics. Many of the works I discuss are far afield from the dictator novel, properly speaking; but they provide the source code(s) on which the genre would later draw. This is a qualified claim, as I am not after a single point of origin. The dictator novel does not emerge in seclusion, despite a critical tendency to treat the dictator as an exclusively Latin American archetype (or “myth”). What would become the dictator novel, following Moira Fradinger, took shape in conversation with the French and American “reinvention of politics” (revolutions) as well as larger discussions about modernity and the theorization of the (democratic) nation-​state. Just as the independent nations of Spanish America emerged in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, so too were debates about politics and national formation entangled with events in Europe. The dictator was therefore not a “mythical character” of Latin American invention, but “a symptom of the upheaval and paradoxes in the Western postrevolutionary political imaginary.”3 Nor was the dictator novel clearly established in this period; these were at best precursors. I therefore use the term “emergence” in this chapter’s title not in the sense of origins, but of coming into view. My analyses will track the consolidation of the dictator as a literary figure in Latin American writing. I trace in these texts the nascent tropes, themes, and motifs that continue to characterize the literary representation of the dictator in the present. This is the emergence of a genre in only the most abstract sense, but it is precisely in conditions of disorder that literary conventions come into view. As Josefina Ludmer has written of the gaucho genre (el género gauchesco), which coalesced in Argentine literature in roughly the same period covered here, “The moment of the emergence of the genre is the moment before the repetition, variation, and convention that precisely constitute a literary genre; it’s the illusion of the first time, when the ideas of the genre are not yet received ideas [idées reçues].” This chapter, following Ludmer, will also read what is not yet genre as genre, from the perspective of the future.4 It looks at the

Tabula Rasa

49

moment prior to the establishment of the idées reçues that constitute the dictator novel; this was a moment of radical heterogeneity when old forms were put to new tasks as new forms arose. In placing this diverse collection of works before but apart from the generic series of the dictator novel, I illuminate the tensions, fissures, and anxieties that continue to animate the genre in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Argentine literary historiography has long posited Juan Manuel de Rosas as a point of origin; as David Viñas famously put it, “Argentine literature begins with Rosas.”5 Such claims center on the work of writers included in the “Generation of 1837” (Generación del ’37), many of whom would go on to become defining intellectual and political figures. The group came together in crisis: two turbulent decades after Argentina won independence, writers and intellectuals had to confront the chasm between aspiration and reality, as represented by the Rosas dictatorship.6 This reckoning begat a furor of writing centered on Rosas as the negative image against which to imagine a renewed vision for the nation. Argentine literature, to return to Viñas, becomes a national literature when the question of the nation and its possible futures comes to the fore. The “Rosas” who begins Argentine literature is therefore not Rosas himself, but the idea of Rosas elaborated by the Generation of 1837. This literary Rosas, in turn, becomes a key reference point for the figure of the dictator later iterated in the dictator novel. The above narrative privileges the works of the Generation of 1837—­like many “generations,” itself an artificial or at least retrospective category—­ and discounts the literature produced by Rosas’s supporters, not to mention literature not explicitly concerned with Rosas or the nation as such. It also extends the axiomatic opposition between “civilization” and “barbarism” outlined in the subtitle to Sarmiento’s Facundo: Rosas and his supporters were forces of barbarism, while the members of the Generation of 1837 represented civilization. But, as I will show, the dictator and his opponents do not map so easily onto this antagonism. Even among texts opposed to Rosas, the logic, rhetoric, and motivations for opposition varied, and the same was true of pro-​Rosas texts. These discrepancies were rooted in larger hierarchies of class, culture, and race, which complicate the easy assimilation of anti-​dictator writing to larger projects of liberation. This problem is starkly visible in mid-​nineteenth-​century Argentina, as in much of Latin America, where European-​descended lettered or learned elites (criollos letrados) controlled the project of nation-​building. Accordingly, together with works by members of the Generation of 1837, this chapter also takes up the popular forms now categorized as the gaucho genre. This is poetry written about and in the voice of the rural laborers and herders who were initially identified as transient or lawless, and who only at the end of the nineteenth century were elevated to the status of a national symbol.7 The gaucho genre originated in the transcription of oral stories and songs in the period of independence

50

Chapter 2

and was codified as a literary genre over the course of the century. Although Rosas counted on the support of the rural masses, there were both pro-​and anti-​Rosas gaucho poets, and for this reason texts of the nascent gaucho genre provide a necessary counterpoint to the works of both the Generation of 1837 and Rosas’s official supporters. With all of this in mind, there is in this archive no single Rosas, but rather multiple versions that function at varying degrees of removal from their historical referent. The Rosas of this chapter is a body of ideas (assemblage), and it is from this uneven and fractious agglomeration that the dictator novel draws its vocabulary and grammar for representing the dictator. These include the depiction of the dictator as a “barbarian” or barbaric force in the culture; there also emerges a version of Rosas (the dictator) as a monstrous or inhuman figure in his own right, categorically distinguished from his supporters and singularly associated with large-​scale social decay and destruction; and finally, already in the nineteenth century, writers opposed to Rosas turned attention to the dictator’s reliance on writing, particularly his use of writerly and bureaucratic tools to consolidate and maintain his power. At its extreme, as I will emphasize in my analysis of Sarmiento’s Facundo, the admission of a possible yet highly qualified symmetry between dictator and writer makes room for the dictator’s role as a competing “author” of the emerging nation. Such acknowledgment of the writer’s investment in authority, in competition with that of the dictator, is a moment of conscious self-​reflexivity that later becomes a constitutive tension in the dictator novel.

Writers versus the Dictator: Rosas and the Generation of 1837 Some historical background is necessary for understanding the forces that shaped opposition to and support for Juan Manuel de Rosas. After the declaration of independence from Spain by the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (1810–­16) came several decades of internecine struggle, during which the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata divided into Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia.8 Within Argentina, the principal opposition was between unitarios (Unitarists or Unitarians) and federales (Federalists), who later became known as rosistas (supporters of Rosas). In general terms, the unitarios were European-​influenced liberal republicans who advocated free trade and the consolidation of a secular republic with the city of Buenos Aires as its capital. The federales opposed centralization, and were most often part of the landowning, former colonial and rural elite that was dependent on semifeudal forms of agricultural production. Rosas was the son of a ranching family from the province of Buenos Aires. Using alliances with regional caudillos (strongmen) such as Juan Facundo Quiroga, he rose from governor of Buenos Aires (province) to become the de facto ruler of the nation. Having declared himself the “Restorer of the Laws and Institutions” (el Restaurador

Tabula Rasa

51

de las Leyes e Instituciones), Rosas was popular among both the rural populations and urban poor. To his supporters, Rosas represented sympathetic engagement with the masses. But to his opponents, the rise of Rosas (the specter of a recently rejected monarchy) signaled the failure of the Argentine independence project. Despite his roots in the federalist cause, Rosas progressively centralized power in Buenos Aires, increasing censorship and making frequent use of his secret police, the mazorca. This reliance on violence is a central component in critiques of Rosas, with particular attention to its effect on social discourse and the public sphere. At stake for Rosas’s opponents was not just the immediate question of national leadership, but the consolidation of the Argentine state and, concomitantly, the elaboration of a cohesive Argentine identity that would be separate from its Spanish colonial roots. Where the indigenous populations of the pampas were concerned, the two sides shared a desire to see them removed, an end largely achieved with the “Conquest of the Desert” in the 1880s. The Generation of 1837 came together in May 1837 as a literary salon, which Rosas banned in 1838. The initial group included Esteban Echeverría, Juan Bautista Alberdi, and Juan María Gutiérrez, among others, and would expand to incorporate José Mármol and Sarmiento as well as Juana Manso, Mariquita Sánchez, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and others opposed to Rosas. Influenced by European romanticism, writers such as Echeverría saw literature as both the manifestation of and vehicle for the dissemination of liberalism. More broadly, members of the Generation of 1837 conceived of themselves as founding a new national culture. To write against Rosas was to imagine a version of Argentina without Rosas, and a national landscape in which the culture he represented could be erased or at least recoded. It was, in short, to imagine the country as a blank slate, a tabula rasa on which to draw new models for the future. For many, this imagining unfolded in exile; Echeverría, Mármol, Manso, and Sarmiento all left Argentina and continued their activism from abroad. Despite physical distance, they developed a common literary vocabulary for the representation of Rosas, and they saw his dictatorship as enmeshed in the broader political questions of their time. It is necessary to note here that cultural independence in this period was not (yet) understood as a search for and celebration of autochthonous cultural forms. The local cultural formations that did exist were rural and associated with the frontier, resulting from contact and exchange between settlers, indigenous populations, and the descendants of enslaved Africans, all of which were antithetical to the urbane and Europeanized modernity desired by the Generation of 1837. Instead, the cultural independence sought by the Generation of 1837 was an instance of what Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano evocatively term “the originality of cultural importation” (la originalidad de la importación cultural).9 It was an exploration of the generative possibilities inherent in the transposition or translation of European models into the Argentine landscape, producing

52

Chapter 2

what Carlos Alonso describes as the “radically heterogeneous structure that is Spanish American cultural discourse.”10 The Generation of 1837’s interest in and openness to the outside world was matched by its apprehensive view of “the interior”: the rural expanse that comprised the majority of the country. The interpenetration of these two spaces is at the core of Echeverría’s attack on Rosas in the short story “El matadero” (“The Slaughterhouse” or “The Slaughteryard”). The city and the interior meet in the slaughterhouse, the place where livestock enter the city to be prepared for consumption. The narrative focuses on the urban and impoverished masses that crowd the slaughterhouse after a meat shortage in the city. The scene is presided over by “the Judge,” who directs the butchers. Toward the end of the story, a young unitario approaches the slaughterhouse and the crowd takes him captive. Although the Judge stops the butcher from slitting the young man’s throat, he dies in the struggle; as one unnamed character remarks: “The barbarous Unitarian has burst with anger.”11 The structuring opposition of this story is that between civilization (the unitario) and the barbarism of the faceless masses. Although the narrator only indirectly refers to Rosas as “the Restorer,” his presence pervades the slaughterhouse in the slogans that paper its walls and punctuate the speech of the crowd, particularly the phrase “Death to the barbarous [savage] unitarios.”12 In his attention to such sloganeering, Echeverría offers a nuanced analysis of the regime’s political use (and abuse) of language to spur the antagonism between Rosas’s opponents and supporters. In this system, any person not explicitly aligned with Rosas is a “savage unitario” and therefore subject to violence and even death. As an early piece written against Rosas by a figure central to the Generation of 1837, “The Slaughterhouse” is often the first text cited in critical genealogies of writing about dictators in Latin American literature. Though composed between 1838 and 1840, it was only published posthumously in 1871.13 While the history of its publication and canonization are untimely, the claims for its influence are valid. Following Adriana Amante, the story reads as a “rough draft” outlining ideas that were elaborated by Echeverría’s contemporaries, the main one being the structuring opposition between civilization and barbarism.14 But although the story’s narrative posits an opposition between these two categories, it cannot maintain an absolute distinction between them. Although the slaughterhouse represents the point at which the practices of rural life enter the city, the masses who crowd that space are themselves of the city: the poor, many black or of mixed race, who make up the core of Rosas’s urban constituency. Here, the systematizing logic of Echeverría’s allegory—­its dialectical opposition between two spheres—­ encounters the limits of its own design. In spatial terms, at least, civilization and barbarism are not exclusive. What emerges instead are hierarchies of class, race, and gender in which the urban poor stand for the threat of barbarism that lies within the city:

Tabula Rasa

53

Each carcass was ringed by a group of human figures of varying race and color. Prominent in every group was a butcher, a knife in his hand, forearms and chest bared, his long hair matted, his shirt, chiripá, and face smeared with blood. Behind him, twisting and turning to follow his every move, was a milling entourage [comparsa] of louts and black and mulatto scavengers—­women as ugly as Harpies—­ amongst whom mastiffs sniffed and growled, nipping at each other over their quarry.15

The comparison of black women to harpies repeats an earlier description of the meat shortage, during which a “horde of black women, out scavenging offal like buzzards, prowled [se desbordaban] the city like so many Harpies, ready to devour whatever edible matter they found.”16 Later, in a particularly grotesque scene, the narrator describes a crowd of black women (again) picking through and fighting over viscera; one woman slips and falls in a puddle of blood, while others unwind intestines. The recurrence of such images, intended to evoke both horror and revulsion, points to the challenge that existing social heterogeneity posed for the liberalism of the Generation of 1837. Nicolás Shumway terms this antipopular and antiegalitarian impulse the “paradox of Argentine liberalism.”17 What Shumway kindly calls “paradox” is in fact the violence of the liberal project itself, which mandated the metaphorical (and for indigenous populations, literal) clearing of the national landscape in order to forge the Argentine nation. While the rural expanse of the pampas could be imagined as empty, the popular sectors of the city resisted such easy inscription and had to be otherwise made amenable. This conflict, which reverberates to this day—­there are still those who would dispute the easy characterization of Rosas as a “dictator”—­is integral to ongoing critiques of the institutions and ideology engendered by the Generation of 1837. “The Slaughterhouse” also presents a paradox for the modern reader of anti-​dictator texts. On the one hand, Echeverría was responding to the brutality of a dictatorship that specifically targeted writers. The young unitario in “The Slaughterhouse” stands for Echeverría and his cohort; the moment in which he “bursts with anger” illustrates the frustration that motivated the story’s composition. On the other hand, its structuring opposition between civilization and barbarism is not merely a means of drawing a distinction between the dictator and his supporters on the one hand, and the opposition on the other. To refer back to Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, it figures the radical delimitation of a national community in which the poor and racialized (urban) masses would have no part. That ideal community is defined as that which is not of the slaughterhouse (the space where the distinction between civilization and barbarism breaks down) and which, as the death of the young unitario suggests, cannot survive therein. The exiled community, then, is only visible through that (re)coding of Rosas and his

54

Chapter 2

supporters as backward, barbaric, and even inhuman (whether as animals or mythical creatures). This is important because the key tropes of “The Slaughterhouse” will become part of the regime of representation for understanding dictatorship as a political and cultural phenomenon, in Latin America and beyond. With this in mind, it is necessary to read the negative representation of the dictator’s supporters not simply as a statement of fact, but as part of a larger effort to redraw the terms of what kinds of action and experience would be deemed countable. In this case, an imagined emergent community that stands for a very different, and fundamentally exclusive, nation to come. Two serialized novels written toward the end of Rosas’s time in power, José Mármol’s Amalia (1851−52 and 1855) and Juana Manso’s Los misterios del Plata: Episodios históricos de la época de Rosas, escritos en 1846 (The Mysteries of the Plata: Historical Episodes from the Era of Rosas, Written in 1846; 1852 and 1855), build upon the ideas sketched out in “The Slaughterhouse.”18 Writing for newspapers in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively, Mármol and Manso aimed to record and denounce the abuses of the Rosas dictatorship. “It is necessary,” Manso declared in her preface to the book version of Los misterios del Plata (1855), “that the entire world know what Rosas, a disgrace and offense to the entirety of humanity, has done to Argentina.”19 In her introduction to the serialized version (1852), published in Portuguese, Manso argued that such acts of disclosure were crucial because Rosas had the benefit of a vast web of paid writers (escriptores assalariados) to refute his critics, as well as a network of assassins to punish those who spoke out against his government. Writing against the dictator was also a project with specifically literary concerns. As Manso argued, to write about Rosas was to engage a uniquely (Latin) American type, distinct from the models provided by “old Europe” (velha Europa), and was therefore part of the work of nurturing a new literature of the Americas.20 As an early example of arguments for the dictator as a Latin American archetype, Manso’s comments illuminate the intersections between opposition to the Rosas dictatorship and the cultural dimensions of the independence project. First, Manso emphasizes the importance of the elaboration of a national literature to the larger project of national liberation, situating her own work in that scheme. Second, she demonstrates the extent to which that project was in dialogue with—­but not merely copying—­larger trends in the period. In both novels, the family serves as a double for the nation, figuring possible political futures.21 The novels’ respective plots center on the fate of a romantic couple and unfold against the background of recent events. In Amalia, this is the end of the French blockade of the Río de la Plata (1838–­ 40) and the failed march on Buenos Aires by Rosas’s opponents (1840–­41). Amalia opens with a fight between the unitario Eduardo Belgrano and

Tabula Rasa

55

the mazorca, from which he is rescued by Daniel Bello and taken to the house of Bello’s cousin, the young widow Amalia. From here, the narrative moves between different political factions in Buenos Aires and the developing romance between Belgrano and Amalia. At the end of the novel, Rosas’s forces kill Belgrano, forestalling the couple’s plan for escape. Los misterios del Plata, meanwhile, is a fictionalized account of Valentín Alsina’s (a prominent opponent of Rosas) escape from prison to exile in Uruguay in 1837. The novel begins with the arrest of Dr. Avellaneda, the stand-​in for Alsina, and follows the efforts of his wife, Adelaida, to secure his escape. At the end of this novel, the family reunites on the boat that will carry them into exile, where they will continue the struggle against Rosas. Although their focus is on recent events, Los misterios del Plata and Amalia present themselves as historical novels. This designation seems imprecise and even contradictory. For instance, the first installment of Manso’s text gave it the counterintuitive designation of a “contemporary historical novel” (romance histórico contemporâneo). Yet Manso and Mármol’s ideological projects were very much aligned with that of the historical novel, the rise of which Lukács locates in the years following Napoleon’s final collapse (1815) and links to the emergence of bourgeois national and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century. Both projects aimed to awaken “national feeling” and bring about social transformation precisely by insisting on what Lukács calls the “historical character of development.”22 As Mármol explained in his prologue, the choice of this generic register was intended to imbue events with retrospective clarity, while also anticipating a future (post-​Rosas) readership.23 This is an explicitly literary project, as the narrator of Amalia makes clear. The task of the historian is to catalog events and describe historical moments, whereas the novelist (romancista) isolates and describes key scenes that communicate the true nature of an entire period.24 In writing against the dictator, therefore, Manso and Mármol engage in a creative repurposing and combination of contemporary models, bending the incipient form of the historical novel to their respective political projects. The claim to history gives each work critical ballast. But rather than reimagine the past for the present, these works interpret the present for an as yet speculative post-​Rosas future. In their combinations of diverse and sometimes discordant discursive registers—­the historical novel, romance, the marriage plot, tragedy, the political pamphlet, and so on—­Los misterios del Plata and Amalia expand the repertoire of tropes and motifs associated with the representation of Rosas, testing the balance between the exigencies of a structuring dramatic plot and political critique. As in “The Slaughterhouse,” the urban underclass of most-often black domestic workers and rural laborers is aligned with the regime and against the protagonists; only a select or “special” few join the unitario cause. The novels also call attention to the role of foreign actors on

56

Chapter 2

the Argentine political scene, whether working for Rosas (as in Los misterios del Plata) or as representatives of their own governments (the U.S. and British ambassadors in Amalia). The presence of these foreign actors embeds the events of each narrative within a larger framework of geopolitical power and, more obliquely, economic exchange. Finally, unlike “The Slaughterhouse,” both novels include extensive descriptions of the dictator’s inner circle and of Rosas himself. The principal symbolic site in each novel is Rosas’s house, as the seat of government and as the home of the dictator’s family. Manso dedicates two chapters to the description of the exterior and interior of the house. The metaphor of authoritarian surveillance is blunt: the house has a tall central tower, the lookout of which contains Rosas’s rooms. Rosas’s house also marks the place in which the Argentine “interior” enters into the civilized space of the city, with Rosas himself as the conduit of contamination: the street is lined with horses, gauchos, and what Manso calls “pampas” (referring to indigenous people) while mazorqueros, informants, and other spies come and go. Inside his house, Rosas holds court over his acolytes in the manner of a medieval monarch. His greatest source of pleasure is the fights he instigates between two buffoons: “two big mulattos, dirty and disgusting, nearly naked and answering to the names ‘Bigúan’ [Big One] and the other to ‘Mulatto Governor’!”25 These lines repeat the racial politics of Echeverría’s “The Slaughterhouse” with a slight difference: rather than merely criticize Rosas via his association with these types, what matters to the narrator is Rosas’s ill treatment of the two men. Attention to the dictator’s domestic sphere—­the “official family” with Rosas as both pater familias and pater patrias—­is an extension of the family metaphor.26 The degraded family unit found in the dictator’s house represents a possible (negative) future for the nation. Mármol in particular pays much attention to Rosas’s treatment of his daughter, Manuela. Because of her prominent place in her father’s government (Rosas’s wife, Encarnación Ezcurra, died in 1838 and Manuela assumed the duties of first lady), the historical Manuela Rosas was often the target of attack. In Amalia, however, Manuela is an object of sympathy; the narrator identifies her as the “first of her father’s victims,” and she even intervenes to help Amalia at a key point.27 Mármol lays out this sympathetic treatment of Manuela in full in a pamphlet from the same period, “Manuela Rosas: Rasgos biográficos” (“Manuela Rosas: Biographical Characteristics,” 1851). His argument relies on a metonymic identification of Manuela with Argentina: both suffer at the hands of the dictator and, Mármol suggests, both can be repaired.28 Mármol’s use of Manuela Rosas reflects the broader rhetorical use of women and the female body in this period. For the (men of the) Generation of 1837, women stood both for those oppressed by the Rosas regime and for the potential for resistance and progress.29 For instance, the anti-​Rosas newspaper La moda, edited and largely written by Juan Bautista Alberdi, used the (feminized) discourse of fashion and manners to critique the regime. However, women

Tabula Rasa

57

writers, including Manso, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Mariquita Sánchez, actively participated in shaping the anti-​Rosas discourse of their time; they reproduced its central tropes while also using this discourse to intervene in larger questions about the role of women in society.30 Los misterios del Plata is a case in point: Adelaida, unlike Amalia, is an active negotiator and strategist who secures her (vulnerable) husband’s escape and ensures the family’s continuation. She is the hero of the plot and an argument for the active participation of women in the making of a new political culture. These variations—­truly, heated internal debates—­demonstrate the extent to which the terms that defined the critique of Rosas were in a process of continual negotiation and modification, even within the same political camp. The most significant contribution of these two novels is their inclusion of Rosas, the dictator, as a character in the text. In the Latin American context, this marks the beginnings of a representative vocabulary grammar that will later characterize the dictator novel. Once Rosas is physically present, there is a necessary shift in the terms of representation. From this closer proximity, the writer must weigh the task of description alongside that of denunciation. These are complementary but not identical projects. The representation of the dictator follows two tracks: first, the description of the mechanics of his regime; and second, the description of the dictator’s body. Within the purview of Rosas’s house, as the de facto seat of government, Manso and Mármol offer descriptions of the bureaucratic mechanics of authoritarian rule. Manso, for instance, remarks on the large cupboards that house the dictator’s archives.31 Mármol offers a more extensive description of the importance of information-​gathering, writing, and communication to the operations of the regime. When Rosas first appears, he is deeply engaged in the work of managing the nation, reading letters from a network of informants while a group of secretaries carefully writes out reports. Rosas maintains a careful record of the political affiliations of his citizens, referred to as the “Classifications” (Clasificaciones), some of which appear in the novel. Mármol’s attention to the dictator’s writing and record-​keeping mirrors the documentary project of Amalia as a whole. Like Rosas (the historical figure and literary character), Mármol presents a large-​scale social portrait in which real people are organized according to their political sympathies. But while the parallel between the dictator and the writer is suggested, it is not the subject of sustained (or self-​reflexive) inquiry. Instead, Mármol offers a parody of authoritarian language within the larger description of authoritarian bureaucracy. In that same first scene, Rosas’s insistence on the use of officially sanctioned terminology repeatedly interrupts his assistants’ work. When a secretary says that he will file the reports under the heading, “Communiqués from provinces under the control of the Unitarians [unitarios],” Rosas tells him he is wrong. The secretary proposes a correction: “Communiqués from provinces under the control of the Unitarian [unitarios] traitors.” Again, incorrect. Finally, the frightened secretary pronounces:

58

Chapter 2

“Communiqués from provinces under control of the savage Unitarians [unitarios].” Rosas is satisfied.32 This scene offers a critique of the regime’s use of the term unitario as a catchall designation for the enemy, echoing Echeverría in “The Slaughterhouse.” Just as important, however, is the comedy derived from the repetition of nearly identical phrases, characterized by the anxious profusion of adjectives. While the dictator may share the writer’s investment in language, he is clearly coded as a “bad” writer. The second component is the physical description of the dictator. Manso’s account of Rosas’s physiognomy, for instance, emphasizes Rosas’s Europeanness (white skin, fine features, blue eyes, blond hair), marking his separation from his supporters at the same time as it insists on the physical signs of his inner nature: “he is one of those individuals born to afflict the human race; what you might call the epidemic personified.”33 The description of Rosas’s body in Amalia demonstrates a similar admixture of familiarity (or curiosity) and dissociation, as in an early scene in which the dictator takes off his shoes while resting before dinner: Rosas sat down on the edge of a bed, his own, and pulled off his boots, setting his feet down on the floor, without stockings, just as they had been inside the boots; he bent down, took a pair of shoes out from underneath the bed, sat down once more, and after rubbing his bare feet with his hands, put the shoes on. He then put his hand beneath the waistband of his underpants, and lifting up a very fine coat of mail that covered his body down to his belly, raised his hand to his left side, spent considerable time scratching that region of his chest, four or five minutes at least, his nature, in which all the animal instincts so strikingly predominated, taking real pleasure in his so doing.34

The dictator here is vulgar—­unrefined, coarse, common—­but not yet grotesque. This lingering description of the dictator’s bare feet and body is nevertheless intended to elicit disgust. The implicit comparison of Rosas to an animal is repeated in the following scene, where Rosas devours meat at the dinner table with great fervor. This Rosas mirrors and even exaggerates the crudeness associated with his supporters. In its careful description of the dictator’s body and bodily habits, this passage anticipates the representation of the dictator as a figure of physical (and sexual) excess in later dictator novels. I have thus far outlined a preliminary glossary of terms for the representation of the dictator that centers on the distinction between the categories of “civilization” and “barbarism.” The former is associated with modernity and humanist and liberal values and is oriented toward the future. “Barbarism,” by contrast, is fundamentally antimodern and is rooted in the base, “animal” instincts exemplified by violence and the desire to remain in or

Tabula Rasa

59

return to a falsely idealized past. But these terms are less categorical designations than heuristic devices: they are shorthand for the distinction between what is a part of and what is excluded from a given community. Crucially, that distinction relies on differences of class, race, and ethnicity, as much as political affiliation. The masses (as an indistinct and amorphous figure) are counterposed to the family (as a discreet, countable entity) which, operating within the rubric of the romantic plot, functions as a metaphor or double for the possible nation-​to-​come. Within the dictator’s house, this is a disordered and feeble family. Outside of the dictator’s house, the formation of a new national family is either impeded, as in Amalia, or forced into exile, as in Los misterios del Plata. Yet, Manso and Mármol’s respective incursions into the dictator’s house and the inclusion of Rosas as a character in the text compel a consideration of the actual mechanics of authoritarian rule. No longer can the regime be dismissed as simply barbaric, even if its supporters prove to be so. Instead, in these more intimate quarters, writers must begin to describe, catalog, and consider the means by which authoritarian rule operates. The influence of these early texts is evident, for instance, in Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (The President, 1946). The narrative follows Miguel Cara de Ángel, formerly the President’s favorite, who falls in love with Camila, the daughter of a general declared an enemy of the state. The romantic plot operates in the tradition of novels such as Amalia and Los misterios del Plata: eventually Cara de Ángel and Camila are separated, and she escapes the country while he dies in prison. The novel also includes multiple scenes in which government officials write reports, send or receive letters, and compose intelligence briefs. The centrality of surveillance and record-​ keeping are underlined at the end of the novel, where the reader learns of Cara de Ángel’s fate in a report written by the Chief of the Secret Police. The scene includes a lingering description of the preparations for and process of writing, as the Chief of the Secret Police struggles to extract a hair from the nib of his pen.35 This detail is both banal and terrifying, suggesting the reduction of human life to mere inconvenience under the necropolitical logic of the authoritarian state. But writing also serves other functions, as in the chapter “El parte al Señor Presidente” (“Reports Sent to the President,” or “The President’s Mail-​Bag”), which features excerpts of correspondence sent to the dictator by his subjects. Civilians write to the President to ask for aid (work, money, or food), thank him for earlier favors, ask permission to travel abroad, and report on the activities of others, including overheard comments, the defacement of posters, and drunken threats. From this collage emerges a view of the precariousness and fear of exposure that condition life under dictatorship. It also illuminates the complex bonds of dependence and desire that emerge between the dictator and his subjects. This is perhaps the book’s most unsettling aspect, and a topic that writers of the Generation of 1837 rarely dared broach. But it is central to representations of Rosas by other constituencies in this period.

60

Chapter 2

Beyond the Generation of 1837: Rosas in the Popular Imagination All of the texts discussed in this chapter first appeared in periodicals and other ephemeral publications, which flourished across Latin America in the decades following independence. The spread of more efficient printing technologies also facilitated the formation of new reading publics, engaged with what William Acree has called “everyday print culture.” Acree’s phrase highlights the involvement of diverse and even illiterate populations with this burgeoning textual culture; the “reading” public here includes those who listened to texts read aloud, which remained common until the last part of the nineteenth century.36 These new publications were comprised of a variety of materials, including written texts, songs, and dance notations, as well as cartoons and other images. Their titles often proclaimed their ideological orientations, as with the anti-​Rosas Montevideo papers El grito argentino (The Argentine Cry or The Argentine Howl) and its successor, ¡Muera Rosas! (Death to Rosas!). The official newspaper of the Rosas regime was La gaceta mercantil (The Commercial Gazette). However, Rosas tacitly supported several other papers, including Archivo americano (American Archive), which was published in Spanish, French, and English and intended for foreign audiences. These publications offered a very different vocabulary for the representation of Rosas, one often mandated by Rosas himself.37 Genealogies of the dictator novel in Latin America pay little attention to the work of writers who were not part of the Generation of 1837.38 There is logic to this omission: opposition to Rosas was one of the defining features of the Generation of 1837, and the literary historiography of the dictator novel privileges opposition to the dictator. However, the consolidation of the central tropes and critical concerns of the dictator novel did not take shape in isolation. Echeverría, Mármol, and Manso were in dialogue with a variety of anti-​, pro-​, and popular representations of Rosas. From here comes the assertion that the “Rosas” of this chapter is an assemblage: a body of contested ideas about the dictator, proper political processes, and the bases for the formation of national culture. In turning to the work of writers who supported Rosas as well as anti-​Rosas writers from the lower classes, I will show that writing about Rosas cannot be cleanly split into two camps. On each side there were further divisions determined by class, race, and location (rural versus urban) that complicate conversations about pro-​and anti-​dictator writing. The editor of Archivo americano, Pedro de Angelis, was a prominent supporter of Rosas and was often subjected to attack by the dictator’s opponents.39 Before assuming the editorship of Archivo americano, de Angelis published a biography of Rosas, Ensayo histórico sobre la vida del Exmo. Sr. D. Juan Manuel de Rosas, gobernador y capitán general (Historical Essay about the Life of the Hon. Mr. Juan Manuel de Rosas, Governor and Captain General, 1830), which was both a response to Rosas’s critics and an

Tabula Rasa

61

anticipatory celebration of his leadership. It offers a very different vision of Rosas, although its underlying values are not entirely distinct from those of the Generation of 1837. The biography begins with a description of Rosas’s lineage (a prominent family of colonial administrators) and youth (Rosas showed early promise, joining the independence struggles at thirteen, and as a young man he became the administrator of his family’s holdings, which he improved and expanded). But the bulk of the biography focuses on Rosas’s battles against the indigenous populations of the pampas. Here, Rosas led efforts to establish a new order, effectively bringing about the “colonization”—­to use de Angelis’s term—­of these native peoples.40 In its emphasis on the subjugation of insurgent populations and its celebration of Rosas as a civilizing force, the values of de Angelis’s biography coincide with those of the Generation of 1837. Both sides were part of a relatively small elite who were fighting for influence over the masses; to succeed, they needed to appeal to those masses. Writing in defense of his work in an editorial published in Archivo americano, de Angelis presented himself as a “public writer” (escritor público) who was defending public discourse from foreign influence.41 But if the aim of the public writer was to articulate a local idiom for the celebration of Rosas and his political program, de Angelis was far from the vanguard. When his image of Rosas in that early biography is juxtaposed with more popular versions of Rosas, there emerges a very different vision for the nation. Although the Rosas dictatorship thrived on the support of rural and poor urban populations, the “popular” of his popularity is not the same as the “popular” of popular culture. I use the phrase “popular culture,” first, to evoke the distance or split between the elite (this includes members of the Generation of 1837 and writers such as de Angelis) and the masses. Second, I use the term to establish popular culture as both a space for contestation and as a contested space, following Stuart Hall. For Hall, popular culture is defined in its continuing tension with the dominant culture, in what Hall calls “the double movement of containment and resistance,” even as a given contestatory form may eventually become part of the dominant culture, as would prove to be the case with the domestication of the gaucho genre in Argentina.42 Together with new technologies for the dissemination of print and a new audience, there emerged in this period a new kind of writer, one who helped to bring about the evolution of the gaucho genre. Although the gaucho genre had its roots in the transcriptions of oral stories and songs, by the 1830s this kind of writing had moved to the more urban medium of the newspaper.43 The central actor in this shift was the gaucho letrado (the lettered gaucho) or gaucho gacetero (the newspaperman gaucho): these were literate rural workers who moved to the city and found work in the rapidly expanding newspaper industry. They brought with them the vernacular cultural forms, songs, dances, and the nonstandard vocabulary, grammar, and orthography

62

Chapter 2

of the rural and lower classes.44 The political polarization of the period meant that these new writers were quickly mobilized to help incorporate the masses, both urban and rural, into various political camps.45 For this reason, Ángel Rama offers a third critical term for this writer-​figure: the gauchipolítico (the political gaucho), which refers to the writers who gave voice in print to rural populations as well as to the gaucho-​poets who edited those newspapers and wrote the poems, songs, and letters published therein.46 The dictator novel and the gaucho genre intersect in this moment, where the gaucho becomes contested ground in representations of Rosas. Both nascent genres were at this point characterized by their openness to and borrowing from a multitude of discourses. By the 1870s, the gaucho genre would be codified and its constellation of contestatory forms contained as it passed into the dominant culture. The dictator novel took longer to fully emerge, but by the twentieth century it would develop a recognizable formula that similarly constrained the destabilizing potential of its early heterogeneity. For the moment, however, both the gaucho genre and dictator novel remained very much in the process of formation. With this in mind, it is necessary to see the work of the gauchipolíticos as engaging in its own purposeful redistribution of the sensible within the larger sociopolitical context of Argentina’s national consolidation. Luis Pérez was one of the most prolific of the pro-​Rosas gauchipolíticos. Between 1830 and 1834 he produced the bulk of more than thirty different newspapers, including such titles as De cada cosa un poquito (A Little Bit of Everything), El gaucho (The Gaucho), and La gaucha (a counterpart for women readers), as well as El negrito (The Negro) and La negrita (The Little Negress). These publications were immensely successful and received notice in Rosas’s official papers.47 They served to mediate between the masses and the ideological values of the regime, offering a different vision of Rosas. Pérez’s version emphasized Rosas’s similarity to and intimacy with his supporters—­a “vulgar” image of the dictator insofar as vulgar remains that which is common to the people (as in the vernacular). In the poem “Carta (Guenos Ayres, Agosto 4 de 1830)” (Letter [Buenos Aires, August 4, 1830], 1839), for instance, the speaker describes to his wife a recent encounter in which Rosas greets each of his men by name and asks after their families.48 Alongside such instances of recognition, Pérez’s poems also posited identification with the ruler, celebrating Rosas’s connection to rural culture and declaring him the “Great Gaucho” (el Gran Gaucho). However, Pérez’s newspapers were not exactly mouthpieces for the government: his was a Rosas created by and for the popular imagination, articulated beyond the regime’s control. The poem “El gaucho” (The Gaucho, 1830), which appeared in installments in the newspaper of the same name, is a case in point. Roughly contemporaneous with de Angelis’s biography, this poem offers a competing vision of Rosas. The narrative turns

Tabula Rasa

63

on a metonymic slippage between its speaker, the gaucho Pancho Lugares Contreras, and Rosas: its early installments narrate the autobiography of Contreras, and only after this does the poem turn its attention to Rosas. The title “El gaucho” is therefore purposefully unspecific; it applies to the poem, the publication, the narrator, the nominal audience, and Rosas himself, suggesting a fundamental affiliation between them all.49 As in de Angelis’s biography, Pérez’s Rosas showed early promise and was made the administrator of his family’s lands. Pérez’s celebration of Rosas’s skill in horseback riding, swimming, and other practices of rural life mark a significant shift in that it makes Rosas a fellow “gaucho.” The speaker’s repeated use of familiar nicknames (“el Viejo,” “el Rubio”) further underlines Rosas’s affinity with gauchos. But the most remarkable element of Pérez’s biography-​poem is its systematic distancing of Rosas from the educated elite, as in a scene in which Rosas confides in his men: Of the “wise men” [sabios] of the world He didn’t think much [Guena opinión no tenía]; “These guys know nothing” [Estos no tienen acierto], He would tell us in private [Siempre a solas nos decía]. These guys are going to tangle us up With their damned theories; And, if not, just wait And you’ll see one day. These are not good men [Estos no son hombres guenos], They are very presumptuous [Tienen mucha presunción]. I hope I am mistaken! And that I am proven wrong.50

Read cynically, Pérez’s Rosas emerges as a proto-​populist leader who is ready to exploit the affections of the masses. His comments accord with the general federalista disdain for the unitarios as men so taken by European ideas that they have failed the cause of independence. Crucially, however, these comments also distance Rosas from the educated elite of his own political faction, including writers such as de Angelis. Indeed, Pérez’s generalized rejection of the educated elite in his biography of Rosas illuminates a paradox for the regime. While his supporters criticized the European affectations of the Generation of 1837, Rosas needed European-​influenced literary culture to justify his rule as much as he needed to appeal to the masses.51 De Angelis was essential to the former; the latter became the province of writers such as Pérez. Through his identification with Rosas from below, Pérez recodes the elements identified as or associated with “barbarism” in the works of the Generation of 1837 as marks of familiarity and therefore the basis for

64

Chapter 2

representative leadership. Yet this act of identification was also potentially destabilizing for the regime, marking the place where it lost control of its own symbolic economy. Eventually, Pérez fell out of favor with Rosas’s inner circle. Tensions grew between Pérez and de Angelis, and in 1834 these broke out in the pages of their respective newspapers. As the conflict escalated, Pérez was arrested and imprisoned; nothing further is known of him.52 Political appeals to popular audiences were not the exclusive domain of Rosas’s supporters. Hilario Ascasubi, a former soldier exiled to Montevideo in the early 1830s, mobilized the gaucho genre against Rosas and in explicit opposition to pro-​Rosas gauchipolíticos such as Pérez. Like Pérez, Ascasubi aimed to cultivate a public of sympathetic and politically engaged readers. His writing focused on the lives of rural workers and conscripts, as with the characters Jacinto Cielo and Aniceto el Gallo, whose names were also the titles of newspapers Ascasubi published. Unlike Pérez, however, Ascasubi faced the challenge of articulating an idiom for the critique of Rosas that celebrated the lived experience and culture of the masses often denigrated in anti-​Rosas works by members of the Generation of 1837. The challenge, then, was to recode these as signifiers in a more inclusive political project. Once again, the term “gaucho” was the locus of these tensions. Ascasubi’s poems and verses from the Rosas years give voice to the gauchos, celebrating their customs and stressing their patriotism. The poems draw a connecting line between the fight for independence and demands for liberty and just treatment in the present. The speakers often refer to Rosas as a gaucho, but the term is always qualified. The poem “Retruco a Rosas” (Retort to Rosas), for example, calls Rosas a “lying gaucho” (gaucho embustero), and in “Brama el Tigre de Palermo” (The Tiger of Palermo Roars) Rosas is a “false gaucho” (gaucho falaz).53 The latter encapsulates Ascasubi’s delicate maneuver: to celebrate the culture of gauchos, rural workers, and soldiers while at the same time condemning Rosas and his regime. Working at the intersection of the language of the emergent gaucho genre with that of anti-​Rosas discourse, Ascasubi reproduces both, with a difference. The term “gaucho,” consequently, functions as the name of a class of subjects—­a means for differentiating and distinguishing members of a social and political group—­in which one might be included or excluded, as well as an internally differentiated class in which there are both good and bad actors. In the world of Ascasubi’s gaucho poetry, there are both “civilized” and “barbaric” gauchos.54 Violence, and in particular indiscriminate or excessive violence, becomes the distinguishing characteristic of barbarism, rather than its association with the indigenous or rural population or with the urban underclass. From this emerges a new image of Rosas (the dictator) as set apart from his supporters and as a fundamentally monstrous figure, marking a shift from the association of vulgarity with the common (popular) to the recognizably grotesque. Here, the dictator’s destructive force is concerned solely with

Tabula Rasa

65

self-​preservation, to the exclusion even of his supporters. In “Isidora, federala y mazorquera” (Isidora, a Federalist and Member of the Mazorca), a poem about a woman member of Rosas’s secret police, the subject goes to visit the dictator. Manuela welcomes Isidora into Rosas’s house and gives Isidora a tour of Rosas’s trophies: the dried skins, scalps, ears, and severed heads of unitarios. Ever loyal to Rosas, Isidora spits on these in disgust. Things take a turn, however, when Rosas enters the scene: he is ill and disoriented. Realizing that Isidora has seen him in this embarrassing condition, Rosas orders her executed, calls for a bottle, and has her body brought back into the room: She was cold and exsanguinated! But even so, Rosas Bent down, gave her a kiss, And issued a howl of laughter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And so the unfortunate [triste] Arroyera [Isidora] Has come to a terrible end [un fin funesto ha tenido] Despite [sin valerle] having been A federala and a mazorquera.55

Such descriptions echo Echeverría’s comparison of black women to mythical harpies in “The Slaughterhouse,” as well as the physical descriptions of Rosas in Mármol’s novel Amalia. But while Echeverría and Mármol’s critiques depended on the association of Rosas with poor and black bodies, Ascasubi overrides this suggested association. His Rosas is clearly coded as a monster. In rewriting the dictator as a monster, Ascasubi simultaneously rescues the figure of the gaucho for the unitario political project and helps to consolidate Rosas (the dictator) as the absolute negation against which to imagine a more inclusive national community. Like Rosas, members of the Generation of 1837 recognized the usefulness of an appeal to a broader popular audience in building support for the opposition, and so they promoted Ascasubi’s work.56 These relationships shaped the remainder of Ascasubi’s life: after the fall of Rosas, he worked for Justo José Urquiza, and later still he served as envoy to France, where he published his collected works in 1872.57 However, Ascasubi’s propositions were complementary, not identical, to those of the Generation of 1837. The arc of Ascasubi’s career returns attention to the figure of the gauchipolítico. Following Rama’s work on the gaucho genre, at worst the gauchipolítico was a writer for hire, producing material equivalent to that of modern propaganda departments; at best, the gauchipolítico collaborated with those in power without ever assuming a leadership role.58 But to privilege a distinction between politically committed writing and propaganda is to miss the larger cultural-​political work in which these texts were engaged, just as it would be a mistake to collapse writers into pro-​and anti-​Rosas camps.

66

Chapter 2

Such readings ignore the tensions between figures such as de Angelis and Pérez, who were ostensibly on the same side of the political divide but had very different relationships to the regime. The same is true of Ascasubi relative to members of the Generation of 1837. More importantly, an emphasis on the division between anti-​and pro-​Rosas writing also elides the critical cultural work in which both Pérez and Ascasubi were engaged: the recognition, documentation, and celebration of the lived experiences of members of the lower economic and social classes. Writing about the dictator, as I posited at the start of this chapter, is not simply a project of critique (or for that matter, support); it also serves as the forum for the elaboration of alternative political futures: first, through an interpretation of the present, and second, through the suggestion of the changes to be made and the tentative articulation of a desired future for the nation. These debates are entangled in the roots of the representational vocabulary of the dictator novel, and they continue to inform its underlying political logic.

The Gaucho, the Writer, and the Dictator: Sarmiento’s Facundo and the Making of the Dictator Novel Having surveyed the wide range of writing produced in response to the Rosas regime, I return to Sarmiento’s highly influential nonfiction text, Facundo o civilización y barbarie (Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 1845). In keeping with the letter cited at the start of this chapter, Sarmiento’s goal was to consolidate opposition to Rosas and establish himself as a key player in that opposition. In many ways, he succeeded. Facundo has attained canonical status: it is a foundational document in Latin American social and political discourse. Sarmiento himself, as a president, statesman, and founder of several national institutions, occupies a central place in Argentine and Latin American history, for supporters and critics alike. Sarmiento was ambitious and highly idiosyncratic—­he could contradict himself multiple times within a single text and often publicly reversed strongly held positions—­and to read him is often a vertiginous or, as Carlos Alonso puts it, an “unsettling,” experience.59 But it is precisely from its very incongruities that Sarmiento’s writing draws its force. Literary critics frequently cite Facundo as a foundational text for the Latin American dictator novel.60 This raises two issues for my project: first, there is a tendency to collapse Juan Facundo Quiroga—­a caudillo who controlled several of the interior provinces of Argentina in the 1820s and early ’30s—­and Juan Manuel de Rosas into a singular figure of the “dictator.” Later dictator novels alternate between emphasis on the dictator’s irrational barbarism (drawing from Sarmiento’s characterization of Quiroga) or cruel calculation (drawing from his version of Rosas). Although Sarmiento’s critique of Rosas relies on the latter’s connection to Quiroga, his argument depends on the

Tabula Rasa

67

distinction as much as the similarities between the two men, since it is from here that he is able to write both Quiroga and Rosas into a teleology of Argentina’s emergence into “civilized” modernity. Second, Facundo is not a novel, nor is it exactly a work of fiction. It is explicitly a work of propaganda and incorporates elements of the essay, biography, epic, political pamphlet, travelogue, and ethnographic study. The book itself is composed of three parts: a topographic and proto-​anthropological survey of Argentina; the biography of Quiroga; and a political essay on and against Rosas. Facundo does, however, have literary qualities, which motivate the arguments for reading it as a work of literature.61 I am sympathetic to this proposition, because it helps to illuminate key aspects of Sarmiento’s text. But this also runs the risk of eliding Facundo’s peculiarities, which are not reducible to a single generic program. What makes Facundo foundational, both as a work of criticism and as an antecedent of the dictator novel, is that it generates a teleology within which to understand the phenomenon of dictatorship, and beyond which to imagine a more desirable national community. Sarmiento presents civilization and barbarism as competing forces in the Argentine national psyche. As in other works by members of the Generation of 1837, these terms function as shorthand (“us” and “them”). Sarmiento emphatically aligns himself with the values of civilization, while the gaucho Quiroga, whose biography forms the core of Facundo, is an exemplar of Latin American barbarism. In this scheme, the dictator Rosas represents an evolution or a departure of sorts.62 As Sarmiento explains, “what in him [Quiroga] was only instinct, impulse, and a tendency, in Rosas became a system, means, and end.”63 The contrast insinuates a distinction between barbarism and dictatorship; it follows, then, that dictatorship will have to be understood as a social phenomenon on its own terms. To this end, Sarmiento embeds his analysis of dictatorship (the critique of Rosas) within a larger description and theorization of postindependence Argentina, hence the topographic and ethnographic survey of Argentina in the first part of the book. In its close attention to rural customs and types, Sarmiento’s subject matter overlaps with that of the gaucho genre, but his is a different project. Unlike Ascasubi or Pérez, Sarmiento is not interested in giving voice to or valorizing the experiences of the gauchos or other inhabitants of the rural expanse. The gaucho is portrayed as a “bad gaucho,” and at best Facundo marks the external limit of the gaucho genre.64 If Quiroga is valuable to Sarmiento because he is uniquely Argentine, this value is only legible (countable) in retrospect. It is only once Quiroga is dead that Sarmiento can incorporate him into the Argentine national narrative. Sarmiento’s true subject is an Argentina of the future, which he intends to access by cataloging, categorizing, and delimiting the Argentina of the present. The future Argentina is one in which both Quiroga (as the emblem of cultural autochthony) and Rosas (as an unfortunate stage in the nation’s political development) have been superseded, ideally with the former remembered and monumentalized and the latter forgotten.

68

Chapter 2

I read Facundo as an agglomeration of disparate, and even conflicting, attempts at writing about the dictator and dictatorship.65 It encapsulates the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of a genre, embodying that moment prior to the establishment of its limits. In this sense, Facundo is the staging ground for the dictator novel: the place in which its diverse components are assembled before being mobilized. These include the narrative or “novelistic” mode, which characterizes Sarmiento’s biography of Quiroga in the book’s second part, as well as the essay, on which Sarmiento relies for his attack on Rosas in the third part. Rather than attempt a synthesis, Sarmiento places these diverse generic formulae alongside each other, allowing them to combine, conflict, and amplify one another. This new language explores and extends elements already discussed in the analysis of other works in this chapter, but here it is intertwined with the writer’s self-​fashioning as an authority on his own terms. The analysis of the dictator, in turn, has two main currents: the first is a focus on Rosas as head of state, while the second considers Rosas as a writer (of sorts) and, therefore, as an uncanny double for Sarmiento himself. Sarmiento generates two archetypal figures of interest in Facundo: first, the writer, and second, the dictator. The “writer” is a mercurial figure, whose self-​fashioning unfolds unorthodox practices of authority that, later, open the way for the novelization of the dictator. At the start of Facundo, Sarmiento’s self-​presentation relies on a sharp distinction between civilization and barbarism, as in the description of his departure for exile in the opening “Author’s Note”: Toward the end of 1840 I was leaving my homeland [patria], pitifully exiled, broken, covered with bruises, kicks, and blows received the day before in one of those bloody bacchanals of unruly soldiers and mazorqueros. Passing the Baths of Zonda, beneath a national coat of arms that in happier days I had painted in a room, I wrote these words with charcoal: On ne tue point les idées. [One does not kill ideas.] The government, informed of this deed, sent a commission in charge of deciphering the hieroglyph, which was said to contain base venting, insults, and threats. Upon hearing the translation, “So!” they said, “what does that mean?”66

The act of defiance is a declaration: ideas are the principal force with which this text will mount its opposition to the dictator. The humor of this scene turns on the confusion of the government agents, which establishes the contrast between culture (civilization) and its opposite. Illiteracy and the lack of rhetorical or interpretative sophistication were already tropes associated

Tabula Rasa

69

with Rosas and his supporters. Sarmiento elaborates on this idea. Prior to its translation, the inscription becomes the subject of rumor and conjecture, which circulate beyond and despite the work of the government commission sent to address the issue. At play here is the writer’s conceptual acuity, which produces the “hieroglyph,” framed by ignorance or confusion, on one hand, and assumption or projection, on the other. But this scene also reveals much about Sarmiento, the writer: the phrase he scrawls is mistranslated, misquoted, and misattributed.67 Sarmiento himself broadly translates the French into Spanish as “A los hombres se degüella: a las ideas no” (Men can have their throats cut, but ideas cannot). Although he credits the quote to Hippolyte Fortoul, it is in fact a misrendering of Denis Diderot’s “On ne tire pas des coups de fusil aux idées” (roughly: One does not kill ideas with gunshots).68 According to Ricardo Piglia, the apparent mistake can be read as a creative act in which Sarmiento takes a half-​remembered quotation and molds it to his own needs.69 Sylvia Molloy is more emphatic: Sarmiento here “unquotes” the original phrase; he “bends the phrase further by brutally adapting it, through a willfully interpretive translation, to present day reality, transforming it into a denunciation of Rosas’s dictatorship.” This moment, then, is also a description of Sarmiento’s writing process as one characterized by error, modification, and even falsification—­what Molloy calls “imposing an image of self”—­as much as by historical documentation, social analysis, and critique.70 Piglia terms this Sarmiento’s use of the “freedom of fiction,” which recalls Sarmiento’s own invocation of the “literary brush” in the letter quoted at the start of this chapter.71 The “literary brush,” as an alternative motor for generating authority, provides the freedom to mold, bend, and even transform factual material to the writer’s own ends. Within Facundo, Sarmiento does insist on the exactitude of his claims. But he also often playfully makes recourse to other literary genres, which destabilizes the book’s apparent documentary claim. For instance, at the end of the introduction, Sarmiento describes his project in theatrical terms, explaining that the Argentine landscape will serve as his stage and setting, while Quiroga will be described by his costume, speech, and manners. The use of literary technique is particularly essential to the biography of Quiroga, as announced by a shift to the narrative mode of storytelling in the biography, in contrast to the factual narration of the preceding ethnographic survey in the book’s first part. Sarmiento frequently marks moments of uncertainty and notes the difficulty of gathering information about his subject. But in the face of historical gaps, Sarmiento relies on the detailed recounting of anecdotes to reveal the totality of Quiroga’s character, as in the story that opens the biography. Here, Quiroga is chased by a jaguar, takes refuge in a tree for several terrifying hours, and then murders the animal in brutal revenge once he is rescued. What begins as a scene of antagonism (Quiroga versus the “tiger”) becomes one of identification: not only does Quiroga later embrace

70

Chapter 2

the moniker “Tiger of the Plains” (el Tigre de los Llanos), Sarmiento spends several lines emphasizing Quiroga’s physical resemblance to the animal. Such stories, Sarmiento insists, “reveal him [Quiroga] completely.”72 The task of the writer, to recall Mármol, is to reveal the “true nature” of an entire period. In fact, Sarmiento announces the centrality of literary technique to political argument in the opening lines of the introduction, where, recalling the conventions of epic poetry, he invokes Quiroga’s ghost: Terrible specter of Facundo, I will evoke you [voy a evocarte], so that you may rise, shaking off the bloody dust covering your ashes, and explain the hidden life and inner convulsions that tear at the bowels of a noble people! You possess the secret: reveal it to us!73

These lines introduce Sarmiento (narrator) as the amanuensis for the narrative that Quiroga (protagonist) will provide. But the imperative “reveal it to us” (revélanoslo) is specious. Quiroga very rarely speaks in Facundo, and it is instead Sarmiento who, using Quiroga as an exemplar, will narrate the secrets of the emerging nation. This poetic device serves to introduce the speaker as much as the subject. The narrator is a writer who is able to mobilize the discursive conventions of poetry at the same time as those of biography, history, and social science. Far from being compromised by this generic heterogeneity, the analysis draws strength from its generic dexterity. This impression is confirmed a few lines later, when Sarmiento remarks: “South America in general, and the Argentine Republic above all, has lacked a [Alexis de] Tocqueville.”74 This Tocqueville, Sarmiento writes—­intentionally using the subjunctive mode—­ would have explained the importance of the Argentine terrain and the habits it produces; the influence of Spanish colonization and indigenous barbarism would have been understood; and, most importantly, this Tocqueville would have been able to describe the struggle between civilization and barbarism that is tearing apart the Argentine republic. This is an anticipatory description of Facundo itself, and Sarmiento thereby pre­sents himself as the Tocqueville of Argentina, or as an Argentine Tocqueville. Importantly, Sarmiento attributes this need for elucidation not just to the Argentines themselves, but to the foreign powers (in particular France and Britain) that have been pulled into the vortex of its disorder. Using Quiroga as an emblematic figure, Sarmiento as the analyst and interpreter of this sociopolitical landscape will also reveal to a European audience the internal dynamics of the new nation. The generic ambiguity of Facundo did not go overlooked or unremarked by Sarmiento’s contemporaries. Valentín Alsina, for instance, submitted to Sarmiento a list of fifty-​one corrections that aimed to mold Facundo into a disciplined work of history.75 Juan Bautista Alberdi went further, declaring Facundo “the first book of history that has neither dates nor supporting information [ni fecha ni data] for the events recounted therein.”76 Such responses

Tabula Rasa

71

assumed that Facundo was intended to be purely a work of history or biography. However, as the vagaries of Sarmiento’s self-​presentation indicate, he was most interested in the critical potential of commingling genres. Noé Jitrik usefully termed Facundo a “coexistence of genres,” governed by a principle of mixture that becomes the generating force of the text.77 Following from this, Facundo makes strategic use of its generic indeterminacy to explore a variety of discourses or generic modes within which to write about the dictator and dictatorship. It is because of this, rather than the question of whether or not Facundo can properly be counted as “literature,” that it is a vital text for reading the Latin American dictator novel. I will explore in more depth the challenges posed by writing about the dictator in the next chapter. For the moment, I turn to Sarmiento’s treatment of Rosas in the final section of Facundo as the key iteration of the many “Rosases” elaborated in this period. In a cursory reading, Sarmiento’s structuring opposition between civilization and barbarism maps easily onto the opposition between writer and dictator. The dictator, Rosas, represents the “barbaric” impulses at work in the Argentine national psyche that have been transformed into a system of government against which Sarmiento advocates for “civilization.” The two men make a suggestive pair. But the opposition between Sarmiento, the writer, and Rosas, the dictator, is mediated by the biography of Quiroga, who is the true expression of those autochthonous barbaric impulses. The opposition is also mediated by Sarmiento’s vocal support for the (anti-​Rosas) general José María Paz, which periodically punctuates and concludes the text. There is, then, a succession of possible pairings in Facundo—­Sarmiento-​Quiroga, Sarmiento-​ Rosas, and Sarmiento-​Paz, as well as Quiroga-​Rosas and Rosas-​Paz—­that forecloses such easy transposition. In the larger scope of Sarmiento’s argument, it is the genealogical link rather than the equivalence between Quiroga and Rosas that makes it possible for Sarmiento to postulate a teleological movement from barbarism to civilization within which the Rosas dictatorship is a stage to be surpassed. From the moment of Rosas’s inauguration, it is clear that he is different. Rosas dons a general’s coat, and his “easy manner and his self-​assurance at the ceremony didn’t fail to surprise those dreamers who had imagined themselves having a good time, watching the clumsiness and gaucherie of a gaucho.” To further separate Rosas from Quiroga, Sarmiento draws parallels between the rise of Rosas and the ascent of despots following periods of political instability in a variety of historical contexts; examples include the rise of Augustus in Rome, of Napoleon in France after the Terror, the expansion of the Great Council of Venice’s powers after the Tiepolo conspiracy, and even the reign of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. While Quiroga embodied the barbaric tendencies of Argentine nature, Rosas himself is not a uniquely Argentine phenomenon. His analogues lie elsewhere, whether it be in the ancient world, post-​Revolutionary France, or even in the romantic tradition,

72

Chapter 2

as in a comparison of Rosas to Lord Byron.78 These comparisons undercut Rosas’s claims to cultural autochthony and independence, and this is where Sarmiento’s own version of “Rosas” begins to take shape. Like Pedro de Angelis and Luis Pérez, Sarmiento uses a biographical summary as his starting point for a description of Rosas, the dictator. Sarmiento’s Rosas too was an outstanding horseman and a skilled administrator of his family’s lands as a youth. Recalling de Angelis, Sarmiento describes Rosas’s administration of those lands as the effective colonization of the pampas, demonstrated by the sowing of crops and the “taming” of local populations. These principles, Sarmiento writes, would later form the basis for the type of government that Rosas imposes on Buenos Aires. However, while de Angelis celebrated Rosas’s ability to impose discipline, Sarmiento emphasizes the gauchos’ resistance to these impositions in order to highlight the severity of Rosas’s system. That is to say, Sarmiento aligns himself with those gauchos who resist the tyrannical landowner. But, to be clear, Sarmiento is less interested in the gauchos as political actors or as a political constituency than in their symbolic value as figures for an authentically Argentine resistance to Rosas. It is not just the severity of Rosas’s system of administration that concerns Sarmiento, but its absolutism. Sarmiento illustrates this point with a brief anecdote that draws unexpected attention to the dictator’s body.79 Rosas had forbidden his peons from carrying knives on his lands, but one day he forgetfully carried his own dagger. When this was pointed out, “Rosas pulled down his own pants, and ordered them to give him the two hundred lashes which was the penalty imposed on his estancia for carrying a knife.” The tawdry image of the dictator lowering his trousers offers a touch of subversive comedy, invoking the critical potential of vulgarity, which (following Achille Mbembe) becomes a key part of both the critique and the aesthetics of dictatorship. This scene further echoes the fascination with the (animal) materiality of the dictator’s body, evident in works such as Amalia. As the site from which authoritarian power radiates, the dictator’s body, its hungers, physical processes, and the comical situations in which it can be placed, will become an important locus in fictional representations of the dictator. For the moment, however, this brief view of Rosas’s behind, which is exposed to the reader as well as to the whip, allows Sarmiento to name the central problem of Rosas’s approach to power: “authority above all, respect for commands, although they may be ridiculous or absurd.” Like Mármol and other fellow members of the Generation of 1837, Sarmiento also registers the centrality of writing to the operations of an authoritarian regime. This includes propaganda, information-​gathering, and record-​keeping. In the discussion of Amalia, I noted that Mármol’s attention to Rosas’s use of writing and record-​keeping suggested an uncanny mirroring of the writer’s own documentary project. While in Amalia this is only a possible parallel, Sarmiento makes it explicit in his description of the moment when Rosas takes power:

Tabula Rasa

73

So now he had the government in his hands [. . .] The state was a tabula rasa upon which he would write something new, original; he was a poet, a Plato who would realize his ideal republic, according to how he had conceived it. This was a work he had pondered for twenty years and could finally give birth to, without old traditions, the concerns of this era, European-​ style copies, individual rights, institutions in force, standing in the way of its realization. He was a genius, finally, who had been lamenting the errors of his century and preparing himself to destroy them in one blow. Everything was going to be new [. . .]80

The fantasy of the blank slate attributed to Rosas here is analogous to that empty “desert” imagined by members of the Generation of 1837. The nation-​ to-​come is a space cleansed of its past, of its inhabitants, of its traditions, and is ready to be filled. While this fantasy was far from reality, what is important here is that Sarmiento so clearly posits a morphological parallel between Rosas’s project and his own. It is an acknowledgment of the dictator’s function as an (or a competing) “author” of the Argentine nation. This observation stands in contrast to Sarmiento’s opening anecdote of his escape into exile. In that case, the opposition between writer and dictator rests on the opposition between a writer’s capacity to understand and mobilize the subversive potential of language, and the incapacity of the dictator’s representatives. However, as Facundo progresses to the critique of Rosas, Sarmiento concedes that in fact the writer and the dictator share language as a common means. This shared means—­even if Rosas is only metaphorically a writer, and not a particularly good one at that—­institutes a fundamental (foundational) ambiguity in the writer-​dictator relation. The dictator’s power, like the writer’s, derives from language. The dictator thus becomes the writer’s uncanny double, and this possibility will haunt the dictator novel long into the future. Unlike so many exiled writers, however, Rosas has the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. Sarmiento is therefore able to evaluate Rosas’s work as a “writer” in his critique of the regime. Once he secured power, Rosas instituted mechanisms that allowed him to consolidate his hold on the state; these included the formation of the mazorca, and the publication of a list of banned persons. Rosas also elaborated a series of public ceremonies and new insignia for the state. Through enforced repetition, he emptied the term unitario of its original meaning, making it the byword for all things considered unacceptable by the regime. Finally, Rosas ordered the creation of what Sarmiento calls an “opinion census” (censo de las opiniones), which Mármol called the “Classifications,” a record of the inhabitants of each province, classified according to their political affiliation, and this became central to the monitoring and control of the population. None of these mechanisms, Sarmiento makes clear, fulfilled the true purpose of government. Rosas’s

74

Chapter 2

neglect of the real work of governance, Sarmiento argues, has led to the atrophy of vital services (such as the postal service) as well as of the economy. Indeed, echoing a critique made by other members of the Generation of 1837, Sarmiento writes that Rosas does not govern, properly speaking. Instead, he has concentrated power in his person and in his house to such a degree that the nation cannot function, since all resources are directed toward the ongoing war that keeps him in power. While Sarmiento may deem Rosas a bad “writer” in his analysis of the government, he also finds Rosas to be a bad writer according to Rosas’s own stated values. This thread of the argument, in which situational irony plays a central role, begins with the observation that many elements of Rosas’s government are no less “new” than the European-​inspired models offered by the opposition. Sarmiento sees parallels between Rosas’s government and the Inquisition, particularly in the form of the Classifications. Even the mazorca has a historical and European analogue in the Cabochiens of fifteenth-​century Paris. Despite being a self-​styled defender of the rural population and rural ways of life, in his move from his landed estate to the “Fort,” Rosas has abandoned this constituency and come to rely on the support of the army, the mazorca, and the poor (black) inhabitants of the city. On the international scene, Rosas’s aggressions toward and interventions in neighboring countries have instigated international (European) intervention in Argentina. This, Sarmiento argues, is the true failure of Rosas, the supposed “defender of American independence.” Along these same lines, the most important outcome of Rosas’s rule has been his unintentional contribution to the cause of national consolidation. Rosas’s concentration of power in Buenos Aires has effectively created the centralized republic that was sought by the opposition. In making this claim, Sarmiento echoes Juan Bautista Alberdi’s observation that although the unitarios had lost, national unity had triumphed; Rosas therefore laid the foundations for the formation of the Republic of Argentina.81 This line of argument goes beyond the comic appeal of making Rosas the unintentional or ironic hero of the unitario cause. It allows Sarmiento to argue for the removal of Rosas in teleological terms: “The Unitarists’ idea has been carried out; only the tyrant is unneeded.”82 From this critique of Rosas’s government, Sarmiento lays out his own plan for Argentina. This is outlined in a series of paragraphs at the close of Facundo, each following the formula: “Because he [Rosas] has . . . the new government will . . .”83 Sarmiento, then, writes his own theory of good government into the margins of Rosas’s “first draft.” As a self-​proclaimed analysis of the hidden life and inner convulsions of Argentina, Facundo is ultimately a narrative for the emergence of the nation. This is a narrative in which its autochthonous barbarism (represented by Quiroga) and violence (exaggerated by Rosas) are recoded as necessary stages in the process of national consolidation. Just as the figurative borders of the national community that Sarmiento writes about opened to include figures such as Quiroga and Rosas,

Tabula Rasa

75

they close again at the end of Facundo, as Sarmiento looks forward to the future. In the end, Sarmiento’s “Rosas” proves to be neither a barbarian nor a monster. Although Sarmiento uses both of these terms, beneath them moves a more complicated creature. This “subterranean” Rosas is a complex individual who can only be partially understood through recourse to archetype (the historical comparisons), individual pathology (the biography), and an analysis of his system of government. None of these approaches fully encapsulates the problem of the dictator. However, in attempting each of these in the third part of Facundo, Sarmiento lays out a series of possible itineraries for the literary representation of the dictator that the dictator novel will explore in the future. By the early decades of the twentieth century, writing about dictators and dictatorship would grow from these nineteenth-​century origins into a rich vein in Latin American literature. It comprised interventions by critics such as José Martí and José Carlos Mariátegui, as well as what both Gerald Martin and Ángel Rama have called “innumerable” novels on the topic.84 In novels such as Martín Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Strongman, 1929) and Asturias’s The President (1946), the dictator is most often in the background of the primary events of the plot and is rarely glimpsed, recalling Amalia and Los misterios del Plata. However, even as the dictator is largely offstage, both novels pay significant attention to the bureaucratic mechanics of dictatorship, turning attention from an idealized romantic couple (as a metaphor for the nation) to the experiences of those in the dictator’s service. Each novel includes several scenes in which officials write reports and send or receive letters, and the barbarity or monstrosity of the dictator is transmuted into the impersonal violence of bureaucratic machinery. In the early 1970s, three more dictator novels were published in quick succession: Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (Reasons of State, 1974), Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme, 1974), and Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975). They share with Mármol, Manso, and Sarmiento, as well as with Asturias and Guzmán, an interest in the mechanics of authoritarian rule. This includes attention to the regime’s reliance on writing, a thematic thread that reaches its apex in I the Supreme, as well as to the activities of agents working for the regime and, crucially, the strategic occupation of the dictator’s narrative perspective. In closing, I return to the idea of the dictator novel as an emergent and volatile body of material; that is, as a genre in the process of becoming, the limits of which, following Josefina Ludmer, are not yet quite visible. The period I have explored in this chapter was one of radical mixing, in which diverse narrative genres and cultural practices were put to the service of writing about the dictator, to varying and often conflicting ends. There is here a conjunction of political, cultural, and aesthetic projects. From this arises a diversity

76

Chapter 2

of “Rosases,” that fractious and insurgent archive from which emerge key tropes for the literary representation of the dictator. In the following chapter, I will look more closely at the dictator novels by Carpentier, Roa Bastos, and García Márquez. In this period, the limits of the dictator novel as a genre—­its established “laws” or formulae—­are certainly more visible. But this does not mean that its borders have fully closed. The difficult conjunction of political, cultural, and aesthetic projects continues to define the dictator novel, in composition as well as circulation.

Chapter 3

Fathers of the Fatherlands Writing, Politics, and Literary Form at the End of the Latin American “Boom”

In early 1967, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa put together plans for a volume of narratives about Latin American dictators. The collection would be titled “Los padres de las patrias” (The Fathers of the Fatherlands) and would consist of short texts written by prominent writers of the moment, each paired with a historical dictator from their home country. “You can be sure that the resulting book will be one of the greatest successes of Latin American literary history,” Fuentes wrote to Vargas Llosa, “and the topic itself would assure success, if not as great at least comparable, in Europe and the United States.”1 Despite much enthusiasm from the organizers, planned participants, and even potential publishers, the project never materialized. A few years later, three dictator novels appeared in quick succession: Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (Reasons of State, 1974), Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme, 1974), and Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975). Fuentes would later declare that all three of these books originated with the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project.2 Although all three writers had been involved, it is not hard to find contradictions to Fuentes’s claim. García Márquez had long been at work on a dictator novel; he interrupted work on what would become The Autumn of the Patriarch to complete Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), which made him an international sensation and consolidated the Latin American literary “boom” in the public imagination. Carpentier had outlined elements of Reasons of State in an essay on Gerardo Machado published in 1933 and had tackled tyranny and political cynicism in El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World, 1949) and “El derecho de asilo” (“Right of Sanctuary,” 1967). Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme, meanwhile, was the second in a trilogy of novels exploring Paraguayan history and identity.3 Nor was the idea of Latin American writers coming together to take on the dictator itself new, as discussed in the previous chapter. In the 1920s and

77

78

Chapter 3

1930s, a generation before “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” Miguel Ángel Asturias wrote El Señor Presidente (The President, 1946) while in exile, and discussed his progress on the novel with Carpentier, Arturo Uslar Pietri, and other Latin American writers and artists also living in Paris.4 But if the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project did not properly originate the later dictator novels, the largely unexplored archive of correspondence it left behind does offer new means to examine these works and regenerate critical discussion of the dictator novel at large.5 I read The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I the Supreme as the literary interrogation of the problems outlined in the correspondence, which links together questions about the writer’s social function, political commitment, and literary form. These problems include, first, the challenge of making literature out of dictatorship, which pits fiction against the seemingly incredible extremes of history. The second problem is the difficult relationship between literature and politics subsumed in the category of “committed literature,” here informed by the cultural politics of the Cuban Revolution and the Latin American literary boom. And third, there is the nagging awareness of the parallels between the writer and the dictator, which was only discreetly registered in earlier works. In engaging these tensions, García Márquez, Carpentier, and Roa Bastos reshape the tropes, themes, and (at this point) idées reçues of the genre. Read together, they offer a set of critical keys for reading the dictator novel, both within Latin America and across the Global South. Because of the critical furor that followed the near-​simultaneous publication of these works, Reasons of State, I the Supreme, and The Autumn of the Patriarch have been central to the demarcation of the dictator novel as an object of study in Latin American literature. Ángel Rama declared them to be exemplary of the critical potential of the dictator novel. Gerald Martin observes that these were among the few works that had “managed successfully to unite the specific instance—­Francia, Rosas, Estrada Cabrera, Gómez, Pinochet—­with the more universal concerns of tyranny, power, and evil.”6 These terms of praise point to a paradox: the dictator novel responds to and exists in relationship with a very real political phenomenon; but if it fails to connect these specifics to more general or “universal” questions, it risks isolation in the particularity of its concerns. Let me reframe the paradox as a question: if Carpentier, Roa Bastos, and García Márquez’s works are exemplary dictator novels, what is the “dictator novel” that they exemplify? Rama would answer that, in engaging the dictator as an individual as well as the historical and social dynamics that make his regime possible, these novels move beyond the immediate goal of denunciation and demonstrate the analytical, and therefore critical, potential of the dictator novel. Taking Rama as a starting point, I would add that these novels in fact illustrate the constitutive difficulties of the dictator novel as a genre. That is: they make visible the tensions and even contradictions that often go overlooked in the

Fathers of the Fatherlands

79

rush to celebrate these works as anti-​dictator statements or, alternatively, to denounce them for falling short of that goal. Although seemingly clear in its purpose (opposition to the dictator), each novel offers a tangled engagement with the idea of the dictator novel as such. The difficulties begin in the complicated interplay of proximity and distance, which conditions production as much as interpretation. Recall Rama’s contention that the value of the dictator novels of the 1970s was their “leap into the void” of the dictator’s consciousness, as the place from which it becomes possible to properly interrogate authoritarian power.7 Yet this proximity carries risk, as Augusto Monterroso—­who politely declined to participate in “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” when Vargas Llosa extended the invitation—­usefully articulates.8 In a later pair of essays, he expressed skepticism about the political impact of literature presumed by such a project, arguing that writing about dictators principally produces commercial and cultural capital for the writer. Asturias, for instance, was “rewarded” for The President with the 1967 Nobel Prize. But Monterroso also admits a deeper aversion in the second essay: “The truth is that the topic frightened me, that I was frightened of becoming [too] involved in the character, as would inevitably have happened, and of falling into the stupidity of looking into his childhood, his possible anxieties [insomnias] and his fears, and that I would end up ‘understanding’ him and feeling pity for him.”9 The danger lies in the intimacy that the act of writing requires, which, Monterroso argues, can lead to identification with the dictator. I have previously discussed Rama’s position as an illumination of the critical potential of narrative mechanics. While the importance of content (the presence of the dictator as a character in the text) is certain, it is Carpentier, García Márquez, and Roa Bastos’s experimentation with literary form in narrating the dictator’s consciousness that sets these novels apart. But if narrative mechanics facilitate imaginative “access” to the dictator, and from here the more thorough critique of dictatorship, these same formal experiments or distortions should also be read as attempts to navigate the risks of narrative intimacy with the dictator. Conversely, one of the remarkable characteristics of these three novels is their orientation toward the past: Reasons of State offers a composite of early twentieth-​century despots; The Autumn of the Patriarch similarly combines historical models into a generalized Latin American (and specifically Caribbean) dictator; and I the Supreme narrates the final days of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the first president of Paraguay. The relative asynchronicity of these works unsettles the presumed relationship between the dictator novel and its historical referent. By the early 1970s, authoritarian regimes in Latin America had undergone significant transformation. This decade saw the ascent of highly bureaucratized military dictatorships, where the junta replaced the charismatic leader as the locus of power. With this came a shift from the bombastic aesthetics of earlier despotisms to more austere, cloistered, and procedural forms of oppression. It is with this in mind that

80

Chapter 3

Dain Borges writes of these novels: “their tone is nostalgic, looking backward at a type that no longer could center politics.”10 Martin, too, accuses Carpentier and García Márquez (but not Roa Bastos) of nostalgia.11 The term implies a sentimental imagining of the past in place of critical engagement with the present. Contrary to such criticism, Rama and Mario Benedetti posit that all three writers use the past to think about the present.12 The question of political commitment in the dictator novel undergirds both positions. For Borges and Martin, the failure to attend to contemporary realities signals a political shortfall; but for Rama and Benedetti, those same realities can only be grasped through a literary engagement with the past. This distinction is at the root of widely differing readings of these novels.13 To further complicate matters, García Márquez, Carpentier, and Roa Bastos were all (to varying degrees) aligned with the Cuban Revolution, but their respective dictator novels sit uneasily with their public positions. As Roa Bastos would later explain, to assume a political stance in advance of writing overdetermines the composition of the text and limits its critical potential. In order to write I the Supreme, he had to relinquish the idea that he was the “crusader of a militant literature” (cruzado de una literatura militante).14 At the core of my argument in this book is the contention that to evaluate a dictator novel on the basis of its historical referentiality forecloses the analysis of form, aesthetics, and—­to use a very literary term—­the transformative function of mimesis. I position this argument in opposition to the idea, implicit in Borges, that if the dictator novel is to function as a political weapon, it requires some kind of referential immediacy. More importantly, however, such debates overlook the fact that the novels themselves are centrally concerned with the complicated relationship between writing and politics. The novels proffer critical meditations on the very possibility of political commitment in literature, drawing on past and present events as well as the tradition of writing about dictators and dictatorship in Latin American literature. The novels are, in this sense, self-​reflexive interrogations of the assumptions that drove the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project and could only have emerged in its wake. The problems they identify are neither dismissed nor resolved, but rather encoded into the novels themselves. To read The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I the Supreme, therefore, is to learn to look beyond the immediate political question of dictatorship and attend to the deeper theoretical questions with which each dictator novel is engaged.

Writers, Dictators, and the Boom: The Story of “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” García Márquez, Carpentier, and Roa Bastos were all established writers by the time they published their respective dictator novels.15 The novels themselves arrived at an interesting moment: by the early 1970s, the Latin American

Fathers of the Fatherlands

81

literary boom had begun to lose momentum. The arrest of Heberto Padilla in Cuba in 1971 and the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 signaled a larger political shift in the region. The boom—­or the “so-​called boom” (el llamado boom)—­is an unavoidable reference point in discussions of twentieth-​ century Latin American literature, and has been alternately described as a movement, a critical construct, and (merely) a marketing phenomenon. It was all of these, to an extent. I take up the boom here as a moment, a movement (in qualified terms), and as a literary-​critical descriptor of limited usefulness that is nonetheless germane to the material covered in this chapter. Arguments about periodization aside, the end of the boom marked the collapse of a particular vision of the role of the writer.16 In their engagement with the political question of dictatorship, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I the Supreme retained the aura of the boom; their self-​reflexive interrogation of the political function of literature signaled its dissipation; and the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project marked the cusp between these two moments. The post–­ World War II period in Latin America saw rapid economic growth and social change, including increasing urbanization, rising literacy, and (often short-​lived) transitions to liberal democracy. The Cuban Revolution made Latin America and the Caribbean protagonists in the Cold War, bringing intensified interest to the region. For writers, the exhilaration of the early years of the revolution fostered a sense of shared politics and collective Latin American identity. According to José Donoso, this feeling of unified purpose was central to the internationalization of the Latin American new novel (which had been developing since at least the prior decade) in the 1960s.17 Writers actively participated in the circulation and promotion of their work; they published essays and articles as part of what Idelber Avelar has called a “self-​descriptive and self-​justifying critical practice”; and they created new networks for collaboration.18 The literary boom was, in this sense, the cultural correlative of the revolution in Cuba.19 However, the place of writers within that revolution remained a matter of debate. As discussed in chapter 1, the Cuban government made often contradictory demands on artists, while arguments between writers unfolded in the pages of magazines such as Casa de las Américas (Havana), Marcha (where Ángel Rama was an editor; Montevideo), Primera plana (Buenos Aires), and Mundo nuevo (edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, initially funded by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom and later by the Ford Foundation; Paris).20 This same period saw anxiety about the region’s underdevelopment and its relation of dependency to the developed economies of the world-​system. The literature of the boom, then, was a response to and engagement with theories of underdevelopment (as “belatedness”) and dependency (as “unoriginality”) that questioned, and even upended, their underlying teleological assumptions.21 For writers and readers alike, the boom fundamentally changed understanding of what Latin American literature could be. In subsequent decades, the formal innovations of the boom-​era novels—­particularly those combined under the term “magical realism”—­were

82

Chapter 3

disseminated into international circuits of cultural consumption and continue to exert influence throughout the global North and South today. The term “boom novel,” however, is frustrating in its lack of specificity. Its cognates “new novel” (nueva novela), which recalls the French nouveau roman, and “total novel” (novela total), which captures the grandeur of vision and monumental ambitions that characterized many of these works, sketch the outline of a typology. But the works produced in this period evince a range of narrative modes—within and well beyond the scope of the kind of magical realism popularized by One Hundred Years of Solitude—­and thematic concerns that contravenes any singular literary-​critical categorization.22 The concept of a “boom generation” is similarly complicated. The boom comprised multiple generations, bringing increased international recognition for already established writers (Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Carpentier, for instance) as much as the emergence of younger talent (García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and so on).23 Insofar as is possible to speak of a “boom writer,” these were (overwhelmingly) men who were highly self-​aware and mindful of their rising status, politically conscious, and increasingly international in their movements and networks. Carlos Fuentes, the multilingual, globe-​trotting son of a diplomat and a future diplomat himself, who was then married to the Mexican actress Rita Macedo, embodied the boom’s glamor as well as its limitations. He makes visible, first, the political ambivalence at the heart of the boom; and, second, the subsumption of issues of race and class under its ebullient celebration of literature, Latin Americanism (as a cohesive Latin American identity), and alluring internationalism. I use the term “ambivalence” in its most literal sense, since these writers’ positions shifted over time. By 1966, Fuentes had begun to moderate his adhesion to Cuban revolutionary orthodoxy, and both the U.S. State Department and the CIA took an interest in Fuentes as a conduit to the Latin American left.24 The inaugural issue of Mundo nuevo (New World), for instance, featured an interview with Fuentes. Yet he did not fully alienate the Cubans, since his work continued to appear in Casa de las Américas. Over the course of the decade, the assumption of the boom writers’ adherence to the Cuban Revolution produced a disjuncture between their public statements, the substance of their work, and the critical reception of that work. As Gerald Martin observes, by the end of the 1960s, many writers seemed to be “speaking left” while “writing right.”25 Similarly, Roberto Fernández Retamar denounced Fuentes as a spokesman for the same class of long-​entrenched elites as Jorge Luis Borges and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento; speaking specifically of Fuentes’s critical study La nueva novela hispanoamericana (The New Spanish American Novel, 1969), he criticized Fuentes for “expounding right-​wing concerns with left-​wing language.”26 The second issue that Fuentes exemplifies is the boom’s monumentalization of literature over and against other forms of cultural production, in particular those engaged more directly with indigenous and popular traditions, which

Fathers of the Fatherlands

83

would become the focus of the cultural turn in Latin American studies in subsequent decades.27 Literature, at least “literature” as imagined by writers such as Fuentes, was still largely the province of the lettered elite. This is not to say that boom writers were uniform in this regard. The Paraguayan Roa Bastos, whose first language was Guaraní and who used Guaraní vocabulary and grammar to make-​strange the Spanish language in I the Supreme, is a very different case. Yet his relatively marginal status, as seen from outside the region, underscores the point. I highlight these issues to better illuminate the difficult position of the dictator novel in the boom: when intended as a public statement or attack, it comes up against the limits of literary form as a vehicle for representation and analysis, as well as of literature itself as a means for political statement or intervention. I explored elements of the latter in the previous chapter. The former requires consideration, because it proved to be the problem at the heart of the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project. From the start, Fuentes and his collaborators imagined “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” as a means to consolidate the boom—­that is, the increasingly international stature of Latin American writers—­by engaging Latin America’s history of dictatorship. As Fuentes wrote to Vargas Llosa: I have been mulling over the idea since we spoke that afternoon, at Le Cerf Volant, about Wilson and Patriotic Gore, and about [doing] a collective book in that vein. I was speaking last night with Jorge Edwards and proposed to him the following: a volume that could be titled “The Patriarchs,” “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” “The Redeemers,” “The Benefactors,” or something like that. The idea would be to write a crime report of our America [una crónica negra de nuestra América]: a desecration of the desecrators in which, for example, [Jorge] Edwards would turn out a [José Manuel] Balmaceda, [Julio] Cortázar a [Juan Manuel de] Rosas, [Jorge] Amado a [Getúlio] Vargas, Roa Bastos a [José Gaspar Rodríguez de] Francia, García Márquez a [Juan Vicente] Gómez, Carpentier a [Fulgencio] Batista, I a [Antonio López de] Santa Anna, and you a [Augusto] Legúia . . . or some other Peruvian. What do you think? [. . .] The people from Gallimard, having returned from Tunis, are telling me of the enthusiasm with which critics from several regions of the world spoke of the Latin American group. It seems to me that emphasizing this sense of community, of a group project, will be immensely important for the future. Without downplaying individual personalities, I think that there are indeed a series of common denominators—­literary, political, linguistic, of outlook and hopes for the future—­that it would be useful to emphasize and strengthen.28

With these initial plans laid out, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa set about inviting participants and reaching out to publishers.29 The topic of the Latin American

84

Chapter 3

dictator, when coupled with the growing prestige of Latin American writers, was a seductive combination; invitations were for the most part eagerly accepted. Carpentier liked the idea so much that he personally reached out to the prestigious Gallimard press in France about publishing the volume; Roa Bastos was “thrilled to add [his] weapons to the encampment”; and García Márquez quickly became involved in planning and coordination.30 The project’s appeal had several facets: first, there was the allure of membership in the group, particularly for less well-​known writers. As Carlos Martínez Moreno put it, “the company is too tempting for me to say no.”31 Second, there was the draw of dictatorship as a common denominator in the region and of writing about dictators as an established tradition on which writers could make their mark. Third, there was the attraction of the topic—­the dictator as well as the forces that sustained and benefited from dictatorship—­as a political question. In assembling pairs of writers and dictators, “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” encapsulated a fantasy of the writer’s involvement in politics, and military metaphors abound in the correspondence. The plural “fathers” can refer to the plurality of dictators or of writer-​dictator sets, each unit constituting a pair of rival potential “fathers” of the fatherland. Some limitations of the project are immediately clear: despite the late-​stage inclusion of Claribel Alegría, this was very much a contest “between men” (cosa de hombres), to borrow a phrase from Gabriela Polit-Dueñas. Nor were the “fatherlands” properly defined: García Márquez was insistent that authors should only write about a dictator from their own country.32 However, he disagreed with the invitation of the Dominican writer and former president Juan Bosch to write about Rafael Trujillo: “Bosch, for being more of an ex-​president than a professional writer, does not seem to me appropriate.”33 In the interest of ensuring broad coverage, some invitees were asked to write about dictators not from their home country. If there was a pervading sense that participation in “Fatherlands” would constitute a form of action, then, its actual aims were vague. These incongruities indicate the fluidity of the contours of the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project. Throughout the planning, it remained unclear what individual contributions or the collection would look like. The repeated references to Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962), a study of the U.S. Civil War in American letters, for instance, yield little elucidation. At best, it seems, Fuentes wanted to replicate its success.34 In that first letter to Vargas Llosa, Fuentes offered the analogy of the crime report (crónica negra); there are also later comparisons to teratology (the study of physical abnormalities), a portrait gallery, and Madam Tussaud’s wax museum. Several invitees, including Miguel Otero Silva, assumed that Fuentes wanted an essay or biography. Fuentes responded that he wanted a “literary re-​creation” (recreación literaria).35 He similarly asked José Donoso for a “literary treatment” of the topic; to Roa Bastos he described a “literary transposition,” adding that “in Latin America, only literature is capable of converting false history [la falsa

Fathers of the Fatherlands

85

historia] into true history [historia auténtica]”; and to José Emilio Pacheco he wrote: “It will be interesting to read how each [writer] converts [convierte] the history into literature.”36 Ineffectual as the terms “conversion,” “transposition,” and “re-​creation” may have proven as instruction, they productively describe a relationship between literature (the dictator novel) and history (the phenomenon of dictatorship): the writer must transform the historical referent into a narrative that will offer a more trenchant analysis of the dictator and dictatorship than is possible in other (nonfictional) genres. Fuentes is also making a larger claim—­seen in the previous chapter—­about the material potential of literature. As he wrote to Cortázar: “I believe that history only becomes truly historical when it is literature, and this project offers us, imaginatively, the opportunity to overwrite [cancelar], in the act of remembering them, the monsters of our Latin American teratology.”37 The goal was not only to make literature out of history, but in so doing to remake history itself, as emphasized by my choice of the English word “overwrite” for Fuentes’s cancelar (cancel). In making this second claim, Fuentes both inserts “Fatherlands” into the larger tradition of writing about dictators and makes explicit some of the implicit assumptions (or hopes) of that tradition. Yet such large-​scale claims occluded the practical difficulties of the writing itself. Fuentes would later acknowledge that the Latin American dictator posed a tremendous challenge for Latin American writers, who had to compete with historical realities that exceeded the imagination.38 As Pacheco put it at the time: [Porfirio] Díaz is unfathomable [insondable]. To understand him is to understand the mechanisms of power and perhaps to understand Mexico—­a project too ambitious for my limitations. What’s more, in terms of the writing, I have no idea how to tackle it. When you have a moment, I would appreciate some direction. The information, the context are indispensable. Here there is the risk of turning the narrative into an article for Miroir de l’Histoire [a popular history magazine] or a cheap sociological essay.39

While I have described the novel as omnivorous in its capacity to absorb other forms of discourse, this is a retrospective description, and, from the writer’s perspective, it does not solve the immediate problem of bending narrative form to an unwieldy subject. Pacheco’s use of the term “unfathomable” to describe Díaz is canny: the dictator is not just a person, but the product of larger forces that stretch back in time (depth) and beyond the individual nation-​state (breadth). The question is not just how to write about the dictator, but of how exactly to understand the phenomenon of dictatorship. This disrupted the driving logic of “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” which relied on a clear-​cut pairing of writers and dictators.

86

Chapter 3

Perhaps most telling of the contradictions inherent in the “Fatherlands” project were comments made by writers who declined to participate. Monterroso, as discussed, was wary of the risks of intimacy with his subject. Otero Silva demurred because of his personal experiences with the Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, who had imprisoned and exiled him as a young man.40 And Jorge Edwards departed because of disagreements about the definition of the term “dictator.” In early 1968, press reports had begun to appear about the forthcoming collection.41 Citing complaints, Edwards argued that the term “dictator” was a misnomer when applied to José Manuel Balmaceda, whom Edwards called “the most progressive Chilean president of the nineteenth century” for the challenge he had posed to entrenched class interests.42 The issue was not simply that the definition of “dictator” is a matter of perspective, but that what came to constitute “dictatorship” in Latin America—­and the Global South—­was intertwined with international economic and political interests, particularly when these coincided with those of the local elite. While on the surface an anti-​dictator project could claim alignment with the values of the Left, it would falter if it failed, first, to properly interrogate the larger structural factors driving dictatorship, and second, to address the complicated place of literature (including literacy and language choice) and the writer in Latin American society. Such (self-​)critical considerations proved not to be within the scope of the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project. By mid-​1968, the discussions in the correspondence had turned to the political turmoil unfolding across the globe, as well as the many other projects in which the writers were involved. Although deadlines and parameters were set, the trail runs cold after 1970.43 Fuentes later ascribed the failure of “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” to the difficulties encountered in coordinating writers’ schedules and interests.44 “Interests” is the key word: what eventually dissolved the project was the fragmentation of the cohesion that characterized the group, as their careers and commitments diverged. But acknowledgement of these external factors must not distract from the actual difficulties of the project. The oppositional pairing of writer and dictator in “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” left little room for effectively exploring the problem of dictatorship in Latin America. Pacheco’s remarks in particular point to the long and difficult trajectory between the thing analyzed and the formal expression of that analysis. For Pacheco, the undertaking apparently proved insurmountable. For García Márquez, Carpentier, and Roa Bastos, the answer was to turn attention to the dictator novel itself.

García Márquez: From “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” to The Autumn of the Patriarch Gabriel García Márquez’s idea for a novel about a Latin American dictator dates to January 1958, when he was working in Caracas and witnessed the

Fathers of the Fatherlands

87

removal of Marcos Pérez Jiménez from power in Venezuela.45 He produced a number of drafts for the novel over the next seventeen years, frequently discussing his progress with fellow writers. In a letter from 1965, Fuentes reported that Asturias himself had praised the project, adding: “Your idea for the tyrant-​novel [novela del tirano] is sensational . . . I think you have a real find on your hands.”46 But writing proved difficult: García Márquez struggled to render historical narrative and political analysis into a literary text, even after he had chosen to invent a composite dictator. “At every step,” he wrote to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, “I am afraid that this novel will turn into a sociological treatise.”47 In the first version of the novel, García Márquez imagined a dictator on trial, inspired by the public trial of Jesús Sosa Blanco, who had been a colonel under Fulgencio Batista in Cuba.48 The second version built on the first: the novel would be structured as the monologue of an old and decrepit dictator attempting to justify the abuses of his ninety-​two years in power before a tribunal; García Márquez planned to write in the first person, using the dictator’s own words to give a full view of his logical errors, ignorance, and simple-​mindedness.49 But by 1966 García Márquez was convinced that fiction would never supersede reality.50 In 1967 he wrote to Vargas Llosa: “the novel of the Patriarch is rotting away inside of me [se me está pudriendo dentro].”51 While corresponding with Fuentes and Vargas Llosa about “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” however, García Márquez began to rethink the novel in earnest, sketching out the final version of The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) in a 1968 letter to Mendoza: With much sorrow I discarded the structure of the long monologue because in this case it was deceptive [era falsa] (I want to tell the story with my words, not those of the character), and I have also resolved (with the recklessness of an adventurer) to eliminate all historical, political, and social context, and to focus on the terrible solitude of the dictator, well over a century old, in the last years of his reign, half-​forgotten and half mad, when he no longer even rules, nor sees, nor hears, nor understands, but nevertheless continues to command without knowing it. I have to start with the final chapter, when the people enter the palace, following the buzzards that are climbing in through the windows, and find the dictator lying in the throne room, dead, and already half eaten away, to the point that no one is sure that it is him. I have to tell everything backwards, in a huge tome that will reconstruct several years of his life and leave the impression that no one will be sure that he is dead. My idea, in all modesty, is that the empty palace will continue to govern.52

The General, the novel’s titular patriarch, is indeed a solitary figure, having withdrawn from the world to safeguard his power. The narrative opens

88

Chapter 3

with the discovery of the dictator’s corpse by a collective “we.” As the first-​ person plural narrator begins to reach for memories of the dictator, voices, including the General’s, surface. The dictator’s life is told in retrospect, as a combination of narrated memories and prolepses, framed within the narrative present in which the body is discovered, so that the novel’s structure forms a spiral. The General’s isolation stands in counterpoint to those many voices that crowd the narrative. García Márquez described this as a “multiple monologue” (monólogo múltiple).53 The resulting polyphony suggests a broader social portrait, but without the guiding hand of a narrator (the “we” is one voice among many, as is the General’s) or a clear chronological order polyphony can quickly slide into cacophony. The effect is disorienting, and in so doing García Márquez effectively defamiliarizes Latin America’s long history of dictatorship as well as its literary representation. The General evinces recognizable tropes of the Latin American dictator, but the novel distorts these through repetition and exaggeration. A military man put in power by the U.S. Marines during an occupation, the General has ruled for what seems like centuries and is almost farcical in his ignorance and brutality. For instance, when he discovers that one of his most trusted men (Rodrigo de Aguilar) has been quietly undermining his regime, the General has Aguilar killed and served as dinner to the high command of the presidential guard. The narrative also gives remarkable attention to the dictator’s sexual appetites. It lingers on the General’s sexual organs (he has a herniated testicle, which is one of the few distinguishable features of his decomposed corpse) and sexual acts, often narrating these from the perspective of the women on whom the General forces himself. While his sexual conquests are many, the General’s performance is “fast and poorly,” and he has a tendency to weep on completion. Critics often cite the novel’s reliance on such vulgarity, which is ostensibly intended to elicit disgust or mocking laughter, as a weakness.54 Here I return to Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the aesthetics of vulgarity in the African postcolony. Obscenity, vulgarity, and the grotesque, Mbembe makes clear, are the modalities of authoritarian power; the body of the despot is central to this symbolic economy.55 García Márquez’s General makes no attempt to hide his excesses, because they are the very expression of his power. To point to these, even in the spirit of mockery, does not suffice as an act of sabotage. This is a system of signs produced between the ruler and the ruled: the dictator’s subjects themselves participate in and help to sustain that system; hence Mbembe’s emphasis on the “conviviality” of power. In this perspective, the repeated scenes of rape (to give one example) in The Autumn of the Patriarch risk contributing to—­or sustaining through repetition—­the patriarchal violence that lies at the heart of dictatorship.56 I treat the repeated references to the General’s herniated and enlarged testicle with the same skepticism. As the first-​person plural narrator recognizes, mocking jokes are often a cover for comfort or intimacy with the dictator: “Not only had we ended up really believing that he had been conceived to

Fathers of the Fatherlands

89

survive the third comet, but that conviction had infused us with a security and a restful feeling that we tried to hide with all manner of jokes about old age.”57 The recurring attentions to the dictator’s bodily and sexual excesses function as a similarly self-​conscious “joke.” The General’s testicle is the material expression of the difficulties described by Pacheco (above) and by García Márquez himself in the years he spent struggling to write the novel. The emphasis on vulgarity, then, is a symptom of the representative challenge posed by the dictator: it is the sign of the aporia, rather than its resolution. If neither the description of the excesses of power nor jokes suffice, a new course is necessary. García Márquez, to be clear, does not properly break with either of these approaches. However, through its use of the multiple monologue, The Autumn of the Patriarch broadens the narrative scope beyond the dictator himself, shifting emphasis from the question of evil or “barbarism”—­the savage and monstrous figure of the dictator explored in the previous chapter—­to the larger forces that drive dictatorship in the region. The empty palace to which García Márquez referred in the letter to Mendoza constitutes the core of the analysis and therefore the political intervention of this dictator novel. The proposition is that the dictator himself is ancillary to dictatorship, because he is in the end merely the servant of the larger interests of capital and imperialism, here represented by the United States. Eventually, the Americans come to make claims on the General, demanding the Caribbean Sea as payment on the interest of the country’s accumulated debts. This is at once a dismissal of the dictator’s claims to omnipotence and a commentary on the nature of dictatorship in the Caribbean, Latin America, and, by extension, the Global South. Debt, like the novel itself, unfolds as a spiral: the country’s debts date to the wars of independence, after which it took out new loans to pay off old debts, and then further loans to pay the interest on the back interest, and so on, all against the background of boom-​and-​bust economic cycles. García Márquez here points back to the collapse of commodity prices at the end of Latin America’s “Export Age” (1870−1930) as well as forward to the hyper-​commoditized logic of neoliberalism and the ravages of structural adjustment.58 In both directions, debt is the key device of capitalist imperialism. With this in mind, The Autumn of the Patriarch is far from “nostalgic,” to recall Borges’s comment, and instead uses its composite dictator to tell a larger story about the political and economic fortunes of Latin America and the Caribbean. The effective “conversion” of social, political, and economic history into literature in The Autumn of the Patriarch produces a strange and difficult text, such that the eruption of literary form itself forms part of the analysis of power in this novel. Take, for instance, the passage in which the U.S. ambassador speaks to the General about taking the Caribbean: [. . .] either the marines land or we take the sea, there’s no other way, your excellency, there was no other way, mother, so they took away

90

Chapter 3

the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing’s nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-​red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons, in spite of the fact that he had appealed to the most audacious registers of his age-​old cunning trying to promote a national convulsion of protest against the despoilment, but nobody paid any attention general sir, they refused to take to the streets either by persuasion or by force because we thought it was a new maneuver on his part like so many others to satiate even beyond all limits his irrepressible passion to endure [ . . . ]59

The focalization here shifts without warning from the ambassador, to the dictator (“there was no other way, mother”), to one of the dictator’s assistants (indicated by the phrase “general sir”), to the plural speaker (“we”). This juxtaposition of voices makes it difficult to distinguish who is speaking at any given moment. The time of narration, too, moves backward and forward, with the General addressing his long-​dead mother in the present tense. Both on the level of grammatical tense and in the seemingly interminable arc of the dictator’s rule, historical periods collapse into each other. This has its formal correlative in the recursive plotting of the novel, as well as in its structural and syntactical complexity. There are no paragraph breaks; the sentences are complex and increase in length as the novel unfolds; and the final chapter is comprised of a single sentence. Confusion is therefore a generalized condition that is expressed grammatically, structurally, and thematically in the novel. As García Márquez explained in a 1975 interview with the Revista de la Universidad de México, he intended to “de-​mythologize” the Latin American dictator in The Autumn of the Patriarch. Only by directly engaging these wider dynamics—­here exaggerated to the limits of intelligibility—­would it be possible to move toward a true analysis of power.60 This is a very different critical task than that envisioned by the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project. Confronting Latin America’s history of dictatorship therefore required the elaboration of a new “literary language”—­to use Ngũgĩ’s phrase, discussed in chapter 1—­distinct from that of One Hundred Years of Solitude, whose shadow García Márquez sought to escape. As he confessed to Vargas Llosa in 1968: “It seems to me that my next novel will be the victim of the success of the previous one. I am making it deliberately hermetic [deliberadamente hermética], dense, complex, so that only those who have previously taken the work to learn literature will be able to stand it [para que solamente la soporten quienes se hayan tomado el trabajo previo de aprender literatura]; that is to say: us, and a few friends.”61 The phrase “deliberately hermetic” implies a limited readership for this dictator novel, which complicates the assumption of its intended function as a public act of denunciation. The Autumn of the Patriarch does not imagine a future beyond the dictator or

Fathers of the Fatherlands

91

dictatorship. It closes with the death of the dictator, where it also began, and the jubilation of the crowd; this is an optimistic but ultimately unqualified gesture. However, the novel does offer two moments in which the conceit of the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project and the task of the dictator novel are staged and interrogated within the text. These self-​reflexive meditations do not rise to the level of self-​criticism, but they do effectively foreground a critical consideration of the task of writing about the dictator and, more broadly, of the Latin American writer’s relationship to the dictator. The most immediate example of this is the dictator’s body double, Patricio Aragonés. Physically identical to the General, Aragonés impersonates the dictator at public events, allowing the General to maintain his popular persona without personal risk. Over time, the two men grow close and begin to resemble each other in their sexual habits as well as appearance: both invariably father children who are born premature (a return of the family metaphor discussed in chapter 2). Eventually, Aragonés is poisoned. During his final night, freed by impending death, the dictator’s double becomes his sharpest critic.62 This is a hatred born of intimacy, expressed by a man who has seen the dictator at his weakest and who understands the tenuous nature of dictatorial power. To recall Monterroso’s trepidation at writing about the dictator, the story of Patricio Aragonés suggests that proximity, intimacy, and even some kind of complicity with the dictator are the conditions of possibility for critique. This is a game of mirrors: the dictator’s double is the writer’s double in the text. At the same time, the comparison helps to establish a distinction: Aragonés is not (quite) the General, just as García Márquez is not (quite) Aragonés, who never managed to properly imitate the General’s voice. In both his personal correspondence and public statements, García Márquez enjoyed drawing parallels between himself and the General, and he often referred to this novel as his most autobiographical work. As he declared in that 1975 interview: “The Autumn of the Patriarch is practically a personal confession [casi una confesión personal], it is a totally autobiographical book, it is almost a memoire [libro de memorias]. The thing is, of course, that they are encoded memories [memorias cifradas]; but if instead of imagining [en vez de ver] a dictator you imagine a very famous writer terribly uncomfortable with his fame, with that key, you can read the book.”63 In his biography of García Márquez, Gerald Martin reads these comments as both a provocation and a confession, linking the General’s isolation to García Márquez’s own conflicted reaction to his fame in the years following the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude.64 This connection is sustained by comments made in García Márquez’s correspondence with several interlocutors from this period. But I am interested in what such claims reveal about the dictator novel; specifically, the nagging concern of the possible parallels between the writer and the dictator, which stretches back to the previous century. While the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project depended on a diametric opposition between writer and dictator, García Márquez in The Autumn of

92

Chapter 3

the Patriarch brings the question of their similarity to the fore. This tension is not resolved, but Patricio Aragonés, the double for both dictator and writer who is killed very early on in the novel, lingers as a kind of warning. Toward the end of his life, when the General finds a photograph of his former double, the General mistakes Aragonés for himself. The second instance of a self-​reflexive mise-​en-​scène in The Autumn of the Patriarch gets to the heart of the matter. This is the General’s own “gallery” of Latin American dictators: the rest home he builds for the “dethroned fathers of other countries [patrias] to whom he had granted asylum over the course of many years and who were now growing old in the shadow of his mercy dreaming in chairs on the terrace about the chimerical vessel of their second chance.” They are a source of comfort for the General, who visits to play dominoes and to “look at himself in the instructive mirror [espejo de escarmiento] of their misery while he wallowed in the great slough of felicity.”65 Within the narrative, these ex-​dictators signal the wider network of dictatorship in the region as well as the General’s remarkable luck, since his tactics for staying in power are not significantly different from theirs. Indeed, the rest home reappears much later, once the Americans have taken the sea, as the General wanders the now-​lunar landscape of the sea floor: “on the top of the reefs he saw the solitary light from the rest home for refugee dictators [dictadores aislados] who sleep like sitting oxen while I suffer, evil-​born bastards.”66 If the rest home was an “instructive mirror,” at the end of the novel the emphasis falls on the mirror as an anticipatory figure, rather than on the instructive value of the negative example. At the metanarrative level, the rest home for former dictators serves as a warning to would-​be authors of dictator novels. Like the General, writers run the risk of mistaking collection and display for instructive or substantive analysis. The former is a suitable description of “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” and the reference is clear in the Spanish phrase “padres destronados de otras patrias” (“dethroned fathers of other fatherlands”). In placing this image near the start of the novel, García Márquez signals his intent (or desire) to resist the temptation to substitute display for analysis via an allusion that is largely only legible to fellow participants in “The Fathers of the Fatherlands.” These, I would argue, are the “few friends” he had in mind. Display, as the enumeration of the dictator’s crimes or the “revelation” of his vulgarity, does not suffice. Nor, drawing on García Márquez’s descriptions of the successive versions of the novel in its development, is occupation of the dictator’s perspective enough to provide a cogent analysis of power (contra Rama). A larger and more intricate social portrait is necessary. Hence García Márquez’s turn to the multiple monologue; which, even if it cannot escape the temptation to wallow in the dictator’s vulgarity, signals a possible (if experimental) way out of this impasse. To extrapolate from this: the critical force of the dictator novel should be directed away from the dictator and toward (first) the underlying causes of dictatorship and (second) toward

Fathers of the Fatherlands

93

writers themselves, lest one slip into self-​congratulation. These are principles that are unevenly enforced in The Autumn of the Patriarch. But when this novel is read in the light of the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project, it is possible to see the myriad ways in which García Márquez aimed to push the dictator novel beyond its existing limitations.

Carpentier: Art and Politics in Reasons of State Although Alejo Carpentier was an early and enthusiastic participant in “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” there is little archival trace of his conversations with Fuentes or Vargas Llosa regarding this project. Having long lived in exile, Carpentier returned to Cuba after the revolution to serve as head of the Editorial Nacional and later as ambassador to France. It was in Paris that Fuentes met with Carpentier and proposed the “Fatherlands” project. Four decades after he had met weekly with Asturias as the latter worked on The President, Carpentier set about writing his own dictator novel—­now informed by the cultural politics of the Cuban Revolution as well as by his much longer history with politically engaged artistic vanguards in both Latin America and Europe. As a young man, Carpentier had been imprisoned by Gerardo Machado (ruled 1925–­33) and later fled Cuba. These experiences were the basis for an early essay on Machado, “Retrato de un dictador” (Portrait of a Dictator, 1933). I read Reasons of State (1974) in dialogue with this essay and the short story “Right of Sanctuary” (1967), which preceded the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project.67 These intertexts illuminate the evolution of Carpentier’s approach to the representation of the dictator and his consideration of the possible modes of opposition to dictatorship. Reasons of State functions as a vehicle for expressing a necessary skepticism of utopian political projects as well as of the deployment (or too easy appropriation) of art in the service of those projects. In his essay “Retrato de un dictador” Carpentier describes Machado as a near-​illiterate, overindulgent hypocrite who secured power through his collaboration with U.S. financiers.68 The story of the Head of State (Primer Magistrado) in Reasons of State echoes the arc of Machado’s career: the lascivious and self-​indulgent dictator of an unnamed Latin American country faces rebellion at home while struggling to shore up support (from both the United States and the United Fruit Company) for his regime in the political climate of the First World War, the ensuing economic boom in the 1920s, and the chaos that followed its bust in the early 1930s. Amid growing opposition, the Head of State is forced from power and retreats to Paris, where he dies (Machado retreated to and died in Miami). But these parallels are simply an initial outline for the elaboration of the dictator as a character in Reasons of State. In the novel, the Head of State is an aesthete: his residence in Paris is filled with fine paintings, sculptures, and furnishings. Hoping to re-​create

94

Chapter 3

these pleasures at home, he brings the opera to his capital city, Nueva Córdoba, and builds a new capitol modeled on the one in Washington, D.C. Inspired by his friend Manuel José Estrada Cabrera’s Temple of Minerva in Guatemala City, the Head of State orders an enormous allegorical statue from an Italian sculptor. When it finally arrives—­hauled in pieces aboard a train from the coast—­the statue of the Republic is so tall that her face is obscured by the dome of the capitol and is visible only to the workmen who clean it. As such scenes suggest, the Head of State’s interest in the arts is about status and the creation of a veneer of “civilization” to cover over the “barbarism” enacted by other means.69 In this, the Head of State represents the moldering end of the Enlightenment principles that had inspired the founding of the Latin American republics. The Spanish title of the novel, El recurso del método (The Recourse of the Method), is a play on René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method, 1637), citations from which appear as sardonic epigraphs throughout the novel. The superficiality of the Head of State’s pretensions to culture is made clearest in his distaste for modern art. This is an attitude assumed from the Distinguished Academician, whom the Head of State supports in exchange for access to Parisian circles, and who reacts with horror to modern sculpture, jazz, and futurism. Toward the end of the novel, once the Head of State has become the ex-​Head of State, he returns to Paris to find that his daughter has discarded his art collections and replaced them with new, more fashionable, acquisitions. Panicked, he hurries from room to room, “finding everywhere the same pictorial transmutations, the same disasters: crazy, absurd, esoteric pictures, without any historical or legendary significance, without subject or message, dishes of fruit that weren’t dishes of fruit, houses looking like polyhedrons, faces with a set square for a nose, women with their tits out of place.”70 The foregrounding of this shift in art historical periods suggests a historical teleology in which the dictator’s moment—­or at least the era of this particular kind of dictator—­will pass. Just as the Beaux Arts gave way to the Belle Époque and then to the many vanguards of modern art, so too will the Head of State become obsolete. Indeed, the Head of State is eventually betrayed by his secretary, Peralta, and this break is anticipated by Peralta’s early (but not boldly stated) preference for modern art. In a larger frame, this alignment suggests a diametric opposition between the Head of State and Carpentier, whose own participation in modernist vanguards laid the groundwork for the emergence of magical realism (via his theorization of the Latin American “marvelous real” in the preface to The Kingdom of This World) and influenced the new novel of the Latin American boom. In this reading, the Head of State is the corrupt remnant of the previous century, and he will be buried by the writer of the twentieth century. Yet, what follows the removal of the Head of State from power in Reasons of State is another series of disappointments. The dictator’s replacement, the Provisional President and former professor of philosophy Luis Leoncio

Fathers of the Fatherlands

95

Martínez, does not prove an effective leader. The Student, an idealized figure who stands for radical youth in the novel, anticipates this outcome in an extended confrontation with the Head of State before the latter is removed from power. Throughout his debate with the dictator, the Student eschews all easy alternatives, pointing out that a coup—­which the Head of State accuses him of supporting—­would likely lead to a military junta seizing power. He instead makes clear that what he and his cohort desire is a truly popular uprising, which does not arrive in the novel.71 Near the end of the narrative, the now-​exiled Student reappears in Paris, on his way to the First World Conference Against Colonial and Imperialist Politics in Brussels (1927).72 On the train, the Student sits with the activist Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban student leader assassinated in Mexico in 1929, and with Jawaharlal Nehru, then the delegate for the Indian National Congress, the future first prime minister of India, and eventually a leader in the Non-​Aligned Movement. This encounter, which bridges history and fiction, shifts the emphasis from opposition to dictatorship at home to the international struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Anticolonialism and anti-​imperialism are here shown to be continuous with opposition to dictatorship, because individual dictators operate in the service of foreign interests that seek to establish or retain economic and political control. Near its conclusion, then, Reasons of State turns to political struggles that exceed the national frame, anticipating other movements of cross-​regional and transnational solidarity, including Bandung (1955), the Tricontinental (1966), the emergence of the Non-​Aligned Movement, and even the Global South. However, the scene aboard the train is less a utopian moment of international solidarity than one of confusion and miscomprehension. While Mella and the Student have an animated conversation, Nehru sits quietly in a corner. As the train passes coal mines at the border with Belgium, Nehru speaks: “ ‘Cool, cool,’ said Nehru, leaving the others uncertain whether he meant to say ‘cool’ or ‘coal’—­but it was indeed cold in this second-​class carriage, excessively cold for these men from hot climates. And the Indian went on sleeping with his eyes open until the train got to Brussels.”73 These terms appear in English in the Spanish, highlighting the problem of language difference: “ ‘Cool, cool,’ dijo Nehru, sin que los otros acertaran a saber si se refería al carbón o al frío—­por una explicable confusión entre coal y cool.” In turning the reader’s attention to the larger political horizon, Carpentier also illuminates the challenges to transnational solidarity, where language stands for actual linguistic differences as well as possible historical and ideological divergences. These problems are not resolved; instead, they signal a refusal to idealize utopian alternatives. The point is not to imagine a condition or system beyond dictatorship, but rather to examine the situation at hand and to learn from the mistakes that came before. The same is true of Carpentier’s use of art in Reasons of State. While the teleology sketched above (from Belle Époque to modernism; from dictatorship to

96

Chapter 3

freedom) is appealing, artistic preferences do not actually index politics. The Head of State’s secretary, Peralta, as well as his fashionable daughter, Ofelia, both prefer modern art, but neither represents a positive political force. Here, the short story “Right of Sanctuary,” which centers on the secretary to the President (dictator) of an unnamed country, provides illumination. Like Peralta in Reasons of State, the Secretary is a lover of modern art, preferring Paul Klee to the President’s (insipid) taste for the Beaux Arts. But he is also an opportunistic schemer who, when a coup breaks out, takes refuge in the embassy of a neighboring country and eventually replaces the ambassador. “Right of Sanctuary” is centrally concerned with the cyclicality of violence and the recurrence of political chaos in the region, and it identifies the Secretary as one of the key causes of the problem. Taking into account Carpentier’s own participation in the artistic vanguards of the first part of the twentieth century, there is in Peralta (Reasons of State) and the Secretary (“Right of Sanctuary”) an important lesson: art, both in general and in the form of specific movements or modes, is not a priori opposed to the dictator. Nor can it be assumed that if a text expresses opposition to the dictator the message will be effectively conveyed. Early in the novel, on his way home from Paris to put down another rebellion, the Head of State purchases a copy of Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845). Reading it “gave rise to some bitter thoughts about the dramatic fate of Latin American peoples, always engaged in a Manichean struggle between civilization and barbarism, between progress and dictatorship [caudillismo].”74 The Head of State, in short, identifies with Sarmiento. The satire cuts in two ways: first, the Head of State is a poor reader who cannot recognize himself as the dictator (that is, a descendant of Rosas); and second, it mocks Sarmiento, whose Europhile model of civilization has given rise to individuals like the Head of State. In this very brief scene, Carpentier ruminates not just on the tradition of writing about dictatorship—­the allusion allows Carpentier to position his own work within the longer arc of the Latin American dictator novel—­but on the material effects of anti-​dictator writing: the work of art is always vulnerable to misinterpretation. For much of Reasons of State, Carpentier installs himself (and the reader) in the dictator’s consciousness. Narrative intimacy with the dictator, both in the first and the third person, drives the satire in the novel. The reader is privy to the dictator’s moments of confusion, his misinterpretations, and his recurrent contemplations of sex. Yet Carpentier is after more than critical laughter. Focalization through the dictator’s consciousness facilitates an analysis of the workings of power, from the Head of State’s ruthlessness and paranoia to his moments of fatigue, as when he struggles to find the words for the requisite victory speech after having put down yet another rebellion. The reader is also given Peralta’s quietly critical view of the Head of State, as well as the perspective of a collective “we” that describes the increasing infiltration of U.S. culture and institutions into daily life in the country.75 As in The Autumn of the Patriarch, such expansions of the field of vision decenter

Fathers of the Fatherlands

97

the dictator, diminishing his importance within the politics of the present. But the shifts in focalization are also a protective measure against the dangers of intimacy (with the dictator) described by Monterroso. In giving these other perspectives, Reasons of State insists that while its focus may be the dictator, the Head of State is by no means the hero of the novel. The impulse to delineate between the dictator and other possible points of view is most explicitly on display in the scene in which the Head of State confronts the Student. The conversation is preceded by a long passage in which their respective interior monologues are interwoven as the two men take stock of each other: a vicious, obscene man: it’s all in his appearance / the face of a boy who hasn’t screwed many women: intellectual lightweight / not even a monster: a petty tyrant giving himself airs / those weak ones are the worst / all this is pure theatre: this way of receiving me, the light on my face, that book on the table / capable of anything: he’s got nothing to lose / don’t look at me like that, I won’t lower my eyes / although he may be brave, he wouldn’t resist torture / I wonder if I could stand torture: some people can’t / I believe he’s afraid /. . . . torture . . .76

Graphically, the use of the slash intends a clear separation between the two men’s streams of thought. However, the contrapuntal play establishes a troubling, if flickering, equivalence; their thoughts echo each other, so that the two monologues come to resemble a dialogue. The Student also becomes the object of derision at the end of the scene, when a bomb goes off and the Student, looking for damage, begins by checking his face “because women were important to him.”77 I stated earlier that the Student in Reasons of State is an idealized figure who stands, broadly, for opposition to dictatorship and authoritarianism. But he is not immune from criticism. The Student, too, is an archetype within the system, the whole of which Carpentier submits to analysis. As a figure of opposition to the dictator who will soon be exiled to Paris—­ recalling Carpentier himself as a young man—­the Student is also a double for Carpentier. I arrive here at the self-​reflexive dimensions of Reasons of State, which Mario Benedetti and Roberto González Echevarría have called “auto-​critique” (autocrítica) and “self-​parody,” respectively.78 Gerald Martin, with González Echevarría’s reading in mind, draws a strong distinction between the “self-​critical” and the merely “self-​referential”; the latter is a gesture, while the former requires sustained critique.79 However, if González Echevarría idealizes Reasons of State, Gerald Martin too quickly dismisses its self-​reflexivity. While these moments in the novel might not rise to the level of critique, they signal a self-​conscious hesitation on the part of the writer, which correlates with the novel’s demurral from triumphant transnational political utopianism. The Student is not the only vector through

98

Chapter 3

which self-​referentiality is achieved. In the brief moments when the narrative focalizes through Peralta, Carpentier’s critical perspective on the Head of State and that of the dictator’s secretary align and Peralta, too, becomes a double for the author. While the Student may make an idealized double for Carpentier, Peralta is a much more troubling prospect, obliquely suggesting complicity between writer and dictator. However, the suggestion of a parallel between Peralta and Carpentier is of a piece with the novel’s consistent rejection of categorical certainties. In so doing, Carpentier calls for a self-​ conscious reflection on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. These are particularly complex questions in the context of the Cuban Revolution. Despite Carpentier’s work for the revolutionary government, it would be a mistake to say that his thinking—­or that of Reasons of State—­ necessarily followed official orthodoxy. In both interviews and essays from this period, Carpentier expressed skepticism of the novel’s ability to effect social change. Literature can reveal or denounce a particular ill, he argued, but it is not a form of concrete action; in this sense, it should be distinguished from nonfiction genres such as the essay.80 Literature, instead, is one possible starting point for the study of social problems. As Carpentier remarked to Elena Poniatowska, Marx and Engels were the first to rely on novelists as the basis for the critical study and observation of society.81 Following from this, Reasons of State offers an extended analysis of a particular form of dictatorship, one primarily associated with the turn of the twentieth century, but with continuities in the present. It locates dictatorship within the larger context of a political culture and global distribution of power—­specifically, colonialism and capitalist imperialism—­of which the dictator is only a part. Similar to The Autumn of the Patriarch, in Reasons of State the dictator serves as the core around which the larger critique is organized. The enlarged frame of the novel, however, must not obscure its smaller, self-​reflexive moments, which distinguish Reasons of State from the celebratory and triumphant tone of Carpentier’s essay “Retrato de un dictador” or, for that matter, the oppositional (and even opportunist) thinking that drove the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project. This interest in self-​reflexivity, in turn, finds its fullest expression in Roa Bastos’s novel I the Supreme.

Roa Bastos: Imitation and Complicity in I the Supreme Augusto Roa Bastos situates his dictator novel, I the Supreme (1974), at the very founding of the Latin American republics: he chose José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the first president-​dictator of Paraguay (ruled 1814–­40), on the conviction that this was the figure best suited to the “monstrous genealogy” (genealogía teratológica) that Fuentes and Vargas Llosa had in mind for “The Fathers of the Fatherlands.”82 The historical Francia was the key actor in Paraguay’s separation from the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata.

Fathers of the Fatherlands

99

He oversaw nearly every aspect of government, dissolving all bodies capable of challenging his rule, including the military and much of the Church, in order to more freely model the nation on Enlightenment principles. A figure of fascination—­particularly for contemporaries like Sarmiento, who mentions Francia several times in Facundo, and Thomas Carlyle, whose essay on Francia is quoted in I the Supreme—­Francia was the archetype of the “enlightened despot” later parodied and evacuated of intellectual substance in Reasons of State.83 In taking Francia as his subject, then, Roa Bastos not only confronts the long history of postindependence dictatorship in Latin America, but also the history of its literary representation. Like The Autumn of the Patriarch and Reasons of State, I the Supreme is as much about writing the dictator as it is about Francia himself; but unlike García Márquez and Carpentier, Roa Bastos directly confronts the dictator’s complicated relationship to writing, placing this at the core of his dictator novel. Narrated almost entirely from Francia’s perspective (and largely within his internal monologue), I the Supreme is the most steadfast realization of Rama’s “leap into the void.” The novel begins with the discovery of an apocryphal official decree, a pasquinade calling for the decapitation of the dictator after his death and the burning of his remains along with those of his servants. The forgery infuriates Francia, because it demonstrates how easily an anonymous writer can assume his voice. The simulation of the dictator’s language in the pasquinade also operates as metanarrative: Roa Bastos too will infiltrate Francia’s stronghold by means of his language and, in the end, bury him with words. Accordingly, the narrative arc follows the dictator’s decline. Early on, Francia suffers a fall that eventually proves fatal; before his death, he sets fire to his records. The novel itself is a palimpsest of archival documents, both real and invented. These include Francia’s dictations to his secretary, Policarpo Patiño; a “Perpetual Circular” written for his functionaries, which becomes a freewheeling narration of Paraguay’s independence; Francia’s private notebooks; texts by European travelers; excerpts from twentieth-​century historiography; and marginal notes of unknown provenance. Much of this material is stranger than the phrase “archival documents” suggests—­as in Francia’s recollections of hunting a manticore (a mythical creature combining elements of the human, lion, and porcupine or scorpion), or the meteorite that he has “captured” and keeps chained to his chair. These fantastical interpolations shift the fevered imagination of the dictator’s consciousness from the re-​creation of an individual mind into a meditation on the nature of knowledge itself. The materials are organized by an unnamed “Compiler” (Compilador), who describes the provenance of archival sources, gives background, and provides translations where necessary. The world of I the Supreme is pointedly multilingual, with frequent recourse to Guaraní vocabulary, cosmology, and grammar, as well as to Portuguese and Portuñol. This attention to the cultural specificity of Paraguay, and particularly to the intersections of indigenous and European cultures as well as of European

100

Chapter 3

empires (Spain and Portugal), locates the problem of dictatorship within Latin America’s history of (external) colonization and internal colonialism, a history that is often obscured by the abstract categories of “barbarism” and “civilization.” Not only is the cultural and political world of Paraguay too complex for this binary, but Roa Bastos suggests that the binary itself, elevated to the status of heuristic device, has foreclosed effective analysis of dictatorship in the region. I the Supreme turns on Francia’s fraught relationship to writing. He is at once absolutely dependent on it for the administration of the state, and fundamentally suspicious of text as a means for conveying information. His secretary, Patiño, bears the brunt of this mistrust. As the dictator’s amanuensis, the secretary embodies the problem of textual mediation, which threatens error as much as purposeful adulteration. In search of a solution, Francia praises the parrot as the ideal recording machine, because it repeats language without comprehension. Later, he makes use of a magical pen, a “souvenir pen” (pluma-​ recuerdo or pluma-​memoria) that is capable of a kind of image-​writing akin to cinematic projection. This fantastical machine allows Francia to break out of language. But these projections are visible only to Francia and are therefore not a viable means of communication. Francia instead becomes obsessed with divining Patiño’s mind, pouring all manner of potions into the basin where the secretary soaks his feet in hopes of discovering his innermost thoughts.84 Finally, Francia accuses Patiño of plotting against him and sentences the secretary to death, forcing Patiño to copy out his own death sentence. Francia’s critique of writing is initially posited as a distinction between writing and action; as he declares, “I don’t write history. I make it.” But this opposition does not hold. In this same scene, Francia goes on to note that both writer and dictator have the power to rearrange events. He continually rails against historians, calling them “rodents” and “rivals of moths and rats” whose imprecise fiddling may be secondary to the work of men of action but is also, crucially, always a threat. As he remarks early on to Patiño: “Later on there will come those who pen more voluminous libels. They will call them History Books, novels, accounts of imaginary facts seasoned to suit the taste of the moment or their interests. Prophets of the past, they will recount in them their invented falsehoods, the story of what has not happened.”85 Within the narrative, Francia’s accusation is meant to weaken any competing claim to historical truth. But by putting such claims in the dictator’s mouth, Roa Bastos moves through the self-​reflexivity of metafiction to a self-​critique of the dictator novel. I the Supreme is in explicit dialogue with the long history of writing about dictators and dictatorship in Latin America, and Sarmiento is a key point of reference. In the narrative, Francia repeatedly endeavors to erase his familial ties: “I was born of myself,” he insists.86 These claims of auto-​genesis culminate in a patricidal fantasy that is also a reworking of a key scene from Facundo. There, the caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga is first introduced to the

Fathers of the Fatherlands

101

reader via an anecdote in which he is stalked by a jaguar (“tiger”) on the plain (pampas) and takes refuge in a tree. Once he is rescued, Quiroga takes brutal revenge on the animal. But he also identifies with its ferocity, earning the nickname the “tiger of the plains” (el Tigre de los Llanos).87 Francia describes a similar incident, in which a jaguar attacks a trading boat captained by his father. The young Francia leaps from the boat just before the attack and watches in fascination as the jaguar wreaks havoc. The father’s gun is thrown from the boat, landing in the young Francia’s hands, but only after the jaguar mauls his father does Francia kill the beast. As he reports: “I closed my eyes and felt I was being born. Rocked in the basket of the giant water lily, I felt I was being born of the muddy water, of the stinking mire.”88 For Francia, the triangulation of the father (a representative of colonial authority), the jaguar (a figure for American nature), and his younger self (the new American man) invites a reading of this story as an allegory of independence in the Americas. Within the novel, what matters is that the story is apocryphal, as the Compiler makes clear. In a larger frame, however, this scene is not just a self-​conscious insertion of Roa Bastos’s work into the tradition of the dictator novel, as Carpentier does when the Head of State purchases a copy of Facundo. Roa Bastos revises the signs of his predecessors. The archive of the dictator novel is full of dictators with missing, absent, or unidentified fathers. In I the Supreme, however, the fatherless dictator is no longer a trope (something the writer can say about the dictator) but the dictator’s own fantasy, and a central component of his understanding of authoritarian power. In breaching the dictator’s consciousness, Roa Bastos brings with him the repertoire of tropes for writing about the dictator. When replicated in the dictator’s voice, they take on new meanings, collapsing the oppositional logic that previously structured the genre. No longer does the writer speak of (or against) the dictator; the dictator speaks for himself and even to the writer. Accordingly, the central self-​critical maneuver of I the Supreme is Francia’s self-​conscious engagement with the literary representation of dictators. Francia names and comments upon the central mechanisms of the dictator novel-​to-​come, as in a scene in which he rails against Patiño: Don’t you think that I could be made into a fabulous story? Beyond the shadow of a doubt, Excellency! The most fabulous, the truest, the most worthy of the majestative exaltedness of your Person. No, Patiño, no. It’s not possible to make stories of Absolute Power. If it were, The Supreme would be de trop [estaría de más]: in literature or in reality. Who would write such books? Ignorant people like you. Professional scribes. Pharisaical farceurs [Embusteros fariseos]. Idiotic compilers of writing no less idiotic. The words of power, of authority, words above words, will be transformed into clever words, lying words. Words below words. If one wishes at all costs to speak of someone, one must not only put oneself in that someone’s place: one

102

Chapter 3

must be that someone. Only like can write about like. Only the dead can write about the dead. But the dead are very feeble. Do you think you could relate my life before your death, you ragtag amanuensis? You would need at the very least the craft and the strength of two Fates. Eh, isn’t it so, compiler of fictions [embustes] and falsifications? You smoke-​collector who, deep down, hate the Master.89

Like the rest home for ex-​dictators in The Autumn of the Patriarch, Francia’s comments loom over I the Supreme, which itself has a compiler (the Compiler). Francia’s central claim is that absolute power exceeds the capacities of textual representation, that the only person willing to attempt the task would necessarily be a self-​righteous charlatan and also a hypocrite, as one who claims to reveal truths that cannot be properly conveyed by “lying” words. Finally, preempting Monterroso, Roa Bastos’s Francia observes that to write from the perspective of the dictator entails not just a measure of sympathetic identification, but identity: “Only like can write about like.” Given early on in the novel, this series of anticipatory accusations is intended to subvert the critical potential of the dictator novel. But this only works if one takes Francia’s characterization of the dictator novel at his word; that is to say: if we continue to assume that the dictator novel is only about the dictator. Instead, by folding the dictator novel in on itself—­having the dictator talk about writing about dictators—­Roa Bastos fully activates the self-​referential dimensions of the genre, making it as much about the writer as the dictator. The mysterious Compiler stands in contrast to the exaggerated impersonation of Francia’s voice in the pasquinade discovered at the beginning of the novel. He is first introduced by way of a parenthetical attribution at the end of a footnote explaining the nature and provenance of Francia’s private notebook; it reads simply “(Compiler’s Note).” Biographical details about the Compiler accumulate in subsequent notes, where the reader learns that the Compiler has conducted extensive research, including ethnographic fieldwork, and has a personal connection to Francia. He is in possession of Francia’s “souvenir pen,” given to him by a childhood friend, the great-​great-​ great grandson of Patiño, just before the Compiler went into exile in 1947 (like Roa Bastos himself). The pen links the Compiler to the dictator through his ill-​fated secretary. This detail is a decoy. The Compiler does not take up his project in order to vindicate Patiño, nor does he take possession of Francia’s pen to turn it against the dictator. The “souvenir pen” no longer works, and actually erases text as it writes.90 Yet the Compiler’s conscious self-​marginalization in fact underscores his centrality. After all, it is he who selects and orders the historical texts; he even marks gaps and discontinuities in the archive, supplementing these with unbound fragments. The Compiler is, in this sense, another one of those historians whose meddling Francia anticipates and abhors. The “Final Compiler’s Note” that closes the novel acknowledges this. Written in the mode

Fathers of the Fatherlands

103

of a conclusion to a historical study, it is here that the Compiler details the exhaustive nature of his research, emphasizing that every word was already said or composed by others. In the final paragraph, however, the Compiler takes a different tack: Hence, imitating the Dictator once again (dictators fulfill precisely this function: replacing writers, historians, artists, thinkers, etc.), the re-​scriptor [a-​copiador] declares, in the words of a contemporary author, that the history contained in these Notes is reduced to the fact that the story that should have been told in them has not been told. As a consequence, the characters and facts that figure in them have earned, through the fatality of the written language, the right to a fictitious and autonomous existence in the service of the no less fictitious and autonomous reader.91

The relationship between objects and acts in this passage is scrambled: the Compiler begins by declaring that he will imitate Francia, but then he explains that dictators themselves replace writers, historians, artists, and thinkers. The writer, therefore, imitates the dictator in his efforts to substitute the writer. The Compiler also insists that the work of the writer or historian is necessarily secondary to the actions that produce the texts that will be “rescripted” or, following the Spanish term acopiar, gathered together and arranged. While the dictator replaces writers and historians, writers and historians are also already following the dictator’s lead. Even this rather cyclical rendering is undermined. Again, the Spanish is helpful: the separation of the “a” via the insertion of the hyphen reopens the term acopiar, transforming the first letter into the prefix of negation. The “a-​copiador” is he who “un-​copies” or un-​gathers. In this reading, writers and historians may well come after the dictator, but theirs is a work of unmaking the previously established narrative. This is an exercise in writerly authority that aims to displace the dictator, but which also reproduces the dictator’s actions. The circularity is dizzying: if dictator, writer, and historian are truly indistinct, there is no possible place from which to articulate opposition. This is why, at the very close of I the Supreme, the Compiler surrenders his only-​ostensibly historical work of fiction to the imaginative capacities of the reader. This closing paragraph presents the effective collapse of the anti-​ dictator project of the dictator novel and the simultaneous reconfiguration of the genre as a space for play with the figure of the dictator. The “void” of Rama’s “leap into the void,” then, is not just the dictator’s consciousness or even the chasm that separates the ruler from the ruled, but the more open and therefore uncertain realm of fiction itself. Behind this overarching declaration about the nature of the dictator novel in I the Supreme is another set of reflections on the writer’s relationship to the dictator, one which extends to and incorporates the reader. Here I return

104

Chapter 3

to the question of the writer’s intimacy with the dictator laid out by Monterroso. Beyond sympathy and identification, Monterroso suggests a fear of complicity with the dictator. By “complicity” I do not mean the kinds of direct collaboration—­the writer as accomplice, assistant, or secretary—­ exemplified by Pedro de Angelis’s work for Juan Manuel de Rosas in the previous chapter. Rather, I mean “complicity” as that state of being mutually involved or implicated in an intricate structure or larger whole, drawing on the Latin root complico or conplicō (to fold together). That is, complicity as “folded-​togetherness,” the recognition of which is the condition necessary for political action.92 The question of complicity, in the narrow or negative sense of the term, haunts the dictator novel. In many cases, this anxiety motivates the relative absence of the dictator from the narrative. When the dictator is present, there is often an emphatic insistence on the dictator’s barbarity, frequently coded as vulgarity, as in The Autumn of the Patriarch. Alternatively, recalling Reasons of State as well as the treatment of Rosas in Facundo, the dictator might be presented as a “bad writer” whose project is fundamentally different from that of the author. The same is true of the preponderance of secretaries, scribes, and other writerly attendants to the dictator in dictator novels; those complicit (in the narrow sense) writers are effectively assertions of the writer’s opposition to and therefore distinction from the dictator. Beyond the practical reasons for its failure, the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project floundered precisely because it presumed opposition, failing to acknowledge the complex history of interconnection between Latin American dictators and writers. In I the Supreme, the acknowledgment of complicity (in the expanded sense) is the starting point for the novel’s critical consideration of the dictator and dictatorship. The place at which the writer “folds” onto the dictator is, precisely, in writing—­as the act of textual representation (the making literary of historical referents) as well as in the writer and the dictator’s shared reliance on text as a medium. But while I the Supreme acknowledges the writer and dictator’s “folded-​ togetherness” in the larger and more abstract sense, it maintains a measure of ambivalence about the actual fact of writing about the dictator. This ambivalence is figured through the worms and other insects that are always working away and eating the papers that fill Francia’s rooms, and whose activity is the background noise of the novel. They are also the cause of “gaps” in the archive, as the Compiler must often suture together worm-​eaten pages. Text, as a material object, is always subject to decay and destruction; the same is true of bodies. Francia himself connects the worms’ consumption of bodies to the consumption of text and to reading. Reflecting on the burial of Simón Bolívar in exile, he remarks: “They consigned to the worms, those neutral and neuter readers of upright men and downright scoundrels, the old, torn book of his ugly person.”93 Worms might be neutral readers, but this “reading” is not a neutral activity: it destroys the original, hence Francia’s comparisons of historians and

Fathers of the Fatherlands

105

writers of fiction to worms and moths. Furthermore, if reading is eating, then reading is also a kind of incorporation, and the worm becomes—­to paraphrase Daniel Balderston’s analysis of worms in I the Supreme—­the text it eats.94 Balderston’s reading echoes a comment made by Francia: “From an early age, when I read a book, I made my way inside it, so that when I closed it I went on reading it (like cockroaches and bookworms, eh?). It then seemed to me that those thoughts had always been mine.”95 Even for the insensate reader (the worm), reading as the consumption of text is transformative. To put pressure on this chain of association: if the writer, as reader-​writer, is like the worm, which consumes bodies as well as texts, and if eating is a process of bodily incorporation, in reading-​writing about the dictator, the writer incorporates the dictator. To write about the dictator, then, is a process of becoming-​like, which recalls Francia’s claim that “only like can write about like.” By extension, the same can be said for the reader. This is a very literal rendering of the folded-​togetherness of complicity, but Roa Bastos does not stop here. The role of worms in the novel should be counterposed to the Compiler’s final interruption in the text, which comes at the end of the novel’s appendix. This appendix concerns the fate of the historical Francia’s remains, which were taken to Buenos Aires after his death. Efforts were made to repatriate these to Asunción (the capital of Paraguay) in 1961, but the task was stymied by debates about which of two skulls attributed to Francia was in fact the dictator’s. Francia kept a skull as a totem or fetish; when his remains were stolen, the skulls were confused, and this is the subject of much epistolary debate. The Compiler interrupts the final letter in the appendix to report a conversation with a former slave who worked in the house of Carlos Loizanga, an opponent of Francia who raided his grave and kept one of the two skulls. The woman—­old but still lucid, the Compiler assures—­tells a story about the ashes of Loizanga’s maternal grandmother, which were kept in the pantry. She once mistakenly used these to prepare the day’s soup. Through the interpolation of this story, the profanation of Francia’s remains is compared quietly to an act of unwitting cannibalism. This exhortation is uncharacteristic of the Compiler, who himself has gathered and works with “remains.” The implied comparison here is between Loizanga and the Compiler as well as readers and writers more generally: all of us “consume” the dictator. However, Roa Bastos is making a more considered point about the ideological and ethical implications of writing about the dictator. Not all forms of consumption are the same. As one of the historians quoted in the appendix remarks, the authenticity of the remains is suspect because Loizanga’s stealing of Francia’s skull “was inspired not by a spirit of serious and impartial historical investigation but by political passion.”96 The Compiler’s attack on Loizanga, then, is obliquely a criticism of programmatically overdetermined, politically committed writing: a version of the dictator novel that privileges the political goal of denouncing the dictator over and above analysis. This

106

Chapter 3

is the type of dictator novel against which Roa Bastos, as well as García Márquez and Carpentier, position their respective works. However, while both Carpentier and García Márquez turn away from this obsessive focus on the dictator to attend to the larger structures that sustain dictatorship, Roa Bastos in I the Supreme writes into the problem, keeping attention on the ways in which the writer and dictator are mutually involved. As with the question of complicity, part of what Roa Bastos works through in I the Supreme is the question of commitment itself. As he explained in the interview cited at the start of this chapter: “What I wanted then was to work the text from within [desde adentro]. I had freed myself of that consciousness [conciencia] that seemed to be dictating to me the misfortunes of the collective, and I was able to allow those misfortunes to be illuminated [irradiados] by the life of the text itself.”97 In the end, Roa Bastos avoids unconsciously imitating the dictator—­that is, reproducing the structures of power to which his project is opposed—­by endeavoring to consciously imitate the dictator, understanding that one is necessarily complicit in these structures. This includes the forceful occupation of the dictator’s consciousness and an appropriation of his language, as well as explicit acknowledgment of the fundamental resemblance between the work of the writer and the work of the dictator. If earlier dictator novels only briefly noted the ways in which the dictator resembled the writer, by beginning with the premise of the writer’s resemblance to and imitation of the dictator, Roa Bastos unfurls the oppositional logic that drove the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project. He expands the dictator novel outward from its origins as an anti-​dictator project, to encompass not just the writer but a critical meditation on writing itself.

Coda: The Latin American Dictator Novel after 1975 My reading of I the Supreme positions Roa Bastos’s novel not only as a self-​conscious critique of the dictator novel, but as an end; that is, as the culmination of a set of problems that developed within the tradition of writing about dictators in Latin America. These questions came to the fore with the emergence of the Latin American new novel at mid-​century and were distilled in the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project. But this does not mean that the dictator novel ceases to exist after I the Supreme. New dictator novels continue to be written, published, and circulate within and beyond Latin America. Many of these return to and rehearse the now-​established contours of the genre, adding to the still growing catalog of Latin American dictator novels. There are two more dictator novels linked to those discussed in this chapter that bear mention. Arturo Uslar Pietri was in Paris with Asturias and Carpentier in the 1920s and 1930s, as Asturias composed The President; in 1976, Pietri published his own dictator novel, Oficio de difuntos (Funeral

Fathers of the Fatherlands

107

Mass). And in 2000, more than thirty years after the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project had dissipated, Mario Vargas Llosa also published a dictator novel, La fiesta del Chivo (Feast of the Goat). These two novels offer means for thinking about the asynchronicity or “untimeliness” of the dictator novel as it relates to its circulation beyond Latin America in subsequent decades and provide a glimpse of how the wider tradition tends to operate. In setting, style, and structure, Oficio de difuntos gestures back to earlier dictator novels such as The President and Martín Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Strongman, 1929). The narrative centers on a Catholic priest, Alberto Solana, who is called upon to deliver the funeral oration for a recently deceased dictator to whom he was a longtime aide. Solana knows that in delivering the oration he will become the scapegoat for the old regime. During a long and anxious night, he reflects on the dictator’s rise to power and how he himself came to be involved with the dictator. Based on a historical person, Solana is also the archetype of the complicit writer—­in the narrow sense of the term—­who, at the end of the dictator’s life, is reduced to cowering in “a small corner, in an attic in that enormous and ramshackle house of power [caserón de autoridad].”98 The novel does not, in Rama’s sense, “leap into the void” of the dictator’s consciousness. In this as well as its narrative style, it was very much out of step with the better-​known, more experimental dictator novels of the 1970s that have been the subject of this chapter. Perhaps not coincidentally, Oficio de difuntos has received relatively little critical attention. But, as a look back to an earlier moment in both Latin American dictatorship and the dictator novel, it offers a useful counterpoint to the standard teleology of successive “phases” in the development of the Latin American dictator novel. While periodization can be a useful heuristic for understanding change over time, the literary-​historical record also offers myriad instances of continuity alongside discontinuity or “breaks.” Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat is similarly asynchronous. This novel explores events leadings up to and immediately following the assassination of Rafael Trujillo in 1961, reviving the oppositional logic of “The Fathers of the Fatherlands” but relying on narrative and critical tactics familiar from The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I the Supreme. The narrative moves between three plot lines: Trujillo’s experiences in the days before his death; those of the men plotting to kill him; and the story of Urania Cabral, the daughter of one of Trujillo’s senators, who is raped by the dictator shortly before his death and who returns to Santo Domingo many years later. As the perspective shifts between these different plot lines, the novel lingers on several moments of extreme violence, often narrated from the perspective of the victims. This includes the torture of one of the conspirators, General José René Román, by Ramafis Trujillo (Trujillo’s son), and the rape of Urania, which concludes the novel (the rape is digital, because Trujillo is impotent).99 This multifaceted approach allows Vargas Llosa to explore the perspective of the dictator as well as the effects of dictatorship on society at large. But the

108

Chapter 3

depiction of suffering is also an unsettling recapitulation of the trope of the dictator’s vulgarity, signaling the limits of this novel’s critical project. Even as the novel endeavors a critique of dictatorship, it falls back on an easy division between perpetrators and victims facilitated by its fealty to the chosen historical referent, which (in turn) forecloses the possibility of any self-​reflexive criticism. Writing three decades after “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” Vargas Llosa does not offer anything new for the dictator novel. The fact of its publication at the turn of the twenty-​first century is nevertheless of interest, as it signaled the return of the Latin American dictator as a topic of literary and commercial interest. Writing of Feast of the Goat and Sergio Ramírez’s Margarita, está linda la mar (Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, 1998), Gabriela Polit-Dueñas makes the following proposition: “When the literary production of the region undergoes notable expansion [measured in terms of recognition and circulation], the caudillo reappears as a consecrated [figura consagrada] and consecrating figure [figura que consagra].”100 She is referring to a renewal of global interest in Latin American literature in the 1990s, which, as in the early years of the boom, was propelled by international prizes and the Spanish publishing industry. What Polit-Dueñas describes in the 1990s was similarly true for the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project in the late 1960s, as well as for the dictator novels that followed in the early 1970s. So, to slightly rephrase Polit-Dueñas, when Latin American literature becomes the object of international attention, the near-​mythical figure of the dictator (re)appears to anoint or affirm its presence. This observation usefully shifts the interpretation of the Latin American dictator novel away from its possible historical referents and toward its world literary circulations. While the dictator and dictatorship may be the starting point, the dictator novel exists in relation to the larger tradition of writing about dictatorship and its dissemination in the global literary market. What I have been calling the “asynchronicity” of the dictator novel—­as in my description of Oficio de difuntos and Feast of the Goat, but also in earlier critical debates around The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I the Supreme—­is more precisely its untimeliness. I mean untimeliness in the sense used by Idelber Avelar in his study of postdictatorship Latin American literature: the untimely is that which is out of sync and takes distance from the present by purposefully turning to the past; it is, he adds, “the very constitutive quality of the literary.”101 The untimeliness of the literary, then, is also the untimeliness of the dictator novel. Propelled in no small part by the aura of the Latin American literary boom and fulfilling Fuentes’s prediction for “The Fathers of the Fatherlands,” the Latin American dictator novel as exemplified by The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I the Supreme has circulated well beyond its continent of origin. It has become, in David Damrosch’s sense of the term, a world literary genre. Perhaps the best proof of this is the appearance of the Latin American dictator novel in Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees

Fathers of the Fatherlands

109

(2007). Here, the dictator novel is one branch in the “tree” of free indirect style in modern narrative (1800–­2000), which ranges from Goethe and Jane Austen to Roa Bastos, García Márquez, Carpentier, and Vargas Llosa. The Latin American dictator novels of the 1970s, Moretti writes, confined free indirect style to a limited role; Vargas Llosa moved the technique to the foreground, realizing “its full political potential: by presenting the mind of the dictator ‘unmediated by any judging point of view.’ ”102 This last comment is at best debatable, particularly given the long history of the Latin American dictator novel into which Vargas Llosa writes Feast of the Goat. Moretti’s perspective is only a very general and necessarily limited overview of the “Latin American dictator novel.” What Moretti does provide, however, is one instance of what happens to the dictator novel when it goes into circulation and is seen from without. In this case, the entire tradition of the dictator novel is reduced to a few isolated and “representative” examples, chosen for their accordance with the formal features whose evolution Moretti is tracking. But if we instead choose to follow the dictator novel as a genre or set of textual features organized around the literary representation of the dictator and dictatorship, new comparative itineraries open up. The dictator novel is not an exclusively Latin American formation. It surfaces elsewhere in the literatures of the Global South, similarly in response to the political phenomenon of dictatorship but also in dialogue with other literary and cultural traditions. Only by following the dictator novel in this broader sense is it possible to gain a full picture of the genre.

Chapter 4

Mésaventures The Politics and Poetics of the Dictator Novel in the African Postcolony

In the Malawian novelist Legson Kayira’s The Detainee (1974), an old man attempts to make his way to the city for medical treatment; but the buses do not run, party membership cards are mandatory, and everywhere are members of the Young Brigade demanding allegiance to the dictator, Sir Zaddock Mlingo, Doctor of Laws and Africa’s Greatest Son. Eventually, the old man is placed in a prison camp, escapes, and, mistaken for dead, is taken to the morgue. The novel ends with the man regaining consciousness and fleeing into the forest. The Detainee is notable for its attention to the protagonist’s conversations with his fellow travelers, in which they discuss the proliferation of draconian laws and violence. These are contrasted to life before independence; or, as one character puts it, “Independence? What independence?”1 Written almost two decades later, the Kenyan humorist Wahome Mutahi’s Three Days on the Cross (1991) similarly charts the injustices and paranoia of life under dictatorship, where security forces carry out kidnappings and violence in the name of the “Illustrious One.”2 At issue in both novels is the descent into factionalism that forestalled national consolidation and the creation of democratic institutions throughout much of the African continent in the decades following independence. Neither novel is properly speaking a dictator novel, because the dictator remains well outside the narrative frame. But they are representative of the literature that emerged in response to postindependence political disillusionment and, from there, the larger, volatile body of material out of which the African dictator novel coalesced. Frantz Fanon anticipated many of the challenges that newly independent African nations would face in Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961). In the chapter “Mésaventures de la conscience nationale”—­ translated into English as “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (Constance Farrington, 1965) or “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness” (Richard Philcox, 2004)—­ he identified as a central concern the unpreparedness of the national bourgeoisie as well as the lack of

111

112

Chapter 4

practical ties between that small elite and the masses.3 Under such conditions, Fanon wrote, the elite would align themselves with foreign interests, becoming agents of neocolonialism. In the face of rising dissatisfaction, the dictator would emerge as a tool for mollifying or, together with the army and on the advice of foreign experts, silencing opposition.4 These possible futures are what Fanon terms the mésaventures tragiques or “tragically bad outcomes” of independence. Much of what Fanon wrote proved strikingly prescient, and in much of African literature a rhetoric of disenchantment quickly displaced the earlier utopianism of the independence period. The term “mésaventures,” however, has been elusive in translation. The English word “misadventure” and its correlates, “misfortune” and “mishap,” seem unsuited to the gravity of Fanon’s subject; here the older word mésavenir—­to “turn out badly”—­seems more appropriate. Yet mésaventures and the implication of “adventure” contained therein are crucial to Fanon’s argument: prescience was not prescription. What Fanon described was one potential series of events within a much broader understanding of the possibilities for decolonization. Like an adventure, decolonization was an undertaking whose outcome was uncertain; hence Fanon’s call to action. I take the untranslated term mésaventures as the title for this chapter in that same spirit, preferring its capaciousness to the teleological arc of disillusionment. The African dictator novel is both a literary response to the mésaventures of independence and is itself a deviation (with unexpected results) when viewed within the framework of the dictator novel. This chapter traces the emergence of the dictator novel in West and Central African literatures in the decades following independence. The dictator novel here is one idiom among many through which writers explored the frustrated promise—­or, to quote Josaphat Kubayanda, the “unfinished business”—­of decolonization.5 These are what I will call the “local” or autochthonous origins of the dictator novel in African literatures. I distinguish the African dictator novel from the broader literature of political disillusionment, including novels of dictatorship, for its attention to the dictator as a key figure in the text. To recall Ángel Rama on the Latin American dictator novel, here too writers enter the presidential palace, sniff around its corners, and even invade the dictator’s consciousness. The shift to focus on the dictator raised formal, thematic, and political questions, which required the elaboration of a new literary vocabulary that both recalls and departs from its Latin American counterpart. The problem (dictatorship) is roughly the same, but the conversations that unfold around the figure of the dictator open new critical trajectories. The Anglophone and Francophone works I discuss in this chapter have their own histories, which are not reducible to typology in the name of facilitating comparative analogy with the Latin American dictator novel. It is in reading for the differences as much as the similarities that the theorization

Mésaventures

113

of the dictator novel as a transcontinental generic series becomes possible. Accordingly, I will look at Ousmane Sembène and Chinua Achebe’s respective dictator novels, Le Dernier de l’Empire (The Last of the Empire, 1981) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), first, as part of an ongoing concern with political disillusionment in each writer’s oeuvre, where each novel is part of a series of works dealing with the unfinished business of decolonization; and second, as dictator novels. The shift from generalized social critique to a focus on the dictator modifies the critical language and concerns of the earlier works. Having established this development—­as an unfolding rather than an evolution—­in postcolonial African literatures, I locate the African dictator novel within the larger constellation gathered in this book. Here, the Latin American dictator novel—­and specifically Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975)—­makes an appearance. But it is not a template for writers to follow so much as a specimen that is disassembled; its components then become part of the larger body of raw material out of which individual African dictator novels take shape. Analyzing works by three Francophone African writers, I highlight the ways in which Aminata Sow Fall, in L’Ex-​père de la nation (The Ex-​Father of the Nation, 1987), Henri Lopès, in Le Pleurer-​rire (The Laughing Cry, 1982), and Sony Labou Tansi, in L’État honteux (The Shameful State, 1981) and La Vie et demie (Life and a Half, 1979), bring to the dictator novel new preoccupations as well as innovations in literary form, significantly expanding the constellation of critical concerns and formal characteristics that distinguish the dictator novel of the Global South. In these early African dictator novels, the dictator is placed alongside the larger complex of issues facing newly independent nations. He is the product of the debates and blunders that characterized decolonization, rather than an aberrant individual or mere puppet for foreign powers. Nor does the dictator represent an entrenchment of “traditional” practices of power; to paraphrase Moira Fradinger’s argument about the emergence of the dictator novel in century Latin America, the dictator here is similarly a sympnineteenth-​ tom of the “upheaval and paradoxes” of the Cold War political imaginary.6 Claims to traditional modes of governance (as well as gender and sexual relations) are therefore part of the aesthetics of vulgarity that characterize authoritarian regimes in the African postcolony. While the dictator remains a defining feature of these works, the overarching interest tends to be in exploring the perspective of those close to or around the dictator, whose participation makes dictatorship possible. Complicity with the dictator, particularly in the sense of collaboration, is explicitly a topic of concern, as is the ambivalent position of the writer within the class structure of postcolonial society. Finally, writing and the work of fiction are themselves submitted to interrogation, where critical self-​reflexivity is part of a larger impulse toward experimentation with narrative and novelistic form. In political terms, these novels are concerned not just with the dictator, but with dictatorship as a

114

Chapter 4

recurring phenomenon. They register the global dynamics of power that shaped dictatorships on the African continent during the Cold War, offering a much wider frame within which to grasp current political realities. In ascribing these features to the African dictator novel, I do not mean that they are absent from the Latin American works; much of what I describe recalls features that I have analyzed in the previous chapters. But these aspects predominate in the African dictator novel, such that the African examples have inflected my readings of the Latin American works, just as the critical tradition of the Latin American dictator novel provides a frame within which to identify and begin to theorize the African dictator novel. When read together with the materials discussed in the preceding chapters, these novels offer new configurations for the representative grammar and vocabulary that comprise the dictator novel as a genre.

The Mésaventures of Independence, the Literature of Disillusionment, and the Dictator Novel: Ousmane Sembène and Chinua Achebe The year 1960 marks the historical benchmark for this chapter; this was when the three countries to which I will refer gained independence from Great Britain (Nigeria) and France (Senegal and the Republic of the Congo). Within a decade, those new countries’ governments had either been unseated by coups, as in Nigeria and the Republic of the Congo, or been transformed into one-​party states, as was the case with Léopold Sédar Senghor’s government in Senegal.7 Throughout the African continent, fledgling nation-​states confronted a variety of neocolonial entanglements ranging from the continuing involvement of former colonial powers to interference from the United States and Soviet Union, which jostled for influence. Their national economies, too, remained dependent on the export of primary materials and were particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations. Despite a period of development-​driven growth in the 1960s, the global economic crises of the 1970s debilitated many national governments. In response, those in charge sought increased international lending; but loans came with “structural adjustment” requirements that would further diminish state services and hobble economies in the long term.8 Cold War–era interventionism on the African continent not only made individual countries proxies for the larger global conflict, it also brought flows of foreign capital that those in power could redirect for their own benefit, propagating predatory states. For those with sufficient access, involvement with the postcolonial state facilitated personal enrichment, which was activated and maintained through patronage networks that produced a system of “big” and “little” men. This is what Jean-​François Bayart evocatively describes as the “politics of the belly” (la politique du ventre), a metaphor for diverse

Mésaventures

115

forms of corruption and a mode of governmentality in which everyone who can must “eat” their fill.9 In many cases, the kleptocratic state was also ethnicized, with select ethnic groups receiving exclusive access to employment, contracts, and income.10 These are all features of what Achille Mbembe has termed the “postcolony.” As discussed in chapter 1, this term refers to societies emerging from colonial domination. It is, in this sense, a temporality, although time is neither linear nor homogeneous. To quote Mbembe, the postcolony “encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelop one another: [it is] an entanglement.”11 This historical summary certainly justifies disillusionment and even pessimism. However, the very tenacity of the “triumph and failure” narrative in discussions of decolonization in Africa, whether at the continental, regional, or national levels, requires attention. Those “tragically bad outcomes” can too quickly come to seem inevitable. While the triumph and failure narrative provides a useful arc within which to frame the novels discussed in this and the following chapter, I aim to trouble the teleological assumptions that underlie such succinct formulations. Scholars tend to emphasize the legacies of colonization, pointing to the often-​arbitrary contours of current nation-​ states—­where, for instance, Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba people are meant to share a common “Nigerian” identity—­as the root cause of political strife. But, to return to Mbembe, although it originates in the experience of colonization, the postcolony is not the persistence of colonial governmentality so much as a new dynamic produced in the interplay of internal and external factors. Arguing against the structuralist emphasis of dependency theory, Bayart maintains that Africans “have been active agents in the mise en dépendance of their societies, sometimes opposing it and at other times joining in it.”12 Within this framework, corruption is a mode of social struggle that is embedded—­or to use Mbembe’s term, “entangled”—­in locally, nationally, and globally unequal circumstances. This approach stresses the relationships between individuals, as the imbrication of all social actors in the operation of the system. I take this emphasis on relationships, both horizontal and vertical, as the necessary starting point for reading the African dictator novel. From a distance, it is easy to see the African dictator—­here evidence of unsuccessful decolonization—­as inevitable. But it is harder to see the (local and global) causes of dictatorship, and this is where the dictator novel intervenes. In the previous chapter, the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project signaled the culmination and decline of a cohesive political idealism and self-​identification for writers of the Latin American literary boom. That project was only conceivable from within a specific understanding of the political role of the writer, and it became impossible once that myth (to use a strong word) had shown its internal fissures. African writers in the era of independence had a comparable sense of shared identity and purpose. This was cultivated within the frame of earlier transnational movements such as négritude, particularly

116

Chapter 4

as galvanized by the journal Présence Africaine (founded in 1947); fed by the rising tide of anticolonialism; and amplified at conferences such as the Fifth Pan-​African Congress (Manchester, 1945), the first and second Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956, and Rome, 1959), the Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University (Kampala, 1962), as well as the First and Second World Festivals of Black Arts in 1966 (Dakar) and 1977 (Lagos). Magazines such as Black Orpheus (1957) and Transition (1961) and publishing projects such as Heinemann’s African Writers Series (1962) provided vital forums for the dissemination of new ideas.13 The mutual recognition fostered by such collaborative projects within and beyond the continent animated the conception of the African writer as a key actor in decolonization. In the decades following independence, however, this optimism would sour. The resulting literature of political disillusionment spans both sub-​Saharan and North Africa. Self-​rule, such works assert, had not resulted in real democratization or actual freedom for the majority. Instead, the masses encountered ongoing inequality, violence, political corruption, economic stagnation, and general hypocrisy. These contestatory works make recourse to parody, satire, and even scatology—­what Jed Esty calls “excremental postcolonialism”—­to account for the realities of the postcolonial present. Some writers even looked beyond colonization to the precolonial period in their critiques, counteracting the idealization of the African past associated with earlier movements such as négritude. Literary historiography generally refers to this period of disillusionment as the “second stage” of African literatures, characterized by critique of the postcolonial state and its bourgeoisie, in contrast to earlier anticolonial and nationalist works of the first stage.14 But rarely are these matters neatly linear: already in 1960, African writers had begun to worry that triumphant nationalism would descend into political corruption and authoritarianism. Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests (1960), a play performed at Nigeria’s independence celebrations, and Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960) expressed apprehension of the emerging political class on the eve of independence. These concerns developed into open critique in Soyinka’s later play, Kongi’s Harvest (1965), and his first novel, The Interpreters (1965), as well as Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966). Ousmane Sembène—­who earlier had written anticolonial works such as Les bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood, 1960), about a railway workers’ strike in 1940s Senegal—­similarly explored the shortcomings of the postcolonial state in two short works of fiction, “Le Mandat” (“The Money Order,” 1965) and Xala (1973), which were later adapted into films (Mandabi, 1968, and Xala, 1975). Over the following decade, the wide-​ranging concerns of the literature of political disillusionment began to concentrate on the dictator. Such works share much with the literature of disillusionment. However, in putting the dictator at the center of the narrative, writers were forced to consider their relationship—both as intellectuals and (even) as members of the postcolonial

Mésaventures

117

elite—to that figure. It is here that the self-​reflexivity at the heart of the dictator novel comes to bear on disillusionment, necessitating a reconsideration of the political role of the writer. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon called for an alliance between the intellectuals, “armed with revolutionary principles,” and the masses in order to counteract the destructive national bourgeoisie.15 This was a vision of the writer-​revolutionary to which many African writers subscribed. Writing in 1965, Achebe presented the model of the “novelist as teacher,” arguing that the task of the writer was to “reeducate and regenerate” so that society could “put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-​abasement.” Just three years later and at the height of the Biafran War (1967–­70), during which Achebe served as an emissary for the secessionist Republic of Biafra, matters were more pressing: “It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant.”16 In public forums, lectures, and conferences, many writers called for more direct forms of action. Soyinka, to give one example, was critical of African writers for failing to take an active part in political struggle. The African writer, he argued in his keynote address at the 1967 African-​Scandinavian Writers’ Conference, had withdrawn into abstract notions of political commitment. The stage of disillusionment called for an examination of “what has been the failure of the African writer, as a writer.”17 At stake here was not just the place of the intellectual in the political sphere, but the question of the political function of literature and, further, of what a properly committed text might look like. For instance, responding to Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (here credited as James Ngũgĩ) called for African writers to “talk in the terms of the workers and peasants,” foregrounding the question of language in African literatures and anticipating his later commitment to writing in Gikuyu.18 These debates are crucial for reading the African dictator novel as an act of denunciation. Much like their Latin American counterparts, African writers were in an ambivalent position vis-​à-​vis the national elite. They were, with notable exceptions such as Sembène or Ngũgĩ, most often members of this class. Yet many quickly found themselves alienated from and marginalized by the governments of their new nations. The literature of political disillusionment marks the break between writers and the ruling class. Neil Lazarus has persuasively argued that “disillusionment” is the wrong term for this rift. Writers remained fundamentally “illusioned,” insofar as they held on to the idea of independence as a revolutionary juncture. “Expecting much too much in 1960,” Lazarus argues, “they became much too cynical in 1968.”19 The tenor of Lazarus’s critique softens when considered within the arc of individual writers’ work. Achebe, for one, was already apprehensive in 1960; read in series, his novels No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah suggest an intensification of concerns, rather than a break. Nevertheless, taking Lazarus’s generalization as a starting point, I

118

Chapter 4

locate the origins of the African dictator novel in the 1960s and its emergence, properly speaking, at the cusp of the 1980s. In the 1960s and 1970s, Sembène and Achebe strove to document the political, economic, and social transformations that followed independence. Each writer was central to the consolidation of postcolonial Francophone and Anglophone African literatures. Sembène also moved into film, becoming a founding figure for African cinema. Achebe, meanwhile, shaped the international image of African literatures through his role as advisory editor for Heinemann’s African Writers Series. (Famously, Ngũgĩ gave Achebe the manuscript of Weep Not, Child [1964] at the 1962 Makerere conference.) In reading Sembène and Achebe together, I aim to bridge a frequent division between their two language traditions, illuminating the parallels while also using the instructive differences between Sembène and Achebe to demonstrate the breadth of writerly response to, first, political disillusionment, and, later, to dictatorship. Broadly, Sembène’s focus was on large-​scale social dynamics, particularly the changing relations between classes and generations; while Achebe’s focus was on the shifting values and increasingly compromised idealism of members of the postcolonial elite. These concerns continue into their respective dictator novels, where both look to the presidential cabinet as the locus of action, or lack thereof. In both of their dictator novels, proximity to the dictator and specifically the materialization—­as physical presence—­of the dictator in the narrative modify the language and concerns of their earlier work, signaling a renewed interest in the critical function of narrative form. The plot of Sembène’s “The Money Order” (1965) centers on one man’s attempts to cash a money order sent by a nephew working in Paris. Illiterate, weak in French, and lacking the birth certificate necessary for the required identity card, Ibrahima Dieng is poorly equipped for the task. Desperate for help in navigating the complicated bureaucracy of a rapidly changing Dakar, Dieng makes recourse to a cousin recently returned from France, to little effect. After several small swindles, he loses the money order and his home to Mbaye, a local businessman and part of what the narrator calls the “ ‘New Africa’ generation.” Sembène’s critique extends from the cynicism of operatives such as Mbaye, to the indifference of the postcolonial state, to the haplessness of Dieng himself. The picture is bleak; as one clerk remarks when Dieng shows his voter identification card: “ ‘You are being fooled with your voter’s cards,’ he said in French. ‘No one is going to be bothered about voting.’ ”20 The story tracks the emergence of three key constituencies in the postcolony. The first is the unemployed or underemployed masses, many of whom must emigrate abroad to survive, as represented by Dieng’s nephew; in counterpoint to this is Dieng’s “been-​to” cousin, who is prepared to take over the operations of the state but is quick to disregard personal obligations; and finally, there is the businessman Mbaye. Less well-​groomed than Dieng’s cousin, he represents the rapacious and ascendant bourgeoisie.

Mésaventures

119

The world of this emergent class is the subject of Sembène’s short novel Xala (1973). Set ten years after independence, it opens with a celebration for the first African head of Senegal’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the “last bastion” of the colonial era. One of the chamber’s members, El Hadji Abdou Kader Bèye, has decided to take a third wife and looks forward to the wedding night; but when the moment arrives, he is suddenly impotent. El Hadji has been struck with a “xala,” and the narrative follows his attempts to discover who is behind the curse. Eventually, he consults a marabout (Muslim holy man or mystic) who offers him respite. But El Hadji has neglected his affairs, bills have piled up, and banks now refuse him credit; and as El Hadji’s life unravels, the xala returns. The source of the curse turns out to be a beggar whom El Hadji had earlier defrauded. Together with his friends, the beggar invades the house of El Hadji’s first wife. This is a parade of the downtrodden and excluded: scarred, crippled, and infected bodies that gleefully sully the finery of the house.21 The grotesque and excremental here illuminate the depredations of the elite and serve to magnify the horror of El Hadji and his family. To remove the curse, El Hadji submits to being spat upon three times by each of the beggars. Xala is a satire of the postcolonial elite, inveighing against its corruption, conspicuous consumption, and hypocrisy. The plot is a narrative of revenge, but it is hardly celebratory in spirit. Sembène repeatedly stages moments of incisive appraisal and criticism that are subsequently undercut. For instance, Rama, El Hadji’s eldest daughter, is fiercely critical of her father; opposed to his third marriage, she favors Wolof over French and calls for social revolution. But she finds the beggars repulsive and is reduced to tears by their invasion of the house. Similarly, when defending himself before his expulsion from the Businessmen’s Group, El Hadji makes a virulent critique of their status as middlemen for foreign interests. His remarks are met with little interest: “We aren’t at the theatre,” one colleague observes.22 Even the beggars’ revenge is undermined. As they spit on El Hadji, the police lie in wait; per the closing line of the novella: “Outside the forces of order raised their weapons into the firing position . . .” (I insert here the ellipses, which are omitted in the English translation).23 The implication is that, regardless of what happens to El Hadji, the existing order will reassert itself and things will remain largely as they were. Xala is not, then, a celebration of the seizure of power by the oppressed; instead, it documents the increasing entrenchment of social and political inequality in the postcolony. This reluctance to idealize acts of criticism or opposition is consistent with Sembène’s understanding of the political function of art. Asked in a 1969 interview about his move to cinema, Sembène explained that he hoped to reach a larger audience, adding: What is interesting for me is exposing the problems my people have to face. I am not a leftist intellectual. Moreover I am not an

120

Chapter 4

intellectual at all. I regard the cinema primarily as a political instrument of action. I stand, as I’ve always said, for Marxism-​Leninism. I am for scientific socialism. However, as I always continue to specify, I am not for “socialist realism,” nor for a “cinema of signs” with slogans and demonstrations. For me revolutionary cinema is something else. And then I am not naive to the point that I believe that I could change Senegalese reality with only one film. On the other hand, if we managed to set up a group of cineastes who all make a cinema directed in the same direction, I believe that then we could influence a little bit of the destinies of our country.24

Just as Sembène does not romanticize the oppressed in “The Money Order” and Xala, there is here a refusal to celebrate commitment as an abstract ideal. That is the kind of mistake made by “intellectuals.” Instead, Sembène emphasizes the accumulated value of multiple critiques. This tension between the work of documentation (bearing witness) and the refusal to idealize any single constituency is a central component of his later dictator novel, The Last of the Empire (1981), where the critical potential of narrative mechanics, particularly focalization and self-​reflexivity, come to the fore. The Last of the Empire turns on a conspicuous absence: the dictator Léon Mignane, the “Venerable One,” has disappeared. His cabinet ministers are unsure whether this is a coup or a trap, and the novel’s action follows the chaos resulting from the dictator’s absence. Key here is the narrative device of omniscient narration, which moves through a succession of actors in the novel-​world, including various ministers, the French ambassador, the journalist Kad, and the Venerable One himself. Except for Doyen Cheikh Tidiane Sall, a longtime comrade and fellow “father” of independence, the cabinet is comprised of younger bureaucrats identified as “the second post-​ Independence generation.” Sembène’s focus on the cabinet generates an analysis of the mechanisms that sustain authoritarian regimes as well as of the overlapping time-​scales that Mbembe describes in the postcolony. While the Venerable One makes use of the differences between generations to maintain his hold on power—­these younger ministers have no popular support of their own—­the fluctuating forces that demarcate these constituencies pose the greatest challenge to his regime. As the journalist Kad surmises at the end of the novel, the present eventually gives way under the Venerable One’s feet.25 The dictator’s staged disappearance unintentionally becomes a reality when, ostensibly responding to demonstrations by activist youth, the army revolts and exiles the Venerable One to France, with help from the French ambassador. At issue here is not just the reliance of authoritarian regimes on falsification and simulacra, but the play of representation itself. A longtime accomplice and later opponent, Cheikh Tidiane serves as the primary vehicle for the critique of the dictator, and the narrative recalls several arguments between the two men. After the Venerable One goes missing,

Mésaventures

121

Tidiane resigns from the cabinet and makes plans to write a memoir, which (per the closing lines of the novel) will be titled The Last of the Empire. The repetition of the title of the novel as that of the fictional memoir suggests an alignment of the two projects. Like the memoir, this dictator novel will serve, to quote Tidiane, as “our final statement of accounts.”26 But there is little actual correspondence between the novel The Last of the Empire and Tidiane’s memoir, its apparent double in the text. Although the novel contains elements of Tidiane’s story, its scope and frame are distinct from that of the imagined memoir. Nor is Tidiane a model for critical political consciousness. He does not, for instance, repudiate the idea that African heads of state can or should hold their positions for life. He also quickly comes to support the army’s coup, arguing that a little discipline will be necessary to address the country’s problems—­much to the disappointment of his interlocutor, Attorney Ndaw, through whom this scene is focalized.27 In the end, the novel evinces little faith in Tidiane, because his critical imagination remains bound by the limitations of his class, generation, and education. The repetition of the title The Last of the Empire within the text therefore serves to differentiate the work of the (imagined) memoir from that of the dictator novel. The contest is one of genre: Sembène draws a distinction between the story of an individual life, as an occasion for the drawing up of “accounts,” and the more complex vision of the novel necessary for effectively understanding the social and political factors that bring about and sustain dictatorship. These factors include the psychological legacies of colonization, the reliance on violence to manufacture consent, interethnic factionalism, the growing inequality between classes, unfettered personal greed, and the forces of neocolonialism. Unlike the memoir, which would anchor the life of the individual to that of the dictator, the dictator novel widens the perspective and therefore the critical scope of its anti-​dictator project. The dictator thus becomes a symptom of the larger forces at work. Writing and the writer are part of this larger system, and this is where the critical value of the metafictional gesture comes to bear. At three separate points in The Last of the Empire, characters refer to Sembène’s work as a poet and filmmaker. These allusions initially seem winking and serve to locate Sembène within the novel-​world. But in each case Sembène’s work is subject to misreading. These characters may be able to quote—­and even celebrate, as Tidiane does—­Sembène’s work, but they have learned little from it. The foremost example comes in a conversation between Kad and one of Tidiane’s sons, Diouldé, a businessman. Taking inspiration from the film Xala, Diouldé and his peers have started referring to themselves as “economic operators” (opérateurs économiques), entirely missing the satire, and dismissing Sembène himself as an “idiot.”28 These self-​referential moments in The Last of the Empire both name and trouble the critical project of the dictator novel. As an act of denunciation, the novel depends on the reader to properly interpret its message. But, to recall the scene in Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del

122

Chapter 4

método (Reasons of State, 1974) where the dictator reads Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845) and identifies with Sarmiento rather than the dictator, the work of art is always subject to misreading and misuse. This observation tempers the celebration of the revolutionary orientation of a new set of actors introduced toward the end of the novel: the youth, a rising “third” generation. As the narrator remarks when the youth take to the streets: For the resignation of older people, moderate and timorous, had been replaced by a new ideal: the cult of bravery, of daring, of economic and political nationalism. Their times were rich in people’s heroes who had died fighting, exemplars of the same struggle being fought in many places: their names were Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Neto, Uncle Ho. Their spiritual capitals were in turn Hanoi, Havana, Accra, Conarky, Alger, Maputo, Luanda, Soweto, Dar es Salaam. They expressed themselves freely, and found themselves writers and thinkers near to hand, on African soil: Fanon, Cabral, Nkrumah, Pathé Diagne, Mongo Beti, Amedy Dieng, Nyerere, Cheikh Anta Diop.29

In part because the outcome of the youths’ actions is unresolved (the Venerable One is removed from power, but the military has taken over and it is not clear what comes next), the treatment of this new generation remains ambivalent in the novel. Despite its title, The Last of the Empire does not imagine an end to dictatorship. The novel describes, instead, the successive transformations of systems of oppression in the decades following the end of direct colonial rule. What matters, however, is that this is not an isolated problem. As Kad argues in the epilogue, “Africa will be at stake for the remainder of this century, and for the first third of the next . . . The present struggle transcends our local problems.”30 His remarks are met with silence by Tidiane and his family (predictably); but they point to a possibly global political future beyond the scope of the novel. Kad’s comments suggest that the potential for change lies not in the critical intervention of a single work or writer, but in the ability to understand that the same struggle unfolds in many places at once. Youth in and of itself does not guarantee revolutionary change; yet, in building transnational networks of solidarity and opposition, a new future might be possible. In counterpoint to Sembène’s attention to large-​scale intergenerational dynamics, Chinua Achebe is interested in the motivations and self-​justifications of the “new Africans” who took power after independence. Both No Longer at Ease (1960) and A Man of the People (1966) track the downfall of an idealistic individual as a synecdoche for the making of a national bourgeoisie. No

Mésaventures

123

Longer at Ease opens with the conviction of its protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, for accepting bribes; set on the eve of independence, the novel anticipates the transition from colonial control to the bureaucracy of the postcolonial state. Achebe embeds this story in a longer history of interaction and collaboration with the British in Nigeria: Obi is the grandson of Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart (1958), who opposed the incursion of missionaries into his community in the early twentieth century. Okonkwo eventually commits suicide and his son Isaac (Obi’s father) leaves to join the mission school. Obi himself goes on to study in England. On his return to Nigeria, Obi becomes one of the first Africans allowed to occupy a “European” post on the Scholarship Board. He is initially highly principled and annoyed by the petty bribery that facilitates life in Lagos. The civil service will remain corrupt, Obi thinks, “until the old Africans at the top were replaced by young men from the universities.”31 Yet Obi quickly takes to the pleasures of his position: a new apartment, a houseboy, a car, and nights out with his girlfriend, Clara. With his salary come new obligations and, pushed by the need to finance an abortion for Clara, Obi too begins to accept bribes. Despite its arc, No Longer at Ease is not quite a moral tale. Achebe is interested instead in the ways in which Obi’s education and privilege have shaped his perspective, as a representative of the generation of future leaders. While critical of the British, Obi is also suspicious of his fellow Nigerians, and this leads to an unsettling proposition: “Where does one begin? With the masses? Educate the masses?” He [Obi] shook his head. “Not a chance there. It would take centuries. A handful of men at the top. Or even one man with vision—­an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance? Perhaps a halfway house—­a sort of compromise.”32

In aligning this pejorative view of Nigerians with the perspective of the British colonizers, Achebe implicitly disputes Obi’s endorsement of an “enlightened dictatorship,” but the question of exactly what kind of democracy will be possible after independence remains open. The novel therefore sounds a general caution, pointing to possible future misfortunes (mésaventures). As Obi observes in a discussion of tragedy during his interview for the civil service, alluding to (if slightly misreading) W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1939): “Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot.”33 A Man of the People returns to this “untidy spot,” now situated in an anonymous African country.34 The protagonist here is a young teacher, Odili, whose school is preparing for a visit from a local politician, Chief Nanga. Odili is already suspicious of the government, but Chief Nanga is

124

Chapter 4

a charismatic man, who entices Odili with the prospect of a scholarship for further study. The plot turns on petty interpersonal conflicts, where questions of personal pride and individual gain displace politics. Achebe uses the intimacy of a first-​person narration to illuminate Odili’s equivocations together with those of the larger system. Although Odili sees Chief Nanga as a barely literate brute—­anticipating the trope of the uneducated but charismatic dictator—­he goes to visit Nanga in the capital. Once Nanga sleeps with Odili’s girlfriend, however, Odili decides to take his government post (and Nanga’s girlfriend, Edna) as revenge. As Odili’s political party and the campaign descend into chaos, the military revolts against the government. In the end, Odili uses funds from his political party to pay Edna’s bride price. Recalling Obi’s critique of corruption in No Longer at Ease, the young men from the universities have proven to be no better than their predecessors. But unlike in No Longer at Ease, where the protagonist’s downfall allows for a measure of catharsis, the (real) tragedy remains unresolved at the end of A Man of the People. With the coup, it has merely moved into a new phase. More than two decades separate Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) from A Man of the People (1966). Published just before the 1966 coup in Nigeria, the earlier novel had proved uncannily perceptive of the imminent political turn. By contrast, Anthills of the Savannah is very much a post-​ Biafra work that marks a dramatic shift in Achebe’s thinking on the writer’s role in politics, as well as the relationship between the novel and the nation.35 The narrative traces the experiences of three people close to the dictator of the fictional country of Kangan. The first two are childhood friends of His Excellency, Sam: Christopher Oriko, the Commissioner of Information, and Ikem Osodi, editor of the National Gazette. The third is Chris’s girlfriend, Beatrice Okoh, who works in the Ministry of Finance. Educated abroad, all four are part of the postcolonial elite, although as a military man Sam lags somewhat behind his former schoolmates. What began as collaboration (after taking power, Sam called on Chris and Ikem for help) curdles into discord as Sam’s grip on power begins to slip; the national economy is struggling and a drought in the north of the country causes increasing unrest. The breakdown of the postcolonial state is visible in the daily traffic jams, the poor state of the roads, and the lack of social services that punctuate events in the plot. There is also a growing division between rich and poor, evident in the interactions of these characters with taxi drivers and other workers, as well as in the tensions between Beatrice and her maid, Agatha, and Ikem’s arguments with his girlfriend Elewa, a shop assistant and daughter of a market woman. By the end of the novel, all three men are dead: Ikem has been arrested and killed by the police; Chris is murdered while traveling north; and Sam is unseated by a coup. Only Beatrice and Elewa, now pregnant with Ikem’s child, remain. As in The Last of the Empire, the dictator exerts a gravitational pull in Anthills of the Savannah, shifting the terms of critique associated with the earlier literature of disillusionment. While the novel’s emphasis is on those

Mésaventures

125

close to the dictator, Sam also enters the frame, and the novel makes use of these multiple perspectives in order to interrogate the work of the dictator novel itself. The narrative opens with a meeting of the Executive Council in the Presidential Palace. The scene is a satire of the political class narrated from Chris’s point of view. The ministers grovel before His Excellency, to comic effect, and several have even adopted a military style of dress. “It is amazing,” Chris thinks, “how the intellectual envies the man of action.”36 Yet he too cowers before Sam. Achebe also registers the increasing influence of foreign interests in the country. As Chris acknowledges, the Executive Council is no longer the center of power. It is instead Beatrice who provides a view of the dictator’s new inner circle, as a guest at an exclusive dinner where the guests include the chairman of the Kangan-​American Chamber of Commerce, the director of the secret police, and an attractive American journalist. The journalist openly lectures Sam on the importance of servicing foreign debts: “What we must remember is that banks are not houses of charity,” she declares. “They’re there to lend money at a fair and reasonable profit. If you deny them their margin of profit by borrowing and not paying back, they will soon have to shut down.”37 This attention to foreign influence is not a means for displacing responsibility from Africans themselves. Achebe is primarily concerned with the internal causes of dictatorship, hence the novel’s attention to those around the dictator. However, in making the dictator present, Achebe must also register the global forces for which the dictator is a conduit. Not only is Sam not omnipotent, he proves expendable. As one passerby comments to Chris when they learn of the coup, in a country like Kangan it is not hard to “go make” another president. Another proposes that the only way to stop this cycle is to “go [to] England and negotiate with IMF to bring white man back to Kangan.”38 More than disillusionment, Achebe here stages the final disintegration of the project of independence. In contrast to the earlier novels, Achebe’s choice to follow multiple characters in Anthills of the Savannah coveys a broader view of the social dynamics that sustain and flow from dictatorship. This includes Chris, Ikem, and Beatrice, as well as a wider cast of characters drawn from diverse social classes, whose presence demonstrates Achebe’s attempt to open up an expanded vision of the demos (populace), even if the idea of a democracy to come still remains in question. More challenging, however, is the novel’s revision of its structuring principles as the narrative unfolds. The narrative initially presents itself as a series of testimonies, with Chris identified as the “First Witness” in the opening chapter and Ikem as the “Second Witness.” But the second chapter, where the focalization (point of view) briefly shifts to Sam, punctures this conceit. Then, a third of the way through the novel, there is a break in temporal progression as the narration moves forward to a future point in which Beatrice reflects back on present events: “For weeks and months after I had definitely taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history as I could lay my hands on,” she explains, “I still could

126

Chapter 4

not find a way to begin.”39 Beatrice, it turns out, is both the “third witness” in and the compiler of the story, at least until an omniscient narrator fully takes over in the final chapters. This formal instability (or volatility) is crucial to understanding Achebe’s project in Anthills of the Savannah. The novel begins by staging the documentary function of the dictator novel, as the testimony of those close to the dictator (the “witnesses”). But it then moves toward a self-​reflexive interrogation of such testimony, putting into question the value of the first-​person account. These are imperfect witnesses, in the sense that each narrator has his or her own agenda. Beatrice, for instance, makes clear that part of her motivation for writing is self-​defense, because she wants to contravene the way she has been characterized in the press. Chris defends his decision to remain in the cabinet and attempts to absolve himself of responsibility by arguing: “I couldn’t be writing this if I didn’t hang around to observe it all.”40 Ikem presents a more complicated case. He is in many ways an idealized example of the writer-​intellectual. As the editor of the National Gazette, he takes pleasure in publishing crusading editorials. At the same time, the narrative notes several instances in which Ikem fails to intervene and even adopts a kind of intellectual or aesthetic curiosity in watching violence unfold, as when he listens to a neighbor beating his wife or he watches a soldier attack a youth at the market. “There are things,” Ikem argues, echoing Chris, “which an observer can only see if he resists the temptation to jump into the fray and become an actor himself.”41 Achebe here illuminates the tension between observation (bearing witness) and action which had long been a topic of debate among writers of his generation. Yet Anthills of the Savannah does not necessarily advocate direct action as a counterpoint to detached observation. As Ikem explains in a speech to the Student Union at the University of Bassa: I want instead to excite general enlightenment by forcing all the people to examine the condition of their lives because, as the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth living . . . As a writer I aspire only to widen the scope of that self-​examination. I don’t want to foreclose it with a catchy, half-​baked orthodoxy. My critics say: There is no time for your beautiful educational program; the masses are ready and will be enlightened in the course of the struggle. And they quote Fanon on the sin of betraying the revolution. They do not realize that revolutions are betrayed just as much by stupidity, incompetence, impatience and precipitate action as by doing nothing at all.42

The role of the writer (as with the dictator novel) is that of careful social analysis, rather than adherence to a particular political program. Ideological orthodoxy, as Ikem earlier argues to Beatrice, is the enemy of art, because it blinds the artist to the faults of the oppressed as much as to the humanity of

Mésaventures

127

the oppressor.43 It is only once the writer has shed all possible political orthodoxies that a new (political as well as aesthetic) radicalism might be possible. “Writers don’t give prescriptions,” Ikem declares in response to a question about the role of the Third World writer from the audience at the University of Bassa. “They give headaches!” Such declarations read as a statement of intent; like Ikem, Achebe offers more questions than prescriptions for the problem of dictatorship. The novel further invites this parallel by mirroring Ikem’s major political awakening—­ his newfound appreciation for the political role of women—­in the resolution of the plot.44 At the end of the novel, Beatrice and Elewa hold a naming ceremony for Elewa’s baby girl, where Beatrice assumes the father’s role. The gathering is also a commemoration of Chris and Ikem attended by the various taxi drivers, student leaders, and workers encountered in the narrative. This radically heterogeneous group suggests a new vision for the nation and an alternative political future consistent with many of the values espoused by Ikem. But the community described in this closing scene is also, following Neil ten Kortenaar, a community “so imaginary that it exists nowhere outside the novel.”45 This closing scene does not resolve the conflicts that ostensibly drive the plot, since the problem of dictatorship remains in place. More importantly, if this closing scene intends to idealize women as the bearers of an alternative political future, Beatrice herself contravenes such a reading when she critiques the role given to women in traditional society as that “of intervening only when everything else has failed.”46 While this final scene suggests closure by introducing a future political community in which women play a central role, the novel itself resists such an easy conclusion. The lack of resolution in Anthills of the Savannah has been a source of frustration for critics, who tend to read this as a commentary on the challenges to consolidation of the postcolonial African nation-​state. In this register, the novel’s displacement of the political (the dictator) by the domestic (as political allegory) seems a sign of exhaustion or pessimism about the future to come. I offer a different interpretation: in shifting his attention to women and the domestic sphere as the site for the creation of new political communities, Achebe signals the limits of the anti-​dictator project of the dictator novel, at least as imagined in continuity with the earlier literature of political disillusionment. Although the cabinet and the scheming of the dictator’s subordinates provide the initial entry into the center of power, this does not suffice for an adequate analysis of dictatorship; hence the novel’s intermittent attention to the global forces that sustain dictatorship, as well as its turn to alternate (if utopian) political communities. To return to my argument about the renegotiations of the structuring logic of the narrative, the apparent incongruence of the novel’s conclusion is another instance of its ongoing formal mutation. For the dictator novel to provide a cogent examination of authoritarian power, Achebe suggests, it will have to look beyond the presidential palace, the simple enumeration of the dictator’s crimes, and even the dictator

128

Chapter 4

himself, and must instead turn to and push the limits of narrative form so as to account for the complex and shifting phenomena that coalesce around the dictator and make his regime possible. Such a project will require a rethinking of the novel form, which includes a move away from singular or exemplary protagonists and toward self-​reflexive interrogation of the political function of literature itself. Anthills of the Savannah, although perhaps not altogether successful, is an attempt to stage this kind of experimentation, and its conclusion points to new possible paths for the literary exploration of dictatorship.

Doing Things with the Dictator Novel: Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, and Sony Labou Tansi From the 1970s onward, dictatorship became a recurring theme and the dictator a pervasive figure in novels from throughout the African continent.47 These works playfully invoke their historical referents, often generalizing the setting in order to more broadly address the problem of dictatorship. The recourse to fictionalized settings and dictators is often read as self-​protection; as Dominic Thomas argues, in the face of censorship and oppression, writers “have found it necessary to resort to the veil of allegory to conceal their narratives, even if everyone sees through it and knows that the fictional state being described is in fact the real state.”48 Without dismissing the real dangers involved in writing under and about a present dictatorship, I posit that this move has more critical heft than allowed by the term “allegory.” The veil is very thin: paratextual devices such as the author’s foreword often serve to name and puncture the allegory before the narrative even gets under way. See, for instance, Sembène’s foreword to The Last of the Empire, where he (sardonically) threatens legal action against anyone who insists on real-​ world parallels. The point is not that the world of The Last of the Empire is in fact Senegal or that the “Venerable One” is actually Senghor. Rather, within the frame of the dictator novel, the confusion of fact and fiction is the metafictional gesture by which writers point to the political work of the text. At stake is not just a specific African dictator, but the African dictator as a composite of individual cases that makes possible an amplification of the critique from the national to a continental and even potentially a global scale. As Soyinka makes clear in his preface to A Play of Giants (1984)—­a play that satirizes the African dictators who, with the support of either the West or Soviet Union, had come to loom large over the political life of the continent—­dictatorship was not solely an African problem; and Achebe, too, argued that dictatorship was not particular to the Third World.49 Which is to say that, while these works emerged in response to and were concerned with contemporary political realities, they cannot simply be read on the basis of their historical referentiality. Once again, I am making an argument for the necessary “untimeliness” of the dictator novel, even when its historical

Mésaventures

129

referents seem straightforward. This opens the dictator novel to projects that extend well beyond a critique of the dictator to questions of the relationship between literature and politics at large. The ideal of the committed writer and committed writing underwent significant transformation in the two decades following African independence, with many writers retreating from public declarations of commitment. The new novels, in turn, were darker, disjointed, even farcical and grotesque. Writers’ engagement with the realities of the African postcolony engendered what Pius Adesanmi calls a “radical re-​invention of textual idiom.” This includes the disruption of narrative time (de-​linearization), the multiplication of narrative voices (polyphony), and the use of neologisms and other “syntactic transgressions,” as well as recourse to the discursive strategies of various genres of African orature.50 When discussing this shift, Mamadou Kalidou Ba notes the influence of the French and Latin American nouveau roman, particularly in the multiplication of narratives, the disruption of narrative time through devices such as analepsis and prolepsis, and a move away from realism toward metafictional reflection on the nature of writing itself. The recourse to orature begat the use of introductory formulae, creating a rhythm of repetition; the direct interpellation of the reader by the narrator; and a more polemical tone in the narrative.51 Writing in 1988, Tchichellé Tchivéla also attributed many of these features in Congolese writing to the influence of Latin American writers and specifically the Latin American nouveau roman (nueva novela or boom novel), charting a trans-​Atlantic kinship (une parenté outre-​Atlantique).52 The textual features enumerated here expand upon the vocabulary for the literary representation of the dictator elaborated in my discussions of The Last of the Empire and Anthills of the Savannah. This section reads the above observations into the generic series of the dictator novel; it is not a simple progression, but rather one in which the nascent conventions of the dictator novel cross with other genres (narrative conventions, modes, and so on) and critical concerns. My focus will be on the use of focalization and the implication of the writer in the text, which for Aminata Sow Fall facilitates a repurposing of the dictator novel in order to address the reception of African women’s writing; the return of questions of complicity and commitment in writing about the dictator, which are central to Henri Lopès’s The Laughing Cry; and the expansion and disruption of narrative time as a means for thinking about the endurance of dictatorship on the continent, which is crucial for understanding Sony Labou Tansi’s project in both Life and a Half and The Shameful State. Lopès and Labou Tansi also register the international prominence of Latin American literature and the dictator novel in particular. In turning attention to the world literary circulations of narratives about dictators and dictatorship, they reframe the dictator novel as a trans-​regional phenomenon, taking apart and repurposing the features associated with their Latin American counterparts.

130

Chapter 4

Published the same year as Anthills of the Savannah, Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Ex-​père de la nation (The Ex-​Father of the Nation, 1987) offers a very different approach to the role of gender in the dictator novel. Narrated in the first person, the novel presents itself as the autobiography of a recently deposed dictator, Madiama, who is writing in prison. Each day, he asserts, “I, his disillusioned Excellency [Son Excellence en désillusion], will continue my explorations [je poursuivrai mes détours] in the labyrinth of my conscience, clouded by eight callous, thirsting, and calamitous years in power.”53 The narrative follows Madiama’s rise and fall: he was elected president of his unnamed country on a wave of popular support, but he was poorly equipped to govern, and so he has quickly become dependent on his French advisor, Andru. Madiama had intended to be a benevolent president; to “develop” his people; and to not give in to the intoxications of power. But the country’s most important institutions remain under foreign control, and there is a severe drought. As the opposition grows more vocal, Madiama decides to resign. On the day of his resignation, demonstrations spread throughout the city and Madiama’s daughter is killed. Infuriated, Madiama turns on his opponents, setting off increasingly violent cycles of “subversion-​repression,” until the army removes him from power. Focalization through Madiama’s perspective allows Sow Fall to highlight the dictator’s isolation, which forms the core of her critique of authoritarian power. As she explained in a 1988 interview, she found inspiration for the novel in a visit to another (unnamed) African country, where she was struck by the way in which those who had so recently revered the ex-​head of state turned on him: “They [the dictators] are people who end up losing sight of the reality of things; and they are praised; they are flattered. So it was the hypocrisy of the people towards men of power that I wanted to analyze.”54 This isolation is crucial to the political imaginary that surrounds the dictator; as Andru explains to Madiama: You think that power isolates! That may be one impression, but the reasons of state demand it, Excellency. You are not an ordinary man. You are the Leader [Chef], the cynosure [point de mire] adored by thirty million men and women [. . .] You cannot blend into the crowd. You have to be shrouded in mystery and, slowly, the people will come to see you as a myth. A myth of power and glory. The entire apparatus of the State is intended [est destiné] for this. A man without mystery rules with difficulty . . . Of course, Excellency, this mystery will also unleash the most deranged imaginations and birth tall tales that, certainly, will not all be pleasing to you. This is the more troublesome [ennuyeux] side of power, incidentally easy to overcome. You simply have to close your ears when necessary. But the legend must be spun in order to maintain the mystery. The people need this, Excellency . . .55

Mésaventures

131

What Madiama, the person, experiences as a loss is vital to the creation of “Madiama,” the head of state. Only when the dictator makes himself absent from the lives of his subjects can he be invested with the surplus of meanings that sustain his dictatorship. Recall here Mbembe’s observation that authoritarian power in the postcolony institutionalizes itself in the form of a fetish: its signs are invested with a surplus of nonnegotiable meanings, which it is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge.56 Continuing from this, what Sow Fall calls the “hypocrisy of the people” is a product of their entanglement in the system of signs that constitutes and sustains authoritarian power. Yet Madiama misses the true implication of Andru’s explanation: if the ruler is simply the myth of power and glory, then that myth is transferrable from one body to another. Throughout the novel, Sow Fall makes much use of the opportunities for irony afforded by Madiama’s first-​person, retrospective narration. Not only does Madiama anticipate the error of his past actions when recalling earlier episodes, but the intimacy of focalization makes the reader privy to Madiama’s prevarications in the present. Foremost among these evasions is Madiama’s preference for narrating events from his earlier life rather than confronting his abuses while in office. Recollections of childhood and youth punctuate Madiama’s narration of his time in power; these nested memories serve as counterpoint, anticipating and complicating elements in the primary narrative. But they also displace a more extensive accounting or analysis of Madiama’s transgressions while in power. At the end of the novel, Madiama still sees himself as the victim of larger forces, an “intoxicating cycle” to which he suspects his successor will also succumb. There is no real analysis of the dictator’s conscience. What announces itself as confession becomes instead a project of self-​justification: in emphasizing the larger structures of power that drive the successive cycles of dictatorship, Madiama attempts to absolve himself of responsibility. This is an inversion of what I have earlier described as an effective displacement of the dictator as the center around whom power is organized in the African dictator novel. By putting the argument in the dictator’s mouth, so to speak, Sow Fall points to the limits of critiques that treat the dictator as a mere puppet of foreign interests, and thereby foreclose any analysis of his political or personal motivations. While the role of foreign interests is crucial to understanding dictatorship in Africa, it cannot be the sole end point of analysis. Sow Fall’s occupation of the dictator’s perspective also makes possible a different analysis of authoritarian power, one that marks its continuities with the logic of patriarchy. As anticipated by the novel’s title, Madiama proves an ineffective “father” of both the nation and the family. As head of state, he has very little actual power and happily grants control to others. He is similarly ineffectual within his own family. Not only does he fail to prevent his daughter’s death, he fails to intervene in the conflicts between his first wife, their children, and his second wife, Yandé. She, like Andru, has a stronger grasp of

132

Chapter 4

the political situation than Madiama. The folding of the politics of the nation onto relations within the dictator’s family recalls the family metaphor discussed in chapter 2, where the disorder of the dictator’s family stood for the disorder of the nation. In placing the dictator at the center of the narrative, however, Sow Fall collapses the distance of metaphor. The disorder of the dictator’s family is here coterminous with that of the nation, and this proximity reveals the crucial differences between the family and the nation-​state. Sow Fall here unstitches the central figure of patriarchal nationalist iconography.57 Madiama is no more the “father of the nation” than he is the “myth of power and glory” constructed around his person, but both are fictions crucial to the operation of dictatorship. At the metanarrative level, the conceit of the dictator’s autobiography enables a broader commentary on women’s writing and the place of women writers in this period. Sow Fall’s first novel, Le Revenant (The Ghost, 1976), was also the first novel published in French by a West African woman. The autobiographical mode was of particular importance to women writers of Sow Fall’s generation, and it has often been the default (and limiting) frame for analysis of their work.58 Although Sow Fall’s work—­in particular the novel La Grève des bàttu (The Beggars’ Strike, 1979)—­shares the social and political concerns of writers such as Sembène, it is not exempt from the critical tendency to read women’s writing as autobiographical. This is perhaps why, as Mary-​Kay Miller recounts from an interview with the author, Sow Fall “welcomed the opportunity to write in the first person with impunity, knowing that no one would try to attribute to her the thoughts and deeds of a character so unlike her.” The assumption here is that the woman writer would not and could not be “mistaken” for the dictator of her novel. As Miller remarks, “despite [Sow Fall’s] disavowal of any autobiographical intentions, the delight she expresses at writing in the first person invites closer scrutiny.”59 With Miller’s invitation in mind, I posit that L’Ex-​père de la nation is both autobiographical and an enfolding of autobiography for the ends of the dictator novel.60 By “autobiographical,” I mean that the novel is a declarative act of self-​writing: in taking up the dictator, Sow Fall repudiates the narrow possibilities afforded to women writers of her generation and claims the right to intervene in the larger political conversation. She capitalizes on the assumptions made of woman writers as license to fully immerse herself in the dictator’s perspective and thereby more closely analyze the internal workings of authoritarian power. L’Ex-​père de la nation is an “autobiography” that will not be read autobiographically. This frees Sow Fall to make her incursion into the dictator’s consciousness without the same concerns that wove through the novels by Carpentier, García Márquez, and Augusto Roa Bastos discussed in the previous chapter. Complicity, either as a recognition of entanglement or identification with the dictator, is not a source of anxiety here. Sow Fall does not make the dictator grotesque or monstrous so as to

Mésaventures

133

mark his separation from both the writer and reader; Madiama is shockingly ordinary. Nor does she resort to the repeated representation of sexual violence to describe what Mbembe terms the “phallocratic system.”61 Instead, using the very restrictions of the dictator’s perspective—­his limited capacity for self-​examination, which is also a limit of the conceit of autobiography—­ Sow Fall presents authoritarian power as coextensive with the patriarchal organization of society. While women play important roles in Achebe’s (Beatrice and Elewa) and Sembène’s (Cheik Tidiane’s wife, Dija Urmel) dictator novels, Sow Fall makes gender and gender relations the driving force in her critique of dictatorship. It is only by writing as the dictator, this novel suggests, that such an analysis is possible. In contrast to the works discussed thus far, Henri Lopès’s novel Le Pleurer-​ rire (The Laughing Cry, 1982) is much more explicitly concerned with the question of how to write about the dictator. The narrative unfolds as a series of debates between the dictator’s former butler, known simply as “Maître” (“master”), for maître d’hôtel, and a former cabinet secretary (directeur de cabinet) with whom Maître shares an account of his time in the dictator’s service. The text is comprised of Maître’s story, comments from the Secretary, and Maître’s descriptions of his life after he goes into exile. But the relationship between these materials and the temporal sequencing itself become increasingly confused as the narrative progresses. In the final section, one of the characters in Maître’s story writes a letter to the author (unnamed, but neither Maître nor Lopès) denouncing the entire work as fiction. The accusation mirrors a declaration made in the novel’s opening “warning” (sérieux avertissement), a disclaimer from the (fictional) Inter-​African Association of Francophone Censors. Having decided to allow the novel’s publication, the censors insist that a dictator such as that described in the novel “does not exist, cannot exist, in these days and on this continent. He is the fruit of a macabre imagination that is close to frenzy: a comic strip character!”62 More than puncture the veil of allegory, Lopès here announces his novel as a work of metafiction. The Laughing Cry is therefore both a novel about dictatorship in Africa and a novel about the dictator novel as a work of politically committed literature, a premise that Lopès submits to systematic interrogation. As a dictator novel, The Laughing Cry presents a familiar picture: General Hannibal-​Ideloy Bwakamabé Na Sakkadé, referred to simply as “Daddy” (Tonton), exemplifies the excesses and vulgarity of the archetypal African dictator.63 During a visit to an interior province, for instance, Tonton flings fistfuls of money to the waiting crowds; he carries a lion’s tail staff; he builds a village hut in the courtyard of the presidential palace; he reshuffles the presidential cabinet several times; he fraternizes with fellow dictators; and he initiates a series of monumental building projects financed by loans from international agencies. Maître himself is always in the room, but in the background. From this vantage point, he registers Tonton’s excesses, his missteps

134

Chapter 4

at public events and private meetings, and even his poor pronunciation of French. But many of these observations fall flat and suggest that Maître is simply catering to the Secretary’s desires. Put a little differently, Tonton’s vulgarity is beside the point; in order to present an effective critique of dictatorship, the narrative will have to look elsewhere. At the end of the novel Tonton remains in power, while the Secretary and Maître, who begins an affair with Tonton’s wife, are forced to flee the country. The dictator’s butler offers a perspective that is very different from the elite at the center of Achebe and Sembène’s dictator novels; his is the viewpoint of the masses whose experience of postindependence transformations has been distant from the political intrigue of the presidential palace. Maître, the reader is told early on, is not particularly enthusiastic about his new post, because he prefers to avoid politics and is suspicious of all “-​isms.” This cynicism is born of the understanding that, for Maître and his community in the working-​class districts of the city, daily life remains largely unchanged regardless of who is in power. Maître is not impervious to what Mbembe would call Tonton’s “majesty.” When it comes to discussing Tonton’s sexual escapades, for example, Maître intimates a parallel between the dictator’s appetites and his own, acknowledging the ways in which he too benefited from the “gifts” proffered to the dictator. But Maître is critical of the bureaucrats and politicians who surround Tonton. Recalling one cabinet meeting, Maître remarks: “A film-​maker would have loved the scene because, shot from a certain angle, it was just an array of attaché case lids, listening to the proposals of the Chief.”64 This is a striking image of the emptying-​out of the state under authoritarian rule, where the object of critique is those who allow this to happen as much as the dictator himself. Such observations unsettle the Secretary, who worries that in scoffing at the cabinet Maître “may be playing the enemy’s game.”65 Maître’s gleeful descriptions of his sexual exploits are similarly a cause for concern. The Secretary worries that Maître is “mixing up genres and losing sight of the objective of all committed writing,” adding: “And the African book coming from these times, and having any respect for itself, cannot choose but be committed  .  .  .”66 Underneath the Secretary’s desire for generic coherence and political clarity lies the problem of complicity. While Maître freely acknowledges his imbrication in Tonton’s patronage network, the Secretary resists any recognition of the role he played in the regime. Per the Secretary, the “committed” work must focus solely on the dictator’s crimes; to expand the field of analysis would implicate other social actors and, according to the Secretary, undermine its anti-​dictator project. Two distinct models for the dictator novel emerge in this back-​and-​forth. The first, represented by the Secretary, is narrowly defined as an attack on the dictator; while the second, Maître’s version, opens toward a broader social critique that includes the dictator’s subordinates as well as the international interests that prop up the dictatorship. Lopès’s investment is in the latter, as indicated by Maître’s sly comparison of the Secretary to a censor: “all things

Mésaventures

135

considered,” Maître explains when he decides to elide an account of sex with Tonton’s wife, “I decided to avoid an unequal clash with the censor.”67 The term “censor” refers directly to the Secretary and, more obliquely, to the government censor. There are, Lopès suggests, instructive parallels between the demands made by the Secretary for a “disciplined” and committed text and those made by the Inter-​African Association of Francophone Censors whose disclaimer opens the novel. “Africa,” they write, “has need of heroes exalting our positive moral values and our ancestral cosmology.”68 The important opposition is not between the writer and a repressive government apparatus, but between the imaginative work of fiction and the external demands placed upon that work. This position is consistent with Lopès’s own statements on commitment, as in a 1977 interview where he argued that, rather than endeavor to prove that he was engagé, the writer should work to engage his audience (Il doit engager son lecteur). “The artist should not attempt to compete with the politician [le tribun] or the guerrilla with his work,” he added. “No work of art will ever replace a meeting, no work of art has ever brought down a regime.”69 Because Lopès himself held a variety of government posts in the Republic of the Congo, including that of prime minister (1973–­75), he is often taken as a difficult case in discussions of commitment. His political life, public statements, and the substance of his literary work do not always comfortably align with each other.70 Rather than treat these (real or perceived) divergences as a problem, I take them as a signal about the particular work of literature vis-​à-​vis the public statement or direct political action. Lopès is interested here in the critical potential of literary invention as a retort to programmatic models of commitment, which (he maintains) foreclose effective analysis. The novel models itself as an alternative “engaging” text that is capable of engendering critical consciousness precisely because it is a work of fiction. The mechanics of literary form are therefore crucial to this project: The Laughing Cry comprises a series of interwoven voices, textual allusions, and (fictional) paratextual frames that unsettle the principles of narrative order. For instance, having grown exasperated with the Secretary’s complaints, Maître inserts an extended quotation from Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, 1796). In the quoted passage, Diderot’s narrator defends the literary value of his work and upbraids the hypocritical reader who would claim to be scandalized by the many sex scenes in the book.71 This is a fitting response to the Secretary, to be sure. But the quotation also functions as an announcement to the reader of Lopès’s novel. In Jacques the Fatalist, the narrative (Jacques’s story of his loves, told to his master) is repeatedly interrupted by chance events and interpolated stories. Built in dialogue with Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), Diderot’s novel is a meditation on philosophical determinism (fatalism) and the capacity of the novel to explore

136

Chapter 4

such topics. The Laughing Cry similarly deviates from its apparent mission (Maître’s narrative as an anti-​dictator project) and becomes a larger meditation on writing, politics, and the dictator novel as such. The extended quotation of Diderot therefore marks a break with what had seemed to be the organizing principles of the narrative: no longer is Maître simply a butler writing a first-​person account. Having discarded this conceit, Maître is now free to take a more inventive approach, as he does in narrating the death of a resistance leader, Captain Yabaka, three times.72 Maître was not present for these events, which take place after he goes into exile. Nevertheless, he describes in detail the torture, show trial, and eventual death of Yabaka; these are scenes of grotesque violence in which Tonton rails at and then urinates into the mouth of his victim. Then Maître turns to the stories that have begun to circulate about Yabaka’s death. One describes the excess of bullets shot into Yabaka’s body. Another takes a more fantastic turn: Yabaka survives multiple salvos from the firing squad and curses Tonton; the soldiers go mad, Tonton’s face is stricken with mysterious spots that defy treatment, and Yabaka joins the pantheon of mythical heroes of the resistance. This shift is a retort to the Secretary’s demand for textual coherence and an ironic fulfillment of the censor’s request for a “positive hero.” Lopès suggests that it is only possible to proffer the latter by violating the former. In the process, he also highlights the importance of stories (fictions, no matter how improbable) for sustaining resistance under dictatorship. The closing pages of the novel further foreground and celebrate the critical potential of fiction. This final break takes the form of a letter written by Soukali, Maître’s mistress, to the author of the narrative, who is no longer Maître. Tonton, “Soukali” reveals, is actually a provincial prefect, Maître a bouncer at a local nightclub, the writer a young heart specialist recently returned from Europe, and she one of his patients. Their small stories of provincial drama have been recast in the grand narrative of the dictator novel. Yet the fictional story still bears on reality, as “Soukali” writes: There is scarcely as much difference between your story and our lives as between a Van Gogh, a Cézanne or a Modigliani and a photograph of the original model. But the magic and teaching power [la magie et la puissance pédagogique] of art, isn’t it less to resemble reality than to lend to reality the colors of the painter’s heart? If that is your aim, your bleeding vision is certainly more acceptable than the prissy edifying images demanded by the young compatriot Cabinet Secretary.73

In his brief response to the letter, the (now unnamed) narrator insists, “in fact, I have borrowed nothing from reality, nor yet invented anything.” But what is at stake is not the distinction between fact and fiction. The author’s commitment inheres in the act of imagination and composition of the aesthetic object, rather than its use-​value. The “magic”—­or, more programmatically,

Mésaventures

137

the instructive potential—­of art lies in its difference from reality; that is, its excess. If the narrative in The Laughing Cry represents the resistance of the writer (“Maître”) to a variety of political imperatives, the closing letter effectively frees Maître’s story from historical referentiality, allowing it to emerge fully as the author’s invention. This final interruption also allows Lopès to make a more direct commentary on the dictator novel as a genre already in international circulation. As Soukali notes, the final version of Yabaka’s death is a “metamorphosis” that has “some echo of the Latin American scene,” which she finds unsuited to “the Africa of today.” The reference is to magical realism and, implicitly, to García Márquez as the writer most directly associated with magical realism via the international success of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). There is, this moment acknowledges, already an established vocabulary for writing about violence and dictatorship in Latin America, and an African novel on those same topics will likely be read in those terms. Lopès distinguishes his own novel from the Latin American model by making pointedly limited use of its vocabulary. The change in register in the final version of Yabaka’s death demonstrates Lopès’s familiarity and facility with this register, without fully subscribing to it. Discarding the demands of political orthodoxy as well as the established model, Lopès presents his dictator novel as a site of experimentation and excess in which different perspectives and narrative modes (tactics) are put to work, recoding and expanding the established vocabulary of the genre. In so doing, Lopès argues for the critical value of the imagination, which allows both the author and reader to look beyond the conditions of the present toward other political futures. Dictators and dictatorship were a recurrent concern in Sony Labou Tansi’s novels and plays. Following from my analysis of The Laughing Cry, I will focus on Labou Tansi’s first two novels, and specifically on his engagements with Latin American literature. The foremost “representative” of the Latin American dictator novel here is García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), which, as the follow-​up to One Hundred Years of Solitude, went into quick international circulation and received much critical attention.74 Labou Tansi’s novel L’État honteux (The Shameful State, 1981) centers on Colonel Martillimi Lopez, a figure who is once again familiar in his propensity to excess and lasciviousness as well as his penchant for violence. Lopez bears a striking physical resemblance to García Márquez’s dictator, as he “came into the world holding onto his hernia [en se tenant la hernie] and exited still holding on to it.”75 The “hernia” refers to Lopez’s herniated testicle, which recalls the General’s herniated testicle in The Autumn of the Patriarch, a defining feature of the character and a comic motif in García Márquez’s novel. As intimated by this opening, The Shameful State reads as a parody of The Autumn of the Patriarch, magnifying to the point of distortion the tropes and style of its Latin American counterpart. The dictator’s

138

Chapter 4

testicles are obsessively invoked, repeatedly exposed, and come to function as a metonymy for both the dictator and the nation-​state. See, for example, an early scene in which Lopez recounts his battle scars: “And so out came his male junk, ravaged by pock marks and blemishes, and please, don’t go thinking I’m crazy: this is where the nation begins.”76 At the end of the novel, again playing on The Autumn of the Patriarch, Lopez has one of his assistants (Vauban) killed and served as dinner at a banquet for visiting foreign dignitaries. Unlike the members of the high command of the presidential guard to whom García Márquez’s General serves the late Rodrigo de Aguilar, however, these guests consume the body without noticing what they are eating, even as Colonel Lopez announces: “Here, help yourselves, eat, this is Vauban.”77 Labou Tansi here elevates the transcontinental allusion from its emphasis on the dictator’s barbarity—­the purpose of the equivalent scene in The Autumn of the Patriarch—­to a critique of the complacency of the international community. In both cases, the scene aims to describe the nature of authoritarian power, but Labou Tansi has expanded the frame of the critique to include the international forces that keep these dictators in place, emphasized by the relocation of this scene to the end of the novel. In formal terms, the narrative voice of The Shameful State similarly evokes the “multiple monologue” and extended sentence structure of The Autumn of the Patriarch. The narration shifts vertiginously between the single and plural first person, as well as an omniscient third person. However, this is not a confrontation between the dictator and a collective “we,” as was the case in García Márquez’s novel, but a feverish cacophony of voices from which the reader struggles to glean a succession of events. Through such exaggeration, which is effectively an explosion of the textual features of the Latin American precedent, Labou Tansi collapses existing tropes for the literary representation of the dictator and recasts them for use in the African context. Rather than simply assimilate the Latin American dictator novel as a model, then, Labou Tansi pushes it to the very ends of its logic. The result is a strange and disturbing text, which offers few of the satisfactions (such as they are) of its Latin American predecessor. In its inflation of the archetype of the African dictator, The Shameful State is also a rejoinder to the easy circulation of dictator novels on the international literary market, which are received as evidence of the (stereotyped) barbarity of the African dictator. As Ato Quayson observes in a discussion of Mbembe’s De la postcolonie (On the Postcolony, 2000), a crucial weakness of Mbembe’s argument is that it does not trace the history of the scatological register, or the history of how the West has deployed this as a stereotype of African politics.78 Critics of the Latin American dictator novel have similarly noted the ways in which writers such as Carpentier and García Márquez play into the prevailing pessimism about Latin American politics, and suggest that it is because of this that their dictator novels have enjoyed success

Mésaventures

139

in Europe and the United States.79 By first linking his dictator (Lopez) to the Latin American archetype and then exaggerating both, Labou Tansi proffers a hyperbolic monster that cannot easily be read back into a specific time or place, frustrating the usual associations and readerly satisfactions. Indeed, despite its opening line, The Shameful State does not end with the death of the dictator, nor does it imagine an end to dictatorship. Instead, the final scene has Lopez admonishing the excesses of his predecessors, to the adoration of the crowds, who chant “Long live Lopez.” Although a dictator novel, The Shameful State aims to make itself unreadable within the bounds of the genre (understood in relationship to the historical phenomenon of dictatorship), short-​circuiting its capacity for international circulation. Critics mark the publication of Labou Tansi’s first novel, La Vie et demie (Life and a Half, 1979), as a turning point in the representation of dictatorship, or “power” (pouvoir), in Francophone African literature.80 This novel is also a frequent touchstone in Mbembe’s theorization of the aesthetics of vulgarity in On the Postcolony. In both that book and earlier essays, Mbembe cites Life and a Half in describing the popular obsession with orifices, odors, and genital organs; the proliferation of clientelism and rent-​seeking; the use of violence, and in particular sexual violence; and the importance of spectacle and public ceremony to authoritarian regimes. But Life and a Half itself resists the kind of exemplarity ascribed to it by Mbembe. Labou Tansi brings to the theme of dictatorship elements of the grotesque, the baroque, the absurd, and a subversive surrealism. This makes for a challenging and even claustrophobic text; one that evades ostensible historical referentiality (the claim implicit in Mbembe’s citations of the novel) and pointedly departs from the kinds of critical realism most immediately associated with committed literature. The narrative tracks the violent reign of the Providential Guides in the fictional country of Katamalanasia; these Guides are a succession of dictators “supplied” by an unnamed European power. As in later dictator novels, the regime maintains its ties to the former colonizer and relies on a variety of foreign advisors; there are also myriad references to the dictators’ sexual activities and sexual organs—­their “tropicalities” (tropicalités)—­as well as an emphasis on grotesque and spectacular violence. In the opening scene, for instance, the (current) Providential Guide slits the throat of, disembowels, and cannibalizes the opposition leader, Martial. But Martial refuses to die. His voice emanates from his remains until the Providential Guide tears these apart, drinks Martial’s blood, and feeds the rest to Martial’s family. Only Martial’s daughter, Chaïdana, remains alive. When the Providential Guide attempts to take Chaïdana as a mistress, Martial’s ghost prevents him from consummating the affair. But Martial and his descendants, too, engage in acts of escalating violence. As the novel unfolds, generations of characters proliferate at a dizzying pace. Eventually, a portion of Katamalanasia secedes, setting off an arms race and subsequent atomic war that destroys the world.

140

Chapter 4

At the end of the novel, one character (Jean Calcium) emerges from an underground shelter to find a new political order in which people refuse to speak of the past. As suggested by this summary, Life and a Half pressures, if not exceeds, the parameters I have set for the dictator novel. I take Life and a Half as a limit case: an extreme or marginal instance of the genre that highlights the dictator novel’s complicated engagement with questions of time, historical causality, and the relationship between fiction and the historical circumstances to which literature responds. Even as it follows successive generations of Guides and their opponents, the novel continually disrupts its temporal progression, swelling and distorting the narrative time-​space, multiplying characters and voices, and disorienting the reader. Its multiplicity of generic registers has drawn comparison to everything from Latin American magical realism (Martial’s ghost, for instance) to science fiction (as in the speculative technologies that result in the destruction of the world).81 But Labou Tansi does not entirely abandon the history of dictatorship on the African continent. Instead, Life and a Half is an exploration of genre itself as a way of knowing the world. Recalling several of the examples discussed thus far, Labou Tansi explicitly rejects possible historical parallels in the opening “warning” (Avertissement) to the novel. Life and a Half, he insists, is a work of invention. However, the disavowal is not entirely straightforward: To those who seek an engaged author, I offer an engaging man. Let the others, who will never be my others, take me for a simple liar. Of course an artist presents just one of infinite pathways into his work. And for those who love local color, who will accuse me of being savagely tropical, and of adding grist to the mill already brimming with racists, I wish to make clear that Life and a Half leaves only the sort of stains made by life itself. This book takes place entirely within me. Anyway, the earth is no longer round. It never will be again. Life and a Half becomes this fable that sees tomorrow through today’s eyes. No present—­neither political nor human—­should get mixed up in this. That would lead to confusion. The day when I’m given the chance to speak about any present day whatsoever, I will not take a thousand paths to get there, in any case, not a path as tortuous as this fable.82

Labou Tansi here plays with the distinction between fiction and reality; poking fun at authorities who might mistake one for the other, as well as readers seeking an ideal politically committed work. The designation of the text as a fable both foregrounds its status as fiction and, following Eileen Julien, “alienates the real world” in order to make it all the more visible.83 The association with fable also has important implications for the representation of

Mésaventures

141

time. This is the most unstable element in the novel, as staged in the opening lines: “It was the year Chaïdana turned fifteen years old. But time. Time has tumbled. [Le temps est par terre.] The sky, earth, things, everything. Totally tumbled. [Complètement par terre.]”84 What begins as a marker of specificity, recalling the introductory formulae of orature, quickly loses its thread. To borrow from the French, time is “ungrounded.” The narrator makes repeated attempts to fix events in time, but time evades such discipline. Even seemingly discrete events slip backward or forward as the narrator makes connections with past or future events. Regularly in Life and a Half, the necessary teleological ordering of narrative and plot threatens to dissolve. This overarching confusion is submitted to provisional order at the end of the novel, where the moment of nuclear destruction is rewritten as an origin story: “This is how the Nile, that witnessed the births of all the pharaohs, was born, along with the Nyasa, the Victoria, and the lake region.”85 Time, already distended, becomes cyclical: a prehistoric myth in which to read the codes that govern the present. This gesture recalls the conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the last member of the Buendía family deciphers the prophecy of their history as Macondo is destroyed by the wind. However, this is only a momentary or provisional order, since after this Jean Calcium discovers a people who refuse to speak of the past. The generic type of the fable does not suffice to describe Life and a Half; fable too is a “law” that the narrative ultimately breaks or evades. The reader is therefore left with a series of overlapping possible genres (registers) in which to read the novel: myth, magical realism, science fiction, fable, and so on. It would be a mistake to privilege any of these to the exclusion of the others. Just as this novel withholds narrative closure, it refuses generic classification, and this very polymodality is the core of its critique of dictatorship. Rather than offer a critique or “theory” of dictatorship—­or even of resistance to dictatorship—­ Labou Tansi models a practice of evasion. Read within the frame of the dictator novel, Life and a Half offers a radical amplification and disarticulation of the principle of historical progression that is crucial to the representation of dictatorship; specifically, the dictator novel’s frequent narration of the rise and fall of the dictator. This is a very different approach to the problem of the endurance or repetition of dictatorship that troubles the conclusion of so many of the dictator novels discussed in this chapter and in this book as a whole. Here, dictatorship is always already in repetition, as part of a serialized narrative with no foreseeable conclusion. This is, first, a critical observation about the recurrence of dictatorship on the African continent, despite the efforts of various opposition movements; and second, it is a commentary on the dictator novel itself as a genre whose tropes and formulae threaten to become similarly repetitive. The only possible dictator novel, then, is one that barely functions as a novel; that is, one that refuses to idealize any of its actors, particularly the opposition, and which denies the narrative teleology of the dictator’s rise and fall. There is no clear beginning

142

Chapter 4

or end in the temporality of dictatorship, and this, Labou Tansi suggests, is where the analysis of the dictator should begin. This chapter has told two stories about the dictator novel in African literatures. In the first, the dictator novel emerges from the literature of political disillusionment, as the concentration of its broad-​ranging concerns into the figure of the dictator. This is a local genealogy for the African dictator novel, which emphasizes its relationship to the political questions that characterized the decades following independence; the chronology moves from independence, through the era of disillusionment, to the late 1980s. The second story moved backward through time (from 1987 to 1979), emphasizing writers’ use of the dictator novel to address issues of gender, genre, political commitment, and narrative ontology. The end of this second story, which is also the earliest point in time, illuminates points of “contact” between the Latin American and African dictator novel, where an established tradition crosses paths with nascent conventions. Here I make a crucial distinction: writers such as Lopès or Labou Tansi do not copy or imitate the Latin American dictator novel so much as register its existence and take it apart. The Latin American dictator novel is less a model or template than grist whose fragments become part of the broader constellation of tropes, themes, and motifs on which the African dictator novel will draw. As with much of the material discussed in chapter 2, Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half (1979) and The Shameful State (1981), as well as Sembène’s The Last of the Empire (1981) and Lopès’s The Laughing Cry (1982), mark what Josefina Ludmer (writing about the gaucho genre in nineteenth-​century Argentina) called the moment of emergence, as the moment “before the repetition, variation, and convention that precisely constitute a literary genre.”86 These works make visible the beginning of a critical and aesthetic vocabulary that would be consolidated over the course of the 1980s—as evinced in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Sow Fall’s L’Ex-père de la nation, both from 1987. Neither of these stories deserves primacy. Juxtaposing these narratives, however, illuminates the limits of existing literary-​critical frameworks for understanding the literatures of the Global South. In thinking comparatively across continents, the temptation is always to fashion an evolutionary narrative (progress through time) to match movement across space. This ordering impulse—­the desire to make organized “trees” out of incongruent and sometimes incommensurable agglomerations—­threatens to leave out a great deal of crucial information, because the search for sufficient parallels always risks the subsumption of difference. In telling the story of the emergence of the African dictator novel twice, I have endeavored to provide a more capacious account of how a genre (and generic series) comes together. The process is piecemeal, and individual instances are highly experimental; the concatenation of these instances, such as it is, is largely only visible in retrospect. The work of comparison itself, to return to my discussion in chapter 1, is

Mésaventures

143

necessarily speculative and incomplete. Hence my recourse to the organizing figure of the constellation for this project, which allows for the play of continuity, disruption, and unexpected deviations I have traced in this chapter. The process of unfolding continues: after the 1980s—­and specifically, after the end of the Cold War—­the African dictator novel will once again undergo a period of recalibration, as I discuss in the final chapter.

Chapter 5

The Dictator in the Corpolony On the Dictator Novel in the Time of Transition

Toward the end of chapter 3, I quoted a remark by Gabriela Polit-Dueñas about the resurgence of the Latin American dictator novel in the 1990s: “When the literary production of the region undergoes notable expansion, the caudillo reappears as a consecrated [figura consagrada] and consecrating figure [figura que consagra].”1 Polit-Dueñas’s observation usefully uncouples the dictator novel from the immediate political phenomenon of dictatorship. While the dictator novel might have originated as a literary retort to the dictator, it has become autogenous or self-​generating as a genre. The dictator, now a literary archetype, becomes a “consecrated” and “consecrating” figure precisely because it satisfies prevailing stereotypes (or pessimism) about politics in Latin America, Africa, or the Global South. This is not to say that the dictator novel is merely a market-​driven phenomenon, or a cynical exercise on the part of the writer. Its concern with the complicated relationship between politics and literature, as well as its self-​reflexive interrogations of its own ostensible undertaking, contravene such an easy dismissal. My point, rather, is that the critical projects of the dictator novel shift over time (and place), which is why a combination of synchronic and diachronic analysis is crucial to understanding the genre. The turn of the twenty-​first century saw a similar resurgence in the African dictator novel, as marked by the publication of two works by well-​established writers: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow, 2004−2007; 2006), discussed in chapter 1, and Ahmadou Kourouma’s En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, 1998). Although the return of the dictator (as a literary figure) was not here part of a notable expansion of the literary production of the region, it was concomitant with increased international interest in the African continent in the 1990s. Composed in a period of marked transformation, Ngũgĩ and Kourouma’s dictator novels look back to the Cold War-​era dictatorships familiar from the previous chapter, but they mobilize the dictator novel to interrogate the changes under way at both the regional and global scale.

145

146

Chapter 5

The results are often darkly comic. Early on in Wizard of the Crow, for instance, the government of Aburĩria unveils plans to build a tower that will succeed where the biblical Tower of Babel failed. Dubbed “Marching to Heaven,” the project is a birthday gift to the Ruler from his people. Part development initiative and part science fiction, Marching to Heaven will allow the Ruler to converse daily with God and put Aburĩria at the forefront of space exploration. But in order to build it, the government needs funding from the Global Bank, which has lately grown reticent in its lending. At the end of the novel, once Marching to Heaven has failed and the Ruler is ousted, its ambitions resurface as branding for a new enterprise: a building for the Globe Insurance Corporation advertised as “a real Marching to Heaven.”2 The unmaking and remaking of Marching to Heaven—­from the bombastic speculation of an autocratic regime to promotional rhetoric for a transnational corporation—­embodies the larger political argument of this novel. The Ruler cuts a familiar figure: vain, cruel, surrounded by a coterie of acolytes, and given to exaggerated displays of state ceremonialism. Indeed, Ngũgĩ’s analysis of dictatorship shares much with the African dictator novels of the 1980s, particularly in its attention to the role of foreign interests. But the mandates of those external powers have changed with the end of the Cold War, and the Ruler’s habits and aesthetics are suddenly out of step. The dictator in Kourouma’s Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals faces a similar set of pressures. After more than three decades in power, Koyaga finds the state coffers empty due to the combination of extravagant spending with falling prices for raw materials and a ravaging drought in the fictional Republic of the Gulf. The French government, his longtime sponsor, refuses further aid, calling instead for open elections. To secure supplemental funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Koyaga will have to implement structural adjustment reforms. The regime also comes under pressure from below, as a growing constituency of unemployed youth and demonstrators begins to agitate for change. At the end of the novel, Koyaga is forced from office following a National Conference (conférence nationale)—­which had intended but failed to bring the dictatorship to account and facilitate the transition to democracy—­and yet another assassination attempt. Understanding that the political mood has shifted, Koyaga hopes to return to power via democratic elections. But victory, as indicated by the present progressive “waiting” (en attendant) of the title, remains uncertain. Like Koyaga’s two fetishes, a Qur’an and a meteorite credited with helping him evade multiple assassination attempts and thereby remain in power for many years, the Cold War has “disappeared.”3 The final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 rearranged the geopolitical scaffolding that had sustained dictatorships on the African continent since the period of independence. In the decade that followed, the triumphal consolidation of neoliberal globalization further transformed global governance and

The Dictator in the Corpolony

147

political economy. Calls for political liberalization in Africa, as the “opening” of “closed” regimes, came with renewed demands for economic liberalization, as the attendant “opening” of “closed” markets. Proponents of liberalization held that such openings—­or transitions—­would spread and strengthen democracy and, more immediately, facilitate the flow of capital and goods in the global market.4 But while the term “transition” might suggest the reclaiming of popular sovereignty, the processes of conversion it entailed did not necessarily lead to greater freedoms, justice, or democracy for the majority, much as had proven the case with independence in earlier decades. Even as dictatorships fell in some African countries, autocratic rulers managed to stay in or return to power in others.5 The problem is not that these transitions failed, but that their actual intentions lay elsewhere. Transition, so-​called, was not a matter of jettisoning oppressive or outdated systems so much as adapting to the new requirements of the international community and, in particular, of international lenders and other financial interests. In Wizard of the Crow Ngũgĩ calls this new logic “corporonialism,” where the portmanteau term signals the interplay of continuity (elements of the old system remain in place) and discontinuity (new forms of oppression arise) that is familiar to the postcolony, combining corporate multinational capitalism with the dynamics of colonialism and its immediate successor, neocolonialism. This chapter takes the term “transition” not as a synonym for change, but as an open-​ended temporality in which the old order has disintegrated but no new system is firmly in place. Transition is a period of uncertainty, invention, and dramatic transformation in which the terms that are to structure the new order are still under negotiation. The outcome, to paraphrase Charles Piot on this period in the Togolese Republic, remains fundamentally unknown.6 Kourouma and Ngũgĩ use the dictator novel to address the shifting realities of this period of uncertainty, bending the novel’s established forms to the examination of the protracted time of crisis disguised by the rhetoric of transition. This requires a shift in focus from the dictator—­his excesses, violence, and other recognizable tropes of the dictator as a literary figure—­to the larger global political and economic systems within which dictatorships are embedded. Once the conduit for foreign interests, and previously able to bend these to their own ends, the dictators in these novels are now pushed to the sidelines. For Ngũgĩ in particular, this decentering or recentering of the critical thrust of the dictator novel changes the nature of opposition to dictatorship. There is here a second shift, from opposition at the local level to a consideration of the possibilities for cooperation and collaboration across the Global South. Within the frame of the dictator novel, this change in perspective represents a significant transition from emphasis on questions of power, sovereignty, and liberation at the national level—­which in the African context were continuous with the earlier literature of political disillusionment—­to a reconceptualization of dictatorship as a phenomenon that repeats across

148

Chapter 5

the fractionated geography of the Global South.7 Dictatorship in the Global South, I have argued, is never simply a local phenomenon. While this was an occasional or lurking observation in previous dictator novels, it comes to the fore at the end of the Cold War. But the shift raises a crucial question for my project in this book: If the dictator has become increasingly irrelevant to the operations of global systems of oppression, what then becomes of the dictator novel? Or, more precisely put, if the dictator novel is no longer primarily bound by an emphasis on opposition to a dictator, what might be the genre’s critical projects going forward? This too, I will argue, is a transition in which the outcome remains unknown; Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals and Wizard of the Crow provide a starting point for thinking the possible futures of the dictator novel. With this in mind, I will read Kourouma and Ngũgĩ’s novels, first, within the generic series of the dictator novel and in relation to the rhetorics of the novels discussed in the previous chapter; second, as critical uses of the dictator novel to account for transformations in the global system in the 1990s; and ultimately, as explorations of the limits of the genre at the cusp of the twenty-​first century.

The Dictator Novel after the Era of Disillusionment Chronologically, Kourouma and Ngũgĩ are contemporaries of the authors whose work I discussed in the previous chapter.8 My designation of Wizard of the Crow and Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals as distinct from the earlier dictator novels points to the limits of the generational model for literary-​ critical periodization. As Dominic Thomas has observed of Kourouma and Ousmane Sembène, not only did their work span the colonial−​ postcolonial divide, its content changed over time, moving from critiques of Western expansionist projects in Africa to the continent’s changing position in global realignments.9 The same is true of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.10 Kourouma and Ngũgĩ’s dictator novels are continuous with the critical concerns of their previous works, and they share much of the formal vocabulary of the dictator novels discussed in chapter 4. Here too there is parody and satire; a disruption of narrative temporality; the multiplication of narrative voices; the use of neologisms and other syntactic transgressions; elements of the fantastic; and, most significantly, recourse to the strategies of African oral literary traditions (orature). The difference lies in the critical ends to which these conventions are put. Both Kourouma and Ngũgĩ take up the dictator at a moment when the circumstances that conditioned dictatorship on the African continent have changed. This gives new urgency to the analysis of authoritarian power, as well as to the self-​reflexive consideration of the political function of the writer. No longer is the central concern of these works the persistence of dictatorship, but rather its transformations in the uncertain and still open-​ended time of transition following the end of the Cold War.

The Dictator in the Corpolony

149

The novels themselves are centrally concerned with the play of persistence and disruption: each positions its dictator in the long history of colonization and postindependence power struggles. In Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, the story of the dictator Koyaga begins with the Berlin Conference of 1884–­85, where the European powers divided the African continent among themselves, and then proceeds to the French colonization of West Africa and the life of Koyaga’s father, before turning to the future dictator. If Koyaga’s dictatorship was the inevitable culmination of a long history of violence—­as evidence of the ongoing operation of earlier systems of oppression—­the crisis he faces at the end of the novel is all the more disconcerting. Like Koyaga, Ngũgĩ’s Ruler in Wizard of the Crow began his career as a servant to the colonizers and a conduit for neocolonial interests, before taking control of the state.11 Both of these dictators ensured Western support for their regimes through the systematic elimination of purported communist insurgencies, and they now feel keenly the loss of a familiar (if imagined) enemy. As dictators, each gleefully embodies the aesthetics of vulgarity described by Achille Mbembe, particularly in their love of public spectacle, lavish expenditure, sexual excess, and extreme violence. Koyaga’s signature is the removal and stuffing of his victims’ genitals into their mouths, a distortion of the Malinke (Mandinka) hunter practice of putting an animal’s tail into its maw to trap its spirit or immanent force (nyama). Koyaga himself has achieved the rank of Master Hunter and is hailed as “the emasculating hunter of beasts and men.”12 Kourouma here effectively de-​fetishizes the political use of the hunter tradition: first, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals makes clear that, while actual historical dictators made frequent recourse to notions of African “tradition” to sustain their regimes, claims to traditional modes of power have less to do with cultural autochthony (returning to “authentic” African practices) than with the symbolic economy through which the dictator maintains his hold on the social imaginary. And, second, the assimilation of the hunt to politics is always an imperfect translation, as one cannot “hunt” one’s way to effective governance. Himself no stranger to violence—­the Ruler keeps a chamber in the presidential palace filled with the bones of his victims—­the most notable aspects of the dictator in Wizard of the Crow are his physical transformations. These begin as a mysterious ailment, the “Self-​Induced Expansion” (SIE) discussed in chapter 1. Frustrated by a myriad of small insults during a visit to the United States and infuriated by the Global Bank’s refusal to fund Marching to Heaven, the Ruler is struck dumb and begins to swell. While he regains the ability to speak after intervention by the Wizard of the Crow (the Ruler’s assistants have the sorcerer, here played by Kamĩtĩ, flown to New York), the swelling continues until the Ruler agrees to implement limited democratic reforms in a program nicknamed “Baby D,” for Baby Democracy. Ngũgĩ’s attention to the dictator’s body in Wizard of the Crow represents a significant recoding of the established tropes of vulgarity: no longer is the emphasis on

150

Chapter 5

the capacity of the dictator’s body to consume or to inflict harm on others, as in the many scenes of sexual assault in a novel such as Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975). The Ruler’s body itself becomes the locus of critique. As his body inflates and deflates, it figures economic and political realities: from the decadent extravagance of a dictatorship in crisis to the deflation of the dictator’s sovereignty when he agrees to concede power. Using the satirical register of the fantastic, Ngũgĩ works to imbue the tropes of vulgarity with new critical force, emphasizing the scatological in place of excess and abuse. This is not to say that Ngũgĩ entirely escapes the tendency to mobilize women’s bodies as metaphors for the larger political argument—­a perpetual issue in the representative logic of the dictator novel, whether women are cast as symbolic victims or idealized as figures for a better political future. Ngũgĩ’s attention to women as political actors, and in particular to the family unit represented by Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra, deserves the same kind of attention given to the conclusion of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. But in taking up the dictator’s body as something more than an object of fascination, and in putting that body to a different kind of figurative work, Ngũgĩ seeks new critical registers within the established vocabulary for the representation of the dictator. For both Ngũgĩ and Kourouma, recourse to parody, satire, and the fantastic serves not just to illuminate the central mechanisms and contradictions of authoritarian power, but to highlight the underlying realities of the emergent global order. The magical elements in these later novels bring to the surface the “magical” (seemingly miraculous or transformative) nature of transition, which is itself closely tied to the magical thinking that sustains the capitalist system. Each novel pays close attention to the ways in which objects and activities are quickly recoded according to the needs of the market. Examples include the ambivalent status of fetish objects in Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, which are at once magical and easily transformed into commodities. See, for instance, the scene in which Koyaga’s assistant Macledio flees a Bamileke royal court, taking with him the skulls of the king’s ancestors for protection. While the skulls keep the warriors in pursuit of Macledio at bay, it is their exchange value that assures his safety: Macledio sells the skulls to a Bamileke businessman to pay for his passage at the port.13 In Wizard of the Crow, three bags of money buried in the plains outside the capital city grow into trees that sprout leaves of American dollars. Once discovered, these are carefully uprooted and taken to the Ruler. But when the trees are unwrapped, the Ruler finds that giant, termite-​like creatures have consumed the leaves. The money trees exemplify the vulnerabilities of gains made through financialization. In this new era of magical thinking, money can “grow” and multiply, producing money from money itself; as Kamĩtĩ, who buries the bags to be rid of the money, unwittingly jokes: “The earth shall be my bank.”14 His investment flourishes, generating potentially infinite wealth, but such gains are ephemeral and can quickly disappear. Indeed,

The Dictator in the Corpolony

151

given the extremes of unemployment in Aburĩria, money itself has become a mysterious and elusive “thing” that is largely uncoupled from the exchange value of labor. The most significant innovation made by both Ngũgĩ and Kourouma, however, is their repurposing of the tropes and conventions of orature for the critical ends of the dictator novel, which opens new paths for formal experimentation in the genre. In chapter 1, I discussed at length Ngũgĩ’s use of the conversational tone, proverbs, and songs of Gikuyu oral and vernacular traditions to craft a new literary language—­or “fiction language,” including but not limited to language choice—­that would be familiar to his intended audience, the dispossessed masses of the Kenyan postcolony.15 The experiments that Ngũgĩ began in Caitaani Mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross, 1980) continue in Wizard of the Crow, particularly his use of the ogre (marimu) to figure the rapacious national bourgeoisie.16 Recall here Titus Tajirika, whom I briefly discussed in chapter 1. When he first appears in the novel, Tajirika is a businessman and Nyawĩra’s boss; he later becomes chairman of the Marching to Heaven project, the minister of finance, then defense; eventually, he unseats the Ruler and declares himself the emperor of Aburĩria. A notable physical transformation accompanies his rise. During a visit to the United States, Tajirika encounters an advertisement for Genetica, Inc., a company that grows body parts and promises to “change anybody into any identity of their desire.” Long tormented by the desire to be white (diagnosed in the novel as “white-​ache”), Tajirika enthusiastically begins the process. He receives a white arm and leg before Genetica shuts down, leaving his transition incomplete. Although Tajirika tries to keep his condition a secret, his daughter spots him one day and is convinced that ogres have taken over her father’s body, as they do in stories.17 While the basic meaning of Tajirika’s “ogre-​ness” is the same as in Devil on the Cross—­in his body and actions Tajirika exemplifies the monstrosity of the elite—­the attribution of his transformation to technological intervention embeds this process in the global circulations of capital and prestige. Tajirika is able to obtain treatment at Genetica, with the intent of escaping the strictures of anti-​black racism, because of his incredible (and often ill-​begotten) wealth, yet he remains at the mercy of the regulatory agencies (“the feds”) that shutter the company. Along similar lines, at the structural level, the narration of Wizard of the Crow expands upon and develops the polyvocal or pluralistic nature of storytelling that is central to Devil on the Cross. The narrator’s voice recalls that of a gĩcaandĩ performer; this is a dialogic (multivocal) poetic form in which performers both collaborate and compete. As in other genres of orature, gĩcaandĩ performers directly address and incorporate the audience. The performance ends with the promise of a future meeting, emphasizing its continuity as a productive “text” that provides a model for interpersonal and public discourse.18 Although Wizard of the Crow has a single narrator—­who

152

Chapter 5

shifts between the various plot lines and occasionally focalizes through specific characters, including the Ruler—­Ngũgĩ incorporates the dialogic and open-​ended elements of gĩcaandĩ performance in order to stage the limits of narrative omniscience. Over the course of the novel, the narrator highlights multiple and often-​competing versions of events, making recourse to both media reports and rumor, and he even calls on the audience. For instance, in preparing to describe the Ruler’s visit to the United States, the narrator concedes that one cannot be everywhere at once, and he appeals to “the invisible global community of Internet users” for their version of events.19 This shift at once interpolates the wider community with which the novel intends to engage and mirrors the disintegration of the dictator’s authority. Unlike the Ruler, who fights to keep the past system in place, the narrator of Wizard of the Crow opens the novel up to contribution, supplementation, and even contradiction. Storytelling is also a key motif within the narrative. Over the course of the novel, Constable Arigaigai Gathere, the policeman who initially pursued Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra, abandons his post and becomes a storyteller known as A.G., the “attorney general of storytelling.” Having “rejected the way of force and opted for that of words,” A.G. travels the country telling the story of the Wizard of the Crow, much like the narrator. As the narrator observes, A.G.’s version of events changes over time, depending on his audience and mood. Occasionally, A.G.’s version contradicts the narrator’s. This conflict is staged in a confrontation between A.G. and a drunken Kamĩtĩ, who disputes A.G.’s version of the Wizard of the Crow’s visit to New York. Kamĩtĩ experiences these discrepancies as an act of plagiarism and wants to correct the facts; but he is so drunk that he staggers outside, falls asleep, and is captured.20 Factual precision, it seems, matters less than the effect a story has on its audience. As the narrator remarks of A.G.’s rapt audiences, “his listeners came away with food of the spirit: resilient hope that no matter how intolerable things seemed, a change for the better was always possible.”21 Storytelling, then, sustains the struggle and can give life to new ideas. As Nyawĩra affirms in the closing lines of the novel, “Thank you, A.G. . . . Thank you for the gift of life.’ ” Such celebrations of storytelling contrast with Ngũgĩ’s attention to the work of complicit artists and writers in Wizard of the Crow. As in the dictator novels discussed in the previous chapter, Ngũgĩ is interested in the henchmen and acolytes who surround the dictator, whether these are his ministers—­ three of whom received their posts after undergoing surgery to enlarge their eyes, ears, and tongue, respectively, as mentioned in chapter 1—­or those who seek the Ruler’s favor. Such characters serve, first, to criticize the individuals who help to sustain the regime; and second, as the occasion for a deeper consideration of complicity. The novel names several former revolutionaries who have entered the Ruler’s service. Principal among these is the Ruler’s official biographer (The Official Biographer, TOB), a man formerly known

The Dictator in the Corpolony

153

as Luminous Karamu-​Mbu-​ya-​Ituĩka (pen writing, yelling, or proclaiming revolution), who shortens his name to Luminous Karamu-​Mbu (pen writing, yelling, or proclaiming). The Ruler’s biographer is always close at hand to “protect the country against malicious rumormongers, so-​called historians, and novelists, and to counter their lies and distortions.” But, to return to another prevalent motif in the dictator novel, writing and the writer are always suspect for the dictator; recall here the dictator Francia’s many insults to, and eventual execution of, his secretary Policarpo Patiño in Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme, 1974). In hearing his biographer give a faithful account of recent events, the Ruler realizes that Luminous is a liability. “This man had no imagination to sugarcoat reality and make it more palatable,” the Ruler thinks. “How did I engage such a fool?” Luminous is quickly disappeared. In his place, the Ruler hires a white Englishman to write an “objective” official biography celebrating the arrival of Baby D.22 The story of Luminous Karamu-​Mbu allows Ngũgĩ to make a familiar distinction between the dictator and the writer. While the former is, once again, dependent on writing for the administration of the state and relies on writing (fiction) to reshape reality to his own political ends, he is also keenly aware that writing, as a source of authority, is never fully under his control. The difference between the writer and the dictator is not that the former has a capacity with language and the latter does not, but that the writer embraces multiplicity and contradiction, which the dictator cannot abide. In this sense, the dictator is a “bad” writer, and Ngũgĩ seems to register the similarity so as to reinforce the old distinction. Yet, recalling the polyphonous structure of the narrative, this presumes that the writer is a singular figure. In shifting the narrative voice toward a more democratic model of storytelling (many voices, many narrators, many sources of authority), Ngũgĩ seeks to stage a pluralistic alternative—­repeated in the novel’s exploration of the daily lives of multiple characters living under dictatorship in Aburĩria—­thus effectively decentering both the dictator and the writer’s claims to authority. Ngũgĩ, in this sense, capitalizes on the very capaciousness of the novel form, stretching it to encompass an ever-​expanding social vision. The result is a sprawling and sometimes discontinuous narrative, but one whose very excess carries critical heft. In the end, the answer to dictatorship lies outside of the presidential palace and the dictator’s circle. In a similar vein, Kourouma uses the Malinke oral genre of the donsomana, or “hunter’s song” recited for members of the hunter clan, as the structuring principle for Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals; through this he places questions of complicity at the heart of his dictator novel. The performance of the donsomana unfolds over the course of six evenings (veillées), corresponding to the six chapters of the novel; it is recited by a sèrè or sora (Bingo), the oral performer or bard of the society of hunters, together with a koroduwa (Tiécoura), who is an initiate and respondent. Tiécoura’s cutting interjections provide an explicitly critical tone, embodying the more

154

Chapter 5

polemical attitude that Mamadou Kalidou Ba ascribes to the interpolation of the discursive modes of orature into the novel.23 As Tiécoura declares on the first evening, he and Bingo are committed to telling the truth about Koyaga’s dictatorship: “we shall denounce your lies, your numerous crimes and assassinations.”24 In this characterization, the celebration of the hunter’s exploits begins to sound like a drawing up of accounts: a trial, of sorts. Despite Tiécoura’s accusatory exclamation, however, the purpose of the donsomana is to restore the dictator to power. The impetus for the performance is the disappearance of Koyaga’s two fetishes, the Qur’an and the meteorite on which he has long relied. According to the long-​ago instructions of Koyaga’s marabout, once Koyaga has his purificatory or cathartic donsomana recited—­and only once he has “confessed, recognized everything, when he is purified, when there no longer exists any shadow in his life”—­will the missing objects reveal their location.25 With the fetishes in hand, Koyaga can call elections and even the animals will come out to vote for him. (This conceit, enshrined in the novel’s title, is a playful reference to rigged elections.) Unlike the notion of complicity as folded-​togetherness explored in previous chapters, Kourouma’s invocation of complicity here seems categorical: in telling the dictator’s story, and even in enumerating his crimes, the narrators become accomplices in his return to power. But the donsomana does not actually fulfill its stated purpose. Only the final two chapters address Koyaga’s time in office. The bulk of the performance explores proximal narratives, including historical and biographical background (the story of Koyaga’s father; Koyaga’s early years in the colonial tirailleurs); the story of Macledio, Koyaga’s closest assistant; and Koyaga’s ceremonial visits to fellow dictators in an initiatory tour after he takes power. By the end of the novel, there has been little actual enumeration of Koyaga’s crimes; Koyaga himself has not confessed or recognized anything; and the fetishes have yet to reveal themselves. To return to the larger historical frame, it is also not clear that the return of the Qur’an and the meteorite will suffice to return Koyaga to power. The Cold War is over, and as Bingo observes while invoking Ramses II, Alexander the Great, and Sundiata Keita: eventually, “all regimes disappear.”26 The apparent failure of the donsomana raises the prospect that what initially appears to be collaboration with the dictator may in fact be subterfuge. Bingo and Tiécoura purport to serve the dictator’s interest, but in deferring their task they ensure that he will not return to power. To a certain extent, deferral and incompletion are of a piece with the donsomana as a genre. Digressions and deviations, whether for an interlude of song, dance, or the recitation of proverbs, are part of its structure.27 The story of a given donsomana forms part of a continuum within the larger tradition, to which the narrator may refer or even deviate to illustrate a point; this includes the epic of Sundiata—­founder of the Mali empire in the thirteenth century—­to which Kourouma alludes in describing Koyaga’s seizure of power.28 Kourouma’s

The Dictator in the Corpolony

155

repurposing of the donsomana bends the central features of that genre to the narrative strategies and critical investments of the dictator novel. The concern with repetitive cycles of dictatorship evinced in earlier African dictator novels is transformed into a characteristic of the narration of dictatorship itself. Tiécoura announces this cyclicality at the close of the novel: “As long as Koyaga has not found the Qur’an and the meteorite, we [too] shall begin and [or] recommence the purificatory donsomana, our donsomana.”29 This pledge to reprise the narrative extends the time of narration, pointing beyond the bounds of the novel to a potentially infinite chain of repetitions. However, there is in Tiécoura’s assertion a crucial slippage, signaled by the possessive pronoun “our” (notre). In giving the story of Koyaga’s life a narrative form, the performers lay claim to it. The dictator’s story is now theirs to tell, separate from the desires or aims of the dictator. This is not to claim that Kourouma fully resolves the question of the performers’ complicity with the dictator; like Koyaga’s possible return to power, this remains uncertain. But such gestures highlight both the limits of the dictator’s control over the narrative and the critical power of the act of storytelling. What matters, then, are the uses to which this power is put. The question of complicity also plays out within the narrative, in the character of Macledio. The story of Macledio’s long peregrinations in search of the “man of destiny” (homme de destin) who will counteract his own ill fortune (nõrô) takes up the third chapter of Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals. As the performers explain: “One may not recite the deeds of Koyaga without first dwelling during an entire sumu [veillée] upon the path followed by Macledio.”30 In short, recalling a common tactic of the novels discussed in the previous chapter: in order to understand the dictator, it is also necessary to analyze those who help to sustain his regime. Unlike the various cabinet members in the novels by Sembène, Chinua Achebe, or Henri Lopès, however, Kourouma presents Macledio’s complicity as something more than a desire for proximity to power or material gain. Macledio longs for and seeks out the man who will make him whole, identifying several possible men (and women) of destiny before settling (reluctantly) on Koyaga. Far from intending sympathy, Kourouma uses Macledio’s story to explore the particular intimacy of writers and dictators. The proposition is that each man has something the other lacks. Koyaga needs Macledio’s skill with language, while Macledio needs his man of destiny to overcome his ill fate. Within Macledio’s biography, his service to Koyaga is anticipated by his earlier collaboration with the socialist dictator of the neighboring Republic of the Mountains, Nkoutigui Fondio (the Man in White). After seeing a speech by Fondio on television while living in France, Macledio leaves for the Republic of the Mountains and goes to work at the national radio station. There, he is responsible for inventing and denouncing a variety of plots; Macledio excels in this work:

156

Chapter 5

Whatever he dreamed up out of whole cloth became fact, the true phases of a veritable plot, for the police, the judicial system, the party, and the international press. Says the responder. Subjected to instruments of torture, victims repeated Macledio’s phrases, adorning them with many details, and finally made them sound accurate, logical, and irrefutable  [.  .  .] Macledio’s lies became solid truths, even for their originator, who always ended up believing that he had discovered the threads of plots rather than having created them.31

This is a sinister reflection on the power of fiction: the plots are invention, but they produce a measure of truth in the world. Macledio realizes this when he finds himself implicated in a plot against Fondio and must make a false confession in order to condemn his supposed co-​conspirators. It is here, and not in more oppositional models of engagement, that Kourouma’s own iteration of the relationship between literature and politics emerges. Specifically, following Madeleine Borgomano, Kourouma proposes that instead of inventing fictions that become truth (as Macledio does), the task of the writer is to invent a way of talking about the world that seems fictional and thereby comes to bear on that reality.32 To return to the metanarrative level: in borrowing from the conventions of orature, Kourouma engages in a self-​reflexive repurposing that submits the donsomana itself to interrogation. Writers (narrators, performers) have long served the ends of those in power. While, in their mastery of the (written) word they are uniquely positioned to challenge dictatorship, it would be a mistake to presume that they are a priori dedicated to such a project. More often than not, the writer-​narrator cannot escape what Mbembe would call the dictator’s “majesty.” A case in point: Bingo closes the performance with a series of proverbs that culminate with the declaration “Night lasts for a long time, but at last day arrives.” The interpretation of this statement—­whether it refers to the end of Koyaga’s dictatorship or the end of Koyaga’s wait for his fetishes—­depends on the critical project one wishes to ascribe to Kourouma’s novel. In the first instance, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals would satisfy the anti-​dictator program of the dictator novel; in the second, the writer-​narrator slides back into his usual role, carrying out his work, once again, in the service of those already in power. Kourouma, as mentioned in chapter 1, resisted being labeled as engagé, explaining: “I write truths, as I feel them [comme je les ressens], without taking a side. I write things as they are.”33 This is not exactly a claim to impartiality; what Kourouma does in Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals is to question the act of writing (of telling the dictator’s story) itself. With this in mind, neither interpretation of Bingo’s closing proverb should take primacy. Kourouma’s point, instead, is that the writer-​narrator’s intent is never given and should not be presumed. These are, ultimately, instructions for reading Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals as well as the dictator novel going forward.

The Dictator in the Corpolony

157

The African Dictator in the 1990s: Post–­Cold War Transitions as Permanent Crisis My use of the phrase “post–­Cold War” as a temporal marker for this chapter implies an epochal break. The early 1990s did see a wave of democratization on the African continent, as many dictators were ousted or at least compelled to allow the formation of opposition parties. Yet this was not the end of dictatorship or, more to the point, the forms of oppression associated with dictatorship. Some dictators remained in or returned to power; coups and violent conflicts continued and even intensified (the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftermaths are one frequently cited example); and many of the new political parties that emerged proved either to be fronts for the ruling party or built on the same kind of patron-​client relationships that characterized the earlier regimes. According to Jean-​François Bayart, the 1990s in fact saw a “re-​composition” of existing power relationships and a renewal of their modes of legitimation.34 One distinguishing feature of this period, however, is that financial interests visibly superseded the ideological concerns of the Cold War. Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) were the driving mechanism of this shift. Beginning in 1979 (with Senegal) and increasingly through the 1980s, international lenders such as the World Bank and the IMF attached demands for structural adjustment to lending and other financial assistance.35 SAPs typically called for the deregulation of markets and currencies, facilitating access for foreign investors; the reduction of labor protections; the contraction of state bureaucracy through drastic cutbacks in spending; the privatization of public services and utilities, often to the benefit of either foreign investors or local politicians; and the privileging of foreign-debt servicing. But the global economic reorderings of the 1980s and 1990s did little to diminish those debts, and in many ways they intensified existing inequalities of distribution and access.36 Though nominally intended to achieve stabilization and economic growth, SAPs more often led to falling salaries, mass unemployment, inflation, and, in seeming contradiction, to the hardening of borders in order to limit migration while emphasizing the free flow of capital and goods. International, nongovernmental, religious, and other aid organizations stepped in to substitute for the public services that had once been provided by the government but were not sufficiently attractive to the market, thereby furthering the “retreat” or “emptying” of the state.37 As Mbembe writes of this decade, the African continent was “demoted” internationally, and individual states were increasingly subjected to a new form of arbitrary power: “tutelary government” or exogenous rule by the World Bank and the IMF.38 In many cases, these large-​scale shifts had the secondary effect of bringing down authoritarian regimes, but at a steep cost. As Ken Saro-​Wiwa evocatively put it in a piece for his short-​lived column in the Lagos Sunday Times (1989–­91), “These sapped [SAP-​ed] times are hungry times.”39

158

Chapter 5

The hallucinatory logic of transition is the true target of critique in Ngũgĩ and Kourouma’s dictator novels, and this is where Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals and Wizard of the Crow most clearly depart from the works discussed in the previous chapter. While Ngũgĩ and Kourouma seek to name and describe emergent phenomena, they are also careful to mark their continuities with previous systems of oppression. Everything and nothing seems to have changed. Here, Mbembe’s analysis of the post–­Cold War period is salient for its attention to the multilayered coexistence of old and new; as Mbembe writes, “Because these new technologies of domination are still being elaborated, they have not yet, generally, totally replaced those already present. Sometimes they draw inspiration from the old forms, retain traces of them, or even operate behind their façade.”40 Transition is uneven and asynchronous; its temporality is at once diffuse and repetitive. To think of transition as a palimpsest—­a multilayered record containing traces of earlier forms, marked by continuities and discontinuities—­rather than as a transformation of the dominant terms, is to allow for the kinds of untidiness, disruptions, and fortuitous connections in which both Kourouma and Ngũgĩ find critical traction. Toward the end of Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, Koyaga confronts a moment of “hunger.” Long accustomed to drawing—­or, to borrow Bayart’s term, “eating”—­from the country’s reserves, he now finds these funds exhausted. France is no longer willing to help. Following President François Mitterrand’s call for African heads of state to “become angelic democrats,” France has stopped automatic emoluments, and it demands that Koyaga instead sign “SAP contracts” with the IMF.41 Koyaga is unfamiliar with the term and, irritated, summons the IMF representative for an explanation. What follows is a parody of the neoliberal principles outlined above: You have to cease and stop everything, interrupt or suspend all operations, reduce or trim away everything, renounce or sacrifice everything, close or suspend everything. You can no longer fund [cesser de subventionner] feasts and dances. You must reduce the number of teachers, nurses, women giving birth, children being born, schools, gendarmes, and presidential guards. Stop subsidizing [subventionner] rice, sugar, milk for nurslings, cotton and compresses for the wounded, pills for lepers and those with the sleeping sickness. Sacrifice the construction of schools, roads, bridges, dams, maternity wards and dispensaries, palaces and prefectures. Avoid [S’abstenir de] helping the blind and deaf, paying for paper, drilling wells, consuming butter and cocoa. Reduce the number of people employed, close enterprises, etc.42

The repetition of the various imperatives to stop, cease, or eliminate takes on a rhythmic quality in which the excesses of the authoritarian state (feasts, palaces, the presidential guard) are made equivalent to all other forms of public

The Dictator in the Corpolony

159

spending (teachers, nurses, roads, dams, and so on). Given the description of the celebrations of his thirty years in power that precedes this scene, Koyaga has certainly engaged in the self-​indulgent misappropriation of state funds. But these are not in fact equivalent to the other forms of spending named in the passage. This nonequivalence is conveyed through the sequencing of elements within each sentence, where neoliberal curtailments quickly mutate from the harsh or extreme to the flat-​out impossible, as when the reduction of teachers transforms into the suspension of childbirth. It is only within the logic of neoliberal structural adjustment that public spending as such can be equated with the dictator’s exorbitance, and Kourouma responds by emphasizing the paradoxical excesses of calls for reductions in government spending. The organization of this passage as a whole similarly targets the underlying logics of neoliberal structural adjustment. The parody does not rely on escalation or increase. The demands of structural adjustment are preposterous from the start, as demonstrated by the banker-​diplomat’s opening call for a total cessation of all things. The parody instead functions through accretion, amplified by the repetitive syntax of the narrators’ prose. No longer are these international financial institutions—­or, for that matter, the narrative—­ driven by the developmental teleology that defined post–­World War II liberal capitalism. Instead, Kourouma stages the temporal diffusion of financialization, in which all things can be abstracted and made exchangeable. The central contention of this passage is not just that the demands of structural adjustment are ridiculous or cruel, but that, like dictatorship itself, neoliberalism is a discourse that makes only minimal attempts at self-​justification and therefore must impose itself by force. Koyaga’s response to these demands is appropriate to his established character: still somewhat confused, he grows enraged and threatens to break the neck of the banker-​diplomat. But Koyaga has little recourse; as Bingo puts it, “no insult or affront is going to stop the sun from setting.”43 After making the requisite apologies, Koyaga implements the reforms, which precipitate an economic, social, and political crisis in the Republic of the Gulf. Like the Venerable One in Sembène’s Le Dernier de l’Empire (The Last of the Empire, 1981), Koyaga also confronts a new constituency of educated but unemployed or underemployed and insurgent youth, whom he dismisses as dropouts, thieves, ruffians, addicts, homosexuals, and “idle scholars” (déscolarisés).44 This heterogeneous group becomes a destabilizing political force. Abandoned by the foreign ambassadors, Koyaga must eventually allow the formation of a National Conference, which will oversee the transition to democracy.45 Despite this chain of events, Kourouma makes clear that it would be shortsighted to credit structural adjustment with the end of dictatorship. The economic demands that surprise Koyaga at the end of his rule had in fact been present from the very beginning of his time in power. Thirty years earlier, Koyaga had encountered neoliberalism at work during his initiatory

160

Chapter 5

visit to the Republic of the Great River. Here, the dictator had permitted the “total liberalization” of mining, granting open access to the country’s mineral reserves and allowing foreign speculators to flood the local economy: The potentate takes advantage of the occasion to conform to the recommendations of the IMF and proceeds to a massive firing of [public] workers [agents de la fonction publique]. Entire classes of schoolchildren follow their teachers to the field. Patients, lepers, and those ill with the sleeping sickness follow their nurses and doctors to the mines. Coffee and cotton growers and fishermen by the entire village desert their plantations or pirogues to become “rock breakers” [casseurs de pierres]. By the class, the village, the hospital, the whole family, everybody attacks the hills like ants. Lepers with stumps and the blind are sifting.46

New systems of informal (food stalls) and illegal economic activity (drugs and arms-​trafficking) grow up around these mining ventures; corporations and aid associations move in to provide services previously assured by the state; while soldiers and policemen are deployed to maintain only minimal order. As the dictator of this country explains, this is “the Great River of the informal sector,” a new world made possible by (neo)liberalism. The constituencies named in the passage above—­students, teachers, nurses, doctors, and the sick—­are repeated in the description of structural adjustment given to Koyaga by the IMF’s representative three decades later, underlining the continuity between these two moments. The observation renders time itself strangely inert: not only have the demands of structural adjustment always already been at work, but they seem to recur with increasing force as the dictator’s authority declines. Despite the nominal causal association of economic liberalization with democratization, the recursive sequencing of events in Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals makes clear that the former has little real need for the latter. Historically, in both Africa and Latin America, dictators were more often willing instruments for the imposition of neoliberal policies than threatened by them. (See, for instance, the case of the Pinochet regime and the so-​called “Miracle of Chile” of the 1980s.) According to David Harvey, the antidemocratic affinities of neoliberalism—­including hierarchal, authoritarian, and militaristic means of maintaining law and order—­are fundamental to its construction of asymmetric market freedoms.47 These policies remained in place with the transitions to democracy in the 1990s, with the political transitions facilitating an entrenchment of the prior economic reorganization. Even in cases where democratization was substantial, an individual government’s ability to make and implement policy was, to paraphrase James Ferguson, fundamentally constrained by the nondemocratic nature of international financial institutions.48

The Dictator in the Corpolony

161

Crisis—­ in the sense of disorder or disarray requiring some kind of change—­has similarly proven to be the central mechanism for the imposition and management of neoliberalism. The global neoliberal shift was itself a response to a larger “crisis” in the capitalist world-​system: the period of stagnation in the late 1960s and 1970s that followed the postwar economic boom.49 As Immanuel Wallerstein argues in the essay “Crisis as Transition” (1982), the global economic downturn of the 1970s was not a failure of the capitalist system but the product of its success, because the rapid acceleration of accumulation had caused a bottleneck. Periodic systemic crisis is a necessary part of the regenerative cycles of capitalist accumulation, but there are structural limits to this process of renewal. According to Wallerstein, “this cyclical pattern cannot go on forever, because in fact it is not truly cyclical but spiral.”50 At some point, there will have to be a break or rupture in the system, and once this happens, transition will have taken place. I am interested in two aspects of the notion of crisis: first, its rhetorical function as a justification for imposition, whether of dictatorship or structural adjustment. In the case of dictatorship, the dictator promises a restoration or return to order after a period of chaos. The dictator novel has long refuted this claim. The early examples of the genre in mid-​nineteenth-​ century Argentina, for instance, emphasized the internal disorder of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s regime, often reflected in representations of Rosas’s family, and the larger social destruction wrought by the violence on which the regime relied. The fatuousness, ineptitude, and vulgarity of dictators in later novels extend this critical thread. Kourouma and Ngũgĩ’s novels continue in this tradition, affixing to this first claim the argument that, like the dictator who serves as the conduit for imposing SAPs, structural adjustment perpetuates and exacerbates rather than alleviates crisis. Second, the central critical intervention of Kourouma and Ngũgĩ’s novels is their illumination of crisis as a recursive rather than a progressive temporality. Crisis does not move things forward: individual dictators may come to crisis, but the larger system continues its operations. In the early 1990s, despite some improvement in the global economy, African economies had seen little advance after a decade of structural adjustment. By the late 1990s, Nicolas van de Walle diagnosed in African economies a state of “permanent crisis” in which “a disastrous situation was at the same time remarkably stable,” and from which some elites continued to derive profits. “The approach that posits crisis as the main instigator of reform,” he added, “clearly does not fit the African situation well.”51 Writing about this same period, Ferguson remarks on the frequent exclusion of African countries from much of the literature of globalization. This is because the remarkably uneven integration of African economies in the world system, emphasizing resource extraction over assimilation, poses a challenge to globalization’s narrative of convergence. Capital, Ferguson asserts, is “globe-​hopping” rather than “globe-​covering,”

162

Chapter 5

and it leaves behind an uneven geography of economic as well as ecological devastation.52 Ferguson’s point is that the experience of the African continent exposes the true logic of neoliberal globalization, which relies on disconnection and segregation as much as convergence. As van de Walle’s comments suggest, “permanent crisis” has proven less an impediment to accumulation than its facilitator. The emphasis here is on “permanent” as “enduring,” rather than “unchanging”: while the specific contours of crisis may shift, the state of crisis as a whole continues. This notion of “permanent crisis,” a change without significant break, presents a unique challenge for the representation of time in Kourouma and Ngũgĩ’s novels. On the one hand, the conceit of these turn-​of-​the-​century dictator novels is that something has changed, as reflected in the downfall of their respective dictators. On the other, the larger, already existing structures of oppression remain in place. I return here to the seemingly inert time of neoliberalism, mentioned above. Inertia explains the lack of closure in Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals: not only is the question of Koyaga’s return to power left open, but individual events recur or repeat in the narrative, muddling its temporal progression. Historical periods are de-​sequenced and overlap, offering a collage or constellated history of external involvement in the African continent. By the end of the novel, the narrative itself threatens to become “permanent,” as the narrators assert that they will continue to perform Koyaga’s donsomana until it produces the desired result. Even though the dictator Koyaga has lost his hold on power, the larger outcome remains unclear. Wizard of the Crow, too, offers several examples of “permanent” or arrested time. These are linked, first, to the operating logic of dictatorship and, second, to the global political and economic transformations that followed the end of the Cold War. The first example comes early in the novel, when the narrator recounts rumors of the Ruler’s imprisonment of his wife Rachael as punishment for her inquiry into his sexual exploits with young girls. Infuriated, the Ruler confines Rachael to a mansion in which the clocks tick but do not progress, the calendar always shows the same date, and even the television and radio repeat the same programs. This is, according to Robert Colson, an early effort by the Ruler to create a “frozen present” in which he rules endlessly.53 As the crisis in Aburĩria deepens, the Ruler attempts to do to the country what he did to Rachael: freeze the passage of time and “abolish the future.”54 The Ruler instructs Tajirika to stage a coup, so that he can reaffirm his hold on power. But time is beyond the Ruler’s control: the false coup becomes a reality, Tajirika takes power (with the full support of the West), and the Ruler becomes a relic, trapped in a previous historical moment and incapable of making the necessary transition. Extending Kourouma’s parody of structural adjustment, Ngũgĩ in Wizard of the Crow seeks to name and thereby illuminate the emergent technologies of

The Dictator in the Corpolony

163

domination that have been obscured by the discourse of transition. Despite the monumental ambitions and performative potency of Marching to Heaven, the Global Bank rejects the Ruler’s request for funds for the project, dismissing his claim that it will generate jobs as “outdated Keynesian economics.”55 Though once quick to respond to the demands of the West, the Ruler is now slow to realize that the rules of the game have changed. This is so even when orders are plainly put, as in a meeting between the Ruler, the U.S. ambassador, and a special envoy of the American president. The West seeks to forge a new global order, as the envoy explains: There was a time when slavery was good. It did its work, and when it finished creating capital, it withered and died a natural death. Colonialism was good. It spread industrial culture of shared resources and markets. But to revive colonialism would now be an error. There was a time when the cold war dictated our every calculation in domestic and international relations. It is over. We are in the post–cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has a chance at the entire globe for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands.56

Rather than a teleological narrative of the progression of capital toward freedom, the envoy describes a series of mutating structures of oppression. For this latest stage (“globalization”), capital requires what the envoy calls a “free and stable world,” or one that will allow the easy movement of capital across borders, and one only nominally identified with democracy. Ngũgĩ gives the latest iteration of the system a new name: “corporonialism.” Fittingly, Tajirika (who is now minister of defense) is the first to propose this new system upon his return from a visit to the Global Ministry of Finance and the Global Bank. These institutions, Tajirika reports to the Ruler, are looking to give over the work of the state to private capital. Citing the British and Dutch East India Companies, the British East Africa Company, and the Congo Free State as positive examples and precursors (echoing the special envoy), Tajirika continues: What private capital did then it can do again: own and reshape the Third World in the image of the West without the slightest blot, blemish, or blotch. NGOs will do what the missionary charities did in the past. The world will no longer be composed of the outmoded twentieth-​century divisions of East, West, and a directionless Third. The world will become one corporate globe divided into the incorporating and incorporated. We should volunteer Aburĩria to be the first to be wholly managed by private capital, to become the first

164

Chapter 5

voluntary corporate colony, a corpolony, the first in the new global order. With the privatization of Aburĩria, and with the NGOs relieving us of social services, the country becomes your real estate. You will be collecting land rent in addition to the commission fee for managing the corporonial army and police force. The corporonial powers will reward you as a modern visionary.57

Although it claims historical precursors, corporonialism is not a return to previous models of external domination. Instead, the claim to historical continuity is a means for establishing its viability in the present. In other words, while corporonialism resembles neocolonialism, circumstances and ambitions have changed. No longer is it a matter of the violation of one state’s sovereignty by another; the very notion of sovereignty, which the dictator had previously claimed for himself, dissolves before the demands of neoliberal globalization. The state and therefore the dictator have become ancillary to the movement of capital in the global market. However, much like neoliberalism itself, corporonialism in practice deviates from its purported theoretical principles.58 This new world without boundaries is still divided into the “incorporators” and the “incorporated.” The state, too, remains necessary in its role as the administrator of the police apparatus, while the majority of decision-​making power passes to private enterprise. “Corporonialism,” therefore, is Ngũgĩ’s term for the uneven form that neoliberal globalization takes on the African continent and, by extension, the Global South. The use of the neologism “corporonialism” at once makes clear the continuities between this new system and older forms of domination and establishes a distinction between the ways in which different regions of the globe experience neoliberalism. In this new era of “liberated” markets, the benefits continue to redound largely to those in the global North and a restricted network of elites in the South, increasing inequality throughout the system. The Ruler himself recognizes the inconsistencies in Tajirika’s proposal, commenting: “Why can’t I incorporate instead of being incorporated?” He adds, laughing at his own joke: “I don’t want to be a company employee.”59 Unlike neocolonialism, which relied on and rewarded a class of intermediaries, the role of the dictator in the era of corporonialism is radically circumscribed. As suggested by the phrase “company employee,” under corporonialism the dictator is no longer a warrior for a cause (anticommunism, for instance), nor is he in control of state resources that he can disburse to a network of clients. Instead, as administrator of the security forces, the dictator becomes just another middle manager.60 The possible future that Tajirika offers to the Ruler, then, reads like a tedious and diminishing retirement. The Ruler dismisses the proposal. But the “laws and needs of globalization” require and will have another kind of leader. Almost immediately following this conversation, Tajirika takes control of Aburĩria.

The Dictator in the Corpolony

165

At first glance, the ways in which Tajirika institutionalizes and exercises his power closely resemble those of his predecessor: he has the Ruler fed to the crocodiles of the Red River, where many of the Ruler’s enemies met their end, and he declares the Ruler’s death a case of “Self-​Induced Disappearance” (SID). He then proclaims himself emperor, renaming himself Titus Flavius Vespasianus Whitehead. Accordingly, the State House becomes the Imperial Palace and the crocodiles of the Red River become the Imperial Crocs of the Imperial River. The limited democratic turn of Baby D is replaced by a philosophy of “imperial democracy,” with a modern coliseum to be built on the site of Marching to Heaven. But Tajirika’s rise is not just another palace coup; nor does his assumption of power simply represent the failure of so-​called transitions to democracy. With the white arm and leg acquired at Genetica, Inc., Tajirika is, as Kamĩtĩ remarks, “a man in a permanent state of transition.”61 In this new chimerical form, Tajirika embodies the palimpsestic nature of transition and epitomizes the operating logics of corporonialism. The latest reorganization of the global economic and political order has deprived the dictator of his power (sovereignty) as head of state. All that remains are its external manifestation, or façades. Marching to Heaven is here an object lesson: while the initial project resoundingly fails, its symbolic ambitions remain in circulation, as indicated in Tajirika’s plan to build a coliseum on its site. The U.S. ambassador, meanwhile, borrows the project’s name for his memoirs, Marching to Heaven: My Life in an African Dictatorship. Marching to Heaven also becomes the currency for branding other building projects, as in the advertisement for the new headquarters of the Globe Insurance Corporation described at the end of the novel. While the Cold War dictator’s (always partial) sovereignty relied on the repeated and excessive enactment (performance) of his power to shore up his regime, under corporonialism the new ruler is reduced to reenactment, as indicated by his obsession with increasingly ornate names, titles, and ceremonial paraphernalia of the new, “imperial” order. Ultimately, it is corporonialism and not the dictator or dictatorship that triumphs in Wizard of the Crow. As Nyawĩra remarks toward the end of the novel: “We live in a corporate globe under imperial corporonialism, as proudly proclaimed by the new ogres.”62 There is here a telling slippage in the use of the adjective “imperial.” In Nyawĩra’s phrasing, it is the corporonializers (the “incorporators”) who are the agents of imperialism, rather than Aburĩria’s self-​ proclaimed emperor. Even if Tajirika does not dress the part, he is a company employee. At this level, the change has been significant. However, viewed from below—­from the perspective of characters such as Nyawĩra and Kamĩtĩ—­ the unequal distribution of global political and economic power looks much the same. The struggle, therefore, continues.

166

Chapter 5

Global Futures: On Opposition to Dictatorship and the Ends of the Dictator Novel My analysis has thus far concerned the fate of the African dictator after the Cold War. As both Kourouma and Ngũgĩ assert, the end of the Cold War did not mark the end of authoritarian oppression on the African continent. Instead, these power relationships were recomposed or “transitioned” to suit concurrent demands for nominal democratization and economic liberalization. But the question remains of what will come next. Although, in keeping with the ambivalent conclusions of many of the dictator novels I have discussed, neither Kourouma nor Ngũgĩ offers a schematic plan for the future, this is where their novels diverge. While Kourouma turns his attention to the disarray and even hypocrisy of purported political alternatives in the service of a self-​reflexive consideration of the work of the dictator novel—­consistent with other iterations of the genre—­Ngũgĩ gestures toward the possibilities for global solidarity in the fight against neoliberal globalization. Here, too, there is a self-​reflexive dimension. In turning his attention to transnational modes of resistance, Ngũgĩ also looks beyond the limits of the dictator novel as a genre whose primary focus has been on national political questions. This final section will explore the futures imagined by Kourouma and Ngũgĩ, and it will consider their implications for the dictator novel as a genre. In part because of the singular focus on Koyaga demanded by the structuring device of the donsomana, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals does not look very far beyond the dictator: the novel begins and ends with Koyaga’s missing fetishes. Kourouma uses the suspended time of “waiting” to reflect on the work of writing about the dictator and the possibilities for justice in the future. Both come into play with the description of the National Conference. Like the historical models to which Kourouma refers, this National Conference is an uneasy union of different constituencies in the Republic of the Gulf, unified by their mutual experience of suffering under Koyaga’s dictatorship. As an accounting of the dictator’s crimes, the structure of the National Conference mirrors that of the donsomana. The difference lies in who has the right to speak: the Conference will hear testimony from the victims themselves. Not only do these public hearings intend to identify and catalog Koyaga’s many crimes, but the act of testimony will help to cleanse the country and provide the basis for a better future. Testimony, as both the act of witnessing and recounting what one has seen or experienced, is key to Kourouma’s conception of his work as a writer. As Kourouma explained to one interviewer: “My intention has always been to serve as a witness [témoigne]. I write and I say: this is what I saw [ . . . ] For me, the central purpose of the novel [l’axe principal du roman] is to bear witness [est de témoigner].”63 Given the continental survey of dictatorship that is provided in Koyaga’s visits to other African dictators, this reads as an apposite description of Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals. However,

The Dictator in the Corpolony

167

I heed Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier’s contention that the testimonial quality of works by writers such as Kourouma (along with Aminata Sow Fall, Emmanuel Dongala, and Henri Lopès) has been “both overblown and oversimplified.”64 Testimony, as the novel itself makes clear, is not as straightforward as Kourouma’s claims in interviews would make it seem. The National Conference itself is far from idealized; as with the donsomana, few of Koyaga’s actual crimes are recorded. Instead, Kourouma turns attention to the conflicts between opposing constituencies as the Conference struggles to institute order in its proceedings. Factions include the disenfranchised youth, the poor, exiled intellectuals, and the descendants of Brazilian freedmen who comprise the professional class in the Republic of the Gulf, as well as government representatives. The delegates assign themselves generous salaries, while arguing at length over the location and parameters within which statements will be given. Only eventually do they begin to hear the witnesses. The content of this testimony—­ as recounted by the narrators of the donsomana—­ranges from the predictable (political prisoners held in concentration camps) to the extreme (accusations of cannibalism). But attention quickly shifts from the experiences of individuals to the act of narration itself, and from there, to a self-​reflexive consideration of the effects and purpose of narrating the dictator’s crimes: They began with testimonies. The assassinations, violence, divestments, and lies that had really been perpetrated by the dictator during his personal reign of three decades. The speakers quickly clothed in verisimilitude the calumnies, fables, and inventions that had been circulated for months in the tracts distributed in the streets. None of that was sufficient. Each speaker felt compelled, in order to sustain the interest of the assembled delegates, to invent new revelations. The first speakers denounced the concentration camps where prisoners in shackles were dying of hunger and thirst in their own feces and urine. They denounced torture of indescribable bestiality; prisoners who had been cut up, piece by piece, or gently burned to death. Again in order to sustain interest, the next speakers demonized the dictator still more: they accused him of anthropophagy and gave proof. By means of sorcery and for ritual purposes—­augmenting his vital forces—­he ate the roasted testicles of his dead opponents for breakfast each morning. These were confabulations that went beyond comprehension and verisimilitude. Eventually, the national and international press grew tired and were repelled by these speakers. One must know where to stop. Once it has been said that the hyena’s anus stinks, there is nothing more to say.65

In offering a glimpse of what Ángel Rama would have called anti-​dictator “diatribes,” this passage aptly captures the difficulties of writing about the

168

Chapter 5

dictator discussed throughout this book. The witnesses speaking before the National Conference struggle to sustain the interest (attention) of their audience, most of whom have heard this all before. From this arises the temptation to exaggerate and invent new, more shocking crimes. The problem is not that the statements made by the witnesses are untrue, but that the audience grows tired of their exaggerations and is repelled by the litany of abhorrent and incredible acts recounted. Eventually, everyone loses interest. The thwarted testimony at the National Conference asserts that a simple recounting, or accounting, of the dictator’s crimes is inadequate to the task of critiquing the dictator and dictatorship. To the extent that they accord with the tropes associated with the African or “Third World” dictator, Koyaga’s violence and vulgarity come to seem predictable and the crimes themselves interchangeable, hence the scant attention given to individual instances in the narrative. As I have argued in previous chapters, the dictator novel cannot merely enumerate the dictator’s crimes; it must provide an analysis of the mechanics of authoritarian power. The National Conference stands as an example of an anti-​dictator project that fails to proceed beyond the immediate act of denunciation. When Kourouma claims that the contents of his novel are “true,” therefore, the claim is not that he recounts facts, but that he conveys the underlying dynamics that sustain dictatorship. This includes the shortcomings of the opposition as much as the involvement of foreign powers. In the end, a shared history of suffering does not suffice to establish a new political order. After months of testimony, the delegates at the Conference take a vote to remove Koyaga and call for democratic elections. But the Conference has not brought relief to the country’s economic crisis, and the people have begun to miss the dictatorship.66 The army, unpaid for months, opens fire on the banquet to celebrate the call for elections, and Koyaga emerges as a newly minted populist leader. His anticipated victory in the forthcoming elections is only put in jeopardy by the disappearance of his fetishes. In interviews from this period, Kourouma often expressed a measure of optimism for the future, as in 1997: “I think that as far as these figures [Mobutu Sese Seko, Jean-​Bédel Bokassa, Idi Amin] are concerned, the democratization process will prevail over them.”67 But his dictator novel offers a darker view. Kourouma’s parody of the National Conference in Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals suggests that democracy will prove impossible so long as deeper social and economic inequalities go unaddressed. It is, in this sense, a cautionary tale, both for possible political futures and for the dictator novel itself. In counterpoint to Kourouma, Ngũgĩ turns his dictator novel toward the networks of global solidarity that can potentially be activated in the struggle against corporonialism.68 This shift is located in the novel’s second plot line, which concerns Kamĩtĩ, Nyawĩra, the Wizard of the Crow, and the experiences of everyday people in Aburĩria. In its attention to those living under

The Dictator in the Corpolony

169

corporonialism, Wizard of the Crow also offers a literary consideration of what Arjun Appadurai has called “globalization from below” or “grassroots globalization.” In Appadurai’s account, if globalization extends the earlier logics of empire, uneven trade, and political domination, globalization from below is an alternative that is focused on issues of access, justice, advocacy, and equitable knowledge transfer.69 However, the shift also points to the limits of the dictator novel’s necessary focus on the dictator: it is only in looking beyond the dictator (first the Ruler, then Tajirika) that Ngũgĩ turns attention to the future. In so doing, Ngũgĩ breaches the apparent limits of the genre, endeavoring to remake the dictator novel as the space in which new modes of opposition and new political futures might be imagined. Attention to the global dimensions of dictatorship is not itself new to the dictator novel, nor is the impulse to look beyond the nation-​state for opposition to the dictator. Recall here the observation in Sembène’s The Last of the Empire that the same struggle is being fought in many places at once; or, per the journalist Kad, that the “present struggle transcends our local problems.”70 Similarly, toward the end of Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (Reasons of State, 1974), the exiled Student travels to the First World Conference Against Colonial and Imperialist Politics in Brussels (1927) alongside the Cuban activist Julio Antonio Mella and the delegate for the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru. In (briefly) incorporating these real historical figures into his novel, Carpentier gestures to the long history of international anti-​imperial collaboration, which becomes the basis for struggles against oppression in the present. However, although their novels register possibilities for global solidarity, both Sembène and Carpentier refuse to elaborate utopian alternatives. As noted in my analysis of each novel, the emphasis is on the examination of the situation at hand. By contrast, Ngũgĩ experiments in combining the analytical function of the dictator novel with a utopian gesture that suggests alternative political futures within and beyond Aburĩria. This represents a new horizon in Ngũgĩ’s work: the proletarian collective of Devil on the Cross is transformed into a more global vision of resistance that is consistent with a larger “global” turn in Ngũgĩ’s thinking.71 With this in mind, Nyawĩra’s words at the close of the novel, “we live in a corporate globe, under imperial corporonialism,” should be read as the starting point for a new political consciousness. I designate this the emergent Global South consciousness of Wizard of the Crow and, by extension, of the dictator novel at the turn of the twenty-​first century. In invoking the term “Global South,” I have in mind its metaphorical dimensions as discussed in the introduction: the Global South “exists,” so to speak, in and as the space of multi-​scalar comparison, where points of connection might be drawn and where recognition and collaboration become possible. In other words, the Global South is composed by and makes possible the coalescing of constituencies that have been fragmented and dispersed by neoliberal globalization. I use the term “emergent,” however, because within the

170

Chapter 5

scope of Ngũgĩ’s novel, something like a Global South consciousness is very much still in the process of formation rather than fully constituted. This is perhaps by design. The story of Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra does not end with a critical synthesis or even a clear articulation of the struggle to come. Instead, these two characters embody exemplary modes of being in the world: a global engagement from which future opposition will emerge. Kamĩtĩ spent many years as a student in Madras (now Chennai), where he received degrees in economics and business management, and where he also studied comparative religion, herbology, and art. Inspired by these studies, he makes frequent reference to figures and ideas from a range of cultures and contexts. Nyawĩra shares Kamĩtĩ’s interest in and engagement with the wider world. She too is an avid reader, familiar with the work of women writers from throughout Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond. The value of this openness to the wider world is enacted in an early scene in which Kamĩtĩ goes for an interview with a prospective boss, Tajirika. Hoping to highlight his credentials, Kamĩtĩ emphasizes the richness of Indian culture, its economic and technological potential, and the continuities between the histories of India and Aburĩria. The similarities continue beyond independence, as Kamĩtĩ notes: “I learned that there is not much difference between the political character of the Indian and of the African. There are some who love their history and their skin color and there are others who hate their history and their skin color.” Tajirika finds the suggestion of similarity appalling, repeatedly expressing hostility for India, generally, and for the South Asian population of Aburĩria, specifically.72 Against Tajirika’s xenophobic nativism, Kamĩtĩ insists on understanding the world as one in which people are divided by greed versus concern for the welfare of others and not by nationality, ethnicity, or race. To underline this point: after Kamĩtĩ visits the Ruler in the United States in the guise of the Wizard of the Crow, he is deported for lacking the proper papers. His return journey to Aburĩria becomes a global tour, as immigration officials in successive countries—­from Peru to New Zealand, Mozambique, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Tanzania, Tasmania, Hong Kong, India, Iceland, Kenya, Korea, and so on—­attempt and fail to properly repatriate him.73 This comically global itinerary is a pointed staging of the ideals and failures of cosmopolitanism. Kamĩtĩ, the itinerary suggests, potentially belongs to all parts of the world. Yet the utopian universalism of this definition of cosmopolitanism repeatedly clashes with the realities of border and immigration systems. In this sense, Kamĩtĩ’s circuitous journey can be read as a parody of simplistic celebrations of cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization. Africa and the experiences of Africans, to recall Ferguson, remain the inconvenient counter-​example to theories that proclaim the free flow of capital, goods, and people. However, the concurrence between the kind of globalism imagined in Wizard of the Crow and cosmopolitanism should not be too quickly discarded.

The Dictator in the Corpolony

171

Ngũgĩ has recently argued for the cosmopolitan character of colonial being, where the culture of imperialism drove a movement of people and ideas that later flourished in their own circuits of collaboration and exchange: “From its very inception, the colony was the real depository of the cosmopolitan.” Consequently, writers from the formerly colonized world have “always assumed an extra national dimension.”74 This is an alternative view of cosmopolitan globality as constituted from below. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has termed this “subaltern, insurgent cosmopolitanism,” a form of cosmopolitanism that takes shape in response to the oppressive forces of hegemonic globalization, and that is articulated through the mutual recognition of human suffering. It does not aim to collapse differences or seek uniformity, which are key tactics of hegemonic globalization. Instead, insurgent cosmopolitanism gives equal weight to the principles of equality and recognition of difference, via the reformulation of the epistemic bases that have thus far structured political and philosophical thought.75 These networks are necessarily diffuse and not clearly rooted in a singular shared history, identity, or culture; instead, they rely on the dynamic of mutual recognition that is central to the constitution of the Global South as a political consciousness. This emphasis on human interconnectedness is exemplified toward the end of Wizard of the Crow, when Kamĩtĩ is taken to the headquarters of the Movement of the Voice of the People to be formally inducted. He finds there, along with the pantheon of pan-​African deities he carved when he earlier fled to the forest, a map of the world with Africa placed at its center. The map, his guides explain, records the history of black civilizations. It also anticipates a network of solidarity and collaboration for the present, which builds from a shared history of struggle against domination to a more generalized sense of transnational solidarity that incorporates what Kamĩtĩ later calls “related peoples.”76 This map, and the collectivities toward which it gestures, prefigures the Global South (as a concept or mode of critical thinking) and, in the process, indexes a shift in the political imaginary of the dictator novel from the scale of the nation (or national consolidation) toward a transnational, cross-​regional, and even cross-​continental consciousness that understands these problems and their solution to be necessarily global in scale. The shift I am describing remains largely speculative within the novel itself. The phrase “related peoples” is both promising in its expansiveness and frustratingly indistinct; transnational collaboration in the fight against corporonialism remains only a future possibility on the horizon. This, I propose, is where Ngũgĩ’s analytical and political project encounters the limits of the dictator novel. At the end of Wizard of the Crow, it is the Ruler’s story that has come to a close, while Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra’s story opens toward the future. However, a continuation of their story, which would also be an elaboration of the transnational collectivities intimated by the map described above, would no longer follow the generic conventions of the dictator novel. While Wizard

172

Chapter 5

of the Crow’s structure of intertwined plot lines allows for a richer social portrait than was possible in Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals—­to give just one example of the many discussed in this book—­the dictator novel’s necessary focus on the dictator does not allow Ngũgĩ the room to fully elaborate utopian alternatives. Wizard of the Crow is, in this sense, itself in a state of transition: it is a multilayered patchwork of old and new, where new possibilities largely operate behind the façade of the old. There are instances in which the new comes to the surface, as in Ngũgĩ’s formulation of corporonialism. Such moments point to the need not just for a new critical language in the post–­Cold War era, but a reconsideration of the apparent solidity of abstract terms and concepts. In this sense, despite its turn away from the dictator as its primary focus, Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow remains faithful to the central critical thrust of the dictator novel as an analytical endeavor, even as it threatens to outgrow the dictator himself. My characterization of Wizard of the Crow as a dictator novel “in transition” opens toward a further claim: at the turn of the twenty-​first century, confronted by large-​scale changes in the global system, the dictator novel comes to its own moment of crisis. This “crisis” of the dictator novel signals the waning of its earlier concern with questions of decolonization and national consolidation, as in the decades following independence on the African continent, and an increasing emphasis on global systems of power—not simply as the force driving dictatorship, but as the machinery of oppression itself. In the era of neoliberal globalization, the dictator is no longer the primary fulcrum around which power, and the critique of authoritarian power, are organized. This returns me to two questions posited at the start of this chapter; first, if the dictator is to become increasingly irrelevant to the operations of global systems of oppression, what then becomes of the dictator novel? And second, if it is no longer bound by an emphasis on opposition to a dictator, what might the critical projects of the dictator novel be going forward? The wording of the first question was purposefully naive: because it has developed a self-​generating drive separate from the actual historical incidence of dictatorship, the dictator novel will continue to exist. Indeed, it will likely persist despite transformations in the global system precisely because of the strong association between the Global South and a history of dictatorship. The history of the dictator novel in Latin American literature suggests that writers elsewhere in the Global South may prove as likely to look backward (in time) as forward. But, as indicated by Kourouma’s reflections on the testimony at the National Conference in Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, such projects—­particularly when they merely enumerate a dictator’s crimes—­are necessarily limited. As I have endeavored to show throughout this book, the dictator novel of the Global South engages and complicates such an easy reliance on stereotype. The dictator novel remains a genre that

The Dictator in the Corpolony

173

is capacious and elastic, amenable to a wide range of critical projects; hence my second question. In its turn toward the Global South as a framework for affiliation, Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow offers a possible model for the futures of the dictator novel. It is, however, one that will increasingly strain against the limits (however flexible) I have proposed for the genre in this book. If Wizard of the Crow opens a path, it is only one among many. I arrive here at a final proposition: dictator novels will continue to be written and circulate internationally, but this does not entail that they should be read in the same key as their predecessors. The dictator novel emerges as a reaction to a complex set of political and cultural factors in a specific time and place; consequently, there is immense variance within the genre. It is necessary to read, as I have modeled in these case studies, for what Fredric Jameson called the “layered” or “marbled” structure of each text, attending to the discontinuities as well as the continuities of the dictator novel as a generic series. In taking up the dictator novel, writers continually reshape the contours of literary form in order to account for new political and cultural realities, mobilizing the genre toward new critical ends. The generic bound­ aries of the dictator novel, therefore, are in a process of ongoing expansion. If anything, the mutations I have illuminated in Wizard of the Crow demonstrate that even a genre whose borders have ostensibly been set can once again become volatile.

Afterword

Moving Outward and Forward

Despite the arc of my argument in the final chapter, dictators, dictatorship, and authoritarianism continue to be matters of pressing concern in the world. The past decade has seen the rise or entrenchment of autocratic regimes as well as attempted or successful coups; longtime dictators have been violently ousted, as during the Arab Spring, or quietly pushed from power, as with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in late 2017. The capture and killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, an event recorded in real time and circulated globally, is one spectacular example of the former. New patterns have also emerged. Existing authoritarian regimes have “gone global,” expanding their influence beyond their national borders and helping to drive a larger backlash against liberal democracy.1 Attempts to unseat dictators in countries such as Syria have descended into protracted and devastating civil war. The rise of right-​wing, populist, and often xenophobic nationalism as a major political force in western Europe and the United States—­the heart, so to speak, of the global North—­is an ongoing phenomenon. The state itself seems to be losing ground, as nonstate and parastate actors come to play an increasingly important role in the global system. The phenomena that provide the historical substrate for my work in this book remain agonizingly timely. I am therefore cautious in offering concluding remarks. At the most basic level, the futures of the dictator novel will remain linked to the futures of dictators and dictatorship. However, I have consistently argued that the relationship of the dictator novel to the historical phenomenon of dictatorship is largely tangential. By this I mean that, while the fact of dictatorship drove the emergence of the dictator as a literary figure (see my argument in chapters 2 and 4), as the dictator novel cohered it acquired an autogenous force separate from the actual incidence of dictatorship. The three Latin American dictator novels of the 1970s and the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project discussed in chapter 3 are a case in point. Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Augusto Roa Bastos—­or, for that matter, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and all the other writers involved in “The Fathers of the Fatherlands”—­were less concerned with contemporary authoritarian regimes than with the history

175

176 Afterword

and legacies of dictatorship in Latin America. This opened up new critical directions in their respective works, and their novels are in dialogue with the history of the representation of dictatorship as much as the history of dictatorship itself. Similarly, Ahmadou Kourouma and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o take up the dictator novel as a means to think about the transformation of structures of oppression, beyond the denunciation of particular dictators or dictatorships. The Ruler and Koyaga are of course central to Ngũgĩ’s Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow, 2004–7; 2006) and Kourouma’s En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, 1998), but each novel posits that the era of this particular type of dictator is coming to an end. The dictator of the dictator novel, then, is a literary phenomenon that recurs on what are increasingly its own terms. In this sense, Jorge Zalamea’s vision of a dictator transformed into a papier-​mâché parrot, even more so than Junot Díaz’s suggestion that the writer and dictator are somehow alike, remains the key image for this book. With this in mind, I will offer some closing reflections for my analysis of the dictator novel in the literatures of the Global South. My argument is premised on the claim that writing about dictatorship, and writing dictator novels in particular, are not practices exclusive to Latin American or African literatures. The dictator novel recurs throughout the literatures of the Global South and it should therefore be read in a comparative perspective. See, for instance, the Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s La Dernière nuit du Raïs (The Dictator’s Last Night, 2015), which imagines the final hours of Muammar Gaddafi. The novel ends with an extended description of Gaddafi’s death, narrated by the dictator, and closes with Gaddafi floating above his body watching the jubilation of the crowd.2 In tone and style, this novel has drawn comparison to both García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975) and Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del Chivo (Feast of the Goat, 2000), w ­ hich are still stalwart exemplars of Latin American literature in the public imagination.3 Further comparisons might be made to Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Ex-​père de la nation; to the portions of the narrative focalized through the Ruler in Wizard of the Crow; and, perhaps most compelling, to the extended narration of Francia’s death in Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme, 1974). Not only would such comparisons open up a fruitful conversation about narrative mechanics, they might also serve to productively trouble the premise of Ángel Rama’s definition of the dictator novel, which has served as my touchstone for the argument in this book. In short: what are the limits (or pitfalls) of trying to understand dictatorship from the dictator’s perspective? A second example: in A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif presents a fictionalized account of the death of General Muhammad Zia-​ul-​Haq of Pakistan (ruled 1978–­88). The book’s narrative perspective shifts between the dictator and those in his service,

Moving Outward and Forward

177

like so many of the novels discussed here, including the general who hopes to unseat Zia. In a familiar comic touch, Zia suffers from an acute case of tapeworm for much of the novel. When he eventually seeks medical help, the physician, who has treated several heads of state, initially assumes that the dictator has come to seek enhancement of his sexual organs or performance. The scene culminates with a meticulous description of the ensuing rectal exam, during which the dictator contemplates the Pakistani flag.4 Such moments require an analysis along the lines of my discussion of vulgarity in The Autumn of the Patriarch (chapter 3) and elsewhere in this book. Hanif’s turn to the scatological is a recognizable tactic of the dictator novel, but it seems to fall into the old habit of substituting insult for critique. However, A Case of Exploding Mangoes also opens up new comparative itineraries. Hanif is explicit about his intertextual debts: the novel’s acknowledgments list both Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat and García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981), and the latter makes an appearance within the novel itself.5 At the same time, it is in dialogue with texts and traditions that fall well outside the scope of what I have explored in this book: among the charred remains of General Zia’s plane are pieces of García Márquez’s novel, as well as an intact copy of the Qur’an. The Qur’an is open to the twenty-​first sura, the story of Dhul-​nun (Jonah) and his prayer to Allah (21:87), the translation of which General Zia contemplates at length earlier in the novel.6 A Case of Exploding Mangoes, together with the dictator novel in South Asian literatures more generally, requires its own case study. The same is true, of course, for Khadra’s The Dictator’s Last Night, which is part of a growing literature on dictators and dictatorship in North Africa and the Middle East that is slowly making its way into translation (and therefore wider circulation), as well as for East Asian literatures.7 This is, finally, what The Dictator Novel offers its readers: a framework and comparative model that should be a starting point for further work. My efforts to delineate the dictator novel as an object of study have been explicitly provisional. I have aimed to highlight its discontinuities as much as the continuities that provide the bases for my comparison of the dictator novel in Latin American and African literatures. As the archive expands, so too will the constellation of features that make up this generic series. The dictator novel remains an emergent and volatile body of material whose textual features—­as well as its politics—­are neither stable nor necessarily given, and which will undergo further transformation and recoding as the dictator novel recurs across the literatures of the Global South.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book on novels about dictators over the better part of the last decade has at times felt all too timely, and at other times woefully out of step with quickly unfolding political realities. The process has been a lesson in what it means to live with a set of ideas as they grow and evolve. If the work of writing occasionally felt untimely, it was certainly not solitary: I have been fortunate to have unstinting support and excellent company. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who have helped to make this book. First and foremost, I thank Gianna Mosser for her enthusiasm about this project and the staff at Northwestern University Press for guiding the manuscript through to its final form. I am especially grateful to the reviewers, whose generous and insightful comments have made for a sharper and better book. I first read Ahmadou Kourouma’s En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages in a seminar with Mark Sanders at New York University (NYU), and I later wrote about the intersections of fetishism and dictatorship in that novel for a seminar with Jacques Lezra. The germ of this book was in those early efforts. But this project would not have been possible without Mary Louise Pratt, who was an early model for the kinds of thinking that well-​grounded and rigorous comparison can open up; who proved a thoughtful and exacting advisor; and who, together with Mark, has remained a generous mentor. The outlines of this book are a testament to the intellectual community at NYU, where I was privileged to find excellent teachers and friends. NYU also provided funding for my early archival work on the correspondence of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, summer support (including a spot in a Mellon Summer Seminar), and a full year of writing time to complete a first draft of this project. At the University of Mississippi, the College of Liberal Arts’ Summer Research Grants funded work in the archives at the Princeton University Library; and the opportunity to edit an issue of The Global South journal, working closely with Leigh Anne Duck, was transformative for the larger framework of the book. An Early Career Residential Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center in 2014–­15 was the period in which this book truly came together. I thank Jonathan Arac and the Center’s directors for the opportunities that year provided. At the Pennsylvania State University, where I have the distinction of holding the inaugural Caroline D. Eckhardt Early Career Professorship in Comparative Literature, I have found an intellectual home and a community of generous peers and colleagues in the College of Liberal Arts. Their input and company have been invaluable to the

179

180 Acknowledgments

completion of this project. Penn State has provided support for my research in the Gabriel García Márquez archive and the African studies collections at the Harry Ransom Center, as well as a return to Princeton and the time necessary to complete this manuscript. It has also funded the conference travel, invitations of guest speakers, and other exchanges that are part of a growing career. The experience has been everything I hoped for in coming to Penn State; I thank Eric Hayot for the opportunity together with Robert Edwards and Carey Eckhardt for their careful guidance in my time here. For the archival components of this project, I owe thanks and admiration to the staff at the Museo Histórico Sarmiento in Buenos Aires (as well as Adriana Amante), the Manuscripts Division in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Princeton University Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Not only were they welcoming and helpful to this particular researcher, their efforts in organizing and maintaining rich collections are crucial to the work that literary scholars do. I have presented parts of this project at a long list of conferences and symposia over the years. My false starts often proved as fruitful as my early successes, and I have benefited from generous audiences throughout. The following is only a partial list of the conversations that have helped the work along. The 2013 symposium “Reading Dictatorship: Looking Back at the Postcolony,” co-​organized with Jini Kim Watson (and with many thanks for the invitation), was crucial for rethinking my dissertation as a book. The 2014 Global Modernism Symposium at Ithaca College similarly helped me to reformulate the stakes of South–South comparison for my work; I thank Chris Holmes and Jennifer Spitzer, together with all of the participants. The lecture I gave at the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center in 2014 was the crucial first step in working through my archival research and formed the core of chapter 3. Charlotte Baker’s invitation to take part in the “Writing for Liberty” conference at Lancaster University in 2015 became the seed for chapter 5 and connected me to a new community of scholars. Further presentations at the 2016 Modern Language Association annual conference and at the “Red on Red” symposium at Yale University that same year helped to put the final pieces of the project in place; I thank Neil ten Kortenaar (later one of the reviewers of this manuscript), Héctor Hoyos, Marijeta Bozovic, and Marta Figlerowicz. As I revised the final manuscript, I was fortunate to have several opportunities to present parts of the book to new audiences at Ithaca College (thanks again to Chris Holmes and Jonathan Ablard); the Penn State Modernist Studies Workshop; the “Thinking the Global South” conference, which was organized with the generous support of many colleagues; the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University (with thanks to Sarah Thomas); and the Arts and Sciences Workshop in the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, a visit cosponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature (with thanks to Mariano Siskind and Katharina Piechocki).

Acknowledgments

181

Portions of my research connected to this project have appeared in several venues; much of this work falls outside the frame of the book, but inevitably contributed to the final result. I am grateful to readers at the Latin American Literary Review, where I published a piece on Juana Manuela Gorriti that helped me to rethink much of the material in chapter 2 (vol. 41, no. 82; 2013), and Research in African Literatures, where I published a portion of chapter 5 (vol. 49, no. 3; 2018); to Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, editor of the collection Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature (2014), in which I published two chapters that proved crucial early steps; and to Kerry Bystrom and Joey Slaughter, editors of the collection The Global South Atlantic (2018). The latter was an occasion to dig into the comparative dimensions of this project, from which the book has benefited immensely. I thank Research in African Literatures for permission to reproduce portions of the article I published with them; Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc., for permission to cite from the Carlos Fuentes Papers at the Princeton University Library; and MIT Press for permission to reproduce the cover of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues’ report, North-​South: A Program for Survival (1980). Lastly, I am honored that this manuscript received a Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award, and I thank the American Comparative Literature Association for supporting the work of young scholars in the field. Such years-​long projects are necessarily sustained by community, intellectual and otherwise. It is impossible to list the many wonderful conversations—­ meals, drinks, and coffees, which often went much longer than planned—­that have helped to make this book. These are precisely the kinds of exchanges that make the work of research such a pleasure. I first met Anne Garland Mahler on an airplane in 2011; from that unlikely meeting have come many fruitful collaborations, including our work on the Global South forum at the Modern Language Association and the creation of the digital platform Global South Studies. Colleagues at the University of Mississippi (together with their partners, families, and pets) provided community within and well outside of work; I have missed them very much since my departure. My year at the University of Pittsburgh was enriched by the excellent intellectual community in and around the Humanities Center. I am grateful to the many people who took the time to engage with my work and share theirs with me; I learned a lot from these conversations. I have been similarly lucky at Penn State. I am particularly thankful to the members of the Department of Comparative Literature, each of whom helps to make it an exceptional place to work. I owe particular gratitude to the people who have taken time to discuss, read, and provide feedback on the many pieces and drafts of this project. First and foremost, I thank Tara Mendola, who has worked with me as a developmental editor on portions of this book as well as on other projects. I also thank Gayle Rogers (to whom I owe the title of this book), Hoda El Shakry,

182 Acknowledgments

Sarah Thomas, Kahlila Chaar-Pérez, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Anne Garland Mahler, Alfred López, Mary Louise Pratt, Katharina Piechocki, Lori Cole, Lily Saint, Nienke Boer, Andrea Cooper, Erica Weitzman, Laurie Lambert, Jini Kim Watson, Julie Kleinman, Jonathan Abel, Jonathan Eburne, Rose Jolly, Shuang Shen, and Anna Ziajka Stanton. There are also, of course, many people outside of professional circles without whom this book would not have been possible. To friends near and far and to my extended families I owe another series of thank-​you’s. Here, I want to acknowledge my parents, Ignacio Armillas and María Luz Tiseyra. In ways that go well beyond the privileges of education and mobility—­which have been many—­they opened the world to me and taught me to be open to it. For that, I dedicate this first book to each of them. I am also grateful to and for my sister Rocío, my given and constant companion in the world. And finally, I am grateful to and for Beniamino Ambrosi, my chosen companion and accomplice in all things.

Notes

Introduction 1. Zalamea outlines these goals in a prefatory letter; see El Gran Burundún-​ Burundá ha muerto y La metamorfosis de Su Excelencia (Bogotá: Arango Editores, 1989), 77–­79. 2. Taban Lo Liyong, “Lexicographicide,” in There Is a Country: New Fiction from the New Nation of South Sudan, ed. Nyuol Lueth Tong (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2013), 57–­62. 3. The caudillo and the Big Man provide the tropes and critical language for representation of the dictator in Latin America and Africa, respectively. The terms themselves require further attention. The caudillo is a regional leader or military strongman, but not all caudillos are heads of state. The Spanish word caudillo has its roots in the Latin term capitellum (head) and acquired its military association during the wars of independence in Latin America, where it occupied the territory between the general term “leader” and a specific government position such as president. Only over the course of the nineteenth century, via its association with Juan Manuel de Rosas (discussed in chapter 2), did the term become fixed as a synonym for “dictator.” This inflection of the term was cemented in Spain, where Francisco Franco (ruled 1936–75) took the title “El Caudillo” as an analogue for “il Duce” (Mussolini) and “die Führer” (Hitler). See David Rock, Argentina 1516–­1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 129; John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America 1800–­1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 3 and 304; and Jorge Lafforgue, ed., Historias de caudillos argentinos (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1999). The term “Big Man” refers to a highly influential individual who wields both formal and informal authority; he sits atop a large patronage network but is not necessarily in government. Despite its close association with the continent, the term “Big Man” is not specific to Africa: it originated in ethnographic studies of Melanesia and Polynesia. See Mats Utas, “Bigmanity and Network Governance in African Conflicts,” in African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks, ed. Mats Utas (London: Zed Books, 2012), 1–­34; and Glynn Cochrane, Big Men and Cargo Cults (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). 4. I acknowledge that whether or not a particular head of state deserves to be called a “dictator” may in many cases be the subject of (heated) debate. However, as will become clear over the course of this book, my interest is in the dictator as a literary figure elaborated within the tradition of the dictator novel, rather than the specifics of its possible historical referents. 5. Fidel Castro, “La novela de sus recuerdos,” Cambio, October 7, 2002, 85–­ 86. A translation of Castro’s essay appeared in Foreign Policy the following year, under the title “Chronicle of a Friendship Foretold” (March-​April 2003). Unless

183

184

Notes to Pages 4–7

otherwise noted, all translations from the Spanish, French, and Portuguese in this book are my own. 6. Castro, “La novela,” 86. 7. See “El Fidel Castro que yo conozco,” Granma, April 17, 2014, http://www​ .granma.cu/cultura/2014-04-17/el-fidel-castro-que-yo-conozco. 8. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Writers in Politics: The Power of Words and the Words of Power,” in Writers in Politics: A Re-​Engagement with Issues of Literature and Society (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997), 67. 9. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2007), 97n11. 10. Ángel Rama, Los dictadores latinoamericanos (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976), 9–­10. 11. My use of the “generic series” model elaborates on Mary K. Addis’s analysis of the Latin American dictator novel; see “Synthetic Visions: The Spanish American Novel as Genre,” Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (1991): 189–­219. For Jameson’s articulation of this model, see the chapter “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism,” in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). 12.  Macarena Gómez-​Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 5–­6. For more on transition and postdictatorship in Latin America and Latinx fiction, see Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Andrew C. Rajca, Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2018); and Jennifer Harford Vargas, Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 13. See Alfred J. López, “Introduction: The (Post)Global South,” The Global South 1, no. 1 (2007): 1–­11; Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (New York: Verso, 2012); and Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018); as well as Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “Introduction: Dislocations,” The Global South 7, no. 2 (2013): 1–­10. 14. Novels such as Ramón del Valle-​Inclán’s Tirano Banderas (Tyrant Banderas, 1926) and John Updike’s The Coup (1978) are interesting exceptions to what I have described, in that they focus on and even focalize through the dictator. In Updike’s case, the satire of a recently deposed Islamic-​Marxist dictator in a fictional African republic falls flat, because the dictator remains the object of mockery rather than analysis. Tyrant Banderas is often cited as an important juncture in the Latin American dictator novel; see Conrado Zuluaga, Novelas del dictador, Dictadores de novela (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1977), 11–­12; Mario Benedetti, “El recurso del supremo patriarca,” in El recurso del supremo patriarca (Mexico: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1979), 12; Carlos Pacheco, Narrativa de la dictadura y crítica literaria (Caracas: Fundación Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1987), 9; Adriana Sandoval, Los dictadores y la dictadura en la novela hispanoamericana (1851–­1978) (Mexico: Universidad

Notes to Pages 9–14

185

Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989), 13; and Addis, “Synthetic Visions,” 192–­200. 15. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (New York: Verso, 2007), 78. 16. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1920), trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 89. 17. As a matter of translation, hyphenation of the English phrase (“dictator-​ novel”) more aptly conveys the link between “dictator” and “novel” in the Spanish or French terms, which I generally prefer. Roberto González Echevarría offers a similar translation from the Spanish; see The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). However, whether in Spanish, French, or English, the critical nomenclature varies immensely; I therefore use the phrase “dictator novel” as the simplest possible appellation. 18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 58–­61. 19. I am summarizing both Sartre’s Qu’est-​ce que la littérature? (What Is Literature? 1948) and “Introducing Les Temps Modernes” (1945); see Jean-​Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? and Other Essays, ed. Steven Ungar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 20. The phrase “combat literature” (littérature de combat) comes from Fanon’s address to the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Rome, 1959), which was the basis for the chapter “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth; see Frantz Fanon, “Fondement réciproque de la culture nationale et des luttes de libération,” Présence Africaine 24/25 (1959): 82–­89. 21. Ngũgĩ, “Writers in Politics,” 67. 22. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 116–­17 and 235–­39. 23. Chinweizu, “African Literary Criticism Today,” Okike 9 (1975): 105. 24. Tchichiellé Tchivéla, “Une Parenté outre-​Atlantique,” Notre Librairie 92 (1988): 30–­4. 25. Henri Lopès, Le Pleurer-​rire (1982; Paris: Présence Africaine, 2003), 345–­ 46 and 355. 26. Edna Aizenberg, “Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Achebe’s No Longer at Ease: Divided Heroes and Deconstructive Discourse in the Latin American and African Novel,” Okike 25/26 (1984): 10. 27. Josaphat Kubayanda, “Unfinished Business: Dictatorial Literature of Post-​ Independence Latin America and Africa,” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 4 (1997): 38–­53. 28. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 238. 29. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–­88. 30. Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” Social Text 17 (1987): 4. 31. Roberto Schwartz, “Is There a Third World Aesthetic?” (1980), in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, trans. John Gledson (New York: Verso, 1992), 174.

186

Notes to Pages 15–16

32. For a more detailed description of these three phases, see Pacheco, Narrativa de la dictadura, 67–­72. In the criticism, these three phases roughly correspond to literary-​historical periods: romanticism, modernism, and the “contemporary,” to use a capacious term. There have been some adjustments to this framework. Juan Carlos García, for instance, offers a four-​phase model that includes “regionalism” (costumbrismo regional), which extends from the late nineteenth century into the first part of the twentieth century; see El dictador en la literatura hispanoamericana (Santiago de Chile: Mosquito Comunicaciones, 2000). González Echevarría, meanwhile, designates Carpentier, Roa Bastos, and García Márquez’s dictator novels as the “postmodern” phase of the Latin American dictator novel (The Voice of the Masters, 65). In counterpoint to studies exclusively focused on dictator novels, González Echevarría, Gerald Martin, and Jean Franco take up the dictator novel within the larger arc of their respective studies of Latin American literature and culture. González Echevarría reads the Latin American dictator novels of the 1970s as part of the move toward postmodernism and what he calls the “textual novel”; see “The Dictatorship of Rhetoric / The Rhetoric of Dictatorship,” Latin American Research Review 15, no. 3 (1980): 205–­28; and The Voice of the Masters. Gerald Martin strongly disagrees with González Echevarría’s reading; see “On Dictatorship and Rhetoric in Latin American Writing: A Counter-​Proposal,” Latin American Research Review 17, no. 3 (1982): 207–­27; and Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1989). Jean Franco reads dictator novels within a larger body of literature on violence and the fragmentation of the social body, issues that remain central to Latin American literature and culture; see The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Expanding on this line of thinking, Franco has more recently analyzed the ways in which the pressures of modernization unleashed a wave of state violence, understood within the longue durée of coloniality in the Americas; see Cruel Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013). 33. Pacheco and Julio Calviño Iglesias each include wide-​ranging lists of works about dictators and dictatorship in Latin America, written by Latin American as well as U.S. and European writers; see Pacheco, Narrativa de la dictadura, 103–­ 27; and Iglesias, La novela del dictador en Hispanoamérica (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1985), 12–­22. 34. Rama, Los dictadores latinoamericanos, 16. 35. Gabriela Polit-Dueñas, Cosas de hombres: Escritores y caudillos en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2008). 36.  Boniface Mongo-​Mboussa, Désire d’Afrique (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 82; see also Jean Ouédraogo, “An Interview with Ahmadou Kourouma: November 24, 1997,” Callaloo 23, no. 4 (2000): 1338–48. 37. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 168. 38. Jennifer Harford Vargas and Monica Hanna, “Transnational Forms,” in Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: Twenty-​First Century Approaches to Teaching, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Harford Vargas, Forms of Dictatorship.

Notes to Pages 16–18

187

39. Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (New York: Riverhead, 2007). 40. Gitahi Gititi, “Ferocious Comedies: Henri Lopès’s The Laughing Cry and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari as ‘Dictator’ Novels,” in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Texts and Contexts, ed. Charles Cantalupo (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 1995), 211–­26. 41. See Koffi Anyinefa, Littérature et politique en Afrique noire: Socialisme et dictature comme thèmes du roman congolais d’expression française (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1990); Josaphat Kubayanda, “Introduction: Dictatorship, Oppression, and New Realism,” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 2 (1990): 5–­11, and “Unfinished Business”; Gititi, “Ferocious Comedies”; Madeline Borgomano, Des Hommes ou des bêtes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Simon Gikandi, “The Winter of Discontent,” Foreign Policy 1147 (March-​April 2005): 76–­77; Robert L. Colson, “Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow,” Research in African Literatures 42, no. 1 (2011): 133–­53; Michael K. Walonen, “Power, Patriarchy, and Postcolonial Nationalism in the African Dictator Novel,” Journal of the African Literature Association 6, no. 1 (2011): 104–­17; Robert Spencer, “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African Dictator Novel,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47, no. 2 (2012): 145–­58; and Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “The Dictator and His Objects: The Status of the Fetish in the African Dictator Novel,” in Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature, ed. Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 40. Kubayanda’s work on literature and dictatorship in Latin America 125–­ and Africa is perhaps the clearest precursor to my project. His manuscript length project remained unfinished after his death in 1991; but for a book-​ a posthumous essay, “Unfinished Business: Dictatorial Literature of Post-​ Independence Latin America and Africa” (1997), contains the kernel of its argument. 42. See Josef Gugler, “African Literary Comment on Dictators: Wole Soyinka’s Plays and Nuruddin Farah’s Novels,” Journal of Modern African Studies 26, no. 1 (1988): 171–­77; Kubayanda, “Dictatorship, Oppression, and New Realism” and “Unfinished Business”; Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, introduction to Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Fiction, ed. Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014); and Cécile Bishop, Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny (London: Legenda, 2014). 43. See Gititi, “Ferocious Comedies”; Colson, “Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest”; and Spencer, “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African Dictator Novel.” 44. The rise of the Global South as a category was of a piece with the more general shift from East-​West rivalries to North-​South tensions at the end of the Cold War; see Eric Sheppard and Richa Nagar, “From East-​West to North-​South,” Antipode 36, no. 4 (2004): 557–­63. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, Vijay Prashad offers more in-​depth accounts of the rise (and fall) of the Third World project and the origins of the Global South in the present. Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South enriches previous historical accounts by drawing attention to the

188

Notes to Pages 18–20

importance of Cold War movements such as the Tricontinental and transnational struggles for racial justice for the Global South today. For further overviews of the emergence of the concept of the Global South, see Arif Dirlik, “Global South: Predicament and Promise,” The Global South 1, no. 1 (2007): 12–­23; Anne Garland Mahler, “Global South,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory, ed. Eugene O’Brien (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780190221911–­ 0055; and Russell West-​ Pavlov, “Toward the Global South: Concept or Chimera, Paradigm or Panacea?” in The Global South and Literature, ed. Russell West-​Pavlov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–­19. 45. Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South, 6. 46. The relationship between the Global South and postcolonial studies remains for me an open question, not least because the latter has undergone productive waves of self-​interrogation and expansion. Some articulations of the Global South define it in contrast to postcolonial studies, positioning the field as uniquely suited to addressing the challenges of neoliberal globalization; see López, “Introduction: The (Post)Global South,” 3; and Anne Garland Mahler, “The Global South in the Belly of the Beast: Viewing African American Civil Rights through a Tricontinental Lens,” Latin American Research Review 50, no. 1 (2015): 96. However, as Mahler has more recently observed, critical understanding of the relationship between the two remains undeveloped; her work in From the Tricontinental to the Global South addresses this issue in historical terms. 47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “How Do We Write, Now?” PMLA 133, no. 1 (2018): 168. 48. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 71–­102. See also Pheng Cheah’s discussion of world literature in the introduction to What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); and Debjani Ganguly’s discussion of “world” and “global” in This Thing Called World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 19–­27. For a discussion that locates the emergence of these concepts in early modern Europe in relation to current critical debates, see the introduction to Ayesha Ramachandran’s The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 49. As the authors note on the copyright page, “This projection represents an important step away from the prevailing Eurocentric geographical and cultural concept of the world.” See Willy Brandt et al., North-​South: A Program for Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980). 50. For more on the untimeliness of the commission’s “global Keynesianism,” see Dirlik, “Global South,” 14–­15; Prashad, The Poorer Nations, 69–­73; and André Gunter Frank, “North-​South and East-​West Keynesian Paradoxes in the Brandt Report,” Third World Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1980): 669–­80. 51. The South Commission formed within the Non-​ Aligned Movement (1987), with Nyerere ­as chair. The majority of its report attends to the conditions that have engendered the present situation and seeks a new paradigm for understanding the South. But the report ultimately makes few recommendations for the future. As Prashad demonstrates, the report itself is less interesting than the debates surrounding its production and dissemination (The Poorer Nations, 85–­141).

Notes to Pages 20–28

189

52. Antonio Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926), in Gramsci: Pre-​Prison Writings, trans. Virginia Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 314. 53. See the United Nations Development Program’s report Forging a Global South (2004), http://​www​.undp​.org​/content​/dam​/china​/docs​/Publications​/UNDP​ -CH​-PR​-Publications​-UNDay​-for​-South​-South​-Cooperation​.pdf. 54. Prashad makes this historical argument toward the end of The Darker Nations and throughout The Poorer Nations. Although the end of the Cold War may have obviated three worlds theory, it was not properly the end of the Third World as a political project. Per Prashad (The Darker Nations), the economic crises of the 1970s, which were nurtured by the restructuring of international finance and the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment programs and accompanied by the emergence of a transnational global elite whose shared interests superseded those of individual nation-​states, caused the unraveling of the Third World project. 55. Like the Global South, the term “Third World” has a complex history. Alfred Sauvy coined the term in 1952 to name the countries already considered as “developing” or “underdeveloped” (sous-​développés). He described the Third World as an entity separate from the First (capitalist) and Second (socialist or communist) worlds; the Third World was therefore the object of the struggle between the First and Second worlds for global hegemony; see Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L’Observateur 118 (August 14, 1952): 5. In the 1970s, Mao Zedong reshuffled Sauvy’s categories, designating the United States and the Soviet Union as the First World (“the biggest international exploiters, oppressors, and aggressors”); Japan, Europe, and Canada as the Second World (the “middle section”); and the international proletariat and the oppressed nations as the Third World; see Editorial Department of Renmin Ribao, Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds Is a Major Contribution to Marxism-​Leninism (Beijing: Foreign Languages, 1977). 56. Prashad, The Poorer Nations, 9. 57. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (2009; London: Paradigm, 2014), 134. For additional descriptions of the Global South as a metaphor, see Matthew Sparke, “Everywhere but Always Somewhere: Critical Geographies of the Global South,” The Global South 1, no. 1 (2007): 117; and Walter Mignolo and Caroline Levander, “The Global South and World Dis/Order,” The Global South 5, no. 1 (2011): 184. Chapter 1 07), trans. Ngũgĩ wa 1. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow (2004–­ Thiong’o (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 667. East African Educational Publishers published Mũrogi wa Kagogo in three volumes between 2004 and 2007. The Gikuyu-​language original anticipates this scene: “Mwathani” (ruler) is also the term used for “Lord” in Gikuyu translations of the Bible. 2. Carlos Fuentes, “A Despot, Now and Forever,” New York Times, April 6, 1986, n.p., https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/24/nnp/supreme.html. 3. Gabriel García Márquez to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, May 22, 1966 (Container 1.1), Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza Collection of Gabriel García Márquez Correspondence, 1961–­1971, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

190

Notes to Pages 28–31

4. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Fiction,” in Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1986), 80. 5. Ibid., 75. 6. Zalamea, El Gran Burundún-​Burundá ha muerto, 78–­79. 7. Thibault Le Renard and Comi M. Toulabor, “Entretien avec Ahmadou Kourouma,” Politique Africaine 75 (1999): 178. 8. Yves Chemla, “En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages ou le donsomana: Entretien avec Ahmadou Kourouma,” Notre Librairie 136 (1999): 29. 9. Alejo Carpentier, “Una conversación con Jean-​Paul Sartre” (1961), in Entrevistas, ed. Virgilio López Lemus (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1985), 507–­10. Sartre and Carpentier discuss the “act of witnessing” (la acción de testimonio) and the figure of the “faithful witness” (testigo fiel) as a description for the work of the committed writer. 10. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier, Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 15. 11.  Jean-​Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman, in What Is Literature? and Other Essays, ed. Steven Ungar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 28. 12. Jean-​Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombie, in What Is Literature? and Other Essays, 297–­98. 13. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” trans. Frances McDonagh, in Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso, 2007), 180. 14. Ibid., 184. Adorno makes a similar observation of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940); the film “loses all satirical force and becomes obscene when a Jewish girl can hit a line of storm-​troopers on the head with a pan without being torn to pieces. For the sake of political commitment, reality is trivialized: which then reduces the political effect” (Aesthetics and Politics, 184–­85). 15. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-​Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 246. 16. Adorno, “Commitment,” 191. 17. See Steven Ungar, introduction to What Is Literature? and Other Essays, 16–­17. states on the African continent achieved independence 18. Most nation-​ between 1956 and 1968; the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola followed in 1974 and 1975. Formally separated from Britain in 1965, Zimbabwe (previously Rhodesia) overthrew white minority rule in 1980; similarly, the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 marked the beginning of independence, understood as democratic self-​rule by the majority. 19. To this end, the government built the Escuela Nacional de Artes on the site of a former country club; it also created the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Art and Industry and the National Council of Culture; Alejo Carpentier returned to Cuba to head the new Editorial Nacional (National Press); and Nicolás Guillén helped found the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. The newly established Casa de las Américas became a major regional and international cultural center through the influence of its annual literary prize, and its magazine served as a key site of exchange. See Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American

Notes to Pages 31–32

191

Left after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1993); and Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). 20. See, for instance, the formation of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL)—­a cultural as well as political organization—­at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana. For more on the circulation and influence of the aesthetic vocabulary developed in OSPAAAL publications such as the Tricontinental magazine, see Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South. 21. As the editors of Casa de las Américas argue in “Responsibility of the Intellectual to the Problems of the Underdeveloped World,” the Third World intellectual must negotiate both the autochthonous culture and the one imposed by colonization or imperialism. The duty of the intellectual, they write, is to appropriate the latter: “And so the instruments which in the colonizer’s hands serve to economically and spiritually subjugate the people are reclaimed by [the Third World intellectual] and thus critically engaged [utilizados con sentido crítico] become instruments of liberation.” “Responsabilidad del intelectual ante los problemas del mundo subdesarrollado,” Casa de las Américas 47 (March-​ April 1968): 104. 22. I am condensing a wealth of debate on magical realism, the Latin American literary boom, and their international circulations; see Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, 127–­235; Fernando J. Rosenberg, The Avant Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); and Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desire: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 59–­102. 23. By 1966, the Cuban government and its representatives were openly critical of writers such as Pablo Neruda and Carlos Fuentes for attending a PEN International meeting in New York. In 1968, Cuban officials opened the Cultural Congress of Havana with a call for the categorical rejection of U.S. cultural imperialism (colonización cultural), which included the refusal of all invitations, scholarships, and employment, the acceptance of which would constitute collaboration; see the “Convocación” in Casa de las Américas 47 (March-​April 1968): 100–­101. 24. Fidel Castro, “Palabras a los intelectuales” (1961), in Revolución, letras, arte, ed. Virgilio López Lemus (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1980), 7–­33. Castro is addressing writers and artists who may not share the revolution’s values; they are, he argues, free to express themselves so long as this does not rise to the level of active opposition to the revolution. The speech as a whole emphasized the need for the development of culture, cultural institutions, and the fomentation of cultural participation as part of the national revolutionary project. Its argument turned on the overlapping meanings of “culture” as both “art” and “education.” Both were crucial for a movement that sought to build a more equitable society, in which greater education would increase access to culture, in both senses of the term; see Parvathi Kumaraswami, “Cultural Policy and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Cuba: Re-​Reading Palabras a los intelectuales (Words to the Intellectuals),” Bulletin of Latin American Research 28, no. 4 (2009): 527–­41. 25. Padilla was arrested in March 1971 and released in April after signing a confession repudiating his collection of poems, Fuera del juego (1968). The letter, signed by Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, Marguerite Duras,

192

Notes to Pages 32–34

Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Octavio Paz, Jean-​Paul Sartre, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others was first published in Le Monde (April 9, 1971) and appeared in the New York Review of Books the following month (May 6, 1971). Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza included García Márquez’s signature in the first version on the assumption that he would be in agreement. García Márquez, however, proved reluctant to condemn Castro and removed his name from the second version; see Mendoza, Gabo: Cartas y recuerdos (Barcelona: Ediciones B., 2013), 222–­41; Ángel Esteban and Stéphanie Panichelli, Fidel and Gabo: A Portrait of a Legendary Friendship between Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez (2006), trans. Diane Stockwell (New York: Pegasus, 2009), 34–­45; and Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2009), 338–­42. 26. Franco, Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 95. 27. Óscar Collazos, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura (polémica) (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1970), 16–­18. For more on this polemic, see Franco, Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 97–­100. 28. Collazos et al., Literatura en la revolución, 49–­53, 66, and 73–­74. 29. García Márquez to Mendoza, July 22 [1966] (Container 1.1), Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza Collection of Gabriel García Márquez Correspondence, 1961–­1971. The letter omits the year, but, given the discussion of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a manuscript near completion and the reference to the upcoming PEN meeting in New York, 1966 is most likely. The original reads: “el arte comprometido, la novela como fusil para tumbar gobiernos, es una especie de aplanadora de tractor que no levanta una pluma a un centímetro del suelo. Y para colmo de vainas, ¡qué vaina!, tampoco tumba ningún gobierno. Lo único que permite subir una señora en cuerpo y alma, es la buena poesía.” The reference is to Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude, an ethereal beauty who floats up to heaven. 30. Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 9. 31. Edward Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 24. 32. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 159–­63. 33. Ibid., 168. 34. Per Wästberg, ed., The Writer in Modern Africa: African-​Scandinavian Writer’s Conference, Stockholm 1967 (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968), 14. For more on the importance of this conference, see Simon Gikandi, “Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations,” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 4 (2001): 1–­18. 35. For an example of calls for transnational solidarity, see Youssef el Sebai, “Intellectuals and the Revolutionary Impetus,” Afro-​Asian Writings: Quarterly of the Permanent Bureau of Afro-​Asian Writers 1, no. 2–­3 (1968): 6–­11. 36. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward a Decolonization of African Literature, vol. 1, African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension, 1980), 239. For a contextualization of this argument within the broader sweep of African literary criticism,

Notes to Pages 34–36

193

see Gaurav Desai, “The Novel in Africa: Theories and Debates,” in The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, ed. Simon Gikandi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 515–­25. 37. Chinweizu et al., Toward a Decolonization of African Literature, 252–­55. 38. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 208–­9. 39. Ibid., 760. 40. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. 41. Ibid., 19. 42. My argument here intersects with Moira Fradinger’s reading of the (Latin American) dictator novel in Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 43. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 686–­701. 44. By “ungenerous,” I mean that Adorno’s reading of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in “Commitment” focuses on the final product, rather than the transformational value of group praxis in the production of the play itself. The latter was at the core of Brecht’s Lehrstücke (“learning plays”). This element of Brecht’s work proved especially influential for African writers; see Nicholas Brown, “Revolution and Recidivism: The Problem of Kenyan History in the Plays of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 1 (1999): 56–­73; “Ousmane Sembène: For Me, the Cinema Is an Instrument of Political Action, but . . .” (1969), trans. Anna Rimpl, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Brysh and Max Annas (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 7−17; and Loren Kruger, Post-​Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 45. Mbembe delivered the original talk at the 1989 meeting of the African Studies Association; it appeared under the title “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony” in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62, no. 1 (1992), and in slightly truncated form as “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” in Public Culture 4, no. 2 (1992). The subsequent issue of Public Culture featured a dossier of responses to Mbembe’s essay, “Belly Up: More on the Postcolony” (5, no. 1 [1992]). A French version, “Notes provisoires sur la postcolonie,” appeared in Politique Africaine 60 (1995). 46. This is also true of Mbembe’s use of the word “banal” in the essay “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony.” In Mbembe’s usage, “banal” suggests the commonplace or quotidian, as that which becomes predictable and routine in the everyday. The phrase echoes Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” an observation put forward in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, 1965) and the subject of much debate. Like Arendt, Mbembe’s use of “banality” is slippery; but here consideration of Arendt’s inflection of the phrase in the book’s “Postscript” is useful. For Arendt, “banality” as it pertained to Eichmann was something akin to “thoughtlessness.” As she writes, what remained striking about Eichmann was that he was not a villain, but rather diligent and, in his remoteness from reality, thoughtless about the actual consequences of his actions; see Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1965; New York: Penguin, 2006), 287–­88. Mbembe, then, takes up the notion of the “banal” to designate signs and practices that have become “ordinary” and are reproduced unthinkingly in all corners of society.

194

Notes to Pages 36–41

47. For more on this line of argumentation, see Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 34–­38. 48. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last, and Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 102–­3. 49. Ibid., 67. 50. Bakhtin’s argument in Rabelais and His World (1965) serves as the representative for a larger critical tendency, and Mbembe does not undertake an in-​depth critique of the concept. As Mikael Karlstöm argues, Mbembe flattens Bakhtin’s argument and eliminates its emancipatory thrust; see “On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony,” Africa 73, no. 1 (2003): 57–­76. 51. Rita Barnard, “On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South African Transition: Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying,” NOVEL 37, no. 3 (2004): 289; and Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 103. 52. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 133. 53. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 18. The Swahili is also used in the Gikuyu original, where it marks the difference between the speaker’s native Gikuyu and Swahili as one of the official languages of the state; see Mũrogi wa Kagogo, vol. 1 (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2004), 19–­20. 54. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 160. 55. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 12–­21. 56. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 145. 57. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 55–­81. 58. Josefina Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre: A Treatise on the Motherland (1988), trans. Molly Weigel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 4. 59. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 131. 60. Ibid., 137–­41. 61. Ibid., 144. 62. Wai Chee Dimock, “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 86. 63. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 39. 64. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 143–­45. 65. This was a collective of peasants, workers, and intellectuals based at the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Education and Cultural Centre. Ngũgĩ produced the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want, 1977) with the collective shortly before his arrest. This work, a Gikuyu-​language and politically oriented form of radical theater (inspired by Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or “learning plays”), along with his work to reform the English Department at the University of Nairobi, are widely seen as the cause of his detention. 66. Ngũgĩ, “The Language of African Fiction,” 64. 67. Ibid., 75–­78. 68. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross (1980), trans. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Oxford: Heinemann, 1982), 89.

Notes to Pages 42–44

195

69. For more on science fiction and Wizard of the Crow, see Ian P. MacDonald, “The Cybogre Manifesto: Time, Utopia, and Globality in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow,” Research in African Literatures 47, no. 1 (2016): 57–­75; and Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “Afronauts: On Science Fiction and the Crisis of Possibility,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3, no. 3 (2016): 273–­90. For an analysis of Ngũgĩ’s departure from realism, see Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, “The Crisis of Representation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow,” Journal of the African Literature Association 2, no. 2 (2008): 34–­57. 70. Eileen Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 145–­46. These kinds of dispersive and mutually effecting transformations, which confound the logic of periodization and the categorization of literary modes, have a long history in African literatures; see Simon Gikandi, “Realism, Romance, and the Problem of African Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2012): 309–­28. 71. Harford Vargas, Forms of Dictatorship, 14–­16. 72. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 5. 73. I discuss magical realism and the use of the fantastic in the dictator novel at length in “Marvelous Autocrats: Disrupted Realisms in the Dictator Novel of the South Atlantic,” in The Global South Atlantic, ed. Kerry Bystrom and Joseph R. Slaughter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 186–­204. See also Ngũgĩ’s description of what he calls the “marvelous realism” of orature in “A Globalectic Heterotopia: Writing a Novel from a Liminal Space,” NOVEL 49, no. 1 (2016): 5–­9. 74. For examples of the former, see the decennial reports on the state of the discipline produced by the American Comparative Literature Association. The most recent of these is Futures of Comparative Literature, ed. Ursula K. Heise (New York: Routledge, 2017), which began as an online platform, offered as an open-​ ended and pluralistic alternative to its predecessors; see https://stateofthediscipline​ .acla.org/. For an example of the latter, see the collection Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), which began as a series of essays published in New Literary History 40, no. 3 (2009) and PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011). For a history of comparative literature as a discipline in the United States, see Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). 75. Joseph R. Slaughter, “Locations of Comparison,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 2 (2018): 209−26. 76. Slaughter, “Locations of Comparison,” 218; Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-​Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 81. 77. Chow, Age of the World Target, 79. 78. For an example of this argument, see R. Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, 15–­33. 79. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, 38–­39.

196

Notes to Pages 44–52

80. Ibid., 42. 81. Shu-​ mei Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, 79–­98. 82. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990), trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 172. 83. Melas, All the Difference in the World, 107. 84. I am referring to Damrosch’s description of the double process by which a work enters world literature: “first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin”; see David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6. Chapter 2 1. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento to Luis Varela, June 30, 1887, in Sarmiento remitente: Cartas, ed. Adriana Amante (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2002), 56−58. 2. Diana Sorensen, Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 23–­40. 3. Fradinger, Binding Violence, 172–­78. 4. Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 4. 5. David Viñas, Literatura argentina y realidad política (1964; Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1994), 4–­5. 6. Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 112–­13; and Pacheco, Narrativa de la dictadura, 54–­59. 7. In Spanish, the gaucho genre is called both gauchesca (when referring to poetry, poesía gauchesca) and gauchesco (as in the genre, género gauchesco). I use the phrase “gaucho genre” in concordance with Ludmer’s translator in The Gaucho Genre. 8. Joshua Simon provides a useful summary of this period, locating these divisions within the larger emergence of postindependence political units in the Americas; see The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 179–­83. 9. Beatrice Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano, “Prólogo,” in Esteban Echeverría, Obras escogidas, ed. Sarlo and Altamirano (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991), xv. 10. Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vi. 11. Esteban Echeverría, The Slaughteryard, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Susan Ashe (London: Friday Books, 2010), 32. 12. This slogan was required on official documents and correspondence; it even appeared on the masthead of the pro-​Rosas newspaper, El defensor de la independencia americana (The Defender of American Independence). 13. Esteban Echeverría, “El matadero,” Revista del Río de la Plata: Periódico mensual de historia y literatura de América 1, no. 4 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta y Librería de Mayo, 1871), 556–­85, https://archive.org/stream​/revistadelriode​ 10gutigoog#page/n7/mode/1up.

Notes to Pages 52–57

197

14. Adriana Amante, Poéticas y políticas del destierro: Argentinos en Brasil en la época de Rosas (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), 474–­75. 15. Echeverría, The Slaughteryard, 13–­14; for the original, see “El matadero,” in Obras escogidas, 131. 16. Echeverría, The Slaughteryard, 7. 17. Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 144n2. 18. Amalia appeared in the Montevideo (Uruguay) newspaper La Semana from late 1851 until February 1852, when the Rosas regime fell. The narrative was missing its final seven chapters, which Mármol included in the revised book version published in 1855. Los misterios del Plata appeared in Portuguese in the Río de Janeiro (Brazil) newspaper O Jornal das Senhoras beginning in January 1852; the Spanish-​language version was published as a book in 1855. 19. Juana Manso, Los misterios del Plata: Episodios históricos en la época de Rosas (1855; Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2005), vii. 20. Juana Manso, “Mistérios del Plata: Romance Histórico Contemporâneo,” O Jornal das Senhoras 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1852): 6–­7, http://objdigital.bn.br​ /acervo_digital/div_periodicos/per700096/1852/per700096_1852_01.pdf. 21. Recourse to the family metaphor was common in this period, and reflects the importance placed on blood ties and alliances in the chaos that followed the wars of independence. According to Doris Sommer, representation of the unified family served to promote a particular ideal of national stability. By contrast, fractured or otherwise fraught family units served as doubles for national strife; see Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Francine Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 22. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937), trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 19 and 25–­30; see also John Marx, “The Historical Novel after Lukács,” in Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, ed. Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (London: Continuum, 2011), 188–­201. 23. José Mármol, Amalia, trans. Helen Lane, ed. Doris Sommer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xxxiv. 24. Ibid., 291–­92. 25. Manso, Los misterios del Plata, 57–­58. 26. Lelia Area, Una biblioteca para leer la nación: Lecturas de la figura de Juan Manuel de Rosas (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2006), 238–­40. 27. Mármol, Amalia, 334 and 572–­73. 28. José Mármol, “Manuela Rosas: Rasgos biográficos,” in Manuela Rosas y otros escritos políticos del exilio, ed. Félix Weinberg (Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2001), 235–­58. 29. Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism, 21–­34. 30. See Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “Beyond Metaphor: Juana Manuela Gorriti and Discourses of the Nation under Juan Manuel de Rosas,” Latin American Literary Review 82, no. 42 (2013): 26–­46. 31. Manso, Los misterios del Plata, 58.

198

Notes to Pages 58–63

32. Mármol, Amalia, 47–­50. 33. Manso, Los misterios del Plata, 58. 34. Mármol, Amalia, 54; for the original, see José Mármol, Amalia, ed. Teodosio Fernández (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001), 129. 35. Miguel Ángel Asturias, The President, trans. Frances Partridge (Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland, 1963), 281. 36. William Garrett Acree, Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011), 3–­6. 37. Rosas functioned as the de facto supervising editor of Archivo americano, where he determined the frequency and length of issues, gave detailed instructions on the order of information, and selected which articles would appear in what language; see Ignacio Weiss, “Juan Manuel de Rosas, Pedro de Angelis y el Archivo americano,” in Archivo americano y espíritu de la prensa del mundo 1843–­1851, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Americana, 1946), xxv−xxvii. 38. Pacheco (Narrativa de la dictadura) touches briefly on this larger body of literature; Amante (Poéticas y políticas) mentions Ascasubi, but he is not the subject of extended analysis. 39. See Mármol, Amalia, 303–­4. 40. Pedro de Angelis, Ensayo histórico sobre la vida del Exmo. Sr. D. Juan Manuel de Rosas, gobernador y capitán general (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1830), 28. 41. Pedro de Angelis, Archivo americano 30 (October 25, 1846): 70–­72; qtd. in Weiss, “Juan Manuel de Rosas, Pedro de Angelis y el Archivo americano,” lv−lvii. 42. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ ” (1981), in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Edinburgh: Pearson, 1998), 443–­49; see also Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 3–­4 n2. 43. See Julio Schvartzman, Microcrítica: Lecturas argentinas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 1996), 165; and Julio Schvartzman, Letras gauchas (Buenos Aires: Erena Cadencia, 2013), 145. 44. Nicolás Lucero, “La guerra gauchipolítica,” in Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, vol. 2, ed. Julio Schvartzman (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2003), 25–­26. 45. Ángel Rama, Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses: Literatura y sociedad (Buenos Aires: Calicanto, 1976), 93–­97. 46. Coined by Rama, the term gauchipolítico is a play on the term gaucho-​ poético (poetic-​gaucho or gaucho-​poet), which was already in circulation by 1853. 47. Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, introduction to Luis Pérez y la biografía de Rosas escrita en verso en 1830 (Buenos Aires: Clio, 1957), 6; William Garrett Acree, “Luis Pérez, a Man of His Word in 1830s Buenos Aires and the Case for Popular Literature,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 88, no. 3 (2011): 379. 48. Luis Pérez, “Carta (Guenos Ayres, Agosto 4 de 1830)” (1830), in Historia y antología de la poesía gauchesca, ed. Fermín Chávez (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Margus, 2004), 78–­80. 49. Schvartzman, Letras gauchas, 190. 50. Luis Pérez, “Poesía biográfica de Rosas titulada ‘El Gaucho’ publicada en 1830, por Luis Pérez,” in Luis Pérez y la biografía de Rosas escrita en verso en 1830, ed. Ricardo Rodríguez Molas (Buenos Aires: Clio, 1957), 23.

Notes to Pages 63–68

199

51. Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 90. 52. Acree, “Luis Pérez, a Man of His Word,” 380–­85. 53. These poems originally appeared in several venues; Ascasubi later gathered them together in his collected works. This particular collection was titled Paulino Lucero, o Los gauchos del Río de la Plata cantando y combatiendo contra los tiranos de las Repúblicas Argentina y Oriental del Uruguay (1839–­1851) (Paulino Lucero, or The Gauchos of the Río de la Plata Singing and Fighting against the Tyrants of the Republics of Argentina and Uruguay, 1872); see Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, eds., Poesía gauchesca, vol. 1 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955), 98 and 264–­66. 54. See Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 138−53; and Acree, Everyday Reading, 73–­76. 55. Borges and Casares, eds., Poesía gauchesca, 1: 207. 56. Juan María Gutierrez praised Ascasubi’s work as an accurate account of life under Rosas, while Florencio Varela and Valentín Alsina promoted Ascasubi in El comercio del Plata; see Hilario Ascasubi, Obras completas, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprenta de Paul Dupont, 1872), vii and xi. 76; Rama, Los gauchipolíticos rio57. See Acree, Everyday Reading, 71–­ 96; Lily Sosa de Newton, Genio y figura de Hilario Ascasubi platenses, 93–­ (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1981), 120. 58. Rama, Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses, 96–­97; see also Ana María Amar Sánchez, “La gauchesca durante el rosismo: Una disputa por el espacio del enemigo,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 18, no. 35 (1992): 7–­19. 59. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity, 51. 60. See González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters, 71; and González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: Toward a Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 98; Iglesias, La novela del dictador en Hispanoamérica, 26; Pacheco, Narrativa de la dictadura, 55; Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, 266; Gwen Kirkpatrick and Francine Masiello, “Introduction: Sarmiento between History and Fiction,” in Sarmiento: Author of a Nation, ed. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Ivan Jaksic, Gwen Kirkpatrick, and Francine Masiello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2; Polit-Dueñas, Cosas de hombres, 27; and Fradinger, Binding Violence, 176–­79. 61. See Noé Jitrik, Muerte y resurrección de Facundo (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1968), 12–­13; Ricardo Piglia, “Sarmiento, escritor,” Filología 31, no. 1–­2 (1988): 19–­34; and Shumway, The Invention of Argentina, 162–­63. 62. Following Sarmiento and his contemporaries, I draw a distinction between the “caudillo”—­a term that referred to a regional or provincial leader (often glossed with the slightly pejorative phrase “regional strongman”) such as Quiroga, of which there were many—­and Rosas, whose authoritarian rule was national in scale. 63. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 31. 64. Ibid., 68–­69; Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 12 and 136. 65. The text’s publication history supports this reading: the first two sections of Facundo appeared in the Chilean newspaper El Progreso (May 2 to June 21, 1845) and end with the death of Quiroga; the book published later that year

200

Notes to Pages 68–75

includes the third section on Rosas; Sarmiento published several further revised editions during his lifetime. See Lucila Pagliai, “Facundo: La historia del libro en la vida de Sarmiento,” in Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, vol. 4: Sarmiento, ed. Adriana Amante (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2012), 33–­66. 66. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 30; for the original, see Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo, ed. Noé Jitrik, Susan Zanetti, and Nora Dottori (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985), 4–­5. 67. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 30 and 263n1. 68. The quote was used as an epigraph by Charles Didier in the Revue Encyclopédique, of which Sarmiento was a reader; see Sylvia Molloy, At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 31. 69. Ricardo Piglia, “Sarmiento the Writer” (1988), in Sarmiento: Author of a Nation, ed. Halperín Donghi et al., 137. 70. Molloy, At Face Value, 31–­32. 71. Piglia, “Sarmiento the Writer,” 137–­38. 72. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 91–­94. 73. Ibid., 31; for the original, see Sarmiento, Facundo, ed. Jitrik et al., 7. 74. Ibid., 32. 75. Sarmiento addressed Alsina’s corrections in the form of a letter, which was included as an appendix to the introduction in later editions; see Sorensen, Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture, 51–­66. 76. Juan Bautista Alberdi, La barbarie histórica de Sarmiento [Facundo y su biógrafo] (1853–­62; Buenos Aires: Ediciones Caldén, 1964), 11. 77.  Noé Jitrik, “Facundo: The Riches of Poverty” (1977), in Sarmiento: Author of a Nation, 169–­92. 78. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 207–­8 and 213. 79. Ibid., 214. 80. Ibid., 208−9; for the original, see Sarmiento, Facundo, ed. Jitrik et al., 206. 81. Juan Bautista Alberdi, “La república argentina 37 años después de su Revolución de Mayo” (1847), in Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–­1880), ed. Tulio Halperín Donghi (Buenos Aires: Ariel Historia, 1995), 122–­23, 126. 82. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 239. 83. Ibid., 243−47. 84. Titles include Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera’s El conspirador (Peru; The Plotter, 1892), Martín Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo (Mexico; The Shadow of the Strongman, 1929), Manuel Bedoya’s El General Bebevidas: Monstruo de América (Peru; General Drinker-​of-​Lives: Monster of America, 1939), and many more. The topic also flourished in novels by non–­Latin American writers such as Joseph Conrad (Nostromo, 1904), O. Henry (Cabbages and Kings, 1901), and Ramón del Valle Inclán, Tirano Banderas: Novela de tierra caliente (Tyrant Banderas, 1926). Toward the middle of the century, Miguel Ángel Asturias published El Señor Presidente (Guatemala; The President, 1946); Jorge Zalamea wrote the surrealist novella La metamorfosis de Su Excelencia (Colombia; The Metamorphosis of His Excellency, 1949) as well as the more formally experimental El Gran Burundún-​Burundá ha muerto (The Great Burundún-​Burundá Has Died, 1952); and Enrique LaFourcade added La fiesta del rey Acab (Chile; King Ahab’s Feast, 1959) to the growing catalog of dictator novels.

Notes to Pages 77–80

201

Chapter 3 1. Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa, May 11, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 2. Fuentes, “A Despot, Now and Forever”; and Carlos Fuentes, “Augusto Roa Bastos: El poder de la imaginación,” in Geografía de la novela (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1993), 91–­102. Fuentes dates this meeting to autumn 1967, but his correspondence with Vargas Llosa shows that the initial conversations took place prior to May 11, 1967. 3. See Darío Villanueva, “El ‘monoteísmo’ del poder: La trilogía paraguaya de Augusto Roa Bastos,” in Yo el Supremo (Madrid: Real Academia Española/ Alfaguara, 2017), xv−xxxviii. 4. See Arturo Uslar Pietri, introduction to Miguel Ángel Asturias, El Señor Presidente, ed. Giuseppe Bellini (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986), ix−xix; and Asturias, “El Señor Presidente como mito” (1967), in El Señor Presidente: Edición crítica, ed. Gerald Martin (Madrid: ALLCA XXX, 2000), 468–­78. 5. Fragmented versions of the “Fatherlands” story have long circulated in the criticism; see Pacheco, Narrativa de la dictadura y crítica literaria; Adriana Sandoval, Los dictadores y la dictadura en la novela hispanoamericana (1851–­ 1978); Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth; Polit-Dueñas, Cosas de hombres; Ángel Esteban and Ana Gallego, De Gabo a Mario: La estirpe del boom (Madrid: Editorial Espasa, 2009), which includes some archival work; Fradinger, Binding Violence; and Harford Vargas, Forms of Dictatorship. 6. Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, 266 7. Rama, Los dictadores latinoamericanos, 15–­16. 8. Augusto Monterroso to Mario Vargas Llosa, February 28, 1968, Mario Vargas Llosa Papers (C0641), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 9. Augusto Monterroso, “Novelas sobre dictadores 1 y 2” (1983), in Tríptico (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 168–­70 and 173. 10. Dain Borges, “Machiavellian, Rabelaisian, Bureaucratic?” Public Culture 5, no. 1 (1992): 112. This essay was part of a dossier responding to Achille Mbembe’s “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony” (Public Culture 4, no. 2 [1992]). 11. Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, 274. 12. Rama, Los dictadores latinoamericanos, 15; Benedetti, “El recurso del supremo patriarca,” 13. 13. Benedetti, for example, argues that Reasons of State offers the most “revolutionary” critique, and he lauds Carpentier’s use of humor (“El recurso del supremo patriarca,” 30). Rama prefers The Autumn of the Patriarch for its incorporation of the plural first-​person narrative perspective (Los dictadores latinoamericanos, 63). Martin is suspicious of the humor in Carpentier (“the familiar phenomenon of laughter camouflages despair”) and writes of García Márquez: “It is difficult to see how so great a writer could have been so mistaken” (Journeys through the Labyrinth, 276–­77). 14. Tomás Eloy Martínez, “Todo Roa Bastos,” Papel Literario de El Nacional (Caracas), May 21, 1978; quoted in Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo, ed. Carlos Pacheco (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986), 395–­96.

202

Notes to Pages 80–82

15. By the early 1970s, García Márquez was an international star; The Autumn of the Patriarch was his first novel published after One Hundred Years of Solitude. Established a generation earlier, Carpentier had long been a prominent voice in Latin American letters. Although less well-​known outside of Latin America, Roa Bastos had received much attention for his journalism, short stories, and the novel Hijo de Hombre (Son of Man, 1960). 16. By 1972, critics were declaring the end of the boom; see Ángel Rama, “El ‘boom’ en perspectiva,” in Más allá del boom: Literatura y mercado, ed. David Viñas et al. (Mexico: Marcha Editores, 1981), 51–­110. The dates of the boom itself remain a matter of debate; propositions range from a period beginning in the late 1950s through the mid-​1970s, to a few short years in the mid-​1960s. The early 1960s saw the publication of key works—­including Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1962), Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962), and Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1963)—­which established momentum for the decade. The publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, which coincided with the award of the Nobel Prize to Miguel Ángel Asturias and the death of Che Guevara, marked the apex of this momentum. The political upheavals of 1968 signaled a turn in the political and intellectual life of the region, and the 1973 coup in Chile (itself preceded by the 1964 coup in Brazil) marked the end of a period of political optimism. Writing with these three dictator novels in mind—­as well as Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975), which he calls a “titanic failure”—­Martin uses 1975 to mark the “end of an era” (Journeys through the Labyrinth, 237). Much of what I condense in this paragraph is expanded upon by the essays in the volume Teaching the Latin American Boom, ed. Lucille Kerr and Alejandro Herrero-​Olaizola (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2015). 17. José Donoso, Historia personal del “boom,” 2nd ed. (1972; Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984), 46–­47. 18. Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 24. 19. Deborah Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press), 5. 20. See the chapter “Toward a Transnational Republic of Letters” in Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). 21. Franco, Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 139; Antonio Candido, “Literature and Underdevelopment” (1970), in On Literature and Society, trans. Howard S. Becker (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 119–­41; for a contemporary description, see Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “The New Latin American Novel,” Books Abroad 44, no. 1 (1970): 45–­50. 22. In the essay “The ‘Boom’ Novel and the Cold War” (1992), Neil Larson gives an excellent overview of differing (and conflicting) approaches to the idea of the boom novel; see Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 64–­78. 23. For more on the shortcomings of the term “generation,” see David Viñas, “Pareceres y digresiones en torno a la nueva narrativa latinoamericana,” in Más allá del Boom, ed. Viñas, 13–­50.

Notes to Pages 82–83

203

24. Russell Cobb, “Promoting Literature in the Most Dangerous Area in the World: The Cold War, the Boom, and Mundo Nuevo,” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, ed. Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 245. Cobb cites as evidence a report written by Darwin (Bud) Flakoll of the U.S. State Department (October 25, 1965). Flakoll later makes an appearance in the archive of Fuentes’s correspondence on the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project: he was married to Claribel Alegría, whom Fuentes invited to contribute, and carried out much of that correspondence on behalf of his wife. 25. Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, 272–­73. 26. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” (1971), in Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 35. 27. Frustration with the hegemonic function of literature instigated a counter-​ canonical shift toward cultural studies and more popular genres such as testimonio; see George Yúdice, “Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America,” in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, ed. Jean Franco, George Yúdice, and Juan Flores (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 1–­28; John Beverly, Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Eduardo Mendieta, “Remaking Latin American Studies: Postcolonialism, Subaltern Studies, Post-​Occidentalism, and Globalization Theory,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 286–­306; and Sophia A. McClennen, “What’s Left for Latin American Cultural Studies?” Minnesota Review 76 (2011): 127–­40. 28. Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa, May 11, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). The original reads: “He andado rumiando desde que hablamos aquella tarde, en Le Cerf Volant, sobre Wilson y ‘Patriotic Gore.’ Y sobre un libro colectivo en esa vena. Hablaba anoche con Jorge Edwards y le proponía lo siguiente: un tomo que podría titularse ‘Los Patriarcas,’ ‘Los Padres de las Patrias,’ ‘Los Redentores,’ ‘Los Benefactores’ o algo así. La idea sería escribir una crónica negra de nuestra América: una profanación de los profanadores, en la que, v.g., Edwards haría un Balmaceda, Cortázar un Rosas, Amado un Vargas, Roa Bastos un Francia, García Márquez un Gómez, Carpentier un Batista, yo un Santa Anna y tú un Leguía . . . u otro hombre peruano. ¿Qué te parece? [ . . . ] Los de Gallimard, a su regreso de Túnez, me hablan del entusiasmo con el que los críticos de varias zonas idiomáticas hablaron del grupo latinoamericano. Subrayar ese sentido de comunidad, de tarea de grupo, me parece sumamente importante para lo futuro. Sin menoscabo de las personalidades, creo que en efecto hay una serie de denominadores comunes—literarios, políticos, lingüísticos, de esperanza y de futuridad también—­que conviene subrayar y reforzar.” 29. Planned and proposed participants included Fuentes (Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexico), Vargas Llosa (Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro, Peru), Edwards (José Manuel Balmaceda, Chile), Carpentier (Gerardo Machado, Cuba), Miguel Otero Silva (Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela), José Emilio Pacheco (Porfirio Díaz, Mexico), Cortázar (Eva Perón, Argentina), García Márquez (Joaquín Mosquera,

204

Notes to Pages 84–85

Colombia), Roa Bastos (José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Paraguay), Carlos Martínez Moreno (Juan Manuel de Rosas, Argentina), José Donoso (Mariano Melgarejo, Bolivia), Claribel Alegría (Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, El Salvador), Monterroso (Anastasio Somoza García, Nicaragua), and Adriano González León (Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela). Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez also discussed soliciting contributions from Miguel Ángel Asturias (Manuel Estrada Cabrera, Guatemala), Juan Bosch (Rafael Trujillo, Dominican Republic), the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo (on Francisco Franco’s Valley of the Fallen), and William Styron. Fuentes proposed that Styron could write on Trujillo, referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s remark that “Trujillo may be a son of a bitch, but he is OUR son of a bitch;” Fuentes to Gabriel García Márquez, July 5, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). The phrase in reference to Trujillo is properly attributed to Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, although Roosevelt is credited with saying the same of Anastasio Somoza García. In subsequent decades, the phrase has become commonplace in discussions of U.S. policy toward dictators throughout the Global South. Among the publishers interested in the project were Gallimard (France), Joaquín Mortiz (Mexico), Sudamérica (Buenos Aires), Seix Barral (Spain), Feltrinelli (Italy), Jonathan Cape (U.K.), and Farrar and Straus (U.S.). 30. Fuentes to Vargas Llosa, July 5, 1967; and Augusto Roa Bastos to Fuentes, June 20, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 31. Carlos Martínez Moreno to Fuentes, February 3, 1968, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 32. García Márquez to Fuentes, June 5, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 33. García Márquez to Fuentes, July 12, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 34. Writing at the centennial of the U.S. Civil War, Wilson demonstrates a deep skepticism of what he calls national “war aims”—­speaking from a place of general disillusionment with the Cold War—­and insists on the inherent illogic of war and the violence that drives national expansion (including internal colonization) and international conflict. The argument is both historical and deeply rooted in the concerns of Wilson’s present. The same could have been imagined for the “Fathers of the Fatherlands” project, but the model fails when it comes to the nature of the individual contributions, which were solicited literary texts rather than a scholarly study of fiction and nonfiction, as per the Wilson model. See Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in Literature of the American Civil War (1962; New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). Here, I owe thanks to Jay Watson for an illuminating conversation about Wilson’s work. 35. Fuentes to Otero Silva, May 5, 1968, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 36. Fuentes to Donoso, February 29, 1968, José Donoso Papers (C0099), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Fuentes to Roa Bastos, June 16, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790); Fuentes to Pacheco, May 15, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 37. Fuentes to Cortázar, May 26, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 38. Fuentes, “A Despot, Now and Forever.” 39. José Emilio Pacheco to Fuentes, April 8, 1968, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). The original reads: “Díaz es insondable. Entenderlo es entender los mecanismos del poder y quizá entender a México. Un proyecto demasiado ambicioso para mis limitaciones. Por otra parte, ya en cuanto escritura, no sé cómo

Notes to Pages 86–87

205

abordarlo. Cuando tengas tiempo te agradecería que me orientaras un poco. La información, el contexto es indispensable. De allí el riesgo de convertir una pieza narrativa en un artículo de Miroir de l’Histoire o un ensayo de sociología barata.” 40. Otero Silva to Fuentes, April 8, 1968, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 41. The article to which Edwards refers presumably appeared in a Chilean newspaper, although Otero Silva earlier mentioned to Fuentes that he had shared information about the project with a Venezuelan journalist; see Otero Silva to Fuentes, February 24, 1968, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). The following year, Flakoll sent Fuentes a clipping from the San Salvador newspaper El diario de hoy that described the project (with significant factual errors) and took issue with some of the writer-​dictator pairings, as well as the choice of dictators included; Darwin (Bud) Flakoll to Fuentes, January 13, 1969, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 42. Edwards to Vargas Llosa, May 15, 1968, Mario Vargas Llosa Papers (C0641). For expressions of similar concern, see Roa Bastos to Fuentes, June 20, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790); and García Márquez to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, July 1, 1963 or 1964 (Container 1.1), Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza Collection of Gabriel García Márquez Correspondence, 1961–­1971, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 43. As far as I have found, Claribel Alegría was the only participant to submit a text, the short story “Audiencia Matutina” (“Morning Hearing”). Narrated largely from the dictator’s perspective, it repeats many of the tropes for the representation of the dictator discussed here but adds little in terms of its approach to form. Claribel Alegría Papers (C1363), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 44. Fuentes, “A Despot, Now and Forever.” 45. Gabriel García Márquez and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, “El otoño del patriarca,” in El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1982), 115–­28. 46. Fuentes to García Márquez, November 19, 1965, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 47. García Márquez to Mendoza, July 1, 1963 or 1964 (Container 1.1), Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza Collection of Gabriel García Márquez Correspondence, 1961–­ 1971. See also Mendoza, Gabo: Cartas y recuerdos, 64. The letter omits the year; Mendoza estimates it is from 1963; but given the references to a series of novels published in 1962 and 1963 (“the year before”), I date this letter to 1964. 48. García Márquez and Mendoza, “El otoño del patriarca,” 120–­21. 49. García Márquez to Fuentes, October 30, 1965, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 50.  García Márquez to Mendoza, May 22, 1966 (Container 1.1), Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza Collection of Gabriel García Márquez Correspondence, 1961–­1971. 51. García Márquez to Vargas Llosa, December 2, 1967, Mario Vargas Llosa Papers (C0641). 52. García Márquez to Mendoza, March 9, 1968 (Container 1.2), Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza Collection of Gabriel García Márquez Correspondence, 1961–­ 1971. The original reads: “Con el dolor de mi alma deseché la estructura del largo monólogo, porque en este caso era falsa (quiero contarlo con mis palabras y no con las del personaje), y además he resuelto, con una irresponsabilidad de aventurero, eliminar todo contexto histórico, político y social, y centrarme en la

206

Notes to Pages 88–94

terrible soledad del dictador, ya más que centenario, durante sus últimos años de gobernante medio olvidado y medio loco, cuando ya ni siquiera gobierna, ni ve, ni oye, ni entiende, y sin embargo sigue mandando sin saberlo. Tengo que empezar por el capítulo final, cuando la gente entra al palacio siguiendo a los gallinazos que se meten por las ventanas, y encuentran al dictador tirado en el salón del trono, muerto y ya medio carcomido, hasta el punto de que nadie está muy seguro de que es él. Tengo que contar todo al revés, en un mamotreto que reconstruya muchos años de su vida, y dejar la impresión de que nadie estará nunca seguro de su muerte. A lo que tiro, modestamente, es a que siga gobernando el palacio vacío.” 53. García Márquez and Mendoza, “El otoño del patriarca,” 122–­23. 54. See Benedetti, “El recurso del supremo patriarca,” 16–­17; and Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, 276. 55. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 108–­9. 56. Polit-Dueñas, Cosas de hombres, 16–­17. 57. Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976), trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper, 2006), 119–­20. 58. As Ericka Beckman observes, García Márquez’s novel proved extraordinarily canny about the “rationalized irrationality of modern capitalism itself”; see Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), vii−ix. 59. García Márquez, Autumn of the Patriarch, 232–­33; for the original, see Gabriel García Márquez, El otoño del patriarca (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana/ Random House, 2014), 265–­66. 60. Guillermo Sheridan and Armando Pereira, “García Márquez en México (entrevista),” Revista de la Universidad de México 30, no. 6 (February 1976): 2–­3; García Márquez and Mendoza, “El otoño del patriarca,” 124–­25. 61. García Márquez to Vargas Llosa, November 12, 1968, Mario Vargas Llosa Papers (C0641). García Márquez made a similar claim in a 1975 interview: “I write for whoever wants to read me. But there is an aspect to The Autumn of the Patriarch that, in large part, will never by deciphered by critics, because it consists of private jokes between my friends and I” (Sheridan and Pereira, “García Márquez en México,” 5). 62. García Márquez, Autumn of the Patriarch, 22–­25. 63. Sheridan and Pereira, “García Márquez en México,” 2. 64. Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2009), 355. 65. García Márquez, Autumn of the Patriarch, 15–­17. 66. Ibid., 234–­35. 67. The story first appeared in the French edition of Guerre du temps et autres nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); then in English in War of Time, trans. Frances Partridge (New York: Knopf, 1970); and in Spanish as El derecho de asilo (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1972). 68. Alejo Carpentier, “Retrato de un dictador,” Octubre (August-​September 1933): 5–­10; in Octubre: Escritores y artistas revolucionarios (Liechtenstein: Topos Verlag AG, 1977), 61–­66. 69. Carpentier offered a useful typology of Latin American dictators in an interview with the Cuban newspaper Granma (May 18, 1974): the “barbarian caudillo” (el caudillo bárbaro); the “out-​and-​out dictator” (el dictador a secas),

Notes to Pages 94–104

207

practically illiterate but endowed with cultural capital by sycophants; and the “enlightened despot” (tirano ilustrado): “[the latter] is somewhat cultured; he reads famous books; he has a house in Paris; he travels, he returns; he has opinions, etc.; and he gives the impression that he is protecting the arts, letters, etc.; but ultimately, through other means, using his henchmen, he commits the same abuses as the general with a gun or the out-​and-​out dictator, who doesn’t even know why he is in power.” Alejo Carpentier, Entrevistas, ed. Virgilio López Lemus (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1985), 211. 70. Alejo Carpentier, Reasons of State (1976), trans. Frances Partridge (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2013), 322. 71. Ibid., 252–­59. 72. The First World Conference Against Colonial and Imperialist Politics took place in Brussels in February 1927; organized by the Comintern, it led to the founding of the League Against Imperialism, with Nehru as president. 73. Carpentier, Reasons of State, 353; for the original, see Alejo Carpentier, El recurso del método, ed. Salvador Arias (Madrid: Cátedra, 2006), 411. 74. Carpentier, Reasons of State, 40. 75. Ibid., 225−35. 76. Ibid., 250; for the original, see Carpentier, El recurso del método, 318–­19. 77. Carpentier, Reasons of State, 259. 78. Benedetti, “El recurso del supremo patriarca,” 21; González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters, 73. 79. Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, 272. 80. See Carpentier’s response to a questionnaire on revolutionary literature (literatura revolucionaria) (La Bohemia, Havana, July 22, 1966) in Entrevistas, 140–­42. While in a later interview with the Sol de México (November 28, 1975) he acknowledged the power of novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin to affect public opinion, he added: “The novel is not the best vehicle [modo] for denunciation, nor the best vehicle for social action” (Entrevistas, 306). 81. Elena Poniatowska, “Sociólogo e historiador además de gran escritor: Alejo Carpentier, el hijo pródigo” (1959), in Palabras Cruzadas (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 2013), 221–­46. 82. Roa Bastos to Fuentes, June 20, 1967, Carlos Fuentes Papers (C0790). 11; Thomas Car83. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 10–­ lyle, “Dr. Francia” (1843), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 4 (Chicago: American Bookmart, 1869), 205–­63. 84. Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Vintage, 1986), 65, 192–­202, and 412–­13. 85. Ibid., 194 and 32. 86. Ibid., 133 and 271–­72. 87. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 91–­93. 88. Roa Bastos, I the Supreme, 284–­85. 89. Ibid., 29; for the original, see Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo (Madrid: Real Academia Española/Alfaguara, 2017), 39. 90. Roa Bastos, I the Supreme, 197–­201. 91. Ibid., 435; for the original, see Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo, 620. 92. The etymology of the English word “complex” draws on the Latin complaited (Oxford plexus, literally “plaited together”: com-​, together; plexus-, ​

208

Notes to Pages 104–114

English Dictionary). The Latin word complex, in turn, is the root of the English “complice” or “accomplice.” For more on complicity as folded-​togetherness, see the introductions to Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 93. Roa Bastos, I the Supreme, 265. 94. Daniel Balderston, “Eater-​Reception and De-​Composition: Worms in Yo el Supremo,” MLN 101, no. 2 (1986): 418–­23. 95. Roa Bastos, I the Supreme, 415. 96. Ibid., 427. 97. Eloy Martínez, “Todo Roa Bastos,” 396. 98. Arturo Uslar Pietri, Oficio de difuntos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976), 344. Uslar Pietri’s dictator is based on the historical Juan Vicente Gómez (Venezuela), and Solana is based on Father Carlos Borges, an early opponent of Gómez who later became an ardent supporter. 99. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 328–­31 and 385–­404. 100. Polit-Dueñas, Cosas de hombres, 166. 101. Avelar, The Untimely Present, 21. 102. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 84 and 89. Chapter 4 1. Legson Kayira, The Detainee (London: Heinemann, 1974), 155. 2. Wahome Mutahi, Three Days on the Cross (Nairobi: Spear Books, 1991). 3. For the earlier translation, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1966). 4. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, 112–­17. 5. Josaphat Kubayanda, “Unfinished Business: Dictatorial Literature of Post-​ Independence Latin America and Africa,” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 4 (1997): 38–­53. 6. Fradinger, Binding Violence, 172–­78. 7. The Republic of the Congo underwent coups in 1963, 1968, 1977, and 1979, as well as several attempted coups; the country’s first elected president took office in 1992. Nigeria underwent two successive coups in 1966; this led to the Biafran War, in which the southeastern (Igbo) part of the country attempted to form an independent state (1967–­70). After the end of the war, Nigeria was largely ruled by a succession of juntas until the late 1990s. Senghor, a pioneer in the négritude movement, was president of Senegal until 1981 and was followed by a handpicked successor who remained in office until 2000. 8. Structural adjustment programs (SAPs; also called “structural adjustment loans,” SALs) are economic policies demanded in exchange for access to lending from institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Although their specific requirements vary, SAPs typically call for deregulation and the privatization of public services—­consistent with the global turn toward neoliberalism in the last third of the twentieth century—­in order to free up funds for servicing those foreign debts.

Notes to Pages 115–116

209

9.  Jean-​François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, trans. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison, Elizabeth Harrison, and Stephen Ellis, 2nd ed. (1989; Cambridge: Polity, 2009); see also Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10. George Klay Kieh and Pita Ogaba Agbese, eds., Reconstructing the Authoritarian State in Africa (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3–­4. 11. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14. 12. Bayart, The State in Africa, 24. 13. For the importance of these forums for young African writers, see Henri Lopès, “Le Congrès de 1956: Un rôle exemplaire,” Présence Africaine 175/177 (2008): 42–­46; the chapter “Transition and That Letter from Paris” in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Birth of a Dreamweaver: A Writer’s Awakening (New York: New Press, 2016); and Milton Krieger, “The Formative Journals and Institutions,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, ed. F. Abiola Irelele and Simon Gikandi, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 398–­407. Like Mundo Nuevo, magazines such as Black Orpheus and Transition received funding from the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Unlike Mundo Nuevo, these existed prior to the CCF’s involvement, and they received periodic grants rather than systematic funding; see Asha Rogers, “Black Orpheus and the African Magazines of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War, ed. Giles Scott-​Smith and Charlotte A. Lerg (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 243–­57. The connection is a useful reminder of the larger context in which conversations about national culture and liberation took place. As Ngũgĩ puts it, reflecting on evidence that the CCF financed the Makerere conference: “This secret manipulation was typical of the Cold War environment in which the conference and the decolonization of Africa took place” (Birth of a Dreamweaver, 139). 14. Literary criticism quickly registered the shift to a more critical treatment of the new leaders, and the shift became central to the systematization of African literatures into a series of phases, with Anglophone and Francophone literatures running roughly parallel. See Bernth Lindfors, “Nigerian Novels of 1966,” Africa Today 14, no. 5 (1967): 27–­31; Lindfors, “The African Politician’s Changing Image in African Literature in English,” Journal of Developing Areas 4, no. 1 (1969): 13–­28; Lindfors, “Politics, Culture and Literary Form in Black Africa,” Colby Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1979): 240–­51; Emanuel Obiechina, “Post-​Independence Disillusionment in Three African Novels,” in Neo-​African Literature and Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz Jahn, ed. Bernth Lindfors and Ulla Schild (Wiesbaden: Heyman, 1976), 119–­46; Daniele Stewart, “Disillusionment among Anglophone and Francophone African Writers,” Studies in Black Literature 7, no. 1 (1976): 6–­9; Jonathan Ngate, Francophone African Fiction: Reading a Literary Tradition (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 1988); Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post-​in Postmodernism the Post-​in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 336–­57; Joshua D. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (1999): 22–­59; and Derek Wright, “African Literature and Post-​ Independence Disillusionment,” in The

210

Notes to Pages 117–122

Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, ed. F. Abiola Irelele and Simon Gikandi, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 797−808. Kenneth Harrow offers an alternate nomenclature, referring to these as “revolt” and “postrevolt” literatures, as distinct from the earlier literature of témoignage (witnessing); see Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994). For a comparison of sub-​ Saharan and North African examples, see Mildred Mortimer, “Independence Acquired: Hope or Disillusionment?” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1 (1990): 35–­57. For more recent treatments, see Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier, Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 22–­26; and Mamadou Kalidou Ba, Le Roman africain francophone post-​colonial: Radioscopie de la dictature à travers une narration hybride (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). The most recent scholarship aims to rethink the standard narrative of African literary history by expanding its temporal and linguistic frames; see Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). 15. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 119. 16. Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 40–­46; and Achebe, “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause” (1968), in Morning Yet on Creation Day (New York: Anchor Books, 1975), 137. 17. Wole Soyinka, “The Writer in a Modern African State,” in The Writer in Modern Africa: African-​Scandinavian Writer’s Conference, Stockholm 1967, ed. Per Wästberg (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968), 16. 18. Wästberg, ed., The Writer in Modern Africa, 25–­26. 19. Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, 24. 20. Ousmane Sembène, “The Money Order” (1965), in The Money Order with White Genesis, trans. Clive Wake (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1972), 98. 21. Ousmane Sembène, Xala (1973), trans. Clive Wake (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1976), 97–­99. 22. Ibid., 83–­84. 23. Ibid., 103; for the original, see Ousmane Sembène, Xala (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973), 171. 24. “Ousmane Sembène: For Me, the Cinema Is an Instrument of Political Action, but . . .” (1969), trans. Anna Rimpl, in Ousmane Sembène: Interviews, ed. Annett Brysh and Max Annas (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 12. For the original, see Guy Hennebelle, “Ousmane Sembène: ‘Pour moi, le cinéma est un moyen d’action politique, mais . . .’ ” L’Afrique littéraire et artistique 7 (1969): 73–­82. 25. Ousmane Sembène, The Last of the Empire, trans. Adrian Adams (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1983), 236. 26. Ibid., 136. 27. Ibid., 221 and 231–­34. 28. Ibid., 143–­44. 29. Ibid., 155; for the original, see Ousmane Sembène, Le Dernier de l’Empire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1981), 280–­81. 30. Ibid., 237.

Notes to Pages 123–129

211

31. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 44. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Ibid., 45–­46. For Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” see Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 179−80. 34. Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (New York: Anchor Books, 1989). 35. Imre Szeman, Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 121–­26. 36. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 4. 37. Ibid., 72. 38. Ibid., 197–­98. 39. Ibid., 75. 40. Ibid., 2. 41. Ibid., 44. 42. Ibid., 145–­46. 43. Ibid., 91. 44. See Szeman, Zones of Instability, 128–­37. Highlighting women as active political agents was Achebe’s response to criticism of the representation of women in his earlier work; see Susan Andrade, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–­1988 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994); Chimalum Nwankwo, “Soothing Ancient Bruises: Power and the New African Woman in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah,” in Critical Approaches to Anthills of the Savannah, ed. Holger G. Ehling (Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1991), 55–­66. 45. Neil ten Kortenaar, “ ‘Only Connect’: Anthills of the Savannah and Achebe’s Trouble with Nigeria,” Research in African Literatures 24, no. 3 (1993): 68. 46. Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 83–­84. 47. Titles include Alioum Fantouré’s Le Cercle des tropiques (Guinea; The Tropical Circle, 1972), Williams Sassin’s Le Jeune homme de sable (Guinea; The Young Man of Sand, 1979), Tierno Monénembo’s Les Crapauds-​brousse (Guinea; The Bush Toads, 1979), Boubacar Boris Diop’s Le Temps de Tamango (Senegal; The Time of Tamango, 1981), Doumbi Fakoly’s La Retraite anticipée du Guide Suprême (Mali; The Early Retirement of the Supreme Guide, 1984), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Caitaani Mũtharaba-Inĩ (Kenya; Devil on the Cross, 1982) and Matigari (1986), Patrick Ilboudo’s Le Vertige du trône (Burkina Faso; The Vertigo of the Throne, 1990), Rachid Mimouni’s Une Peine à vivre (Algeria; Sentenced to Life, 1991), and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (Nigeria: 2000–­2002). 48. Dominic Thomas, Nation-​Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002), 125. 49. Wole Soyinka, “On the Heroes of our Time,” in A Play of Giants (New York: Methuen, 1984), v−x; Anne Rutherford, “Interview with Chinua Achebe,” Kunapipi 9, no. 3 (1987): 2. 50. Pius Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée: Reflections on the Francophone African Novel,” Comparative Literature 56, no. 3 (2004): 227–­42. 51. Ba, Le Roman africain francophone post-colonial, 161–­74. 52. Tchivéla, “Une Parenté outre-​Atlantique,” 30–­34.

212

Notes to Pages 130–135

53. Aminata Sow Fall, L’Ex-père de la nation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), 8. There is no published English translation of this novel, although William Hemminger completed a translation for a dissertation at Ohio University (1988). 54. Peter Hawkins, “An Interview with Aminata Sow Fall,” African Affairs 87 (1988): 430. 55. Sow Fall, L’Ex-​père, 51. The original reads: “Vous pensez que le pouvoir isole! Cela peut effectivement être une impression, mais les raisons d’État l’exigent, Excellence. Vous n’êtes pas un homme ordinaire. Vous êtes le Chef, le point de mire qu’adulent trente millions d’hommes et de femmes [. . .] Vous ne pouvez plus vous perdre dans la foule. Il faut que le mystère vous entoure et que, progressivement, le peuple vous identifie à un mythe. Mythe de la puissance et de la gloire. Tout l’appareil d’État est destiné à cela. Un homme sans mystère arrive difficilement à gouverner . . . Évidemment, Excellence, ce mystère libèrera les imaginations les plus folles et des fables naîtront qui, certainement, ne vous plairont pas toutes. C’est le côté un peu ennuyeux du pouvoir, facile d’ailleurs à transcender. Il suffit de savoir se mettre du plomb à l’oreille chaque fois que c’est nécessaire. Mais la légende doit se tisser pour entretenir le mystère. Les peuples ont besoin de cela, Excellence . . .” 56. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 102–­3. 57. See Andrade, The Nation Writ Small, 38–­39. 58. See Hawkins, “An Interview with Aminata Sow Fall,” 419; Mary-​Kay Miller, “Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Ex-​père de la nation: Subversive Subtexts and the Return of the Maternal,” in Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, ed. Mary Jean Green, Karen Gould, Micheline Rice-​Maximin, Jack A. Yaeger, and Keith L. Walker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Mary-​Kay Miller, “My Mothers/My Selves: (Re)Reading a Tradition of West African Women’s Autobiography,” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 2 (1997): 5–­15; Cazenave and Célérier, Contemporary Francophone African Writers, 33–­34; and Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 246–­94. 59. Miller, “Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Ex-​père de la nation,” 100. 60. My discussion of autobiography draws on Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-​Portraiture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Mineke Schipper, “Who Am I? Fact and Fiction in African First-​ Person Narrative,” Research in African Literatures 16, no. 1 (1985): 53–­79; and Molloy, At Face Value. 61. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 110. 62. Henri Lopès, The Laughing Cry: An African Cock and Bull Story, trans. Gerald Moore (New York: Readers International, 1987), n.p. 63. Moore translates “Tonton” as “Daddy,” an apt rendering of the paternalism of Bwakambé’s regime. But the choice in the French is purposeful: the former colonizers are referred to as “the Uncles” (les oncles) to Bwakambé’s “Little Uncle” (tonton). 64. Lopès, The Laughing Cry, 72. 65. Ibid., 34. 66. Ibid., 95. 67. Ibid., 139. 68. Ibid., n.p.

Notes to Pages 135–141

213

69. R. Chemin, “Le Réalisme critique: Entretien avec Henri Lopès,” Notre Librairie 9–­10 (1977): 71–­72. 70. Thomas, Nation-​Building, 120–­ 21; Cazenave and Célérier, Contemporary Francophone African Writers, 35–­38. For more on Lopès and commitment, see Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “The Unfaithful Chronicler: On Writing about the Dictator in Henri Lopès’s Le Pleurer-​rire,” in Unmasking the African Dictator, 47–­64. 71. Lopès, The Laughing Cry, 209–­11. 72. Ibid., 243–­56. 73. Ibid., 257–­58; for the original, see Henri Lopès, Le Pleurer-​rire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2003), 369–­71. 74. The French edition of García Márquez’s novel, L’Automne du patriarche, appeared in a translation by Claude Couffon in 1976 (Paris: Bernard Grasset). 75. Sony Labou Tansi, L’État honteux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), 7. Dominic Thomas foregrounds and emphasizes this reference in his translation of the same line. In Thomas’s rendering, Lopez “came into the world holding his big greasy herniated balls and exited still holding onto them.” The French is less straightforwardly obscene; it reads: “venu au monde en se tenant la hernie, parti de ce monde toujours en se la tenant.” But the reference to the dictator’s genitals is quickly clear in the variety of epithets that Lopez uses for his hernia, and Thomas chooses to foreground this in his translation. See Sony Labou Tansi, The Shameful State, trans. Dominic Thomas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 76. Labou Tansi, The Shameful State, 8. 77. Ibid., 115–­16. 78. Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 37–­38. 79. Mary K. Addis, “Synthetic Visions: The Spanish American Novel as Genre,” Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (1991): 213–­14. 80. Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality,126; Boniface Mongo-​ Mboussa, Désire d’Afrique (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 21; Phyllis Taoua, Forms of Protest: Anti-​Colonialism and Avant-​Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002), 29; and Lydie Moudileno, Parades postcoloniales: La fabrication des identités dans le roman congolais (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2006), 6–­9. 81. For more on magical realism and Life and a Half, see Taoua, Forms of Protest, 226–­28; Lydie Moudileno, “La Vie et demie, or the Tortuous Path of the Fable,” trans. Francis Higginson, Research in African Literatures 29, no. 3 (1998): 24; and Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “Marvelous Autocrats: Disrupted Realisms in the Dictator Novel of the South Atlantic,” in The Global South Atlantic, 186–­ 204. For discussions of Life and a Half and science fiction, see Lydie Moudileno, “Magical Realism: Arme miraculeuse for the African Novel?” Research in African Literatures 37, no. 1 (2006): 28–­41; Ba, Le Roman africain francophone post-colonial, 165; and Armillas-​Tiseyra, “Afronauts,” 273–­90. 82. Labou Tansi, Life and a Half, 3–­4; for the original, see Sony Labou Tansi, La Vie et demie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), 10. 83. Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality, 139. 84. Labou Tansi, Life and a Half, 5.

214

Notes to Pages 141–148

85. Ibid., 131. 86. Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 4. Chapter 5 1. Polit-Dueñas, Cosas de hombres, 166. 2. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 762. 3. Ahmadou Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, trans. Carrol F. Coates (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 238. There are two translations of Kourouma’s novel, Coates’s version and another by Frank Wynne, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (London: Vintage, 2004). To my mind, “waiting for the vote of the wild beasts” would be the most precise rendering of the original French. 4. Not only have global events in the decades since the end of the Cold War contravened the association—­or indeed, conflation—­of free-​market capitalism with democracy, this storyline is only one small (and often misinterpreted) piece of neoliberal thinking. For a large-​scale intellectual history of neoliberalism, see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018). 5. In Kenya, Daniel arap Moi took power after the death of Jomo Kenyatta in 1978 and remained in office until 2002. In Côte d’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-​ Boigny, the first president of the country, remained in office until his death in 1993. His handpicked successor, Henri Konan Bédié, held power until he was ousted in 1999. 6. Charles Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 4–­6. 7. I borrow the term “fractionated geography” from Eric Sheppard and Richa Nagar’s description of the global shift from East-​West to North-​South in the years following the end of the Cold War; see “From East-​West to North-​South,” Antipode 36, no. 4 (2004): 557–­63. 8. All of the African writers whose work I discuss in this book were born 2007), Ahmadou Kourouma (1927–­ before 1950: Ousmane Sembène (1923–­ 2003), Chinua Achebe (1930–­2013), Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), Henri Lopès (b. 1937), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938), Aminata Sow Fall (b. 1941), and Sony Labou Tansi (1947–­1995). 9. Dominic Thomas, “New Voices, Emerging Themes,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, ed. F. Abiola Irele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 227–­42. 10. Kourouma’s first novel, Les Soleils des indépendances (The Suns of Independence, 1968), was a key text in the literature of political disillusionment. His next novel, Monnè, outrages et défis (Monnew, 1990), arrived two decades later and explores the colonization of West Africa. This was followed by a period of prolific publication—­Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals (1998), Yacouba, chasseur africain (Yacouba, African Hunter, 1998), and Allah n’est pas obligé (Allah Is Not Obliged, 2002)—­before Kourouma’s death in 2003. This included the publication of the play Tougnatigui, ou, le diseur de vérité (Tougnatigui, or, the Truth Teller, 1972), often cited as the cause of Kourouma’s second exile, under the title Le Diseur de vérité (The Truth Teller, 1998). Ngũgĩ’s wa Thiong’o’s

Notes to Pages 149–154

215

first published novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), is set during the uprising against colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s. His subsequent works explored the arrival of British missionaries in central Kenya, the period of decolonization, and the decades of political disillusionment during the Cold War. Following a year of imprisonment (1977–­78), and like Kourouma in the 1960s and again in the 1970s, Ngũgĩ went into exile in the early 1980s. His novels from that decade, Caitaani Mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross, 1980), begun in prison, and Matigari (1986), explore the ravages of neocolonialism in the Kenyan postcolony. Wizard of the Crow followed almost two decades later. 11. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 230–­37. 12. Ahmadou Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, trans. Carrol F. Coates, 245. For more on these hunter societies, see Jean Dérive and Gérard Dumestre, eds., Des Hommes et des bêtes: Chants de chasseurs mandingues (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999). 13. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 92–­93. For more on the critical function of fetish objects in the African dictator novel, see Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “The Dictator and His Objects: The Status of the Fetish in the African Dictator Novel,” in Unmasking the African Dictator, 125–­40. 14. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 551–­53 and 124. 15. See Ngũgĩ, “The Language of African Fiction,” 63–­86. 16. Ngũgĩ refers to Devil on the Cross several times in Wizard of the Crow. For instance, at one point Kamĩtĩ encounters a man reading Devil on the Cross aloud to the crowd at a bar (Wizard of the Crow, 592). When Kamĩtĩ first meets Nyawĩra, she is reading the Swahili translation of Devil on the Cross, Shetani Msalabani (50–­51). Kamĩtĩ himself shares his name with the Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, where Ngũgĩ was detained and began writing that novel. 17. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 741–­43. 18. For more on gĩcaandĩ performers and performance, see Gitahi Gititi, “Recuperating a ‘Disappearing’ Art Form: Resonances of ‘Gicaandi’ in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross,” in The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, ed. Charles Cantalupo (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 1995), 109–­27; and Kimani Njogu, “On the Polyphonic Nature of the Gicaandi Genre,” African Languages and Cultures 10, no. 1 (1997): 47–­62. For more on the polyvocality of Wizard of the Crow and the ways in which rumor challenges the Ruler’s hegemony, see Robert L. Colson, “Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow,” Research in African Literatures 42, no. 1 (2011): 133–­53; and Robert Spencer, “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African Dictator Novel,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47, no. 2 (2012): 145–­58. 19. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 273. 20. Ibid., 570 and 594–­95. 21. Ibid., 95. 22. Ibid., 20–­21 and 708–­9. 23. Ba, Le Roman africain francophone post-colonial, 173–­74. 24. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 4. 25. Ibid., 41–­42. 26. Ibid., 238.

216

Notes to Pages 154–158

27. Stephen Belcher, Epic Traditions of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 66; Dérive and Dumestre, Des Hommes et des bêtes, 39. 28. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 60–­67. Koyaga’s victory over his opponent is a battle of competing magic and cunning that echoes Sundiata Keita’s confrontation with the Sosso king, Sumanguru Kanté. 29. Ibid., 258. 30. Ibid., 83. 31. Ibid., 111–­12; for the original, see Ahmadou Kourouma, En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,1998), 166–­67. 32. Madeleine Borgomano, Des Hommes ou des bêtes: Lecture de En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages d’Ahmadou Kourouma (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 184–­87. 33. Thibault Le Renard and Comi M. Toulabor, “Entretien avec Ahmadou Kourouma,” Politique Africaine 75 (1999): 178. 34. Bayart, The State in Africa, xxiii. 35. As Susan Strange points out, the imposition of such conditions on lending ended the illusion of equality among member states of institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF; see The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–­70. 36. For more on what has alternately been called the “African crisis” and the “African tragedy,” see Giovanni Arrighi, “The African Crisis: World Systemic and Regional Aspects,” New Left Review 15 (2002): 5−36; and James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 37. The verb “retreat” is taken from Strange (The Retreat of the State) and is not specific to the African context. The notion of the “empty” state comes from Charles Piot’s work on Togo (Nostalgia for the Future). For more on neoliberalism’s effect on the state, see Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); and Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). 38. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 68 and 74. The chapter “On Private Indirect Government” outlines much of what I have condensed here. 39. Ken Saro-​Wiwa, “The World Bank and Us,” in Similia: Essays on Anomic Nigeria (London: Saros International, 1991), 61. 40. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 67. African Summit (June 19–­ 21, 41. The reference is to the sixteenth Franco-​ 1990) at La Baule, an annual meeting of representatives from the French government and its former African colonies. In his address, Mitterrand expanded dramatically on previous calls for democracy. Bayart dismisses the importance generally ascribed to this speech: “Contrary to a widely held opinion, the wave of pro-​democracy agitation of 1989–­1991 was caused less by the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the speech of François Mitterrand at the Franco-​African Summit at La Baule in June 1990, or by pressure from aid donors, than by the resurgence of old expectations and social movements of long standing, able to assert themselves once more as soon as international organizations had moderated their support for authoritarian regimes” (The State in Africa, xix−xx).

Notes to Pages 158–163

217

42. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 233–­34; for the original, see Kourouma, En Attendant le vote, 344–­45. 43. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 234–­36. 44. Demographically, this new generation is part of the “youth bulge,” a condition in which an unusually high percentage of the population is young. As Mike McGovern writes of Côte d’Ivoire: faced with diminishing prospects for employment in the countryside, the youth crowd the cities and join the ranks of the urban unemployed; see McGovern, Making War in Côte d’Ivoire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Kathryn Nwajiaku adds that “youth” is not just about literal age, “but can extend to those who see themselves as never having enjoyed the rites of passage into ‘adulthood’ because of their degree of marginalization”; Nwajiaku, “The National Conferences in Benin and Togo Revisited,” Journal of Modern African Studies 32, no. 3 (1994): 236. 45. This fictional National Conference is part of a wider “National Conference movement” in French-​speaking West and Central Africa, where several such conferences took place between 1990 and 1993 (Benin and Congo, 1990; Zaire, 1991; Togo, 1991; Niger, 1992; and Chad, 1993). The aim was to facilitate the transition from dictatorship to constitutional democracy, but the outcomes were uneven. See John R. Heilbrunn, “Social Origins of the National Conferences in Benin and Togo,” Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 2 (1993): 277–­99; Nwajiaku, “The National Conferences in Benin and Togo Revisited,” 429–­47; and Pearl T. Robinson, “The National Conference Phenomenon in Francophone Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 3 (1994): 575–­610. Kourouma’s fictional Conference also shares much with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (1996–­98); for more on this comparison, see Thomas, Nation-​Building, 161–­65. 46. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 171; for the original, see Kourouma, En Attendant le vote, 253–­54. 47. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 48. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 84. 49. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 162–­65; Immanuel Wallerstein, “Crisis as Transition,” in Dynamics of Global Crisis, ed. Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunter Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Monthly Review, 1982), 11–­54; Wallerstein, World-​Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 77–­90; and Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, 2nd ed. (1994; New York: Verso, 2010), 309–­35. For an overarching analysis of crisis and capitalism, see David M. Kotz, Terrence McDonough, and Michael Reigh, eds., Social Structures of Accumulation: The Political Economy of Growth and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 50. Wallerstein, “Crisis as Transition,” 22. 51. Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–­1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 44. 52. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 26, 38, and 47–­48. 53. Colson, “Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest,” 138. 54. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 750. 55. Ibid., 485–­86.

218

Notes to Pages 163–171

56. Ibid., 580. 57. Ibid., 746. 58. I am drawing here on Harvey’s critique of neoliberalism: “The internal economic and political contradictions of neoliberalization are impossible to contain except through financial crises. So far these have proven locally damaging but globally manageable. The manageability depends, of course, upon departing substantially from neoliberal theory” (Brief History of Neoliberalism, 188). These failures, Harvey adds, will not prevent the deployment of neoliberalism as rhetoric. For more on the ideological shortfalls of neoliberalism, see David M. Kotz, “Globalization and Neoliberalism,” Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 2 (2002): 64–­79. 59. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 747. 60. See Piot’s description of the same in the case of Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo: “A grand irony of the late Eyadéma years: that, in adapting to the new realities of the post–­Cold War moment, the potentate oversaw and even engineered his own deconstruction. The patrimonial state—­centered on the person of the dictator who retained absolute control over power, money, development, and violence—­disappeared into the ether of the neoliberal moment” (Nostalgia for the Future, 43). 61. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 743. 62. Ibid., 760. 63. Yves Chemla, “En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages ou le donsomana: Entretien avec Ahmadou Kourouma,” 26–­27. 64. Cazenave and Célérier, Contemporary Francophone African Writers, 26. 65. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 247; for the original, see Kourouma, En Attendant le vote, 364–­65. 66. Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote, 251–­52. 67. Jean Ouédraogo, “An Interview with Ahmadou Kourouma: November 24, 1997,” 1340. 68. For an extended version of this argument, see Magalí Armillas-​Tiseyra, “Tales from the Corpolony: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and the Dictator-​Novel in the Time of Transition,” Research in African Literatures 49, no. 3 (2018): 223−40. 69. Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 1–­19. 70. Ousmane Sembène, The Last of the Empire, 155 and 237. 71. See Simon Gikandi, “The Winter of Discontent,” Foreign Policy 1147 (March-​April 2005): 77; Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, “What Is My Nation? Visions of a New Global Order in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow,” Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective 2, no. 2 (2007): 186–­99; and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 72. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 53–­57. 73. Ibid., 585–­86. 74. Ngũgĩ, Globalectics, 52–­54. 75. Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 135 and 134n44. 76. Ngũgĩ, Wizard of the Crow, 757–­60.

Notes to Pages 175–177

219

Afterword 1. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Christopher Walker, eds., Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 2. Yasmina Khadra, The Dictator’s Last Night, trans. Julian Evans (London: Gallic Books, 2015). 3.  Robin Yassin-​Kassab, “The Dictator’s Last Night (review): Yasmina Khadra imagines Gaddafi’s Final Hours,” The Guardian, October 15, 2015, https://www​ .theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/15/the-dictators-last-night-yasmina-khadra​ -review-novel-muammar-gaddafi. 4. Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (New York: Vintage, 2009), 92–­95. 5. For more on Hanif and the Latin American boom novel, see Roanne L. Kantor, “A Case of Exploding Markets: Latin American and South Asian Literary ‘Booms’ in a Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Literature 70, no. 4 (2018): 465−86. 6. Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 30−34. 7. See here Jini Kim Watson’s work on dictators and dictatorship in East Asian literatures, beginning with “A Not-​Yet-​Postcolonial Peninsula: Rewriting Spaces of Violence, Division, and Diaspora,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2014): 69–­87; and Watson, “The Wrong Side of History: Anachronism and Authoritarianism,” in The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present, ed. Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 259–­80.

Index

Achebe, Chinua, 114, 116–­18, 122–­28, 133–­34, 142, 150, 155 works: “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause,” 210n16; Anthills of the Savannah, 9, 113, 117, 124–­30, 150; A Man of the People, 116–­ 17, 122–­24; No Longer at Ease, 116–­17, 122–­24; “The Novelist as Teacher,” 117, 210n16; Things Fall Apart, 123 Adorno, Theodor, 30–­31, 36, 193n44 aesthetics: fiction and, 10, 80, 126, 136, 142; politics and, 27, 32, 34–­35, 42, 75–­76, 79, 98; Third World and, 14, 127; vulgarity and, 22, 26, 36, 72, 88, 113, 139, 146, 149 Africa: independence in, 6, 12, 31, 111–­ 17, 147; postindependence and, 6, 13, 23, 37, 125, 129, 142. See also political disillusionment; Wizard of the Crow African-­Scandinavian Writers’ Conference (Stockholm 1967), 33–­34, 117. See also Soyinka, Wole African Writers Series (Heinemann), 118 Afro-­Asian Conference (Bandung 1955), 20–­21 Afro-­Asian Writers Bureau (AAWB), 21 Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 51, 56, 74; on Facundo, 70 Alegría, Claribel, 84, 203n24, 205n43. See also “Los padres de las patrias” Alsina, Valentín, 55, 70, 199n56, 200n75 Angelis, Pedro de, 60–­64, 66, 72, 104. See also Pérez, Luis Anthills of the Savannah (Achebe, Chinua), 9, 113, 117, 124–­30, 150 aporia, 194n55; of dictator’s vulgarity, 22, 27, 35, 38–­39, 89

Argentina: history of, 50–­51, 66; lettered elites (criollos letrados) in, 8, 49; literature and politics of, 22, 40, 48–­49. See also Facundo; gaucho; Rosas, Juan Manuel de; Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino Ascasubi, Hilario, 64–­67 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 87, 93, 106–­7; El Señor Presidente (The President), 9–­10, 14–­15, 59, 75, 78–­79 En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (Kourouma, Ahmadou, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals): Cold War and, 145–­46, 148, 158, 166; complicity and, 153, 155; fetish objects and, 146, 150, 156, 166, 168; future of dictator novel and, 148, 166, 168; neoliberalism and, 146, 158, 160, 162; oral and vernacular tradition in, 153, 156. See also donsomana authoritarianism, 3, 6–­7, 27, 97, 116, 134, 157–­58, 166, 175; abuses of, 36; aesthetics of vulgarity and, 22, 26, 37, 113; dictator novel analysis of, 15–­16, 42, 56–­57, 59, 72, 75, 79, 88, 101, 120, 130–­33, 138–­39, 150, 168, 172; neoliberalism and, 160 autobiography, 63, 91, 130, 132–­33 The Autumn of the Patriarch (García Márquez, Gabriel). See El otoño del patriarca Avelar, Idelber: The Untimely Present, 81, 108 Ba, Mamadou Kalidou: Le Roman africain francophone postcolonial, 129, 154 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37, 40, 194n50

221

222 Index barbarism: dictatorship and, 27, 50, 58–­59, 89, 96, 100; Facundo and, 47, 49, 66–­68, 70–­71, 74; Generation of 1837 and, 53–­54, 63–­64 Bayart, Jean-­François: The State in Africa, 114–­15, 157–­58, 216n41 Benedetti, Mario: “El recurso del supremo patriarca,” 80, 97 Big Man (figure of). See men Black Orpheus (magazine), 116, 209n13 Bosch, Juan, 84. See also “Los padres de las patrias” Brecht, Bertolt, 30, 36, 193n44, 194n65 cannibalism, 105, 139, 167 capitalism, 24, 44, 147, 159. See also neoliberalism Carpentier, Alejo, 15, 23, 75–­80, 84, 86, 93–­98, 202n15; correspondence of, 23, 78, 86; interviews with, 29, 98; “Derecho de asilo” (“Right of Sanctuary”), 77, 93, 96; Labou Tansi, Sony and, 138; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and, 169; “Los padres de las patrias” and, 175; El recurso del método (Reasons of State), 75, 77–­81, 93, 95–­ 99, 104, 107–­8, 122, 169, 201n13; El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World), 77, 94; “Retrato de un dictador” (Portrait of a Dictator), 93, 98; Roa Bastos, Augusto, and, 99, 101, 106, 109; Sembène, Ousmane and, 121; Sow Fall, Aminata and, 132. See also Cuba Casa de las Américas: magazine, 31, 81–­ 82, 191n21; cultural center and prize, 190n19 Castro, Fidel: García Márquez and, 4; “Palabras a los intelectuales” (“Words to the Intellectuals”), 31–­32 caudillo (figure of). See men Chinweizu (Chinweizu Ibekwe), 13, 34 Cold War, 12–­13, 31, 81, 113–­14, 143, 145–­46, 148, 157–­58, 166; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and, 81, 82; Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and, 81, 209n13; Global South and, 18, 20; political imaginary of, 113; post–­Cold War period, 18, 20, 23, 37,

154, 157–­58, 162–­65, 172; US State Department and, 82 Collazos, Óscar: debate with Cortázar, Julio, in Marcha, 32 Colombia, 3, 23. See also García Márquez, Gabriel; Zalamea, Jorge comparative frameworks: 14, 17–­18, 27, 43–­44, 142, 177; Chow, Rey, 43; Friedman, Susan Stanford, 44; Shih, Shu-­mei, 44; Relation (Glissantian term), 44–­45; Slaughter, Joseph R, 43. See also genre, Global South complicity, 23, 38, 91, 98, 104–­6, 113, 129, 132, 152–­55, 207n92 Conference of African Writers of English Expression (Makerere University, Kampala 1962), 116, 118 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). See Cold War Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Paris 1956) (Rome 1959), 116, 185n20 corpolony, 147, 163–­65, 168–­69, 171–­72 Cortázar, Julio, 32, 191n25; boom and, 82–­83, 202n16; “Los padres de las patrias” and, 85, 203n29. See also “Los padres de las patrias” Côte d’Ivoire, 24, 214n5, 217n44. See also Kourouma, Ahmadou crisis, 49, 161–­62, 216n36; dictator novel as site of, 5, 27, 147, 172; dictatorship in, 149–­50; transition and, 157–­62; Wallerstein, Immanuel, 161; van de Walle, Nicolas, 161–­62. See also Cold War, neoliberalism Cuba: “grey period” in, 32; Padilla, Heberto, 32, 81, 191n25; revolution in, 31, 78, 80–­82, 93, 98, 191n23. See also Carpentier, Alejo culture: imperialism and, 31, 96, 99, 171, 191n21; national, 33, 51, 60, 191n24; political, 57, 98; popular, 37, 61; textual, 5, 22, 60, 63; writing and resistance as, 4, 43 Damrosch, David: What Is World Literature? 45, 108 Le Dernier de l’Empire (Sembène, Ousmane, The Last of the Empire), 9,

Index

113, 120–­22, 124, 128–­29, 142, 159, 169 Derrida, Jacques, 38, 39 Descartes, René: Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method), 94 Díaz, Junot: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 4, 16, 176 Diderot, Denis, 69, 136; Jacques le fataliste et son maître, 135 Donoso, José, 81, 84, 203n29. See also “Los padres de las patrias” donsomana, 153–­56, 162, 166–­67 Echeverría, Esteban, 22, 51, 60; “El matadero” (“The Slaughterhouse”), 52–­54, 56, 58, 65 Edwards, Jorge, 83, 86, 203n29. See also “Los padres de las patrias” L’État honteux (Labou Tansi, Sony, The Shameful State), 8, 113, 137–­39, 213n75 L’Ex-­père de la nation (Sow Fall, Aminata, The Ex-­Father of the Nation), 130–­33, 142, 176 Facundo o civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas (Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism): Carpentier, Alejo and, 96, 122; generic hybridity and, 40–­41, 67, 69–­71; precursor of dictator novel, 66, 68, 99–­101; Rosas, Juan Manuel de and, 47, 49–­50, 73–­75, 104 family (as metaphor for nation), 54–­56, 59, 91, 131–­32, 197n21 Fanon, Frantz, 6, 11–­14, 111–­12, 117, 122, 126; colonized intellectual and, 33, 117; Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), 11, 33, 111; Latin America and Africa, 12–­13; littérature de combat (combat literature) and, 11, 185n20; mésaventures of independence and, 111–­12. See also littérature engagée; politically committed literature farce, 15, 101 fathers. See men “The Fathers of the Fatherlands.” See “Los padres de las patrias”

223 Ferguson, James, 160–­62, 170, 216n36 Fifth Pan-­African Congress (Manchester 1945), 116 First World Conference Against Colonial and Imperialist Politics (Brussels 1927; League Against Imperialism), 207n72 Flakoll, Darwin (Bud), 203n24, 205n41. See also under Cold War: US State Department and focalization: definition of, 9; dictator novel and, 14–­15, 17, 29, 90, 96–­ 98, 120, 125, 129–­31, 176. See also narrative mechanics Fradinger, Moira: Binding Violence, 48, 113, 193n42 Franco, Jean, 32, 186n32 Fuentes, Carlos: “boom generation” and, 82, 202n16; Carpentier, Alejo and, 93; correspondence of, 23, 86–­87, 201n1, 201n2, 203n24, 203n28, 205n41; Fernández Retamar, Roberto and, 82; La nueva novela hispanoamericana and, 82; “Los padres de las patrias” and, 23, 27, 30, 38, 77, 83–­87, 98, 108, 175, 203n24; paradox of dictator novel and, 38; Roa Bastos, Augusto, and, 98, 175, 201n2. See also Latin American literary boom García Márquez, Gabriel: Castro, Fidel and, 4; Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), 32, 77, 82, 90, 91, 137, 141, 192n29; correspondence of, 28, 30, 32–­33, 78, 86, 91, 205n42; Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), 177; interviews, 86–­ 87, 90–­91; El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), 8, 14, 23, 28, 75, 77, 79, 86–­93, 104, 107–­8, 113, 137–­9, 150, 176; “Los padres de las patrias” and, 23, 77, 83–­86, 175, 177. See also Latin American literary boom; magical realism (narrative mode) gaucho: 56, 63–­65, 72; gaucho genre (género gauchesco), 22, 39, 48–­49, 61, 67, 142; gaucho poetry (poesía gauchesca), 50, 62; gauchipolítico, 62, 64, 65–­66 198n46

224 Index gender: 16, 52, 113, 130, 133, 142; femininity and, 56; masculinity and, 16. See also men; women Generation of 1837, 49–­53, 56, 59, 61, 63–­67, 72–­74 generic series. See under genre: generic series and genitals, 37–­38, 88–­89, 137–­39, 149, 167, 177, 213n75 genre: constellation as, 8–­9, 21–­22, 25, 40, 42, 45, 62, 113, 142–­43, 177; generic series and, 5–­6, 8, 21–­ 23, 27, 39–­40, 45, 49, 113, 142, 173, 184n11; limits of, 6, 43, 48, 67–­68, 75–­76, 140, 148, 166, 169, 173; novel as omnivorous form of, 40; taxonomy and, 15, 25, 40, 44–­ 45; transnational framework for, 5, 12, 16, 39, 166. See also narrative form gĩcaandĩ, 151–­52, 215n18 Glissant, Édouard: Poetics of Relation, 44–­45 globalization, 11, 18, 146, 161–­ 64, 166, 171–­72, 188n46; from below (Appadurai), 169. See also neoliberalism Global South: Brandt Report and, 19–­ 20, 188n29; center-­periphery and, 13; as comparative framework, 27, 43–­45, 142; as discursive formation, 6; globalization and, 164; history of term, 18, 20–­21; López, Alfred J, 6; Mahler, Anne Garland, 6, 18; North-­South divide and, 6, 13, 17–­19, 181, 187; as political consciousness, 7, 169–­71; Prashad, Vijay, 6, 187n44, 189n54; South Commission and, 20; Third World and, 6, 20–­21 González Echevarría, Roberto, 97, 185n17, 186n32 Gorriti, Juana Manuela, 16, 51, 57, 197n30 Gramsci, Antonio: “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” 20; “The Intellectuals,” 33 grotesque, 22, 35, 37, 53, 64, 88, 119, 129, 132, 136, 139 gunboat diplomacy. See imperialism

Guzmán, Martín Luis: La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Strongman), 9, 14, 75, 107, 200n84 Hanif, Mohammed: A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 176–­77 Harvey, David 160, 218n58. See also neoliberalism historical novel, 55, 197n22. See also Lukács, Georg I the Supreme (Roa Bastos, Augusto). See Yo el Supremo imperialism, 16, 89, 98, 169, 191n21; colonialism and, 7, 18, 31, 98, 171; culture and, 31, 191n21; First World Conference Against Colonial and Imperialist Politics and, 95, 169, 207n72; gunboat diplomacy and, 12, 88–­89; United Fruit Company and, 12, 93 Indian National Congress, 95, 169 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 125, 146, 157, 158, 160, 208n8, 216n35. See also neoliberalism; Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs); World Bank Jameson, Fredric, 5–­6, 39–­41, 173, 184n11; “Third-­World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” 14 Kayira, Legson: The Detainee, 111 Kenya, 25, 28, 41, 111, 151, 170, 214n5, 214n10. See also Mutahi, Wahome; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Khadra, Yasmina (Mohammed Moulessehoul): La Dernière nuit du Raïs (The Dictator’s Last Night), 176–­77 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 8, 145–­51, 153–­ 56, 158–­62, 166–­68, 172, 176, 179, 214n8, 214n10; interviews with, 16, 29, 167–­68. See also En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages; donsomana Kubayanda, Josaphat, 13, 112, 187n41 Labou Tansi, Sony, 129, 137–­42; L’État honteux (The Shameful State), 8, 113,

Index

137–­39, 213n75; La Vie et demie (Life and a Half), 113, 129, 139, 140–­42 LaFourcade, Enrique: La fiesta del rey Acab, 200n85 The Last of the Empire (Sembène, Ousmane). See Le Dernier de l’Empire Latin America: independence in, 5–­6, 49–­51, 60, 61, 63, 64, 72; postindependence and, 12–­13, 89, 99 Latin American literary boom, 6, 22, 31, 43, 77–­78, 80–­83, 94, 108, 115, 202n16; nueva novela (new novel) and, 31, 82, 129 The Laughing Cry (Lopès, Henri). See Le Pleurer-­rire littérature engagée, 4, 11, 30, 140; littérature de combat (combat literature) and, 11, 185n20 See also Fanon, Frantz; politically committed literature; Sartre, Jean-­Paul Liyong, Taban Lo: “Lexicographicide,” 3 Lopès, Henri, 129, 142, 155, 167; interviews with, 135; Le Pleurer-­rire (The Laughing Cry) 11, 13, 129, 133–­ 37, 142 Ludmer, Josefina: The Gaucho Genre, 39, 48, 75, 142. See also gaucho Lukács, Georg, 9, 55 magical realism (narrative mode), 31, 43, 81–­82, 94, 137, 140–­41, 191n22 Manso, Juana, 16, 22, 51, 58–­60, 75; Los misterios del Plata: Episodios históricos de la época de Rosas (The Mysteries of the Plata), 12, 54–­59, 75, 197n18 Marcha (magazine), 32, 81 Mármol, José, 51, 60, 70, 75, 197n18; Amalia, 10, 12, 54–­59, 65, 72, 197n18; “Manuela Rosas: Rasgos biográficos,” 56 Martin, Gerald, 75, 78, 80, 82, 91, 97, 186n32 Martínez Moreno, Carlos, 84, 203n29. See also “Los padres de las patrias” Mbembe, Achille, 6, 22, 36–­38, 88, 115, 120, 131, 133, 138, 149, 156–­58, 197n18; banality and, 36, 193n45,

225 193n46, 201n10. See also under aesthetics: vulgarity; phallocratic system; postcolony men: dictatorship and, 16; as fathers, 101, 131–­32, 149, 151; figure of Big Man and, 3, 6, 183n3; figure of caudillo and, 3, 108, 145, 183n3; impotence and, 36, 107, 119; patriarchy and, 88, 131–­33. See also gender; genitals; “Los padres de las patrias” Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo, 32–­3, 87; García Márquez, Gabriel and, 189n3, 191n25 Mengestu, Dinaw: The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears, 16 Middle East: North Africa and, 177 Molloy, Sylvia: At Face Value, 69, 212n60 Monterroso, Augusto, 79, 91, 97, 102, 104 Moretti, Franco: Graphs, Maps, Trees, 9, 108–­9. See also genre; taxonomy; world literature morphology, 13, 16, 39, 73. See also comparative frameworks; genre Mundo nuevo (magazine), 81–­82, 209n13 Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o). See Wizard of the Crow Mutahi, Wahome: Three Days on the Cross, 111 narrative mechanics, 15, 27, 43, 79, 176. See also focalization narrative mode, 31, 43, 69. See also genre; magical realism; orature; polyvocality nation-­state, 48, 85, 127, 132, 138, 169 négritude, 115–­16, 208n7 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 95, 169, 207n72. See also Indian National Congress neocolonialism, 7, 11–­12, 28, 112, 114, 121, 147, 149, 164 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 4; Gikuyu and, 28– 9, 41–­2,117 151; Kamĩrĩĩthũ theater group and, 41, 194n65; structures of oppression and, 176.See also gĩcaandĩ works: Birth of a Dreamweaver: A Writer’s Awakening, 209n13;

226 Index Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, continued Caitaani Mũtharaba-­Inĩ (Devil on the Cross), 28, 41–­42, 151, 169, 214n10; Matigari,187n40; “The Language of African Fiction,” 28, 34, 41; Weep Not, Child, 118; “Writers in Politics,” 11. See also Wizard of the Crow (Mũrogi wa Kagogo) Nigeria, 13, 23, 34, 114–­16, 123–­24, 208n7. See also Achebe, Chinua; Soyinka, Wole neoliberalism, 11, 89, 146, 158–­62, 164, 166, 172, 188n46, 214n4. See also globalization; International Monetary Fund (IMF); Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs); World Bank Non-­Aligned Movement, 20–­21, 95, 188n51 nueva novela (new novel). See also Latin American literary boom obscenity, 22, 37–­38, 88, 97. See also vulgarity orature, 41–­42, 129, 141, 148, 151, 154, 156 Organization for Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), 21 Otero Silva, Miguel, 84, 86, 203n29; correspondence of, 204n35, 205n40, 205n41. See also “Los padres de las patrias” El otoño del patriarca (García Márquez, Gabriel, The Autumn of the Patriarch), 8, 14, 23, 28, 75, 77, 79, 86–­93, 104, 107–­8, 113, 137–­39, 150, 176 Pacheco, José Emilio, 85–­86, 89, 203n29. See also “Los padres de las patrias” “Los padres de las patrias” (The Fathers of the Fatherlands), 23, 28, 77–­81, 83–­86, 90–­93, 98, 104, 106–­8, 115, 175, 203n29 Pakistan, 176–­77. See also Hanif, Mohammed Paraguay, 71, 77, 79, 83, 98–­100, 105. See also Roa Bastos, Augusto parrot, 3–­5, 100, 176

patriarchy. See under men: patriarchy and Pérez, Luis, 62–­64, 66–­67, 72. See also Angelis, Pedro de phallocratic system, 133. See also Mbembe, Achille Le Pleurer-­rire (Lopès, Henri, The Laughing Cry), 11, 13, 129, 133–­37, 142 Polit-­Dueñas, Gabriela: Cosas de hombres, 15, 84, 108, 145 political disillusionment, 118, 124, 127, 130; postindependence Africa and, 23, 111–­12, 116–­17, 125, 142, 147, 209n14; Lazarus, Neil, 117 politically committed literature, 4, 10–­11, 22, 26–­27, 28–­35, 65, 105, 134–­35, 140; debates around, 29, 32, 34, 78, 80, 117, 129, 190n9; problems and limits of, 5, 23, 26, 30, 135 postcolonial elite, 118–­19, 124; national bourgeoisie as, 6, 12, 41, 111, 116–­ 18, 122, 151. See also postcolony postcolonial state, 114, 116, 118, 123–­24 postcolony, 6, 37–­8, 41, 114–­15, 118, 120, 129, 131, 147. See also under aesthetics: vulgarity pregnancy, 36, 124 Présence Africaine (magazine), 116 race, 16, 49, 52–­53, 58–­60, 82, 170. See also Argentina; Rosas, Juan Manuel de Rama, Ángel, 81; Los dictadores latinoamericanos 5, 11, 15, 40, 75, 78–­80, 92, 99, 103, 107, 112, 167, 176; gauchipolítico and, 62, 65–­66, 198n46; Latin American literary boom and, 202n16 Rancière, Jacques, 35, 48, 53 rape (sexual assault), 36, 88, 107, 150 Reasons of State (Carpentier, Alejo). See El recurso del método El recurso del método (Carpentier, Alejo, Reasons of State), 75, 77–­81, 93, 95–­ 99, 104, 107–­8, 122, 169, 201n13 Republic of the Congo, 23, 114, 129, 135, 208n7. See also Labou Tansi, Sony; Lopès, Henri

Index

Roa Bastos, Augusto, 80, 83–­84, 99–­ 102, 105–­6; correspondence of, 78, 86, 207n82; Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme), 14, 23, 75, 77–­81, 83, 98–­ 108, 153, 176. See also “Los padres de las patrias” Rosas, Juan Manuel de: daughter of (Manuela), 56–­57, 65; gaucho genre and, 50, 56, 61–­66; as literary figure, 50, 60, 71–­72; nineteenth-­ century Argentine literature and, 47, 50–­59; popular imagination and, 61–­66. See also gaucho; Generation of 1837; Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino: Argentine culture and, 22, 51,196n2; correspondence of, 47, 196n1; Fernández Retamar, Roberto and, 82. See also Facundo Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 10, 32–­33; Carpentier, Alejo and, 29; Fanon, Frantz and, 11, 33; littérature engagée and, 4, 10–­11, 30, 32, 185n19 scatology, 116, 138, 150, 177 self-­reflexivity, 10–­11, 27, 50, 86, 90–­93, 97–­98, 100–­102, 113, 117, 120–­ 21, 126–­27, 156, 166–­67. See also narrative mechanics Sembène, Ousmane, 23, 36, 116–­22, 132–­33, 148, 155; interviews with, 119–­20 works: Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood), 116; Le Dernier de l’Empire (The Last of the Empire), 9, 113, 120–­22, 124, 128–­29, 142, 159, 169; Mandabi (film), 116; “Le Mandat” (“The Money Order”), 116, 118, 120; Xala (film), 116, 121; Xala (novella), 119–­20 Senegal, 114, 116, 119–­20, 128, 157. See also Sembène, Ousmane; Sow Fall, Aminata; Senghor, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 30, 114, 128, 208n7 The Shameful State (Labou Tansi, Sony). See L’État honteux slavery, 13, 51, 105, 163

227 Sousa Santos, Boaventura: Epistemologies of the South, 21, 171 Soviet Union, 12, 114, 128, 146. See also Cold War Sow Fall, Aminata, 16, 130–­33, 142, 167, 176; L’Ex-­père de la nation (The Ex-­Father of the Nation), 130–­3, 142, 176; La Grève des bàttu (The Beggars’ Strike), 132; interviews with, 130, 132; Le Revenant (The Ghost), 132. See also under gender; women: as writers Soyinka, Wole, 34, 116–­17, 128; A Dance of the Forests, 116; The Interpreters, 116; “On the Heroes of Our Time,” (preface to A Play of Giants) 128, 211n49; Kongi’s Harvest, 116; “The Writer in a Modern African State,” 117, 210n17 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 10, 18 Strong Man. See men Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), 89, 114, 146, 157–­62, 189n54, 208n8. See also neoliberalism surrealism, 139, 200n84 taxonomy. See genre Tchivéla, Tchichellé: “Une Parenté outre-­Atlantique,” 13, 129 testicles. See genitals Third World, 189n55; Global South and the, 6–­7, 17–­20, 44–­45; “third-­world literature” and, 13–­14 Thomas, Dominic, 128, 148, 213n75 Transition (magazine), 116 transition (process), 42, 147, 151, 161; Charles Piot on, 147, 216n37 transnational literary genre, 5, 12, 16, 21, 39, 166 transnational solidarity, 26, 34, 95, 171. See also Global South Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Havana 1966), 21, 95, 191n20 United Nations, 21, 138, 189n53 United States, 26, 77, 94, 149, 151, 152, 170, 175; Africa, involvement in, 12, 114; Latin America, involvement

228 Index United States, continued in, 12, 89, 93, 96, 203n29; State Department, 82. See also Cold War; imperialism Uslar Pietri, Arturo: Asturias, Miguel Ángel and 78; Oficio de difuntos (Funeral Mass), 106–­7 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 77, 79, 82–­87, 109; correspondence of, 23, 87, 90, 93, 201n1, 203n28, 205n42; La fiesta del Chivo (Feast of the Goat), 107–­9, 176–­ 77. See also Latin American literary boom; “Los padres de las patrias” vernacular: cultural forms, 22, 31, 41–­ 42, 61; print culture, 60; popular culture, 61; vulgarity and, 36. See also orature La Vie et demie (Labou Tansi, Sony, Life and a Half), 113, 129, 139, 140–­42 vulgarity. See also under aesthetics: vulgarity of; obscenity Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals (Kourouma, Ahmadou). See En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages Wilson, Edmund: Patriotic Gore, 83, 84, 204n34 Wizard of the Crow (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mũrogi wa Kagogo): 10, 25–­7, 38; future of dictator novel

and, 148, 168–­69, 171, 173, 176; magical realism and, 43, 150; oral and vernacular tradition in, 42, 148, 151; physical transformation in, 36, 42, 149, 151; political commitment and, 26, 34; science fiction and, 42, 146, 195n69; temporality in, 147–­48, 158, 162; transnational solidarity and, 168–­72 women: blackness and, 53, 65; in the dictator novel, 15–­16; rhetorical use, 56, 127, 150; as readers, 62; as writers, 15–­16, 57, 132–­33, 170 World Bank, 19, 26, 157, 208n8, 216n35. See also International Monetary Fund (IMF); neoliberalism; Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) World Festival of Black Arts (Dakar 1966, Lagos 1977), 116 world literature, 43, 188n48. See also Damrosch, David; Moretti, Franco Yo el Supremo (Roa Bastos, Augusto, I the Supreme) 14, 23, 75, 77–­81, 83, 98–­108, 153, 176 Zalamea, Jorge, 3, 4, 14–­15, 28, 176 El Gran Burundún-­Burundá ha muerto, 3, 14–­15, 28, 200n84; La metamorfosis de Su Excelencia, 183n1, 200n84