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HISTORY, HORROR, REALITY: THE IDEA OF THE MARVELOUS IN
POSTCOLONIAL FICTION

By

Kayode Omoniyi Ogunfolabi

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2008

ABSTRACT

HISTORY, HORROR, REALITY: THE IDEA OF THE MARVELOUS IN
POSTCOLONIAL FICTION

By
Kayode Omoniyi Ogunfolabi

This dissertation examined the use of anti-realist aesthetics in the representation of
history in postcolonial fiction produced in Latin America, the Caribbean, South India and
Africa. More specifically, it focused on how postcolonial writers engage the issue of
history, outside of the dominant realist literary expression.

This work explored the issue of history, with particular focus on the writings of Alejo
Carpentier, Sony Labou Tansi, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri. These writers’ works were
situated within the framework of the marvelous real, which regarded history as a
phenomenon that was in itself, supernatural. Therefore, the histriographical discourse
foregrounded in the selected texts was sensitive to the nightmare of history on the one
hand and the vagaries of the production of historical knowledge on the other.

The dissertation found out that the marvelous dimension of the postcolonial novel
derived from the horrific characteristic of historical events. Rather than generating the
marvelous by evoking the supernatural as external to history, postcolonial fiction
produced the marvelous by narrativizing imperialism as an experience of horror, which
constituted an alteration, and amplification, of the scale of reality. This magical aesthetic
provided the writers the opportunity to continue in the tradition of political commitment,
which was no longer possible in the realist convention.

This study observed that the violence of history during the colonial era and in post-

independence period in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America manifested

as horror of infinite proportions, which was represented through the notion of the
marvelous. This thematization of horror, as a unique characteristic of history, was an
effort on the part of these writers to capture the contradictions of social and historical
experience. The dissertation concluded that by centralizing horror as a distinctive source
of the marvelous, by highlighting the limitations of the process of producing historical
knowledge, and by undermining mimetic representation, these writers attempt to re-
imagine new social systems and create new political vision devoid of the contemporary

regime of violence.

Copyright by
KAYODE OMONIYI OGUNFOLABI
2008

To Ajayi, Olusola, Tomi, Ajike, Lola,

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have to recognize Kenneth W. Harrow, his invaanble support, and quick turn around
time, which allowed me to complete this work within a reasonable time; I must mention
Olabode, who always listened to my ideas, and whose contributions made the work
possible. I would not forget to mention Melissa, who never tired of reading my many
drafts. My appreciation also goes to Thomas and Victoria for their overall constant

encouragement.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION”.......................................’ ..................................... 1

CHAPTER ONE

THE MARVELOUS AND THE IMPERATIVE OF HISTORY ........................ 32
Background to Carpentier’s Fiction ...................................................... 40
The Kingdom of this World and Memory of Haitian Revolution ..................... 43
“Historical Marvelous”: The Kingdom of this World .................................. 64

CHAPTER TWO

THE ROAD LEADING STRAIGHT TO HORROR ..................................... 82
Navigating Horror .......................................................................... 87
Space and the Production of Horror ...................................................... 96
Landscapes of Horror ...................................................................... 103

CHAPTER THREE

REPRESENTING THE UNREPRESENTABLE .......................................... 130
Midnight ’3 Children: Towards Representing the Unrepresentable ................... 145

CHAPTER FOUR

REIMAGINING POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN POSTCOLONIAL FICTION" 165
The Critical Context of Astonishing the Gods .......................................... 175
Background to the Political Vision of Astonishing the Gods in Incidents at the
Shrine, Stars of the New Curfew and The F amzshed Road ............................ 182
Towards a New Social Vision in Astonishing the Gods .............................. 188
Subverting the Regime of Naming ...................................................... 190
Re-dreaming the World ................................................................... 198

vii

Introduction

Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s The Last Supper (1976) is a film inspired partly by the
Haitian Revolution and partly by a church event in Cuban history of slave labor: a
plantation owner selected twelve of his slaves in a reenactment of the biblical “Last
Supper.” In the film, “the count” arrives from a neighboring village and meets an
assembly of his slaves who work his sugar mill. Present at the occasion is the runaway
slave, Sebastian, who has been captured and dragged to the assembly by a horse. Other
slaves are made to witness his punishment: the sadistic overseer cuts off one of his ears,
and although the count winces at this barbaric act, he fails to intervene in the gruesome
torture. The violence which is meted out to Sebastian inspires the Count to explore other
strategies through which to control and repress the slaves. At the gathering, he orders his
overseer, Don Manuel, to select twelve of the slaves for a biblical ritual. But when Don
Manuel is unable to make up his mind about the twelfth, the count instructs him to
include the wounded Sebastian.

The count’s determination to follow a biblical precedent is unmistakable when later on
he washes the twelve slaves’ feet just as Jesus Christ did with his twelve disciples. But
his expression of contempt at this self-imposed duty creates a caricature of the sacred act.
This ritual is followed by a generous dinner, and the slaves, full of food and wine and
contented with this position at the table, take advantage of the moment to complain to the
count about Don Manuel’s brutality. The slaves’ attitude to Don Manuel triggers the
Count’s paternal harangue about the natural order of races, a hierarchy in which the

slaves are supposed to serve their masters as a fulfillment of a divine destiny. In addition,

he informs the slaves that they should observe religious rites which the slaves interpret to
mean a suspension a suspension of their labor on the following day, that is, Good Friday.

The Count leaves the mill at dawn, before the work at the sugar mill usually starts, for
his administrative post in a neighboring village. As usual, Don Manuel rushes through the
slaves’ quarters, waking them up for the day’s work at the sugar mill. The slaves,
however, argue with him that the Count had exempted them from work on Good Friday.
Unable to convince Don Manuel of the Count’s decision, the situation escalates in chaos
and before long, the sugar mill goes up in flames. In the midst of this confusion, Don
Manuel is captured and Sebastian asks other captors to allow him to decide Don
Manuel’s fate, then deals Don Manuel the fatal blow and disappears with all other slaves
into a nearby forest.

The priest, who is stationed at the sugar mill, rushes to inform the Count of the riot on
his property, at which point his Episcopal personality of the previous night disappears.
The Count then assumes the violent and brutish temperament of’a conquistador and heads
straight for the mill. He restores order at the mill by ordering the execution of the twelve
slaves who had dined with him the previous night and their heads are pierced with stakes
which line Don Manuel’s grave. At this point there is a close up shot of one of the stakes
without a head and the scene dovetails to Sebastian running through the bush with a
machete in his hand. In a quasi marvelous realist manner, Sebastian’s lycanthropic
powers can be discerned as the images alternate between a waterfall, and a group of
galloping wild horses and birds, all of which not only evoke his possible special powers,

but also celebrate Sebastian’s hard-earned freedom from servitude.

Set in the eighteenth Century during the Haitian Revolution and the Enlightenment,
The Last Supper expresses a number of postcolonial artistic and critical concerns. The
first is the attempt to capture an historical moment in which slaves were assumed to be
subservient people incapable of resistance; rather than passive victims, they are presented
in this film as agents of freedom. The second has to do with the competing discourses in
the movie. The Count gives the initial narrative at the dinner table as he tries to condition
the slaves’ consciousness to accept their circumstance as God’s punishment for black
people whose bondage is a benevolent act of redemption. However, Sebastian is skeptical
of the Count’s discourse and delivers a counter-narrative grounded in Yoruba mythology.
In response to the Count’s discourse of submission, Sebastian tells the story of how
Olofin (another name for God in Yoruba religious beliefs) created Truth and Lie, two
arch enemies engaged in a duel in which each beheaded the other. In the confusion of
their fight, each mistakenly took the head of the other and Sebastian ends the story by
saying that Lie is now going about with the head of Truth while Truth is wandering about
with the Head of Lie. The implication of Sebastian’s tale is not lost on the audience: the
Count, with his discourse of submission and racial determinism, is analogous to Lie that
parades itself as Truth.

Furthermore, in this story Sebastian deconstructs the Count’s rhetoric of white
supremacy through which he plans to perpetuate the slaves’ thralldom by normalizing
slavery. It is not clear whether or not the slaves fully comprehend Sebastian’s counter-
narrative, but the violence that erupts the following day suggests that the Count’s effort is
in vain. But the more crucial significance of the violence lies in its ambivalent

relationship to the narratives. That is, for Sebastian, his discursive challenge to the Count

and the liberating violence of the following day are inseparable. At the end of the film, it
is apparent that Sebastian’s mastery of the word and sword leads him to self-
determination.

The Last Supper is not a quintessential marvelous realist film, but its religious tone,
Sebastian’s mythical tale, and the marvelous ending suggest a strong similarity to the
thematic concerns of marvelous realist fiction. The film intersects with marvelous realist
literature precisely because it renarrativizing the history of slavery and colonization. The
opening sequence of The Last Supper testifies to the violence that dominates the frame.
For example, Don Manuel’s terrifying rage as he thrashes through the slaves’ quarters in
search of the runaway Sebastian, and the gruesome murder of the other eleven slaves who
had dined with the count the previous night show that one of the fundamental issues
thematized in The Last Supper is the dehumanizing effects of late eighteenth Century
industrial economy. In the marvelous realist and magical realist texts from 19405 through
this age of globalization, writers have consistently grappled with the same horrific history
as evident in The Last Supper. Miguel Angel Asturias’ Men of Maize (1949), Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children (1980), Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982), Ben Okri’s Songs of
Enchantment (1993) and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2004) have all
thematized the horror of imperialism and colonialism, choosing strategic historical
moments from the conquest, through independence, to the present moment. The cultural,
political and economic contexts in which these texts are set may be different, but their
preoccupation with the horror of history indicates that they explore more or less the same

subject.

Here lies the significance of The Last Supper: Sebastian tells a story that deconstructs
the Count’s colonial discourse by arguing that the rhetoric of benevolent slavery is false.
He also demonstrates a command of his master’s language and culture and unravels the
vicious agenda of European economic expansion. Sebastian’s choice of story, situated
within Yoruba mythological and oral archive, is crucial for its ideological purpose.
Incidentally, the story belongs to a culture and tradition from which he has been uprooted
and displaced but which he nevertheless evokes in opposition to the Count’s. The strategy
works by exposing the ideology of slavery through whereby The Last Supper shows that
imagined or essentialized cultural constructs can be empowering especially in breaking
down the mobious strip of history. Recent postcolonial criticism tends to regard
“monadic” cultural representations as oppositional to liminal identities but as The Last
Supper has shown, liminality and “essentialism” need not operate on parallel lines. The
Last Supper then foregrounds critical issues of resistance and blurs the boundary between

liminality and essentialism.

Critical Reception of Postcolonial Marvelous Realist and Magical Realist Fiction
Ogunsanwo, in “Intertextuality and Post—Colonial Literature in Ben Okri’s The
F amished Road,” argues that Okri’s primary concern in The F amished Road is to
challenge the European literary canon. He contends that “[fjrom Okri’s viewpoint . . . the
modernist tenet of the universalizing values of ‘serious art’ ignores cultural differences”
(41). Ogunsanwo’s point becomes clearer when he says that one remarkable achievement
of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is the clearing of a new cultural and literary space
within the European canon and history (45). The grim reality of Nigerian history that

Okri captures in his novel has been silenced because for Ogunsanwo, it functions mainly

as a structure to the novel (47). It is the intolerable condition of Nigerian reality which
partly explains Okri’s leaning towards the marvelous, and in order to appreciate his use
of this mode, it is indispensable to situate The F amished Road and other texts of similar
aesthetic orientation like Songs of Enchantment and Astonishing the Gods within their
particularly disturbing historical contexts.

Hawley makes a similar argument in “Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child: Abiku Migration and
Postmodemity” as he says, “[i]n The F amished Road and Songs of Enchantment, 0in is
not intent upon replacing one ruling system by another, but . . . wishes instead to
recognize and celebrate a distinctive way of encountering and describing reality: he has
an aesthetic, rather than overtly political or psychological, aim” (33). Just like
Ogunsanwo, Hawley fails to account for the historical concern of the texts, especially as
evinced in Songs of Enchantment, a text that expresses the horror of Nigerian polity.
Hawley seems to privilege the aesthetic quality of the texts while the political, social and
historical imperatives remain largely ignored. In contrast to Hawley’s argument, the
excessive violence of the political parties during the 19603 and early 19805 and the sheer
terror perpetrated by the political class testify to the horrific reality that Songs of
Enchantment tries to capture through its marvelous mode.

The above critical tendency to ignore historical dimensions of texts is not limited to
Ben Okri’s works. For example, Bassi in “salman Rushdie’s Special Effects”
acknowledges Midnight ’s Children’s concern with history; that is, Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children challenges the colonial rhetoric, particularly in relation to historiography (53).
He argues that Rushdie “counters colonial historiography” by rejecting the chronological

order imposed by Western imperial order (53), but the actual bloodbath that characterizes

post-independence India, so central to Midnight’s Children, is not given much attention.
One wonders why critics neglect the characters’ apprehension of the massacre and the
trauma of war that arises from the India/Pakistan conflict. Midnight’s Children’s
subversion of European empirical and linear historiography cannot be denied, but the
horror of post-independence India also, at strategic moments, structures the supernatural
dimension of the novel.

In “Liberals, Conservatives, and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the Fictions of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” lanes argues that the imagination in Garcia Marquez’s fiction
is not intrinsically political or social (125). She, nevertheless, acknowledges the author’s
ability to integrate the political history of Colombia and the resources of the imagination.
According to J anes, the height of the author’s expertise can be located in One Hundred
Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch in which Garcia Marquez is able to
blend the supernatural and post-independence Colombian history (125). While Janes’s
claims may be valid, she fails to recognize how the marvelous real functions as the
medium through which Colombia’s traumatic colonial and neocolonial history is
narrativized in both One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch.

Of particular importance is Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Lost Harmattan of Alusine
Dunbar, a novel which, like Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s The Last Supper, tries to articulate
some of the silences in history that have to do with the cataclysmic consequences of the
trans-Atlantic economy. In Last Harmattan, a group of freed slaves returns to the West
African village of Kasila and found their own settlement, which they call Malagueta.
After an unfortunate incident in which some inhabitants of Kasila fall victim to the

potatoes planted by Jeanette Cromantine, a war breaks out and the survivors of

Malagueta must hide in the forest before they are visited by another set of aspiring
settlers. Together they build the new Malagueta which prospers so much that it attracts
colonial interests. After many years of attacks and counter-attacks, Malagueta falls into
the hands of the colonialists who institute martial law and force some of the inhabitants
into servile labor, the kind from which the people had escaped long before coming to
West Africa. Later on, the military regime gives way to a bourgeois clique that is
interested only in profiteering; and in the process of dominating political and economic
spheres of power, the new regime destroys Malagueta’s historical monuments. The
marvelous dimension of the novel is partly built around the unusual power of Fatmatta
the bird-woman. She is a ravishing beauty who renders impotent any man who forces her
into a sexual act. In her death, she deploys her power to revolutionary purposes by
rescuing those who are wounded during battles.

In responding to Last Harmattan, Bertinetti argues that the text “blurs chronological
time, in which one event succeeds another, thus placing them [events] in a temporal
dimension that is epic, not historical” (200). Cheney-Coker’s novel certainly subverts a
linear form of narration and sometimes gravitates towards the epic, but it is surprising
that Bertinetti fails to notice how the occasional epic style of the novel enhances the
terrifying history that the author centralizes in this narrative. Bertinetti seems so
concerned about the novel’s disruption of the realist mode that the history that is so
pivotal to it goes unacknowledged.

Meanwhile, Cooper’s critique of Last Harmattan locates the text within the
postcolonial paradigm just as Ogunsanwo and Hawley have done in the case of Ben

Okri’s The Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment. Her book, Magical Realism in

West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye is worth examining in greater detail.
Brenda Cooper contends that in Last Harmattan, the freed slave’s idea of returning to
some moments or places of origin is met with contradictions which reinforce the novel’s
skepticism about the idea of “returning.” Cooper emphasizes the problems of the
originary with two main arguments: that the notion of “return” is an attempt to preserve
an assumed pristine origin and tradition and that it can only lead to crisis. Cooper,
therefore, highlights the war that arises between the people of Kasila and the settlers by
stresses the following: “But when their children succumbed to death soon after eating the
sweet potatoes which the foreign woman had planted, they deduced with an age-old
logic, contrary to reason, that the seed of the settlers' misfortune had been planted in their
world, which not even the totemic power of their gods could halt” (100). The war
between the indigenous people and the settlers, for Cooper, and rightly so, is a marker of
the text’s postcoloniality because it refuses to valorize or romanticize West Africa as an
idyllic space of return.

For Cooper, the history of Malagueta testifies to the impossibility of returning to an
originary moment or space and, as stated earlier, it derives its postcolonial impetus from
resisting the notion of a pristine past or space. However, the history of Malagueta should
be examined within the larger context of the novel; the fact that Cooper bases her
argument almost entirely on the early part of the novel makes critical inquiry into the rest
of the novel pertinent. Malagueta should be seen within the historical context of its
colonization. The destructive outcome of the colonial encounter partly accounts for the
marvelous aura of the text whereby the war of attrition between the inhabitants of

Malagueta and the colonial forces transform the town’s peaceful and stable signs to one

of terror and also explains why Fatmatta the bird-woman has to intervene from time to
time, either to comfort the grieving or assist in the bloody encounters.

After the successful story of Malagueta has been heard overseas it becomes the target
of colonial interests and tyranny. The impending doom of Malagueta is foregrounded in
the following passage:

Captain Hammerstone, at the head of sixty men, sailed for Malagueta to establish a
British garrison. He had obtained a commission from the Colonial Office which
had been pleased to find such an enthusiastic man willing to go out to a place when
others had baulked at the idea. His instructions were to build a fort, protect the new
traders who would follow on his heels to build warehouses and shops, guarantee
peace and stability, and to put down any rebellion or uprising by the founders of
the town, though he was warned against antagonising the citizens. . . . He went out
with a conscience that was clear, and with the impetuous notion that his new life
had already been sanctioned by Divine Providence. Beinga man utterly convinced
of his own worth, he sailed, determined to impose his rule. (156)
Phrases and clauses like “British garrison,” “a fort,” “put down any rebellion,” “Divine
Providence” and “determined to impose his rule” confirm Captain Hammerstone’s
imperial project justified not only by the force of military power, but also by the
discourse evoking divine authority. After a series of battles, Hammerstone’s army
subdues the Malaguetans. Although the settlers lose to the imperial army, they are
determined to liberate Malagueta from the invaders. When the narrator says of
Hammerstone, “[n]ow his lovemaking was a methodical formula, like the mapping of a

territory which required interest but very little love” (302), Hammerstone’s reign of terror

10

that follows the subjugation of Thomas Bookerman’s forces becomes unequivocal. The
marvelous mode of the text captures the disruptive consequence of the colonial intrusion
and no character other than Thomas Bookerman could express this invasion in historical
terms. He says to Captain Hammerstone,
You done come like a tief 'mongst us, and you gon tell us how you gon steal our
land, how you gon build factories, and take our women and chillum for your bed
and workshop. Ain't never known any king be good to black people. We all come
here cause de king done lie to us; tell us to fight for him and he gon give us land,
gon give us respect and we gon be safe. And we done believe him, but he gives us
land ain't fit for man or animal. People dying there 'cause ain't no thin you kin do
wid dat land: marshes, swamps, thorns, thistles and it's cold. So we come here and
make dis place real nice, and we got a little happiness, and our women ain't afraid
no more people gon be taking their chillum. Now you want to live here, but why
you don't stay where you come from? Because we ain't gon be letting you do
nothing to us now we free. We is our own men now, dem chains no longer round
our necks and we ain't gon let you, you hear, Mr King? (159)
In his speech, Bookerman refers to particularly traumatic historical moments which
include slavery, servitude on American plantations, the American war of Independence,
betrayal by the British royalty and of course, the new imperialism brought by Captain
Hammerstone. Last Harmattan shows that as a postcolonial text, it is concerned with
subverting a romanticized view about Africa as well as revisiting the traumatic encounter
between Malagueta and the colonial forces.

It is because of the centrality of colonial conflicts that one needs to go beyond

11

Cooper’s claim about the illusion of return. The main historical concern of the text which
is devoted to the clash between the people of Malagueta and the mercantile colonial
forces of the British Hammerstone, is conspicuously missing from Cooper’s argument.
As seen above, some of the postcolonial critics cited have emphasized more or less the
same argument: the primacy of hybrid and liminal cultural forms, a paradigm through
which these texts confront and subvert colonial narratives that insist on stable notions of
reference. In doing so, the texts’ engagement with history is partly lost in the rhetoric of
hybridity and liminality. In order to grapple with traumatic renderings of historical
encounters during and after colonization, it is crucial that we contextualize these texts
within the framework of the marvelous real precisely because the marvelous emerged as
a consequence of the brutal meeting of the agents of European expansion and the “other.”
The marvelous dimension of above-cited novels lies in the irrationality of a grim and
traumatizing history because the horror of colonization defies logical knowledge and is
therefore, marvelous (Achille Mbembe 7-8). Some postcolonial either fail to adequately
recognize and emphasize the historical interests of these novels (Ogunsanwo and
Hawley), valorize the subversion of European historiography (Bassi) or reduce the texts
to an integration of history and the imagination (J anes). It cannot be overemphasized that
postcolonial criticism dealing with texts that profusely deploy the imaginative should
articulate both interstitiality and liminality on the one hand, and the texts’ grim historical
reality on the other. The central argument here is that these texts are narratives of horror
and this horror is inextricably bound with history. However, the fact that the novels
engage a traumatic history does not imply that the focus on interstitiality and liminality is

secondary or ancillary to the overall purpose of postcolonial fiction. In fact, these two

12

modes of criticism must be kept in view at all times because the process of production of
history enhances and undermines access to historical knowledge. These novels emphasize
and foreground the intolerable reality of colonialism and neocolonialism not only to
awaken our memory of the past, but also to complement and mediate the now prevalent
discourse of hybridity. Stressing the relation between history, horror and the marvelous

illuminates a triangulated relationship that is integral to evaluating these narratives.

History, Horror, Reality and the Marvelous

The emergence of the marvelous real is overdeterrnined by myriad factors which
range from the desire for regional identity, the attempt to break from European realist and
modernist aesthetic practices, the celebration of an autochthonous epistemological
viewpoint to the subversion of European historiography. Equally important, and most
often ignored, is the narrativization of the intolerable and horrific history during and after
colonialism. History, in this case, does not imply linear or unproblematic accounts of the
depredatory effects of colonialism. That is, the texts examined here do not claim to have
narrated colonial history “as it really happened,” but draw attention to themselves as
constructs of the past and suggest new perspectives for understanding and interrogating
the predatory consequences of the “discovery.” The domination of non-Europeans by the
British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish empires did not end with the
independence of the colonies. Rather, “decolonization historically went hand in hand
with neo-colonialism” and the “end of an old-fashioned imperialism . . . meant the end of
one kind of domination but evidently also the invention and construction of a new kind”
(Jameson 184). Consequently, the globalizing world hardly suggests the end of overt or

implicit domination; it only shows that the imbrications of local and foreign agents of

13

power have created a vicious cycle of pain. The texts studied here constitute an effort to
demonstrate how European historiography is “implicated in the long history of European
colonialism” by thematizing the continued devastating effects of internal and external
imperial agendas (Young xii).

Horror therefore refers to the violence, concomitant with the colonial project, directed
at the bodies and landscape in the occupied territories. This notion of horror also includes
the post-independence atrocities of indigenous regimes which have been represented in
such novels as Songs of Enchantment, Shame and The Autumn of the Patriarch. It refers
to the cycle of bloodbath and irrational levels of violence that resists logical
comprehension and has characterized the history of imperialism before and after the
official granting of independence to the colonies. The former colonies have continued to
experience a history that has “always [made] animality and bestiality its essential
components, plunging human beings into a never-ending process of brutalization”
(Mbembe 14). The novels depict the gruesome existential experience in the aftermath of
colonialism and create a terrifying social and historical reality.

The concept of horror being used here is a manifestation of the brutality that
characterizes colonialism and its aftermath. It is different from the horror depicted in the
Gothic fiction where evil, fear and terror, are a representation of psychic space. The
effect of the horror in the Gothic novel is the creation of the awareness that evil is not
external to humans but lies within their psychological domain (MacAndrew 5). Ghosts,
monsters and the lurking assassin “frighten because they are already the figments of our
dreaming imagination” (8). Unlike in marvelous and magical realist literatures where

horror is the ineffable temperament of colonial history, Gothic fiction produces pleasure

14

because “[i]f an idea of danger is involved, the result will be a terror that is pleasing
because the [reader] knows he is himself safe” (40).

Although Kristeva analyzes the historical repression of women through patriarchal
structures, she seems more concerned with the exclusion of women from the symbolic
order and how such exclusion is transformed to empowerment through the destabilization
of the symbolic order by that which stands outside of it. For Kristeva, horror is produced
by the abject, which is “a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, . . . a friend who
stabs you” (4). However, the horror being described in marvelous and magical realist
literatures concerns the representation of the “other” “in the harshness of its destiny”
(Mbembe 18), from the Middle Passage, slavocracy, colonialism, neocolonialism, to the
contemporary contradictions of our globalizing world. The marvelous real, is then an

attempt to come to terms with the vicissitudes of history, whose terror defies rational

explications.

Emergence of the Marvelous Real

In Latin America, writers had experimented with French Romanticism and various
modernist literary expressions like Dadaism and Surrealism, but later revolted against
these literary modes at the onset of the 19405 (Irish 127). This revolt can partly be
explained by of the influence of Roh’s publication of Post Expressionism, Magic
Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting (Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer
Realismus: Probleme der neusten Europc'iischen Malerei) in 1925. However, Roh’s
concept applies to European painting and suggests an encounter with an object strictly in
the realist sense. His notion of magical realism is a rejection of the Expressionist painting

which is why Roh argues that “this fantastic dreamscape has completely vanished and . . .

15

our real world re-emerges before our eyes. . . . The religious and transcendental themes
have largely disappeared in recent painting. In contrast, we are offered a new style that is
thoroughly of this world, that celebrates the mundane” (17).

By 1927 when Roh’s book was been translated to Spanish and published by Revista de
Occidente, European writers in Buenos Aires started referring to their works as magical
realism (Irene Guenther 61). In 1935, Jorge Luis Borges' collection, A Universal History
of Infamy [Historia universal de la infamia] appeared in Buenos Aires and it was this
same year that Flores believes magical realism emerged in Latin America (133). It was
not until 1949 that the term, “the marvelous real,” emerged in the prologue to Alejo
Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World titled, “On the Marvelous Real in America” (75-
88). The marvelous real derives its power partly from autochthonous ritualistic and
religious practices whose logic does not totally conform to a rational/positivist model.
Also, the marvelous reflects Caribbean and Latin American writers’ desire to break away
from the European canon which has served as their literary model since the beginning of
the 20th century. It constitutes an aspect of the writers’ efforts to find an “authentic”
Latin American voice in literary expression. For instance, Haiti occupies a pivotal place
in the formulation of the marvelous real for being the space where Afro-Caribbean
religious practices flourishes despite the violence of the French colonial enterprise. The
racial and cultural plurality of Haiti also threatens the racial and cultural purity
maintained by the imperialists. Therefore, “the undeniable spell of the lands of Haiti,” the
“magical warnings along the red roads of the Central Meseta,” the “drums of the Petro

and the Rada,” the “presence of the Indian and the black man,” and “its fecund racial

l6

mixing” all emphasize how the religious beliefs and racial mixing form the basis for the
marvelous real (Carpentier, “Marvelous Real” 84-88).

Perhaps Carpentier’s most enduring influence to postcolonial criticism is his
exploration of the relationship between marvelous real and history. In Carpentier’s The
Kingdom of this World therefore, Haiti is not only a site that represents the survival of
Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs, or racial and cultural plurality, but is also a place that
carries the burden of the most atrocious events of modernity. So, the marvelous real
grapples with history and attempts to account for the inexplicable horror of modernity, as
seen in the following statement: “[n]ow then, I speak of the marvelous real when I refer
to certain things that have occurred in America” (Carpentier, “The Baroque” 102). One of
the events being referred to here is the “discovery” of the American continent,
particularly, the manner in which the “discoverers” wiped out entire civilizations and
collective memory. For instance, “when Heman Cortes said to his monarch: ‘As I do not

3”

know what to call these things, I cannot express them (Carpentier, Baroque 107), he
was expressing his wonder at the magnificent city of Mexico. However, by asserting that
“I cannot express them,” he also denies the history of the continent by extirpating its
memory both literally and figuratively (104). The notion of the marvelous therefore, lies
in the unleashing of imperial savagery on the continent and the violence with which it
was resisted:

The marvelous real is found at every stage in the lives of men who inscribed dates

in the history of the continent and who left the names that we still carry: from those

who searched for the fountain of eternal youth and the golden city of Manoa to

17

certain early rebels or modern heroes of mythological fame from our wars of
independence [...]. (Carpentier, “Marvelous Real” 87)
The history of imperialism, then, becomes a source of the marvelous real because the
conquest of the New World and establishment of colonies seem to confound our sense of
reality and geography: that is, imperial powers subdued cities which had already built an
advanced civilization and were much bigger than major cities in colonizing nations
during the period of European economic expansion. The Conquest was characterized by
the most unthinkable horror especially because of unnecessary use of violence against the
people of the Caribbean and Latin America. Carpentier contends:
How could America be anything other than marvelously real, if we recognize
certain very interesting factors that must be taken into account? The conquest of
Mexico occurs in 1521, when Francois I ruled France. Do you know how big the
urban area of Paris was under Francois I? Thirteen square kilometers. . . . When
Bemal Diaz del Castillo laid eyes . . . on . . . the city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of
Mexico, the empire of Montezuma, it had an urban area of one hundred square
kilometers - at a time when Paris had only thirteen. (“Baroque” 104)
These geographical disparities and the horror of the conquest are crucial to formulating
notions of the marvelous real because of the strangeness of these events. History
becomes marvelous in itself precisely because of our inability to capture and express its
horror in realistic and logical terms. The task of the writer is then to attempt to recover
this history and rescue it from the ruins of colonialism. The marvelous real is not only

about capturing the strange, intolerable and shocking history of the colonized peoples, it

18

is also a means of recovering the memory of peoples and histories partially lost in the

ruins of the colonial encounter. For example,
As far as the marvelous real is concerned, we have only to reach out our hands to
grasp it. Our contemporary history presents us with strange occurrences every
day. . . . Today, we know the names of these things, the forms of these things, the
texture of these things; we know where our internal and external enemies are. We
have forged a language appropriate to the expression of our realities, and the
events that await us will find that we, the novelists of Latin America, are the
witnesses, historians, and interpreters of our great Latin American reality.
(“Baroque” 107-108)

Novels like Miguel Angel Asturias’ Men of Maize, Carlos Fuentes’ Where the Air is
Clear, and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo employ indigenous beliefs that were threatened
during the colonial period. They also attempt to recapture the memory of epochs that had
fallen victim to the brutal force of the conquering European nations. The theme can also
be located in the works of other Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and
Jose Donoso, and in the writings of African writers such as Sony Labou Tansi, Mia
Couto, Ben 0in and others. Although the marvelous, from Carpentier’s point of view, is
a uniquely Latin American experience, there is an emergence of contemporary African
writers who have appropriated the marvelous to confront horrific historical situations,
though within different contexts. Neocolonialism, dictatorship and perpetuation of pain
can partly explain why various writers have been experimenting with the marvelous real

beyond the geographical and cultural context of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Marvelous or Magical

l9

Although there are fundamental and irreducible differences between the marvelous
real and magical realism, many critics tend to conflate the two concepts in their textual
analysis. Scarano contends that the term, “magical realism,” despite its inability to
embrace all texts based on the imagination, is still very attractive and will therefore
survive better than other terms like the marvelous, real imaginario, realismo, artistico or
realismo fantastico (10). Bertinetti also argues, in a footnote, that “the concept of magical
realism originated and to a substantial degree developed in Latin America, with one of its
chief starting—points being the formulation in 1949 of the concepts of the real maravilloso
by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier” (197). Another critic, Robinson, writes of “Carpentier’s
formulation of magical realism,” thereby implying that the marvelous real and magical
realism are the same (79). Yet Fishbum also claims that The Kingdom of this World is a
work of magical realism ( 167). Although Shroeder did not effectively distinguish
between the marvelous real and magical realism, she acknowledges that the term magical
realism became more confusing when it was applied to the works of Alejo Carpentier
(Shroeder 2). In his discussion of magical realism, Slemon refers to the marvelous real as
belonging in a different context; and just like Shroeder, Slemon does not fully distinguish
between the two terms but acknowledges that the two terms are not interchangeable
(407).

Magical realism is the amalgamation of reality and the supernatural in such a way that
“the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction
between them” (Faris, Ordinary Enchantments 1). In other words, there is no hierarchy
between the supernatural and realistic elements in a text because the story is narrated in a

matter-of—fact manner which portrays both the “telluric” and the “supernatural” events as

20

“real.” The narrator of magical realism expresses no surprises because to him or her, both
the real and the supernatural are accepted as realistic. Although “the educated reader
considers the rational and the irrational as conflicting. world views, he does not react to
the supernatural in the text as if it were antinomious with respect to our conventional
view of reality, since it is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and
characters in the fictitious world” (Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic 23).
However, the marvelous real derives from the Latin American encounter with the
historicity of its landscape (Carpentier, “Marvelous Real” 87). The landscape is believed
to be imbued with both historical and supernatural characteristics founded in horror
(Delbaere-Garant, “Psychic Realism” 252-253). The horror of history is so intense that it
becomes more or less a spiritual experience which shocks and astonishes the characters
and the reader as in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

This shock and astonishment produced by the narrative of history differentiates the
marvelous from magical realism, where the supernatural events are presented as ordinary
events. For example, Rushdie’s Midnight ’s Children (1980) is the backdrop of bloodbath
that attended the independence of India and the separation of Pakistan from India.
Whereas the horror of history is being represented in this novel, it does not make any
claims about the supernatural as such. Wherever the supernatural is invoked, it almost
always serves as a narrative technique, but the novel’s eclectic style often integrates other
narrative forms such as the fantastic, uncanny and the marvelous.

Both the marvelous real and magical realism are partly characterized by “ontological
duality,” which implies that they both express two opposing epistemologies and

perspectives of apprehending reality (Angulo 6). That is, they both present a world in

21

which some events occur that are considered “real” because they conform to our
doctrines of the real while other events happen that are described as “supernatural”
because they usually involve characters and actions that are assumed to be unfamiliar to
us. These two perspectives in magical realism and the marvelous are “conflicting, but
[are] autonomously coherent . . . perspectives, one based on [a] rational view of reality
and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality” (Chanady,
Magical Realism and the F antastie 21-22). Magical realism, then, adopts both views of
reality, and the supernatural does not disconcert the narrator. However, the supernatural
in the marvelous real is fundamentally different from that of magical realism because it is
partly derived from a religious experience, and the “experience of the marvelous is
unexpected and unusual” (Hart, “Magical Realism” 43). In addition, the marvelous real
self-consciously alerts us to the experience of the past which is astonishing and
supernatural in itself (Carpentier, “Baroque” 105). This is a quality of the marvelous real
that is not an integral part of magical realism and it is for this reason that the direct
engagement of the marvelous real with the absurdity of history sets it apart from magical
realism.

Aside from differences in terminologies, Durix, John Beverley and Aldama have
raised certain questions about the marvelous real. For example, Durix argues that the
marvelous real projects the European gaze on the “other.” Consequently, the marvelous
real is no more than a Eurocentric fetishization of the “other” because it is premised on
the uniqueness of Latin American and Caribbean landscapes and cultural sensibilities
(105). In addition, Durix contends that the marvelous expresses the “feeling of wonder

experienced by the conquistadors”; more importantly, it “is not very far from conceptions

22

of the Noble Savage” (105). Similarly, Aldama asserts that the marvelous real has been
greatly influenced by the European anthropological assumptions about Latin America,
particularly, as articulated in Levy-Bruhl’s How the Natives Think (10). In Aldama’s
view, anthropology “suggested that ‘primitive’ thought and perceptions are pervaded by
mysticism and that ‘primitive mentality’ is not governed exclusively by laws of logic and
is therefore mainly prelogical and analogous to the mentality of a child” (10). The
implication for the marvelous real, Aldama states, is that “[t]he link between 10 real
maravilloso and Levy-Bruhl’s influential book is readily apparent: it had a clear though
unintended role in fixing and justifying the political propaganda of colonialist and
neocolonialists everywhere” (10).

The link between the marvelous and the baroque is the subject of John Beverley’s
criticism of the marvelous. Beverley argues that the cultural and racial mixture that is
central to the concept of the marvelous does not reflect the violence, racism and
segregation that characterized the history of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean and
Latin America (62). Also, Wilson declares that “Carpentier appropriated . . . [“le
merveilleux”] from Breton’s vocabulary,” and “could discount the surrealist marvellous
because he linked urban with reason, and tropical nature with the unpredictable” (70).

There is a sense in which the marvelous can be considered anthropological; the
incorporation of folk narrative styles and the evocation of “traditional” belief systems can
invite such criticisms advanced by Durix and Aldama. Liam Connell makes a similar
argument in a different context when he says that the anthropological element of magical
realism implies that realism is based on superstition and myth and therefore opposed to

European writings assumed to be informed by logic and rationality (95-96). But

23

interestingly enough, both fantasy literature and Gothic fiction developed from the late
eighteenth century into the nineteenth century also creates worlds which are radically
opposed to, and intended to challenge the hegemony of logic and reason. Both fantasy
literature and the Gothic present “explicit antinomy between the laws of reason and
supernatural beliefs” in an age . . . when rational explanation and empirical observation
had relegated archaic paradigms to an inferior status” (Chanady, “Territorialization of the
Imaginary” 132). They therefore deconstruct “rationalist discourse affirming hegemonic
paradigms of the Enlightenment” . . . “by the description of apparently supernatural
events and constant reference to the fear of the protagonist in the face of the inexplicable”
(132). If Durix and Aldama have based their criticism of the marvelous on its supposed
opposition to logic and rationality, such a manifestation is not unique to the marvelous
but shared by both fantasy and Gothic literatures. It is apparent that both Durix and
Aldama have ironically reinforced the same Eurocentric perceptions of non-European
peoples and cultures without acknowledging the same trend in European literary practice.
Furthermore, they have only isolated an interpretation of the marvelous, the effect of
which leaves us with a half-truth about the significance of the marvelous. The marvelous
real, though partly relying on the supernatural in the construction of reality, is by no
means circumscribed or undermined by religious and ritualistic significations; it also
relies on the horror of history to produce its supematuralized reality. It is true that some
religious and ritualistic elements can be interpreted as ethnographic, but to reduce the
narrative mode to ethnographic content is to overlook the primacy of history. More
importantly, these ethnographic elements can become a means through which resistance

is articulated as seen in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Kojo Laing’s Women of the

24

Aeroplanes where history, myth and existential experience struggle and overlap with each
other. Ultimately, Aldama and Durix fail to acknowledge the political and liberatory
significance of the marvelous real. Their criticism of the marvelous as ethnographic
derives from “uniqueness” of the Caribbean and Latin‘America rather than a careful
analysis of quintessentially marvelous real texts (Mellen, Magical Realism 119).

In addition, Beverley’s claim that the marvelous fails to reflect the violence, racism
and segregation that characterized racial and cultural mixing is not entirely valid. For
instance, The Kingdom of this World is particularly sensitive to the violence of French
colonialism in general, and specifically, the horror of racial mixing which is shown as
forbidden, and punishable with terrifying cruelty. Rather than obscuring history, the
marvelous confronts the silences and horrors (Carpentier, “The Baroque” 107-108).
Despite the above criticisms, marvelous real, with its interrogative approach to the past,
offers a perspective on history vital to postcolonial criticism. In other words, the
centralizing the traumatic encounters between Europe and non-Europeans will revitalize
postcolonial criticism which previously has been shaped by emphasis on cultural

hybridity.

Critical Approach/Methodology

The critical approach/methodology in this work will follow the postcolonial critiques
developed by Spivak, Bongie, Gilroy, Young, J anMohammed Neil Lazarus and others.
Since the texts examined are more or less grounded in the marvelous, there is particular
emphasis on how they portray the “other” in the “harshness of its destiny” (Mbembe 17).
Of course, Bhabha, Appiah and Hall have privileged the politics of interstitiality which

means they not only celebrate cultural plurality, but also valorize porosity of borders; it is

25

obvious that they have been influenced by the postmodernist idea of “death of the
subject” which implies that subjectivity and identity are never constituted prior to the
moment of enunciation. Their criticism constitutes a counterpoint to colonial narratives
that privileged homogenized and imagined identities. However, the danger in pursuing
Bhabha et al’s argument is that there hardly exists any space, location or position to
interrogate the traumatic past that postcolonial fiction has foregrounded. The following
excerpt will throw light on the issue:
Doesn’t it seem funny that at the very point when women and people of color are
ready to sit down at the bargaining table with the white boys, that the table
disappears? That is, suddenly there are no grounds for claims to truth and
knowledge anymore and here we are, standing in the conference room making all
sorts of claims to knowledge and truth but suddenly without a table upon which to
put our papers and coffee cups, let alone to bang our fists. (Amory, qtd. in Shohat
and Stam 345)
Therefore, the fluid and cosmopolitan politics advocated by Bhabha, Appiah and Hall has
the tendency of becoming another kind of cultural imperialism (Kortenaar 11). It is for
this reason that Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason will be pertinent to
this work because it not only acknowledges the primacy of hybridity, interstitiality and
the porosity of national boundaries, but also demonstrates that certain unified
subjectivities like “self,” “people” and a totalizing concept like “nation,” are still useful
in understanding and challenging historicity. Categories like “nation” and “people” are
crucial to this work because “[h]owever transnationalized or globalized today’s world

might be, the boundaries of a civil society still mark out the individual state and are still

26

nationally defined” (Critique 399).

While the postcolonial method, like postmodernism, rejects fixed and unitary notions
of identities, the notion of “totality” and “fixity” help re-conceptualize the politics of
resistance outside the postmodern “orthodoxies.” In addition to Spivak’s Critique,
Bongie’s Islands and Exiles provides the paradigm to re-inscribe “fixity” and
“essentialism” into the analysis of the above-cited texts because “[a] reliance upon, and a
reversion to, fixed and ultimately fictional (ethnic, racial, national, and so on) identities is
inescapable, notwithstanding our ever greater immersion in and sensitivity to a creolized
and creolizing world” (Islands 10). The confrontation with past and present injustice that
is germane to postcolonial narratives suggests that categories like the “nation-state,”
“ethnicity,” and “people” are strategic points of references. In effect, “monadic” and
“unified” representations of individual and collective subjectivities are deployed, a task
for which Bongie’s Islands becomes invaluable because of its potential for repositioning
such “stable” references in current postcolonial debates. More importantly, no matter
how globalized the world has become, not matter how cosmopolitan the world of these
novels is, the historical context of their production is one in which the relationship of the
former colonized peoples and the former colonizers is still structured by binary
opposition (J anMohammed 82). JanMohammed says further that “the dominant pattern of
relations that controls the text within the colonial context is determined by economic and
political imperatives and changes, such as the development of slavery, power- and
interest-relations in all colonial societies is the manichean opposition between the
putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native” (82). In

the globalizing world of today, discourses of binary oppositions have diminished

27

significantly and the former colonial powers are more or less absent from the affairs of
the erstwhile colonies. However, because the West as a colonial force has given way to
the multinational corporations, the devastating effects of their policies on the political and
economic lives of former colonies are not easily discerned. Since the corporations now
have multinational membership, they operate with more audacity while their lack of
specific national identity undermines expectations of accountability at a time when
nation-states in the developing worlds no longer exercise dominant economic and cultural
roles, unlike in the 19605, 19705 and early 19805. Colonial governments no longer
control the affairs of the developing nations directly, but the multinational businesses
have dominated the markets, thereby creating similar, if not the same negative
consequences of colonialism. It is for this reason that JanMohammed will be essential to
theorizing the transformation of the colonial order.

The writers whose works have been selected for analysis are the first generation
writers (Alejo Carpentier from Cuba and Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia) and
second generation writers, Sony Labou Tansi (Congo), Salman Rushdie (Britain/India)
and Ben Okri (Britain/Nigeria). These Latin American, Caribbean, African and Indian
authors have been chosen for the manifestation of the marvelous real in their writings on
the one hand, and their tendency to depict the cruelty of the colonial past and the violence
and pain of the post-independence period, up to this age of globalization on the other.
Their significance lies more in their historical narratives more than in their geographical
locations although the different social and historical contexts will be appreciated. Their

choice is not entirely based on geographical criteria.

28

In chapter one, the main issue is the centrality of history to the idea of the marvelous
real, particularly, the fundamental connection between historical narratives and memory.
This argument is situated within Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World. This is a novel
in which the writer is preoccupied with the question of history as memory and myth
which underlines the significance of accounting for events of the past while being
conscious of the fact that history is produced discursively. The idea of history as
narratives that subvert amnesia in this text becomes of the utmost importance especially
when contextualized within the logic of Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse in which he
suggests that the experience of colonialism obliterates collective memory (62). Also,
Young’s poststructuralist paradigm in White Mythologies and Glissant’s text will provide
the forum to develop the argument that, structured by meticulous sensitivity to the
subversion of amnesia precipitated by the processes of the production of historical
knowledge, Kingdom attempts to recover, narrativize, appropriate and reconstruct the
place of the “other” in the challenge to historicity. i

In chapter two, the argument is that second generation novels, specifically, Sony
Labou Tansi’s Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez, function within the marvelous realist
notion of horror, and that the history that the texts account for is shaped by the horrific
character of its passing. The horror that this novel exemplifies is different from the
conventional category of horror in the 18th century Romance and Gothic fiction in which
horror is an extemalization or narrativization of the human psyche (MacAndrew 5-7).
Although it is possible to locate certain aspects of the Gothic horror in Seven Solitudes,
such as the grotesque and terror, emphasis will be placed on the text’s dramatization of

how horror is shaped by violence of history. In contrast, Achille Mbembe’s On the

29

Postcolony functions to demonstrate that Seven Solitudes describes a different kind of
horror that is distinctive to the encounter between Europe and the New World, which has
also patterned the representation of post-independent social realities (Mbembe 17).

Chapter three argues that the idea of horror discussed in the previous chapter is an
experience too gruesome to recall by memory. Therefore, the horror of the past events
captured by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight ’s Children problematizes literary representation
because the experience they try to depict defies the logic of memory or rational
representation. This novel, to varying degrees, operates within the paradigm of the
marvelous real because it narrativizes history so that the extremely troubling dimensions
of history produce an unexpected, shocking and supernatural representation of reality.
That is, the horror that characterizes this narrative has fundamentally altered the illusion
of reality as typically seen in realism, and the naturalization of the supernatural as given
in “magical realism”; it also signifies the limitations of the representational potential of
the marvelous. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notion of the “unrepresentable” in The
Postmodern Condition reinforces the shock and astonishment that Midnight’s Children
evokes, which resist conventional modes of representation; Kristeva’s Revolution in
Poetic Language will help engage the idea that, although Midnight ’s Children testifies to
the impossibility of a coherent narrative of horror, it is imperative to acknowledge that
one cannot entirely avoid totalizing historical experience.

Chapter four examines the role of the marvelous real in reviving the politics of
engagement which plays a diminished role within realist narrative mode. More
importantly, Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods, together with Spivak’s Critique, Bongie’s

Islands and Exiles and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus make it possible to

30

deconstruct colonial narratives of cultural and racial essentialism. They also follow the
marvelous real’s politics of oppositionality enhanced by the recognition of how imagined
identities like racial and national categories can become instrumental to challenging the
conditions of anomie that structure historical realities of the non-European during
colonialism, post-independence, and this global age. In other words, the politics of
engagement and oppositionality inherent in the marvelous real energizes postcolonial

criticism.

31

Chapter One: The Marvelous and the Imperative of History

How does postcolonial fiction engage the history of colonialism? First, it will be
erroneous to assume that there is one unproblematic category of postcolonial fiction.
Postcolonial narratives are shaped by a lot of factors which differ in terms of historical
specificity and aesthetic choices. For instance, while some Caribbean and Latin American
writers had expressed their social and historical conditions through literary realism and
modernism, others focused on the marvelous. This assertion poses the question, why the
marvelous? The main reason for privileging the marvelous lies in history’s irrationality;
that is, like Auschwitz, the cataclysmic consequence of colonization cannot be fully
grasped through empirical method or rational logic. This is why the marvelous realist
writers depart from literary realism because to adopt realism is to place reality within an
ordered system and within a rationally comprehensible order of knowledge. In addition,
the irrationality of colonization also has to do with the magnitude of colonial atrocities
especially those committed by nations that claimed, while these atrocities were being
perpetrated, that they had superior civilizations. These contradictions are by no means
reducible to logical reasoning which is why many postcolonial writers tend to gravitate
towards the marvelous.

One of the important texts that explores the operation of the marvelous is Alejo
Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World (1949). Kingdom offers a revisionist perspective
on History by reconstructing the events of Haitian Revolution in such a way that less
known actors in that revolution now become its heroes. In essence, Kingdom participates
in exposing the silences of history. Kingdom is also a quintessential work of resistance

literature designed specifically to challenge imperialism and its manifestations in

32

colonialism, racism and sexual predation. This text also attests to Said’s claim in Culture
and Imperialism that partly because of imperialism, cultures have always been hybrid
(xxv). Kingdom shows how voodoo and Catholicism overlap and how the idea of
“mestizaje” has come to be constitutive of the Caribbean and Latin American identity.
Kingdom’s marvelous perspective on history reinforces our understanding of the
persistence of colonization, which is why revolutionary zeal is central to its story. It is
necessary to sound a note of caution at this juncture because, while the idea of
emancipation may be central to the Enlightenment project, Kingdom shows an ambivalent
attitude toward it. In other words, the Enlightenment translates to slavery, colonization
and racism, but the text embraces its emancipatory ideal. Despite embracing
revolutionary Optimism, it is clear that Kingdom does not attempt to “normalize” history
or present history as a series of orderly events where such order is non-existent.

The idea that colonial history is so overwhelming for rational contemplation has some
affinity with the idea of the sublime. It is necessary to point out right away that one
cannot equate the marvelous and the sublime and one cannot interchange the terms.
However, the notion of the magnitude of experience which is incomprehensible to the
senses establishes some subtle relations between the marvelous and the sublime. In other
words, even though the terms “marvelous” and “sublime” have different connotations and
originate from different critical contexts, the fact that they both try to represent
experiences whose magnitude exceeds the power of the senses already signifies a
similarity in their operation. Therefore, the sublime is crucial to our understanding of
history in the sense that, as Immanuel Kant argues, “nothing that can be an object of the

senses is to be called sublime” (106). This implies that history cannot be expressed

33

through empirical knowledge precisely because the magnitude of the events concerned
exceeds the power of the senses. It is for this reason that we have to understand the
sublime in terms of an event that is beyond the grasp of the senses. Kant says further,
“[h]ence the magnitude of a natural object to which the imagination fruitlessly applies its
entire ability to comprehend must lead the concept of nature to supersensible substrate, . .
. a substrate that is large beyond any standard of sense and hence makes us judge as
sublime . . . the mental attunement in which we find ourselves when we estimate the
object” (112). In the above quote, one can deduce the connection between the sublime
and the marvelous: the expression, “inability to comprehend” and “large beyond any
standard of sense” reinforce the notion of magnitude of history and the impossibility of a
rational understanding of history. That is, history is marvelous precisely because it shares
a certain quality of the sublime; and it is sublime because its atrocities and cataclysm
cannot be apprehended through empirical knowledge. White’s idea of the sublime in The
Content of the F arm, though different from Kant’s because it is directly related to
historiography, emphasizes the incomprehensibility of history. White may not be talking
about aesthetics like Kant but they both operate on the premise that certain experiences
are beyond human perceptual capacity. Therefore, any attempt to present history as
understandable and unproblematic is complicit with ideologies of dominant groups.
White says:

Historical facts are politically domesticated precisely insofar as they are effectively

removed from displaying any aspect of the sublime. . . . By this I mean . . . the

following: in so far as historical events and processes become understandable, as

conservatives maintain, as radicals believe them to be, they can never serve as a

34

basis for a visionary politics more concerned to endow social life with meaning
than with beauty. In my view, the theorists of the sublime had correctly divined
that whatever dignity and freedom of human beings could lay claim to could come
only by way of what Freud called a “reaction-formation” to an appreciation of
history’s meaninglessness. (70-72)
In this sense, the sublime operates on at least two levels. The first is that it attributes
incomprehensibility to history, and rightly so, because the catastrophes of history cannot
be reconciled with rationality even though the perpetrators could justify their heinous
acts. The second is that the sublime also encourages political resistance that aims at
achieving freedom for those who have been victims of history. In order to revisit the
contradiction of history, it is important to acknowledge its sublime nature without which
a vision of a different future will be difficult to imagine. In fact, White asks whether the
recovery of the sublime cannot engender a historiography “charged with avenging the
people?” and he answers by stating, “This seems plausible to me” (81). Also, the sublime
acts as a reactivation of memory in the sense that by refusing to paint a pleasant picture
of history, the sublime brings to memory the atrocities of the past which, as Glissant
argues in Caribbean Discourse, obliterates collective memory (62). In the situation in
Kingdom where Carpentier’s historiographical project intersects with the sublime, history
emerges in opposition to the order, comprehensibility and transparency of knowledge.
White says:
It seems to me that the kind of politics that is based on a vision of a perfected
society can compel devotion to it only by the virtue of the contrast it offers to a

99 “

past that is understood . . . as a “spectacle” of “confusion, uncertainty,” and

35

“moral anarchy.” . . . But modern ideologies seem to me to differ crucially from
eschatological religious myths in that they impute a meaning to history that renders
its manifest confusion comprehensible to reason, understanding, or aesthetic
sensibility. To the extent that they succeed in doing so, these ideologies deprive
history of the kind of meaninglessness that alone can goad living human beings to
make their lives different for themselves and their children, which is to say, to
endow their lives with meaning for which they alone are fully responsible.
(Content 72)
It is pertinent to indicate that the very incomprehensibility, meaninglessness and the
illogicality of the colonial enterprise in Kingdom, which have been rendered through the
marvelous mainly because the marvelous is not merely a “supplement,” but the manifest
character of Haitian history. As will be shown in Kingdom, history is presented as an
experience in the sublime. In addition, by exploring the Haitian Revolution, the novel
seems to say that emancipation must be seen as marvelous because of the contradiction of
freedom. The novel shows how despotism follows the revolution, a statement that
testifies to the marvelous and paradoxical character of revolution paradox. This bitter
reality must always be remembered in order to envision a different historical trajectory.
The main reason for proposing a different historical trajectory has to do with historicity
itself; Carpentier’s historiography in Kingdom exposes the myth of singularity of history,
thereby initiating alternative histories an example of which is the successful slave revolt.
Glissant says:
One of the most disturbing consequences of colonization could well be this notion

of a single History, and therefore of power, which has been imposed on others by

36

the West. The struggles for power and the wild assertion of power in South
America in the nineteenth century and in Africa today (after decolonization) are the
result of this. We begin to realize that . . . the profound transformation of
mentalities in this regard creates the possibility of changing the world order. (93)
In Saint Domingue, when the blacks subvert the French slavocracy, they also challenge
the dominant notion of history so that both the bloodbath that the reader confronts and
Makandal’s narratives contribute to a new historiography: a notion of history from the
bottom as against the idea of history from the top, whose object is power and domination.
It should not be surprising that Carpentier remythologizes Makandal who already exists
within popular imagination among blacks as the liberator; to deploy Makandal implies
embracing the instability, incomprehensibility and surplus of history. It also implies the
whole culture of the marvelous, which undermines the transparency, stability of reference
and the dialectic, on which the Western historiography relies. Glissant rightly notes that
“on the eve of the victorious confrontation of Bonaparte’s armies in 1802, the Haitians
celebrated the exploits of the Maroon Mackandal, as they were idealized in their
imagination . . .” (71). The myth about Makandal works in this context to create a new
historical direction that figures the peoples who are victims of Western colonization and
historical discourse. The fact that Makandal’s “history” becomes central to Kingdom
indicates that subverting West’s tyrannical idea of history is paramount to the novel. The
tyrannical and colonizing impulse of Western form of History occupies a central place in
Young’s White Mythologies on the ground that Western historical discourse already has a
colonial character that excludes other peoples while paradoxically subjugating them.

Young says:

37

the mode of knowledge as a politics of arrogation pivots at a theoretical level on
the dialectic of the same and the other. Such knowledge is always centred in a self
even though it is outward looking, searching for power and control of what is other
to it. . . . History, with a capital H, similarly cannot tolerate otherness or leave it
outside its economy of inclusion. The appropriation of the other as a form of
knowledge within a totalizing system can thus be set alongside the history (if not
the project) of European imperialism, and the constitution of the other as “other”
alongside racism and sexism. The reaction against this structure has produced
forms of politics that do not fit into traditional political categories. (35)
Both Glissant and Young agree on the totalizing power of Western history; they also
agree on West’s exclusion of the “other” from its own definition of history. For instance,
Glissant concludes that in fashioning alternative historiographical-models, one should be
skeptical of the notion of history as “simply a sequence of events, to which . . . there will
always be an outcome” (Glissant 70). Since “History . . . written with a capital H . . . is a
totality that excludes other histories that do not fit into that of the West” (75), there must
be a surplus of meaning, which implies that this singularity must be broken to allow
multiple and varied signification. It is in accordance to breaking the totality of History
with the capital H that Glissant suggests that “we should let the weight of lived
experience ‘slip in’ ” precisely because “[i]n it lie histories and the voice of peoples”
(75). In reference to Kingdom, by centralizing the black slaves, Carpentier calls into
question the dominance of Western historical approach; that is, history as an event, as
lived experience and as discourse, must all struggle to shape the nature of postcolonial

historiography without any one of the models attaining a position of privilege. The

38

multiplicity of historiographical modes also allows expression for the incomprehensible
aspect of history. Glissant suggests that in response to colonization, “authors . . . give . . .
excessive emphasis to the unspeakable” (78). In other words, in opposition to a
teleological pattern of historical discourse, Kingdom represents an attempt to repudiate
Western teleological, mappable and knowable pattern of history by exploring aspects of
history that are irreconcilable to the logic of the senses.

A problem arises from destabilizing the purported singularity of History with the
capital H: within the context of Kingdom, the blacks’ alternative history operates as a
counter-point to Western historical model, but this alternative history is inextricably
bound to the history of the French Revolution, so that while foregrounding a counter-
history, one ineluctably reproduces the dominant history. The tales and myth about
Makandal cannot exist by themselves, they must be situated within French colonial
history in Saint Domingue. The colonial history ceases to enjoy the privilege of
singularity, but because the history of liberation in Kingdom prefigures the history of
colonialism, one must necessarily reproduce the other.

The rest of this discussion will be divided into three parts: the first will give a
background to Carpentier’s fiction, particularly Kingdom, which had shaped the
formulation and the praxis of the marvelous real. The second part will explore the
nuances of memory, its alignment to history, its irreducible difference from history and
how historiography participates in the reconstitution of memory. The third section will be
devoted to the specific ways in which Kingdom reconstitutes memory of the Haitian
Revolution through the immediate context of Haiti and through remythologizing African

history.

39

Background to Carpentier’s Fiction

In the prologue to his 1949 novel, The Kingdom of this World, Alejo Carpentier asks a
rhetorical question: “After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of
the marvelous real? (“On the Marvelous Real 88). Because of the geographical scope of
America, this is an ambitious statement, the validity of which may be controversial.
Despite the attempt to unify America in his discourse this assertion raises another issue:
the notion of history as marvelous. In that same prologue, Carpentier argues that the
magnitude of colonial expedition, the conquest of the Americas and resistance to colonial
order which culminated in the first ever successful slave revolution in Saint Domingue
between 1791 and 1804, all signify the marvelous character of European mercantilist
domination of the new world. Kingdom, with a focus on the Haitian Revolution, explores
the marvelous reality that Carpentier claims, is the distinctive character of America.

Carpentier’s works are so varied that they cannot be forced into coherent literary or
political ideologies. Other novels like Music in Cuba (1946), Reason of State (1974), The
Harp and the Shadow (1979), The Lost Steps (1956) and others mark the shifting
moments in Carpentier’s literary concerns. But Explosion in a Cathedral (1962), though
published thirteen years after Kingdom, pursues themes similar to the latter. However,
two major differences between Kingdom and Explosion are their geographical scope and
attitude to reality. In other words, while Kingdom is specifically set in Haiti, Explosion’s
stories extend beyond Haiti to Guadeloupe and other Spanish, English and Dutch colonial
possessions in the Caribbean. Also, Explosion does not exhibit the marvelous reality of

Kingdom although there are a few moments that can be classified as marvelous in the

40

former. Despite their differences the two novels are preoccupied with the Haitian
Revolution and how it altered the history of European colonialism in the Caribbean.

Kingdom was written more than a century after Haitian Revolution, but for most of the
19th century, the astonishment caused by the Haitian Revolution tragically led to Haiti’s
being ostracized by many countries in the Western hemisphere; historians also avoided
the subject of Haitian Revolution partly because the idea of an independent black nation
was considered unthinkable (Debois 2). One of the immediate consequences of that
ostracism was economic hardship for Haitians which is why when Carpentier visited
Haiti in the early 19405 he observed that the aftermath of the revolution was nothing but
marvelous specifically because of the economic hardship and cultural plurality.

The independence of Haiti also meant a loss to the French Empire in the Caribbean
and Cuba’s assumption of the production and supply of sugar. The expansion of the sugar
industry between 1898 and 1927 meant a greater demand for manpower, and in an
attempt to cope with this demand black laborers had to be imported from Jamaica and
Haiti (Echevarria 44-45). This sugar boom made Cuba and Dominican Republic the
dominant sugar suppliers in the Caribbean, but ironically, the blacks were economically
alienated. Partly as a result of their social and economic alienation and partly as a result
of newly arrived slaves from Africa, blacks in Cuba maintained several cultural practices.
These practices separated them from the rest of the population through a division largely
along racial lines (43). Therefore, the religious practices that Carpentier witnessed in
Haiti in 1943, along with Afro-Cubanism which meant embracing African cultures, the
impoverishment of the independent nation, its ostracism and the use of Haitian laborers in

Cuba marginalized by classism and racism, inevitably found their way into Kingdom.

41

Kingdom self-consciously evokes the memory of Haitian Revolution precisely because
freedom for the slaves and independence of Saint Domingue were events which were
considered unthinkable. The novel focuses specifically on the black slaves and how their
role in the revolution caused one of the most surprising events in the history of
colonialism. Since Carpentier conceives the idea of the marvelous as a uniquely
Caribbean and Latin American experience, Kingdom to some extent fits into “modern”
Latin American writing in which writers were more concerned with eliminating European
influences in their works. As Irish notes in “Magical Realism: A Search for Caribbean
and Latin American Roots,” Latin American writers have experimented with French
Romanticism and various modernist literary expressions like Dadaism and Surrealism in
the early part of 20th century, but later revolted against these literary modes with the
emergence of inadequately theorized “magical realism” (127). Apart from the literary
experimentation among Latin American writers of mid-twentieth century, Kingdom also
coincided with the period when empire had started to decline. A year before its
publication, India attained its independence from Great Britain; following World War H,
the ground was also prepared for decolonization in Indochina and Africa. In essence,
Kingdom highlights the memory of Haitian Revolution within the contexts of post-
revolution disillusionment in Haiti, the marginalization of black laborers in Cuba and the
decolonization in Africa.

Kingdom attempts to fill some of the silences and absences in history particularly
because European historiography up till the middle of the 20th century had ignored the
role of the colonies in colonial history (Slemon 41 1-2). More importantly, the paradox of

independence has perpetuated literatures of resistance in many post-colonial societies

42

because independence hardly meant the end of domination. Post-independent Haiti in
Carpentier’s novel is a good example in which the oppressive force is no longer France,
but King Henri Christophe, who subjects Haitians to a life of servitude in order to protect
Haiti from French invasion. Kingdom helps to evaluate changing patterns of domination
in many post-colonial societies especially in contemporary contexts where the physical
presence of a colonial power has been either marginal or negligible.

The memory of the Haitian Revolution in Carpentier’s novel evokes the marvelous
dimension of the revolution and also provides a paradigm for rethinking domination and
resistance, especially in this global age when porous borders and shrinking global space
can mask patterns of domination. Also, unlike in the nineteenth century when Haiti was
abandoned by the West politically and economically, there have been more historical
studies of the revolution, although these are quite marginal when compared to the French
Revolution with which it was intertwined. But more important is the novel’s potential for
' understanding the intricacies of domination especially in a world in which formal

colonization has ended, thereby making it difficult to identify its traces.

The Kingdom of this World and Memory of Haitian Revolution

The fact that Kingdom was published in 1949, a time when empires had started to
decline and had partially lost their legitimacy raises more questions than answers. Around
the time of its publication the move towards decolonization had started in the colonies
and more specifically, there had begun constitutional reforms in the then Gold Coast and
Nigeria to gradually eliminate colonial influence in governance. With the ratification of
The Atlantic Charter of August 14 1941, it was almost unequivocal that empires were on

a trajectory that would result in their demise. However, it is not very clear that

43

Carpentier’s novel was a direct response to declining empire or was a statement in
support of decolonization of colonized territories; what is interesting about this novel is
the strategic moment of its publication and the historical event that forms the basis of its
narrative, the Haitian Revolution. On the one hand, Kingdom valorizes the slaves’ victory
over the French army and government in Saint Domingue, a timely celebration of the
waning of imperial power. On the other hand, Kingdom self-consciously makes one
remember the battles, politics and the very history that culminated in the Haitian
Revolution. One important aspect of the Haitian Revolution, particularly in the context of
Kingdom, is its incomprehensibility and astonishing character, which give this historical
event its marvelous temperament. In order to appreciate the significance of the Haitian
Revolution to Carpentier’s novel it is crucial for us to examine some of the
pronouncements of those involved. At this point, an excerpt from General Leclerc’s letter
to his in-law, Napoleon Bonaparte will suffice:
The black generals are well aware at this moment that I am going to destroy their
influence entirely in this country; but they dare not raise the standard of rebellion:
(1) because they detest each other and know very well that I would destroy them,
the one with the aid of the other; (2) because the blacks are not brave and this war
has scared them; (3) because they are afraid to measure themselves against the man
who destroyed their leaders. Under these circumstances I am marching steadily and
rapidly towards my goal. The South and West are almost disarmed. In the north the
disarming will begin in eight days.
The police is being organised, and as soon as the disarmament is over and the

police in position, I shall strike the last blows. If I succeed, as is probable, then San

Domingo will be readily restored to the Republic. (Quoted in C. L. R. James 336-

37)
In the above excerpt, Leclerc presented his action plan to Bonaparte in such a methodical
manner that one would not hesitate to commend the “pragmatism” with which he
executed the war. Also, Leclerc was not only sure of his war plans, he was confident of
his knowledge of black generals as well as the black population of Saint Domingue. The
subtle reference to his “superiority,” of which the blacks supposedly were afraid, made
him certain of winning the war. This notion of his “understanding” of the blacks is most
evident in his use of “because” in the excerpt, which signifies his over-confidence.
Leclerc’s empirical, positivist rhetoric is important: it shows that as the representative of
the French government he has authority over the discourse of the war. Leclerc reduced
the blacks to knowable and known subjects and in so doing he claimed victory over them
even before the execution of the war. Leclerc portrayed himself as having mastered the
blacks’ own knowledge when he used the expressions “black generals are well aware,”
and “know very well.”

Ironically, Leclerc could not have been more mistaken in his “knowledge” of the
black people of Haiti, a point that emphasizes not knowledge, but his ignorance of the
war and its astonishing outcome. More important is the magnitude of the war which must
either have been downplayed by Leclerc, or of which he must have been oblivious. The
fact that these same blacks decimated the French army shows he had underestimated not
only the strength of black soldiers, but also the magnitude of the war he was fighting.
Equally important, the landscape seems to assume extraordinary power and participated

in the destruction of the French army that later succumbed to treacherous terrain and

45

disease. When he later says, “If I succeed . . . then San Domingo will be readily restored
to the Republic,” Leclerc was hinting at his secret mission in Saint Dorrringue, which is to
restore slavery; but the blacks were also ready to procure and defend their freedom with
their lives.

There is no doubt that “[h]istory is the main topic in Carpentier’s fiction” and the
history that Carpentier engages in Kingdom is the history of the Caribbean and more
importantly, it is the history of “beginnings” and “foundations” (Echevarria 25). Kingdom
recounts the history of a people who refused to be re-enslaved and it retells the history of
an empire whose administrators questioned the slaves’ humanity and right to their
freedom. The same French Empire after World War H was not ready to relinquish
Indochina or Algeria despite the fact that Vietnam had declared its own independence
following the defeat of Japan.

Yet, what gives Kingdom its marvelous dimension is partly the supposed uniqueness
of the Caribbean and Latin American cultural space and the animistic endowment of the
Latin American landscape. Therefore, while critics have stressed anthropological
materials in Kingdom, they have overlooked how history could be marvelous (Aldama 7).
The marvelous nature of history is rooted partly in the notion that freedom for the slaves
or independence of Haiti was never considered possible options within the scheme of
French imperialism. Equally marvelous is the idea that imperialism perpetuates itself
despite independence after the revolution, which implies that the pattern of history
presented in Kingdom is a cyclic one. In other words, French imperialism is followed by
King Henri Christophe’s autocracy, followed by the reign of the mulattos in which

slavery was being reconstituted.

46

It cannot be emphasized enough that Carpentier’s novel tries to refashion memory
through the evocation of the “foundational” moment of Haiti, especially because history
itself is a form of amnesia. The idea that the historian has the power to select what
“makes” history, the fact that historical accounts are narratives of events, and the notion
that historiographical concerns in recent times have tended towards the processes through
which historical knowledge is produced, all point to the processes of inclusion, exclusion
and silences which are inseparable from the production of historical knowledge in the
first place. Kingdom as a historiographical text, rejects teleological notions of history but
more importantly, it explores history for the possibility of validating popular memories of
the revolution.

Stephanie Black’s documentary film, Life and Debt, testifies to the persistence of
imperialism through a study of how another Caribbean country, Jamaica, has become a
tourist country which attracts visitors from the more prosperous countries in the world. It
also highlights the irony in the boom of tourist industry by exploring how Jamaica has
become the site of exploitation through the proliferation of sweatshops, a condition in
which the workers are no better than slaves. The historiographical attitude to history in
Kingdom more or less resuscitates memory as a counter-historicist and counter
hegemonic strategy to the unending cycle of imperialism. For example, Ti Noél, a slave
to M. Lenormand de Mezy is a companion to Makandal, the slave who loses his arm
while working a machine. The fundamental issue about Ti Noél’s reference to Makandal
is that the latter is a storyteller whose stories evoke the memory of Africa:

He spoke of the great migrations of tribes, of age-long wars, of epic battles in

which the animals had been allies of men. He knew the story of Adonhueso, of the

47

King of Angola, of King Da, the incarnation of the Serpent, which is the eternal
beginning, never ending, who took his pleasure mystically with a queen who was
the Rainbow, patroness of the Waters and of all Bringing Forth. But, above all, it
was with the tale of Kankan Muza that he achieved the gift of tongues, the fierce
Muza, founder of the invincible empire of the Mandingues, whose horses went
adorned with silver coins and embroidered housings, their neighs louder than the
clang of iron, bearing the thunder of two drumheads that hung from their necks.
(Kingdom 13)
Aside from Carpentier’s idyllic or quasi-romantic recollection, Makandal instills in other
slaves specific knowledge of Africa, a cultural, political and social space from which they
had been displaced. Memory is therefore an irreducibly political phenomenon, serving
specific interests, and in the case of Kingdom, it becomes a means of subverting the
colonial discourse within the drudgery of the slave system.

The idyllic character of this memory of Africa may actually have served Makandal a
specific purpose, one of which is guiding the slaves through a process of unlearning the
ideology of French domination. Through this seemingly romantic “remembering” of
Africa, Makandal constructs a counter-narrative to the myth about slavery. For instance,
C. L. R. James says in his influential book about the Haitian Revolution, The Black
Jacobins, that “[t]here are and will always be some who . . . try to prove that slavery was
not so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists
and not the habitual lot of slaves” ( 13). But Makandal’s loss of his arm and Ti Noel’s
recapture by Henri Christophe’s taskmasters are evidence that contradict the idealization

of French slavery. According to James, French officials like Malouet and Vaublanc spoke

48

of the “privileges of slavery” through which slaves could “enjoy ‘the pleasures of love,’
his master [having] no interest in preventing the indulgence of his tastes” (14). Such
narratives are by now commonplace but are critical to Makandal’s recollection of Africa,
especially the choice of the story to be given to other slaves. It is not just the content of
these stories, which is significant, it is the method through which Makandal tries to
legitimate his own story of Africa. So, when the narrator tells us, “[t]he ground was
covered with signs: . . . several black chickens swung head down along a greasy branch.
Finally, where the signs ended, a particularly evil tree stood, its trunk bristling with black
thorns, surrounded by offerings. Among its roots were thrust twisted, gnarled branches as
crutches for Legba, the Lord of the Roads,” it is apparent that Makandal’s stories and Ti
Noél’s rendition of them are self-consciously situated within ritual (109). The reference
to ritual reinforces the primacy of memory to Makandal’s revolutionary mission because
he confers on the narratives the sacredness of myth.

Makandal’s anecdotes draw their inspiration from African ancient history, a point that
alerts the reader of Kingdom to the reality that Makandal’s stories emerge from oral
archives and resuscitated as “memories” of Africa. In other words, “[h]istoriography . . .

9”

‘represents . . . a truly new kind of recollection (Ricoeur 400). Moreover, one must not
overlook the fact that Makandal’s storytelling follows more or less in the tradition of the
griot, in which history is constructed from memory. But what one sees in Kingdom is that
Makandal’s reconstruction of history is made possible by adopting a style that closely
resembles that of the griot in which history is reconstructed mainly from memory. The

power of the griot’s historical reconstruction derives from his or her narratological

strategies which according to Hale in Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters

49

of the Songhay Empire, can range from direct address to “repetition, metonymy,
comparisons, metaphors, ideophones . . . and etiological tales” (62). The griot also
employs “variations in narrative voice” as a way of “[diminishing] the distance among
the audience, the narrator, and the story,” in order to emphasize important aspects of the
story. However, there is a problem in reading Makandal as a griot or to interpret his
storytelling as a griot’s narrative; this is because in Kingdom, one does not have direct
access to his “performances” except through the third person narrator’s account. In
addition, these stories are short pieces that the narrator inserts into the narrative and this
structuring prevents a sustained evaluation of Makandal as a griot. However, he
reconstructs the reign of Mansa Moussa, focusing on his achievements while attempting
to achieve immediacy by bridging the gap between the past and the present, and between
the audience and the story just like the griot.

In order to appreciate the relation between history and memory and consequently the
novel’s historiographical approach, one has to foreground the layering of the narratives.
That is, on one level is African ancient history rendered by Makandal and related to the
reader as memory. On the second level is Ti Noel’s perspective which constitutes a
narrative within narrative; and because the first narrative has to do with African ancient
kingdoms, the novel presents history within history. The third level is the story told by
the third person and when these three levels are aligned, they form a unique form of
metahistory. Although this metahistory may not reflect the self-referentiality that has
come to characterize of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame, Kingdom’s
layering of African historical narratives and myth, intertwined with the Haitian

Revolution, indicates a self-conscious application of history and memory. The excerpt

50

from the above quote will help explain this unique deployment of history and memory:
“[b]ut, above all, it was with the tale of Kankan Muza that he achieved the gift of
tongues, the fierce Muza, founder of the invincible empire of the Mandingues, whose
horses went adorned with silver coins and embroidered housings, their neighs louder than
the clang of iron, bearing the thunder of two drumheads that hung from their necks” (13).
Again, the narrator emphasizes Makandal’s skill as a storyteller who evokes history
through memory, more or less in the tradition of the griot in which, according to Hale,
griots focus on military achievements of rulers more than their failures. The particular
reference to the ancient Mali Empire, within the context of the Haitian Revolution and
Makandal’s revolutionary vision, is Makandal’s attempt to reorient the slave’s
consciousness by putting his narrative force into reenacting Mansa Moussa’s military
valor. Probably because Mansa Moussa’s exploits are replete with marvelous accounts—-
magical stallions, miraculous climatic changes, being able to disappear and reappear-—
Makandal’s Mansa Moussa is a supernatural being with incredible strength and fecundity.
Makandal, apart from being a revolutionary, is a politician par excellence because he
is aware of slavery’s repressive regime and its impact on their psyche. Therefore, he
constructs a grand narrative about Africa that to some extent essentializes Africa and its
history. The fact that his oratorical genius manifests when he tells the tale of the nascent
Mali Empire demonstrates, not only demonstrates his mastery of that history, but also his
desire to impress the slaves with the same marvelous history. The “fierce Muza, founder
of the invincible empire of the Mandingues” indicates that he attempts to convince the
slaves that they possess a supernatural heritage that they could deploy in order to break

the cycle of the new world colonial economy. Certainly, one can question why Makandal

51

should construct such a grandiose image of Africa for the slaves, but the effect of slavery
on the slave’s psyche might have called for a counter-grand narrative to challenge the
grand narrative of slavery and colonialism. For instance, C. L. R. James says about the
slave’s treatment that “[n]o . . . white was a servant, no white man did any work he could
get a Negro to do for him. . . . This was the type for whom race prejudice was more
important than even the possession of slaves, of which they held a few. The distinction
between a white man and a man of colour was for them fundamental. In defence of it they
would bring down the whole of their world” (33-34). This is a reality that Carpentier
encountered when he was in France and which partly explains his disenchantment with
the French Communist Party which he believes was implicated in the French colonial
agenda. It is therefore not surprising that he resorts to a character like Makandal who
exhibits a deep understanding of the imperial program. The “magical” grandiose nature
of the narrative resonates with ontological plurality usually associated with epic
narratives which the griots are known to chant and perform. But the fact that griots
perform epic narratives does not imply that all griots are comfortable chanting in the epic
form because as Hale observes, there is a “difference between master and apprentice
griots” (58). There is no doubt then, that in reconstructing the memory of Africa for the
slaves, Makandal’s interest is undisguised. The history of Kankan Muza—Afro-Cuban
version of Mansa Moussa—serves to educate the slaves about their heritage, an idea that
would likely sharpen their antagonism towards their thralldom. Of course many of the
slaves might be Mandingues, there were slaves from other groups in West Africa;
therefore, the kind of consciousness that Makandal is propagating is that of an “African

heritage” geared towards serving the political needs of all the slaves and must not be

52

assumed to be an African consciousness already present in their memories. Perhaps the
most powerful effect that Kankan Muza assumes in Makandal’s narratives is the
“fantastic” performance through which the hero is “brought to life” as a way of activating
submerged memories. These slaves, who never shared Mansa Moussa’s political, cultural
and social heritage, can now partake of the sense of wonder that reminds one of the
hero’s supernatural exploits epic as performed by the griots.

Nowhere has Makandal ventured to alter the slaves’ mentality more than in his
comparison of European and African political systems. The image he presents is that of
Manichean opposites; that is, in terms of governance, Africa and Europe are essentially
opposites and his preference for the African political system is unequivocal. Again,
Makandal is presented to us as a character well versed in international politics and culture
and therefore able to demonstrate his authority on the history of Europe and Africa. Ti
Noel recalls Makandal’s tales as follows:

In Africa the king was warrior, hunter, judge, and priest [. . .] with a mighty strain
of heroes. In France, in Spain, the king sent his generals to fight in his stead; he
was incompetent to decide legal problems, he allowed himself to be scolded by any
trumpery friar. And when it came to a question of virility, the best he could do was
engender some puling prince who could not bring down a deer without the help of
stalkers, and who, with unconscious irony, bore the name as harmless and silly a
fish as the dolphin. Whereas Back There there were princes as hard as anvils, and
princes who were leopards, and princes who knew the language of the forest, and
princes who ruled the four points of the compass, lords of the clouds, of the seed,

of bronze, of fire. (14-15)

53

This epic image of Africa is deliberately invoked in opposition to the European political
system and it is obvious that Makandal, and probably Carpentier, favors the African epic
narrative style on the one hand and its political system on the other, while the European
monarchy is mocked as weak and lacking in authority. There is no doubt that the slaves
would have to grapple with their glorious past which Makandal has now caused them to
“remember” while trapped within the French slave system. In order for his revolt to be
successful, or at least to carry the slaves along, the slaves’ past must be reexperienced as
memory in a process through which history is gleaned from official and oral archives.
Memory in this case is a “struggle against forgetting” and Makandal’s mastery of African
ancient history becomes instrumental in reconstructing the slaves’ past (Ricoeur 413). It
is not surprising that Ti N061 and other slaves idolize Makandal, whose power of
storytelling gives them a narrative of their past, bringing back “heroes” with supernatural
abilities. For example, Kankan Muza is an historical and mythical figure; more
importantly, he is a ghost conjured by Makandal’s words, becoming one of the most
important characters of Kingdom interacting with the living. Meanwhile, the griot’s
power of performance sometimes gives official significance to the narrative; Johnson et
a1 argue in support of the strength of the griot’s historical narrative when they observe
that for many African listeners “the version of the past recounted by a griot constitutes
the accepted representation of events” (xx). In comparison to Hale’s position, the scribes
who document historical accounts, unlike the griots who rely on memory, are most
always suspicious of the validity of the griot’s version. The griot’s version is subject to
the dialectic of memory, but the scribes sometimes resort to the griots for information,

which means that the official history depends on the griot’s memory. But in the context

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of Kingdom, whether or not Makandal is telling the truth does not matter much; what is
important is that he adopts the narrative style of the griots in order to achieve immediate
political gods.

The more important implication of memory at this point is its relation to
historiography in Kingdom precisely because in Kingdom, Carpentier’s View of history is
both that of an event that has been concluded in the past, and an event whose ghost
continues to haunt historians. It is on the basis of history as a haunting experience that
Carpentier constructs a cyclic perception of history that can be discerned in successive
regimes following the Haitian Revolution. Carpentier’s historiographical choice therefore
makes sense in its awareness of history as a process that must be reexperienced and
releamed. An immediate problem arises from reexperiencing and releaming history,
which is the need to fight against the forces of amnesia, the forces of forgetting, within
the process of the production of historical knowledge. This need to remember explains
' why the question of memory is central to any historiographical analysis of Kingdom. But
one must address the question of the complex relation between memory and history.

While the “art of memory” dates back to antiquity, the emergence of modern history
goes only as far as the nineteenth century, when history tended towards social sciences.
But despite the fact that history as a social science emerged more or less recently, it has
not been able to completely break away from the notion of memory. Whatever the
similarity or distinction between memory and history, it is fundamental to acknowledge
that neither is politically innocent. That is, both are always constructed and are subject to
manipulation. Le Goff argues in History and Memory that during the classical era,

manuscripts of important political events were designed as extensions of human memory

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so that their primary function is to help humans remember, that is, help fight against the
threat of forgetting (73). He observes that while one cannot claim that all details recorded
in manuscripts is subject to manipulation, the manuscripts were greatly influenced by
desire for power, which meant that to control the manuscripts was to determine who
would be remembered, or what might have been remembered. This practice, according to
Le Goff, is in fact historical, that is, it can be traced from antiquity to Renaissance,
whether in classical thought or Christian religious practices. Le Goff says of the
Christianity in the Middle Ages:
In addition to forgetfulness, there was also the possibility that the names of the
unworthy might be struck out of memory-books. . . . Concerning an
excommunicated person, the synod of Reisbach declared in 798 that “after his
death let nothing be written in his memory,” and the second synod of Elna in 1027
issued an earlier edict concerning other condemned people: “and let their names
not be read at the sacred alter along with those of the faithful dead.” (73)
The above highlights that the idea of memory goes beyond the capacity for an individual
or a group to remember past events because right from the antiquity, memory has been
associated with writing as a means to preserve the past. The quote also confirms that
memory is not innocent and that it is heavily selective in its details. A corollary of this
point is that those who are in power often use their control over the manuscripts and
documents to determine who and what is remembered and who and what might be
forgotten. All point to a crucial development: writing has become significant in the

exercise of memory and whoever controlled the manuscripts controlled memory, at least

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to some extent. Le Goff emphasizes the relation between memory and the written
document in the Middle Ages when he says:
in this period when the written word is developing alongside the oral and when
there is, at least among clerks or literati, an equilibrium between oral memory and
written memory, recourse to writing as a support for memory intensifies. Lords
bring together in charter books the documents they need to produce to defend their
rights. Concerning the land, these charter-books constitute the feudal memory. . . .
The introduction to the charter granted in 1174 by Guy, Count of N evers, to the
inhabitants of Tonnerre, declares that “The use of letters was discovered and
invented for the preservation of memory of things. What we wish to retain and
learn by heart, we cause to be written down, so that that we cannot keep
perpetually in our weak and fragile memories may be preserved in writing and by
means of letters that last forever.” (74-75)
The main idea that can be deduced from the operation of memory through the written
word is the interest to preserve the past. However, we have also seen that the manuscripts
had been deployed for inclusion and exclusion of those not considered worthy of being
remembered. Memory, in this sense, is more complicated than an unproblematic retrieval
of events either from the human faculty or from manuscripts. The fact that memory as the
written document was invented primarily to “meet the needs of an emerging literacy”
suggests that whatever constitutes memory in written form would be contested especially
because of conflicting class interests (Hutton 12). However, this is not to claim that there
is always class conflict wherever the elite may be involved. But because the written

document is not merely a glossary of events or catalogue of day to day happenings,

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conflict of interests would certainly emerge over the content of the manuscripts. This is
why the “mastery of memory and forgetfulness” is one major preoccupation of “classes,
groups, societies” (Le Goff 54). To buttress this position, Yates’s major study of “the art
of memory” in the classical period and its manifestation in the Renaissance has shown
that the art was shaped by mnemonics. That is, the practice of mnemonics during the
classical times depended on the techniques in oral culture through which knowledge
could be organized and its use during the Renaissance reflected a sixteenth century
culture whose historical relevance had been either ignored or silenced (251).

Having briefly noted the practice of memory and its constructivity in antiquity and
classical period, one must grasp the relatedness of memory and history. To explore
further the connection, or lack of it, between history and memory, Halbwachs’s
ruminations on the subject might yield some useful insights. Halbwachs’s position
regarding the memory-history debate centers on discontinuity between history and
memory. He in fact says categorically, “[h]ow could history ever be memory . . . since
there is a break in continuity between the society reading the history and the group in the
past who acted in or witnessed the event?” (79) For Halbwachs, there is an irreconcilable
opposition at work, “the ultimate opposition between memory and history” (79). Memory
for Halbwachs concerns those events which occur time after time and which tend to
establish a connection between the past and the present. In essence, the distinction
between the present and the past is blurred so that the past is construed to be active in the
present, and the present becomes nothing but the past that is relived. This interpretation
of memory is problematic for Halbwachs primarily because his perception of history is

that of events which happen only once and can never be repeated. Unlike history that

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involves supposedly singular and unrepeatable events, memory is invented and focuses
on people and events, whose significance is exaggerated. Also, memory is hardly
dynamic in the sense that it holds on to its invention when living reality contradicts such
premises (79). Whereas, history is a science whose record can be considered objective
because it relies on evidence regarded as factual reports, memory lacks objectivity
(Hutton 77). Again, Halbwachs associates memory with tradition and history with a break
from tradition. Unfortunately, since Halbwachs sees memory mainly in terms of its
alleged opposition to history, he fails to recognize the possible connections between
them. As Hutton argues, Halbwachs “never looked at history as a kind of official
memory, a representation of the past that happens to enjoy the sanction of scholarly
authority” (77). Despite the fact that Halbwachs initially suggests the possible link
between history and memory, he is unable to focus his investigation on the overlapping
of the two concepts. Perhaps one of the most crucial contributions Halbwachs makes in
the discourse of memory can be located in his criticism of Freud’s theory on memory.
Halbwachs argues that Freud’s notion of individual memory and memory-images which
are lodged deep in the unconscious is doubtful in the sense that those memory-images are
“collective images of social discourse”; also, individual memories are “reconstructed by .
. . virtue of their relationship to a framework of social memory” (78). It is this perception
of memory, and his criticism of Freud that make Halbwachs contend that recollection “is
always an act of reconstruction, and the way in which we recall an individual memory
depends on the social context to which we appeal” (78-79). Individual and collective are
constructed mostly from diverse, confused and contradictory sources and therefore are

unreliable, in contrast to history whose method depends on factual objectivity. The

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emergence of history as a social science establishes the dominion of history over

memory, a view that Le Goff shares with Halbwachs:
At the outset, I had to examine the relations between history and memory. Recent,
na'r've trends seem virtually to identify history with memory, and even to give
preference in some sense to memory, on the ground that it is more authentic,
“truer” than history, which is presumed to be artificial and, above all, manipulative
of memory. It is true that history involves a rearrangement of the past which is
subject to social, ideological and political structures in which historians live and
work. It is also true that history has been and still is, in some places, subject to
conscious manipulation on the part of the political regimes that oppose the truth.
Nationalism and prejudices of all kinds have an impact on the way history is
written, and the rapidly developing field of the history of history (a critical and
highly evolved form of traditional historiography) is in part founded on the
acknowledgement and study of these links between historical production and the
context of its period as well as that of successive periods which modify its
meaning. But the discipline of history, which has recognized these variations in
historiography must nonetheless seek to be objective and to remain based on the
belief in historical “truth.” (xi)

For Le Goff and Halbwachs, there is danger in privileging memory, but this danger can

be avoided through the meticulous efforts of the historian who would escape the pitfalls

of memory. Le Goff argues:
Memory is the raw material of history. Whether mental, oral, or written, it is the

living source from which historians draw. Because its workings are usually

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unconscious, it is in reality more dangerously subject to manipulation by time and
by societies given to reflection than the discipline of history itself. Moreover, the
discipline of history nourishes memory in turn, and enters into the great dialectical
process of memory and forgetting experienced by individuals and societies. The
historian must be there to render an account of these memories and of what is
forgotten, to transform them into something that can be conceived, make them
knowable. To privilege memory excessively is to sink into the unconquerable flow
of time. (xii)
Neither Le Goff nor Halbwachs could see the interesting link between memory and
history and therefore could not appreciate the peculiar way in which historiography
participates in the fulfillment of the demands of memory. It seems that their quest to
establish and consolidate history as a science has motivated them to discount
historiographical reconstruction of memory. Although Halbwachs and Le Goff could not
pursue the link between memory and history, particularly the ways in which, according to
Ricoeur, historiography is a unique form of recollection, their idea of memory as a
problem of social power reinforces memory as a realm of conflicts and struggle for power
and dominion. Any discussion of memory must reflect the tensions that beleaguer the
process of recollection because remembering and recollection are never devoid of
interests and desire for power.
The fact that the process of recollection is fraught with interests is significant;
historiography plays an important part in determining what is remembered and it is for
this reason that remembering is also a politically charged process that cannot be entirely

separated from historiography. Memory and history are therefore interconnected and this

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connection must be explored. The fact of their connection does not imply that memory
can be substituted for history and vice versa; rather, historical knowledge interrogates the
past, tries to understand it and also, it “remembers” the past. Unlike Le Goff and
Halbwachs who argue that history is a triumph over memory and in whose works
memory is associated mainly with oral cultures, our understanding of history must
acknowledge the notion that history partakes of the process of remembering. In a sense,
memory and history are not radically opposed to each other. If one examines Nora’s
statement that “Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists,” there is a
sense in which the idea of memory is problematized (l: 1). That is, an event long
concluded in the past is no longer available to our consciousness in space and time; its
‘truth” is reconstructed and this fact is true for memory and historical knowledge.
Although they may be opposed to each in several respects, they have something in
common:
Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects
opposed. Memory is life, always embodied in living societies and as such in
permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,
unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in various ways to
appropriation and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long periods only
to be suddenly reawakened. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction,
always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always a
phenomenon of the present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, being a
phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only those facts that suit it. It is

vulnerable to transferences, screen memories, censorings, and projections of all

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kinds. History, being an intellectual, nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and
critical discourse. Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context. History
ferrets it out; it turns whatever it touches into prose. Memory wells up from groups
that it welds together, . . . that there are as many memories as there are groups, that
memory is by nature multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual. By
contrast, history belongs to everyone and to no one and therefore has a universal
vocation. Memory is rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, image, and object.
History dwells exclusively on temporal continuities, on changes in things and in
the relation among things. Memory is an absolute, while history is always relative.
(l: 3)
It is within this “dialectic of remembering and forgetting” that Carpentier’s Kingdom
must be situated. That Carpentier chooses the history of the Haitian Revolution implies
he must have forgone other historical moments in the Caribbean history. But the
centrality of this peculiar history indicates that Carpentier is conscious of the reality of
remembering and forgetting, hence the choice of Haitian Revolution. His other novel,
Explosion in a Cathedral, attempts to cover the whole history of the Caribbean from late
17005 to the early decades of the 18005. In a way, the two novels deal with similar issues
and while Kingdom is restricted to Saint Domingue and Cuba, Explosion covers some of
British, Dutch and Spanish colonial territories. The centrality of the Haitian Revolution to
Kingdom demonstrates Carpentier’s desire to remind one of the event and to activate
one’s memory of the revolution and help resist the threat of amnesia. While Nora may be
correct in his distinctions between memory and history, one cannot ignore the symbiotic

relation between them, and it is this relation that distinguishes Nora from Halbwachs and

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Le Goff, who see memory and history as radically opposed. But the important thing to
note is that in the old Songhay Empire, as Thomas Hale has argued, the distinction
between history and memory is not so clear-cut. The scribes were the ones who produced
official records but it will be erroneous to assert that the scribes operated independent of
the griots who relied mainly on their memory. Both the scribes and the griots were
employed by royalty and aristocracy, and in fact, Hale suggests that “[w]hat links the two
. . . is their service to the elite” (46). Even though the scribes would not openly admit it,
Hale observes that more often than not, the scribes relied on the griots to produce an
approximate version of historical events (54). Certainly, the griot’s versions are subject to
the vagaries of memory but no matter how unreliable or distorted they could be, the griots
contributed to the production of history either by offering their services to the scribes or
by performing their stories and histories. Also, because their versions sometimes
validated the popular imagination, there is the tendency to conclude that the griot’s
versions challenge the official version; sometimes griots “do telescope history to reveal a
view of the aristocracy that glosses over the major catastrophe in Songhay history” (54).
This tendency would explain why Makandal favors the griot’s version of Mansa
Moussa’s history, whose production blurred the borderline between history and memory.
The question then concerns the place of memory in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this

World.

“Historical Marvelous”: The Kingdom of this World
History functions in two fundamental ways in Kingdom: first, history is akin to trauma
which haunts its victims who are therefore unable to escape their past. Second, history in

the novel operates like memory in that the past is evoked to fulfill a need in the present.

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Pierre Nora has argued that memory is “always a phenomenon of the present” while
history is the “reconstruction” of what is “no longer” (1: 3). The distinction between
memory and history that Nora is trying to establish here does not imply that memory
incorporates only “present” events while past events belong exclusively to history. The
distinction must be understood in terms of uses of history through memory; that is, the
past becomes immediate and is given the urgency of the present. In Kingdom, memory
resurrects the past and gives it a sense of immediacy and more importantly, a
supernatural quality in which the past “literally” lives in the present. The importance of
this approach in Kingdom rests on the notion that the “past is still making itself felt in the
present” and continues to impact the material conditions in the present. Kingdom is a
quintessential instance of the perpetual living of the past in the present. The focus on the
Haitian Revolution signifies a memorialization of history through which history is
temporarily divested of its pastness and becomes a present phenomenon. Again, the
method by which this feat is accomplished is the supematuralization of the past through
which Makandal’s ghost helps liberate the slaves.

The Haitian Revolution and Makandal of Kingdom both simultaneously occupy
historical and fictional spaces. That is, the historical event thematized in Kingdom serves
specific fictional and ideological purposes, which demonstrate the untamed power of the
past over the present. In the same way that the Haitian Revolution looms over the Haiti
and Cuba of Carpentier’s time, Makandal, now imbued with lycanthropic abilities,
outlives his own historical time. In a sense, the similarity between historical Makandal
and fictional Makandal is limited to the insurrection of 1857 in which, through the

unification of plantation slaves in most of the Caribbean islands, livestock and

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slaveowners were poisoned en masse (King 10). Makandal’s role in the rest of the novel
is clearly a fictional choice that aims at engendering the revolutionary vigor of this orator
underscoring the sublime nature of his epoch. In fact, Makandal, though a strong leader
of the maroons and a great organizer, was undermined by his “temerity” and was
betrayed, captured and “burnt alive” (C. L. R. James 21). Beyond his rebellion, betrayal
and execution, Makandal becomes the inspiration for the Haitian Revolution between
1791 and 1804, although by that time he had been dead for close to forty years. In
Kingdom, his death translates to a renewed revolutionary energy that inspires the slaves
to follow through with the rebellion. The narrator says of Makandal:
the slaves of the Lenormand de Mezy plantation continued unshaken in their
reference to Macandal. Ti N 06] passed on the tales to his children, teaching them
simple little songs he had made up in Macandal’s honor while currying and
brushing the horses. Besides, it was a good thing to keep green the memory of the
One-Armed, for though far away on important duties, he would return to this land
when he was least expected. (62—63)
Kingdom preserves Makandal’s memory in two crucial ways: his follower, Ti Noel
consciously educates his children about the “One-Armed” revolutionary. Ti Noel would
later explain that Makandal, through lycanthropic powers, strengthens the blacks’ belief
in the possibility of freedom. Through preserving Makandal’s memory, one leans of his
abilities, rendered in supernatural discourse. In the above quote, the narrator collapses
historical time so that Makandal’s memory becomes fresh in the slaves’ minds and he
becomes directly relevant to the anti-slavery rebellion. This is a strategy that Slemon calls

“foreshortening of history” (“Magical Realism,” 411), which allows the writer to traverse

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history from colonization to emancipation or independence within the same narrative. In
Kingdom only twenty years passes between Makandal’s execution and reorganization of
the rebellion, whereas in actual historical time, it was between 1757 and 1791.
Makandal’s memory was not known to have directly influenced the revolution that
started in 1791, but Ti Noél’s suggestion that Makandal would return when least expected
signals the writer’s commitment to this folk hero and the determination to make him
relevant to the overall success of the revolution. At several post-revolution meetings and
voodoo rituals, the narrator constantly refers to Makandal’s invisible presence or
lycanthropic forms.

By centralizing Makandal in the revolutionary war, the narrative significantly alters
historical fact precisely because Toussaint L’Overture, Dessalines and Henri Christophe
were the generals who later led the revolution and they are conspicuously absent from
this version of history in Kingdom, except L’Overture who is presented as an artist
carving African masks. Kingdom, therefore, is a rewriting of history designed specifically
to immortalize Makandal. It is not very clear why these active generals are denied their
place in Kingdom, but one thing seems apparent, the novel is certainly not about
rationalists who believed entirely in the European civilization that the French planters
propagated in Saint Domingue. Another character who occupies the center stage with
Makandal is Bouckman, who will be remembered for his role in the voodoo ritual that
preceded the revolution. Voodoo is a practice in Kingdom that is germane to the
operation and success of the revolution and it is partly through voodoo that Carpentier is
able to demonstrate one of his irreducible marvelous characteristics of history. That is,

Bouckman and Makandal, voodoo initiates, are two central characters who elevate the

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revolution to spiritual dimension, which Carpentier calls “an amplification of the scale
and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of
the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state” (“On the Marvelous Real,” 86). It is no
wonder, therefore, that the generals did not believe in voodoo and, in fact, forbade its
practice (King 10; James 309). Dessalines had on an occasion raided the maroons of
Saint Domingue for practicing voodoo, but voodoo is ascribed a revolutionary purpose in
Kingdom partly because it accentuates the supernatural dimension of the revolution.

By constructing the history of the revolution around Makandal, Bouckman and the
army of slaves, Kingdom produces a representation of “history” rather than History. That
is, the French colonization of Saint Domingue must be interpreted, not only as economic
aggrandizement, but also as a landmark in French and modern History. However, the
history that the slaves produce is a counterpoint to colonial History, which more often
than not, obliterates the roles the slaves play in the encounter. For instance, Leclerc’s
impudence demonstrates colonial arrogance on the one hand and on the other, it shows
that his commitment to actualize Napoleon’s mission in Saint Dorrringue is intended to
become a great historical achievement. In such a situation, Makandal, Ti Noel and
Bouckman would not become historical figures in their own right, but passive victims of
history; ironically, through their successful slave revolt, History (with the capital letter)
becomes challenged. Glissant makes a similar observation in Caribbean Discourse by
arguing that the history of the Caribbean is an encounter between History and histories
which is why he says, “History [with the capital H] ends where the histories of those
peoples once reputed to be without history come together. . . . History is a highly

functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone ‘made’ the

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history of the World” (64). One should note that Makandal’s insistence on the griot’s
version of ancient Malian history functions not only as a political strategy to conscientize
the slaves into revolutionary action, but also as a counter-discourse to Western notion of
History. As Glissant argues, the cataclysmic proportion of Caribbean colonial history
precipitated not only the destruction of lives and property, but also the extirpation of
collective consciousness. Therefore, Makandal’s foregrounding of the monarchical
grandeur of Mansa Moussa is an attempt to produce history (with the small “h”) at a
moment when the slaves have been displaced. History (with the capital letter) must be
seen within Kingdom as a destructive force through which the West violated the New
World. Glissant says:
The French Caribbean is the site of a history characterized by ruptures and that
began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade. Our historical consciousness could
not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment . . . as happened with
those peoples who have frequently produced a totalitarian philosophy of history,
for instance European peoples, but came together in a context of shock,
contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the
continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all,
characterize what I call a nonhistory. (62)
The negative consequence of this process is what Glissant calls “the erasure of the
collective memory” (62); it is for this reason that one must view Makandal’s narrative as
a gesture aimed at producing a counter-history and reconstituting the collective memory.
One can conclude that Makandal’s tales constitute a kind of “oral historiography,” which

is an attempt to reconstruct the past through memory using the narrative style most

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associated with the epic, mostly performed by griots. Makandal’s oral historiography
challenges West’s totalized form of history which Glissant maintains is a “History . . .
written with a capital H” and must be seen as a “totality that excludes other histories that
do not fit into that of the West” (75).

The key issue about Carpentier’s historiography is that it produces a counter-culture
precisely because, as voodoo initiates, Makandal and Bouckman amplify the narrative to
a spiritual level at which the supernatural functions as a characteristic of history. That is,
history itself becomes supernatural and in fact marvelous, especially if we consider
Glissant’s assertion that “History has its dimension of the unexplorable, at the edge of
which we wander, our eyes wide open” (66). In no other place is the supematuralization
of history apparent than in Bouckman’s speech on the night of initiation prior to the
revolution. Having told the congress of blacks that “some very powerful gentleman had
declared that the Negroes should be given their freedom, but . . . the rich landowners of
V the Cap . . . had refused to obey them,” Bouckman declares war on the slaveowners in a
language in which historical and the spiritual become intertwined (66). Bouckman says,
“The white men’s God orders the crime. Our gods demand vengeance from us. They will
guide our arms and give us help. Destroy the image of the white man’s God who thirsts
for our tears; let us listen to the cry of freedom within ourselves” (Kingdom 67). The
reference to God and gods seems to locate the impending conflict within the African
pantheon in which the deities intervene in human warfare. The fact that he says, “let us
listen to the cry of freedom within ourselves,” evinces the interrrringling of history and
divinity, or more appropriately, the statement underlines the blacks’ involvement in a

process that spiritualizes history. Fredric Jameson in another context makes a similar

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argument when he contends that the marvelous real in Carpentier is “not a realism to be
transfigured by the ‘supplement’ of a magical perspective but a reality which is already in
and of itself magical or fantastic. Whence the insistence of both Carpentier and Garcia
Marquez that in the social reality of Latin America, ‘realism’ is already necessarily
‘magic realism’ ” (“Magic Realism” 311). In essence, Bouckman and Makandal’s
involvement in voodoo already places history in the realm of the supernatural by
understanding the revolution in both human and spiritual terms. It is no coincidence that
after Bouckman is killed, he is placed in the same historic place where Makandal’s
execution becomes a spiritual feat. The narrator says, “[t]he head of the Jamaican,
Bouckman, green and open-mouthed, was already crawling with worms on the very spot
where Makandal’s flesh had become stinking ashes” (Kingdom 76). Interestingly, apart
from Bouckman, there is no other dominant character other than the slaves themselves.
This account of history resonates with what Glissant calls history from “below,”
especially when he cites the example of Caliban and Prospero from Shakespeare’s The
Tempest in order to substantiate the idea that the West produced its totalitarian form of
history through literature. The slaves’ revolt in Kingdom can be likened to history
produced from below as against Western notion of history produced from above. Young,
in his reaction to postmodernism in White Mythologies, rightly suggests, “the loss of
‘History’ [which] can no longer be a single story, even though Western history continues
to conspire with its ‘vast unfinished plot’ of exploitation” ( 156). But despite the
continuation of History’s agenda of exploitation, it is clear that the singular and dominant

History has been challenged by histories constructed from below.

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Moreover, it is imperative to re-examine the roles that Makandal plays in the Haitian
Revolution. In the version of the revolution in Kingdom, one crucial event that
determines the course of the revolution is Makandal’s execution. The narrator says:

Macandal was now lashed to the post. The executioner had picked up an ember
with the tongs. With a gesture rehearsed the evening before in front of a mirror, the
Governor unsheathed his dress sword and gave the order for the sentence to be
carried out. The fire began to rise toward the Mandingue, licking his legs. At that
moment Macandal moved the stump of his arm, which they had been unable to tie
up, in a threatening gesture which was none the less terrible for being partial,
howling unknown spells and violently thrusting his torso forward. The bonds fell
off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into
the black waves of the sea of slaves. A single cry filled the square:
“Macandal saved!” (Kingdom 51-52)
For the slaves who are aware of Makandal’s reputation as a voodoo initiate with
supernatural powers, this event confirms Makandal’s powers and in fact, the skeptics
among them would be convinced of his extraordinary abilities. In addition, the force with
which he fights and breaks his bonds is extraordinary, and it undermines the French
political legitimacy. The event that happens next makes Makandal’s execution one of the
most controversial episodes of the novel:
Pandemonium followed. The guards fell with rifle butts on the howling blacks,
who now seemed to overflow the streets, climbing toward the windows. And the
noise and screaming and uproar were such that very few saw that Macandal, held

by ten soldiers, had been thrust head first into the fire, and that a flame fed by his

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burning hair had drowned his last cry. When the slaves were restored to order, the
fire was burning normally like any fire of good wood, and the breeze blowing from
the sea was lifting the smoke toward the windows where more than one lady who
had fainted had recovered consciousness. There was no longer anything more to
see. That afternoon the slaves returned to their plantations laughing all the
way. Macandal had kept his word, remaining in the Kingdom of This World. Once
more the whites had been outwitted by the Mighty Powers of the Other Shore. And
. . . M. Lenormand de Mezy in his nightcap commented with his devout wife on
the Negroes' lack of feelings at the torture of one of their own — drawing there
from a number of philosophical considerations on the inequality of the human
races which he planned to develop in a speech larded with Latin quotations.
(Kingdom 52-53)
These two passages taken together raise the problematic of epistemology. Bassi draws
attention to how Makandal’s execution inspires the slaves to develop revolutionary zeal
(56-57). However, the key idea in these passages is the intertwining of two supposedly
contradictory versions of Makandal’s execution and how these contradictory accounts
demonstrate that the execution has something in common with the sublime. The sublime
as well, reinforces the notion of the marvelous. It does not however follow that the
marvelous real can be equated with the sublime but the important thing is to observe the
affinity between the operation of both the sublime and the marvelous. Kant argues
concerning the sublime as follows: “[f]or what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the
term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but contains only ideas of reason, which,

though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very

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inadequacy . . (99). The crucial point in Kant’s assessment of the sublime lies partly in
the irreconcilable difference between rationality and empiricism. That is, the sublime
cannot be grasped through reason and at the same time, the sublime overwhelms the
senses.

In the passages above, the pseudo dramatic irony evinces the operation of the
marvelous real but the scale of brutality before and after Makandal’s execution is too
much that it cannot be understood simply in empirical terms, which is why the idea of the
sublime becomes relevant. The slaves see Makandal escape from the burning stake and
because of the pandemonium, they are unable to witness Makandal’s death. However,
their ignorance of Makandal’s death is not the locus of the sublime; the sublime and the
marvelous real in that event inhere in their unflinching faith in Makandal’s invincibility.
In terms of the gruesome circumstance of the execution, it is the reader who will be
disturbed by this horrific act of burning Makandal at stake; the senses are inadequate to
explain this gruesome act. That is, the event is such that can only be described in infinite
proportions. Kant explains that magnitude of destruction is essential to the understanding
of the sublime when he argues that “it is rather in its chaos that nature most arouses our
ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation, provided
it displays magnitude and might” (99-100). The key words to note here are “chaos,”

,9 6‘

“wildest, ruleless,” “devastation” and “magnitude,” and they suggest that the
catastrophic event cannot be fully grasped by the senses. Rather, it is an event whose
devastation must be described in superlative terms. Although Kant might be dealing with

nature in this case, there is a remote affinity to the marvelous real in the sense that

Kingdom is concerned with History, which was marked by unprecedented level of

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devastation. It is for this reason that Carpentier in his prologue describes the history of
the Caribbean as “a chronicle of the marvelous real” (“On the Marvelous Real” 88).

Zamora elaborates on this contradictory knowledge by arguing that “[i]n The
Kingdom of this World, the clash between European and African worldviews invests
objects (most especially Mackandal’s body) with contradictory meanings that co-exist
and operate equally within the text — a semantic duplicity largely foreign to literary
realism” (“Swords and Silver Rings” 30). It is possible that the priority given to African
myth and history in Kingdom might have influenced Zamora in centering her argument
on the divide between African and European forms of knowledge; the episode also serves
to underscore the magnitude of the events which follow Makandal’s demise. The sublime
and the marvelous real intersect on the ground of magnitude and surplus of ruin and
devastation. Although it is pertinent to add that the killing of Makandal and the genocide
committed on the slave population may share certain features of the sublime, this does
not mean that colonialists do not rationalize their acts of brutality. But the crucial thing to
note is that the sublime is experienced by other characters and readers who cannot make
sense of the excessive destruction.

When M. Lenormand de Mezy advocates the imperial ideology concerning “inequality
of the human races,” the narrator sets up the arrogance with which colonial
administration relates to the slaves of Saint Domingue (Kingdom 52-53). Because he is so
racist, M. Lenormand de Mezy fails to see the reality of the dangers that would later
accompany the revolution. When the revolution starts, the narrator confronts the reader
with one of the prevalent stereotypes perpetrated by empire; that is, the blacks are

represented as weak and incapable of conceiving of the notion of freedom. Trouillot

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makes the same observation by describing La Barre’s assertion that the revolution is a
myth. Trouillot says:
In 1790, just a few months before the beginning of the insurrection that shook Saint
Domingue and brought about the revolutionary birth of independent Haiti, French
colonialist La Barre reassured his metropolitan wife of the peaceful state of life in
the tropics. He wrote: “There is no movement among our Negroes . . . They don’t
even think of it. They are very tranquil and obedient. A revolt among them is
impossible . . . We have nothing to fear on the part of the Negroes . . . We sleep
with our doors and windows wide open. Freedom for Negroes is a chimera.”
(Silencing the Past 72)
Yet after the revolution began, “the most important slave insurrection in recorded history
had reduced to insignificance such abstract arguments about Negro obedience” (72). In
this speech, La Barre tried to ignore the reality of the slave revolution as a way of forcing
“reality within the scope of [. . .] beliefs,” which is why Trouillot argues that his aim is to
“repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse”
(72). However, when it becomes clear that the insurrection cannot be ignored, although
still believing that the slaves are incapable of achieving freedom, the colonialists decide
to wipe out the slave population. The narrator tells us, “[t]he colony faced ruin. . . . M.
Blancheland was in favor of complete, absolute extermination of the slaves, as well as the
free Negroes and mulattoes. Anyone with African blood in his veins . . . should be put to
death” (Kingdom 78). Their strategy, according to James, is to “[k]ill them off and get
new ones who know nothing about liberty and equality” (360). This is one of the

moments in the novel that testifies to the notion of the marvelous as constituted by

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brutalities of colonial history, especially at a time when the French colonialists believed
that colonizing the blacks was the justified by their “superior” civilization, supposedly
founded on reason.

The manner of colonial rule and the ruthlessness of the regime precipitate the
marvelous role ascribed to nature; that is, the “landscape is not a passive creature,” which
is why the stormy night after the revolution began is presented to as divine intervention
on the side of the black fighters (253). Some animals are seen as “allies of men” and they
are active agents of revolutionary energy rather than inert objects. In the battle against the
French slavocracy, Ti-Noel identifies several animals he believes are participants in the
conflict and in support of freedom. For example, when the mulattoes attempt to capture
him, Ti N061, who by that time has acquired lycanthropic powers, turns himself to a
stallion and escapes. The reader is able to experience the encounter between the French
army and the slaves as marvelous because of the supernatural mode through which it is
presented. However, the marvelous aspect of the novel is produced partly by, and
lycanthropic power.

One of the memorable sublime moments in Kingdom is Ti Noél’s description of Le
Cap on his return from Cuba. Ti-Noel returns to the Cap only to encounter a grim reality
that supports the notion of history as marvelous. Henri Christophe, a former cook, and
one of the generals of the revolutionary force has become the king of independent Haiti.
Henri Christophe is so ruthless that it is hard to determine whether his regime is not as
repressive as the ousted colonial regime:

“Prisoners,” thought Ti Noel to himself, as he observed that the custodians were

Negroes, but that the workers were too, which ran counter to certain notions he had

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picked up in Santiago de Cuba. . . . But the old man stood still in his tracks, awed
by the most unexpected, most overwhelming sight of his long existence. (113)
The idea of the cyclic nature of history presents itself when Ti-Noel discovers that the
prisoners or slaves as well as the menacing soldiers are black people. The image he
encounters is just unthinkable and his shock is unmistakable. The words such as “awed,”
“unexpected,” and “overwhelming” fit perfectly into the register of the sublime and
marvelous real. The perception of the sublime is enhanced primarily because it is not
only the reader who encounters this shock; that a character expresses his astonishment at
the sight of black slaves policed by black overseers reinforces the marvelous
temperament of the scene. To emphasize his dismay, the narrator says, “But the old man
stood still in his tracks, awed by the most unexpected, most overwhelming sight of his
long existence” (113; emphasis added). For Ti-Noel, it is the most disagreeable sight he
has seen and this is a classic example of the marvelous real. This encounter in the
unbelievable universe will emphasize Ti-Noel’s anxiety and shock and should be quoted
at length:
But what surprised Ti Noél was the discovery that this marvelous world, the like of
which the French governors of the Cap had never known, was a world of Negroes.
Because those handsome, firm-buttocked ladies circling in a dance around a
fountain of Tritons were Negresses; those two white-hosed ministers descending
the main stairway with leather dispatch cases under their arms were Negroes;
Negro was the chef, with an ermine tail on his cap, who was receiving a deer borne
on the shoulders of several villagers led by the master huntsman; those hussars

curvetting about the riding ring were Negroes; that high steward, with a silver

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chain around his neck, watching, in the company of the royal falconer, the
rehearsals of Negro actors in an outdoor theater, was a Negro; those footmen in
white wigs, whose golden buttons were being inspected by a butler in green livery,
were Negroes; and, finally, Negro, good and Negro, was that Immaculate
Conception standing above the high altar of the chapel, smiling sweetly upon the
Negro musicians who were practicing a Salve. Ti Noel realized that he was at Sans
Souci, the favorite residence of King Henri Christophe, former cook of the rue des
Espagnols, master of the Auberge de la Couronne, who now struck off money
bearing his initials above the proud motto God, my cause and my sword. (114-15)
This passage captures the new imperial regime which replaces the French colonialists in
almost all aspects of oppression. It is certain that they have maintained the hierarchies
formed and guarded by their colonial regime and probably have intensified such
hierarchies. As Ti—Noel observes, the soldiers who are enforcing the great servitude not
only beat the slaves, but also kill them indiscriminately, and this is why Ti Noel states
that even slavemasters are usually reluctant to kill their slaves since they are valued in
monetary terms. Kingdom is a testament to history as a narrative that resists
comprehension especially because Henri Christophe’s regime undermines the blacks’
hard-earned freedom.

Although Haiti’s imperial regimes follow a chronological order, the narrative displays
the meaninglessness and enigma of history as a consistent theme. Christophe’s reign
follows French colonialism, and is followed by that of the mulattoes. Thereby the
narrative highlights the perplexing characteristics of history. By the end of the novel, we

are reminded again of Makandal’s influence, which persists in Ti Noél’s lycanthropic

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powers. In order to escape the mulattoes, Ti Noél disguises himself as a goose, but on
arriving at a clan the geese reject him. On realizing that he is an intruder, he changes to
human form and resigns himself to “The Kingdom of this World.” That is, Ti No'e'l
accepts the incomprehensibility of history and resolves to fight for future generation even
though he is aware that he “will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy
either” (Kingdom 185). The last passages of the novel from which the above excerpt is
quoted evince the reality of a world that is shaped by perpetually repressive regimes
whose existence cannot be understood except as the marvelous. The role of the Latin
American writer, Carpentier argues, is that of the historian, intent upon capturing the
marvelous reality of history (“The Baroque” 107-08).

Wakefield suggests that Carpentier’s baroque fiction is “an escape from history”
because of the significance ascribed to nature (45). However, Kingdom is an exploration
in history and simply because history in Kingdom is not presented within a “symbolic
order” does not imply that the novel is an escape from history. This claim is true not only
of Kingdom, but also true of The Lost Steps and Explosion. In David Mickics’s reading of
Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, he contends that the “wilderness that the narrator discovers
fails to offer the hoped-for canvas or blank page ready for Adamic telling. This nature
recalls a history . . (384). Explosion examines similar issue of history, just as does
Kingdom. The main difference between them is that Kingdom is set primarily in Haiti
while Explosion captures most of the Caribbean islands, and the revolutionary war in
Haiti takes a marginal position in the latter novel. However, the contradiction of freedom
and slavery, and what Hayden White calls “moral anarchy,” are common thematic

concerns in both novels. The war against the goddess of Reason in Kingdom manifests in

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Explosion in a Cathedral in the contradiction of the freedom expedition which is
supposed to save Guadeloupe from the British but eventually reestablishes slavery. In
both novels we encounter characters who are “overwhelmed by historical forces they

neither created not control” (Zamora, “Magical Ruins” 63).

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Chapter 2: The Road Leading Straight to Horror
In his article, “Postmodernism as Realism: Magic History in Recent West African

Fiction,” Wright studies some West African literary works and observes that some of the
recent West African writers such as Kojo Laing, Syl Cheney-Coker and Ben Okri
thematize horror in their fiction. A particular example is Biyi Bandele-Thomas’s The
Man who Came in from the Back of Beyond (1991). Wright has this to say about Bandele-
Thomas’sl novel:

Corporate responsibility at state level is as missing as family solidarity at the

domestic one. Corpses rot in gutters and uncollected refuse piles the streets. Laws

that are no respectors of starving citizens are implemented by police who do not

care what crimes the indigent resort to in order to pay their taxes. In one scene of

surreal horror the skeletons of the anonymous poor . . . are dragged from makeshift

congested graves by rabid dogs and trundled to the doors of nearby houses. In this

world of brutish nightmare world anything is possible, nothing surprises. (189-90)
The same can be said of Ben Okri’s Songs of Enchantment where the citizens in the
ghetto are victims of state-organized violence and repression. But narratives of horror are
not limited to West African writers; rather, horror is a condition of postcolonial literature
which is why a critic like Gina Wisker can include Achebe’s Things Fall Apart among
postcolonial texts of horror precisely because this text details the tragic consequences of
colonization. Whether Things Fall Apart fits the category of horror or not is not the
central issue here; the main issue is how postcolonial texts capture colonial and post-

independence social rrrilieus as an experience steeped in excessive violence. It is in the

 

' Biyi Bandele-Thomas is now known simply as Biyi Bandele.

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sense of excessive and overwhelming condition of violence that horror is used primarily
in the context of our argument about horror.

This attribute of horror inheres in state repression (although it is not limited to it)
especially in official activity like public execution, through which the state makes horror
a spectacle. Foucault examines this phenomenon in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison; in the first few pages of this book, Foucault relates and foregrounds a public
execution which becomes an experience in horror precisely because pain, agony, the
grotesque and excorporeality, all abound in a manner reminiscent of Seven Solitudes of
Lorsa Lopez (1985). Citing archival records Foucault says, “On a March 1757 Damiens
the regicide was condemned. . . . ‘Finally, he was quartered,’ . . . ‘This last operation was
very long, because the horses used were not accustomed to drawing; consequently,
instead of four, six were needed; and when that did not suffice, they were forced, in order
to cut off the wretch’s thighs, to sever the sinews and hack at the joints (3). This
graphic display of violence which the state legitimated with official power takes the
regicide through this slow and agonizing pain of death. But it also took the spectators
through the same trauma because even though the spectators were not the condemned,
they certainly shared the trauma vicariously. Foucault states further that “the executioner
. . . took the steel pincers . . . and pulled first at the calf of the right leg, then at the thigh,
and from there at the two fleshy parts of the right arm; then at the breasts” (4). The slow
process of execution certainly fills one’s consciousness with excess of agony and disgust
because this execution was designed specifically to take the condemned through a
process in which pain is limitless. When Foucault notes that “the same executioner

dipped an iron spoon in the pot containing boiling potion, which he poured liberally over

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each wound” (4), one cannot fail to notice the similarity to Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et
demie where the protagonist has been shot and when commanded to drink some potion,
the liquid comes out through all the holes in his body. The two incidents are not exactly
the same but they are similar on the ground that they are state-initiated torture, making
horror a spectacle. When one invokes horror, one of its instances involves the spectacle
of pain as in the execution of Damiens the regicide, an experience that is beyond the
limits of reason. In order to show that Damiens’ execution produces surplus of agony it is
pertinent to examine the part of the execution, of which Foucault says, “[w]hen the four
limbs had been pulled away, the confessors came to speak with him; but his executioner
told them that he was dead, though the truth was that I saw the man move, his lower jaw
from side to side as if he were talking” (5). The executioner, one can see, is not exempted
from the trauma that he inflicted on Damiens; he had to tell the confessor that the
condemned man was already dead even though he knew that was not the truth. When
recontextualized within Sony Labou Tansi’s fiction, the “dead man” talking has a greater
significance: it suggests that what the executioner experienced must be explained, not
only by the process of slow death, but also by the irrationality of the execution, in which
a perfectly mechanical incident developed an aspect of the extraordinary and of the
supernatural. This aspect of the execution is not incidental precisely because the
executioner’s logical, rational and methodical habit and practice gave way to the
irrationality, not only of the sentence, but also of surplus of pain. It is for this reason that
in reading horror in postcolonial fiction, and specifically in Sony Labou Tansi’s fiction,
one should pay attention to the ways in which excorporeality can produce supernatural

narrative. That is, horror produces the marvelous because, as seen from this example, the

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excessiveness of violence sometimes produces a narrative which cannot be uttered within
the symbolic order. Of course, Foucault is more concerned in Discipline and Punish with
“the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” (7), Damiens’s execution that he
foregrounds will help in demonstrating that horror inhabits the realm where surplus of
meaning is produced and where language is inadequate to express its referent which is
why the discourse of horror sometimes borders on the marvelous, the magical or the
fantastic.

One writer whose works self-consciously grapple with the horrific condition of
independent nation-states is Sony Labou Tansi. Among others Sony Labou Tansi has
published The Antipeople (1983), La vie et demie (1979), L’e’tat honteaux (1981), Les
yeux du volcan (1988), and Le commencement des douleurs (1995). But the text on which
this argument focalizes is Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez ( 1985). Nearly all of Sony
Labou Tansi’s texts mentioned are explorations in violence and the grotesque, which is
why Perraudin refers to them as literature of disenchantment. Perraudin says of these
texts thus: “[a] last resort, a last gesture, the confrontation with pain and its graphic
representation constitutes the ultimate act of a visceral resistance and denunciation, . . . it
also echoes an entire generation of African francophone writers for whom the
representation of violence, or rather violence in representation, becomes a political act of
intervention par excellence” (81). One has to agree with Perraudin that the representation
of violence, specifically in Sony Labou Tansi’s texts (Seven Solitudes most especially), is
a political act of intervention. Also, violence is not merely the monopoly of state
apparatus. It can be deployed by dominated groups to mediate the repressive regime

established by the state. It may be true that violence constitutes a means of intervention

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on the political terrain, but one should be conscious of its attendant problems raised in
Seven Solitudes. Certainly, Seven Solitudes is not intent on replacing a regime of horror
with another; therefore, the violence it depicts must be understood as a condition of the
African nation-states rather than an unproblematic political weapon. In Seven Solitudes,
“Sony Labou Tansi describes a reality that is coexistent with the fictional experience,
inseparable from the novel,” which is why the novel should be seen not only as depicting
unmediated horror, but also as a way of imagining a social space relieved of its regime of
violence (145).

Published in 1985 and set in a post-independence mythical African town, the horror in
Seven Solitudes brings together both colonial and post-independence horror. The rest of
this discussion will be organized as follows: the next section will examine the category of
horror and this part will acknowledge the theoretical and critical applicability of horror to
postcolonial fiction, and will also recognize the problems associated with deploying
horror in interpreting postcolonial fiction. The second segment will examine the
intersection of space and horror and argue that space functions in Seven Solitudes as a
symptom of a stifling social condition suitable for the discourse of horror. In addition to
space as an indicator of horror, this section will argue that both domestic and public
realms are doomed by violence. The last part of the chapter will be devoted to justifying
the claim that the disappointment in postcolonial nation-states has significantly eroded
the faith in the efficacy of these nation-states. But the key issue at stake is that
postcolonial fiction does not only reflect this disappointment, it also represents how
horror influences some postcolonial texts in embracing non-realist modes, particularly,

the marvelous. This last portion will evince the manifestations of horror in the

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indiscriminate brutality of political repression and death; this part will argue as well that

horror is evident in the violence committed on the body of both men and women.

Navigating Horror

In order to read postcolonial fiction as narrative of horror, one has to engage the
problem that is immediately apparent with the category of horror and its applicability to
Sony Labou Tansi’s Seven Solitudes. Apart from Seven Solitudes, The Antipeople (1988)
is another novel that, to some extent, fits the discourse of horror because of its immersion
in the trauma of war which partly accounts for the marvelous reality of the novel.
Although the intersection of horror and the marvelous might be tangential to Antipeople,
it explains the very structure of Seven Solitudes, hence the focus on Seven Solitudes as a
narrative of horror. To determine what constitutes horror in Seven Solitudes is a difficult
task because unlike novels like Men of Maize (1949), Where the Air is Clear (1958),
Explosion in a Cathedral (1962), Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and The House of the
Spirits (1980), which are to some extent historical novels, Seven Solitudes cannot be
deemed historical. The immediate explanation is that Seven Solitudes attempts to capture
the violence of the social landscape which is incongruent with conventional notions of
the historical novel: that is, utilizing aesthetic and temporal distance from the event or
events on which the text is based (Wole Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion” 128).

Although Seven Solitudes might not conform to normative definitions of the historical
novel, its focus on contemporary and post-independence violence cannot be ignored as
horror narratives. The fact that contemporary social reality intertwines with colonial
history makes this novel historical in its own right, a fact which reinforces its

preoccupation with horror because it combines both colonial history and postcolonial

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social moments. The notion of horror in Seven Solitudes is shaped by the “harshness” of
social reality, tyranny, repression and brutal effects of power. The following quote from
Mbembe’s On the Postcolony will help situate the use of horror in Seven Solitudes:
“[t]hus, it was through the slave trade and colonialism that Africans came face to face
with the opaque and murky domain of power, a domain inhabited by obscure drives and
that everywhere and always makes animality and bestiality its essential components,
plunging human beings into a never-ending process of brutalization” (14). Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish, in the afore-mentioned execution, offers a view into state
repression and its manifestation in public display of horror, which sometimes can parallel
colonial violence and postcolonial repression. Foucault notes:
After two or three attempts, the executioner Samson and he who had used the
pincers each drew a knife from his pocket and cut the body at the thighs instead of
severing the legs at the joints. The four horses gave a tug and carried off the two
thighs after them, . . . the same was done to the arms, the shoulders, the arm-pits
and the four limbs. (5)
Seven Solitudes epitomizes these quotes, especially with the meaningless and gory
spectacle of death that characterize colonial and postindependence historical moments.
The novel fits what Mickics in another context calls, “grim, implacable vision of history”
(384). It is this grim and implacable vision of history that constitutes horror in Seven
Solitudes and this vision is significant because the narrative draws the reader’s attention
to itself by locating the discourse in the marvelous realm. That is, it is the horror in Labou
Tansi’s novel that produces the marvelous real. In essence, the marvelous in Seven

Solitudes does not function as an ornamental device; rather, the marvelous is itself the

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horror of history and it is for this reason that we must refute Simpkin’s attempt to
homogenize all “magical realist” narratives as to create a supplement to reality on the one
hand, and simply as an aesthetic device on the other. The horror, the marvelous in Seven
Solitudes, is the very history that the text tries to confront, although one must be careful
to avoid simplifying both the horror of history and the aesthetic component of the novel
into the familiar form and content divide. The marvelous temper of Seven Solitudes
cannot be divorced from its historical context and social landscape.

Meanwhile, another problem emerges here, which is the historical nature of horror
narratives themselves. Horror narratives have emerged centuries before the publication of
Seven Solitudes. Horror can be traced to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Other examples include Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights ( 1847), Ann Radcliff’ s The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus (1818). Frankenstein is a unique example of horror: while the other texts rely
on the supernatural to produce horror, Frankenstein seems more or less like science
fiction which Brown argues is Shelley’s attempt to “[replace] empty theatrics of popular
supernatural fiction” (The Gothic Text 6). But during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries horror texts were characterized by the presence of the supernatural whether in
texts simply called horror narratives or the ones called Gothic horror. Wisker argues that
horror is a branch of the Gothic and they both use the same formulae; however, horror,
she contends, is more likely than Gothic to “dwell on the connections between violence
and sexuality” (8).

The similarities and differences between horror fiction and Gothic fiction should not

become a primary concern here as much as the relation of horror to postcolonial fiction in

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general and Seven Solitudes in particular. One has to admit that there must be some
similarities between the Gothic horror and the marvelous and the most important one is
that both are a response to harsh social and historical conditions. Jones makes a similar
argument in Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film when he says:
by the time it was published in 1818, Northanger Abbey, set around 1798, was
already an historical novel, beneath whose surface was detectable the upheavals of
that very turbulent decade, the 17903, when England was at war with France . . .
living under constant fear of French invasion, with rioting on the streets of London
and other cities, and a full-blown political uprising in Ireland. [T]he Romantic
Gothic novel of the 17905 is a direct product of this instability. (2)
The marvelous as well is predicated on the horror, violence and repressive regimes that
had characterized colonialism and that continue after the official termination of
colonialism. Seven Solitudes is a quintessential case of the manifestation of structures of
colonial tyranny and violence in post-colonial nation-states. For instance, Wilson Harris’s
Palace of the Peacock (1960), populated by ghosts of past explorers and slave drivers,
retraces the agony and violence of colonization on the Caribbean islands while Juan
Carlos Onetti’s Let the Wind Speak (1996) and Sony Labou Tansi’s Antipeople and Seven
Solitudes show how colonial regimes of violence have survived in post-colonial times.
Apart from being influenced by turbulent social and historical situations, horror and
the marvelous sometimes exhibit a gloomy vision of history. However, this gloomy view
of history is a self-conscious effort on the writers’ part to disturb and disrupt the
purported order and structure of history. One of the main reasons why the state (whether

monarchy as in the execution of Damiens the regicide, or as in postcolonial nation-states)

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organizes spectacle of horror is to coerce the people a regimen, a discipline. Foucault
says, at the moment that the French state removes “horror” from the public space, it
replaces it with another kind of horror, developing a subjugated body and a disciplined
body. The body “was in the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints,
prohibitions or obligations” (136), so that discipline “produces subjugated and practised
bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (138). One may not encounter “discipline” in the same way that
Foucault has described it; the public show of violence on the body is an attempt to force
Damiens into some discipline, which is why “Monsieur Le Breton, the clerk of the court,
went up to the patient [Damiens] several times and asked him if he had anything to say
[that is, confess]” (4). The violence that is done to the body becomes concomitant with
the condemned man’s conformity to certain state regulations and both must be seen as
operating on the mechanics of horror. It does not, however, imply that the violence and
“confession” are the same things. The important thing is that they complement each other
in this display of horror. Seven Solitudes may not have foregrounded such exhibition of
violence, that is, the slow and painful death to which Damiens was condemned, but the
detailed description of some murders parallels the horror of the eighteenth century French
monarchy. This grim representation of history, common to horror fiction, could be
nihilistic and the writers are equally maligned for projecting a gruesome vision of history.
Williams makes this same argument, claiming that nineteenth century French horror
writers (that is, Charles Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de
Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet) were too quick to denounce the Industrial Revolution
and particularly, the French Revolution. His study is based on French writers, but his

criticism is still pertinent to other literary contexts. In fact, his criticism of these French

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writers resonates with allegation of pessimism leveled against Sony Labou Tansi and
other francophone writers of the 19805 (Moudileno 21-22). Williams has this to say:
Historians have advanced a variety of tenable explanations to account for the
peculiar philosophical gloom of the nineteenth century. We know of the
disenchantment after the apparent failure of the French Revolution; we can sense
the moral dismay over the decline of legitimacy and the birth of utilitarianism as
principles of authority; and we still can be moved by the descriptions of sordid life
in the new factory towns. On the other hand, does any historian give us a world,
before 1789, so celestial and sanitary that we would unhesitantly opt for it ahead of
the nineteenth century? For that matter, did the French Revolution really “fail” to a
degree that would justify the pessimism that followed? Did not the Industrial
Revolution offer hope for the future, if perhaps too soon, and not merely horror?
(X)
Williams goes on to argue that French horror writers depict the horror that followed the
French Revolution because they were neurotic, and that “disease had blackened their
outlook on life” (xi). That Williams assumes that French horror fiction can be explained
mainly by the writers’ medical conditions presupposes a logical connection between
disease and horror fiction. The problem with Williams’s line of argument is that in his bid
to justify the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, the irrational violence that
followed the French Revolution becomes silenced by the sanctimonious rhetoric of
progress. He indirectly justifies the “reign of terror” as a sacrifice for progress. Whether
the writers experienced severe medical issues or not, the horror that they represent in

their works is historical and, therefore, was fictionalized history. Williams also neglects

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to mention that thousands of blacks were condemned to servitude in Saint Domingue and
would have probably argued that the horror of French slavocracy did not merit its
depiction as horror in Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom (1949) or Patrick Chamoiseau’s
Texaco (1995). The chief issue here is that Williams, consciously or unconsciously,
participates in silencing the French imperial history of horror.

This trend of interpretation is not limited to French horror writers but applies to
postcolonial fiction as well. Diawara describes as “Afro-pessimists[,] writers such as
[Williams Sassine], Henri Lopes, Amadou Kourouma, and Sony Labou Tansi” (46). That
these writers’ outlook appears gloomy may not be denied, but the fact remains that they
represent history as an experience of horror. One way of approaching this issue is to
observe and acknowledge that both Kourouma and Labou Tansi try to capture an
extremely traumatic history and by representing this history as horror is to underscore the
irrationality of genocide and tyranny. In addition, writers such as Kourouma and Labou
Tansi are evidently not so optimistic about glorifying a future whose history is marked by
repression and bloodbath. Their stance is not opposed to a conflict- and oppression-free
future; in fact, their unique form of horror is an inverse way of imagining alternatives to
the horror thematized in their works. Therefore, interpreting their works as gloomy may
be a valid observation in its own right, but it does not reflect the complexity and nuances
of horror. One must get past criticisms such as Williams’ and Diawara’s and focus
instead on how the depiction of horror in Labou Tansi’s novel, Seven Solitudes, includes,
but transcends the evocation of terror, fear and revulsion.

So far, there is one fundamental trait that the Gothic horror of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries shares with horror of postcolonial fiction: a representation of

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violence, repression and terror which characterizes specific historical situations. Just as
there are points of convergence between the Gothic horror and postcolonial horror, there
are also irreducible differences. For instance, Gothic horror explores the mind landscapes
and in fact extemalizes the mind so that the horror depicted is the fear lurching in the
confines of an individual’s mind. Although it may take its inspiration from history, the
Gothic horror sometimes focuses on the workings of an individual’s psyche. It is for this
reason that Haggerty in Gothic F iction/Gothic Form suggests that “[r]ather than directly
addressing the philosophical question of how the mind transforms the external world into
private experience . . . the Gothic novelists attempted to give imaginative worlds external
and objective reality [and] were looking for ways of giving private experience external
manifestation” (7).

One crucial difference between horror in the Gothic fiction and postcolonial novel is
that the Gothic presupposes an orderly world in which the supernatural intrudes, which is
why at the end of the story, the invading forces are always vanquished and order is
restored. This perspective of horror differs considerably from postcolonial fiction where
horror is represented as characteristic of, if not an intrinsic part of, history. Whether one
is concerned with The House of the Spirits where cycles of violence are associated with
changes in Chilean political history, Kingdom of this World where history is a series of
never-ending regimes of horror, or Seven Solitudes where horror appears to have been a
normalized condition of history, there is no closure in these postcolonial texts. Bloom
argues in “Horror Fiction: In Search of a Definition” that “primeval nature of fear, deeply
embedded in our ‘subconscious rrrind’ and our ‘inner instincts’ and stored in the

‘residuum of powerful inherited associations’ leave . . . us confronted with the ‘terrible’

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and ‘cryptic’ power of the ‘extraterrestrial,’ ‘whereof we know nothing and wherein we
have no part!’ ” ( 158) The “supernatural” event which is the source of horror is always
presented as external to our own world, believed to function according to the laws of the
sciences. So, horror is always an intrusion, a statement that is questionable in the works
of postcolonial writers cited above, including Sony Labou Tansi. Bloom emphasizes this
in his argument by stating that “[t]here is always the presence of the supernatural,
demonic, violent and unpredictable, usually present without explanation or logic and
glimpsed at the moment it breaks into our world. The demonic threatens the annihilation
of human consciousness but, at the same time, assures us of continuity in the eternal . .
(165; emphasis added). On the other hand, at the end of Seven Solitudes social hierarchies
are still intact and those who hold oppressive and repressive powers are unchallenged
even though there is a suggestion of change in the flood that brings the story to a close.
The supernatural in horror fiction must be seen as “barbarism and savagery of unlawful
invading forces . . . that threaten. . . civilized life” unlike in Seven Solitudes where the
idea of “civilized life” is seriously questioned (Heiland, Gothic and Gender 4). Horror
can also be pleasurable primarily because order is restored at the end of the story and the
reader is aware of the “asymmetry” between the world of fiction and his/her own world
(Wisker, Horror Fiction 4; Leffler, Horror as Pleasure 261-2). Certainly, Seven
Solitudes can be read for pleasure and there is no apparent objection to the restoration of
order; however, the chaos, horror and bloodbath are irreducible part of the history it
captures, which is why at the end of the novel no order is restored and no civilization is

particularly assured of its continuity.

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Space and the Production of Horror

The story of Seven Solitudes is set in the mysterious village of Valancia, an isolated,
impoverished and violent village. The conflict begins with the murder of Estina Benta,
the wife of Lorsa Lopez. Estina Benta is suspected of having an affair with another man
and because Lorsa Lopez could not withstand such an allegation, he murders his wife in
the most gruesome way imaginable. The villages expect the police to come and
investigate the crime but they only wait in vain until towards the end of the story when an
outspoken woman, Estina Bronzario is also murdered without any clue about the identity
of the culprit. Finally, there is a flood that destroys the mythical town of Nsanga-Norda,
the seat of the government, which, despite being close to Valancia, is unconcerned about
its affairs. A novel like Seven Solitudes gives voice to those groups who have been
silenced not only by Western imperialism but also by the structures of power within
Africa itself. It will be misleading to reduce this novel to a work of “art for art’s sake”
because both in the language and in the diegesis, this work is conscious of the structures
of power that are operative within the African polity.

The horror of Seven Solitudes is contingent upon integration into, and exclusion of, the
mythical town of Valancia and Nsanga Norda from the international community. From
the beginning of the novel it is clear that Valancia is an isolated town, which, because it
is set within an unfamiliar geographical space, becomes even more isolated. As it is set in
an unfamiliar space, it is implied that there is no clear reference to a known African or
non-African country, although the novel concerns the tribulations of African countries,
particularly in the Congo region, after the disappointment of independence. Seven

Solitudes achieves it marvelous temperament partly through this remote location of

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Valancia and partly through the violence and horror that is symptomatic of life in the
town. The undying tree, the singing trees and sighing mountains, mourning the relocation
of the government capital from Valancia to Nsanga Norda, all point to a marvelous
world. However, this marvelous world is also created through the town’s isolation from
the rest of the world. That is, although the novel does not make reference to a known
African country (except South Africa), it nevertheless maintains its consciousness of, and
distance from, Europe and the United States. The issue which is at stake here is how the
novel launches its discourse of horror, and one important method deployed in Seven
Solitudes is by creating a remote and claustrophobic space.

That Seven Solitudes creates a claustrophobic space is not necessarily apparent and
should not be taken for granted. The characters are both socially connected and detached
mainly because they lack the power to initiate political action whether within their homes
or outside. In other words, the claustrophobia in Seven Solitudes works in two
fundamental ways: the first is that the home space is apparently inaccessible to outsiders
while those inside lack the agency to break the domestic claustrophobic setting or escape
the terror within that home. The second is that the society represents a macrocosmic
dimension of domestic space and the same lack of political agency haunts the characters
whether they are within the home space or outside of it. A good example is Estina Benta
who is unable to escape her husband’s maniacal and homicidal rage and who aa-uld not be
saved by the community no matter how loud she cried for help, thereby reinforcing the
notion that violence dominates both the domestic and the public space.

But before exploring how Estina Benta’s murder fits into the discourse of horror in

Seven Solitudes, one should engage the circumstances that make that horror possible in

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the first place; that is, the way in which Valancia represents an abode of horror. The first
strategy used in this text is economic and political isolation, the implication of which is
that Valancia is crippled economically and consequently has to suffer the trauma of such
economic and political terrorism. It is not surprising that Seven Solitudes has to lean
towards the marvelous real, especially because the trauma that follows this isolation is so
extreme that literary realism would be inadequate to express it. To grasp this discourse of
solitude through which the horror of this isolation is expressed one should examine how
the narrator describes it:
We hadn't sold our pineapples that year, because our President had insulted
America at the Sixteenth Paris Conference on the price of raw materials. Out of
revenge, the Americans refused to eat our pineapples, and the French had
supported them by refusing to eat them out of modesty, the Belgians because they
understood, the Russians out of timidity, the Germans out of simple bloody-
mindedness, the South Africans by intuition, the Japanese out of honour. . .
Anyway, for one reason or another, the whole world refused to eat our pineapples.
(.1)
Despite Valancia’s economic separation from the rest of the world, it is clear that some
sort of international relation existed prior to this isolation. This economic strangulation
must be explained not only in terms of international policy, but also in the spatial
constriction, an attribute that evinces Valancia’s suitability for horror. In essence, this
economic blockade works in two important ways. The first and the more obvious is the
trade restriction; the second, which is the primary concern here, is how Valancia

gradually becomes literally a “haunted house” where the dark evil consists in harshness

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of existence rather than in some inscrutable supernatural forces as in the case of Gothic
narratives. With the trade embargo in place, Valancia becomes a claustrophobic town in
which the inhabitants are forever trapped and forced into the ineluctable tyranny of
poverty, insecurity and fear. The notion of Valancia’s claustrophobia is reinforced by the
fact that none of the inhabitants ever leaves Valancia except for a few visitors who come
and go. Here lies the power of horror in Seven Solitudes: the characters who come and go
are government officials, whereas the original people of Valancia are restricted to its
existential terror. The horror of Valancia’s claustrophobia inheres in government
official’s exceptional power to traverse spaces and as Seven Solitudes demonstrates their
presence in Valancia always coincides with malevolent events. The implication is that
government officials, with their abilities to cross spaces in contrast to Valancia’s people
who are trapped within its walls, are invested with supernatural powers. Government
officials’ supernatural powers as set against the people’s imprisonment within Valancia
links Seven Solitudes to the discourse of the marvelous real in which the marvelous
derives from disparity of power or rather the interplay of power and powerlessness. Even
though the novel hardly makes explicit reference to governmental perfidy, corruption and
the “failure” of the postcolonial state, it nevertheless captures similar trends in a most
powerful manner: that of rendering the narrative within the marvelous mode. The idea of
the supernatural powers commanded by government officials shows not only the extent
of social disempowerrnent, it also accentuates the claustrophobic condition in which the
people live, a condition through which horror thrives. The isolation and enclosure, which
Foucault argues is a component of discipline, may not necessarily involve the graphic

images of horror in Seven Solitudes. Foucault contends that “[d]iscipline sometimes

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requires enclosure. . . . It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony. There was the
great ‘confinement’ of vagabonds and paupers; there were other more discreet, but
insidious and effective ones. There were the colleges, or secondary schools . . .” (141).
While prisons and schools might not display the violence of 18th century French
monarchy, the notion of confinement and isolation in Seven Solitudes exacerbates the
violence and the people’s helplessness and consequently, the inevitable feeling of horror
within the confined space of Valancia.

Both Gothic horror and Seven Solitudes are linked by their deployment of
claustrophobic spaces. Although one cannot equate the claustrophobic spaces of the
Gothic horror to the one in Seven Solitudes and while Seven Solitudes is clearly not a
Gothic text, the claustrophobic state that pervades Valancia is Gothic in form. In another
context, Armitt compares magical realism and Gothic fiction and comes to this
conclusion: “[i]n magical realism [. . .] is a fabulous panorama, whereas the Gothic
landscape is inevitably claustrophobic. Part of the clashing worldviews in The House of
the Spirits revolves around the tension between the allure of the agoraphobic, manifest in
the many adventures into new territory, and a type of Gothic magnetism which
continually drags characters back to a nodal grouping of oppressive houses” (308). While
Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits seems to combine both the form of the haunted
house and oppressive social landscape, it conforms to, and resists, the Gothic at the same
time. Seven Solitudes shares the same ambivalence to the Gothic in the sense that the
haunted house is limited to Lorsa Lopez’s house most of the time; however, the whole
social landscape of Valancia is itself claustrophobic, a motif that is overwhelming in

comparison to horror fiction, which is deliberately confined to the haunted house.

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The horror of Seven Solitudes is such that the claustrophobic setting shows how
imperialism persists in postcolonial nation-states; that is, the horror in Seven Solitudes
can partly be explained by Valancia’s subjugation by international imperialist forces
through economic and political policy that turns Valancia into a claustrophobic state in
which poverty and terror reign. Although dealing with a different issue, it is precisely
because of the intersection of imperialism and horror that Wisker says, “[u]surping the
laws of other lands, imperialists and colonialists stole mother tongues and silenced
peoples, imported and enslaved, disenfranchised, destabilised, and disempowered them,
taking over spaces and ways of living. Some insisted on imposing the post-Enlightenment
bravado and self—assuredness of the . . . European conqueror as the best, the only way”
(173—74). Wisker seems to be more concerned with the early stages of colonialism than
its manifestation in postcolonial situations; but one thing is apparent from Wisker’s
cements (and in Seven Solitudes), “[t]he history of postcolonial peoples is one that
reeks of the elements of horror” (174). More specifically in Seven Solitudes, imperialism
manifests itself in terms of international trade “conspiracy” which undermines Valancia’s
place and viability within global commerce. The claustrophobic environment created by
this conspiracy turns Valancia into a landscape of horror.

One should sound a note of caution here: imperialism alone does not account for the
horror in Seven Solitudes; rather, local tyranny also contributes to Valancia’s isolation
and consequently, its regime of horror. The novel does not privilege local politics against
international forces which is why the horror in the novel derives from combined forces of
international imperial machinery and local autocratic systems, investing the landscape

with invisible presences. The involvement of local regime in the horror of Seven

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Solitudes is unequivocal right from the beginning of the text. J ust after detailing
economic emasculation of Valancia, the narrator tells us about local administration’s
involvement in exacerbating the horror:
It was the same cry we’d heard at the same hour of the day years before, when the
authorities had decided, for the seventh time, to move the capital from Valancia to
Nsanga-Norda: “We can’t stay here, this place belongs to the devil,” they said. And
so, for several long months, walls, bridges, municipal gardens, town squares,
swimming pools, railway stations, all went on their travels, by air and by water, by
rail and by road. Even the water from the artificial lake of the Village of Passions,
the seven drawbridges, the thirty-nine mausoleums, the fifteen triumphal arches,
the nine Towers of Babel . . . were all transported to the new capital. (2)
It cannot be overemphasized that relocating the capital is concomitant to disappearance of
infrastructural facilities. The element of the improbable from the above quote is
impossible to render through conventional realism; Sony Labou Tansi, leaning towards
the marvelous, captures political perfidy. The absence of the law, inefficiency of the law,
lack of basic amenities and indiscriminate and sure deaths, all can be partly explained by
relocating the capital. Also, whenever the law appears in Valancia, it does so almost like
an intruding evil force most characteristic of the Gothic novel. For instance, at the death
of Estina Benta, the sloppiness of the officials and the police, the threats that they issue,
their arrogance and indifference, and the assertion of an unfathomable level of power
over the people of Valancia make the officials and the police appear more like aliens who
are, or who perceive themselves as being invincible. The incredible power of the officials

over the people deepens the deplorable and horrific existence led by the people of

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Valancia and it also situates Seven Solitudes in the realm where the unfathomable is
possible.

The passage not only demonstrates how local tyranny reinforces the claustrophobia
created by international imperial forces, it also resonates with imperialism and
colonialism. In the passage there is an intertextual relation to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s
postcolonial text about a tyrant in his twilight, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) where
colonial forces “carry off [. . .] territorial waters” in an apt metaphor of dispossession
(210). Where in Garcia Marquez’s text the imperial forces are constituted by Germany,
Britain and the United States, in Seven Solitudes the forces of pillage reside in a ghostly
government. The fact that the people of Valancia receive no positive response to the
request to perform the funeral rites for Estina Benta indicates the govemment’s
indifference to the people’s concerns. However, it is the marvelous dimension of this
narrative that establishes its urgency and consequence; that is, the people could not bury
the dead until they were left with the skeleton in the public square which creates both a
chilling effect and a humorless satire. The reason why this episode is interesting is that
the government is largely absent, but, when present is mainly as ghostly agents of horror,
fear and dispossession, a point that links Seven Solitudes, though vaguely, to the imperial

impulse of The Autumn of the Patriarch.

Landscapes of Horror

In Seven Solitudes, the body figures as the site of horror. That is, both female and male
bodies function as the site of local and state violence so that the body operates in Seven
Solitudes as the body politic. However, the body is imbued with multiple significations

which means that its function transcends victimhood; the body is also the site of

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resistance to local and state repression, violence, and more important, the body is the site
where “otherworldliness” manifests. But it is pertinent to mention right away that
resistance also has its problems. At this point one should focus on how the body is
constituted as the body politic, but also how it serves as the site of violence. The female
body particularly functions as the body of the nation which means that at the moments
and scenes of violence, the body, according to Veit-Wild, is gendered (238).

It is the murder of Estina Benta that jolts one back into the consciousness that women
are not merely the victims of the patriarchal order in Valancia. They are also the victims
of state repression and it is Estina Benta’s death that makes the connection possible. The
representatives of the state do not themselves participate in the regular murder cases in
Valancia; however, their silence over the cases establishes their collusion with local
regimes. While one may not be able to categorically link the state apparatus at Nsanga-
Norda to Valancia’s masculinist order, the fact that both regimes condone Oppression of
women makes women doubly vulnerable in Valancia. It probably would be safe to
contend that women in Valancia are victims of both regimes whether or not there exists
an understanding that binds the two repressive administrations together. However, Estina
Benta’s body becomes the site where patriarchal violence is displayed so that her death
“links power relations in political discourse to violence in gender discourse” (Veit-Wild
236). The novel seems intent on shocking the reader through the horrifying description of
her murder by exaggerating the violence used in the act, a device that makes one question
whether the horrific account is the central issue. For instance, Lorsa Lopez is presented as
a sociopath from whom such a gruesome murder should not be a surprise; but one should

not lose sight of the fact that Labou Tansi also hyperbolizes the murder episode so that

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one cannot fail to notice that Seven Solitudes produces a surplus of signification.
However, because Sony Labou Tansi exaggerates this murder scene, its horror is, to some
extent, mitigated. That the horror might be mitigated shows not only that the male-female
relationship is based on injustice and violence, but also that the woman is vulnerable to
mysterious predatory powers. Lorsa Lopez states:
Since the women of this town have started playing at being men, nothing's right
any more. It's all the fault of the whites. They've mixed everything up: the roles of
the puppet, the epileptic and the idiot. Their money has killed our soul. I'm going to
pack you off to the devil for good.

While she screamed for help, he went into the pigsty. He came back with a spade
and struck her three true male blows, breaking the spade - so he gave her two more
hefty blows with the handle. Then he went and fetched a pickaxe and began
chopping her like wood. He split her body open and, ripping out her smoking guts,
he tore at them with his big wild animal’s teeth and drank her blood, to appease the
anger knotting his soul. (1 1-12)

If it is true that the claustrophobic condition of Valancia is produced partly by modern
imperial powers, the passage above also indicates that the patriarchal order is equally
responsible. The sheer force with which Estina Benta is killed only emphasizes women’s
vulnerability within a city where the male oppressive regime seems normalized. At a
glance, the violence of the act is unmistakable, and that Lorsa Lopez is a sociopath is
unequivocal. The violence is so excessive that it breaks the bounds of the symbolic order.
In addition to being outraged by Estina Benta’s murder, the narrative invites the reader to

mock the fact that Lorsa Lopez reduces the problem to the influence of the “whites.” One

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can see that he relishes patriarchal privilege so that it is immediately apparent that what
he could not accept is the disruption of gender hierarchy. That is, Lorsa Lopez is reluctant
to see women transcend the role of second class citizens and give expression to their
personality. I

In Lorsa Lopez’s own speech, the reader witnesses a “horror” and at the same time is
lured to mock Lorsa Lopez’s buffoonery. On the one hand, Lorsa Lopez provides a weak
alibi for killing his wife: colonialism. But what he has done here is to replace one horror
with another, thereby deepening the intensity of the violence beyond the logic of
language. From his speech it is clear that Estina Benta’s murder is an extremely political
act and Lorsa Lopez is the one who makes this link possible. The murder is supposed to
be a pseudo-reaction to a belated colonialism, but it turns out to be a domestic and public
aggression which signifies that the people of Valancia are both victims of colonialism
and local autocracy. However, it is the women who are represented as ultimate victims.
When the narrator tells us that he “struck her three male blows,” one is instantly
reminded that gender hierarchy in the story take a primal place. The crime is so cruel that
Labou Tansi represents it to us in cannibalistic terms. Of course, the cannibalistic
representation immediately resonates with stories about Idi Amin in Uganda, but it is not
certain if Sony Labou Tansi is trying to make this connection. But the cruelty against
women and Estina Benta in this case, rendered in cannibalistic terms, is so unthinkable
that it threatens the limits of realist aesthetics. Although the law seems to be absent from
Valancia, it condones Lorsa Lopez’s crime. It is because of the law’s culpability that
Estina Bronzario asserts immediately following Estina Benta’s death that “[t]he police

haven't been [here] because it was only a woman who was killed” (19). The law, or the

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government at Nsanga-Norda in this case, is not merely inefficient, it is an agent of
horror precisely because it preys on the people in a manner reminiscent of supernatural
evil.

Interestingly enough, the story takes a dramatic turn: the death of Estina Benta
becomes the rallying point of women’s resistance to patriarchal injustice. That Estina
Benta is murdered is not the only issue that angers the women, but that the administration
at Nsanga-Norda refuses the women’s plea to bury her is unthinkable and unacceptable.
Women’s resistance constitutes another twist to the horror in Seven Solitudes so that it is
not an altogether a pessimistic story as Manthia Diawara has argued; indeed, women are
portrayed as revolutionaries. Nonetheless, while Seven Solitudes is not a conventional
horror story, it still resonates with Gothic fiction like Wuthering Heights where the
confinement of women within the domestic space is meant to highlight a repressive male-
centered ideology. Although the castle or mansion can be limiting and disempowering in
Gothic fiction, Heiland contends that Gothic fiction transgresses patriarchal structures of
power. She argues further by stating that

the stories of gothic novels are always stories of transgression. The transgressive
acts at the heart of gothic fiction generally focus on corruption in, or resistance to,
the patriarchal structures that shaped the country’s political life and its family life,
and gender roles within those structures come in for patriarchal scrutiny. Further,
and importantly, these acts are often violent, and always frightening. (5)
The protest following Estina Benta’s death also constitutes a transgressive act which is
meant to challenge Valancia’s patriarchal authority and the state power, at least through

Lorsa Lopez’s ruthless killing of his wife. Within this repressive space is agency and

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resistance, just as in Seven Solitudes; however, there is a fundamental distinction between
the Gothic and Seven Solitudes: Gothic fiction is usually set in a confined space like an
old castle or abandoned mansion, but the setting of Seven Solitudes is the whole town of
Valancia. The fact that the story of Seven Solitudes happens in a town is a testament that
the novel conforms to, and resists classification as, horror, through its transformation of a
whole social setting into a claustrophobic, violent and frightening space. As the story
progresses, the remains of Estina Benta are left unattended and the police refuse to
investigate the case.
The women of Valancia conceive of Estina Benta’s tragedy as a tragedy of all women,
and in order to resist this callous act, they act in unison by declaring sexual abstinence
from men. This move is important because the women seem to categorize state violence
and patriarchal terror as complementary. While it is certain that all citizens of Valancia
are victims of state violence, state terror is intensified by ruthless killing of the women.
When the women declare their abstinence from men, it is clear that they are taking on the
patriarchal system, but their resolve is unmistakable when the narrator says,
Fartamo Andrea set at sixteen moons the period during which they would not open
their clothes to a man. Woe betide the fool who spurned the majority’s decision!
She’d either menstruate continuously or catch the Nsanga-Norda sickness. This
women’s talk made the men smile, but knowing that Estina Bronzario would
always be Estina Bronzario, they accepted that they would have to steel themselves
to endure this enforced abstinence. (Seven Solitudes 22)

By abstaining from men, the women impose a punitive measure, but the implication of

this punishment far surpasses the penalty. The women avoid not only the mere sexual

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encounter, but also the violence associated with it; this is why sexual violence must be
seen as a parallel to the murder of Estina Benta and governmental abandonment of
Valancia. But it is also a means of breaking the limits of conventional representation by
producing excess of signification. To buttress this point, Veit-Wild also observes that
“[m]en in Sony’s fictionalized societies are characterized by a voracious appetite for
food, sex and for material wealth” (“The Grotesque Body 235). This link between sexual
conduct and state violence is corroborated in the following passage from Mbembe’s On
the Postcolony:
To exercise authority is, above all, to tire out the bodies of those under it, to
disempower them not so much to increase their productivity as to ensure maximum
docility. To exercise authority is, furthermore, for the male ruler, to demonstrate
publicly a certain delight in eating and drinking well, and, again in Labou Tansi’s
words, to pass most of his time in “pumping grease and rust into the backside of
young girls.” The male ruler’s pride in possessing an active penis has to be
dramatized, through sexual rights over subordinates. . . . The unconditional
subordination of women to the principle of male pleasure remains one pillar
upholding the reproduction of the phallocratic system. (110)
This women’s revolt opposes both administrative complacency and terror on the one
hand, and female persecution on the other. But the most important subject here is how
sexual terror functions in Valancia; that is, the women decide to put an end to men’s
sexual predatory practices that double as political tyranny, which seems to have been
normalized. Sexual abstinence is an attempt to take away the normalized sexual privilege

of men and rejecting men’s names is an effort to demythologize patriarchal authority, just

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as Sony Labou Tansi veers away from realism.

However, the men become aware of the seriousness of the women’s revolt when
Estina Bronzario threatens Valancia’s symbolic systems. The narrator says of Estina
Bronzario, “[t]he other decision taken by Estina Bronzario’s women was no less of a
constraint for the men. In future, men would take their wives’ names when they married
in Valancia” (Seven Solitudes 23). First, it is apparent that Valancia is a patrilineal
society. Second, the men seem more threatened by the prospect of renouncing their own
names than abstinence from sex. It is hard to determine whether Sony Labou Tansi
specifically is referencing Lacan’s famous “Name of the Father”; 2 in any event, it seems
the women’s aim is to uproot the whole symbolic system on which Valancia is built. If
one follows this hypothesis briefly, it is certain that the women of Valancia operate
outside of the symbolic order and they clearly have threatened that system, which is why
their action can partly be explained by Kristeva’s argument about abjection in Powers of
Horror.

According to Kristeva, bodily fluids and matter that the body expels can be considered
filth. But it is not the filth that is actually being expelled, but defilement, and this
defilement is culturally constructed most typically in religious terms. She, therefore,
argues that “[d]efilement is what is jettisoned from the ‘symbolic system. ' It is what
escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based,
which then becomes differentiated from a temporary agglomeration of individuals and, in

short, constitutes a classification system or a structure” (65). When applied to women and

 

2 Jacques Lacan argues that at the pre-oedipal stage, contrary to Sigmund Freud’s position, the child is

not afraid of the father but “the name of the father” which signifies the father’s mastery over the symbolic
order into which the child must enter his/her illusion of wholeness and unity has been shattered at the
mirror stage.

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also to Seven Solitudes, the exclusion of women from the symbolic order is contingent,
not on any rational logic but on the logic with which the symbolic order operates that
demands the exclusion of women. The men of Valancia have taken their “superiority” for
granted, which implies that they could not question the alleged female “inferiority.”
Masculinist hegemony in Valancia cannot be mistaken when Elmano Zola says on behalf
of men, “[t]hey can give us lice, all the lice on earth . . . They can give us the pox and all
the mushrooms in the world, but not their names” (Seven Solitudes 23). Clearly, the battle
is drawn right here because both the women and men are set to confront each other; but
while it is the women who are originally threatened and persecuted, they have become a
threat to the men, or more specifically, the symbolic order. In other words, abjection
cannot be total in the sense that there is always the threat of defilement and this threat is a
violent one that attacks the symbolic order, the same way that the women of Valancia
have decided to renounce the “Name of the Father.” No matter how many Estina Bentas
are killed the men cannot escape from the threat that women constitute to the society’s
systems of signs. In a sense, abjection becomes the horror which terrorizes male
hegemony. In Seven Solitudes, the women directly confront the men and it is clear that
the battle between the genders is as physical as it is symbolic. Kristeva’s notion of
abjection depends on both violent and subtle means of warfare:
In societies where it occurs, ritualization of defilement is accompanied by a strong
concern for separating the sexes, and this means giving men rights over women.
The latter, apparently put in the position of passive objects, are none the less felt to
be wily powers, "baleful schemers" from whom rightful beneficiaries must protect

themselves. It is as if, lacking a central authoritarian power that would settle the

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definitive supremacy of one sex-or lacking a legal establishment that would
balance the prerogatives of both sexes-two powers attempted to share out society.
One of them, the masculine, apparently victorious, confesses through its very
relentlessness against the other, the feminine, that it is threatened by an
asymmetrical, irrational, wily, uncontrollable power. (70)
Perhaps the way to understand how the women of Valancia contend with male authority
is not to focus exclusively on the scenes of violence and horror, but also on the very
marginalization of women from the symbolic order. This way, this marginalization can
be interpreted as the cause that produces the “terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles,
a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a
friend who stabs you. . . .” (4), and as the very “defilement” that menaces the symbolic
systems.

In Seven Solitudes especially, men are not the only perpetrators of horror and
ultimately the text does not make gender distinction in the use iof violence. The text is
obviously concerned about the precarious position of women in society, but fails to
stereotype women as passive victims whose injustice is unmitigated. Rather than
represent them as helpless sufferers of male excessive force, women confidently
challenge the basis of male power, while participating in the reign of terror over
Valancia. The following passage will throw some light on the issue:

It’s not altogether certain how Elmano Zola’s pronouncement reached the ears of
the women. The next morning, on opening the deep freeze to get out Fr Bona’s
daily half-kilo of liver, . . . still too bleary-eyed to make out anything clearly,

[Madame Elmano Zola] was confronted by the most horrifying sight: three pieces

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of husband with a strip of vellum stuck between his teeth. On it, the following
words were written with a cosmetic pencil and underlined with nail varnish, as we
all saw later when we came to have a look, our faces streaming with hot tears:
“Women are also men.” (23)
First, the fact that the perpetrators are never captured or because there are no eye witness
account of this hideous act which resonates immediately with the killing and chopping of
Estina Benta’s body, (and also resonates with the Texas chainsaw massacre), it is hard to
conclude that the women are responsible for the crime. But the details provided by the
narrator suggest: “cosmetic pencil,” “nail varnish” and the legend attached to the dead
that reads “women are also men.” The frightening part of the violence that now seems set
to engulf Valancia is that apart from proposing to reverse the symbolic order by making
men to take the names of their wives upon marriage, the women seem only to exacerbate
the regime of horror demonstrating that they are equal to men in violence. At this point in
the novel, Sony Labou Tansi seems to experiment with surrealism by juxtaposing objects
which usually do not belong together. Elmano Zola’s chopped body existing side by side
with beef liver is clearly a surrealist reference, which implies that the source of the
marvelous in Seven Solitudes is multiple.

Seven Solitudes provides the context to celebrate women’s resistance to male
authority; but the novel also offers the opportunity to problematize women’s position
within the conflict. The fact that the legend reads, “women are also men” confirms that
the women of Valancia are still operating within phallocentric logic with which men have
oppressed the city. The text seems to reverse gender roles without extirpating the reign of

terror. Perraudin argues that

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When we limit ourselves to . . . the literature of the 19703 and 19803, also called the
“literature of disenchantment,” the resort to this type of motif of violence signifies
the entry into a symbolic order of violence. Such a maneuver is evidence of a desire
to position the subject in the postcolonial world, a desire that coincides with what
Jonathan Ngaté refers to as politics of anger. . . . In this context, the acts of violence
seem inevitably confined to a highly political and public sphere. The driving
motivation behind these acts of torture, excorporations and rape seems to stem from
a desire to weaken the ability of the other to assert himself or herself within a realm
of power that is in the process of being contested. (“From a ‘Large Morsel of Meat’
73)
Perraudin’s observations, though applicable directly to Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et
demie, is instructive to Seven Solitudes. Violence seems already normativized with the
murder of Estina Benta, but it is reinforced by the murder of Elmano Zola. One can try to
exonerate the women by arguing that they did not invent the violence, but have only
deployed a means that is already operative in the society. It is also true that these acts of
violence are meant to incapacitate everyone, especially the women, so that they can be
unthreatening to men, but their adoption of violence simply confirms the power of
violence over everyone, both male and female. In another context, Nicolas Martin-Granel
argues that “femininity . . . allows one to escape from the male monstrosity” (Le
quatrieme cote’ du triangle 71), but in Seven Solitudes, the women’s intervention in the
regime of patriarchy challenges the status quo on the one hand, and legitimizes it on the
other, since they themselves now appropriate the same method of violence. In Seven

Solitudes, the violence is not restricted to the “political and public sphere” as Perraudin

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has noted in the case of La vie et demie. Neither the public nor private realms can escape
the dominance of violence in Seven Solitudes; however, women’s effort is nevertheless
important precisely for the fact that they have initiated a process of challenging the
“season of anomie” that seems to characterize many West African, Central African and
Southern African nation-states. This gesture may not be perfect, but it is still an important
revolutionary moment through which the women “express a deep moral indignation in
their denunciation of the shameful state into which humanity has sunk today” even
though they cannot be exempted from this very condition (Clark, “Passionate
Engagements” 39) . As the novel will show, there is no other record of such a gruesome
murder by women, whereas there are more women and men killed by other men,
anonymous persons, and the mysterious forces terrorizing Valancia.

Seven Solitudes epitomizes Achille Mbembe’s idea of the postcolony where violence
and arbitrariness of power reside in political institutions and individuals. This means that
the repressive apparatus of power may be enforced by dominant political class but the
dominated people like Lorsa Lopez, Estina Benta, Elmano Zola and Estina Bronzario, all
are implicated in the brutal display of power and its horrific consequences. Also, women
constitute the revolutionary force intent upon dismantling the dominant signs of the
political class and patriarchal hierarchy. The interesting thing about their representation
in Seven Solitudes is that the text fails to apotheosize the women just because they have
challenged the dominant regime of power. Just as the women are implicated in the
exercise of violence, so are the people of Valancia. Unlike in novels like Ousmane
Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood where the

oppressed class is portrayed as agents of social change, that kind of revolutionary

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optimism is absent in Seven Solitudes. In fact, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat
attempts something similar to Seven Solitudes by depicting the revolutionary class as
treacherous and unreliable. But Sony Labou Tansi in Seven Solitudes shifts the focus
from socialist realism of the 19603 and early 19703 to a literature shaped more or less by
disenchantment because there is no section of the society that can be exempted from the
brutal reality of power. Mbembe’s description of the postcolony can help the excessive
violence in Seven Solitudes which in this case has been termed, horror:
The notion “postcolony” identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that
of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence
which the colonial relationship involves. To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically
pluralistic. . . . The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political
improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion. . . . But the
postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and political
machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence. In this
sense, the postcolony is a particularly revealing, and rather dramatic, stage on
which are played out the wider problems of subjection and its corollary, discipline.
(102-3)
To buttress his argument, Mbembe claims that corporate institutions in the postcolony do
not possess the monopoly of instruments of violence and the existence of private militia
testifies to the proliferation not only of instruments of violence, but also instances of
violence. Seven Solitudes dramatizes this proliferation of instances of violence and as
Mbembe contends, violence is not the prerogative of the dominant class. The

normalization of violence by the repressive political apparatus inspires the appropriation

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of violence by dominated class. It should not be surprising to that the women not only kill
Elmano Zola, they claim responsibility for this horrific act in a manner reminiscent of
terrorist operations and older colonial practices likethat of King Leopold who maimed,
beat and killed the inhabitants of the Congo region in his desperate attempt to appropriate
natural resources. The idea that violence in postcolonial societies has “a tendency to
excess and lack of proportion” can be located in Seven Solitudes’s hyperbolic language:
excessive and graphic description of excorporeality on the one hand, and vulgar language
typical of carnivalesque spirituality.

The position of “the people” is a little more complex in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel:
even though they do not physically engage in these acts of violence, they nevertheless
support it with their complacency and apathy. The apathy and brutality of the law
parallels the lukewarmness of the people whom the narrator presents as passive
collaborators in the crimes against women. While Lorsa Lopez is killing his wife, despite
her plea to be saved from her maniacal husband, the neighbors simply lament but do not
lift a finger to save the poor woman. The text suggests that everyone in the society is
complicit with this pattern of oppression and murder. During the murder of Estina Benta
the narrator describes Lorsa Lopez’s final act of cruelty, but the crucial issue is how the
narrator portrays the dying woman and the immediate and remote neighbors who
abandon her:

He fetched all the tools from his pigsty: meat hooks, picks, forks, felling axes,
machetes rrrillstone. He finished off his crime with the pickaxe. One last blow,
which was heard throughout the town. Until siesta time, the body lay in the town

square, still calling out: “Help me! He’s killing me!”

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Dismembered, disemboweled, completely covered in red clay, crawling with
flies stuffing themselves on the blood and gore, her body garlanded with her guts,
she lay there, moaning. No one brought her the help she needed. Her voice
gradually faded away. “Help me! He’s killing me!” From her bloodless vocal cords
came a hard metallic, grating sound. Until two in the morning, “Help me!” (12;
emphases added)

From this quote it is apparent that Lorsa Lopez’s crime is not merely a private atrocity
but a communal one. The notion of collective responsibility for Estina Benta’s murder is
signified by the location of the victim’s remains at the town square. By placing her dying
body in the center of the town, the narrator seems to make the town accessible to her
death throes. Since she is ignored at the moment of dire need, the city’s culpability in this
crime is as heinous as the murder itself. The people’s vicarious participation in the
murder is reinforced by graphic displays of filth and disgust and especially what Kristeva
calls “defilement,” the basic components in the rhetoric of horror. When the narrator
states, “[n]o one brought her the help she needed,” it is clear that the people have the
agency to intervene in the murder but decide to abstain from action. However, this
argument can be reversed: the state of horror in Valancia is so overwhelming that
everyone is incapacitated. In this case, the people’s passivity merely expresses the extent
to which the corporate institutions of power have dominated them to the point that rather
than being participants in the crime, all are victims. It also signifies that Lorsa Lopez’s
murder of his wife and the women’s cruel butchering of Elmano Zola are manifestations
of violence previously sanctioned and maintained by the dominant group. While this

argument may be operative in Seven Solitudes, it definitely is not the only possible

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interpretation of these killings. Both the dominant and dominated groups are agents of the
violence through which the novel achieves its discourse of horror. This sense of the
horror is reinforced by the marvelous impulse of the passage; that is, a chopped human
body, already disemboweled, continues to plead for help through its marvelous agony. By
giving this body the capacity to yell after it had been mutilated, the cruelty of her death
becomes accentuated because her agony is not lost on the reader. More important, the
speaking dead fits the marvelous temper of the novel so that in death, Estina Benta
paradoxically gives voice to the voiceless.
In order to show that the people are as liable as the administration in N sanga-Norda,
one should examine another episode from the text. This example concerns the occasion
when law enforcement officials visit Valancia to determine whether Estina Benta’s
remains should be buried or not. The description of the government representative who
visits Valancia because of the murder is frightening and ominous for what is to happen
shortly:
This was the first time we’d heard that voice in Valancia, the deep voice of
Carlanzo Mana, issuing with some difficulty from a mouth buried in hair over six
feet from the ground, from the centre of the face of a wild creature. It sounded like
the voice of death. The hairs that devoured Carlanzo Mana’s face were of abnormal
size and length. His protruding forehead forced his dark glasses back into the
enormous depression of his eyes. This man introduced himself to the crowd in
these terms: “Carlanzo Mana from the Ministry of the Interior.” (50)

The narrator’s description of Carlanzo Mana borders on physical attributes of a monster.

His monstrous hair, the deep depression in his face, his appearance resembling a wild

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creature and his voice of death, already spell doom for the people of Valancia. His
description corresponds to that of the “Dewild” (or Agbako) from D. O. Fagunwa and
Wole Soyinka’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1968), a ghommid with terrifying
personality. To worsen the case for Valancians, he holds executive authority that the
people despise but cannot confront. For the minister of the Interior who is also the
representative of the government at Nsanga-Norda to visit Valancia, it is clear to the
people that the government is actually a monster preying on its own people. Despite
Carlanzo Mana’s intimidating and dreadful description, one of the people present at the
town square, Salmano Ruenta openly despises corporate travesty that Carlanzo Mana
displays. The narrator says:
Carlanzo Giraffe, as the crowd were already calling him, took off his glasses. His
eyes were strangely bloodshot. His mulatto’s forehead took on the grey hue of a
fresh corpse. The same colour spread to his neck, and a stream of blue snot began
to run down from his left nostril. The man caught the snot with his tongue. This
clumsy child’s gesture made us all smile, but Salmano Ruenta exploded into a howl
of manic laughter that made everyone freeze. (51)
If we again subscribe to Kristeva’s notion of horror as filth that is expelled from the
body, Carlanzo Mana is an epitome of such horror, as seen in the snot coming from his
nostril. But the main attribute that qualifies him as Kristeva’s candidate for horror is his
association with a corpse. A corpse, according to Kristeva, is the ultimate form of
abjection. Although Seven Solitudes may not be the quintessential horror novel, Carlanzo
Mana’s description conforms to Kristeva’s formulation of the concept. Carlanzo Mana

lives true to his portrayal and kills Salmano Ruenta:

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Tears were pouring down his face. His forehead was creased into two wide
furrows. Carlanzo Mana leapt upon him and began to throttle the laughing man
with his iron grip. We saw Salmano Ruenta struggling for air, just a little air for his
lungs. But Carlanzo Mana squeezed ever tighter. The silent crowd began to cross
themselves, then we heard a bone crack. The laughing man's tongue protruded
further and further out of his mouth as he gasped for air. We heard another bone
crack. Then a drop of fresh blood could be seen on his tongue, and the crowd
crossed themselves with a sigh. “Oh, God! How terrible! He's killed him.” (51)
Now if the murder of Estina Benta takes place in the night and one assumes that the
people could not venture out because of the dangers of the night, the same cannot be said
of the murder of Salmano Ruenta, which takes place right in broad daylight. Rather than
intervene to save Salmano Ruenta’s life, the people simply watch him die in the hands of
the maniacal Carlanzo Mana. When they say, “Oh God! How terrible! He’s killed him,”
1 they are not only lamenting Salmano Ruenta’s demise, but also establishing their
involvement in his death. According to Mbembe, this instance of “mortification of the
flesh, the torment and torture and beatings that drive the native to loose great inhuman
cries, the trembling that overtakes the native faced with soldiery, the shaking and raw
expressions of horror and terror” (Mbembe, On the Postcolony 167), can help capture the
ruthlessness with which Carlanzo Mana murders Salmano Ruenta. Sony Labou Tansi
seems to question the people’s reluctance to mitigate the horror of their own postcolony,
Valancia. Therefore, the men who commit these atrocities on women, the manic
government officials to whom the people are a mere quarry, the women who deploy the

same violent methods of the patriarchal order and the men and women who simply watch

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the commission of these atrocious crimes are all implicated in the regime of violence that
now engulfs Valancia. This violence takes on a supernatural dimension when the dead
develops the power of speech; Carlanzo Mana’s ruthlessness also characterizes a
nightmare while the people’s apathy becomes so exaggerated that it becomes unreal.

In Seven Solitudes, the reign of terror overwhelms Valancia when Carlanzo Mana
declares that he would kill Estina Bronzario. It thus appears that the women’s
participation in the rule of terror is short-lived. Two events can partly explain the
women’s subjection: one is Samgata Nola’s repression of women by reducing them to
mere objects of male sexual desire. It should be acknowledged that Samgata Nola
operates differently from Lorsa Lopez and Carlanzo Mana, but the end result of his act is
the repression of his many wives and by extension, the women of Valancia. The
objectification and oppression of women are not limited to the violence unleashed on
them by the political institution and patriarchal system, but also involve the roles they
have been assigned in the social space by men. One of the first instances in which women
are described is through Samgata Nola, a performer whose several wives he forces into
perforrrring for men’s sexual gratification. The narrator tells us:

Samgata Nola's women were beautiful beyond all imagining, and they danced the
rumpus with consummate art. They were called the “daughters of the devil”
because of the salaciousness and earthiness of their boneless hips, which spat fire
and made men sigh with desire. And since, at the time, Estina Bronzario's sexual
curfew was in full swing, the dancers gave the men the opportunity to shoot their
load in secret without any hassle. (32)

One cannot deny women’s objectification, but by foregrounding the sexual idiom, this

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novel creates a sort of fantastic landscape where it becomes possible to transgress societal
inhibitions particularly in the realm of language. It is for this reason that sexual
references abound in the novel, although more importantly, the women’s reaction and
resistance to male authority also function within the fantastic register. For example, it is
understandable that a woman can refuse sex within the domestic space, but by situating
this act within public space the novel takes us onto a marvelous world of infinite
possibilities. When Estina Bronzario confronts Samgata Nola about his wives, subjected
to a life of itinerant dancers, he replies to Estina Bronzario that his wives are free, though
the ludicrousness of his response could be more appalling:
Stop being such a bloody fool, Estina Bronzario. My wives are free. . . . You
know Valtano. You know N sanga-Norda. You know the Seven Solitudes in the
rue de Nesa. I took them away from there, away from the disease, the hunger and
the shame, because, I can't bear the sight of women fucking for cash. I showed
them how to make their cunts a cathedral, a holy of holies, the summit of heaven
and earth. For the vagina, Estina Bronzario, isn't a Coca-Cola can or minced meat:
it's the road all people must take to freedom, honour and dignity. The vagina,
Estina Bronzario, isn't a come-rag. . . . I freed them from all the "that's what
women are for" filth. I gave them a heart, a soul, a purpose. Thanks to me, they
know now that the penis isn't an instrument of terror, a see-saw, or a juice-
shooter, but our third eye. If you want them to be free to pass on lice and disease,
you'll have to wait until I'm dead. (38)
On first glance at the quote it would appear that Samgata Nola is interested in women’s

freedom but his interest lies in exploiting them and his exploitation of them is no less

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violent than mutilating their bodies. While it may be true that Samgata Nola rescues his
wives from a life of prostitution, it is also true that he has put them under a different
thralldom in which, though free from prostitution, are inevitably condemned to serving
his own economic whim. This is a new kind of slavery and a different form of oppression
in which the absence of prostitution provides the illusion of freedom. The difference
between the previous life of prostitution and the life of erotic dancing is not so clear
because the patronage of his performance depends largely on the seductiveness and the
erotic movements of these women. In the present regime, they are brought directly under
the male gaze where their objectification as sex symbols is total. The women have only
moved from one oppressive situation to another and the assertion that Samgata Nola
makes that his wives are free cannot be further from the truth. They are still objects of
male desire and they are not freer than when they allegedly were prostitutes. Instead of
freeing them, he has re-inscribed them within the patriarchal repressive system. But
Samgata Nola’s representation cannot be explained exclusively in terms of oppression;
the women’s portrayal as social spectacle functions also in two fundamental ways. The
first has to do with their “performance” of prostitution and their erotic dances which must
be understood in terms of the carnival, through which social taboos of sexuality are
mimicked and destabilized. In other words, the carnival-like performance of the women
functions as transgression of social norms about sexuality especially if this interpretation
is predicated on the women’s act and not Samgata Nola’s discourse women’s liberation.
The second point, which is a corollary of the first, is that the open mention of sexuality
signifies the destabilization of the symbolic order, which is why we cannot interpret the

women’s performance as a normalization of heterosexual imaginary. The narrator’s

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indiscriminate use of sexual references shatters the demand for social decorum and
reinforces the women’s subversion of sexual norms; the fact that Valancia is a marvelous
setting already repudiates the official language, supplanted by the carnivalesque.

Not even Samgata Nola can escape the brutal force of the dominant political group
located in Nsanga-Norda despite the authority that he wields over his wives. Carlanzo
Mana announces his determination to murder Samgata Nola and Estina Bronzario. The
entry of Carlanzo Mana into the crisis in Valancia signifies government’s intervention in
a situation marked by unending chaos. Unfortunately, the government’s participation
functions specifically to escalate the chaos and not to mitigate it. Therefore, women’s
original move to stem the tide of male violent rule over Valancia ends up being no more
than a “storm in a tea cup.” Carlanzo Mana becomes the major threat that beleaguers the
town even though everyone, as seen above, is guilty of exacerbating the violent situation.
The frightening part of this crisis is that the people’s inability to resist Carlanzo Mana’s
threats gradually turns to accepting his power as inevitable; this implies that the
tremendous cruel and brutal power he holds over Valancia is normalized. In relation to
the threat to murder Estina Bronzario, the narrator says, “[a]t the time, the people of the
Coast called Estina Bronzario 'the Lady of Bronze', or 'the Mucandi', that is, she who will
be killed. We didn't know if they were going to kill her before or after Samgata Nola, but
no one in Valancia was in any doubt that Estina Bronzario would be killed. Perhaps one
morning, under the loutish midday sun? Or one night? We had no idea. Lorsa Lopez had
barked one evening that she would be killed down by the bayou” (67).

This passage accentuates the argument that while the inhabitants of Valancia are

victims of state-ordered attacks, they are vicarious participants in this reign of terror.

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They are aware of the impending terror on Valancia and are nonchalant about it; they
simply acknowledge and accept its inevitability which, rather than inspiring a
confrontation with Carlanzo Mana and his invisible killer squad, they end up normalizing
this imminent doom looming over Valancia. We should acknowledge, however, that
corporate violence and patriarchal force seem to complement each other. That Lorsa
Lopez could predict the time and place of Estina Bronzario’s death indicates either he is
privy to the information or that the tendency to murder has become so instinctive that he
easily predicts the condition of Estina Bronzario’s murder. And just as he predicts, Estina
Bronzario is murdered accordingly. The narrator observes, “we heard someone shouting
and we all turned round to face the direction of Nsanga-Norda. We saw Fartamio Andra
coming from the bayou. . . . She was shouting . . . 'Estina Bronzario's been killed! What a
disaster!’ As at the time of Estina Benta's murder, everyone crossed themselves as
Fartamio Andra passed. 'God! What a disaster! They've killed her!‘ (98) By shouting
“Estina Bronzario's been killed! What a disaster!‘ . . . They've killed her!” the people are
mourning the loss of Estina Bronzario but more importantly, they are declaring their
complicity in her death without knowing it. Their reaction is consistent with the general
reactionary attitude towards organized and personalized form of violence. At the end of
the novel, when no one knows exactly if Carlanzo Mana is actually the one responsible
for Estina Bronzario’s murder, political terror assumes its marvelous dimension
mentioned earlier; that is, the ability to traverse space and being able to enter and exit
Valancia while the inhabitants of Valancia are unable to escape the claustrophobia of
their town. The anonymity of Estina Bronzario’s murderer is a phenomenon that

completes the marvelous capacity of the political power located in Nsanga-Norda. It is

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probably because of this overwhelming supernatural power of the state that intervention
in this nightmare (the storm and flood that eventually destroys Nsanga-Norda, promising
the people of Valancia a new beginning and a possible end to their nightmare) is
portrayed with the tropes of the marvelous.

Seven Solitudes is a text that has made it possible to capture the sense of horror that
characterizes the post-independent Congos, and the tyrannical power of the political
machinery located at Nsanga-Norda may also speak to Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire.
Whether the then Zaire or Congo Brazzaville are immediate referents of Seven Solitudes
or not, the condition of horror resonates with many West African and Central African
nation-states particularly in the 19805 when military dictatorship ravaged many African
countries. More specifically, though Mobutu Sese Seko might have ruled the then Zaire,
his repressive force and authoritarianism haunted the two Congos and other neighboring
countries, which is why the claustrophobic condition of Valancia, the violent deaths of its
inhabitants especially Estina Benta, Elmano Zola and Estina Bronzario, and the graphic
description of these murders evince the suitability of horror to Seven Solitudes. However,
examining the novel from the perspective of horror is not without fundamental problems
that must be acknowledged. If the basis for horror consists in the graphic display of guts,
blood, snot, and if it appeals to our sense of fear, disgust and terror, Seven Solitudes
definitely is comparable to classic horror fiction as in 18th century and nineteenth century
horror fiction, typical of the Gothic literature and fantasy literature of the nineteenth
century. Seven Solitudes must be seen, according to Moudileno’s emphasis on Sony
Labou Tansi’s fiction, as a text that is intertextual in nature because its formal properties

embrace not just the Gothic horror, but also science fiction (32). Others include elements

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of surrealism (as in human meat that is indistinguishable from animal flesh), magical
realism (like the tree by the coast with the ability to grow back its foliage as soon as it is
cut down), and the marvelous real (that manifests itself in the terror produced by
disproportionate power relations between dominant and dominated groups), and so on.
This last point features more conspicuously in the overall argument: that is, Seven
Solitudes self-consciously dramatizes the horror of a post-colonial African nation-state by
capturing the proliferation of violence not just by official agents of governmental power,
but also by individuals and groups. Horror in this novel definitely has many
manifestations which have already been mentioned and it is through them that the
nightmare of post-independence has been captured.

However, because Seven Solitudes possesses some of the cardinal elements of Gothic
literature, one have to ask if it also inherits its contradiction in terms of whether or not it
destabilizes official discourses of power including dominant discourses of fiction. The
fact that fantasy literature and Gothic fiction usually occupy the margins of Western
social and political discourse tends to confine the disruption caused by intruding
supernatural agents within isolated contexts, thereby legitimating and consolidating the
values and hegemony of bourgeois culture. Paris in her discussion of the relation between
magical realism and Gothic fiction suggests:

Unlike Gothic fictional dwellings, magical realist houses do not isolate their magic
but instead provide focal points for its dispersal. They are openings from which it
spreads into the world around it and receivers through which it welcomes cosmic
forces, which may either terrorize before ultimately refreshing it. . . . But most

important for women's narratives, the domestic sphere in these magically real

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houses is usually not closed in on itself in isolation but opened outward into

communal and cosmic life, as proven by the ghosts from other times and places

that wander through some of them. (182)
Faris contends further saying, “the fantastic has played a defensive role, validating the
status quo, modifying ‘hegemonic discourse in order to justify the survival of bourgeois
society.’ It did this by locating unreason in confined spaces where it represented the
cultural metaphor of marginality. Some of magical realism perpetuates this trope,
particularly, as in Gothic fiction, in the phenomenon of the haunted house . . .” (160).
Bloom seems to corroborate this argument when he states that “the malevolent spirit or
hellbound demon, . . . reassure[s] and affirm[s] values even as they terrorize us” (162).
Despite the potential reactionary bent of horror, one must also acknowledge, as Donna
Heiland contends, that horror trans gresses dominant and oppressive discourses so that at
best, horror is ambivalent towards established structures of power (4). Meanwhile, Seven
Solitudes thematizes a peculiar form of horror through which it mimics, deconstructs and
lampoons the arbitrary, yet excessive deployment of violence by dominant and unofficial
units of power. Seven Solitudes may share the elements and contradictions of horror, but
one thing is sure, it is not ambitious or overly optimistic about restoring of order and
tranquility which is central and indispensable to Gothic fiction and fantasy literature. At
the end of the novel Estina Bronzario is murdered while the fact that the people are
unable to determine the perpetrator implies that all of them are in danger. Order,
tranquility and reassurance, are far from Valancia; they are far from the postcolonial

world of Seven Solitudes.

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Chapter 3: Representing the Unrepresentable
Several voices shouted at the same time:
"Get down! Get down ! "

The people in front had already done so, swept down by the wave of bullets. The
survivors, instead of getting down, tried to go back to the small square, and the
panic became a dragon's tail as one compact wave ran against another which was
moving in the opposite direction, toward the other dragon's tail in the street across
the way, where the machine guns were also firing without cease. They were penned
in, swirling about in a gigantic whirlwind that little by little was being reduced to
its epicenter as the edges were systematically being cut off all around like an onion
being peeled by the insatiable and methodical shears of the machine guns.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (329)

One of the significant moments in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude is the historic strike conducted by the workers of the Banana Company. The
strike takes place because the workers, particularly J 036 Arcadio Segundo, decides to
protest the company exploitative practices and their main demand is that they “they not
be obliged to cut and load bananas on Sundays” (Solitude 319). Miraculously, José
Arcadio Segundo is the sole survivor of this massacre; what follows is the battle over
which version of the event will be accepted. This implies that J 036 Arcadio Segundo’s
version of one of the most ruthless massacres in the history of Macondo struggles against
the official version. For the despotic government of Macondo, the massacre did not take
place. Yet, Jose’ Arcadio Segundo’s experience of the massacre is gruesome and that the

event occurred cannot be denied.

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There are two problems that the survivor faces right away. The first is that he is
automatically launched onto the plain field of the production of historical knowledge,
which means he has to account for the event and cannot rely simply on the fact that the
massacre takes place. In essence, he has to contend with the official version of the event
as the government denies the event altogether. It is not surprising that the people of
Macondo merely adopt the government’s report on the occurrence, even when their
family members are still missing or are dragged away from them. As the narrator
recounts, “[t]he official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the
country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally
accepted” (333).

The second problem has to do with José Arcadio Segundo’s rendition of the massacre;
that is, no one can deny the massacre as a factual event, but it is impossible to narrativize
it in order to reverse the amnesia that now plagues Macondo on the one hand, and on the
other, to refute the government’s claim that the massacre did not take place. To worsen
the case for him, J 036 Arcadio Segundo could not convince anyone that the event took
place despite his efforts to discuss with as many people as possible. The main challenge
he faces is to represent an event which is no longer representable; his inability to
convince the people of Macondo that the massacre took place or his failure to reverse the
official version of the tragedy is not entirely because of the government’s propaganda
machine or the people credulity. The issue that One Hundred Years of Solitude
foregrounds in the massacre and its account is the problem that is inherent in language on
the one hand and in memory on the other. In other words, in an attempt to “represent the

unrepresentable,” Jose’ Arcadio Segundo confronts two different, yet similar problems:

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the first has to do with what Paul Ricoeur describes as “the aporia of the representation of
an absent something that once happened” (135-36), while the second has to do with the
deferment of signification which implies that since the event has been lost in time and
space, it is beyond the reach of language to capture. In One Hundred Years of Solitude,
marvelous events are not totally dependent on endless trail of blood, the capacity for
humans to fly into the sky or humans growing a tail. The marvelous in this novel is
contingent upon the horror of history and the process of producing historical knowledge,
which, as has been seen from the above example, becomes problematic as soon as the
event enters into the symbolic order. Whether it is a specific historical moment like the
massacre or it has to do with the notion of reality, the role of language is to capture the
occurrence, but at the same time, one should be aware that language also fails to capture
the event.

This thematic concern in One Hundred Years of Solitude can also be found in Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight 's Children, a novel in which the problem of representing the horror
of reality, the horror of history and the originary beliefs through which the horrors are
justified, is foregrounded. Central to Midnight ’s Children are two violent events: the
State of Emergency that the then Indian Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi, declared in the
19703 and the bloodbath that characterized the nationalist war between India and
Pakistan, arising from the partitioning shortly after independence in 1947. Although
Midnight ’s Children cannot be reduced to the marvelous in the way that the marvelous
functions as underlying structure of One Hundred Years of Solitude, their similarity in
terms of depicting history and reality as horror, and their similarity in regard to the

limitation of language and memory in representing the past, is striking. The problem of

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representing the horror of the Emergency is immediately apparent when the protagonist
of the novel, Saleem Sinai declares, “[s]omewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic
slum, they had rrrislaid their powers of retention, so that now they had become incapable
of judgment, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything that
happened. Even the Emergency was rapidly being consigned to the oblivion of the past”
(Midnight ’3 Children 512). Here, Saleem Sinai confronts an audience similar to the one
in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which fails to believe that a tragic event has taken
place. In Rushdie’s novel, this population does not dispute the Emergency and the
unthinkable violence that characterizes it; the challenge that Saleem struggles with is that
this horrific event is already being overtaken by amnesia to the point that the Emergency
is already becoming a myth. The Indian government’s strategy is not unconnected to the
propaganda machine that the Colombian government employs in One Hundred Years of
Solitude. It is on account of this that Saleem tells states that “[t]oday, the papers are
talking about the supposed rebirth of Mrs. Indira Ghandi; but when I returned to India,
concealed in a wicker basket, ‘The Madam’ was basking in the fullness of her glory.
Today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious clouds of
amnesia” (443). The idea that the people are already forgetting the atrocities that Indira
Ghandi committed during the Emergency is shocking to Saleem; however, the fact that
Saleem is worried that collective memory of the Emergency is disappearing does not
imply that the novel records the event faithfully. Contrary to a faithful representation of
these atrocities, Midnight ’s Children thematizes the problematic nature of reality; that is,

the novel is an account of the war of partition and the horror of the Emergency, but it is

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also a testament to the limitation of language and memory in representing cataclysmic
events. In essence, Midnight ’s Children attempts to represent the unrepresentable.

Interestingly enough, this is not a problem new. neither to literature or critical theory,
nor specifically about the relationship of literature to reality. In the recent past, that is in
the last century this problem became central to modernism. Modernism, in challenging
the logic of modernity, that is, in its questioning of notions of order, meaning and
progress, rejects the notion of art as a reflection of reality. It is for this reason that one of
the major casualties of this modernist attack is the realist novel, specifically, its
assumption that art can represent reality “as it is.” The fact that the realist novel is
contingent on representing reality does not imply that its relationship to reality is
mimetic. Far from being mimetic, the relationship between the realist novel and reality is
one predicated on a doctrine of the real that aspires to capture reality in a graphic sense.
Modernist novels such as James Joyce’s Finnegan ’3 Wake (1939) and Virginia Woolf’ 3
Mrs Dalloway (1925) are a conscious attempt to challenge the notion of reflection of
reality that was so central to realism, which is why meaning and “the subject” are
fragmented in a way that resists realist pretension to wholeness and unity of space and
time.

The same fragmentation of meaning, indeterminacy of signification, instability of
space and time also constitute some of the cardinal characteristics of postmodernism.
However, the main difference between modemism’s disintegration of the subject and
meaning and postmodemism’s reflection of the same is that while modernism laments the
disappearance of wholeness and unity, postmodernism celebrates fragmentation and

plurality. Also, because modernism expresses a kind of anguish over the subject that no

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longer possesses a center, it still sympathizes with the loss of that unified subject and
aspires towards wholeness and unity even when such a dream is clearly unattainable.
Postmodernism has an ultimately decentering impulse through which hierarchical
structures of knowledge are destabilized. In A Poetics of Postmodemism: History,
Theory, Fiction, Hutcheon asserts:
Postmodern art . . . asserts and then deliberately undermines such principles as
value, order, meaning, control and identity . . . that have been the basic premises of
bourgeois liberalism. Those humanistic principles are still operative in our culture,
but for many they are no longer seen as eternal and unchallengeable. The
contradictions of both postmodern theory and practice are positioned within the
system and yet work to allow its premises to be seen as fictions or as ideological
structures. This does not necessarily destroy their “truth” value, but it does define
the conditions of that “truth.” Such a process reveals rather than conceals the tracks
of signifying systems that constitute our world — that is, systems constructed by us
in answer to our needs. ( 13)
There is no doubt that Rushdie’s Midnight ’s Children is an attempt to draw attention to
its signifying process in a way that fits Hutcheon's theory of postmodernism. It is no
coincidence that Hutcheon categorizes Midnight ’s Children in a group of literature she
calls “historiographic metafiction,” by which she implies, “those well-known and popular
novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to
historical events and personages” (5). But since these issues, that it, the fragmentation of
meaning in modernism and postmodernism’s deconstruction of grand narratives, are no

longer new, one should examine the relevance of this discussion to Rushdie’s Midnight’s

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Children. The key issue is the relation of the foregoing to postcolonial discourse; that is,
the notions of fragmentation of meaning and the problem of representing reality, which
are so germane to modernism and postmodernism. must be foregrounded. This is not to
say that there exists no link between postmodernism and postcolonialism, but one must
not assume that this link is absolute so as to avoid overgeneralizing about the relationship
of the two concepts; or, one may end up occluding the idiosyncratic perspectives of
postcolonial discourse. However, to examine how the postcolonial critical enterprise
challenges orthodoxy and “immutability” of meaning in relation to reality is not an
unproblematic exercise, especially since some texts that are considered postmodern also
pass for postcolonial. In this situation, any attempt to distinguish the postmodern from the
postcolonial runs the risk of fetishizing their assumed differences; conversely, to establish
their similarity is also to risk conflating them. For instance, Garcia Marquez’s One
Hundred of Solitude and Rushdie’s Midnight ’s Children are texts that are uniquely
postmodern primarily because of their unrelenting self-reflexivity and anti-mimetic
mode. They are also postcolonial in the sense that they undermine values of universality
and absolutism, which are cornerstones of imperialism during the colonial period or
despotism after the official termination of colonialism. The interesting thing is that these
two texts, in different ways, are also postcolonial based on the features which make them
postmodern. In other words, self—reflexivity, disintegration of meaning, the problem of
representing reality, which are quintessential elements of postmodernism, function within
postcolonial contexts to undermine not merely bourgeois values, but also manifestations
of hierarchical structures and forms of authority within postcolonial literature and

societies.

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Again, Hutcheon distinguishes postmodernism from postcolonial discourse by arguing
that “[w]hile it is true that post-colonial literature . . . is also inevitably implicated and . . .
‘informed by the imperial vision,’ . . . it still possesses a strong political motivation that is
intrinsic to its oppositionality. However, as can be seen by its recuperation (and rejection)
by both the Right and the Left, postmodernism is politically ambivalent: its critique
coexists with an equally powerful complicity with the cultural domination within which it
inescapably exists” (“Circling the Downspout of Empire” 130). Relying on Hutcheon,
Tiffin, During and Slemon, Fletcher corroborates Hutcheon’s assertion about postcolonial
literature being more politically motivated than postmodern literature (Reading Rushdie
6). Admittedly, the political concern of postcolonial literature cannot be denied, but it
will be misleading to conclude that it can be distinguished from postmodern literature
solely because of its political commitment. The “truth” of the matter is that as Rushdie’s
Midnight 's Children shows, the decentralizing impulse of the fiction, disintegration of
meaning and the fragmentation of the subject, are not always so easy to separate from the
political aim of the text because being skeptical of totalizations, they are already
implicated in a political agenda. More important is the fact that because Midnight ’s
Children, to some extent, tends towards the marvelous real, the problem of capturing
reality within an imperial context and post-independence dictatorships is already
foregrounded. The marvelous world of Midnight ’s Children is marked by an instability of
the sign, which implies that the symbolic order, though not to be escaped, is constantly
threatened precisely because of the fluidity of the marvelous universe, where “meaning”

is always relative and subject to endless possibilities.

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This skepticism toward immanent meaning and the representation of reality is an issue
that dominates Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and it manifests in Saleem’s discourse on
the nations, India and Pakistan; it manifests in Saleem’s contemplation of himself as a
subject and also surfaces whenever he discusses the status of his writing as history. All
these are legitimate angles to examine the text, but the focus here will be, specifically,
how Midnight’s Children attempts to “represent the unrepresentable.” Put differently, the
task at hand will be to interrogate how Rushdie’s text negotiates the problem of
representing reality. But the question of reality in Midnight’s Children is not simply a
concatenation of quotidian activities; the issue that is at stake in this novel has to do with
the reality of history and how it can be represented. This will include primarily events of
cataclysmic proportions in the novel, which are at the same time events of historical
significance to India as a nation.

However, one should also mention that investigating how Midnight ’s Children
attempts to represent the unrepresentable will turn on the general problem of
representation already central to the text. In other words, the challenge in capturing
horrific events is not an isolated one in the text, but is just one manifestation of the
problem of representation. It is for this reason that it is pertinent to make reference to
other parts of the text that may not directly concern these horrific events but which have
intertextual relations to one another. For instance, in the beginning of the novel Saleem
states “[a]nd there are so many stories to tell, too many, such all excess of intertwined
lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the
mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll

have to swallow the lot as well” (Midnight’s Children 4). In essence, the various thematic

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shifts in this novel are exclusive of one another but are interrelated just like the way in
which Saleem’s private life has been “handcuffed to history” (Midnight ’s Children 3).

However, to interpret the violence in Midnight ’s Children in terms of the novel’s
multiple narratives does not clarify the question of reality, or more specifically, of
representation. In other words, one still needs to understand how the novel gives an
account of its many violent moments resulting from the partition and the Emergency.
But, to claim that Midnight ’s Children represents the unrepresentable is a paradox
precisely because the narrator, Saleem, gives a description of carnage and terror and thus
would seem able to represent the unrepresentable. If Saleem can give a description of the
battlefield, littered with human bodies in grotesque forms, it appears that he could still
represent these violent events.

The fact that he could describe what he sees does not mean that the portrayal of the
events is entirely successful. This narrative operation is a complex one and it is pertinent
that one turns to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the relationship between what she calls “the
thetic” and “the semiotic” in Revolution in Poetic Language, in order to formulate a
model that can partly explain Saleem’s encounter with violence and carnage. Kristeva
describes the thetic as belonging to the realm of signification; that is, the thetic belongs in
the symbolic order and adds that the thetic is required for all forms of enunciation. She
explains:

[w]e shall distinguish the semiotic from the realm of signification, which is always
that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions. This
positionality . . . is structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the

identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality. We

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shall call this break, which produces the positing of signification, a thetic phase.

All enunciation, whether of a word or of a sentence, is thetic. (43)
It then follows that if all enunciation requires the thetic, it certainly applies to Midnight’s
Children. However, the thetic by itself does not explain the narrative of the novel
especially the one that concerns scenes of violence. The way the thetic is presented here
requires Kristeva to situate it within the language of psychoanalysis. She explains the
thetic as the concept that “permits the constitution of the symbolic with its vertical
stratification . . . and all the subsequent modalities of logico-semantic articulation. The
thetic originates in the ‘mirror stage’ . . . no signifying practice can be without it” (62).
Of course, the mirror stage is the point of recognition; but Jacques Lacan argues that it is
also the realm of the imaginary because this recognition is an illusion—rather than
recognition, it is misrecognition. 3 The psychoanalytic angle that Kristeva introduces has
to do mainly with the constitution of subjectivity, but it is intimately tied to the
functioning of language. That is, the way that a child perceives itself during the pre-
oedipal stage as whole, unified and spatially bound, is similar to the way an event is
represented and also similar to the way that objects and experiences function within the
symbolic order. Kristeva argues that “the mirror stage produces the ‘spatial intuition’
which is found at the heart of the functioning of signification. . . . [I]n order to capture his
image unified in the mirror, the child must remain separate from it, his body agitated by

the semantic motility” (46). The idea of reflection at the mirror stage resonates partially

 

3 Terry Eagleton elaborates on Lacanian psychoanalysis by suggesting that “[t]he image which the small

child sees in the mirror is [...] an ‘alienated’ one: the child ‘misrecognizes’ itself in it, finds in the image a
pleasing unity which it does not actually experience in its own body. The imaginary for Lacan is precisely
this realm of images in which we make identifications, but in the very act of doing so are led to misperceive
and misrecognize ourselves” (143).

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with the notion of art as reflection of reality, an idea that is fundamental to the operation
of realism. According to Kristeva, the kind of image the child desires to capture is a
unified one, which when applied to external reality translates to an entity that is graspable
as whole, coherent and unified. The thetic must be viewed as subjective positioning,
which constitutes a break in the signifying process. This thetic break, according to
Gutkin, creates a “barrier between the semiotic and the signifying process” 4 and this
barrier “is constantly being renegotiated” (10). Similarly, Oliver elaborates on the thetic
break by arguing that “[t]he threshold of the symbolic is what Kristeva calls the ‘thetic’
phase, which emerges out of the mirror stage” (2). Oliver explains further that the relation
between the semiotic and the symbolic must be seen as a dialectic oscillation; it is a
process through which subjective positions are formulated but also challenged by the
intervention of the semiotic. Ultimately, this oscillation makes possible the intrusion of
the semiotic in order to destabilize the symbolic order (2). This means that by extension,
if one applies the thetic by itself to the novel, it would speak directly to the
representational logic of realism. After all, the child who “recognizes” itself, though to a
large extent unaware of it, is simply constructing an idea of itself; basically, the child is
trying to represent itself.

Meanwhile, to appreciate how the thetic might help to grapple with Midnight ’3
Children, one must place it side by side with the semiotic. Kristeva says of the semiotic,
“[t]hough absolutely necessary, the thetic is not exclusive: the semiotic . . . constantly

tears it open, and this transgression brings about all the various transformations of the

 

4 For Kristeva, “the semiotic” constitutes the force that always threatens “the thetic” by disturbing the

stability of signs. However, the semiotic does not just disturb the symbolic order, but it tries to destroy it:
but because the thetic always constitutes and reconstitutes the sign, the semiotic cannot destroy the thetic
entirely. Their relation provides the basis for the functioning of language.

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9”

signifying practice that are called ‘creation (62). From this notion of the semiotic, it is
clear that the relationship between the thetic and the semiotic is both antagonistic and
complementary in the sense that the thetic homogenizes and totalizes while the semiotic
transgresses. It is this transgressive function of the semiotic that Kristeva implies when
she says, “a text, in order to hold together as a text, did . . . require a completion, . . . a
structuration, a kind of totalization” (51), precisely because it is this totalized
representation that the semiotic destabilizes and through which the symbolic order is
disturbed. The semiotic, for which Kristeva sometimes substitutes textual experience or
practice, performs a destructive role in the sense that it destroys the basis of social
representation within the context of the thetic. This combative relationship between the
thetic and the semiotic can be explained further in the passage below where the
foundationalist tendency of the thetic is juxtaposed with the transgressive attribute of the
semiotic:
The thetic—that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes
himself as signifying and/or social—is the very place textual experience aims
toward. In this sense, textual experience is one of the most daring explorations the
subject can allow himself, one that delves into his constitutive process. But at the
same time as a result, textual experience reaches the very foundation of the
social—that which is exploited by sociality but which elaborates and go beyond it,
either destroying or transforming it. (67)
It should be stated that the functioning of the thetic and the semiotic refers directly to the

signifying process and nowhere does Kristeva make reference to scenes of violence,

which is why her theory of representation should not be confused with theory of violence.

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But her notion of the signifying process certainly provides a model, not only for
representing the carnage in Midnight ’s Children, but also all forms of representation
which must include the constitution of identity or representation of reality. But more
importantly, the semiotic disturbs the representability of reality by destroying the
foundation of the thetic and consequently, it destroys reality as a coherent and unified
entity.

This model differs from that of Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. For Lyotard, realism is synonymous with horror and terror and that is why
towards the end of his text he argues that one must do away with realism and embrace the
language of the avant-garde. Realism, he believes assumes that reality is representable
whereas, it is unrepresentable, which is why he cites Kant’s idea of the sublime, the
inability of the senses to grasp infinite beauty, an idea that Lyotard appropriates for his
skepticism of realism. Lyotard argues further:

it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to
the conceivable which cannot be presented. And it is not to be expected that this
task will effect the last reconciliation between language games . . . and that only the
transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them into a real unity.
But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. The
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We
have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the
reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the
communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for

appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the

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realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on

totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable. (81-82)
This quote, to some extent, resonates with the reality of Midnight’s Children specifically
because the partition of Pakistan and India was a way of establishing identity and
effectively totalizing identity. But the consequence of the partition is the bloodbath,
which becomes one of the major subjects of the second half of Midnight ’s Children, and
Rushdie alludes to it at the beginning of Shame, where refugees from both sides endure
the anguish of the partition. Because realism tends to totalize experience, the danger of
unifying or totalizing experience is hinted at in the above passage when Lyotard refers,
though vaguely, to the tragedies of twentieth century like the carnage of the First and
Second World Wars, and the genocide committed against Jews based on Hitler’s illusion
of ethnic or racial superiority. When he says, “[t]he nineteenth and twentieth centuries
have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the
nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible,
of the transparent and the communicable experience” (81-2), it is clear that one can only
be “witnesses to the unpresentable” (82). There is no doubt that one is supposed to
renounce totalization; while it makes sense to do so and to embrace what Lyotard, in his
criticism of certain unmentioned critics, calls “avant-gardes [“spread a reign of terror”] in
the use of language” (71 ), totalization seems to be repudiated fully. Although Jameson
alleges in Postmodemism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that Lyotard
formulated his notion of postmodernism more in terms of the social than the aesthetic, he
agrees that Lyotard’s “analyses turn on the antirepresentational thrust of modernism and

postmodernism” (60). However, in order to grapple with the place that violence and

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bloodbath takes in Midnight ’s Children, one cannot avoid reproducing totalized
representation precisely because it constitutes a fundamental part of the signifying
process as seen in the relationship of the thetic and the semiotic; the novel itself
reproduces this totalized representation not so much as to validate it but to highlight its
limitations. Therefore, the approach to Midnight’s Children will reflect not only how it
epitomizes the impossibility of representing reality, but also how totalized representation

is invoked and reproduced, but more importantly how it is undermined.

Midnight ’s Children: Towards Representing the Unrepresentable

Salman Rushdie’s works have received much critical attention especially on issues of
migrancy and history; critics have also focused on his texts’ self-referentiality. For
instance, Hassumani in her book, Salmon Rushdie: A Postmodem Reading of His Major
Works, stresses the “enabling power of hybridity” in Midnight ’3 Children” (31). Cundy in
Salman Rushdie argues that Rushdie’s texts are an attempt to reclaim the past,
emphasizing how reclaiming the past is “subject to vagaries of memory on which its
reconstruction relies” (33). Kortenaar observes in Self, Notion, Text in Salman Rushdie ’s
Midnight ’3 Children that Rushdie’s skepticism about the nationalism is juxtaposed with
the inevitable oscillation between nationalism and cosmopolitanism (10). In Salman
Rushdie: Fictions and Postcolonial Modernity, Morton suggests that Midnight ’s Children
explores the relationship between terror and freedom as the condition of postcolonial
modernity (34). Morton also highlights the connection between the partition and
violence, especially the displacement of India’s Muslim population (13). Most of these
critics offer valid observations of Rushdie’s works and particularly, Midnight’s Children;

and while others, like Morton, identify the centrality of violence in the novel, the

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question of how this violence is represented is still an issue. That is, one cannot deny the
tragic consequences of the partition in Midnight ’s Children, but it is equally important to
explore how the bloodbath that features prominently in the second half of the book is
represented}

One of the ways in which Midnight 's Children attempts to undermine the discourse of
nationalism is the role Rushdie ascribes to Saleem. One finds Saleem, who is born an
Indian but is forced to fight in post-partition period, on Pakistani soil. The fact that he is
caught between the two national sides emphasizes the ambivalence of national
consciousness and it underscores the triviality of expressing such patriotic sentiments,
although the monumental scale of violence cannot be considered trivial at all. Located
between India and Pakistan (although Saleem prefers India to Pakistan because India for
him is hybrid and culturally fluid while Pakistan is repressive), Saleem becomes a
witness to mindless atrocities following the partition and Indira Ghandi’s reign of terror.
It is crucial for to examine his experience on his return to India after his conscription into
the Pakistani army. Saleem describes a scene of battle as follows:

There was a small pyramid in the middle of the field. Ants were crawling over it,
but it was not an anthill. The pyramid had six feet and three heads and in between,
a jumbled area composed of bits of torso, scraps of uniforms, lengths of intestine
and glimpses of shattered bones. The pyramid was still alive. One of its three heads
had a blind eye, the legacy of a childhood argument. Another had hair that was
thickly plastered down with hair oil. The third head was the oldest: it had deep
hollows where the temples should have been, hollows that could have been made

by a gynecologist’s forceps which had held it too tightly at birth. (429)

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This is an extremely disturbing scene for Saleem and for the reader because on Saleem’s
return to India he has to make sense of the aftermath of the partition, which involves
confronting this scene of battle. More importantly, he has just witnessed an extermination
of his friends, those he fondly calls “the midnight’s children.” With a close examination
of the above passage, it is clear that it is not a quintessentially marvelous or magical
realist narrative; but it does not follow that Midnight ’s Children is self-consciously
complicit with the realist mode of representation. Even though the novel does not
valorize realism, it cannot escape it precisely because the marvelous real and magical
realism are contingent on juxtaposing realist and supernatural events. In fact, for the
narrative of Midnight ’s Children to remain magical realist or marvelous, it must function
simultaneously within both realist and supernatural modes or else it would soar into the
realm of fantasy. The significance of highlighting this realist aspect of Midnight 's
Children lies in the centrality of Kristeva’s notion of “the thetic,” which is fundamental
to all signifying systems. Just as “the thetic” in Kristeva’s formulation always sets up the
position of the subject, and “the semiotic” always disrupts the symbolic order, Midnight's
Children self-consciously undermines the status of the realist narrative through the
introduction of the marvelous dimension on the one hand, and historiographic metafiction
on the other.

Midnight ’s Children foregrounds realist narrative and disrupts it in the passage below
in which Saleem and his friends from Pakistan (Ayooba, Shaheed and Farooq) enter into
the squalid part of the town, bearing witness to the devastation that result from the battle

between India and Pakistan:

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I returned to that city in which . . . Shaheed and I saw many things which were not
true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved
so badly; we saw men in spectacles with beads like eggs being shot in the streets,
we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not
true because it could not have been true, . . . we moved through the impossible
hallucination of the night, . . . there were slit throats being buried in unmarked
grave. (432)
Just as in the previous passage, Saleem recounts their encounter with horrific scenes of
violence but the main difference between the two is that in this second one, he
emphasizes their immediate perception of these atrocities. Both witness scenes of
carnage where the battle has been concluded and those in which the killings are still
going on. Shaheed’s reaction to this horror launches the narrative onto the marvelous
plane precisely because what they witness becomes an impossible experience. It is
crucial to understand that from the points of view of the two parties, the carnage is not
only understandable, it is a logical consequence of their beliefs in maintaining their
borders. In their perception and beliefs about the war and its tragic consequences one
finds out that the thetic is operative precisely because it pertains directly to their
positioning, which is necessary for signification. But one must also realize that their
positioning—the thetic—is inadequate to provide 0 frame that would enable them to
comprehend their experience, which is why “the unrepresentable” and Saleem’s self-
reflexivity almost always disrupt this individual positioning. In addition, the marvelous
dimension of this passage is not contingent on the perspectives of the Indian and

Pakistani fighters and administrators for whom the war and killings are necessary

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governmental policy. For the government and the soldiers, the killings have logical
explanation. However, if one examines Shaheed’s reaction-- “No, Buddha—what a
thing, Allah, you can’t believe your eyes—no, not true, how can it—buddha, tell, what’s
got into my eyes?” (432)-- we would notice that the events and scenes which Saleem
describes above make no logical sense for Shaheed, and he is unable to provide a rational
explanation for what he sees. More importantly, the certainty of Saleem’s narrative is '
questioned when placed side by side with Shaheed’s who is unable to believe what he
sees. Shaheed’s response also problematizes Saleem’s temporary reliance on optical
perception, because in his version of the events, expressions such as “Shaheed and I
saw,” “we saw men in spectacles” and “we saw the intelligentsia of the city,” underscore
Saleem’s dependence on his sense of sight, an indication that he is to some extent
operating within realism. However, the fact that he says, “we moved through the
impossible hallucination,” tells one that the marvelous dimension of this passage is
realized by both Shaheed’s and Saleem’s perception of the events. In comparison to
Saleem’s partial dependence on the sense of sight, Shaheed does not display the kind of
certainty found in Saleem’s narrative especially when Shaheed asks the question,
“what’s got into my eyes?” It is the illogicality of these experiences to both Shaheed and
Saleem that gives the scenes their marvelous temperament, following Carpentier’s
explanation that the marvelous does not have to be invented through a dependence on
fantasy but can be realized through an exploration of irrational and illogical tendency of
history. When Carpentier says,

There are still too many "adolescents who find pleasure in raping the fresh

cadavers of beautiful, dead women" . . . who do not take into account that it would

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be more marvelous to rape them alive. The problem here is that many of them
disguise themselves cheaply as magicians, forgetting that the marvelous begins to
be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality,
. . . from . . . an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected
richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality,
perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads
it to a kind of extreme state. (86)
his definition of the marvelous resonates with the implacable horror that Shaheed and
Saleem witness, emphasizing the fact that history produces the marvelous through a
representation of these horrific experiences. It is pertinent though, that one observes how
the marvelous interrupts and destabilizes the realist narrative through which the scenes of
horror are presented. The marvelous displaces the realist discourse and thereby, calls into
question the certainty of “the fact” since privileging empirical fact is one of the
fundamental basis of realism. By dismantling or at least challenging “the factuality” of
violence, the marvelous narrative of Midnight’s Children disrupts the very “truth” of
experiential discourse that is germane to narratives or realist orientation. In another
context, Kristeva argues, “[m]agic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and
‘incomprehensible’ poetry all underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest
to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative
structures” (Revolution 16). One can conclude that the role that the narrativization of
violence, and its marvelous bent, plays in Midnight’s Children is to break the normative
value of facticity thereby exposing the process through which the narrative is constructed

rather than masking this process through the illusion of realism.

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The signifying process is foregrounded further when in the same episode Saleem
responds to Shaheed experience of terror:
"0, Shaheeda," he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, "a person must
sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away
from there now." But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were
being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before they were shot.
Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly
down upon the scene. (432)
By stating that “a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not”
and by telling Shaheed to “look away,” they both face the reality of describing their
experience; Saleem and readers understand the horrifying effects of witnessing a
bloodbath and it is clear that it can be so shocking that, as Saleem advises Shaheed, one
sometimes would have to look away primarily because the traumatic gravity of the event
undermines the character’s ability to come to terms with it, and also because the trauma
destabilizes the thetic—the character’s positioning regarding the war. Shaheed’s reaction
is enough to conclude that it is the shocking effect of the killings which underlies
Saleem’s advice to Shaheed to look away. This is a classic moment at which what they
perceive fails to be adequately represented because it is an experience that stretches the
limits of the subjective perspective on the real and the epistemological perspective of the
real. These killings represent an “alteration of reality,” which “leads to an extreme state”
that Carpentier speaks about in his theory of the marvelous; it also constitutes the

moment that language fails, thereby disrupting the normalization of the sign.

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Another problem arises from the passage above: one does not have a choice but to
question the whole narrative of Midnight ’s Children. Since Saleem advocates that one
has to choose what one sees, it is safe to assume that this is a strategy that he practices in
order to mediate the traumatic effects of violence. Saleem does not hide the fact that he
chooses aspects of experiences he would rather see because he seems to be addressing the
readers or himself when he talks to Shaheed—he is aware that “Shaheed could not hear”
(432). Such a moment of self-reflexivity evinces the difficulty in representing a shocking
experience such as Saleem and Shaheed witness; one is aware that the story (or stories) of
this novel should not be considered “whole,” “unified,” or “total” precisely because the
narrator has warned the readers not to expect a total story. It is a story with a lot of “its
parts missing,” since the narrator himself has decided to choose objects he observes. But
such a move raises another concern: both realist and all anti-realist writings involve
authorial choice, and if this is so the difference between a realist novel and a marvelous
one in terms of representability of reality becomes crucial. Because the realist novel,
according to Belsey in Critical Practice, has to create the illusion of reality, the reader is
most certainly “sutured” into the narrative since the story would not draw attention to its
constructivity. However, in a marvelous story like Rushdie’s Midnight 's Children,
Saleem constantly refers to his process of writing through which he emphasizes the
discursivity of the novel. Gurnah argues:

Saleem’s narration repeatedly refuses a linear narrative, anticipating, delaying, at
times unable to resist blurting out the significance of an event to a future outcome,
at other times appearing to struggle with admissions. Part of this is to do with the

retrospective nature of the narrative, so that the meaning and significance of what

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is narrated is already known to the narrator, and the drama is created as much by

withholding as by revealing. Linear narrative in these circumstances will lie. (97)
Gurnah is right to focus on the novel’s self-reflexivity and how the retrospective manner
of the story would emphasize the text’s discursive process. He seems to have stretched
his argument a bit too far by asserting that in such cases linear narrative will “lie.” What
is at stake is not whether the narrative lies or not; the fact that linear narrative conceals its
process of construction does not imply that it ultimately lies. That all literature involves
making choices means that they all “lie.” At the moment that Saleem tells us that one has
to ignore certain realities for others, the fundamental issue is that certain experiences are
too shocking for the senses to register their significance because events of horrific
dimensions tend to develop a marvelous reality in Midnight ’s Children.

To clarify this point, one has to understand the circumstances that influence the
writing of the novel, and if one is not able to ascertain Rushdie’s physical, emotional and
psychological reaction to the violent history of Midnight ’s Children, at least one is sure
of Saleem’s threnodic involvement. In other words, Saleem writes the story of Midnight’s
Children at a time that his body is undergoing disintegration, just as the tragic
consequences of the partition caused India to disintegrate socially and politically. His
main business lies in the pickle factory: what Saleem-describes as “chutnification of
history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!” through which he plans to document this
tragic moment in his private life and India’s history (529). However, the irony is already
apparent in Saleem’s cynicism about “the grand hope of the pickling of time!”, which
tells one immediately of the limitation of writing history. It is precisely because of the

limitation of representing the nightmare of history that one has to see Midnight ’s

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Children as a good example of historiographic metafiction. Rather than lay claim to the
totality of experience, Saleem demonstrates the provisionality of historical accounts,
especially when his narrative concerns events of traumatic magnitude. Hutcheon is
correct in claiming that:
there are overt attempts to point to the past as already “semioticized” or encoded,
that is, already inscribed in discourse and therefore "always already" interpreted. . .
. . Historiographic metafiction self-consciously reminds us that, while events did
occur in the real empirical past, we name and constitute those events as historical
facts by selection and narrative positioning. And, even more basically, we only
know of those past events through their discursive inscription, through their traces
in the present. (96-7)
Therefore, when Saleem signifies the need for narrative choice he invites the reader to
witness, not only the bloodshed of Indian and Pakistani history, but also his own
involvement in the process of reconstituting this history. The narrator gives to self-
reflexivity a kind of thematic significance; he does this by intermittently foregrounding
the conflict between Padma, his pickle factory co-worker and friend, and himself.
Writing about one of those conflicts, Saleem says, “. . . I must interrupt myself. I wasn’t
going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration
becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands
holding the strings” (Midnight’s Children 70). On another occasion he says, “I must
return (Padma is frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect” (338), a statement that
tells reveals that both linear and self-reflexive narratives overlap in the novel; but by

keeping the readers aware of when the narrative shifts to cause-and-effect, readers are

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less likely to accept the illusion of reality that is so central to realism but which Saleem
constantly undermines.

The novel’s historiographic metafictional attitude reinforces the predicament of
representation if one considers Saleem’s and Shaheed’s encounter with scenes of horror
after returning to India from Pakistan. The reader has already seen how Saleem
encounters three of his friends who have already become victims to the violence. It is the
violence that undermines Saleem’s ability to represent the carnage when he is face to face
with the horror. On their entry into Dacca Saleem says, “[s]tudents and lecturers came
running out of hostels [and] were greeted by bullets. . . . And while we drove through the
city streets Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that weren’t-couldn’t have
been true: soldiers entering women’s hostels without knocking; women, dragged into the
street, were also entered, and again nobody troubled to knock” (410). The interesting
thing about the way that Saleem describes these gruesome killings and rapes is that he
relies on Shaheed’s perception, and not his own, to account for the violent acts. Saleem is
probably aware of the problematics of representation, which is why it would be safer to
record the details “witnessed” by another character than to assume responsibility for such
historical accounts, especially when he is conscious of the limitations of sensory
perception. If one compares Saleem’s reliance on his friend’s perception to his own
account of the battlefield, it will be clear that he embraces the provisionality of history. In
his portrayal of his friends, Saleem refuses to identify them by names and he also resists
constituting them as whole entities. Instead, he describes them as a pyramid, and what
follows accentuates his resistance to a totalizing narrative, particularly when he says, “the

pyramid had six feet and three heads” (429). He adds, “a jumbled area composed of bits

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of torso . . . lengths of intestines and glimpses of shattered bones” (429). In these two
excerpts, as a reader, one experiences a vicarious witnessing of war victims whose
corporeality has been shattered by violence. Sincetheir bodies are already shattered,
Saleem does not try to totalize them, and in fact, it is impossible to represent them as
whole. The impossibility of rendering whole bodies parallels Saleem’s resistance to
unified and totalized narratives so that with the full extent of ex-corporeality, the prospect
of representing this scene in a coherent and linear fashion is equally shattered. Whether
narrating through Shaheed’s perception or thematizing the disintegration of body and
narrative, narratives can only give approximate or partial accounts of reality. Therefore,
when Saleem tries to pickle history or “chutnifies” history, he demonstrates the
inescapable desire to totalize experience, and impossibility of totalizing reality, whether
in terms of quotidian sequence or in terms of specific historical cases like that of violence
that Saleem and Shaheed witness.

Despite foregrounding the story’s discursivity, one should not imagine that linear
narratives or realism can be eliminated entirely from historiographic metafiction like
Midnight ’s Children. However, Midnight’s Children only indicates the shifts from one to
the other. Saleem also makes it clear that it is Padma (who in this case may mean the sum
total of all audience expecting to read a linear story) who wants a linear story and who
constantly forces Saleem to resort sometimes to devices of realism. But Saleem more
often than not shatters this illusion of reality through self-reflexivity. Linear narrative
might be present but it is always disturbed, according to Kristeva, “the semiotic” shatters
“the symbolic” thereby initiating “linguistic changes [that] constitute changes in the

status of the subject—his relation to the body, to others and to objects” (Revolution 15).

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,9 6‘

In this case “the semiotic also reveals that normalized language is just one way of
articulating the signifying process that encompasses the body, the material referent, and
language itself” (15-6). If Saleem has to resort to a linear narrative, it is not necessarily
because Padma forces him to do so; it is because it is an inevitable aspect of the
signifying process. Though the linear narrative aspires to totality, the marvelous
intervenes by disturbing any kind of totalized representation. As seen above, the history
that Saleem narrates is an extremely violent one, and in recording this history Midnight’s
Children simply epitomizes the violence. In other words, the discontinuity and
defamiliarization in the language of Midnight’s Children foreground the violence of
history on the one hand, and the violence of representation on the other hand. Midnight ’s
Children’s formal complexity must be seen as an effort that parallels Saleem’s cynical
but virulent denunciation of history, which is why the novel should not be considered
solely as an aesthetic experiment. Adorno might be in support of the intersection of the
aesthetic and engagement when he argues that “the form” could constitute the site for
political engagement (213). Citing Baudelaire’s and Kafka’s literature as examples,
“experimentations of the aesthetic avant-garde . . . continued to challenge the violence of
a bourgeois, technocratic, and bureaucratic society through the shock of the aesthetic
form” (Quoted in Sanyal 8). One cannot read Midnight’s Children as fetishization of
form simply because it draws attention to its signifying process; rather than reify history,
the novel dramatizes the problem of representation as an ideological project.

If one considers Saleem as a witness, his status as a witness does not simplify the issue
of representation. Of course, witnessing privileges the sense of sight and erects the status

of the witness to an authoritative position; but Saleem self-consciously undermines that

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purported authority by relying on Shaheed’s perception, and also by giving a fragmented
version of the narrative rather than rendering the story in a linear or a coherent form.
Although the violence that Midnight’s Children represents may not have the same
magnitude as the Holocaust, its representation is equally problematic. The main reason
why Saleem disjoints and fragments his accounts of the war is precisely because “[t]here
are never enough words . . . to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in
thought, memory and speech” (Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub 78). The fact that the
story cannot be captured through memory and speech does not mean that one can deny
the occurrence of the events. Rather, literature highlights the limitation of language and
memory in producing a coherent narrative. Saleem’s representation might be seen as
similar in its inadequacy to the account of someone who is not a witness. The key issue is
not whether Saleem’s version is more “authentic” than that of a non-witness but has to do
with the nature of the event that he has witnessed because “the inherently
incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own
witnessing, even by its victims” (Felman and Laub 80). Shaheed’s inability to articulate
his visual experience is contingent upon the events themselves which make witnessing
almost impossible because they are so shocking as to surpass the witness’s
comprehension.

The task at hand now is to make sense of Saleem’s determination, not only to
represent, but also to preserve his private history and Indian political history. One would
recall early in the novel that Saleem desires to preserve India’s history as well as his own.
This need is evident when he says, “I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment,

although there are signs of acceleration” and “[t]his is why I have resolved to confide in

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paper, before I forget” (Midnight’s Children 36). His desire to preserve history as
memory is reinforced by his parenthetical comment that “[w]e are a nation of forgetters”
(36). Certainly, one cannot equate representation with memory but there is a reason why
one cannot ignore memory in Midnight’s Children. As Ricoeur has argued in Memory,
History, Forgetting, “[w]hat forgetting awakens . . . is . . . the very aporia that is at the
source of the problematical character of the representation of the past, namely, memory’s
lack of reliability” (413). Consequently, it is difficult to trust his memory since his body
has started disintegrating, although it is not until the end of the novel that the reader
realizes that his corporeal disintegration is a result of his violent encounter with history,
which Saleem signifies when he says that he has been “buffeted by too much history”
(Midnight 's Children 36). In addition, to preserve this history he resorts to a means of
representation, writing what he later calls “[m]emory’s truth, because memory has its
own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and
vilifies also” (242). This statement implies that the history that Saleem writes in
Midnight ’s Children is subject to the vicissitudes of memory that he describes above. The
fact that aspects of the story come from his memory, or that the story is actually his
attempt to preserve memory, does not make representation less problematic; the events he
narrates, including his encounter with the tragedy of partition, are constructed from
memory, which one knows is already fraught with inconsistencies. If one considers that
Midnight ’s Children, through allegory, “offers a means to reestablish individual and
communal memory” (209), it is apparent that the memory being reconstituted is a
fragmentary, and not a coherent, one. But because memory would try to put order to

chaos, Saleem is right to observe that in the end “[memory] creates its own reality, its

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heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever
trusts someone else’s version more than his own” (242). The subjective nature of memory
indicates that it can only supply partial truth and never an absolute one, which is why the
narrative of Midnight’s Children, according to Saleem, is an effort to resist forgetting
through writing although this account of history can only give an approximate
representation. No amount of “chutnification” of history can remedy the lacuna in
representation because the events which are being represented are so traumatic they
impose on Saleem, the burden of representing the unrepresentable.

Moreover, whether one describes the representational strategy of Midnight ’5 Children
as the marvelous real because of the way that horrific historical accounts assume
supernatural dimension, or one sees it as magical realism because of the coexistence of
ontologically disparate narratives, such categorizations always generate problems. For
instance, Joyce Wexler in “What is Nation? Magic Realism and National Identity in
Midnight ’5 Children and Clear Light of Day” observes that it is not uncommon for critics
to take the magical elements in Rushdie’s Midnight ’s Children literally and therefore
miss the metaphorical import of the style (149). Likewise, Chanady argues that the
concept of magical realism “is no less vague to most readers and critics and it is
frequently applied to any work that departs slightly from the depiction of conventional
reality” (viii). It is therefore important to sound a note of caution that Midnight ’3
Children may yield to categorizations such as the marvelous or magical realism: the
novel is eclectic in its representational and formal properties, it cannot be rigidly framed
by any of the two designations. Wexler also notes that critics tend to over-emphasize the

link between novel’s magical dimension and Indian spirituality like levitation, especially

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when Amina, Saleem’s mother visits a soothsayer to know about the future of her unborn
child. His concern is justified if one considers Faris’s claim that Midnight ’5 Children’s
magical realism is technologically derived because Saleem’s supernatural ability to
connect with other midnight’s children is portrayed as radio transmission (63).

Although the marvelous has been instrumental in shattering conventional mode of
representation in Midnight ’s Children, Rushdie’s novel questions an aspect of the
marvelous, which is the reason why any description of the novel in terms of the
marvelous should reflect its complexity. More than halfway through the novel Saleem
and his colleagues run from the war raging between India and Pakistan, and it is this
moment that presents an opportunity for Saleem to reflect on the status of the marvelous
in his narrative. In order to demonstrate his predicament in capturing an experience that is
so gruesome that one finds it hard to make sense of it, Saleem alerts the reader to the
tendency to veer into stories of a supernatural quality, specifically, in the manner of the
marvelous. In fact, the violence of the war is so intense that it resists rational
contemplation, so that “[w]hen thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest
remedy” (410). This explains why “dog-soldiers strain at their leash, and then, released,
leap joyously to their work” (410). But when Saleem and his colleagues find themselves
in the forest and Saleem presents to a predatory representation of the forest, the
intertextual connection to Carpentier’s The Lost Steps is unmistakable:

But one night Ayooba awoke in the dark to find the translucent figure of a peasant
with a bullet-hole in his heart and a scythe in his hand staring moumfully down at
him, and as he struggled to get out of the boat (which they had pulled in, under the

cover of their primitive shelter) the peasant leaked a colorless fluid which flowed

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out of the hole in his heart and on to Ayooba’s gun arm. The next morning
Ayooba’s right arm refused to move; it hung rigidly by his side as if it had been set
in plaster. Although Farooq Rashid offeredhelp and sympathy, it was no use; the
arm was held immovably in the invisible fluid of the ghost. (418)
However, in the next paragraph there is no doubt that the narrative self-consciously
distances itself from the marvelous empowerment of nature and landscape. Saleem states:
After this first apparition, they fell into a state of mind in which they would have
believed the forest capable of anything; each night it sent them new punishments,
the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked down and seized, the
screaming and monkey gibbering of children left fatherless by their work. . . . and
in this first time, the time of punishment, even the impassive buddha with his citi-
fied voice was obliged to confess that he, too, had taken to waking up at night to
find the forest closing in upon him like a vice, so that he felt unable to breathe.
(418)
In this passage, Midnight ’s Children veers away from Carpentier’s notion of the
marvelous in relation to nature; but the skepticism of the forest’s marvelous powers is not
without significance to Saleem’s story. The significance of attributing supernatural power
to the forest has less to do with the forest than with the characters’ experience of the
trauma of war. In support of this claim, one must examine Saleem’s statement concerning
“[w]hat I hope to immortalize in pickles as well as words: that condition of the spirit in
which the consequences of acceptance could not be denied, in which an overdose of
reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of dreams. . . But the

jungle, like all refuges, was entirely other-was both less and more than he had expected”

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(415). As a result, what one experiences as a reader is a simultaneous appropriation and
suspicion of the forest’s supernatural power, which is why the marvelous becomes
ambivalent in Midnight’s Children.

In this quote, by telling the reader that, “they fell into a state of mind in which they
would have believed the forest capable of anything,” the narrator takes the
representational mode away from both the marvelous and magical realism. The reader
now knows that the author and the narrator are themselves skeptical of the supernatural
and since they are, it will be difficult for the reader to accept it. By creating doubts in the
reader, Rushdie deploys the style of the fantastic which is based on the questioning the
supernatural event rather than believing it as required of the implied reader of magical
realism. To emphasize the use of the fantastic one should examine Todorov’s The
F antostic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.

Briefly, Todorov’s argument about the fantastic is that its realization depends on the
reader’s hesitation to believe the supernatural event which contradicts the logical laws of
nature. That is, the reader is one who is grounded in a world governed by the laws of
reason and who confronts a supernatural act but hesitates to believe or accept a
supernatural explanation. Todorov stresses the importance of this hesitation when he
says, “ ‘I nearly reached the point of believing ’: that is the formula which sums up the
spirit of the fantastic” (31). Todorov’s argument reinforces the idea that Midnight’s
Children incorporates elements of the fantastic.

However, Rushdie is ambivalent in his use of the forest and the fantastic. That is,
when he states that “the jungle, like all refuges, was entirely other-was both less and

more than he had expected,” the jungle still retains some aura that could not be explained

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away by a character who knows only the rational laws, an irreducible requirement of the
fantastic. He does not dismiss the supernatural quality of the forest as a rationally
explainable phenomenon and neither does he accept a supernatural explanation. Todorov
argues that “[e]ither total faith or total incredulity would lead us beyond the fantastic: it is
hesitation which sustains its life” (31), and this hesitation cannot be more eloquent than
Saleem’s description of the jungle as less and more. This hesitation rrrirrors Kristeva’s
“oscillation” between the semiotic and the symbolic. Because Saleem, Ayooba, Shaheed
and Farooq develop their notion of the supernatural aspect of the forest at a moment of
anguish about the war and are unable to determine the validity of their experience (except
perhaps Ayooba’s stiff arm), the story still retains its resistance to linear and conventional
representation where reality is presented in quotidian form that is empirically knowable
and verifiable. Once again, the attempt to represent “the unrepresentable” falls short of
totality; whenever the narrative aspires towards totality, “the semiotic,” the provisionality

of history comes in to tear it apart.

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Chapter 4: Reimagining Political Engagement in Postcolonial Fiction

Ogundele observes in “Devices of Evasion: The Mythic Versus the Historical
Imagination in the Postcolonial African Novel” that the most influential postcolonial
novels in the past two decades are the ones that can be broadly described as marvelous or
fantasy realism (126). Some of the writers who are quintessential examples of this
narrative mode are Sony Labou Tansi, Syl Cheney-Coker, Salman Rushdie, Kojo Laing,
and possibly Biyi Bandele-Thomas. Their works, in similar and distinctive respects,
grapple with what it means to be postcolonial; that is, they rewrite colonial history
(Cheney-Coker), depict the terrifying conditions that follow independence from imperial
powers (Rushdie), and portray the nation-state, not as a site of convergence, but as a point
of dispersal and conflicts (Rushdie, Bandele-Thomas). One other writer who should be
included in this short list is Ben Okri, whose writings can be described as quintessentially
“postcolonial” for their suspicion of the nation as a locus of domination and hegemony
and for their skepticism of ethnic, racial, and all regional essentialisms. His works that
particularly represent this literary and critical mood are The F amished Road (1991),
Songs of Enchantment ( 1993), Astonishing the Gods (1995), Dangerous Love (1996),
Infinite Riches (1998) and In Arcadia (2002).

These writers mark a generational break from the writers of the period immediately
following independence. One major difference between the early Chinua Achebe’s novel,
say, A Man of the People (1966), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beoutyful Ones Are Not Yet
Born (1976), Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1985) and Wole Soyinka’s The
Interpreters (1970) on the one hand, and the works of Okri, Cheney-Coker, Kojo Laing

on the other, is that, while the earlier group in different ways attempts to redeem the

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beleaguered nation-states by lamenting the deplorable states of social infrastructures,
exposing the decadence of political leadership, or by exploring possible alternatives to
leadership issues within the framework of the nation-states, the latter group is more
skeptical of the nation-state which has, in itself, become an apparatus for fostering
repressive regimes. In other words, the works of the first category of writers can be
relatively described as literature of commitment; and by commitment is meant literature
of combat or struggle which is concerned with pursuing the viability of the nation-state
by critiquing corrupt leadership and by advocating social and economical justice. There is
no indication that the writers whose works fit into the latter group are opposed to the
emergence of a viable social and political system. Rather, their works actually embrace
such goals, and similar issues have survived in the more recent cultural production in
Africa. Also, the earlier literature privileges realism as the dominant mode of expression
and also a mode of capturing the world of the quotidian. However, the realism of the
latter writers could be regarded as limited because it is more or less informed by “the
ideology of liberal humanism that assumes a world of non-contradictory individuals
whose unfettered consciousness is the origin of meaning, knowledge and action” (Belsey
67). This ideology, in its own interests, suppresses “the role of language in the
construction of the subject...” (67). By suppressing the role of language in the
construction of the world, realism tends to hide its own constructivity and thereby
presents its characters and their world as “free, unified, [and] autonomous” (67).

In contrast, writers like Laing and Okri are sensitive to the limitation of language in
representing their material conditions, which partly explains why their writings tend

towards the marvelous. The marvelous, particularly in Ben Okri’s fiction (excluding

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Flowers and Shadows and Landscapes Within), calls into question the dominance of
realism as a narrative mode intimately connected to the Enlightenment project and
therefore, to colonialism. But it also provides therhetorical space to pursue the vision of
new social systems although without the kind of optimism characteristic of Odili in
Achebe’s A Man of the People or the kind of revolutionary impetus that describes Karega
in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood. The main argument here is that the later
postcolonial fiction, particularly Ben Okri’s writings, is a literature of commitment. In a
more specific sense, postcolonial fiction participates significantly in projecting the
ideology of engagement. In other words, Ben Okri’s works constitute a way of imagining
a world devoid of bloodshed, conflict and political decadence.

In order to pursue this thesis one should focus primarily on Astonishing the Gods for
the following reasons: First, this novella offers the opportunity to re-imagine social
systems outside of nationalist interests mainly because the text self-consciously avoids
propagating social changes rooted in national politics. Second, Astonishing the Gods, in
mediating the social conflicts which are by now characteristic of Okri’s works,
deconstructs ethnic and racial idiosyncrasies in order to engender viability of the nation-
state. Third, rather than valorizing the nation-state, the novella undermines its
hierarchical structures of power. Fourth, instead of a nation-state, Astonishing the Gods
pursues the possibility of utopia rendered through the discourse of the marvelous.

Because the nation is a locus of power and domination, Astonishing the Gods
undermines its structure of power by projecting a space where hierarchy is extirpated
through the obliteration of all racial and ethnic categories. The narrative is situated in a

liminal realm that is sensitive to the ambivalence of such categories. The utopian space of

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Astonishing the Gods is not a world of repose but one marked by instability of signs; it is
a world that calls into question the normalization of the symbolic order. In order to
engage Astonishing the Gods as it projects its own version of politics of engagement, it is
fundamentally necessary to situate it within a process that is already overdetermined by
multiplicities of social formations. Deleuze and Guattari say in A Thousand Plateaus that
“[t]he world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer dichotomize, but accedes to a
higher unity, of ambivalence and overdeterrnination, in an always supplementary
dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos . . .” (7). Literally, the world
of Ben Okri’s works, as will be apparent, is riddled with conflicts, and some of these
conflicts are generated partly because of the regime of difference, which subsists through
the valorization of ethnic peculiarity within the Nigerian nation. The marvelous
dimension of Astonishing the Gods on the one hand fails to portray the nation as an
unproblematic category but self-consciously undermines it as a unified and autonomous
entity. It is in the light of its skepticism for organized categories that one must view the
novel as it intersects with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the world as chaotic. On
the other hand, the marvelous narrative of the novella is suitable for intermingling,
concentration and dispersal of people and spaces without at any time reducing them to
fixities.

At the heart of Astonishing the Gods is the issue of power: that is, Astonishing the
Gods deals with the formation or constitution of power while at the same time offering a
paradigm for undermining oppressive regimes, which is why in the novella, social and
racial categories are deliberately undermined. Social and racial categories tend to fix

people into monolithic types, with the presupposition that they are unrelated or

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unproblematic. In order to undermine the oppressive power of sovereign entities,
constituted authorities are the first casualties. But if constituted authorities draw attention
to their purported singularity, it also implies thatracial, social and ethnic categories, to
some extent, operate on the logic of power and domination. A recent example is Nazi
Germany where the ruthless differentiation of race not only implied the gruesome
extermination of “other races,” but also was concomitant with the intention to achieve
political domination over the rest of the world. Another example is the Hausa oligarchy
in northern Nigeria that still views itself as “chosen” descendants of Uthman Dan Fodio
and therefore considers itself a privileged group. It is no coincidence that this political
class sees the Hausa ethnic group as possessing unquestionable political rights over the
Nigerian nation-state. The interesting thing is that the Hausa oligarchy tends to claim the
north of Nigeria as a unified and autonomous ethnic and political group, whereas nothing
can be further from the truth because the north, as other parts of Nigeria, is pluralized in
terms of ethnic composition and religious preferences. In fact, one of the reasons
attributed to the Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970 is the pogrom carried out
against the Igbo people of South East Nigeria. Astonishing the Gods must be approached
as an enterprise in political intervention especially in mediating conflicts and
undermining excessive and destructive political power hierarchies.

To do this, the novella constructs a marvelous space where power, racial and social
hierarchies are constantly challenged. To decipher how the political engagement of
Astonishing the Gods is deployed, it is necessary that one situates its mediating force
within the metaphor of rhizome expounded by Deleuze and Guattari. One must say at the

outset that there is danger in assuming that there exists a one-to-one correspondence

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between Astonishing the Gods and the notion of the rhizome; indeed, the rhizome is not
interchangeable with the novella’s obliteration of social hierarchies. The important thing
to note is that the conscious undermining of centralized power in Astonishing the Gods
can, to some extent, be explained and problematized through the prism of the rhizome.
Deleuze and Guattari state:
The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in
the simplest of ways . . . with the number of dimensions one already has available. .
. . A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem
is absolutely different from roots and radicles. . . . The rhizome itself assumes very
diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into
bulbs and tubers. (7)
One must understand that there are at least two major intersections between the concept
above and the political thrust of Astonishing the Gods: the first has to do with the notion
of roots. Ben Okri, like other postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie and Syl Cheney-
Coker, abhors the notion of roots or the originary and it is because of their tendency to
repudiate the idea of roots and origin that the nation, as the purported site of solidarity
and political allegiance, disappears altogether in Astonishing the Gods. The second is that
fetishizing roots or cultural, racial or social categories inevitably produces hierarchies and
consequently, in most cases, oppressive practices and intense conflicts. It is no wonder
that one major feature of Astonishing the Gods is its obliteration of hierarchies, whether
political or ethnic. By rejecting the idea of “a higher dimension,” Deleuze and Guattari
equally advocate a leveling of all categories at all times because such a higher dimension

implies the inevitable presence of hierarchies, which in turn, precipitates domination.

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Multiplicities must therefore be understood as perpetual proliferations on a level plain
that makes impossible the emergence of what Deleuze and Guattari call “rigidified
territorialities” (16). Rigidified territorialities can be understood, particularly in the
context of Okri’s Astonishing the Gods, embracing as all forms of unities, be they
religious, political, cultural and national. One would not be surprised that Deleuze and
Guattari too, are wary of unities when they assert that “[t]he notion of unity [. . .] appears
only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity” (9). This implies that the notion
of unity is a destructive force because it parallels domination and it for this reason that
multiplicities signify recognition of manifold differentiation but without establishing
hierarchies. The passage below will help engage the idea of multiplicities and its relation
to the rhizome:
The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded,
never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines,
that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines. All
multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions:
we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities, even though the
dimensions of this “plane” increase with the number of connections that are made
on it. (9)
One must admit that the notion of the rhizome is not a formula for understanding social
and political formations: it resists the notion of formula precisely because the rhizome
and multiplicities imply intense struggle which oscillates between constituting forms of
domination and demolishing categories of oppression. There is now a problem to contend

with, which is to interrogate how the marvelous dimension of Astonishing the Gods

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engenders endless possibilities and yet foregrounds contradictions that beleaguer this
marvelous space. Astonishing the Gods must be interpreted as a text that constructs a
protean world where a struggle over power exists. The fact that it attempts to neutralize
all categories of oppression does not indicate that this marvelous and utopian world is
without contradictions. Rather than a simple and unproblematic world, the utopian space
of Astonishing the Gods is riddled with conflicts. The significance of the notion of the
rhizome here lies in accepting that social groups are never constant or fixed and in the
same way, power is never static either. The idea of the rhizome brings about the
recognition of the fact that this metaphor does not unproblematically translate to the
process of interpretation or social schema. Recognizing the instability of social
formations and interpretation, Deleuze and Guattari assert
you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that
restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject—anything you
like, from Oedipal resurgence to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals
contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. . . . Good and bad are only
products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed. (10)
In this sense, both ontological formations and hermeneutical practices rrrirnic the rhizome
because just as the rhizome sometimes produces bulbs, multiplicities are also challenged
by monadic discourses that attempt to fix interpretation and people into rigid categories.
Astonishing the Gods’ political engagement should be viewed in terms of subverting
society’s hierarchical systems, thereby foregrounding the possibility of a new social
system in which corruption, leadership inadequacies, war and conflicts are constantly

mediated.

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But the question remains to be asked whether or not “bulbs,” that is, totalizations, are
always negative and threatening. Definitely, any form of totalization must be understood
as a construct and in most cases associated with power and dominant interests.
Astonishing the Gods should, on this account, be celebrated because by foregrounding a
utopian space where hierarchies are obliterated, it attempts to reduce the power of
dominant discourses and repressive political orders. Yet, totalizations can still be
empowering: for instance, movements like N egritude and nationalism harbored their own
contradictions; they operated partly within the parameters of the dominant ideology of
colonization on the one hand and the Enlightenment on the other. But they were
discourses which contributed in no small way to challenging British and French
imperialism in parts of Africa and the Caribbean. As Bongie argues, “A reliance upon,
and a reversion to, fixed and ultimately fictional (ethnic, racial, national, and so on)
identities is inescapable, notwithstanding our ever greater immersion in and sensitivity to
a creolized and creolizing world” (Islands and Exiles 11). Deleuze and Guattari’s notion
of the rhizome, which has some tangential relationship to Bongie’s idea of a creolizing
world, definitely has its merits, but their rejection of all totalizations signified in the
metaphor of the “bulbs” indicates absolute intolerance for totalizations, whereas
totalization can still be empowering in some instances. For example, the different social
and cultural units that make up the Niger-Delta area of Nigeria for decades have
sometimes asserted their local identities as a way of mobilizing resistance to Nigerian
federal government’s desire to homogenize them within the fictional Eastern Nigeria.
They have also maintained their identity in order to spotlight atrocities committed by oil

companies which have led to environmental degradation. In fact, Ken Saro-Wiwa fought

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on behalf of the Ogoni people in order to minimize or stop the hazardous effects of
petroleum mining by Shell Oil. Bongie says further:
the laudable demystification of such identities, which is a necessary tactic of any
post essentialist politics, is patently not a sufficient one: provisional affirmations of
identity are often politically necessary, notwithstanding the fact that they are
theoretically “unviable.” . . . Even . . . the most fervent demystifications of a stable
identity end up repeating—be it strategically or unconsciously . . . —the same
mystificatory act they critique: this is patently evident . . . in the case of such post-
or anti-identitarian models as those of “schizophrenic” or the “nomad” that
Deleuze and Guattari . . . offer up in the name of pure “ethics of flow.” (11)
The important thing is not to construe the notion of the rhizome and totalization as binary
and irreconcilable opposites; the two are absolutely necessary to Astonishing the Gods,
which reveals this same contradiction. That is, although Astonishing the Gods attempts to
mediate political gloom by challenging its dominant discourses of identifications, it also
demonstrates that fixed social formations are not only necessary, but are also inevitable.
This tendency explains why references to fixed categories must be seen as “strategic
essentialism” as Spivak puts it in her influential article, “Can the Subaltem Speak?” Also,
one should come to terms with the fact that “[h]owever transnationalized or globalized
today’s world might be, the boundaries of a civil society still mark out the individual state
and are still nationally defined” (Spivak, Critique 399). More often than not, critical
reception of Okri’s texts borders on the celebration of the transcendence of material
reality on the one hand, and acknowledgement of regional or national categorization on

the other. Okri’s texts, particularly Astonishing the Gods, are also implicated in the same

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discourse of fixity. Although it deploys narratives of fixity, Astonishing the Gods is not a
nationalist text despite the preponderance of “essentialist” rhetoric in the text.

However, it is interesting to discover that the political thrust of Astonishing the Gods
particularly, and other Okri’s texts generally, is questioned and challenged. The main line
of attack is that Astonishing the Gods, according to Pietro Deandrea, is a text that is far
removed from social reality and therefore, disconnected from the concerns of the
oppressed. Although Okri’s text can be read thus, one should also be aware that '
Astonishing the Gods is one of Okri’s less accessible texts, which means it is prone to
misinterpretations. The fact is that Astonishing the Gods is an intensely experimental
novella that offers a radical paradigm of political intervention. It is fitting that one

examines in some detail, this trend of critical exegesis on Okri’s work.

The Critical Context of Astonishing the Gods

In Fertile Crossings: Metamorphoses of Genre in AnglOphone West African
Literature, Deandrea contends that Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods is a novella with a
lot of shortcomings. He argues that the novella is lacking in political commitment
primarily because it is “linked with the desire to shed the physical substance of human
existence” (86). There is a sense in which the world of Astonishing the Gods resists any
association with mimetic or quotidian reality but is immersed in marvelous enchantment.
But it will be erroneous to claim, as Deandrea has done, that Astonishing the Gods “sheds
physical substance of human existence” just because Okri has demonstrated the limitation
of language in representing social reality. Contrary to Deandrea’s assertion, Fraser
contends in Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City that while Lagos and London are

recognizable in The F omished Road “the details of its architecture, the sumptuousness of

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its fabric, mark [Astonishing the Gods] as faintly Italian” (84). Whether or not the world
of Astonishing the Gods resembles any known human community, the crisis that the
novella engages is far more significant than theurgency of mimetic relation of the text to
human reality. The novella, in one sweep, self-consciously yokes together the problem of
power and leadership on the one hand, and the problem of interpretation on the other. In
other words, by distancing itself from concept-reality logic of Saussurean linguistics,
Astonishing the Gods seems on the whole to issue a cautionary note on any haste to
associate words with reality.

Deandrea pursues his argument against Okri and Astonishing the Gods by positing that
Ben Okri “[u]nfortunately severs himself and his own book from any possibility of
establishing contact with his readers’ lives” (Deandrea 86). The implication of
Deandrea’s argument becomes clearer when he asserts that Okri’s philosophy in
Astonishing the Gods is antithetical to reason: “Okri’s scepticism about the power of
language is paralleled by an analogous attitude towards reason” (86). There is no doubt
that this interpretation of Astonishing the Gods simplifies the text, which treats reason as
a category of power central to the Enlightenment that is often reproduced in postcolonial
societies, and particularly, in justification of despotic regimes. Examples abound: General
Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida’s eight-year rule in Nigeria was founded on rationalized
policies aimed at perpetuating his reign; another example was that of the late Mobutu
Sese Seko who used to rationalize all his repressive orders and carnage committed on his
own people. So when Deandrea states that Okri associates “understanding” with
“ignorance,” he aims to show that Okri rejects reason, whereas, when the guide in

Astonishing the Gods states, “[u]nderstanding often leads to ignorance,” he is directly

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addressing the protagonist’s desire and haste in mastering the new world in which he
finds himself. This means that he fails to take in the world of the invisibles; rather, he
attempts to impose his own signs on a world he barely knows.

Deandrea’s critique of Okri and his work is similar to McCabe’s contention in “
‘Higher Realities’: New Age Spiritualism in Ben Okri’s The F amished Road.” McCabe
maintains that the spiritual world of Okri’s texts serves to distance the narrative from the
world marked by intense social struggles. Whereas Deandrea sees in Okri what he calls
“Plato’s epistemology,” by which he means that “Okri seems to place emphasis
exclusively on pure Ideas” (90), McCabe interprets Okri’s work as dependent on New
Age Spirituality the major characteristic of which is narcissism, detachment from social
struggles and maintenance of bourgeois values. McCabe says further:

[New Age] reflects and promotes . . . “the culture of narcissism,” where self-
centered consumerism is celebrated and sanctified as a [. . .] path toward
enlightenment or authentic being. . . . Sure enough, the vast majority of those who
attend New Age personal transformation courses, training seminars, healing
retreats, and shamanic workshops are well-to-do urban professionals and corporate
managers, many of whom see personal transformation and Self-actualization as
giving them a competitive advantage in their work. . . . In short, the New Age
movement, believing that social transformation is effected only through narcissistic
spiritual self-pampering, reflects and contributes to the capitalist and individualist
features of modernity that are widely held to perpetuate social and political
inequality and oppression. This is one important ideological contradiction of New

Age spirituality—“ideological” because New Agers . . . remain largely

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unconscious of the way in which their activities contribute to maintaining

capitalism’s sociopolitical injustices. (9)
It is crucial to set McCabe’s criticism in the appropriate context: his major claims are as
follows: that Ben Okri’s The F amished Road, despite deploying the myth of the obiku, is
not a novel informed by the abiku tradition precisely because Okri’s use of the abiku
myth contradicts its historical and literary references in the African context; that rather
than the abiku tradition The F amished Road is influenced by Okri’s personal spiritual
preference, New Age spirituality; that New Age philosophy reinforces capitalist values
rather than mediating social injustice; that Okri’s other texts such as Astonishing the
Gods and In Arcadia are steeped in New Age philosophy more than The F amished Road.
McCabe has caused more problems than he has solved. First, it is not certain that Okri’s
spiritual concern is necessarily thematized in his work. Second, if Astonishing the Gods
and In Arcadia are the perfect instances of New Age philosophy in Okri’s work, McCabe
refuses to base his argument on either of these texts. McCabe contends that Okri’s texts
have maintained and reinforced social stratification and that they have appropriated
bourgeois class values, a move that he believes distances his work from the “wretched of
the earth.” The fact that Okri resists a quotidian narrative in Astonishing the Gods does
not imply that the text is politically complicit with power; to the contrary, Astonishing the
Gods aspires to create a world that is free of repression, conflicts and war.

Smith, in “Ben Okri and the Freedom whose Walls are Closing in,” seems to combine

aspects of Deandrea’s and McCabe’s arguments when he suggests that:

The rule of cultural disinterestedness, emblematic of Okri’s writing, and of

postcolonial criticism’s literary “anti-foundationalism” more generally, does not

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actually mean disinterestedness. Statements of detachment from the social world
are perfectly in keeping with the perspectives of the owners of cultural capital
whose first distinguishing assertion has always been . . . their ascendance above the
entanglements of the secular world. This statement of adherence to the realm of
true art is therefore a covert display of “disinvestment,” an oblique celebration of
freedom from the more urgent imperatives of material survival. (10)
Although these three critics, Deandrea, McCabe and Smith, have different approaches to,
and interpretation of, Okri’s work: the world of Ideas for Deandrea, New Age spiritual
realm for McCabe and the world of artistic hedonism for Smith, they all tentatively agree
on the supposition that Okri’s work, particularly Astonishing the Gods in this context,
distances itself from social and political concerns. Inadequate as they may be, these views
are extremely difficult to refute precisely because, unlike The F omished Road, Songs of
Enchantment and Infinite Riches which oscillate between supernatural realms and human
world, the only reference to a recognizable place occurs in the first two pages of
Astonishing the Gods while the rest of the novella details the protagonist’s experience on
the island of the invisibles starting from the third page of the text.

This structure of the narrative raises a fundamental problem. This problem has to do
with the social context from which the traveler emerges before his excursion in the island
of the invisibles. In other words, from the third page of the book, the protagonist has
already been transported onto the utopian plane of spirituality, a literary device which
makes the political commitment in Astonishing the Gods difficult to discern. Deandrea,
McCabe and Smith contend that the text is either apolitical or politically complicit.

Rather than claiming that Astonishing the Gods valorizes the world of Platonic pure

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Ideas, thereby removing itself from existential struggles, one should examine the text as
one having its social context and references elaborated more in Okri’s other works. That
is, The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998)
(usually referred to as “the famished road trilogy”) provide the context for situating
Astonishing the Gods. One might argue that this paradigm shift has created its own
problem in that it depends on references outside of Astonishing the Gods, and is
therefore, structurally deficient in terms of narrative. In addition, there is no certainty that
Okri deliberately constructs Astonishing the Gods in parasitic relation to his other novels
for its social and political struggles. One must accept that Astonishing the Gods is a
unique text in the sense that its references to social struggles are presented as codes. For
instance, in Astonishing the Gods “history books” refers primarily to colonial narrative
while “invisibility” signifies the postcolonial condition of marginality, oppression,
corruption and the vicissitudes of democratic aspirations. The main challenge in coming
to terms with the political thrust of Astonishing the Gods lies in mastering the idiom of
the text, which to some extent differs from the language of Okri’s other texts where
reference to the social domain is not as ambiguous. To capture the politics of Astonishing
the Gods one must accept that its idiom relies primarily on coding, allowing the writer to
compress whole histories within the first two pages of the novella. There is no question
about the political thrust of Astonishing the Gods because issues of historical marginality,
the oppression of the underclass, and the seemingly atavistic regression of political
leadership are foregrounded and also operate as subtexts in the novella. Zeleza asserts:
The question . . . is not one of whether or not African literature is political, for all

literature is political, but what type of politics it expresses. . . . African literature

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produced since independence has been political. . . . [T]he theme of resistance has
featured prominently. Indeed, it has been a literature of resistance par excellence.
The finest of this literature . . . presents “a sophisticated testamentary tradition that
taps the deepest democratic aspirations of the continent and its people.” (484)
In fact, one can argue that the protagonist’s quest to the land of the invisibles is informed
by the desire to achieve social transformation and democratic fulfillment although
Astonishing the Gods fails to demonstrate the kind of optimism expressed in literature of
realism or socialist realism. But that it is committed to themes of the literature that Zeleza
is speaking of cannot be denied.

The main challenge that critics of Astonishing the Gods encounter is that the slum and
ghetto of The F amished Road and Songs of Enchantment are conspicuously absent from
Astonishing the Gods. Because of the literal absence of the slum and ghetto, it is tempting
to denounce the text as one perpetuating social hierarchies on the one hand, and on the
other, divorcing itself from existential struggles. The political preoccupation in
Astonishing the Gods requires an understanding that the language used to express the
social concerns is coded so that political struggle attains metaphorical signification,
which is suitable to the marvelous narrative of the text. Also, because the novella
explores the possibility of utopia, Astonishing the Gods is marked by literary
experimentation. Second, this short fiction needs to be contextualized within the
framework of Okri’s other texts precisely because the conflicts, leadership ineptitude,
political repression, which critics fail to see in the novella, abound in The F amished Road
and Songs of Enchantment. This does not imply substituting the social contexts of “the

famished road trilogy” for that of Astonishing the Gods because this would mean that the

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novella is not an independent work of art. Rather, one must argue that just as the
famished road trilogy is concerned with pursuing a social vision, Astonishing the Gods is
no less preoccupied with such social transformation. The main approach here is to
describe the world of Okri’s fiction precisely by examining his collections of short
stories, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988), together with
The F amished Road and Infinite Riches. The argument that rests on the apolitical
interpretation of Astonishing the Gods, and Ben Okri’s other works, is untenable because
the structural and literary experimentation in Astonishing the Gods contradicts such a
claim. Astonishing the Gods speaks in codes and metaphors that cannot be circumscribed
within quotidian narrative. Even though one of the main preoccupations of the text is that
political aspirations, social vision and democratic optimism must be approached with
caution, one must be wary of any interpretive endeavor that assumes a one-to-one
correspondence between the word and referent.

Background to the Political Vision of Astonishing the Gods in Incidents at the Shrine,
Stars of the New Curfew and The F omished Road

While Astonishing the Gods has its own internal cohesiveness, the paucity of familiar
references to social experiences might have influenced the assertion that Okri ignores the
turbulent and traumatic experiences which characterize the world in which his readers
live. It is crucial to stress that the world of Okri’s texts is one ravaged by conflicts, and
this is immediately apparent in his first collection of short stories, Incidents at the Shrine.
In the story entitled, “Laughter Beneath the Bridge,” one of the major trends in Okri’s
texts manifests and the link to Astonishing the Gods, though not equivalent, can be
discerned: this has to do with how religious violence, ethnic tension and civil war were

interconnected to reveal social political turbulence familiar to the Nigerian situation. In

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this story, a ten-year old boy is rescued by his mother from an abandoned school
compound. The intensity of war is immediately apparent when the boy narrator’s mother
is unable to rescue the other boys who are friends with her own son. Through this
narrator, the story emphasizes 1033, fear, dispossession and the disruption of a youthful
life. Although the story is not set in the scenes of battle, the reader is not spared any of
the tragic consequences that most definitely resemble those of the Nigerian Civil War.
The more frightening experience is the narrator’s witnessing of a gruesome rape
scene. The boy says, “[b]ehind the bushes three soldiers smoked marijuana. Half-
screened, a short way up, two soldiers struggled with a light-complexioned woman”
(Okri, “Laughter” 7). Here is an indication of thematic consistency in Okri’s writings:
social conflicts are intricately tied to ethnic politics; ethnic politics beget violence in
ways that resonate fully with Astonishing the Gods. The narrator says, “[t]he soldiers
asked mother where she came from in the country . . . as the soldiers, a short way up,
struggled with and finally subdued the woman” (“Laughter” 7). In this excerpt, one
would notice that the soldiers are intent upon superficial identifications, such as the
mother’s home region. In the same excerpt, the narrator blends together the demand for
identity and the threat of violence that is immediately obvious in the women being
assaulted by the soldiers. The narrator declares, “[t]hey shouted to mother to recite the
patemoster in the language of the place she claimed to come from: and mother hesitated
as the woman’s legs were forced apart” (“Laughter” 7). So, when in Astonishing the
Gods, Okri intensifies the marvelous dimension of the narrative and exhibits his distaste
for rigidified identities, the thematic overlapping of “Laughter Beneath the Bridge” and

Astonishing the Gods becomes clearer. The narrative in “Laughter Beneath the Bridge”

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provides glimpses of the frightening level of violence, a consequence of the soldiers’ and
possibly Nigerian, leadership before, during and after the Civil War. Apart from showing
the woman being beaten and trampled by the soldiers, the story also highlights how
women are subjected to different levels of violence. When the narrator states that “[t]he
soldier in the bush had finished wrecking his manhood on the woman and was cleaning
himself with leaves,” it is clear that the narrative is as much about the turbulent social
landscape as the peculiar ways in which women suffer in a world of military dictatorship
(“Laughter” 7).

Okri deploys a similar motif in the first story of Stars of the New Curfew, that is, “In
the Shadow of War.” Unlike the nameless narrator of “Laughter beneath the Bridge,” the
main character of “In the Shadow of War” is Omovo. Just as in “Laughter beneath the
Bridge,” the brutal reality of war manifests through an encounter with, and the killing of
a woman suspected to be a spy. The story is also reminiscent of the dead bodies which
exude their putrefaction in “Laughter beneath the Bridge,” signifying how conflicts and
war can be contagious and can contaminate post-war experiences, which probably
explains why conflicts represent one of the constant social entanglements characteristic
of all of Okri’s writing. In “In the Shadow of War,” “the dead animals were in fact
corpses of grown men” (8), but the instability of these images, mixed with the forest’s
supernatural sensibilities, transports the conflicts from a mere social event to the realm of
the extraordinary. “In the Shadow of War” ends as Omovo tries to escape after the
soldiers fire a fatal shot, after which Omovo discovers that the alleged woman spy has
fallen victim. As he tries to escape he falls down, only to wake up in his house, stupefied

and unable to draw the line between what is real and what is unreal. The beauty of the

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story lies in Omovo’s dreaming of the whole ending because on waking up, he thinks
everything has been a dream, which is why, in these two stories, scenes of war are self-
consciously conflated with scenes outside of organized combat, making it difficult to
separate the two. More important is the story’s play on time: that is, the past and present
are conflated in Omovo’s dream-consciousness so that the Nigerian Civil War which
ended in 1970 is given a sense of immediacy. This strategy is particularly crucial because
the violence and conflicts which have characterized Okri’s fiction, and coincidentally, the
Nigerian polity, become like characters themselves. These are not merely historical
events limited in reference to the past, but are events which continue to structure, and
struggle with, social living in Ben Okri’s later works.

The F omished Road and Songs of Enchantment are structured by an implacably
violent social terrain, which in The F amished Road, Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite
Riches is captured by the abiku myth. The abiku myth is not new in African literatures
and can be traced to J. P. Clark’s and Wole Soyinka’s poems, both titled, “Abiku.” Abiku
is a Yoruba word which means “bom-to-die” and has become the name of a child that is
believed to be born, die, and be reborn by the same mother. Such a child is believed to
possess supernatural powers used for malevolent purposes; and because they are believed
to be part-human and part-spirit, their perception of the world is assumed to transcend,
but incorporate telluric reality. Among the Yoruba people of Southwestern Nigeria,

names like Kokumo,5 Igbekoyi, 6 Kosoko,7 and Durojaye8 suggest a strong belief in the

 

S/he dies no more.

The Forest Refuses This. Because the death of children is considered as tragic and ominous, they were
usually buried in the bush designated for the purpose, unlike old people who were buried within the
community.

7 There Is No Hoe. The name implies there is no hoe to dig a grave for the dead child.

8 Stay and enjoy life.

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existence of these spirit-children and reinforce the faith in a world that comprises the
world of the living, the dead and the unborn. Hawley in “Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child: Abiku
Migration and Postmodernity” supports this view’by observing that “Mothers will give
such children names like ‘Malomo—Do Not Go Again’; ‘Banjoko——Sit Down And Stay
With Us’; Duro oro ike—Wait And See How You Will Be Petted’ and ‘Please Stay and
Bury Me’ ” (30). Philips in “Ben Okri’s River Narrative: The F amished Road and Songs
of Enchantment” also suggests that the context of the above novels “is anchored to the
truth of a worldview where many different worlds coexist” (168). The worlds of The
F amished Road, Songs of Enchantment and Astonishing the Gods are shaped by
implacable historical cycles that follow the pattern of the abiku children. The abiku in
The F amished Road describe their entry into human historical, social and political order:
“[t]here was not one amongst us who looked forward to being born. We dislike the
rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, . . . the fact of dying and the amazing
indifference of the Living. . . . We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom
are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see” (Famished 3). The horror of living can be
discerned when again the abiku, whose name is Azaro, says, “[t]o be born is to come into
the world weighed down with . . . an inextinguishable sense of exile” (F amished 5).
Azaro’s description of the human world parallels the protagonist’s in Astonishing the
Gods in which he discovers that his people have been crushed by history’s apocalyptic
cycle of cataclysm, effacing them from historical records (Astonishing the Gods 3). There
is another parallelism between Azaro and the protagonist of Astonishing the Gods: both
of them resent life’s painful drudgery and are determined to pursue the possibility of

change. Just as in Astonishing the Gods the protagonist endures agony in order to

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discover other social alternatives, in The F amished Road Azaro is frustrated by his
coming and going and decides to stay in the world of the living. It is in Azaro’s staying in
the world that marks the political thrust of The F amished Road and probably explains
why, despite the turmoil that the protagonist of Astonishing the Gods faces he refuses to
abandon the struggle. This is how Azaro frames his intervention:
How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many
times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had
no idea. So much of the dust of the living was in me. But this time, somewhere in
the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay. . . . It may
simply have been that I had grown tired of coming and going. It is terrible to
forever remain in-between. It may also have been that I wanted to taste of this
world, to feel it, suffer it, know it, to love it, to make a valuable contribution to it,
and to have the sublime mood of eternity in me as I live the life to come. But I
sometimes think it was a face that made me want to stay. I wanted to make happy
the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother. (The Famished
Road 5).
The passage above connects The F amished Road to Astonishing the Gods in at least two
fundamental ways. The first is that both protagonists are tired of the vicious cycle of
history and they both want to discover the knowledge that would assure them of social
renewal. Azaro’s decision to enter into existence, his longing for historical change,
intersects with the protagonist of Astonishing the Gods’s strong desire for cessation of
pain, which is why he becomes desperate to learn from the ageless wisdom of the

invisibles. The second point is that Azaro’s conviction to stay in the world of the living is

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basically inspired by the love of humanity, and his desire to ease the pain of humans, and
for no other reason does he say, “I wanted to make happy the bruised face of the woman
who would become my mother” (F amished 5).

A close examination of The F amished Road will reveal unequivocal connections
between the abiku myth and national politics especially when, after an epiphany, Azaro’s
Dad explains, “[o]urs too was an abiku nation, a spirit-child nation, one that keeps being
reborn and after each birth come blood and betrayals, and the child of our will refuses to
stay till we have made propitious sacrifice and displayed our serious intent to bear the
weight of our unique destiny” (F amished 494). Similarly in Astonishing the Gods, the
protagonist’s mission to the island of the invisibles arises out of his love for humanity:
that is, to discover why he, his mother, and his people, are invisible and ultimately to
subvert historical marginality, poverty and endless conflicts and wars (Astonishing the
Gods 3). Astonishing the Gods is an attempt to subvert history’s implacable cruelty by
celebrating hybrid, liminal and syncretic cultural formations. The grim horror of
“Laughter Beneath the Bridge” and “In the Shadow of War,” which is predicated on
fetishization of fixed and fictionalized identities, is mitigated when in The Famished
Road, Songs of Enchantment, Infinite Riches and Astonishing the Gods, the narratives

valorize a utopian world where ethnic, racial, social and political tensions are reduced.

Towards a New Social Vision in Astonishing the Gods
Astonishing the Gods chronicles the story of an unnamed protagonist who leaves his
country in search of visibility because he believes he is invisible and banished from

historical time and space. The narrator describes the protagonist’s experience as follows:

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It was in the books that he first learnt of his invisibility. He searched for himself
and his people in all the history books he read and discovered to his youthful
amazement that he didn’t exist. This troubled him so much that he resolved . . . to
leave his own land and find the people who did exist, to see what they looked like.
(Okri 1995, 3)
In this passage, the protagonist associates history with visibility, an observation that
emphasizes what Deandrea calls “[t]he written culture” which he associates with “the
colonial experience” (82). The mission of the main character is to search for “personal
realisation” and “historical relevance” (Sénchez-Arce 123-4). Astonishing the Gods is,
therefore, an intervention in historical invisibility of the protagonist, and in the novella,
there are two main ways in which this is achieved. The first has to do with subverting the
regime of “naming,” which the novella paradoxically associates with historical visibility
and fixity of the subject. The text resolves this paradox by later making the protagonist
desire and embrace invisibility through which he overcomes cultural and racial
monadism. The second strategy has to do with the protagonist’s rite of passage into the
island of the invisibles. The crucial issue with this ritual is that he acknowledges the
impossibility of a Platonic universe or repose; instead, he comes to the understanding that
the new world he desires must be re-imagined and must be nurtured with the
consciousness that a new social vision comes at a price: learning through one’s own
suffering and pain. It is only through painful sacrifice that the new political order can be

imagined and actualized.

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Subverting the Regime of Naming

The protagonist’s desire for visibility and knowledge is reinforced when on his arrival
on the island of the invisibles he wants to understand things by names, a premise that
partly supports nationalistic idiosyncrasy because to name is to establish difference.
Naming signifies a strategy for revealing the absurdity of brutal consequence of racial,
ethnic or gender oppression. An example was the pogrom in northern Nigeria shortly
before the start of the Civil War in 1967; and the Civil War, which was fought mainly on
ethnic and econOmic grounds. The short stories, “Laughter Beneath the Bridge,” “In the
Shadow of War and “Worlds that Flourish” are representative examples of how naming
implies fixing a subject within a limited identity; but more important is its link to
violence, war and conflicts. The distrust of ethnic politics and its gruesome material and
spiritual reality become foregrounded when successive military and civilian
administrations, rather than alleviating the problems, worsen them so that with each
regime comes more misery through governmental repression, as with the regime of
General Sani Abacha in Nigeria. Astonishing the Gods vigorously challenges the reader’s
attitudes to identity, which, as the guide told the main character, have become habitual.
That is, our attitudes toward ethnic identity have become so perfunctory that they are no
better than cliches, which explains why the protagonist has to go through a “purgatory” in
order to destroy the habit of naming. Also, because naming in most of Okri’s writings
and particularly in the short stories cited above, along with The F amished Rood, Songs of
Enchantment, Infinite Riches and Astonishing the Gods, implies cultural limitation,
Astonishing the Gods signifies a quest to undermine any sense of the originary and roots.

It probably is because of this suspicion of the originary and roots that the central

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character feels at home while away from his “home.” His adventure in the island of the
invisibles resonates with the concept of the rhizome developed by Deleuze and Guattari’s
in A Thousand Plateaus:
[t]o be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or
better yet with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to new uses. We’re tired
of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots and radicles. They’ve made us
suffer too much. All of aborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to
linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political apart from underground stems
and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. (17)
One should emphasize an important point: the notion of the rhizome does not suggest the
disappearance of roots or stems and does not imply that “rigidified” identities do not
exist. One must recognize that such identities must be constantly destabilized and in
Astonishing the Gods the island of the invisibles is a place where invisibility is a
metaphor for the possibility of transcending racial and ethnic cultural fixities while
embracing not only cultural interstitiality, but also a post-hybrid disappearance of
difference. When he asks, “[w]here is this place?” from his guide, one understands his
attempt to reduce things and places to names (Astonishing the Gods 6). The question also
implies that even when he is now in a different time and place, he is still asking the same
questions, which ironically reinforces the idea that he has internalized the culture of
naming. But his guide’s response, “[i]t doesn’t have a name. We don’t believe in names.
Names have a way of making things disappear,” deconstructs the protagonist’s fixation

with naming and suggests that names create only the illusion of mastering an object or

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idea, whereas in reality, they are incapable of adequately representing humans, ideas, and
places (6).

In this regard, Astonishing the Gods is similar. to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
in which Alice passes into a forest without names. In this forest, animals have no names
and thus are not afraid of each other. The fact that names make things disappear is a
paradox in Astonishing the Gods: first, names, like habituation, have weakened the main
character’s knowledge in the sense that he imposes his pre-given knowledge on a new
experience without trying to understand his new cultural terrain; second, names also
establish difference on which ethnic distinctions are based and for which the Nigeria
Civil War was fought. The protagonist’s experience on the island of the invisibles evinces
the need for a renewal of approaches to the desolation of towns and obliteration from
history. It comes as no surprise that later in the novella, one of the ways to transcend this
historical black hole caused by conflicts and war and their brutal afterrnaths is by first
subverting this regime of nomenclature. It is the protagonist’s first rite of passage.

The significance of the protagonist’s loss of habit of naming lies in the connection that
the story of Astonishing the Gods establishes between habituation and trauma of war.
Nowhere is this issue made clearer in the novella than the moment when the main
character learns the value of namelessness and invisibility. Invisibility reinforces
namelessness precisely because visibility operates on visual economy and to be visible is
potentially to be named. To buttress this claim, the narrator observes, “[a]s he went along
. . . he felt himself becoming less substantial, less real. He seemed to be losing his
identity to the mirrors. He felt as if the heaviest and least important parts of him were

dissolving in the effulgent lights. At the same time he felt himself becoming more

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peaceful, less questing, and freer from anxieties” (10). The experience of the protagonist
suggests on the one hand that emphasizing difference can only lead to pain and grief; and
on the other, renouncing his identity and the pedagogy of naming signifies the acquisition
of peace. Without breaking his habit, he is trapped in the cycle of blood and betrayals as
Azaro’s father suggests in The Famished Road (494). Astonishing the Gods is a direct
attack on tropes of racialism and ethnicity, which is not unconnected to the legacy of
colonialism; this is why Kortenaar says in “Fictive States and the State of Fiction in
Africa” that “Western narratives about Africa often imply that, while Europeans are
defined by the nations they belong to, non-Europeans are defined by race” (229). It is
unquestionable that Astonishing the Gods challenges this western discourse highlighted
by Kortenaar especially by developing a major character that rejects limiting
identifications such as race, ethnicity and nationality.

Just as Astonishing the Gods is intolerant of hasty racial or ethnic identifications, it
also seems reluctant to accept conventional interpretations. In other words, the rejection
of naming is concomitant with the renunciation of criticism that does not reflect the
complexity of language and signification. Of all Ben Okri’s novels and short stories
Astonishing the Gods is one of the most difficult to classify into conventional genres.
Most critics have determined “the famished road” trilogy to be “magical realism”
although, if one pays particular attention to the ways in which social conditions, historical
experience and existential struggles are rendered in horrific terms through which the
“supernatural” element of the novel emerges, the novel is unequivocally marvelous in the
Carpentier’s use of the term. But the same cannot be said of Astonishing the Gods

precisely because its formal structure is multiple. One would not be surprised when Smith

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3, ‘6

and Deandrea use terms like “oneiric, poetic allegory,” and “fantasy” to describe the
novella. Whether intentional or not, it is clear that the book’s reservation towards racial
and national categories seems to parallel the novella’s complexity of form. Ben Okri has
been known to harbor suspicion for the term “magical realism” on the ground that such
criticism lacks rigor and that critics simply impose existing categories on his fiction
rather than looking for their intrinsic values. Bowers continues the discussion in her
book, Magic(al) Realism when she contends:
The traditional West African mythological content and narrative perspective of the
narrative lead some critics to question whether this is indeed a magical realist
novel. The question of whether the mythological aspect is considered to be real or
magical depends strongly on the cultural perspective of the reader. If the reader
lives within a cultural context where magical happenings of the type portrayed in
the novel are considered to be a possible aspect of reality and not magical at all,
then the reader may not recognize the magical realist element of the narrative. (56-
57)
Of course, Bowers is speaking specifically of The F amished Road, but her analogy can
help problematize the thematic and aesthetic preoccupation in Astonishing the Gods.
Categories such as magical realism, magic realism, magico-realism, fantasy, the fantastic,
the marvelous, the uncanny and the oneiric represent an attempt to fix literature within
existing critical modes. While Astonishing the Gods seems to contain aspects of many, if
not all above-listed categories, it cannot by any means be circumscribed by any of them.

In essence, though Astonishing the Gods might exhibit certain qualities of the marvelous,

magical realism, fantasy or the oneiric, none of these terms is adequate to describe it. Just

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as the novella is a me’lange of different narrative forms, people are also multiple in their
identities and in no other place in the text is this issue emphasized more than when the
narrator says that “[h]e seemed to be losing his identity to the mirrors” (Astonishing the
Gods 10). The point is that in the same way that the text cannot be confined within a
particular genre or narrative mode but is meaningful only when situated within its
multiplicity of form, so also are people; the example of the narrative is a case in point
because rather than having just one reflection of himself, there are multiple reflections
and several mirrors, implying there exist several reflections of himself. Obviously,
Astonishing the Gods is re-interpreting the Lacanian mirror9 in this instance, questioning
the validity of the reflection, and it is in consonance with Deleuze and Guattari’s
assumption that the rhizome displaces the "One" subject and the split subject on the
ground that the split subject, still operates on the logic of unity and oneness. Rather than
valorizing the split subject they celebrate multiplicities, an idea that connects with
multiple reflections of Okri’s character in Astonishing the Gods.

Okri complicates the metaphor of the mirror further by deploying it to undermine the
regime of realism whose assumption is that art is the reflection of reality. The narrator
tells states:

He was mesmerized by the gyrating spectacle of an infinity of perfect realms,
perfect interiors, pure landscapes of joy, and the atmosphere of bliss that dwelt in

the shining depths of the mirrors; . . .

 

9 While the mirror at the “mirror stage” produces for the child, the imaginary, the one in Astonishing the

Gods functions to deconstruct that same imaginary by producing multiplicities of reflections, which do not
necessarily have any “real” behind them.

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To his astonishment, as he looked deeper into the mirrors, as into the depths of a
magical lake, he saw beautiful women playing mandolins, reading books, singing

silently in chorus, reciting words that turned into radiant colours. (10)

He was about to speak when another wonderful sight caught his eyes. He turned

and beheld, in another rrrirror, a magnificent garden in which flowers bathed in

celestial glow. (10-1 1)

Further on, in the blue rrrirrors [...] he saw a green lake. (1 l)
The relation of the mirrors to art, and the process of interpretation, is undisguised; the
reference to “an infinity of perfect realms” signifies that the guide piloting the protagonist
is intent upon making his host aware of multiple significations and realms of meanings.
The mirrors are therefore multiple just as the images they reflect are multiple; they are
not confined to a fixed image in the same way that meaning in language is always
deferred. The protagonist’s experience with the rrrirrors highlights two important points:
one discovers that one’s identity is not constituted as a fixity, but multiplicities; the
mirrors reflect different images every time the protagonist looks at them. In the first
place, the central character, who sets out searching for visibility, loses his visibility to the
rrrirrors, thereby putting to an end, albeit temporarily, to the economy of racialism. The
significance of the protagonist’s loss of his visibility lies in the connection that lies
between horror and visibility, or a fetishization of cultural and national identity. The
experience of the protagonist suggests that an unnecessary pursuit of the originary and
national and cultural identity can only lead to pain and grief, whereas renouncing his

identity to the mirrors in which his identity becomes nothing but a simulacrum signifies

1.96

the acquisition of peace, unlike previously when he was so burdened by the anxiety and
weight of his illusion of identity.

To come back to the second point, in the same way the mirrors change images,
Astonishing the Gods seems to emphasize that meaning in language is not fixed.
Instability of meaning parallels the protean nature of identity; it is a lesson that the main
character of this text learns in his dialogue with his first guide who leads him onto the
island of the invisibles. The following passage from the text marks his entry into a
different ontological landscape: that is, he discovers the presence of other invisible
inhabitants of the island and also enters into the realm of linguistic neutrality:

They went into the city at the most mysterious time of the night, when footsteps
were heard and no one was seen. . . . The glow that was his guide was intense in
the open legendary spaces. . . . On the stone monoliths had been inscribed the
original words of the initiators of the new civilisation — words that had the brevity
and authority of universal laws. They were words of a language he couldn’t
decode, a language no longer spoken. Then he realised that all along he had
assumed a similarity of language, when in fact he had been communicating with
his guide beyond words. (35-36)
Unquestionably, the entry into the city of the invisibles parallels the obliteration of
linguistic difference, but one still has to ask the question about the very expression
through which the guide and the visitor communicate. The desire to transcend the
limitation of regional languages is evident when the protagonist realizes the possibility of
communicating without resorting to pre-established languages. This new language must

be seen as a new language of interpretation which defies orthodox critical models. More

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important is the realization that communication is possible without national or ethnic
affiliation. No matter how transnationalized Okri’s conception of language and criticism
may be, there is a subtle parallel to the Nigerian ethnic structures. In a country bound
together by colonial expediency and not necessarily cultural similarity just as the
protagonist assumed, the battle over the “superior culture” more often than not has led to
constant conflicts and bloodshed. And probably because Okri comes originally from the
area of Nigeria now known as Midwestern Nigeria or Niger-Delta, he must be quite
familiar with the pain and agony of national politics, which Ni get-Delta has experienced,

no matter which side the Niger—Delta supported in national politics.

Re-dreaming the World

In Astonishing the Gods, the habit of naming impedes knowledge, and therefore to
develop a new social vision, it becomes mandatory that old assumptions be renounced in
order to welcome new knowledges that the protean nature of the novel’s spirit realm.
From the protagonist’s experience, it is safe to conclude that even though he has now
embraced invisibility, he is set to create his own history. In essence, in order to achieve a
new world where conflicts, pain and suffering are mitigated, it is essential to learn and re-
learn one’s history. Astonishing the Gods is a “depiction of social possibilities . . . in the
‘utopian’-like world where historical invisibility and political decadence can be overcome
(Dandy 49) The guide tells the main character, “[o]n this island of ours learning what you
know is something you have to do every day, and every moment,” and goes further to
develop a critique of amnesia by alleging, “[i]n the places where I have been, forgetting
is what you do every day” (17). This quote immediately resonates with the statement

made by a character in Ben Okri’s short story entitled, “Stars of the New Curfew.” The

198

character, Arthur, says, “human beings are notorious for having such a short memory”
(“Stars of the New Curfew,” 86). If one compares this notion of memory and the one
offered by Deleuze and Guattari there appears to be a contradiction:

Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant

but with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory

(family, race, society or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates

continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an “untimely” way, not

instantaneously. (17)
The confusion introduced by this quote is in terms of the opposition between short-term
memory and long—term memory and how the latter implies race, family, society and other
“rigidified tenitorialities.” The question then is to consider whether the notion of the
rhizome can undermine social transformation that is so urgent in Astonishing the Gods. In
order to engage this issue one must acknowledge that Astonishing the Gods self-
consciously attacks the originary and roots, which is why the protagonist has to conceive
of a place where identity based on visual economy is discouraged. Memory in the novella
is being used strategically, neither in the sense of short-term memory or long-term
memory that Deleuze and Guatarri have advanced. Rather than being opposed to
interstitiality and the notion of the rhizome elaborated above, Astonishing the Gods
celebrates cultural fluidity; its use of memory in this instance is directly connected to the
need to invent the future with keen consciousness of the past in order to mitigate the
regime of suffering that characterizes the novella and other novels cited.

Moreover, other novels like Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches testify to the

preponderance of suffering, a point that evinces Astonishing the Gods’ immersion in

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power-related conflicts. In an interview with Jane Wilkinson Talking with African
Writers, Ben Okri reinforces the centrality of suffering in his novels, a condition that
Astonishing the Gods tries to mediate:
For me one of the central themes in the book is suffering, probably the only
paradoxically democratic thing about our condition: suffering on the one hand and
joy on the other, but especially suffering. Suffering is one of the great characters of
the book, the different ways people suffer. It defines the boundaries of self but also
breaks down the boundaries of individual identifications. So when Azaro sees
Mum in all the market women, they are Mum. Any one of their children telling
their stories would be telling a story just like this one, but with its own
particularity. There are hundreds of variations, but there is just one god there, and
that god is suffering, pain. But he’s not the supreme deity. The higher deity is joy.
Again, that’s just part of the paradox. (85)
Admittedly, Okri’s comments in the excerpt above are in direct reference to The
F amished Road, Songs of Enchantment and probably Infinite Riches; it is also applicable
to Astonishing the Gods where the narrative is quite parsimonious on the grim details of
everyday experience and history. If Astonishing the Gods is as influenced by Nigerian
history as The F amished Road and Songs of Enchantment are, then there is ample chance
that the turbulent historical and social condition of the other novels may significantly
impact Astonishing the Gods. As long as one can tolerate authorial evidence, the
statement, “I’ve come to realize you can’t write about Nigeria truthfully without a sense
of violence,” emphasizes the ubiquity of violence and suffering in Okri’s works,

including Astonishing the Gods. Consequently, when the guide educates the protagonist

200

that the main reason why they have to re-learn their history constantly arises from their
suffering, one immediately understands the context in which he is speaking. He says,
“[t]oo much forgetting led to our great suffering. ‘We always have to releam here” (17), a
statement that serves as a constant reminder of the implacably cruel world of Incidents at
the Shrine, Stars of the New Curfew, The Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment, but
one, which is mediated in Astonishing the Gods.

Although much of the references to conflicts and pain must be located in Okri’s other
novels, Astonishing the Gods is not entirely devoid of pain and suffering as Okri
mentions above. The marvelous realism of the novella allows the protagonist to gain
access into “universal” history, the characteristic of which is agony. Through this ritual
he understands his guide’s theory about the link between forgetting and suffering; he
must learn that his future society is not a Platonic world. Rather, it is a world whose
memory must be nurtured in order to avoid reverting to cycles of pain:

At this point his mind plunged into total darkness. He found himself spinning in
that darkness. Then he felt himself falling, falling away from himself, falling
without end into a darkness that got deeper and more unbearable. The only thing he
could do to rescue himself from the sheer terror of his internal abyss was to scream.
He screamed in absolute horror of becoming more invisible than he already was.
So loud and so piercingly did he scream that the entire island seemed to resound
with it. . . . He felt himself falling through layers of world’s unheard agony. (14-15)
If before his journey to the island he had assumed it was a kind of paradise, he must have
been disillusioned with his entry into world’s apocalyptic history. He remembers this

lesson “because he didn’t want to have to go through it all over again” now that he is in

201

the new city (26). His suffering is doubled by the fact that he is magically transported
into the world’s misery, especially since his main reason for embarking on the trip is to
mitigate his misery. But because he has not yet accepted the centrality of memory to
achieving social transformation, he is made to experience the horror of world’s history.
The quotation below emphasizes the primacy of remembering the pain of the past in
order to prevent its occurrence in the future. Here it is his guide educating him:
At the beginning of our history there was great suffering. Our sages learnt that we
tend to repeat our suffering if we have not learnt fully all that can be learnt from it.
And so we had to experience our suffering completely while it happened so it
would be so lodged in our memory and in our desire for higher life that we would
never want to experience the suffering again, in any form. Hence the law. Anyone
who sleeps through their experiences would have to undergo them as many times
as it takes to wake them up and make them feel the uniqueness or the horror of
their experiences for the first time. This law is the basis of our civilization [. . .].
(47)
This is the basis of the social vision in Astonishing the Gods: it is not a world of eternal
repose but a world structured by intense awareness of the possibility of both suffering and
social transformation, where the latter consists in releaming the pain of history. In
relation to The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches, the
protagonist of Astonishing the Gods is similar to Azaro, the spirit-child, at least in one
respect: he is also an abiku. This similarity will be more obvious when one observes that
both characters decide to enter into history despite its horror. Azaro says, “I wanted to

make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother” (F amished

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5); the protagonist of Astonishing the Gods decides to enter the city of the invisibles with
the knowledge that he must constantly experience his suffering until its memory becomes
part of his consciousness. Soliman supports this observation when he states in “From Past
to Present and Future: The Regenerative Spirit of the Abiku” that “[t]he implication is
that Nigeria too can be a resilient abiku only if it transcends a history and a present of
nothing but conflict” (166). Soliman is definitely right when he argues that Nigeria also
can follow the example of the abiku and avoid its history of conflicts; however, as the
excerpt above has shown, there is a great responsibility required of those who want the
change. It is for this reason that Okri says in his collection of essays entitled, A Way of
Being Free, that:
The only hope is in daring to redream one’s place in the world — a beautiful act of
imagination, and sustained self-becoming. . . . New vision should come from those
who suffer most and who love life the most. The marvellous responsibility of the
unheard and the unseen resides in this paradox. . . . The real quarrel of the
oppressed is not with the oppressors. It is with themselves. (55, 103, 133)
This statement speaks directly to Astonishing the Gods whose central character is on a
journey to literally “redream” the world as Okri suggests. It is also apparent that Okri is
concerned primarily with micropolitics in opposition to macropolitics, which is why the
responsibility of social change is placed on the shoulders of the oppressed. However,
Smith disagrees with this notion of social transformation because it holds the oppressed
responsible for history when in fact they are primarily the victims of history. He

elaborates further,

203

Although it is undeniable that political action presumes a change in perception,
there seems to me to be something perverse in giving primacy to a supposed failure
to dream on the part of the oppressed. It ispa statement without any possible
effective political deployment, and one that is only comprehensible in the context
of a fundamentally dematerialized understanding of social struggle. (8-9)
Although a cursory reading of Okri’s texts can yield this kind of interpretation, a closer
look at them shows that the politics in Okri’s novels cannot be dichotomized into text and
reality as Smith has suggested. Redreaming the world hardly implies abandoning social
struggles; all of Okri’s writings testify to the centrality of social struggles. Azaro’s father
is the quintessential activist who houses and feeds the poor and who himself labors in the
market to provide for his family. Therefore, Smith’s assertion, “Dad’s continual
insistence to Azaro that we need new visions [is] romantic privileging of a great act of
imagination,” and his conclusion that “all of this holds power and conviction only where
the dominant metaphor of the social world is a textual one or where social change is
understood to be a cultural matter rather than a question of systems of material
production,” border on the illusion that language can capture reality in an unproblematic
fashion (8). The main challenge for Smith is that he does not seem to appreciate the fact
that changing one’s perspective is as important as social change. Another thing he fails to
consider is that what the narrator in Astonishing the Gods calls “world’s unheard agony”
is a repetitive one, and without breaking this monotony of suffering, its repetitiveness
would persist. Hence, the primacy of changing perspective and “redreaming the world.”
The island of the invisibles is a kind of prototype through which the protagonist

understands that social transformation is possible, a notion reinforced by his guide when

204

he says, “it has taken us much suffering, much repetition of our suffering . . . to arrive at
this condition” (53). If Astonishing the Gods “thwarts all efforts on the side of the reader
to create a coherent illusion of history, meaning and representation in the text,” it is
precisely because Okri is sensitive to the instability of signification in language (Pordzik
46). The world of Astonishing the Gods is one of great promises for social change; it is
also a world in which to acknowledge the instability of meaning, to discover the illusion
of a coherent representation of reality or the purported transparency of history, is as
important as social change.

In conclusion, it cannot be over-emphasized that Astonishing the Gods is a
controversial text. This controversy is not unconnected to the problem central to
postcolonial criticism: that is, “postcolonial literary theory, born under the sign of post
Saussurian linguistics, and seeking to avoid the most reductive kind of Marxist cultural
analysis, has come to accept as a fundamental premise the idea that there is no necessary
connection between cultural forms and social formations and . . . no logical link between
representation and the real” (Smith 3). This problem is not new at all: it has been one of
the central issues in Western metaphysics since the time of Plato through Descartes,
Hume, Kant and Hegel. Astonishing the Gods has contributed to this debate not
necessarily by “resolving” the contradictions, but by acknowledging and celebrating this
contradiction through its sensitivity to discursive constructions of reality. Admittedly, the
“real” is not self-evident and the fleeting terrain of signification in Astonishing the Gods
parallels the unstable process of interpretation, which is why one of the central motifs of
the novella is paradox, particularly in the proliferation of mirrors and their images, where

the mirrors represent the protean canvas of interpretation.

205

This leads us to the central issue that has been engaged so far, the extent to which
Astonishing the Gods as a text promotes political action and social change. While this
theme(s) can easily be located in The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment and Infinite
Riches, the same cannot be said of Astonishing the Gods because it is lacking in detailed
quotidian experience unlike the earlier three novels, even though existential vicissitudes
are captured within a marvelous motif. In some sense, Astonishing the Gods is a text that
traverses metafiction and metacriticism mainly because it foregrounds both the problems
of representation and interpretation. Politics and social change do not escape the dynamic
of these processes of representation and interpretation. For instance, Azaro’s father in The
F amished Road “represents the active struggle that Okri holds to be requisite to escaping
cycles of social and political destructiveness” (de Bruijn 179). Yet the problem arises
concerning Okri’s character that represents the model for social change. In a way, the
abiku is the one who most represents the desire and the determination for social
transformation and this is evident in his understanding of history, which he understands
to be implacably cruel. He says in the beginning of The F amished Road, “[t]here was not
one amongst us who looked forward to being born” and that “we dislike the rigours of
existence, the unfulfilled longings . . (Famished 3). The horror of history captured in
this novel can be discerned when again the abiku laments, “[t]o be born is to come into
the world weighed down with . . . an inextinguishable sense of exile” (The F amished
Road 5). The determination of the spirit-child and his desire to change his world
resurfaces in the nameless protagonist of Astonishing the Gods, who like the spirit-child,
thematizes self-sacrifice for the purpose of changing the cataclysmic historical condition

to which he belongs. But the main difference between Azaro and the protagonist of

206

Astonishing the Gods on the one hand, and Azaro’s father on the other, is that even
though Dad is very determined, his efforts to change the world become repetitive.
Therefore, when he tells his son that “we need new visions” he is admitting his
insufficiency in vision. He needs to develop the kind of perspective that takes into
consideration the transitoriness of signification, through which Azaro and the main
character of Astonishing the Gods come to realize that reality is not rigid. Political
intervention and social change must reflect this dynamic; Deleuze and Guattari alert us to
this problematic when they state that “[t]he world has lost its pivot, the subject can no
longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or
overdetermination” (7).

Astonishing the Gods is sensitive to this ambivalence and overdeterrnination and goes
to the extent of obliterating difference by creating the world of the invisibles where
superficial distinctions are useless. Through the disappearance of racial, ethnic and
national idiosyncrasies, the novella destroys the hierarchy of pigmentation, which was
central to colonial discourse and, which in a different context, especially in Okri’s
Incidents at the Shrine and Stars of the New Curfew, are causative agents of conflicts and
war. One concern that one must address is, in obliterating racial and ethnic hierarchies on
the one hand, and undermining repressive rules on the other, there might be the
possibility that he has simply replaced one form of social structure with another. One
would recall that before entering the auditorium at the end of the story, there is no sign of
organized state machinery; but the seemingly privileged pedestal given to the council of
the invisibles appears not only to be a higher rung of power, it appears cultic. Words and

phrases such as archangel, sages, higher life, and civilization suggest there might be

207

established hierarchies among the invisibles after all, despite the eradication of racial
difference. This trend raises the fear that one may not escape monolithic subjectivities no
matter how cosmopolitan our world becomes, as did the world of Astonishing the Gods.
The novella seems to be saying that the struggle against difference, against
“transcendental signified,” against racial distinctions, against classism and against
despotism and totalitarianism, is eternal. Deleuze and Guattari ask, “Does not a
multiplicity have a strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications,
mimetic mechanisms, signifying power, and subjective attributions take root?” (14) It is
important to recognize that the world of Astonishing the Gods is a world of great
possibilities, but it is also a world inevitably threatened by the obstacles it overcomes, but
which are ready to coalesce and take roots. It will require the doggedness of Azaro and

our protagonist to dismantle the totalizing force of power.

208

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