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Post‐dialectic: Politics inpostcolonial African fictionGerald Gaylard aa Lectures in English and Media Studies ,University of the WitwatersrandPublished online: 01 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Gerald Gaylard (2003) Post‐dialectic: Politics in postcolonialAfrican fiction, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 15:1,135-150, DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2003.9678148

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CURRENT WRITING 15(1) 2003 ISSN 1013-929X 135

Post-dialectic: Politics inPostcolonial African Fiction

Gerald GaylardAbstractThe paper describes and analyses the political agenda of current African writers. Thesewriters attempt to fill the lacuna of uncertainty about the political in the postcolonial era,when the clear enemy provided by colonialism and neo-colonialism is not always quite soapparent. Their attempt to find political agency is via a rigorous critique of the Marxistdialectic utilised by African nationalism, a critique which, at the least, extends that dialecticinto a constellation of multiple dialectics and consequently defamiliarises previous notionsof the political. The politics of this fiction might be described as dissident, and its aestheticsis nothing if not inclusive.

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Few philosophies have been as influential as Hegel’s dialectic. This was primarilybecause it provided not only a powerful description of an active, dynamic world,but also a mode of thought that was not merely passively descriptive: a mode ofthought that could move beyond itself in a creative reaching out to the future aswell as to history. This dialectic was both an ontological principle for Hegel and amethod of demonstration, showing the necessity of development or transitionfrom one stage of history or consciousness, or from one abstract category of logic,to a higher stage or category. Such dialectical development occurred via negativity,the opposition of the antithesis to the original thesis, which differentiated andconcretised and hence encouraged the motion of becoming in Hegel’s famousprogression: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This motion of becoming was extremelyimportant for Hegel as he thought that what was undifferentiated was lifeless, anotion that recurs again and again in The Science of Logic, Phenomenology ofSpirit, and The Philosophy of History. Dialectic was thus the transition of things,and of knowledge, from abstract potentiality to actuality via contradiction, but insuch a way that the arising of a fuller differentiation pointed beyond itself to afurther contradiction. In other words, dialectical awareness saw the process ofantithetical opposition: that opposition was interminable and pointed alwaystowards a higher unity or synthesis. In The Phenomenology of Mind Hegel arguedthat this trajectory in the realm of consciousness dialectically progressed from thesimplest level of consciousness, through self-consciousness, towards reason, astate of rational freedom.

Hegelian dialectic was clearly seminal in Marx’s thought, because it gavehim a theory of the inevitability of historical transition and progress, and because

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it helped him to arrive at historical materialism. For many African thinkers, particularlyduring the nationalist heydays in Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s, this Marxistdialectic with its roots in Hegel provided the political understanding they neededto help them analyse imperialism and actively oppose it. Many of these Africanthinkers were particularly influenced by ‘Third World’ interpretations of this dialecticby intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Nkrumah; not tomention the work of American and Caribbean authors, particularly C L R James,Langston Hughes, George Lamming and James Baldwin. Dialectic was adoptedbecause, as Alexander Herzen once wrote, “The philosophy of Hegel is the algebraof revolution” (1968:403), and because of the reassurance to those under the yokeof colonialism that Hegel offered when he wrote: “we have a vision of Dialectic asthe universal and irresistible power before which nothing can stay, however secureand stable it may seem itself” (1975:118). For a prime example of the adoption ofdialectic by African writers we have only to turn to Ngugi who identified WilliamBlake and Georg Hegel as the influences upon his notion that “contradiction is theroot of all movement and all life, and only in so far as a thing incorporates acontradiction is it mobile, does it possess impulse and activity” (1981:124), and hisemphasis on the “dialectically opposed” (1980:27). Such an emphasis oncontradiction, or what Adorno called a negative dialectic, is visible in Africannationalist politics with its desire antithetically to oust the foreign imperialists.

My argument is that it has taken a new generation of African writers andthinkers to see fully that whilst contradiction was a sine qua non of the Africanrevolt, this revolutionary “Understanding” did not quite manage to make it toHegel’s higher stage of “Reason” or “The Speculative” which “apprehends theunity of terms (propositions) in their opposition”. This lack of “Reason” was oftendue to the appropriation of the dialectic by those in power, destroying “a unity ofdistinct propositions” (Hegel 1975:119). Those intoxicated with new-found powerhad conveniently forgotten Hegel’s warning that “In political life, as every oneknows, extreme anarchy and extreme despotism naturally lead to one another”(118), a warning echoed in C L R James’s anti-Trotskyite 1948 prophecy that “theresults of Reason in one generation become Understanding in another, and thenegating, the transcending of the determinations into a higher unity cannot bedone” (1980:34). African writers’ rejection of political or ideological dogmatism andtheir ability to convey nuance and complexity are hardly new phenomena; one justneeds to consider texts such as Achebe’s A Man of the People or Abrahams’s AWreath for Udomo.

My point is nevertheless that the political and ideological circumspection,if not outright suspicion, evident in such texts has been brought to prominencewithin the extreme ‘postcolonial’ social exigencies of today. Hence manycontemporary African writers have struggled with the contextual, sociohistoricalappropriations of the idea of dialecticism. Those who rose to power throughrevolutionary antithesis tended not to promote dialectical Reason, and rather tended

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to entrench hegemonic systems by prolonging rhetoric beyond its sell-by date. Inparticular, the rhetoric of an atavistic traditionalism was regularly invoked to justifyan apparently indigenous elite in a return to a false synthesis of idealised traditionalorigins. M G Vassanji describes such comprador neo-colonialists as “bush-shirteddemagogues [who] waylaid those dreams with arid ideologies, and torpidbureaucrats [who] drained our energies” (1994:273). Hegel called such rhetoric theabstract identity of the categories of Understanding, an analysis echoed by manyAfrican writers disillusioned with the ‘grand narrative’ of revolutionary nationalismand ethnocentrism. Naguib Mahfouz, for example, describes revolution in thisway:

The whispered words took root in the minds of the harafish [rabble orriffraff] and were changed into a destructive force. A flood swept throughthe alley, such as had never been seen before...they were prisoners of theirown emotions...Fath al-Bab maintained absolute authority through hispersonal charm and the power of the harafish who came out in force tosupport him, intoxicated by the triumph of their rebellion. ...So ended thestory of Fath al-Bab and his crusade. A brief burst of sunshine in a long,cloudy day. One morning his shattered body was found at the foot of theminaret. Many wept for him, some rejoiced. People said he was dementedwith sorrow at having the leadership snatched from him, and had climbed tothe top of his mad ancestor’s minaret in the night and, in an act of profanity,thrown himself into the void. (1993: 362-327)

Mahfouz is sceptical about revolution because people rely on and are “intoxicatedby” the emotions that are inherited from a feudal tradition of mythical heroes,causing them to become “increasingly attached to legendary exploits” (369), andeven suicidal. There is a stark contrast between this scepticism and the revolutionaryrhetoric of Ngugi’s Petals of Blood,1 which features hope in the metonymic formsof Karega and Joseph who will lead the proletariat towards “joying and loving increative labour” (1986:344). Perhaps Mahfouz’s point is that political emancipationrequires the intellectual and emotional freedom that Hegel called Reason?

Many current African writers, however, were not merely disillusioned withthe neo-colonial generation of leaders who turned revolution into rhetoric, but hadstructural criticisms of dialecticism. Despite the ability of dialecticism to emphasiseprocess, for many postcolonial2 African writers it often tends inadvertently toover-emphasise contradiction, the binary poles of opposition, even within dyadicdialectical terminology. This emphasis can reduce the possibilities of that spaceoutside of contradiction, and each moiety in its quest for synthesis can reinforceextremities instead of exploring interstices and complicities. So whilst thecontradiction between the comprador bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Ngugi’sPetals of Blood embodies the entrenchment of neo-colonialism, newer writerssuch as Dambudzo Marechera see dialecticism as adversarial and conflictual and,in consequence, not always an appropriate tool of analysis or action. Two of thecharacters in Marechera’s Black Sunlight, for example, “were like a matchstick and

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matchbox; to scratch them against each other always worked. Except on certainoccasions” (1980:24). Thus dialecticism may implode as much from its own internalpressures as from being violated by external forces. Much of the adversarial andconflictual hermeneutic within dialecticism perhaps derives from the nineteenth-century instrumental scientificism and empiricism of Marx’s thought, particularlywhen it is brought to bear upon literature and literary criticism. Marx’s key notion,the dysfunctionality of capital accumulation within Western scientific modernity,did not dissuade him from the utilisation of ‘scientific materialism’ which, thoughoppositional in spirit, is not necessarily so in character or methodology:

Classic Marxism is logocentric. It finds a centre for itself by means of aseries of binary oppositions. Materialism/idealism, use value/exchange valueand base/superstructure are to be held in place by a foundational oppositionbetween the real and the apparent. (Easthope 1995:6)Similarly, many of the socialists following Marx such as Althusser, Macherey

and Eagleton, despite their attempts to differentiate their ‘science’ from Westernempiricism, also occasionally elevated a rational scientificism to the same level ofidealism as the individualist aesthetic they were opposing.3 The result of thisinstrumental scientific logic in the analyses of Marxism is perhaps most visible inthe Manichean and monolithic notions of power it suggests. This replication ofsome of the key features of bourgeois ideology in Marxism was a result of beingcharacterised by the dual imperative to open up to reality as well as to interpret itin a final way, inevitably constructing a formal discourse which remains just asclosed to reality, offering instead its own values and definition of truth. Suchinstrumental scientificism in Marxist critique could be useful in the study of fiction,but tended to ignore formal elements and to prescribe a certain economic realism.Socialist realism in literature has its roots in the realism of the early European noveldescribed by Raymond Williams as “the advocacy and support of this ‘ordinary,everyday, contemporary reality’ [which has] been normally associated with therising middle class, the bourgeoisie. Such material was called ‘domestic’ and‘bourgeois’ before it was called ‘realistic’” (1980:581-582). In the Soviet Unionthese “earlier definitions of realism have been maintained and extended...‘realism’becomes...a principled and organized selection” (582-583). This selection accordingto “future social development” (582) subjected fiction to a frame of analysis whichsaw it as merely superstructure: a diversion from or disguise of primarily economicinterests, suggesting that the relationship between aesthetics and society wasone of direct, though often unconscious, reflection. Thus aesthetics were actualisedideology and a simple though rigorously demanding and hence prestigious rolefor artists and critics was arrived at: the exposure of the ideology that victimisesthe ignorant masses/artists/critics. This tended to result, firstly, in a replication ofthe elitist stance of much moralistic humanist critique. Secondly, it elided thepotential problem that a hermeneutic based on economics tends to ignore theformal qualities of fiction and places the critic in an adversarial and superior role to

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writers and their work. Thirdly, it suggested the political naivety that a correctconsciousness would instigate an entirely new beginning. For current Africanwriters Marxist critics all too-often “arrived at a cold-blooded theoretical Marxism,throwing every historical event to the cogs of a class-struggle machinery, letting itchurn out the conclusion” (Vassanji 1989: 251) so that

[r]evolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest.They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other menbuy with their money. Revolution for them is like sex for us. Something tobe abused. Something to be sold. (Saadawi 1983: 88)Thus African writers today suggest some of the structural limitations of

dialectical understanding and Marxist critique. Instead of promoting dialecticalunderstanding, Marechera attempts to manifest what he calls “[t]hat set of multipleparallel foci” (1980:113), which is an awareness of complex dynamic compliancewithin and between systems. Writers such as Marechera have tended to refuse asynthesising, unitary dialecticism, particularly in the realm of the heart: “thethoughts that controlled our feelings were not those of where straight lines comefrom nor where they go. There is no centre either, no circumference, but as it werespiralling nebulae, galaxies beyond galaxies, exploding wildly outward, hurtlingaway towards the incredible infinite that lay beyond the boundaries in which wehad lingered” (1990:103). We find the same refusal of synthesis in Reda Bensmaia’sreading of Assia Djebar:

The composition of La nouba is such that no element can be labeledsubordinate to or dependent upon another. If the various elements combineto define some form of ‘unity’, it is in no way as parts of a single ‘whole’or as ‘moments’ of an ultimate synthesis. In this sense, and certainly for thefirst time in Maghrebian cinema, there is no dialectical conception of thework as a totality to order the arrangement and the progression of elementsthat constitute the work; quite the contrary, the fragments seem to point toa primordial chaos, and no ‘sum total’ preordains the constituent units.(1996:880)Building on dialecticism, these writers extend it towards an analytical model

consisting of constellations4 of multiple and multiply interconnected dialectics,thus expanding dynamic relationship, propinquity and dialogic interconnectedness,which can in turn limit the individualism and hierarchy upon which hegemonythrives. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin argued thata constellation was a new disposition of material that opens up the possibility foraltered historical understanding, and this sense of the constellation is applicablehere. Furthermore, this constellar expansion might also be particularly appropriatebecause it echoes traditional African systems of political understanding. Forinstance, there is some support for an African notion of political space as constellarin Nugent’s comments:

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This fictionalized web of intrigue is replicated in reality in a number ofAfrican countries. In Zaire, some of the most substantial fortunes that aremade from clandestine trade accrue to those who are in government, includingMobuto himself. Frequently, the local border official who colludes withsmugglers is not moonlighting at all, but actually following orders! At theborder, then, Weber tends to make way for the more ambiguous figure ofAnanse. …[W]hereas Europeans thought of political space as a kind ofchequer-board in which every state shared borders with others of its kind,the West African map looked more like a raisin bun with centres of politicalpower interspersed between no man’s lands and scatterings of decentralizedpolities...they also represented a wilderness into which dissidents couldescape to bide their time before striking back. …It has often been noted thatAfricans imagined political space “as a structure of concentric circles ofdiminishing control, radiating from the core”. (1996:39)

In fiction this concern with a constellar expansion beyond dialectical understandingmight be found in Ben Okri, for instance, who argues that his project is to move“deeper into realism”, to capture more layers of reality. Okri seems to take his senseof textuality from the Latin word textum, which means web. This sense is, however,not merely a formal textual quality but also the result of sociohistorical contexts,and Quayson notes of Okri that “The degree of disillusionment is so high as tolead to...the foregrounding of ambiguity and chaos in place of mere contradiction”.This ambiguity is embodied in “The concept of the abiku [which] is what may bedescribed as a ‘constellar concept’ because it embraces various beliefs aboutpredestination, reincarnation and the relationship between the real world and thatof spirits” (1997:123; 164).

Thus what perhaps most distinguishes politics in current African literaturefrom the dialectic of Hegel and Marx as manifested in a previous African nationalisttriumphalism is not merely extending dialecticism but abandoning synthesis,abandoning any transcendent unity. The notion of a tertium quid has been viewedwith suspicion by many current writers because it has been, and is, so easilyappropriated. Kojo Laing, for instance, parodies dialecticism as the double-crossing“triple view”:

The cockroach stood there bristling, its mouth open over the bristle, “Sothat’s why I’ve been getting a third feedback from my supercables...anywayI took some precautionary action. I inverted the superfluous feedback, sothat the double viewing was cut off by the new triple view. You see, in lifeI AM AFTER THE TRIPLE VIEW! samia. I carry this principle in thewar: take a third decision immediately you suspect that someone has takena second one against you secretly.” (1992: 69)

Instead of a synthesised and often amorphous whole, “a vast network” (Okri1995:66) or “grandiloquent tapestry” (Cheney-Coker 1990:7) of political potentialsis envisioned which cannot be grasped as a whole without all of its constituentparts and processes. In fiction, these parts and processes include metafiction,

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revisions of the past, critiques of current international relations, emphases on theaesthetic, the psychological, the imaginative, the gendered, the domestic, the bodyand the socially marginal, all of which cautiously extend and challenge the discourseand taxonomy of the politics of contradiction. Any attempt to grasp such multiplicity,especially by and through language, is often synthetic as it tends to obliteratethose constituencies and unwittingly becomes what Laing calls “another cheapbreak of the paradox” (1992:22). Laing argues that synthesis can be reductive:“Then something strange happened: the two of them started to speak at exactlythe same time, using exactly the same words – it was Torro’s reduction machine nodoubt synchronising disparate beings and actions again” (49). In order to avoidsuch a “reductionist synchronising”, African authors have had to insist not onlyon the incommensurable, the marginal, but also the specifically marginalised withina specific context, given the tendency of the West and certain African leaders towild generalisation. Thus if ‘postmodernism’ is what Jameson calls the culture ofthe fragment (257), then ‘postcolonial’ African fiction is the culture of locatedfragments. Hence, unlike “in the modern moment...[when] the play of autonomizedfragments remains meaningless” (Jameson 1997:264), contemporary African writingfinds or wrests meaning from fragments through relative location.

This emphasis on relative location provides the politics of a constellarvision. A constellation or web does not imply that there are no hierarchies or powerdifferentials. Political importance lies in tensions or power differentials within andbetween a variety of situated dialectics and along the interlinking strand processes.Such power differentials are usually due to marginalisation according to Africanand other ‘Third World’ writers. For instance, the gleam of Western promise coercesthe youth to leave Palestine and enter into exile in the fiction of Ghassan Kanafani,and a meditation on borders and boundaries is also strongly present in JamalMahjoub. This meditation suggests that displacement from traditional communitiesis a journey into hell where “the angels are the frontier guards” (Kanafani 1982:36).Hence the web of international relations is predatory upon the marginalised;Mahjoub refers to “all them vultures hanging round that spider web of a capitalyou live in” (1989:113). Clearly the cosmopolitan is confined to elites, sometimesincluding writers, but the sense of tension is not uni-directional as many currentAfrican writers also emphasise the blandishments of Africanism and tradition.Thus identity in a polycentric world is mostly a locus in crisis, pulled by varioustensions in different directions. Identity becomes increasingly complex as conveyedin Syl Cheney-Coker’s description of the nominative plural in Africa today: “wewith our different designs, innumerable facets” (1980:16). This sense of thedifferential, the incommensurable, the difficulty of using collective pronouns, indeedthe problem of language, is thus not some sort of indeterminacy or ethical relativism,but rather an awareness of the difficulty and complexity of dynamics within a web,net or matrix.

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This is nothing new, of course, and the politics of much African fiction untilthe present has been concerned with the dynamics and agon of living in community.However, whilst literature of the struggle tended to acknowledge some of thedifficulties of living in and between communities, and hence might be seen asworking within a constellar concept, many of these works tended to resolve suchdifficulties through the lexicon of nationalism, of the struggle. For instance, inNgugi’s Petals of Blood the difficult relationships between the primary charactersWanja, Nyakinyua and Munira are resolved through determined hope in theinevitable triumph of the workers’ struggle. Similarly, Serote’s existential angst inthe first half of To Every Birth its Blood is dissipated through unity in the cause oftoppling the apartheid regime. More contemporary literature has tended similarlyto highlight some of the problems and joys of community life, but without suchresolution.

Sony Labou Tansi’s critique of community in The Seven Solitudes of LorsaLopez, for example, is based on its often hegemonic and paralysing effect. Thenarrative concerns the bitter relationship between a coastal town, Valancia, andthe centre of power and control, Nsanga-Norda, and this is paralleled by thehierarchical relationship of machismo between the sexes. This story is stylisticallycouched in exorbitantly long sentences and lists, conveying in poetic form thealienating strangeness of power relations dependent on macho notions of taxonomy,order and control. Such strangeness is eventually embodied in the murder ofEstina Bronzario by her husband for giving him lice. This propels the narrativetowards another fated death. The women of Valancia respond to this murder bywithholding sex from the men and assuming traditionally male roles, which happensto enrich an entrepreneurial male who invents “machines à baiser” (Labou Tansi1985:66), “screwing machines” (Labou Tansi 1995:37),5 to sell to his friends. Aburlesque of the community thus emerges via the intersection of power withcharacters and events that draws extensively on cultural cross-referencing. Forexample, Carlanzo Mana from the Ministry of the Interior is sent to “solve themystery and control the restless natives of the interior” and appears as a parodicimage of macho imperial figures from Napoleon to Nostromo:

“Nous vîmes alors pour la première fois émerger de la multitude, grandcomme une girafe, lunettes noires, complet de cuir vert olive...bien campésur son boulonnais tout noir, nous le vîmes avancer...ses bottes de jaislâchaient un cliquetis qui emmerdait les nerfs. ...C’était la première fois quenous entendions cette voix dans Valancia...on eût dit la voix de la mort”(1985:86).“Then it was we first saw him approaching, as he emerged from the crowdastride his pitch-black Boulonnais horse. He was huge like a giraffe andwearing dark glasses and an olive-green leather suit...his jet-black bootsmade a clattering noise which set our teeth on edge. ...This was the firsttime that we’d heard that Voice in Valancia. ...It sounded like the voice ofdeath”. (1995:50)

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The italicising of the “le” here suggests the alienation of the imperial investigatorfrom the community, yet the community is not able to solve its own problemsbecause it is unable to prevent an utterly unnecessary death.

Thus it emerges that the narrative locus of the novel is the fatally flawedcommunity, “our” and “we”, and the traditional/Marxist idea of community. In thisrespect the novel seems very similar to Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretoldand has a similar atmosphere of powerlessness; the community in the grip of aparalysing mediaeval superstition is unable to prevent what it sees as an inevitabledeath. The overall impression is of the tragically blind destruction of communalrelationships by the community’s own rigidly macho structures: “Nous écoutionstous Lorsa Lopez qui parlait de l’île des Solitudes et personne ne vit mourir FartamioAndra do Nguélo Ndalo. Elle a dû mourir comme une ombre pour éviter de nousdéranger” (1985:201):

“no one saw Fartamio Andra do Nguelo Ndalo die. She must have died likea shadow to avoid disturbing us”. (1995:129).

This interplay between individual and community, coast and interior, tradition andmodernity, Africa and Latin America, realism and magic, both confirms and criticisestraditional African communalism, as in the above passage, through metaphoricalcongruence/mutual exchangeability between the narrative personal “I” and thecollective “we” or “us”, and because the deaths occur not as a result of somedetectable criminal cause but as a result of the totality of the society, its history,individuals and events, again as in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The noveladmits to the failure of any community, genre or narrative mode that relies on adialectical unity-in-contradiction for identity. As Harrow notes, “[t]he novel...isalso marked by inconsistencies, by resistance to its own pose of absolute knowledgeand certainty. ...Sony Labou Tansi’s unease lies with two absolutes: the absoluteevil of tyranny; and the absolute rigidity and purism of its opponents” (1994:33).This criticism of oppositions is embodied in the novel thus:

Que la Côte me pardonne. Nous lui avons trop demandé. Nous l’avonssacrêe dure à tout. Nous l’avons fondée monstre: nous avons monté sespierres dans nos côtes à nous. Nous avons essayé de changer ses pierres encœurs. De la même manière que nous avions su que Lorsa Lopez allait tuersa femme, qu’ Estina Bronzario allait être massacrée, nous savons que laCôte mourra un jour, mangée par la mer. (1985:177)I hope the Coast will forgive me. We’ve asked too much of it. We’ve madeit hard. We’ve created a monster. We’ve used its stones to make our ribs.We’ve tried to change its stones into hearts. Just as we knew Lorsa Lopezwas going to kill his wife and that Estina Bronzario was going to beslaughtered, we know, too, that one day the Coast will die, eaten by the sea.(1995:112)

Although the notion of constellation is partly derived from a ‘traditional’ animistworldview and can be seen in operation in a variety of different literatures, its

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eclecticism and refusal of unity dramatises the difference between current andprevious African writing. Whilst both celebrate “the values of authentic being asbeing-for-the-other, of community as constituted by rebounding reciprocity, andof the absolute and primary necessity of coming-to-consciousness about one’ssocial and historical condition” (JanMohamed 1983: 276), such interconnection iswider and more fraught for African writers today because traditional communitieshave sometimes been so closed, so normative, so fractured by the impact ofcolonialism. Perhaps more importantly, the notions of tradition and communityhave often been usurped by cultural commissars as part of a pervasive climate ofprescription.

Another crucial aspect of the constellation as an image and a praxis is thatit embodies an increasing environmental and ecological concern. This concernmanifested itself powerfully in nationalist fiction, which set out to wrest the Africanlandscape away from the imperialist notion of the ‘dark continent’ and maintain theanimism of tradition that saw man and nature in harmony. In Petals of Blood, forexample, Ilmorog “had had its days of glory: thriving villages with a huge populationof sturdy peasants who had tamed nature’s forests and breaking the soil betweentheir fingers, had brought forth every type of crop to nourish the sons and daughtersof men” (Ngugi 1986:120), with women (Nyakinyua and Wanja) representing nature,and the freedom fighter (Abdulla) as master of natural lore (135). This maintenanceof tradition is often rejected by today’s African writers because of the dangers ofatavism, yet they also strategically value animism as an empowering notion ofinterconnection. One of the earliest examples of this is “The Christmas Reunion”in Marechera’s The House of Hunger, in which the narrator refuses to kill a goat atthe family Christmas because “a goat was a passionate creature beloved of Panand how could I kill that beast in me?...This business about ‘being a real man’ iswhat is driving all of us crazy” (1978: 138). This is an unusual example of militantfeminist vegetarianism in African literature6 and contrasts strongly with Marechera’sjuvenilia, in which nature is worshipped as earth mother of the nation:

When I was a boyI climbed onto your granite breasts...Now a manin exile from the warmth of your arms...Shall I not stride back to you with hasterout all my enemies and bind the wicked husbandmen...pledging my soul. (Marechera 1992: 6)In dialectical harmony with this constellar environmentalism, the

constellation is also often pictured as the image of a “sleeping” but rapaciousmodernity: “the small town, still asleep, snuggled in the valley below, its myriadconstellations of yellow, blue, red and green fluorescent lights flickering like preciousstones taken from the country’s womb” (Kanengoni 1997: 40) and “the menace ofneon-eyed gods” (Cheney-Coker 1980: 16). An image that can suggest not only

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environmental concern but also its apparent opposite, modernity, is in danger ofbeing nebulous, yet perhaps the constellation as the image of interconnection isable to embrace both the ecological and the human, so that human culture becomesa patiently embroidered tapestry respectfully mantling the earth.7 Thus theconstellation is an image suggesting the tension of interconnectedness. To describethe interconnection as hybridity is inadequate. Rather, the tension identifiesdifferentials of power: the context that is generally applicable to African fiction,and to life in Africa.

Such a condition is important for it suggests the movement of theory andfiction beyond dialecticism: that is, beyond synthesised unity towards a dynamicrelationship between thesis and antithesis. As Okri notes, “Mathematics worksitself backwards and forwards, but fiction, like music, presses in all directions”(1992:79). The movement of theory and fiction is potentially suggestive for it is notmerely a spatiality, but is simultaneously in motion and is, therefore, a temporality:not statically flat but temporally three-dimensional through continual ‘gravitational’,orbital negotiation. As Baudrillard notes, orbital circulation is the implosive self-reflexive process of the technological era, replacing the dialectical passage betweenpoles (1983:21). In other words, this is the imagery of momentary balance throughtension, the constellative locus of gravity and centrifuge that does not “break theparadox” but keeps it alive. The verbal “constellate”, its dictionary meaning “toform into a (group like) constellation; adorn as with stars”, suggests the potentialcreative potency of a constellar reading and interpretation that locates andcontextualises in an ongoing process without serving any one particular centre.Syl Cheney-Coker conveys this sense of spatial motion thus:

now that we are no more innocent of the whirlwindof words cyclic posturing of the baobabwe ride the constellations drifters upon seven seasprovoke those ceremonies called to functionspelling out our treason in monotonous syllogism. (1990:12)

African writers today are “no more innocent” and must actively “ride theconstellations...spelling out our treason”, yet simultaneously be passive “drifters”with a merely “monotonous” treason to the “cyclic posturing” of the worlds ofboth nature (“baobab”) and culture (“words”). This simultaneity of resistance andacceptance is the satyagraha of a dynamic yet compliant politics. Such simultaneityis also the much commented-upon syncretic time that is characteristic ofpostcolonialism. Hence the politics of the constellation is limited, multiple,contingent, treasonous and, most importantly, in process; such politics might bestbe termed dissident.

The complexity of constellations necessarily implies the contingency ofany political point of view or position. Quayson suggests the ineluctability of thiscontingency when he notes of Okri that “It is...important, for instance, to grasp therelationship of non-realist writing to the sense of the incoherence in the status of

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the postcolonial condition in Africa, political, social, as well as cultural” (1997:155).Biodun Jeyifo similarly notes of current African fiction that “the narrative andstylistic organisation of the material is informed by a problematic which assumesthat the work of fiction can no longer complacently proffer a fictional ‘reality’axiomatically at variance with the socio-historical reality of alienation, degradation,chaos and instability for the vast majority of its living generations” (1986:9). Thusdissent in today’s African writers is not merely a sign of a generation in rebelliousreaction to its immediate heritage, but also a response to social urgency. Given theexigencies of state oppression, censorship8 and social pressure on writers toprovide answers, dissidence makes a great deal of sense. Thus perhaps the mostappropriate idea for the politics of the constellation, matrix, lattice, web or net isdissidence. Open rebellion or public protest is too often immediately punishableand hence the adoption of the safer courses of anonymous attacks, satire, characterassassination, shunning, fudging the question, mimicry, feigning ignorance and,of course, silence. Such dissident ‘guerilla tactics’ have often been adopted bytoday’s African writers as these stratagems are extremely difficult to define oroppose for, as Obinkaram Echewa writes, “if the argument is conducted in silence,with the sullen face and the question that is really a rebuke, how do I defend myselfor my point of view against this unstated opposition?” (1992:310). Such measuresmight be found in many African writers today, but are particularly prominent inZakes Mda’s ludic quasi-hero, Toloki (1995:169), Mike Nicol’s critiques of conflictand the history of conflict (1992: 249), Ben Okri’s attacks on the political harassmentof artists (1996:38-40), and in Assia Djebar’s deconstruction of hegemonic history-making (1985). One may note in each case, however, that dissidence has not beenprompted solely by local conditions, but also by international relations. Preciselybecause late capitalism works through a global net (Jameson 1984: 53-93), themarginalised have had to expand their horizons in all directions and become evermore wily at tangling that net.

Power is at times ubiquitous, therefore, at times diffuse. Oppositionaccordingly has to consist of localised dissidences as well as large-scaleorganisation. Although split along a number of fronts, politics is not necessarilydisabled by such splitting; instead new forms of struggle are often difficult tocontrol and manipulate as the subject is dispersed. Complexity is seen as aprerequisite for political action that cannot ever take place on one front alone, forthe status quo itself is multiply constituted. The politics suggested by many currentAfrican writers includes both opposition and resistance as forthright modes, butis prepared to acknowledge the limitation of such antitheses which are dialecticallydependent on what is being opposed. Such a politics must also includeambivalence, complicity, and, most importantly, creativity. Such characteristicsencourage turbulence within power by speaking with a voice that desires to beoutside of power. This desire to be outside of power is literally unimaginable forhow can one begin to be outside of that which is ubiquitous? Politics are thus

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recognised as having multiplicity of purpose, idea and action. For unless one seesthe importance of many specific spheres one cannot perceive the overallsignificance. Diversity becomes the basis for solidarity; there is the need forredefinition of our political vocabulary away from a simple dialectical“Understanding”. As James Scott notes:

So long as we confine our conception of the political to activity that isopenly declared we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essentiallylack a political life or that what political life they do have is limited to thoseexceptional moments of popular explosion. To do so is to miss the immensepolitical terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt and that, for betteror worse, is the political environment of subject classes. It is to focus on thevisible coastline of politics and miss the continent that lies beyond.(1990:199)In conclusion, perhaps the most powerful meaning of ‘constellations’ in

current African literature is that it is an image of global interconnection with all ofthe tension that that implies. The politics arising from such interconnection is acontingent dissidence. This consists of multiply-located and specific localsubversions in attempts to, at the least, defamiliarise hegemonic notions of thepolitical. Hence, whilst politics may seem to be dead, like God, it is not so easilykilled off. For many current African writers, politics can no longer be seen asconfined to the state and oppositional organisation; it cannot exclude any area oflife, no matter how apparently marginal. Politics in African literature today is nothingif not sceptical of any Hegelian Understanding9 that is singular or speciouslyunified. Likewise, literature can no longer be read as able to intervene in the sociusin a direct and unmediated way; it no longer has a political high-ground. Theresult, nevertheless, is to give literature a pervasive importance as potential accessto the hitherto marginalised; after all, literature is precisely the speculative whichHegel called Reason. Of course, the danger that such an inclusive andheterogeneous literature and politics runs is that of otiose, dilatory vacuity; indeed,the centre cannot hold and things do fall apart. The fiction of Reason is arguablyoccasionally incoherent, but at least there is space and time for all, even for thesense of irony needed when considering that Hegel, an occasional racist andimperialist, has had such an impact in the ‘Third-World’.

Notes1 Balogun claims that the formal Eurealism of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was adopted

by most African writers and that “an ambitious naturalist proletarian prose epicwritten in the style of socialist realism and titled Petals of Blood ... was certainly themost influential novel in Africa from the late 1970s through the 1980s ... a personi-fication of the mood of a continent” (1997:9). Lazarus agrees that Ngugi’s novelwas “definitive of the new politically committed writing that has emerged in Africasince 1970” (1990:204).

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2 ‘Postcolonial’ here means both a period and an aesthetic. I want to use the termwith its full freight of periodic connotations: a result of colonialism, aftermath,afterbirth, development, denial, rejection, and so on. I also want to use the term todenote an aesthetic that includes disillusionment with the failure to live up to thepromises of independence, as in the fiction of Ngugi, Achebe, Iyayi, et al., but thatmoves beyond this in its inclusivity; such a style might be described as magicalrealism. The writers that I have cited in this paper might be exemplars of such astyle: Marechera, Gurnah, Okri, Mahjoub, Mahfouz, Laing, Labou Tansi, Nicol,Mda, Vassanji, El Saadawi, Cheney-Coker.

3 See in their different ways, for example, Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Produc-tion, Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism and Lukács’s The Meaning ofContemporary Realism.

4 Walter Benjamin uses the idea of the constellation to differentiate between ideasand things: “Ideas relate to things as stellar constellations relate to the stars” (1980:214). Adorno also uses the constellation, but situates it historically.

5 Quotations throughout are from Clive Wake’s 1995 translation of Les Sept Solitudesde Lorsa Lopez (1985).

6 Other examples might include Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974) and J MCoetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999).

7 This might be captured in the “jewelled net of Indra” image of Mahayana Bud-dhism, which is a holographic view of the universe: each being, at each node of thenet, is a jewel that reflects all the others.

8 In recent years one only has to consider Saro-Wiwa, Ngugi, Marechera, Farah or ElSaadawi.

9 For example, Abdulrazak Gurnah typically writes of any understanding that “thisis only a guess and the experience of life from which it is drawn is inevitablycircumscribed and limited” (1996:8). Hence, the struggle waged against the longev-ity of ideas and the self-undercutting, reflexive provisos issued by writers to com-bat the misinterpretation of their ideas.

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