Editor’s Note
The current editorial note takes its cue from the proliferation of works, listed in this year’s bibliographical issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, that centralise animals, whether as animals or as metaphors. This is not to suggest that they formed a distinct trend in the year 2012 so much as to indicate both the pervasiveness and the paradoxical, simultaneous invisibility of non-human animals in literature. In postcolonial terms, animals have been accorded comparatively little critical attention. As Phillip Armstrong notes in his suggestively titled article, “The Postcolonial Animal” (2002), postcolonialism has “concentrated upon ‘other’ humans, cultures, and territories but seldom upon animals”, although it shares with Animal Studies the recognition that “ideas of an absolute difference between the human and the animal (and the superiority of the former over the latter) owe a great deal to the colonial legacies of European modernity”, including the conflation of race and species, or the exiling of the “animalistic” to Africa, as well as to colonial notions of and distinctions between “the human”, “the natural” and “the cultural” (413-14). One of the most striking examples of the violent conflation of racism and speciesism comes from the post-Apartheid history of South Africa, specifically, the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on human rights crimes committed by former government and liberation movements during the apartheid era. Rosemary Jolly (2006: 155-7) comments on the confusion between perpetrators and victims in the participants’ testimony at these hearings when the animal metaphor was used – both groups of people referred to the other as animals and described themselves as such in an endless vicious cycle. The perpetrators, it appeared, have become animals by treating their human victims like animals; or, the perpetrators have always been animals, it was suggested, simply showing their animal nature by treating their human victims like animals; or, the perpetrators have treated their victims like animals because the victims have always been (treated) like animals – such statements were made by both perpetrators and victims alike. The “postcolonial animal”, then, is a politically oriented construct which has to challenge the continuing legacy of “imperialistic humanism” (Armstrong, 2002: 414).
In this issue of JCL, animals feature in 2012 fiction, poetry, autobiography and criticism in a wide range of representations. While it is impossible to offer full readings of these texts within this editorial, it is interesting to note several patterns that emerge. Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings [see India, Fiction] and Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Rabbit Rap: A Fable for the Twenty-First Century [see Pakistan, Fiction] offer social satire in the form of animal fables. The Wildings features a feline population which inhabits Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighbourhood and parallels the social divisions of the human world: wild-domestic, feral-civilised, unhoused-housed, poor-rich. Animals use what Shyamala Narayan refers to as a “junglee”, or a “wild” language to communicate telepathically across species but remain incomprehensible to humans. Rabbit Rap mirrors human factions even more ostensibly in its warring modern and traditionalist blocs of FRUMPS (Fat Rabbits Urging Modern Perspectives) and OGRES (Old Generation Rabbit Elders), respectively. Ventriloquising animals thus, or anthropomorphising them in other ways, has been seen as a mere reproduction of the beast fable’s or other classic narratives’ treatment of animals, that is, “relegating them to the background of human activity or reading them as more-or-less transparent allegories of ourselves” – in both cases, “animal as animal becomes invisible” (Huggan and Tiffin, 2010: 173). However, as Timothy Clark observes, to criticise a representation for being anthropomorphic means to rely on “assumptions about what human nature is in the first place” and that it is distinct from that of non-human animals’ in ways we claim to know (2011: 194). Instead of seeking to represent animals as “pure” animals, thereby running the risk of positing essentialist human and animal categories, we may use anthropomorphism strategically, as John Simons recommends – that is, as a “category of representation which deals with animals as if they were human but does it in such a way” as to “create profound questions in the reader’s mind as to the extent to which humans and non-humans are really different” (2002: 120). Anthropomorphism may offer a form through which we can analyse why and how animals become constructs and what this suggests about human self-assumptions – for example, through “representations that stage their own artificiality” (Clark, 2011: 191).
The next two novels I would like to discuss briefly here do not stage representations of animals but of animal metaphors, pointing to the fact that animals cannot exist independently of human linguistic structures, that whether symbolic or “real”, they are already caught within the social relations, norms and boundaries of the human world. E.S. Shankar’s Tiger Isle: A Government of Thieves [see Malaysia and Singapore, Fiction, Malaysia) and Sheila Kohler’s The Bay of Foxes [see South Africa, Fiction] employ and parody the emblematic use of animals, particularly telling in both novels’ place-name titles. Tiger Isle, set in a fictional country, a thinly veiled stand-in for Malaysia, exposes bureaucracy and corruption sustaining ethnic and religious divisions parodied as “Project Tigerism”. The Malayan tiger, otherwise an endangered animal, is also the national animal of Malaysia, appearing in the country’s coat of arms and symbolising the government and various related institutions. A more direct source for the title and the novel’s central metaphor is, of course, the tiger as a trope in the Western coinage “tiger economy”, a term reserved for the successful smaller economies of East Asia, including that of Malaysia. While the origin of this term is unclear, one cannot help but see in it the perceived threat the West associates with the “wild”, perhaps even “virulent” economies of the “developing” world stating their presence in the global marketplace. The Bay of Foxes, described by Crystal Warren as a “literary thriller”, also makes emblematic use of an animal, the fox, here seen as an embodiment of reprehensible human qualities and behaviours such as cunning and deception. An Ethiopian refugee is invited to a famous French author’s Sardinian villa, beside the eponymous Bay of Foxes, where she keeps him like a flesh-and-blood African relic in order to draw inspiration from him for her writing. In complicity with the history of his oppression, the French author treats her Ethiopian captive in a way best described as othering “under the sign of the animal” (2010: 137), to use Huggan and Tiffin’s apposite phrase, though casting herself in the role of the cunning fox. It is questionable, therefore, whether animals’ entanglement in the symbolic economy of human tropes is reinforced or subverted in this novel.
A different approach to the question of animals is employed in Marguerite Poland’s Taken Captive by Birds [see South Africa and Zimbabwe, South Africa, Non-fiction], an autobiographical work which traces myths, traditions and meanings associated with birds and their names in Zulu and Xhosa cultures. In recounting memories as related to birds, this book offers an alternative classification to those made pervasive by zoology or, in this case, its branch, ornithology – sciences that have conspired with ethnography and anthropology in the colonial project. Also concerned with birds, Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds [see Australia, Fiction] centralises the idea of observation, where the observed, however, are both birds (or other animals) and humans. Bird watching here takes on an unusual significance – it suggests, as does the title itself, the parallel lives we live with animals. Animal observation is also at the heart of the title story in Cary Fagan’s My Life among the Apes [see Canada, Fiction], where the protagonist observes a tribe of chimpanzees only to reflect, later on, on the ways in which they are mimicked by social relations, for instance hierarchies, in the human world. Observation is highly suspect – a parallel technique in colonial ethnography as the study of “primitive” peoples by Western “experts”, in the natural sciences’ classifications of “indigenous” life, and in primatology’s tests of animal intelligence. Fagan’s story, however, undermines the species boundary by posing the question who is aping whom. In this question, the story is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917), in which Red Peter, a civilised African ape, apes humanity in delivering a learned speech to an audience of academics on the evolutionary process, as based on that humanly tried and tested narcissistic technique of self-observation. Ironically, humans and apes appear caught in a perpetual process of reflecting back each other’s image.
At the opposite end to the fable within the spectrum of animal representations stands a Canadian novel, Don LePan’s Animals (2009), on which this issue of JCL carries an article of criticism [see Canada, Criticism, Studies on Individual Writers, LePan, Don]. It is set in a dystopian future where humans have consumed and, in this way made extinct, almost all animal species and are now “farming” the meat of so-called “mongrels”, people with mental or physical disabilities. As Paul Keen observes in the above-mentioned article, readers of the novel are invited to “judge the decisions characters make in reinforcing and policing categories of mongrels and humans” so as to question “the unstable classificatory system through which we organise physical and textual worlds” (153). LePan’s animal story, then, is based on the absence of non-human animals; indeed, it foregrounds it. Human animals take centre-stage merely to perpetuate the same divisions in an echo of the endless cycle of violent racism/speciesism as evinced by the example from South African history with which we began. LePan’s novel also destabilises the distinction we make between carnivorous and cannibalistic, otherwise both qualities referring to the practice of meat-eating. This distinction has been instrumental in both colonial discursive constructions of alterity (in the case of cannibalism as a barbarous practice) and in what Jacques Derrida terms carno-phallogocentrism: the conjunction of carnivorous virility and the logos which highlights, in his view, the sacrificial structure of human subjectivity, reinforced through the ritual sacrificing (meat- hunting and eating) of the animal within us as a way of ensuring our own dominance and sanctity (1991: 112). The title of LePan’s Animals is particularly interesting to consider in this context – as an uncanny return of the animal within, as a self/other-aimed slur (“you, animals!”) and, perhaps, most provocatively, as the combination of these two meanings in reference to its human characters.
I end on a note of apology. This year, the bibliography issue of JCL is forced to mark an unfortunate omission – that of the Caribbean bibliographical entry – which is not to be seen as reflective of the otherwise healthy critical and creative output in the region and which will be rectified in next year’s issue in a double instalment of bibliography from the Caribbean, covering the period 2012-2013.
