Abstract
Editor’s Note
This year, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is delighted to welcome a new contributor for the Caribbean – Maria Alonso Alonso. In the current issue, readers can find her double bibliographical entry, with coverage for the years 2012 and 2013, rectifying last year’s omission.
Taking part in recording, over the years, the richness and diversity of the literary output from the regions represented in JCL’s bibliography has given me the rather Borgesian task of observing details, fragments and patterns or of pursuing particular strands, without attempting to totalize or generalize the incredible range and quantity of material gathered in each issue. This year, I take my cue from Grace Musila’s Introduction to the bibliography from East and Central Africa. She comments on the continuing history of misrepresentation of Africa and Africans as haunted by the triad of “disease, war and poverty” and notes the consolidation of a genre of Anglo-American fiction she refers to as “volunteer tourism romance”, featuring service in slums, orphanages and refugee camps where protagonists find love and healing. Undoubtedly, in the images rehearsed in this fiction we can recognize, once again, the idea of Africa as a heart of darkness exposed by Chinua Achebe as the reduction of a continent to a mere setting for the unfolding psychological dramas of the Western mind. In the banality they have acquired through mass-media coverage, however, images of an Africa plagued by disease, war and poverty reveal a related, more alarming tendency. In its ongoing reports on the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa, BBC News offers, after a wealth of material on the origin, history and nature of the disease, a hyperlink to “More African stories”. Exploring the “epidemic of signification” that the development of another disease, AIDS, has generated in relation to Africa, Jean Comaroff cites Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttal (2004) who argue that such images “exceed even the archetypes of otherness implied in Said’s Orientalist paradigm” by being “correct”: Global geopolitics have produced new zones of exclusion in which alterity becomes highly relative. The Muslim terrorist might have emerged as the acme of opposition to American dominance in the post-Cold War world, but disease-ridden Africa epitomizes another otherness, a product less of an axis of evil than an axis of irrelevance. (Comaroff 2007: 201)
Whereas the Ebola-infected dying African bodies remain anonymous statistics, the Ebola virus has enjoyed attention, popularity and awe. Its “portrait”, its story, its cartography, and its CG-animated clinical manifestations have achieved a high profile in the media. On 10 September this year, BBC devoted to it a special episode of Horizon: “Ebola – The Search for a Cure”. It is this novel topicality of the disease that I would like to explore here, given that, as Daniel Sokol (2014) reminds us, statistically, Ebola is a “relatively trivial disease” in comparison with malaria and tuberculosis each of which kills several million people each year.
The scientific “discovery” of Ebola was claimed remotely, in Antwerp, by Belgian scientists, but the name it was given was local, that of a river in what was, in 1976, Zaire. As the story goes, a thermos flask had been flown to Antwerp’s Institute of Tropical Medicine. Inside it, “[n]estled amongst a few melting ice cubes were vials of blood along with a note”. The handwritten note explained that the blood was from a Belgian nun who had died of an unidentifiable illness. It was then when, “[n]early 40 years ago, a young Belgian scientist [the eponymous “virus detective” of this BBC news story] travelled to a remote part of the Congolese rainforest” (Brown 2014) to help the Belgian doctor who had sent the flask investigate the illness. Heart of Darkness motifs are particularly prominent – the Congo, its “overwhelming” quality to European senses, the dangerous river, the emissary of light’s journey to the dark Inner Station, which is also a journey back in time to the “mysterious source” of Ebola, the alter-egos in a European’s quest for another European (Marlow/Kurtz, Stanley/Livingstone), the dying “natives”, otherwise peripheral to the story, the multiple framing of/regression to “the horror”, the knowledge that this may be a point of no return, the epistemological crisis, and so on. Added are romantic elements – the “message in a bottle” – more reminiscent of Haggard’s classical imperial adventures than of Conrad’s modernist interior landscapes of consciousness.
In the current spread of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa – Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria – ethical doubts have been expressed by Western scientists in relation to the treatment of local patients with the experimental drug ZMapp. Horizon reports on the successful treatment of a British nurse infected with Ebola, after he had been flown back to the UK by the RAF, as well as of two other Western medical workers, all of whom are credited with a superior understanding of the concept of “informed consent” in comparison with local sufferers whose recovery, the viewer is told, would have been regarded with suspicion in their culture. Under the heading “Can cultural practices spread Ebola?”, BBC News documents practices such as consuming raw bushmeat, contact with infected bats and monkeys, and washing, hugging and kissing of bodies before burial, whereas the initial outbreak of Ebola in Zaire was partly aided by the repeated use of unsterilized needles in neonatal consultations at the Belgian mission station, otherwise run “heroically” by the nuns (Horizon 2014). Ebola has effectively allowed, once again, the production of narratives of Western philanthropy, self-sacrifice, adventure spirit, detective skills and scientific advancements to play themselves out against the backdrop of African superstition, eating practices, and burial rituals.
The appearance and spread of infectious diseases such as AIDS and Ebola has also led to the formation of what Nicholas B. King (2002) terms the emerging diseases worldview, informing the American understanding of international health since the 1990s (767). This worldview involves a self-contained ontology of epidemic disease: its causes and consequences, its patterns and prospects, the constellation of risks that it presents, and the most appropriate methods of preventing and managing those risks. It comes equipped with a moral economy and historical narrative, explaining how and why we find ourselves in the situation that we do now, identifying villains and heroes, ascribing blame for failures and credit for triumphs. (ibid.)
If, while drawing on the colonial ideology of territoriality, the emergent diseases worldview identified particular regions and populations as potential sources of infection, it also recognized that risks can now be prevented not through “the preservation of territoriality” but through the contemporary de-territorialised networks of information, where American institutions would act as the “natural leaders and the most prominent beneficiaries of the creation of a global surveillance network” (ibid., 772, 775). The pharmaceutical industry, as a global network of commodity exchange, was also integrated into the emergent diseases worldview. This involved the division of the world into regions or bands, depending on their “ability to pay”, which were then charged different rates for drugs so as to ensure the efficient distribution of “the risks and benefits of the unpredictable vaccine market” (ibid., 777-9). The announced “clinical trials” of the experimental Ebola cure to begin in Africa later this year thus point to a lingering legacy of imperialism, the West’s inclination to use African bodies for experimentation and profit, and to the more fundamental idea of biocapital, “the knowledge, patents and systems of exchange and command that mean the difference between life and death” (Comaroff, 213-4).
That drugs have come to embody the meaning of life and citizenship is demonstrated in a 1995 Hollywood action thriller, Outbreak (dir. Wolgang Petersen), dramatising a simulation scenario of an Ebola-like epidemic spreading from Zaire to the US. Andrew Lakoff discusses such simulation scenarios as an essential technique of preparedness – “a form of rationality for approaching questions of domestic security in the US” that have involved, especially since 9/11, preparations for a response to a wide range of events, from terrorist attacks to natural disasters to epidemics – all considered within the same framework of national “security threats” and drawing on game theory, that well rehearsed business strategy tool for outwitting competitors, in attempting to predict the moves of the enemy, viral or otherwise (Lakoff, 2007: 247; 258; 266). In Outbreak, the site of the original outbreak of the disease – a village in the Motaba Valley in Zaire – is bombed out of existence in the late 1960s to prevent further spread of the epidemic. The virus, closely modelled on Ebola and also named locally, “Motaba”, is illegally transported in its monkey host to the US, where it devastates a classic quiet, small town, Cedar Creek, in its new airborne mutation. Whereas in Zaire, a local witchdoctor’s interpretation of the disease is cited as divine punishment, the warning in the American context is against illegal trade and, more generally, the violation of national boundaries. The idea of an “airborne” virus itself betrays fears of illegal immigration in the contemporary context of pervasive air travel and, for today’s viewer, resonates with fears of the “airborne” terrorist attack. Older, Cold-War fears resurface in the main plot twist – the Motaba virus has been manufactured as a biological weapon, along with a cure (for its non-airborne variety), by the American military. Recurrent mention is made of American citizenship and the American constitution is thrown on the table in support of an otherwise moral argument against the bombing of Cedar Creek. Not only is it clear that the residents of the Motaba Valley can make no such claims to citizenship, but the film makes no attempts to even consider the Zairian victims, consigned to what Giorgio Agamben (1998) terms “bare life”. Atonement for the American bombing of the region is superseded by “pharmacological salvation” (Comaroff 207) – reserved for American citizens only – the manufacture of a cure for the airborne Motaba strain. As in the spread of AIDS in the US, Africa figures as “the primal other” and the Motaba virus enacts the uncanny “return of the repressed”, of “dangerous desire” (ibid., 197-8). In the film, Kevin Stacey jests in his role of a medical worker researching the Motaba virus, “Listen to the way it rolls off your tongue. Mo-ta-ba. Like a perfume. One drop and you feel so different. Your lover will never recognize you again.”
Outbreak is intended to serve both as a cautionary tale, exposing biopolitical vulnerabilities of US national security, and a simulation exercise that affirms the military infrastructure which, in turn, “guarantees the continuity of political and economic order, not the health of the population or the condition of their existence” (Lakoff 271). As the Ebola epidemic continues, President Obama, quoted in the Washington Post, has declared it to be “a potential threat to global security if [the affected] countries break down, if their economies break down, if people panic” (Larimer 2014). As I am writing this editorial, Operation United Assistance is planned to go ahead, including the “establishment of a U.S. military command center in Liberia to support civilian efforts”. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the Liberian victims, “some dying on the streets, because there is not enough room at isolation clinics set up to treat infected patients”, are “spreading the virus” (Fessy 2014). The Ebola death of the African sufferer is that of Agamben’s homo sacer, “a scarcely human being condemned […] to death without meaning or sacrificial value” (Comaroff, 207).