Abstract
As the British Isles are floating away from Europe and the construction of what has been popularly dubbed “the great wall of Calais” is being planned to ward off illegal immigration into the UK, I am reminded of the meditations of Franz Kafka’s narrator in “The Great Wall of China” (1917), the testimonial of one of the builders of this monumental structure that the story itself mocks in its title, parodying the “knowledge” of genres such as the pamphlet or the encyclopaedia entry. The Wall was constructed in a piecemeal fashion, the narrator explains, with groups of workers being perpetually transferred from one section they had just completed to another, rather than carrying on building in a continuous line. Many gaps were left, as a result, where fragments of the wall never converged. This prompts him to ask, logically: But how can a wall protect if it is not a continuous structure? Not only can such a wall not protect, but what there is of it is in perpetual danger. These blocks of wall left standing in deserted regions could be easily pulled down again and again by the nomads, especially as these tribes, rendered apprehensive by the building operations, kept changing their encampments with incredible rapidity, like locusts, and so perhaps had a better general view of the progress of the wall than we, the builders. (235-6)
Similar ruptures in the project of “the great wall of Calais” as a prohibitive measure and as political propaganda attending to nationalist paranoia, are readily discernible, for example, in the fiction of its impermeablility or in the fiction of the radical alterity of those beyond the wall. Linearity and monolithic constructions have never been an enduring obstacle to the already perilously uneven and circuitous movements of the dispossessed and the persecuted. Like the northern nomads in Kafka’s story, they would always have a better, of necessity more intimate, understanding of the mechanisms, material and psychological, of their own exclusion than that of those they are designed to protect or even of the mechanisms’ authors.
Further contemporary resonances in Kafka’s story include images of alterity in popular representations of the peoples of the north – “these faces of the damned … When our children are unruly, we show them these pictures, and at once they fly weeping into our arms” (241) – and the absurdity in the logic of “the high command” thrown back upon itself in its interdicts – “Try with all your might to comprehend the decrees of the high command, but only up to a certain point; then avoid further meditation” (240).
Projects of this kind articulate Europe as a zone of trespassing, the wall superseding structures of connectivity, such as the English Channel, whilst also emphasising in this way its exclusivity as a route. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to address, instead, the historical and political conditions at the roots of such displacements. In a recent editorial on the “point of Europe”, Sandra Ponzanesi (2016) urges for a shift in its “heading”, understood in the light of Derrida’s The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (1992) as, at once, a concept and a project or trajectory, rather than one remaining “predicated on its singularity and exceptionality” (160) as articulated in contradistinction to the non-European Other. A possible “heading” for Europe as a “unique crystallization of traditions and conflicts” (Balibar, 2016: 165) would involve a revised notion of cosmopolitanism, so as to “include multiculturalism, not as something that pertains to non-European people, but to people who have always been part of the European project through its wider imperial history” (Ponzanesi, 162). One of the threats to which this understanding of cosmopolitanism may be subjected, however, has presented itself in the form of what Sadakat Kadri (2016) assures us is only “idiosyncratic chatter” – various evocations of Britain’s colonial heritage, including propositions of a CANZUK federation of the “Crown countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom” (Roberts 2016).
Two novels listed in JCL’s bibliographical listings this year imagine the “centre” – Britain, England, London – as a dystopian place: Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown (Malaysia and Singapore, Malaysia) and Anna Smaill’s The Chimes (New Zealand). The story in the former, set in a Regency London and featuring the first African “Sorcerer Royal”, Zacharias Wythe, involves rescuing an England whose supplies of magic are about to be depleted. The latter novel, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015, is set in an alternative London where writing has been banned and whose populace are further ensnared by means of the regular chimes of a Carillon, gradating to a deafening crescendo and inducing a collective amnesia. The Carillon, the world’s largest musical instrument and a public medium reflecting “the preferences and feelings of a local community” (Rombouts, 2014: 321), evokes the Wall in Kafka’s text as a colossal apparatus – a physical presence and reminder of the hallucinatory discursive regime of the state/empire. “The urgent message of a community’s need to share memories is compelling,” comments reviewer Catherine Taylor (2015), “but Smaill also touches on the significance of willed amnesia” in the figure of one of the characters, Clare, “a self-harming survivor of abuse”.
A related theme running through the bibliographies this year is the relationship between silence/-ing and sound. A special issue, 15(1), of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature: JASAL, is devoted to considerations of the possibility of claiming “a distinct sonic texture for Australian literary and cultural formations” (Groth and Cummins, 1). The articles gathered in this issue draw on Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past (2003), which argues that just as “there was an Enlightenment, so too was there an ‘Ensoniment’ … a series of conjunctures among ideas, institutions, and practices [that] rendered the world audible in new ways and valorised new constructs of hearing and listening”; the articles explore silence and the colonial past; music and landscape, or the silence attributed to it; the frontier meeting-through-sound of Indigenous Australians and European settlers, and the litany of urban voices in writing (ibid. 1, 7). Further criticism concerning itself with sound/silence includes representing and translating silence in poetry (Canada); the role of “chutney music”, or the “musical mark” that people of East Indian/South Asian descent have made in Trinidad and Tobago (Caribbean); the ways in which institutions, culture and identity have shaped “African musics” (archiving music; music and motion), and the development of the “socio-political song” in Kenya (East and Central Africa).
The voicing of silenced stories and histories, a central preoccupation of postcolonial writing, assumes an interesting configuration in 2015’s offerings – from the preponderance of “bookish” characters obsessed with writing, textuality and metafictional imaginings in Australian fiction through poetic and dramatic retellings of the infinitely re-imaginable and re-imagined Mahabharata to novels which revision “classics” – Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (Caribbean) and Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (India) – to translations, for example, in the English adaptation of some of Aamer Hussein’s Urdu work in his new collection, 37 Bridges and Other Stories. The list is, of course, by no means exhaustive. Here, we can also include cartographic revisions such as Dennis Greene’s collection of poems, Here Be Dragons (Australia), whose title is a translation of the Latin legend Hic Sunt Dracones (“Here there are dragons”), appearing on a medieval (c. 1460-70) world map and, in another variation, on the South-Eastern coast of Asia on a c. 1510 globe, among others (van Duzer, 2012: 389). Greene’s volume re-imagines journeys of exploration and scientific discovery such as those of Magellan and Darwin, foregrounding the complicity of science and colonialism in its juxtapositions.
In her study, What Is a Classic (2014), Ankhi Mukherjee explores a host of postcolonial responses to “the canon” that simultaneously reposition it as “not just an archive but transmission, perpetuating a critical tradition”, lending itself to “interventions that dislodge familiar reading formations” and, importantly, questioning the understanding of the canon, in John Guillory’s phrase, as “the aristocracy of texts” (8-9). Noting postcolonial responses’ inevitable belatedness in relation to the canon, Mukherjee demonstrates how their quality of being after dramatises “the latecomer’s desire to be a precursor”, to articulate the voices “dominated, displaced or silenced” by what Edward W. Said has referred to as “the textuality of texts” (46). In Caryl Phillips’s response to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, we can recognise both this impulse and its textual dramatisation. Set in post-World War II Britain, The Lost Child, imagines into being the past of Brontë’s Heathcliff (Julius Wilson) as the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw by a freed slave we see dying in Liverpool at the beginning of the novel. Phillips fleshes out Heathcliff’s obscure, racially ambiguous origins through echoes of Liverpool’s past as a centre of colonial trade, especially of the British slave trade, and its complicity with the present. The novel also engages with the idea of “the author” and her life, through the character of Monica, who marries Julius and abandons her Oxford degree, thus alienating her parents – a plot element that is reminiscent of Wuthering Heights’ early reception, alienating Emily Brontë from middle-class values and judgements that identified the novel itself with its disturbing, “wild” and “moorish”, character. In an interview, Phillips explains that his novel’s Yorkshire moors both consciously and subconsciously reflected the 1960s landscape of the Moor murders – its sinister quality suggesting an analogy between the children victims and Heathcliff’s “traumatised childhood”. That Monica should choose Julius over her Oxford degree points to the idea of “unlearning” as a broader response to the historical violence of colonial English education and a strategy of engagement with the “canon” itself, inclusive of classics positioned ambiguously in relation to colonialism, such as Wuthering Heights. Yet, it also gestures towards postcolonial rewriting as a “historical becoming” of a canon otherwise “untouched by the depredations of history” (Mukherjee, 119). Phillips shares what Mukherjee identifies as “the predicament of the postcolonial writer, whose conscious or unconscious affiliation and allusiveness to the Western literary tradition is an inheritance that is as often unwanted as it is laboured for” (113).
Contemporary writing in English which revisions “classics” of what is considered “world literature”, such as the Indian epic of the Mahabharata or the culturally-impure, migrant collection of the Thousand and One Nights, can be perceived as participating in what Mukherjee refers to as “the invention of alternative canons” based on “new ‘imaginary unities’” (10). Despite the fact that such alternative canons would tend to move inexorably towards Western markets and readerships, they also constitute a “heterotopic site” of “continuities, discontinuities, repetitions, and displacement” (48). The Nights as a cultural text has a fascinating relationship to ideas of classics and canons. A mutable compendium of stories, contained within, spilling over, and returning, in various ways, to the confines of the frame of Scheherazade/Shahrazad and Sultan Shahryar, it stands for a paradigm of an alternative canon. It has historically contained both “originals” and their “afterlife” versions; it is a collection in which the tales added by the West (specifically, by the eighteenth-century French Orientalist translator of the Nights, Antoine Galland) are known as “the orphan stories” (“Ali Baba”; “Aladdin”; “Sindbad”) and whose adoptive “parents” include Persia, India, Egypt and, more broadly, North Africa, and Andalusia. In the long history of the Nights’ appropriation by contemporary fiction, Rushdie’s engagement has been predicated upon the inexhaustibility of storytelling as well as the idea of telling stories to save one’s life. His Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights once again rehearses this pre-occupation with the infinity of stories, signalled in the arithmetic of the title (amounting to, or just short of, the number 1001) and the playfulness of its numerical symmetry (2-8-28). Like other contemporary revisions of the Nights, Rushdie’s novel “emboldens” Dinarzad or Dunyazad (Jones, 2005), Shahrazad’s sister, but it also performs a gender inversion. Writing into the frame of the Nights his experience under the fatwa, he imagines the figure of the author of The Satanic Verses into that of the Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rashd, or Averroes, and Dinarzad (here Dunya) in the role of the Sultan, demanding stories and sex: “So he was a sort of anti-Scheherazade, Dunya told him, the exact opposite of the storyteller of The Thousand Nights and One Night: her stories saved her life, while his put his life in danger” (Rushdie, 2015: 13). Dunya, a sixteen-year-old jinn girl or “jinnia”, is named so by a traveller – Rushdie’s nod to the Nights’ worldliness in the etymology of its Dinarzad’s name.
Karthika Nair’s contemporary reclamation and re-politicisation of the Mahabharata also attempts to place its silenced characters centre-stage. Her poetry collection, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (2015a), borrows the African proverb, “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”, famously cited by Chinua Achebe to explain his motivation for writing as a historian of the hunt that would “reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions” (1996). Nair seeks to document the stories of nineteen marginal characters in the Mahabharata as part of her “enquiry into power and the ethics of power” (2015b) – women and foot-soldiers, some nameless in the epic – based on various translations, regional versions and other retellings.
Whereas, in an interview, Nair describes the Mahabharata as “a literary Petri dish” (2015b), the title of Kiran Nagarkar’s play, Bedtime Story, another re-interpretation of the epic, is an ironic genre qualifier in its reference to the Mahabharata’s popularity as a story for children. Written during the Emergency, censored and appearing in print for the first time in 2015, the play re-historicises the Mahabharata to address issues of caste, gender and war.
Children and childhood are the focus of two collections of criticism listed in, respectively, the bibliographies from West Africa and Zimbabwe this year: Ernest N. Emenyonu’s edited issue of African Literature Today: Children’s Literature and Storytelling and Robert Muponde’s authored book Some Kinds of Childhood: Images of History and Resistance in Zimbabwean Literature. Children’s Literature and Storytelling explores the circulation of traditional stories and myths told to children and contemporary revisions of such tales as well as the ways in which modern African fiction blurs the boundary between literatures intended for children and for adults through its children characters who often find themselves in armed conflicts. Muponde’s study examines the ways in which representations of childhood in Zimbabwean literature disrupt forms of exclusivist “nationalist discourse and its inflexible brand of history and resistance” as well as complicit, sentimental mythologies of childhood, including the trope of “children of resistance”, through strategies such as the portrayal of “dystopian childhoods” (3).
Postcolonialism’s relationship to children’s literature has been relatively little explored and theorised. In her 2007 study, Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature, Clare Bradford notes that postcolonial revisions of “canonical” texts (citing J.M. Coetzee’s revision of Robinson Crusoe in Foe as an example) are uncommon in children’s literature. Instead, such politicised children’s fiction tends to reflect colonial education contexts, where children’s stories set and dramatise this encounter with colonial “classics”, and to recurrently revisit a related trope of displacement in these contexts, that of “home” (31).