FOR BJ

Many years ago, while working on Wole Soyinka, I came across Biodun Jeyifo’s magnificent piece on The Road in his The Truthful Lie. That piece was an eye-opener for me. In it Jeyifo read the subterranean logic of repressed violence as being the dramaturgical dimension from which to understand the various contradictions in the play. Professor’s convoluted language of self-representation, the motor-park touts discordant assemblage of heroic and epic images from Yoruba and urban lore, and the tortuous and spasmodic development of the play’s action were all read against this subterranean logic. At the end of it Jeyifo concluded that Soyinka was not quite able to marry the implicitly metaphysical level of the action (the Word, Murano, appeals to Ogun, etc) with the material signifiers of alienation and dispossession that marked the lives of those on the represented urban periphery. The explosion of violence at the end of the play at the emergence of the masked egwu-egwu and Say Tokyo Kid’s stabbing of Professor were the final acknowledgement, at the level of form, of the unresolvability of the contradiction at the heart of the play.

Biodun’s piece stayed with me for a very long time and even though I read many other things by him, it is this piece that defined for me the character of his critical sensibility. In it could be seen the Marxist disposition that has long defined his work. But also significant was the fine attention to all levels of the play and the capacity to modulate the critical focus in order to take account of a comprehensive range of implications, some of which were only vaguely hinted at in the action itself. Many times I have found myself going back to the piece on The Road to think through the steps he deployed in writing it. The present essay is an attempt to replicate aspects of Jeyifo’s method as a way of celebrating what I have always felt to be one of the most remarkable literary scholars to have come out of Africa. It is Borges who suggests in his story on Pierre Menard that the repetition of Don Quixote word for word is a form of re-creation. I cannot aspire to any such mimetic re-writing; what I wish to do is to acknowledge how much my own thinking has been influenced by the critical methodology of people such as Jeyifo. I will one day write an extended essay or perhaps book on “Critics Reading Writing” to explore closely the critical essays that I have found most illuminating for my own literary-critical formation and hope to include in this prospective piece critics such as Roland Barthes on wrestling, Michael Riffaterre on the Romantics, Erich Auerbach on Homer and the Bible, Stephen Greenblatt on The Merchant of Venice, J. Hillis Miller on Kafka, Edward Said on Kipling, Spivak on Jean Rhys and Rosemarie Garland Thomson on Toni Morrison among a few other instructive examples from the non-Africanist critical tradition. In this exercise Jeyifo’s piece on The Road would exemplify what I consider to be some of the most stimulating from the African critical tradition.

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The Island and the Vicissitudes of Self-fashioning

Readers of Athol Fugard’s The Island will recall the point towards the end of Scene I when John mimes a telephone conversation with one of his old friends on the mainland. Both he and Winston have returned to their cell after a hard day’s work on the lime quarry undertaking the pointless task of filling in and emptying out a wheelbarrow onto each other's mound of sand. Though we cannot tell what exactly is being said on the other side of the line, we are able to piece together bits and pieces from John’s end of the conversation: he asks about his friends, tells his interlocutor about their own hard life on Robben Island prison and the difficulties they are having with Hodoshe, the blatantly sadistic prison warden. He finally asks for a message to be passed on to his wife, Princess. Winston sneaks in a request for a message to be passed on to his own wife too, but by that point in the telephone conversation the two friends are less than enthusiastic about carrying on the make-believe. The stage directions say that ‘the mention of his wife guillotines Winston’s excitement and fun. After a few seconds of silence, he crawls back heavily to his bed and lies down. A similar shift in mood takes place in John (206). Even though the word “guillotine” signals decapitation, the fact that it is coupled with a description of John’s “crawling back heavily” suggests that it also has vague resonances of emotional dismemberment and disablement. It is interesting to note, however, that the force of the word guillotine comes from reading the stage direction, whereas in performance the actor’s rendering of the effect of the conversation upon him would have been returned to the level of his body and its gestures. Thus even though in reading the stage directions the word might be taken as operating at the level of metaphor, we have to visualize the sudden deflation of the two characters’ egos and the return of their bodies to the harsh realities of incarceration. The mental and the physical are overlaid upon each other, and the moral issue of the loss of freedom and how one must act with regard to that loss is translated unto the bodies of the characters on stage.

There are several things that have been suggested by this point in the play and that are more or less encapsulated in the telephone conversation itself and the two men’s gestural reactions to it. First is the blatantly obvious point about their nostalgia for freedom. But their nostalgia is not just for freedom, but for freedom as it is connected to their past as freedom fighters. In other words the nostalgia is for a particular form of freedom, which is ultimately defined by their being political beings first and foremost. Second is that the telephone conversation is only one point in the various modalities of the taking on of roles that is also at the heart of the play. For as will be recalled, they are rehearsing their parts in a special production of Sophocles’s Antigone in which Winston will be Antigone and John Creon. Getting Winston to believe in the efficacy of the suspension of disbelief is only one part of John’s troubles in trying to persuade his cellmate to rehearse his lines; what is more pressing is the fact that Winston is going to have to dress in drag and perform the role of a woman, something that elicits a strongly negative reaction from him. By the time of the telephone conversation the two men have gone through a series of adopted roles, most of which have no bearing on the Antigone play they are rehearsing for. The phone conversation is but the final and most dramatic of these adopted roles in the first part of the play.

Overarching the thematic of nostalgia for freedom and the rehearsal of various roles is something of much greater significance for the overall dynamic of oppression and resistance that is revealed in the play. This is the thematic of what, following Giorgio Agamben, we may refer to as bare life, the life of he who can be killed but not sacrificed. As Agamben points out in Homo Sacer (1998), the biological life of those situated on the periphery of the political order is precisely that which defines that order in the first place. It is the instantiation of the exception that allows the invocation of sovereignty; the excluded example helps to define that which is included. Thus the exception is the limit case that folds into itself both the logic of the dominant order and its definition of what is exclusionary to that logic. For Agamben the bare biological life of the subject is the precise instantiation of the logic of the political system since that biological life is meaningless outside the discourse of the polity itself (he turns to Aristotle and the Greeks to explore this point). What should be of interest to us here, however, is not solely his discussion of the bare life of the homo sacer, since, as he acknowledges it, the research agenda he pursues has already been laid out by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, but the example he gives of the concentration camp as one of the foci for understanding the rule of the exception. He defines the camp not ‘as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’ (166). Agamben speculates on the genesis of camps, suggesting they might be traced to the 1896 Spanish effort in Cuba to suppress local insurrection, or to the camps into which the English herded the Boers at the end of the 19th century. Both these are instances of states of emergency linked to colonial wars that then engulf the entire civilian population. Robben Island was at various points in its history an articulation of a “state of emergency” and was routinely used as a place to which socially and politically anomalous types were kept separate from normal society and used to define the exception.1

Returning to Fugard’s play we see that the bare life of John and Winston is defined across a range of practices of the self that they perfect in their incarceration, some of which we have seen in their adoption and rehearsal of roles. Their “nakedness” as prisoners is rehearsed before the imaginary audiences of their wives, comrades, and other political interlocutors on the mainland. It is this that gives the telephone conversation such poignancy and significance, for their naked identities are worked out both between themselves and in the anticipation of the reactions of various imagined and real others. This seems like an obvious point, yet since the entire gamut of other depicted characters outside of John and Winston is strictly evoked via the reminisces and projections of the two characters on stage, the idiom of the drama becomes one of the refraction of anticipations. It is these anticipations that worry Winston. He can tell exactly how the other prisoners will respond to him as Antigone. It is for John to persuade him that beyond the laughter that he will provoke there will also be a space for listening and that it is this that he must wait for in enacting the role of that classical female rebel.

Commentators have noted that Fugard draws on a tradition that can be traced back to Beckett. Certainly the intensity of the relationship between the two prisoners is evocative of the world of Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, which as we saw in Chapter 3 shares with other Beckett plays the dialogism of an implied sceptical interlocutor. The Island shares with Waiting for Godot the themes of anticipation and waiting, since John is later on in the course of the play informed that his ten-year sentence has been commuted to three, leaving him with a mere three months of incarceration to bear. This in itself becomes the occasion for the two prisoners to rehearse the various situations that they imagine would be pertinent to John’s arrival home among his family and comrades. One significant dramaturgical difference between Beckett’s and Fugard’s play, however, is that in Waiting for Godot the two tramps do not enact multiple identities. Even though imagingin different situations Estragon and Vladimir do not alter their essential personalities to match these situations. They are not characters rehearsing the identities of other characters in different scenarios. The situations that they invoke flow directly from their (vaguely) remembered pasts and the future they anticipate in waiting for Godot. The only radically different situation to theirs is provided when Lucky and Pozzo enter the play, where the responses of the two tramps to the fresh pair provides different trajectories for interpreting their own condition. In Fugard’s play, on the other hand, John and Winston proliferate scenarios and the responses that they might adduce in anticipation of putative interlocutors. This makes the play a medium of heterogeneous mediations of the self, since the effect of the proliferation of scenarios and the rehearsals attendant upon those scenarios is (a) to multiply other interlocutory selves and (b) to engender new modes of address in relation to such interlocutory others. I would like to suggest that it is this medium of heterogeneities that gives the play its insightful and radical edge and not the enactment of the trial of Antigone that all things seem to lead up to and that in fact closes the action.

The trial of Antigone in The Island is a major interpretative telescoping of what happens in Sophocles’s play. In the Sophoclean Antigone there is no trial in any straightforward sense of the word. What there is is a major clash between Antigone and Creon and a lengthy debate about the rights of the family as opposed to those of the city. Recall, at any rate, that Creon is Antigone’s uncle on her mother’s side and that she is betrothed to Haemon, his son, and things become somewhat more complicated than in Fugard’s rendition. In telescoping the meaning of Antigone into the relative rights of the state vrs those of the citizen, Fugard is drawing inspiration for a tradition of interpreting the play that can be traced at least to Hegel. In his own account Hegel was to note that the essential form of a tragedy depended on certain inescapable collisions, but that these collisions were not necessarily the collisions of directly opposed ethical conceptions of the citizen but rather conceptions that essentially participated of one another. Thus, writing about the mutual entanglement of the oikos (familial) principle with the polis (political) principle in Greek tragedy, he suggests that ‘the opposition . . . is that of the body politic, the opposition, that is, between ethical life in its social universality and the family as the natural ground of moral relations’ (1998: 39; italics added). The dialectical interplay that Hegel stipulates is between a form of social universality, essentially an abstraction, and a natural ground of moral relations that must perforce be concrete and immanent within the microcosm of interpersonal relations (i.e., the family). We must qualify Hegel’s terms slightly in order to account for a different kind of dialectical pairing, particularly so as the ethics of a social universality in a place like South Africa were seriously called into question because of the uneven political domain within which such a universality might have been articulated. In other words, social universality cannot be taken for granted under conditions of oppression; the social universal is itself a ground for contestation and struggle.2 And since the domain of interpersonal relationships both offers the grounds for working through morality and is itself produced by the essential logic that dominates any system, that domain then takes on a coloration from the problematic social universal that is being shaped under the impress of unfreedom.

It is useful to recall in this regard Fugard’s observation that Robben Island has been the most important absent presence in the lives of South Africans: it is real, visibly present in the sea just off Cape Town, and yet until the fall of apartheid was hardly ever spoken about (Vadenbroucke 1985: 126). Because of its political salience as an apartheid prison, it thus became the spectral figuration of the fraught political domain in which South African lives were lived. In several respects it might be possible to “calibrate” a reading of the play as a way of decentring the essentially political narrative that has dominated representations of Robben Island by focusing on the theme of multiple rehearsals of the self encapsulated in the action of the play and how these provide a different means for thinking about the Island’s history. What such a reading produces is the sense of the Island’s heterogeneities that are at once spatial, rhetorical, ideological and political. It is easy in reading a play (as opposed to seeing it performed) or a historical account to think of human beings as disembodied abstractions. A dramatic performance on the other hand places us in the presence of material human bodies sighing, losing their temper, falling down, rising up again, wringing their hands in despair, laughing, and invoking a world of reality through gesture and action. A dramatic performance also produces a form of perspectival depth since we are always meant to recall that the stage is a microcosm of a wider social universe that rings the action unfolding before us. Indeed, with regard to The Island the “John” and “Winston” of the play were really John Kani and Winston Ntshona, South African citizens who ran the real risk of being imprisoned should they have transgressed the many laws regarding theatre, performance, and race in their country (Wetmore, 2002: 197).

To conclude then. The Island allows us to (a) keep in the foreground of our minds the materiality of bodies-in-action; (b) focus upon the multiple rehearsals of the self that take place against a horizon of anticipations; (c) perceive the essential lineaments of the struggle between social universality and the interpersonal and familial grounds for the elaboration of morality, and (d) keep in view the oscillating relationship between the depicted foreground of the action and the wider social and political background that frame that action. As in Jeyifo’s reading of Soyinka’s play, the implication of my account of The Island is ultimately that there is a significant methodological insight to be drawn from the dramaturgical action when it is seen as part of a larger socio-political dynamic. This is not to read literature in a merely instrumentalist manner; rather, it is to recognize that literature is fully worldly, even if it conceals this worldliness via the ambiguations of form.

Bibliography

Hegel, G. W. F. (1998). “Tragedy as Dramatic Art”. In Tragedy, eds. John Drakakis and Naomi Conn Liebler. London: Longman.

Honneth, Axel (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jeyifo, Biodun (1985). The Truthful Lie: Essays in the Sociology of African Drama. London: Beacon Books.

Quayson, Ato (2007). Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. (2002). The Athenian Sun in an African Sky. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

Notes

* A version of my discussion of Fugard’s play will appear in the chapter on Robben Island in Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007).

1 The phrase “normal society” is bound to strike a jarring note, given the fact that under the colonial expropriation of land and property normality was strictly speaking abrogated and could only be regained through various forms of struggle. Normality then can only be seen in as far as it was tied to an articulation of freedom. Colonial and apartheid Cape society was in that sense more normal than the culture of Robben Island, but completely abnormal under the impress of colonial domination. And colonial domination itself produced variegated standards of normality for the Europeans and the natives they ruled over.

2 For a further elaboration and expansion of Hegel’s idea of the interrelationship of the social universal to the family as the ground of moral relations, see Honneth (1996).