Bulawayo’s ‘Glory’ and Mbebe’s ‘Subject in Crisis’ on Narrating the Experience of Africaness
What happens to people’s minds, beliefs, and (in)actions when they are forced to become accustomed to living in a constant state of crisis?
I was delighted when I found Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo in a bookstore in a small town in the Deep South of the Netherlands.
I don’t know if it would’ve been available there if not for it being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, but one thing I do know, is that if it doesn’t get shortlisted tonight, I’ll be enduring a dark night of the soul.
The Guardian somewhat reduced it to ‘a Zimbabwean Animal Farm’, but in truth, NoViolet Bulawayo has woven, at once, an entirely original, and all-too-familiar tale of neocolonialism: including — but not limited to — the detailed ways in which good revolutionaries make for very bad democrats; and how the myriad cognitive dissonances required to cope in contemporary African society give rise to public consent for the continued mediocrity of the continent’s new “leaders”.
That said: you don’t have to know a single thing about Zimbabwe nor African politics to read Glory and adore it and fall in love with its characters and cry, at the end.
Bulawayo plays with autochthonous linguistics and storytelling styles to convey complex subject matter in the most accessible way possible.
Here’s an example from my favourite passage, heavily paraphrased:
WE NEED A NEW WORLD ORDER
When those who know about things say the colonial powers gave Africa her independence but not her freedom, tholukuthi what they mean is that the colonial powers gave Africa her independence but not her freedom.
It was not lost on us how to the West, which loved to ‘save’ Africa and announce every action to the whole world, did so with one limb while manipulating, looting, and fleecing us with the rest of its limbs so that more money in fact poured out of the continent than trickled in.
We did not need to be told that it was no accident we were shackled by the immovable chains of prodigious debts to the very nations who otherwise depended on our wealth for their prosperity.
It was no mistake that multinational corporations yearly reaped and shipped colossal profits from Africa back to their countries as had been the case during colonial times.
Even the sticks and stones would tell you that the African earth at any given time howled and shook and heaved from the extraction of its precious minerals that rarely benefited its own miserable children.
Reading Glory raised up a lot of memories for me.
Memories of home; memories of studying storytelling, political “sciences”, and linguistics in Cape Town, South Africa; memories of coming of age on a continent and in a country in a seemingly constant state of some or other crisis.
In 1995, the same year South Africa won the Rugby World Cup, Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe and American Anthropologist Janet Roitman published a paper titled Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis.
Thirteen years later, my poetry professor would burst into a class of four-hundred odd first years and rip his shirt off, proclaiming:
“What am to do, with this? With the contradiction of it? We choose and wear clothes only because we hope they’ll make other people want to take those same clothes off. What am I to do, with that information, with its inherent contradiction?”
My poetry professor was trying to demonstrate (perhaps) a point from the same family as Mbembe’s and Bulawayo’s; which has (I think) something to do with the impossibility of a new disposition (and, indeed, the impossibility of a new dispensation) when the subjects of a regime are forced to swallow and adapt to the circumstances (and contradictions) that come with living in a state of constant crisis.
“Thus one approaches the crisis not as a system, but as a prosaic: the routinisation of a register of improvisations lived as such by people and, in this sense, belonging at most to the domain of the obvious or self-evident, and at least to the banal or that which no longer evokes surprise.”
Along with much more evidence, Mbembe in his paper about the subject in times of crisis invokes the sharp decline of Cameroon’s once optimistic economic growth rates and institutional failures to draw fascinating parallels between, for example, the fact that most traffic lights didn’t work at the time, and the ‘very particular economy of traffic circulation’ that kind of infrastructural crisis incites within the mindset of the failed population, the subjects of which, have necessarily become conditioned to survive in crisis.
Using broken traffic lights as a signpost, Mbebe locates a signifier for the ways in which using the roads in Cameroon gives rise to ‘an array of dispositions and arts of negotiation that are constitutive of subjectivities of conflict’, pointing to the paper’s overarching thesis regarding
“the physical and mental violence that issues from the lack of coincidence between the everyday practice of life (facticity) and the corpus of significations or meanings (ideality) available to explain and interpret what happens, to act efficaciously and, in so doing, attempt to overcome the specter of nothingness (le neant: in the double sense of nothingness and meaningless).”
A common response to all of this academic speak is something along the lines of Yes, well when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you don’t always have a lot of time to — as Mbebe puts it — ‘understand what is happening to [you], much less [master] the ins-and-outs of the processes in which [you] are implicated.’
When Jidada’s usurped Father of the Nation sneaks past the Defenders to walk the streets of his former kingdom in Glory, he is disgusted by the poverty, desperation, and chaos he finds on what is evidently his first-ever on-the-ground check-in with his former subjects.
He begs a duck to explain: how is it that all of these educated graduates, having earned advanced degrees in the universities of Jidada, have been reduced to vendors — beggars, essentially — animals the Father of the Nation calls “uncivilised beasts”?
Throughout his journey through the broken streets and schools of Jidada the Father of the Nation receives no answer from his former subjects. In fact, he is treated with suspicion, on account of his utter stupidity —
“‘Where have you been living Auntie, really?’ the duck said, his eyes curiously surveying the Father of the Nation for signs of what part of the world the animal may have been possibly spat from because surely, even the dead leaves of Jidada wouldn’t think to ask such naive questions.”
Mbebe asked, back in ’95, if we start to ‘understand’ our extraordinary lived experiences as ordinary, routine or commonplace, or worse — inexplicable and ‘incomprehensible’ —
“What forms of (in)action does such an intelligibility or even such a mental disposition lead to? And to what extent can one say, at the same time, that this complex of dispositions and conduct itself contributes to the very aggravation of the crisis?”
At many points towards the end of Glory, I inscribed a strong call for individual action into what I was reading. But — on reflection — I now remember more the ways in which community-driven thought and conversation were written to show their potential to lead brave individuals to take the first action required to start a country-wide movement.
Buy ‘Glory’ by NoViolet Bulawayo from an independent bookstore near you!
You can download the full PDF of Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis for free here.
