Literature as a way of seeing (2/2)
Writing as a quest, as detective work, has always been an important aspect of my writing, perhaps because I started my career as a journalist. My very first novel "Waiting for an Angel" has as its main character a journalist; in my third novel, "Oil on Water", I again find myself returning to the theme of journalism and the quest for truth. Here, a British woman visiting the Nigerian Delta has been kidnapped and two journalists are sent into the jungle to find her; and through their eyes we are shown a world devastated by violence and oil pollution.
The writer, like the detective, like the dragon slayer, is the ultimate loner and outsider. He can only exemplify the truth he sees by bucking against trend, against tradition and accepted ways of thinking. That is why in some countries where freedom of speech is seen as a threat, writers are imprisoned, or sent into exile, or even killed. In fact, exile – both real and metaphoric - has been described by Edward Said and many others as the natural state of most thinkers and intellectuals, to whose ranks the writer surely belongs. In order not to compromise himself he must reject all notions of belonging, he must make his home only in his writing, he must adopt an attitude of transcendental homelessness because, to quote Theodor Adorno, "It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home".
For me, no writer has exemplified and lived that truth better than the eccentric Zimbabwean, Dambudzo Marechgera, who famously said, "If you are a writer for a specific nation or race, then fuck you." Of course he was sent into exile – first by the white minority government of Ian Smith, and nine years later when he came back from external exile in England he still remained a pariah, an internal exile in his now independent country, and in 1987 he died, still an exile. Most nations have no place for the individual voice, everything is subsumed under the story of the nation, and that is why the writer, unless he writes in praise of the nation, will always be viewed with suspicion, even hostility. And that is why the writer, the artist, will always be at war with society.
Where the novelist cannot be tamed, his novel is often re-interpreted and co-opted to serve the national cause. Perhaps the most obvious example of this would be Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" – I have watched over the years how this important book has gradually come to assume an almost oracular sanctity. The author, in countless interviews and essays, has mentioned that he wrote the book for two main reasons: first, to point out to us Africans where the rain began to beat us – that is where we went wrong and therefore made it possible for alien culture to overcome us - and second, as a comment against colonialism. Today, our critics and intellectuals have conveniently forgotten the first reason.
That is how dictatorships are formed, in the name of the nation, of the collective, in the unquestioning belief that tradition is always right, that the new is alien and contaminating. When Marechera was asked what inspired him as an African writer, of course they wanted him to say "African history" or "African culture", but instead he referred to the suffering of the people, the helpless who are daily denied justice by the very leaders who had promised them so much.
Who is more important: the nation or the individual, the one single child or the community? This question isn't as counter-intuitive as it might appear. This is a debate that has been going on since the beginning of human history. But as a writer I must cast my lot with the individual, for how can I help or change the nation if I cannot even see my fellow man? As a writer I work with character, one at a time, and I always begin with the simple question: what does my character want? If I can answer that, the rest is easy.
In my second novel, "Measuring Time", my protagonist decides to write a history – or what he prefers to call a "biography" - of his hometown, and the method he adopts is to write about the ordinary individuals, not the chiefs, or the generals, or the pastors, or the imams, but about the labourer and the housewife, and the schoolchild. He believes that if he can talk to these individuals and paint in words their hopes and desires, then in aggregate, he will be capturing the dreams and hopes of his entire hometown. I wrote this book in 2007, long before the popular revolution we call the Arab spring, but I now see that my character's intention is in so many ways similar to that of the Arab spring revolutionaries. They are both dreamers, dreaming of a new dawn when the individual's story will be as important as that of the president's, when both will be seen to be truly equal before the law and before history.
In front of our eyes the Robert Mugabes and Yoweri Musevenis and Hosni Mubarraks and Muammar Ghaddafis who all came to power in the name of the people, some under the glorious banner of anticolonial struggle, have turned into enemies of the people. But as long as the nation continues to fail the individual, to deny him even the most basic of civil rights and freedoms, so long will the writer continue to walk away from the nation, to focus his attention on the individual, that single child in the dungeon. Gradually we are witnessing a new kind of literature emerging in African, a literature I like to call "post-nationalist". In our globalized world, the writer now prefers to write about the individual who, tired of not being seen or heard or respected, simply packs his bag and crosses into the next country where he can live more freely. We are discovering what writers like Marechera knew long ago, that before you can be a writer for a group or a nation, you first have to be a writer for the individual.
In conclusion, I want to point out how apt it is that the Arab spring, if the myth is correct, began on Facebook, one of the most truly democratic spaces, where everyone has the power to accept or reject a friendship request. Where everyone, as long they have access to the internet, can put up their picture and be seen the way they want to be seen, the way they see themselves.
Editor's note: Concluded
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