Abstract
Extending the focus on the poetics of postcolonial re-imagining in the previous two chapters, ‘Postcolonial writing, terror, and continuity’, chapter 4, looks at the revisionary poetics of terror writing, and how it uses narrative continuities including the ongoing flow of consciousness as modes of regeneration following on from terror’s first destructive instant. The discussion continues the question of a postcolonial poetics, left open at the end of chapter 2, but approaches the device of juxtaposition from a different angle than chapter 3, where the focus is on the resistant meanings that might be construed from suggestive gaps and apparently unsorted referents. The concern here is with writing beyond discontinuity, and the resistant effects this might generate, as reflected in four works: Ben Okri’s short fiction ‘In the City of Red Dust’ (1988), Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997), M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), and Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home’ (2014). Readings of these texts explore the ways in which writing on terror can, almost impossibly and yet powerfully, evoke both its moments of violent rupture and also the experience of endurance and recovery that can, for those who survive, lie beyond. The central question is how these texts are able in their form as writing to confront, expand, and to some extent make sense of the reversals and disruptions that express in terroristic ways within global history.
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Notes
- 1.
Ben Okri, ‘In the City of Red Dust’, in Stars of the New Curfew (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988), p. 49.
- 2.
Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 4.
- 3.
Warsan Shire, ‘Conversations About Home (At the Deportation Center)’, Our Men Do Not Belong: Seven New Generation African Poets, eds. Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani (New York: Slappering How Press, 2014), p. 19. There are many on-line versions of the poem, for example: Warsan Shire, ‘Home’, https://www.umcnic.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Home-Poem-by-Warsan-Shire.pdf. Accessed 3 July 2017 (the version used below). Also: https://www.umcnic.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Home-Poem-by-Warsan-Shire.pdf. Accessed 8 October 2017. There is also a version in four verse paragraphs in the pamphlet by Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (London: Mouthmark Press, 2011).
- 4.
M. NourbeSe Philip, ‘Zong! #4’, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), p. 7. Impossible to include in the layout of the epigraph, but crucial to the appearance of the poem on the page, is that ‘Zong! #4’, along with the 26 other ‘Zong!’ poems comprising the first part ‘Os’ of the book-length poem Zong!, is bordered by a line of the 150 names of the Zong’s victims, that runs along the bottom of the page, like an undertow of memory. In the case of ‘Zong! #4’ the line runs: ‘Lipapwiche Aziza Chipo Dada Nomsa’.
- 5.
Achille Mbembe, ‘What is Postcolonial Thinking?’, interview with Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur, and Jean-Louis Schlegel, trans. John Fletcher, Esprit, http://www.eurozine.com/journals/esprit/issue/2006-12-15.html. Accessed 12 May 2012.
- 6.
‘Slow terror’ in this chapter is set up by analogy with Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, as will be outlined below.
- 7.
Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
- 8.
Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit (2001; London: Atlantic Books, 2003).
- 9.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History, Thesis VI’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 255–66.
- 10.
Among other examples from postcolonial fiction, we might think of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), or Tabish Khair’s How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2012).
- 11.
The most prominent treatment of 9/11 as spectacle, a giant symbol of global anti-US feeling, is probably Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terror, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2013), which first appeared as an article in Le Monde in November 2001.
- 12.
Consider again Roman Jakobson’s six functions of language, as explicated in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). In terms of the approach to reading followed here, we might want to see all these functions unfolding at one and the same time, if with differing intensities, within the reading moment.
- 13.
As I have done in previous work: see Elleke Boehmer, ‘Postcolonial Writing and Terror’, Wasafiri 22.2 (June 2007): 1–4; and Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, eds., Terror and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
- 14.
Turkey, included in my list of terror attacks, is in this sense, too, on a cusp, not only of Europe, but also of a zone in which one-off terror attacks are perceived to shade into something closer to a state of civil war.
- 15.
In some sense like the arch-vampire, Dracula, as I suggest in ‘Empire’s Vampires’, Dark Blood: Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires, eds. Tabish Khair and Johan Hagglund (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–3. Further vampiric associations of terror are explored in the reading of Okri below.
- 16.
In the war on terror since 2001, for example, the figure of the nameless Al-Qaeda or Islamic State fighter has been widely invoked as the cause and justification of the expansion of US military power in the Middle East, even as that expansion is motivated by the long-term political and economic interests in the region of the US and its allies. For a more detailed account of contemporary terror and cultural representation, see Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, ‘Introduction’, Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 1–24. See also: Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (2001; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Faisal Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
- 17.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Picador, 2008), pp. 10–11.
- 18.
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).
- 19.
See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
- 20.
Ania Loomba, et al., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 2–4.
- 21.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961; London: Penguin, 1986).
- 22.
Nixon , Slow Violence, p. 6; Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, et al., Global Modernities (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1995), pp. 2–3; Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also: Saskia Sassen, Denationalization: Territory, Authority, and Rights in a Global Digital Age (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005).
- 23.
These literatures are also of course written in widely understood, if also creatively adapted world languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch, in the main.
- 24.
Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 4, 6.
- 25.
Elleke Boehmer and Bart Moore-Gilbert, ‘Introduction to Special Issue: Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance’, Interventions 4.1 (2002): 7–21.
- 26.
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic (London: Routledge, 2001).
- 27.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). See also: Gayatri Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee , and Certain Scenes of Teaching’, The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 195–213.
- 28.
Chapter 2 explored these two ‘inflections’ in relation to resistance theory. For more on the accommodations of the first, hybridizing inflection, see: Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000); Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991). For more on continuing colonial impositions, see: Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
- 29.
Gregory , The Colonial Present, pp. 9–10.
- 30.
As Tabish Khair’s knowing title How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, cited above, implies.
- 31.
David Runciman, The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 11.
- 32.
Here we might remember that terrorism in its incarnation as anarchism, and its manifestation as dynamite explosion, was born with the late nineteenth-century modern world.
- 33.
Allen Feldman, ‘Securocratic Wars of Public Safety’, Interventions 6.3 (2004): 347.
- 34.
Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40.
- 35.
Mbembe , ‘Necropolitics’, p. 23. Mbembe draws upon Fanon’s vivid spatialization of necro-power but expresses an interestingly different view on the ethics of terror.
- 36.
Jonathan Barker also draws attention to the implacable colonial legacies of state violence, if in a different register: ‘The colonial powers … [used] violence to maintain their domination, to recruit labour and soldiers … to seize additional territory’. See Jonathan Barker, The No-Nonsense Guide to Terrorism (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 61–2.
- 37.
Benjamin , ‘Thesis VI’, Illuminations, pp. 265–6.
- 38.
Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (Scarborough: Picador, 2003); Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner’s, 2007); Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (London: Cape, 2005); Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Terribly Close (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005).
- 39.
Robert Eaglestone, ‘Contemporary Fiction and Terror’, in Terror and the Postcolonial, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 361–9, especially pp. 368–9. On DeLillo , whom Eaglestone does not discuss: in Cosmopolis, terror takes the form of mediatized market domination, a self-perpetuating force that feeds on civil society but cannot incorporate it. And in Falling Man, while protagonist Keith Neudecker and his wife Lianne find that symbolizations of 9/11 are inescapable in the New York in which they live, at the same time the 9/11 that is represented is displaced onto these symbols and so in a sense is contained and made safe.
- 40.
Benjamin , ‘Thesis VI’, Illuminations, pp. 265–6.
- 41.
Chakrabarty , Provincializing Europe, pp. 8–9.
- 42.
In this regard we might recall an alternative definition of a terrorist as one who believes that their case is exceptional (they have been unconscionably denied), and that the odds stacked against them are so high that desperate action alone will suffice.
- 43.
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (1966; London: Heinemann, 2003); Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: Women’s Press, 1988); Aravind Adiga, White Tiger (London: Atlantic Books, 2008).
- 44.
Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy (London: HarperCollins, 2010).
- 45.
Nixon , Slow Violence, pp. 2, 9.
- 46.
Nixon , Slow Violence, pp. 6, 10. See also Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, eds., Reconciliation Through Truth (Cape Town: David Philip, 1996), on how ‘humanism [travels] always with … resistance’ (p. 50).
- 47.
See Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Mandy Bloomfield, Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2016), pp. 189–92. The two works are unsurprisingly germane to Ian Baucom’s discussion of slavery as venture capital in Specters of the Atlantic.
- 48.
On the body as its own sign, see J.M. Coetzee , Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 247–8.
- 49.
Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Cape, 1991).
- 50.
Ben Okri, ‘In the City of Red Dust’, Stars of the New Curfew (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988), pp. 37–52.
- 51.
Okri, ‘In the City of Red Dust’, p. 44.
- 52.
Okri, ‘In the City of Red Dust’, p. 52.
- 53.
See Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic.
- 54.
D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, pp. 14–17. Page references will henceforth be given in the text along with the abbreviation FtG.
- 55.
Philip, Zong!, p. 189. Page references will henceforth be given in the text along with the abbreviation Z!
- 56.
These effects are accentuated in NourbeSe Philip’s own readings from the poem. See, for example, the recording on the website https://writersmakeworlds.com
- 57.
I cite from a classic postcolonial essay, Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, ‘Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, “Postcoloniality” and the Politics of Location’, Cultural Studies 7.2 (1993): 322–34.
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Boehmer, E. (2018). Postcolonial Writing, Terror, and Continuity: Okri, D’Aguiar, NourbeSe Philip, Shire. In: Postcolonial Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90341-5_4
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