by Paddy O’Halloran
‘And how can one live in
death, be already dead, while being-there—while having not necessarily left
the world or being part of the spectre—and when the shadow that overhangs
existence has not disappeared, but on the contrary weights ever more heavily?’
– Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony
(2001, 201).
In a famous passage of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
describes the dreams of colonized people.
The dreams are of ‘muscular prowess’, of going ‘beyond certain limits’:
‘I dream’, Fanon writes, ‘that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one
stride […]. During the period of colonization, the native [le colonisé] never stops achieving his [sic] freedom from nine in
the evening until six in the morning’ ([1961] 1963, 52). These are dreams which challenge, in the
subconscious world, unfettered from reality, the limitations of the coerced
reality of colonization. They are dreams
which the dreamers wish to make real, desiring to mimic the excess of action of
their nightly fictions in waking life. Fanon,
later, imagining an uprising of the ‘slaves’ writes: ‘We were running like
madmen; shots rang out . . . we were striking [….] Blood and sweat cooled and
refreshed us’ and, as they burned the structures of the colonizers, ‘the flames
flickered sweetly on our cheeks’ (1963, 88).
The physical violence that Fanon
depicts is, in his argument, an experiential stage of decolonization, a revolt
of the body against the ‘static period’ (Fanon 1963, 69) and the physically confining
forces of colonization, the violence of body against body that flows from being
accounted for only as a body, even as
‘bestial’ (Fanon 1963, 42). Yet, it is
not a physical response only, if it ever even becomes manifest physically. It is a revolt, too, of the mind, which is
belittled, ignored, and patronized by the colonizer; the mind of the colonized
will, in a profound and stifled anger, turn to visions and imagery of violence. In the end, only a relative few will take up
arms or risk their physical bodies in anti-colonial struggle. The rest will dream for them; the futile but
glorious reaction to the understanding of the colonized that ‘From his [sic]
birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can
only be called into question by absolute violence’ (Fanon 1963, 37). Yearning for release, the colonized dream the
moment into existence.
Forty years
after The Wretched of the Earth, when
Fanon’s colonized world in the throes of dismantling had been transfigured into
the modern, ‘post-colonial’ world, Achille Mbembe narrates in On the Postcolony (2001) a cartoon from
a Cameroonian newspaper in which an ‘autocrat’, the ruler of a
post-independence African country, dreams.
The cartoon and the dream together produce a sense of physicality, but
without the muscular exceeding of the dreams Fanon depicts. Instead there is a sense of muscular atrophy
and unhealthy bodily excess. Mbembe’s
description emphasizes the autocrat’s body; the stomach, ‘like the sated rumen
of a cow’, ‘collapses and sprawls’, the face is ‘puffed up’, the chest hairy
and ‘podgy’, and more grotesque descriptions besides. The general sense is of extreme ‘gluttony’.
The dream that this ‘misshapen’ autocrat dreams is of being called to account
by the people of his country, who remind him that the people are sovereign, and
who threaten to burn him. ‘[The
autocrat]’, writes Mbembe, ‘has been a victim of terror by night, struck by a
horrible feeling of choking, and by anguish; he has just had a nightmare (2001,
149-153).
Granted,
both Fanon’s account of dreams (though informed by his practice of psychiatry)
and the nightmare related to us by Mbembe from the Cameroonian cartoonist are
depictions and interpretations only.
Still, the shift in the imagination that must occur in order for dreams
(in their political interpretation) to transform from positivity and overcoming
to negativity and being overcome, ‘choking’, is a drastic one. What is the nature of the postcolony that it
can engender such a spectrum-sweeping change? Or is it the postcolony that
affects this change, at all?
Mbembe
writes, ‘The notion “postcolony” identifies specifically a given historical
trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of
colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves’ (2001,
102). The plurality of the colonial and
post-colonial situation is, in Mbembe’s view, obscured by an enveloping myth of
the violent, of the corporeal, of the still
essentialized body of the African person and the still essentially violent
existence of and on the African continent.
The post-colonial world, in many ways, has not escaped its
‘coloniality’; colonial tropes persist, racism abounds, and power relations
between the formerly colonized and former colonizers are still skewed. Africa still exists, in a hegemonic
imagination, as the physical, giving ‘nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS’, an
entire continent of ‘permanently tumescent layabouts’ (Myers 2008). The critique of Western (and also African)
perceptions of Africa is not unique to Mbembe, but the way in which he pursues
the problem is unique, perhaps, in
its sophistication and in its recognition of the importance of fiction, of myth, in fictional
representations, which is the focus here.
The argument that Mbembe proposes or substitutes lived experience in the
stead of an essential Africa/n is true to an extent (Janz 2002, 1), but the arc
of On the Postcolony traverses the
realm of myth more seriously and deeply than it does the lived world. To understand the post-colony requires
exploring this unreal domain.
For Mbembe,
and also for Fanon, the moment of crucial import comes after
decolonization. It is this lengthy and
ill-defined moment on which Mbembe focuses in his book, On the Postcolony (2001).
Let us remember Fanon’s assertion, that, ‘for 95% of the population in
underdeveloped countries, independence brings no immediate change’ (1963,
75). In many ways, what Mbembe writes at
the turn of the twenty-first century is a revitalization of the argument Fanon
put forward forty years earlier in his chapter titled ‘The Pitfalls of National
Consciousness’ in which he foresaw the troubles that could befall African
countries after independence. Consider
the autocrat’s nightmare: it reveals the ‘misshapen’ distribution of power and
resources in the post-colony. For Fanon,
it is revolution that is (ever) incomplete.
For Mbembe, with the advantage of hindsight, the post-colony not only
betrays the struggle and the moment of independence, but also reveals the
necessity of shedding colonial fictions which did not depart with the colonial
troops and administrations.
Mbembe puts
forward a myth of the post-colony which he shows, perhaps, to have stifled the
completion of an emancipatory project.
The world is not subject only to myth, of course. Certainly, there are
lived realities—the colonized did in fact experience their dispossession, their
oppression, and their dehumanization at the hands of the colonizers; the wars
of independence were fought and concluded; and the good and the bad of
independence are felt by ordinary people—but what is ‘fact’ is overlain with
and often overshadowed by various fictions which are perceived to be and are
accepted as reality. This is the curse
of the post-colony: that it is conceived in and from myth. Mbembe wants to move
beyond the ‘dead’ conceptions of the
post-colony, stillborn, as it were, at independence.
We are not
talking simply about the frequently invoked menace of ‘social constructions’,
which loom problematically over any and all human experiences. These fictions are less particular, more
ambitiously broad-sweeping in their essentializing of people and places. Perhaps something along the lines of Geertz’s
‘controlling political idea’ is most accurate (in Midgal 1997, 213). Indeed the myths in question are movers of
culture. These myths are part of the
thick and multifold ‘entanglement’ that Mbembe identifies in and as the
post-colonial experience (2001, 14). The
myths in question are narratives of origin, of history, and of the present
which inform and merge with the peculiar gestalt of the post-colony: the
internal and external explanations of ‘pre-colonial’, ‘colonial’, and ‘post-colonial’
that engender a moment in which African people and polities are seemingly at
once triumphant and damned. Notably,
futurity is absent. ‘I felt’, writes
Mbembe, ‘that what distinguishes the contemporary African experience
is that this emerging time is appearing in a context—today—in which the future
horizon is apparently closed, while the horizon of the past has apparently
receded’ (2001, 16).
Myth is not about the future; that
is the prerogative of prophecy. Myth
stretches indefinitely into the past, a past which was once stirred by action
and heavy with meaning (in contrast with the stillness and determinedness of
the present). It marks the present, but
there stops. The ‘static period begun by
colonization’ of which Fanon writes is weighted and constrained by myth. Fanon’s life ended on what seemed to be a
future-oriented triumph (in the devices of myth, the fulfillment of an
anti-colonial prophecy), but myth persisted.
Mbembe, in On the Postcolony, attempts
to demystify the mythic post-colony, to set us, instead, to tracing its
‘entangled’ pluralities, hoping to emerge at a point from which a future is
again visible, again possible. Future,
in the case of the post-colony, means stripping away the old, negative myths of
violence, of the irreclaimably vulgar, of a profound physicality, and writing
new narratives with positive trajectories.
Mbembe and Rethinking Narratives of Africa
Let us
examine Mbembe’s project in practical terms before pursuing the more abstract
aspects of his argument concerning myth.
In general, Mbembe’s work tries to shift the focus of thinking about
Africa from what he considers to be a theoretical dead-end provided by the
‘postcolonial’ modes and narratives of thought to a more dynamic theory that truly
considers and accepts the plural complexity of post-colonial Africa. He writes that ‘whether produced by outsiders
or by indigenous people, end-of-the-century discourses on the continent are not
necessarily applicable to their object’ (2001, 242). His writing moves between outright critique,
as in his essay, ‘African Modes of Self Writing’ (2002), and phenomenological
exploration through prose in On the
Postcolony.
In ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, Mbembe
critiques the way in which African scholars in the humanities have studied and
written about Africa. Importantly, the
concept of futurity is at the forefront of his argument. He focuses on the unwillingness, in general,
of African thinking on Africa to deal with the future. He writes, ‘Various
factors have prevented the full development of conceptions that might have
explained the meaning of the African past and present by reference to the
future…’ (2002, 240), echoing, to some extent, Lewis Gordon’s formulation on
‘bad faith, in which the ability to construct a tomorrow is concealed in a totalization of the present’ (1995, 86,
emphasis in original).
Mbembe is
talking about thinking only within the constrictions formed and determined by a
particular past. Such past-oriented
explanations of Africa he terms ‘historicist’, which—in two different strains,
‘Afro-radicalism’ and nativism’—is an intellectual manifestation of the
limitations imposed by the mythic ‘Africa’ which Mbembe finds to be so persistent
in the post-colony. Focusing on three
events in African history—slavery, colonization, and apartheid (2002, 241)—the
former strain of historicist thought responds to what non-Africans have done to
and think about Africa, while the
latter deals with what they have done to or think about Africans. Mbembe argues that
both are inappropriate modes of thinking because they rely on narratives of
victimization and on ‘the West’s fictional representations’ and, most
importantly, do not advance beyond these (2002, 244). These modes of thinking are reactionary in
the way that the dreams of the colonized are reactionary; the imposition of
violence is answered in like terms—a ‘great organism of violence which has
surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence’ (Fanon 1963, 94). The ‘state of war’ that Mbembe ascribes (a
bit too generally) to ‘contemporary Africa’ is, like the muscular tension and
spasm of the colonized in Fanon, a reaction to constriction, to confinement and
objectification that do not permit self-formed subjectivities to Africans. War and violence create the space for such
formations (2002, 267). Intellectual and
philosophical work on African subjectivity thus far do not, in Mbembe’s view,
create such a space. That is to say that
the system of colonial violence (not only physical violence and war but the
system of violence which dehumanized the minds and the bodies of Africans) and
the troubles of the post-colony are explained from within their systemic limitations. Thinking about Africa in these ways relies on
the narratives and actions of the colonizer, and, in doing so, reifies Africa
and essentializes Africans within the framework of European myth. Mbembe proposes an alternative: ‘we must
clear an intellectual space for rethinking those temporalities that are always
branching out toward several different futures and, in so doing, open the way
for the possibility of multiple ancestries’ (2002, 241).
But such ancestries are swallowed by
the continent itself: for many, ‘Africa’ is,
and that is all that need be said. As
Mbembe writes in an essay that depicts the constrained intellectual traditions
of the post-colony as a ‘ghetto’, ‘[d]eplorably, legitimate criticism of the
damaging effects of occidental Africanism has been transformed into an extreme
fetishizing of geographical identities’ (1999, 3). Africans, in such a view as Mbembe is
describing, are determined simply by their being from the continent of Africa
(of course perceived, too, to be more or less homogenous). Their identity as geographically African (or
more local versions of such) is all that is necessary to fully describe
them. Mbembe employs the figurative
ghetto to show that the ‘place’ where Africans ‘have been put’, intellectually,
has come to provide their reference point when thinking about modern Africa.
It is a simple argument, complicated
by the vast differences in experience in different corners of the African
continent now and historically; complicated, too, by the myths which overshadow
how Africans are thought about and how they think. This is what we will focus on in regard,
especially, to On the Postcolony, and
in particular the elusive chapter, ‘God’s Phallus’, in which Mbembe has most
fully entered the realm of myth.
A word might be said about why the
theme of myth has been chosen when so much of On the Postcolony provides opportunities for comment and analysis
on a number of themes. The decision to
focus on myth and fiction is based on Mbembe’s frequent use of words which conjure
up ideas of sleeping and dreaming, of the imaginary, of the grotesque, of the
hallucinatory, and of myth itself (Mbembe 2001; 2002). Reviewers allude to this attention to the
imaginary (Pouchedepass 2006; Quayson 2001), but do not fully engage with it. Another reason is Mbembe’s attending to this
‘genre’ of the fantastic by ‘performing’ it—the phenomenological experiment
through prose and poetic license which was mentioned above. On the whole, engaging with the shadowy and
abstract realm of fiction offers the best way to access what is at times an
obscure book in On the Postcolony and
an ‘African reality [...] of the order of fantasy and narrative’ (Pouchepadass
2006, 192). Speaking about On the Postcolony, Mbembe says that
Africans must not ‘fool ourselves’ or ‘tell ourselves stories that have no
meaning’ (Erskog, 2014). What are needed
are stories with meaning. It is this logic which motivated Mbembe when
he engaged with the post-colonial world of his experience.
The Essential Africa: Mythic Time and Death
The concept
of performance really opens a route into the form and structure of On the Postcolony, and, in extension,
the way in which it presents its thesis.
Achille Mbembe speaks about the ‘viscerality’ of his book, which ‘is
formal in the sense that the book is written, designed, and crafted like that,
willfully’ (Erskog 2014). He explains
about writing while listening to Congolese music, and how the rhythms of this
music were transposed into the cadence of the prose. Considering this idea of physicality and
rhythm and the book’s engagement with ‘the dramaturgy of the political
domination of Africa’ (Ferme, in Pouchepadass 2006, 193), the idea of
‘performance’ is seemingly appropriate.
We can adopt a hermeneutics similar to the dramaturgical method of
reading that Ato Sekyi-Otu (1996) brings to the works of Fanon. Sekyi-Otu writes, ‘We need to read [Fanon’s]
texts and scenes within texts
dialectically rather than sequentially
or as discrete entities’ (1996, 22, emphasis in original); he later adds, ‘The
result of this dramaturgical procedure is that the finality of propositions
made in various scenes is rendered suspect’ (1996, 35). Employing the same method, literal readings of
the often disjointed chapters—an ‘itinerary of discursive forms’ to use
Quayson’s phrase (2001, 152); or a ‘set of exercises in existence’ for Janz
(2002, 2)—and extended metaphors of On
the Postcolony should be replaced by an attention to different themes and
figurative extrapolations in interaction with each other and around Mbembe’s
argument.
What exactly is Mbembe performing? In
part, he is engaging with negative depictions of Africa by employing their
imagery; demonstrating an essentialized, brutal vision of Africa that we see
much more clearly in his acquiescing, momentarily, to its tropes than if Mbembe
were to dismiss it with curt disdain (as is not unjustifiably done). The critique levelled at Mbembe that he fails
to ‘escape the influence of the very same body of works [of Western
essentializations of Africa]’ that he denounces is unfounded on this view
(Obarrio, in Pouchepadass 2006, 199). It
is necessary, if we are to fruitfully engage with myth, to enter into its
ontology. Beginning with relatively
clear and concrete matters, On the
Postcolony steadily moves deeper and deeper into the abstract, culminating
in the chapter ‘God’s Phallus’ with a theological enquiry and a discursive form
that does not divorce history from myth; that is, it accepts myth in its own
terms, considering it independently of (but not detached from) reality.
Africa,
begins Mbembe in On the Postcolony,
is interpreted under two ‘signs’: that of the ‘strange and the monstrous’ and
that of ‘intimacy’ (2001, 1). The words
themselves arouse images of the unknown, of witchcraft, the grotesque, the
deformed, the animal, and the body, particularly the sexualized body. Conrad’s brooding Heart of Darkness is suggested by Mbembe’s vocabulary. Furthermore, these are words which, in the
colonial imagination, contextualize the notion (the invention) of ‘traditional
societies’ (2001, 3). Mbembe
characterizes ‘traditional societies’ as innately definable by ‘facticity’ and ‘arbitrariness’. To quote
Mbembe at length: ‘By facticity is
meant that, in Hegel’s words, “the thing is;
and it is merely because it is . . . and this simple immediacy
constitutes its truth.” […] By arbitrariness is meant that, in contrast
to reason in the West, myth and fable are seen as what, in such [traditional]
societies, denote order and time’ (2001, 3, emphasis in original).
Myth, in Mbembe’s argument,
continues to denote order and time, whether through the old colonial ideas or
through certain Africanist concepts that equally homogenize and mythologize an
African past and, in so doing, cannot produce a viable future. It is this homogenizing tendency of myth that
Mbembe seeks to excise from post-colonial explanations. In addition to objectifying (or, at least,
de-subjectifying) African people and the African continent, myth determines and
proscribes African time.
Time is fundamental to understanding
Mbembe’s argument. In ‘African Modes of
Self-Writing’, he makes the point explicitly, that his purpose is ‘to
reinterpret subjectivity as time’ so that ‘criticisms of African imaginations
of the self and the world’ can escape entrapment ‘within a conception of
identity [facticity] as geography—in other words, of time as space’ (2002, 242;
271). Underpinning the essentialized
Africa/n, determining their place, is Time, but Time without the motion that we
usually understand; rather, Time as myth, afforded an inertia that smothers the
societies over which it is lain. What is at stake here is an ontological
reduction of the past to a single experience—or, rather, a collection of
experiences understood from the single perspective
of European renaissance, exploration, conquest, or, according to Mbembe’s opposite
formulation, of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. It is a solemnized, essential past.
Lewis Gordon
asks (1995, 53), ‘Can essences be used without essentialization or
essentializing?’ Mbembe’s project of reinvigorating post-colonial analysis with
plurality in the face of monolithic, mythic time seems in a similar vein. If we consider the possibility of multiple
pasts, a fact of African history and present, then the ‘essence’ of the past
becomes rather complicated. Essence must
be an aggregation of action—past, present, future, and un-acted—neither the
‘sum’ nor the ‘average’ meaning of all performances and abstractions. Essence might exist, but it is fleeting and
unstable. Even an individual’s essence,
in these terms, cannot be apprehended by another except as a necessarily past
moment, and this essence will exclude immense portions of a particular,
essential action-identity; ‘essence, that is, without necessity nor presumed,
rigid, ontological commitments beyond the reality of the world in which one
lives’ (Gordon, 1995, 56). Yet, we
perceive, and purport to apprehend, African-ness via the other, the West. It is a timeless vision, even ‘hallucinatory’
to borrow Mbembe’s expression in the idiom of the fictive.
What is
timelessness? Mbembe identifies in it an
overarching necessity: death. Where
‘time […] is supposedly stationary,’ in the post-colony, in Africa, where myth
reigns, we are dealing with ‘the indefinite’ and ‘interminable time of death’
(Mbembe 2001, 4; 200). Such is the tone
of many passages in On the Postcolony.
The images become gruesome. Mbembe describes the decomposition of the
dead body, and, worse, of cannibalization:
The fact is that power, in the postcolony, is carnivorous.
It grips its subjects by the throat and squeezes them to the point of breaking
their bones, making their eyes pop out of their sockets, making them weep
blood. It cuts them in pieces and, sometimes, eats them raw (2001, 201).
This and
other scenes of gore, of violence most basic, are, perhaps, reminiscent of
Fanon’s phrase ‘descent into a real hell’, to which we will return ([1952]
1967, 2). The post-colony, in these
images, becomes a place of death: The colonial condition of ‘cannibalism’—the
destruction of some people to satisfy, to engorge, some others—persists in the
post-colony, where power eats. ‘Once killed, the animal [can we read as ‘the
colony’?] is no more than a mass of flesh to be cut up’ (2001, 200). With the departure of the Europeans—the alive and life-giving Europeans, who through slavery, colonization and
apartheid enlivened the Conradian deadness
of Africa—the colony, affixed with the chronological prefix ‘post-’, is dead,
is death, again. In death, there is no
future, and therefore there is none for ‘Africa’. We can see Mbembe’s concern with—his fright at the prospect of—interpreting
an Africa through the actions and history of the colonizers, through the myth
of a dead or dying Africa or of a glorified timeless Africa which is of
necessity mythic and dead.
According to
Mbembe, ‘More than any other region,
Africa […] stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with,
and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence,” “lack,” and “non-being,”
of identity and difference, of negativeness—in short, of nothingness’, a place
of ‘special unreality’ which is ‘null, abolished, and in its essence, in
opposition to what is’ (2001, 4). Africa,
in its emptiness, is also a ‘receptacle’ for myth.
We will explore this concept before continuing on to the important
‘God’s Phallus’ chapter and analyzing its implications as regards this
discussion of myth.
Myths of Origin and Origins of Myth
In many
ways, the ‘essential’ Africa that Mbembe portrays in On the Postcolony refers back to the ideas of V. Y. Mudimbe, who,
corresponding with the idiom of Mbembe, denotes that essence through words like
‘exotic’, ‘savage’, and ‘evil’ (1994).
In The Idea of Africa (1994), Mudimbe
details at length some of the earliest representations of the African continent
in European tradition, one written by Philostratus before the Common Era, part
of a tradition of Western scholarship as ‘“fantasies” and “constructs” made up
by writers since Greek times’(xv). In
this particular tale, ant-like men of Libya (Africa) called pygmies, ‘who live
according to the passions of the body, completely subservient to its pleasures
and violences’, combat Hercules of Europe (Mudimbe 1994, 4). Reading such a fantasy reminds one of Swift’s
Gullivers Travels, or, once again,
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, colonial
literature that create discourses that move beyond, even render obsolete, ‘the
present-day opposition between true and false’ (Mudimbe 1994, 4). As Mbembe writes, in combining ‘bits of the
actual, colonial discourse ends up producing a closed, solitary totality that
it elevates to the rank of a generality.
And so reality becomes enclosed within a pre-ordained madness’ (2001,
178), which madness, in Conrad, is the fate awaiting a person entering the dark
and irrational world of myth, of Africa—taking the death-abundant and ‘weary
pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares’ to ‘the earliest beginnings of the
earth’, an empty wilderness (in Knowles, 2010, 55; 77).
Mudimbe discusses
the writing of one Robert Burton, living in seventeenth century England. In Burton’s view, Africa does not represent
even a ‘geographical body’ but is exclusively a site of values (or of the
absence of values), a space—that wilderness—where ideas rather than facts are
contestable (Mudimbe 1994, 9). It is
contestable only insofar as it can be ‘filled’ with the values of Europe. According to Mudimbe:
Concretely, the spatial
marginalism of the non-Western space [Africa and America, in Mudimbe’s
discussion] would be dissolved in the expansion of European geography and
history, to the extent that these consider themselves sufficiently powerful to
re-establish the uniformity of Genesis by deleting the accidental monstrosities
that resulted from the diverse marches of history (Mudimbe 1994, 10).
‘Burton’, continues Mudimbe, ‘proposes a utopia in which myths and
mythmaking interact and are interdependent’ (1994, 14). In short, Europe will determine, mythically,
through colonization and civilization, the ‘historical’ course of the rest of
the world. It is a ‘mission’ which is
accomplished through a symbolic enactment of sexual intercourse, in Mbembe’s
metaphor. The ‘coitus’ of the colonial moment is made possible through language
as narration and myth. Singling out
Hegel from the many possible options, Mbembe writes that ‘long before the colony was conquered and penetrated, a web
of words had been woven around these distant lands and their peoples’ (2001, 175),
words which portray Africa as a ‘vast tumultuous world of drives and
sensations’, and words which ‘grasp and anchor in pre-set certainty’ ‘the land
of motionless substance and of the blinding, joyful, and tragic disorder of
creation’, that is, sex and the sexual (2001, 176).
What is
important to the discussion here is that myth is intrinsic to the Africa ‘of
Europe’; it is a place of myth (or ‘values’) to be dominated through and by the
power of an alternative myth, external to itself, which will, in covering Africa,
explicate it. As Mbembe puts it, ‘Since
fable and myth are seen as expressing the very power of the originaire, nothing [requires
justification]; it is enough to invoke the time of origins’ (2001, 4).
What is the ‘time of origins’ for
colonial Europe? The passage from Mudimbe included above alludes to it. The myth of origin of Europe is found in
Genesis, in the Jewish Torah, in the New Testament of Christians, and
ultimately in Christianity itself, creating colonialism as a ‘holy saga of
mythic proportions’ with the ‘silent permanence’ of religion behind it (Mudimbe
1994, xii; xiii).
Following on
this, Mudimbe shows how the Christian myth was injected into what later became
the European imperial projects through Papal bulls of the fifteenth century
that denied earthly rights to non-Christians in favor of the divine right of
Christians to the earth. The bull Romanus Pontifex (1454), particularly,
decrees that non-Christians have no rights to land, or possessions, or even to
life, all of which can justly be taken by Christians. The Christian symbolism in colonization was
explicit and prompt. Upon landing on
‘heathen’ coasts, the Christians raised the cross and celebrated mass,
transplanting their originary myths into the lands they would conquer (Mudimbe
1994, 30-33).
The Mythic Climax: ‘God’s Phallus’
We will now
attempt a gloss of the sixth chapter of On
the Postcolony, ‘God’s Phallus’. It
is important to carry forward the themes discussed up until now that relate to
the significance of myth in Mbembe’s interpretation of post-colonial Africa:
the realm of the imaginary, the essentialized Africa/n as violent and sexual,
performance, the importance of time and timelessness, and the omnipresence of
death. The chapter itself is crucial to
the completion of Mbembe’s project around myth, and therefore the seeming lack
of attention the chapter has received, and in some cases its dismissal, is
surprising. Theological and abstract it
might be, but ‘God’s Phallus’ is the climax of the metaphors and the
performance of On the Postcolony that
provide important insights into contemporary Africa. The remainder of this discussion will clarify
the key points of the metaphor in resolving Mbembe’s variegated text towards a
conclusion that takes into account the centrality of myth in the political.
Reviews of On the Postcolony have sorely understated and, in my view,
misinterpreted the sixth chapter. Ato
Quayson calls its connection with the important themes of the rest of the book
‘not at all straightforward’ and ‘tenuous’, while at the same time making
points that would, if developed, elucidate just the ways in which ‘God’s
Phallus’ does indeed signify, and powerfully, the thematic core of On the Postcolony. Quayson talks about ‘some of the ways in
which monotheism can be seen as imperializing’ and, notably, how in
Christianity is found a myth in which ‘all contradiction is subsumed under the
discursive disposition of a transcendental signified of ultimate value’
(Quayson 2001, 159), which forms, given our discussion here, a more than ‘tenuous link with the problem
of arbitrariness’ and myth.
‘God’s Phallus’ begins with a
discussion on ‘divine libido’, a sexualization of monotheism. Key to this discussion is the fact,
explicitly made by Mbembe, that ‘behind the metaphor of the divine libido may […]
be glimpsed a very special form of power, the
power of the fantasm and the fantasm of power’ which ‘make it possible to
attain a certain peace and plenitude for which the ultimate reference is salvation’ (2001, 212, emphasis in
original). Considering the imperializing
tendency (an historical one) of Christianity-bearing-Christians, we can see in
the mention of power a reference to colonization: sexualized in a way both
‘monstrous’ and ‘intimate’. The power is
itself fantastic, derived from a theological, mythical referent. Behind the practical violence of colonization
lies the illusory power of God (see Mudimbe), ‘the fantasm of the One’, which, writes Mbembe, ‘circumscribes [the]
collective subject’s connections with itself and with the world’ (2001, 213).
The myth of unitary truth penetrates the colonized world, its reality cast
aside—rather, immediately negated—in favor of a non-reality with mythic
(historical) and prophetic (future) extrapolations that do not apply either to
the land or the people that are colonized—an uncompromising and incompatible
ontology. It is Mbembe’s argument that
neither a past nor a future have been reclaimed in the post-colony.
Again, we need to observe Mbembe’s
vocabulary. The chapter is replete with
words and phrases like ‘genesis’, ‘beyond time’, ‘totalization’, ‘ultimate’,
‘truth’, ‘omnipotence,’ ‘universal’, ‘irreducible’, ‘originary phantasm’, and ‘absolute
arbitrariness’ (2001, 214; 215; 217; 230; 231, emphases in original). All refer to the Judeo-Christian ontology of
monotheism in which ‘divine sovereignty’
is simultaneous with ‘liberation from time’ (Mbembe 2001, 217). We have seen that ‘timelessness’ is central
to the imposition of myth, and also that inherent in timelessness is death.
Yet, Christianity is premised on
transcending death, is it not, and the resurrection denotes the victory of life
over death? In a strange reversal, it is
possible to interpret the event as victory of death over life. Through the death of the incarnate god, all (faithful)
humans are invited to participate in everlasting
life in the presence of a singular god.
So is ‘truth’, in Conrad, ‘stripped of its cloak of time’ (in Knowles
2010, 80). Such a ‘life’—eternal and
unsubtle—is an invitation to existence in myth, the god having enveloped the
real. ‘At the moment of death, the god “absorbs”
the world and is “absorbed” by the world, beyond
time and beyond space’ (Mbembe 2001, 222, my emphasis). Moreover, it is through an act of ‘magical
excitement’ and release that this is accomplished (Mbembe 2001, 222) —therein
the essence of Mbembe’s ‘god’s phallus’ metaphor. God is made incarnate—embodied, physical,
sexual—and then vanquishes the bodily via pain/orgasm to proclaim the triumph
of the mythic over the real. In extending the empire of Christendom into
Africa and other parts of the non-Christian world, through conversion—to be
‘involved in the destruction of worlds’, and ‘an entry into the time of the
other’ (Mbembe 2001, 228; 231)—Europeans were reenacting the victory through the
violence of myth over actual, of death over life. Timelessness could reign. As Mbembe eloquently frames it, ‘creation and
redemption subtend the exit from, and then the transcendence of, an original,
primordial state of disorder and sin—mortality’ (2001, 229). In mythic Africa is found the site of the
‘most mortal’; of the un-reclaimed, perhaps irreclaimable humanity without god,
already extant in death-timelessness-myth. The missionizing Europeans, bringing
‘life’ to a ‘dead’ continent, killed its future ability to imagine itself as
alive.
We must consider
this in the context of the post-colony that is the challenge of Mbembe’s
book. Mbembe, discussing power in the
post-colony, demonstrates it to be an interaction, a system of reflections,
between the ruler and the ruled: ‘the masses join in the madness’ and ‘within
the confines of this intimacy’, a sensual, sometimes sexual exchange, is the
production of power enacted, but it is a dead power—without future, even—and in
its ‘vulgarity’, a figment of the ‘burlesque’ (Mbembe 2001, 133). Later, Mbembe proposes that the autocrat,
introduced earlier, is a function (functionary) of the arbitrary, wielding a ‘magical power’ which ‘magic consists in
making something come into
being—better, in making nothing exist,
but nothing, in the sense that, voided
of what he takes to be his substance, the autocrat, raw power, no longer
belongs to that universe of crude, laughable, capricious things’ (2001, 164), of the ‘lugubrious drollery’ that characterizes
Conrad’s Africa (in Knowles 2010, 47). It
is a renewal of the Christ moment: making from the physical the aphysical. Let
us consider the conclusion of the ‘God’s Phallus’ chapter:
[To] produce religious truth,
faith and a certain stupefaction must overlap.
All religious truth, especially when the latter aspires to universality,
is always exposed to being seen as in some way an experience of madness [….
Madness] as the point where discourse on the divine that seeks to explain
itself and make itself understood by others is suddenly exhausted, exhausts its
meaning, and provokes a kind of astonishment and incredulity, to the point that
people laugh (Mbembe 2001, 231).
The formations and derivations of power in the post-colony are
‘religious’, or mimic religion, to the extent that they are prefigured by faith
and stupefaction with myths of power and origin. Mbembe wants thinkers of the African
post-colony (post-colonies!) to escape
the imperialized modes of thought which have at their center both a reified
history of Africa and a blanketing myth of Africa. In this there is some concept of
transcendence.
It is the reviewer Janz’s understanding that
Mbembe, in the argument of ‘God’s Phallus’, does not permit for transcendence,
and therefore that Mbembe’s argument is framed only in the negative. He
writes, ‘One might be led to suspect that Mbembe is suggesting that one might
transcend the mundane and alienating conditions [of colonization/the
post-colony]. This would be a serious misunderstanding of what he intends…’
(Janz 2002, 4). This is a narrow reading
that only takes into account a half, as it were, of Mbembe’s argument.
Simply put, for
Mbembe, transcendence cannot be
achieved through the ‘unique’ but only through the ‘plural’. There cannot be, certainly, a salvation (see above) in the idiom of Christian
myth. Salvation premises, falsely, both
an external savior from another world—Heaven, Europe—and a bundling into
timeless time, which, promising life, only allots death. ‘A new subject’, says Janz,
correctly, ‘cannot be created by a deferral of death such as Christianity might
imagine’ (2002, 5), but the alternative, a purely Nietzschean acceptance of
disorder and violence in the interest of ‘enjoy[ing] as complete men [sic]’
(Janz 2002, 5) is unsatisfying and not the only way to read Mbembe. Such a reading is decidedly unsatisfying, not
only as an attitude towards the African continent, which, in looking toward
futures, Mbembe seems not to hold, but also as the end to a long and intricate
thesis, which indicates that Mbembe had more purpose in writing On the Postcolony than to conclude in
relative despondency. Certainly, there
is no deus ex machina for the African
continent on any of its many ‘trajectories’, but there are possibilities. These are the other half of Mbembe’s argument.
Let us flesh out a passage from
Fanon quoted only in part above. In the
introduction to Black Skin, White Masks,
Fanon says, ‘There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid
region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In
most cases, the black man [sic] lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish
this descent into a real hell’ (1967, 2).
In another of the long, visceral passages from On the Postcolony (2001, 220-224), Mbembe describes the torture and
crucifixion of Christ, which reads indeed, in its nervous violence, like a
descent into hell. Mbembe makes special
mention of the ‘humiliation of [Jesus’s] nudity’, his exposure, and also his
sense of abandonment and utter aloneness (2001, 221). Such a moment of death which does not yet
mean absorption into the mythic space, but which is rather a celebratory
performance of mortality, is that ‘naked declivity where an authentic upheaval
can be born’. The ‘hell’ is denied
‘black men’ (Africans) through a perpetual objectification: their very
mortality, their humanity, is
circumscribed by the living death of the mythic. Unbounding the human requires violence. This
is not to be taken to mean that in the corruption of power, the frequent
violence and suffering of the post-colony there is inherent a regenerative or
redemptive power—that is, salvation—but rather should be understood to be about
radical, emancipatory subjectivity formation, which necessarily means doing
some violence to the power of hegemonic myths (hegemonic in the Gramscian
sense). This line of thinking follows,
again, Lewis Gordon: ‘Man [sic] needs a radical form of self-reflection. For whatever may be abstracted from him as
contingent faces its own delusion of reality’ (1995, 11).
Plurality will be transcendent. “The thing
cannot be expressed in a single proposition’ (Mbembe 2001, 241, emphasis in
original), unlike the myth, the arbitrary which is itself a proposition of the
singular. It is in its very nature as ‘entangling’—as unbounded and moving time
and times, perspective and perspectives that Mbembe imagines to ‘overlay’,
‘interpenetrate’ and ‘envelope one another’, neither ‘linear’ nor a ‘simple
sequence’ (Mbembe 2001, 13; 16)—it is in the difficulty of ‘entanglement’ that
the post-colony is capable of positivity.
In the real, in the human, there is life, in utter opposition to the
deadness and deadliness of myth. There
are neither ‘timeless truths’ (Fanon 1967, 1), nor a timeless truth. There are many, moving, confusing truths of
the living world. This does not only
mean the replacement of the constructed with the lived experience (Janz 2002),
which substitutes one savior for another, but also a turn, with such a project
of the experiential in mind, towards the future, a turn impossible while living
in the past-oriented mythic and thinking ‘in a historical trajectory [of
victimization through slavery, colonialism, and apartheid] that negates or does
not makes use of all its potentialities’ (Erskog, 2014).
In short, an
effort must be made to again dream
the postcolony, but to dream while waking.
Each waking dream is a future, and in a future, unlike a past, is the
possibility of being alive.
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