Achille Mbembe, Mail & Guardian
I wrote most of On the Postcolony at night. It was in the
early 1990s, as the deep shadow of Afro-Marxism was receding. Then, it seemed
as if the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Many
scholars were peddling increasingly unhelpful maps of the present at the very
moment that new dramas were taking shape.
As the crisis in the social sciences was intensifying,
innovative trends, even a new kind of thinking, were emerging in fields as
disparate as design, fiction, fashion, painting, dance and the domain of
aesthetics in general. In all these disciplines of the imagination, something
of a reconciliation between so-called African identity and a certain idea of
worldliness, if not cosmopolitanism, was in the making.
But a proper biography of On the Postcolony would be
impossible without a direct reference to African music. I discovered Congolese
music in the late 1980s – a time of structural adjustment programmes, wars of
predation, cruelty and stupidity parading as leadership, military coups and
deferred social revolutions. The emotional sublimity of the Congolese musical
imagination taught me how indispensable it was to think with the bodily
senses, to write with the musicality of one’s own flesh.
With this music I could feel not only the movement of power,
but also the truth of WE du Bois’s injunction: “Life is not simply fact.” Music
has the capacity to marry soul and matter. Indeed, in Africa, music has always
been a celebration of the ineradicability of life, in a long life-denying
history. It is the genre that has historically expressed, in the most haunting
way, our raging desire not only for existence, but more importantly for joy in
existence – what we should call the practice of joy before death.
The African novel is the other direct biographical element of
this book. From the late 1980s onwards, the best of the African novel was
already celebrating the demise of the nationalist project and of Africa’s
post-independence rulers’ claim to stand for the Father. At the same time, the
novel was alerting us to the appearance of new, uncommon forces that we could
neither quite grasp nor yet capture in the then dominant conceptual languages
(development, state-society relations, civil society).
I had begun reading the work of the Congolese writer Sony
Lab’ou Tansi in the late 1980s. Whether in La vie et demie, L’État honteux, Les
sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez or La Parenthèse de sang, experimentation always
came before ontology. Unexpected bridges were built between abstraction and
concreteness, reason, emotion and affect, the conscious, the unconscious and
the oneiric. Art and thought were made to come alive and to resonate with one
another.
Tansi’s idea of an agreement constantly deferred in order for
new questions to be introduced revealed the need to expand the dictionary for a
rethinking, a reinvention, to happen – for difference to become productive.
Contingency, uncertainty and ephemerality appeared to offer a vast reservoir of
freedom and free play. I found the same ability to seize the ephemeral in Amos
Tutuola’s L’ivrogne dans la brousse and in Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de
violence.
This is when I decided to write a book that would make a
space for resonances and interferences across different modes of thinking,
neither of which would be situated above the others. The best way to do this
was to explore what a political and aesthetic critique of the Father might look
like in the Africa of the last quarter of the 20th century and how, because of
its powerful resonances – and hopefully its explanatory uniqueness – a critique
of the Father (the “Thing” and its doubles) would enable us to write an
alternative history of our present.
Of On the Postcolony, it can therefore be said that it is an
attempt to uncover what lies underneath the mask of the Father. What form does
the Father take in the aftermath of colonialism stricto sensu? What does his
face look like? What are his shapes? What is produced by means of the Father
and what surfaces does he engender?
To paraphrase Deleuze, what I found was something like a
“goat’s ass” that lived under the curse, and stood opposite the face of a pagan
god – death concealed in the darkness as well as darkness in the full light of
day, shining and stinking. On the Postcolony therefore looks at the ways in
which this Phallos in the shape of a goat’s ass stages itself and how it is
refracted in the consciousness of those who are under its spell – in short,
what life, lived under its sign and as a result of its (de)generative power, is
about.
This way of thinking and writing is very much a product of my
training in specific post-war French traditions of intellectual life
(re-presented by, for example, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Blanchot,
Deleuze). But, as I have already said, it is also rooted in my reading of the
Francophone African novel and my listening to late 20th-century African music.
What both traditions have taught me is that to think is to
experiment. To think is also to recover and rescue the figurative power of
allegory as it applies to specific realms of human experience, of which it is
the adequate form of expression, or the conceptual language in which that
experience alone can be expressed. To think is finally to embark on a voyage of
the mind and to write is a form of enjoyment. This is why, in On the
Postcolony, I wanted to experiment with the sensation that comes from a mind
that is ready to let things go off in unforeseen directions, at the risk of
coming face to face with unspeakable desires and fears and waking up the
daemonic agencies of our underworld.
This is perhaps the reason why those who have read On the
Postcolony without a philosophical disposition have characterised it as
pessimistic. I come from a tradition in which “to think” (penser) is the same
as “to weigh” (peser) and “to expose”. To think critically is to work with the
fault lines, to feel the chaotic touch of our senses, to bring the
compositional logics of our world to language.
Critique is witnessing as well as endless vigilance,
interrogation and anticipation. A proper critique requires us first to dwell
in the chaos of the night in order precisely to better break through into the
dazzling light of the day.
We recognise the moment of pessimism when the layers of the
past and the world of the present fall into the void; that is, a place that is
not a place. We recognise the moment of pessimism when we trivialise human
experience or provoke misplaced empathy or contempt, when, unable to release
language, we succumb to the elemental materiality of the there is.
We enter this “dark night of language” when its symbolising
powers are suddenly crippled and, instead of revealing what is hidden within
the self-evident and what lies beneath the surface, behind the mask, language
circles in on itself and hides what it should be showing.
From art, literature, music and dance, I have learnt that
there is a sensory experience of our lives that encompasses innumerable unnamed
and unnameable shapes, hues and textures that “objective knowledge” has failed
to capture. The language of these genres communicates how ordinary people laugh
and weep, work, play, pray, bless, love and curse, make a space to stand forth
and walk, fall and die.
Literature, and music in particular, are also practices of
desecration and profanation. Each in its own way involves a paradoxical and at
times risky play with limits – both the limits set by moral or political orders
and those that shape language and style, thought and meaning.
The quiet force of African aesthetic practices is to be found
in the way they see every moment or instant of human existence as both entirely
fortuitous and at the same time utterly singular. In the best tradition of African
art, music, literature, every moment of human existence is made up of points of
intensity that are never stable. There is nothing in On the Postcolony that
could resemble a linear history. Africa will never be a given.
But confronting the archive and interrogating the future help
us to reflect critically on the present – the present as that vulnerable space,
that precarious and elusive entry point through which, hopefully, a radically
different life might make its appearance. There is no future without hope – the
hope that we might bring this radically different temporal life into being as a
concrete social possibility, as a systemic transformation in the logic of our
being-in-common and being-in-the-world as human beings.
