John C. Eustace, Acadia University, Wolfville
In a letter to Mordecai Richler, dated 2 August 1968, Margaret Laurence made an unusual reference to Africa while complimenting Richler for his novel Cocksure: "[I]f you have ever once been a white liberal," she says, "you never forget how it was, way back when, even when you have changed and no longer can imagine yourself agreeing with people, just because the colour of their skin was different than yours (I could write a long weary diatribe on the subject, but why bother?). These days the whole question of Africa etc etc leaves me having no opinions on the subject whatsoever) [sic]."[1] Laurence's tone of disengagement here seems inconsistent with her long-held public stance on Africa, exemplified by her remarks near the beginning of her travelogue The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963): "I had no specific pre-conceived ideas of what the Somalis would be like, or ought to be like," says Laurence, setting her voyage to Somaliland in opposition to Sir Richard Burton's. "My bias lay in another direction. I believed that the overwhelming majority of Englishmen in colonies could properly be classified as imperialists, and my feeling about imperialism was very simple--I was against it."[2] While, in subsequent chapters, Laurence effectively explores the biases inherent in her white liberalism, and problematizes her early conception of imperialists, she does ultimately maintain, though with some ironic self-reflexivity, a "righteous disapproval of the empire-builders" in Africa (PCB 251). And the same stance is reflected in a piece of literary criticism contemporaneous with the letter Long Drums and Cannons (1968), a work that won her one of the few places of honor and approval in Chinua Achebe's essay "Colonialist Criticism."[3] It would seem, therefore, that there is some tension between Laurence's public and private utterances about Africa, between her public manifestation of solidarity, and her private revelations of weariness.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand that tension is to ascribe it to the differences between imperial and postimperial Africa. Certain political events--for instance, the fall of Nkrumah, the failure of the Pan-African movement, and the Biafran war--challenged the optimism Laurence had felt about imperialism's demise in the early 1960s when she had written much of her African work. Her disaffected statement would then seem the obvious result of those events; her public utterances, the residuals of hope and solidarity.
However, I would like to suggest that something more complex is going on here, that the weariness and resulting tension signify a troubled white liberal conscience more than a disaffection with contemporary Africa. What I am concerned with here is not the conscience troubled by a sympathy transformed into condescension, which is how Laurence discusses her white liberalism in her interview with Rosemary Sullivan[4] and her essay "The Very Best Intentions" (1964). Instead, I see the tension signifying a conscience troubled by its neocolonial agency, by its mediation of African signs to a Western readership. And I think we can see signs that Laurence was thus troubled in her African fiction. From her first African short story, "The Drummer of All the World" (1956), to her last, "A Mask of Beaten Gold" (1963), she was continually renegotiating her position in relation to Africa, the position of the white liberal caught between decolonizing and neocolonial impulses. On the decolonizing side of the equation, we see her challenging imperial assumptions about Africa, representing a sophisticated Ashanti culture at odds with imperial constructions of African primitivism. On the neocolonial side, as I have argued elsewhere in reference to This Side Jordan (1963),[5] we see her texts reinscribing problematic Western discourses--in particular the discourses of progress and modernity that Partha Chatterjee has identified as neocolonial in their universalizations of Western epistemological and moral frameworks of judgment.[6] Her texts do seem to qualify their neocolonial gestures through reflexivity, problematizing the well-meaning interference of white liberals--such as Matthew in "The Drummer of All the World," Constance in "A Fetish for Love" (1963), and Miranda in This Side Jordan--and calling attention to the problems circumscribing her own endeavors. It is questionable, however, whether such reflexive qualifications adequately address the problems created by her representations, either for Laurence, or for contemporary readers of her fiction, who have recourse to almost forty years of African fiction by African writers. This paper will suggest, then, that the weariness evident in Laurence's private utterance to Richler derives from her extended and failed struggle to negotiate a position that would allow her to write Africa as effectively as she might have liked, a failure she articulated years later in her essay "Gadgetry or Growing" (1980): "I had decided I could never get deeply enough inside the minds of African people," she recalls, "or, at least, I'd gone as far as I personally could as a non-African."[7]
I would like to examine Laurence's agency in the mediation of African signs and symbols by looking at her most reflexive African short story, "The Pure Diamond Man" (1963). This story, her second last published independently of the African collection The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories (1963), best reveals the nature of her struggle and her acute perception of her problematic mediative role. Through its pervasive reflexivity, this story shows both why it was necessary that Laurence stop writing about Africa, and how aware she was of that necessity. As such, we should consider it as a rather important step in the process by which she wrote herself out of Africa.
The story seems at its decolonizing best in its construction of the anthropological agent, diamond magnate, and closet anthropologist Philip Hardacre. Near the beginning, we see Hardacre, only slightly "grateful" with the "grotesque" manifestations of contemporary ceremony, searching for the undiluted Africa of anthropology, an Africa constituted by the "weird magnificence" of the "witchfinders' dance, festivals of the dead, offerings to the river gods, [and the] medicine man's phenomenal sense of the dramatic."[8] The text problematizes Hardacre's search, however, by framing it within two complementary statements of interest: "Always had a personal interest in this country, owing to my family's finances," says the diamond magnate to the African protagonist, Tetteh, before describing his failed search; and "[i]t's the pure customs which interest me, not these dilutions," he says afterwards (187; emphasis added). Hardacre's bold assertion that he knows what the "the true Africa" (187) is through his readings of European anthropological texts will be thoroughly challenged during the course of the story, but the nature of the challenge is evident immediately in this clear connection between his financial and anthropological interests. Hardacre's anthropological interest ultimately serves his neocolonial interest by allowing him to figure Africa as the site of invariable Otherness--an Otherness he can interpret, and hence control, with the help of scientific discourse.
Of course, that Laurence associates neocolonial and anthropological interests here is doubly significant given how scrupulous she was about consulting anthropological texts as a prelude to representing Africa. As Fiona Sparrow's extended treatment of the African writings reveals, Laurence scrupulously researched her fiction by consulting authoritative anthropological texts, such as B. W. Andrzejewski's and R.S. Rattray's respective studies of Somali and Ashanti peoples.[9] However, Sparrow's concern with articulating the credibility of Laurence's representations and the painstaking research that went into them precludes any in-depth consideration of their political ramifications. Her study fails to acknowledge how the author's research, and hence her representations, are problematized by the fact that the anthropological texts informing them were also used to "other" Africans and license imperialism. Laurence, however--if we can use Hardacre as evidence--seems to have been aware of the problem. Hence the identification of her authorial agency with Hardacre's neocolonial interests.
Tetteh's interested manufacture of the "real" old Africa through a manipulation of sign and symbol consistent with Hardacre's expectations reveals how such interests mediate representations and perceptions of Africa. He rids his father's house of "dilution," of all those things of modern, syncretic Africa, replacing them with stage props--"bush rat bones," "chicken feet," "bunches of leaves and grass," assorted "wooden clubs," "feathers and clusters of cowrie shells" (193)--objects primitive and mysterious enough to delight any amateur anthropologist. And when Hardacre takes the bait, asking Tetteh to explain the significance of the leaves, the latter responds with romantic obfuscations: "Magical medicine.… Do not touch, please. Special for the gods of this house" (193). The significance of the items is something that Hardacre must create in his own imagination, informed by an equally intangible European anthropology. Tetteh's suggestion that the leaves have magical significance, even when they are clearly empty signifiers, reveals his understanding that any meaning or context these items may possess will have to come from the imagination of the white man, whose interest in seeing them as magical is strong enough to color his perception of reality. Of course, as the denouement reveals, Hardacre is not ready to accommodate an African reality that does not conform to his expectations or one that exposes him to a reality incongruent with his interests. When witnessing a real ceremony near a local swamp exposes him to malaria, guineaworm, and roundworm, he abandons his anthropological interests and returns to England.
While Laurence's representation of how Hardacre's anthropological interests cloud his perceptions of Africa seems quite pointed as a decolonizing gesture--even more so when we consider how she implicates herself in the process--the gesture loses its effectiveness when she posits in place of the diamond magnate's romanticized Africa an equally troubling alternative. For the reality Laurence has Hardacre butt against is consistent with neocolonial constructions of Africa as backward and primitive. This Africa is diseased, characterized by malaria, diarrhea, guinea and roundworm; it has not yet benefited from the "progress" of good plumbing and swamp drainage. While I do not think that we can fairly blame Laurence for valuing these modern technologies or for desiring to extend their benefits to Africa, I do think that we have to recognize the problem inherent in her representation. In characterizing the real Africa as disease-ridden to challenge Hardacre's interested constructions, Laurence merely undermines one Western discourse on Africa to replace it with an adjacent one. Her "real Africa" has more in common, then, with the alienating ones of Joyce Cary or Ayi Kwei Armah than with the naturalized one of Achebe. And the latter's comment--that Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) "imposes so much foreign metaphor on the sickness of Ghana that it ceases to be true"[10]--might well extend to Laurence's text here.
The conflation of decolonizing and neocolonial impulses is equally evident in the representation of Tetteh. On the surface, we again have a fairly strong decolonizing gesture in Tetteh, who, through the telling of his own tale in the framing narrative, seems to challenge Western discourses by demonstrating how they mediate Africa to serve their own interests. We see this decolonizing gesture in his dealings with Hardacre, but the issue really comes to the fore in the framing story and his dealings with Daniel, his "been-to" friend. The latter is, in one sense, the story's reader and, as such, its prime interpreter and mediator. Not surprisingly, he is associated with the West through his education. And this association with the West and its discourses inevitably leads to a dissociation from local discourses. Thus, at the very beginning of the story, Daniel challenges Tetteh's anthropomorphic concept of luck with Western discourses of logic and science: "Scientifically, you realize, a consistently lucky person is an impossibility. You didn't honestly believe you were an exception?"(182), he says patronizingly. But as Tetteh explains, a Western education and an elevated social status license Daniel's skepticism: "You are 'been-to' men, my friend. What should you be needing with heavenly signs? But I am a boy from Gyakrom, and I am following my Luck and greatly wishing for some divine happenings to provide me with sufficiency of cash" (185). As Tetteh suggests, the financial security resulting from been-to status licenses Daniel's interpretive authority. The only signs he and other been-tos are interested in are appropriate signs of respect from their underlings.
The framing device, then, seems to work against interpretations secured on Western interests, and Daniel's skepticism about Tetteh's local discourse on Luck corresponds with Hardacre's gullibility at Tetteh's manipulation of the signs. Both men try to circumscribe indigenous discourses within limited European ones, but Tetteh's worldview, his ability to read and manipulate the signs around him, invalidates those circumscribing discourses. In telling his story and in interpreting it himself, Tetteh reestablishes his connection with avuncular Luck. Through telling his own story, he sees the solution to his financial troubles: a traditional corn cure that brings the juju man, Bonsu, and the priest, Quarshie, together as friends back in his rural village. In effect, Tetteh, through the telling of his own story, renegotiates his relationship to local discourse and extracts from it what he needs to live and thrive in the new Africa. According to the logic of this story, his worldview wins out over the circumscribing discourses of colonialism precisely because his vision is assimilative rather than exclusionary, because he resists the logocentric interpretive framework represented by Daniel and negotiates a syncretic one consistent with local discourse. The "Bonsu Corn Cure" sign Tetteh creates at the end of the story is one that does contain meaning and significance because it advertises a legitimate cure for corns.
Again, Tetteh seems an impressive decolonizing gesture on Laurence's part, anticipating a time when Africans will mediate their own signs to Westerners and other Africans, and, in essence, acknowledging that the time for outsiders like herself to mediate those signs is over. However, her figuration of the alternative Africa they will mediate again confounds her decolonizing gesture. The hope Tetteh's sign represents is ultimately contained by the sign's trace to the diseased Africa of the neocolonial imagination: Tetteh will secure his fortune by offering a cure to a diseased Africa. Moreover, and perhaps even more problematically, Laurence predicates this hope on a confidence man such as Tetteh. While the confidence man, as a manipulator of sign and symbol, seems an ideal figure of resistance as a relative of traditional tricksters--and indeed, W. H. New describes Tetteh as a modern trickster[11]--he is, in fact, not nearly as savory. For what a confidence man consolidates is not the cultural sign, but the dollar sign. Tetteh deconstructs the interested signs of authority only to reinscribe them in his own interests, ones not that distinct from Hardacre's and Daniel's. As such, Tetteh seems a decolonizing gesture contained by neocolonial impulse.
To read Laurence's African fiction thus is to risk becoming, in Achebe's words, "the sympathiser whose weeping is so loud that he drowns out the owners of the corpse" ("Colonialist Criticism" 7)--or at least the owners of the signs, to complete my appropriation of the Igbo proverb through adaptation. And if the owners of the signs, such as Achebe, find little fault with her mediations, why should we? Indeed. And despite my reading I refuse to find fault here, because Laurence represented Africa more sensitively than almost any other outsider, and because there was value in the effort. The facts of the matter, however, are that Laurence seems to have found fault with herself, that she recognized her failure to successfully negotiate her decolonizing and neocolonial impulses, and that she wrote herself out of Africa around the same time as she wrote the closet anthropologist, Hardacre, out of it, in what I would suggest is her strongest decolonizing gesture.
Of course, none of this explains the tension between her private and public utterances about Africa, but it does create a context for understanding that tension. Laurence could no longer see a way of writing Africa after 1963, but she still had an interest in it, as her literary criticism reveals. When communicating with a fellow writer, one who understands a writer's personal investment in fictional representations, she reveals that interest in a different way than she does in public utterances. She reveals that interest as a wearying struggle with representation, a struggle already lost.
Footnotes
1. J. A. Wainwright, ed., A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters from Margaret Laurence to Canadian Writers (Dunvegan, Ontario: Cormorant Books, 1995) 170.
Return to Article
2. Margaret Laurence, The Prophet's Camel Bell (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988) 25. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation PCB.
Return to Article
3. See Chinua Achebe, "Colonialist Criticism," Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975) 12. Subsequent references to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
Return to Article
4. See Margaret Laurence, interview with Rosemary Sullivan, A Place to Stand On: Essays by and about Margaret Laurence, ed. George Woodcock (Edmonton: NeWest, 1983) 63.
Return to Article
5. See John Eustace, "Containing Nationalism: Neo-Colonial Gestures in Margaret Laurence's This Side Jordan," Literature of Region and Nation: The Proceedings of the 6th International Literature of Region & Nation Conference, ed. Winnifred M. Bogaards, vol. 2 (Saint John, NB: University of New Brunswick, 1998) 362-75.
Return to Article
6. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books for the United Nations University, 1986) 11.
Return to Article
7. Margaret Laurence, "Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel," Journal of Canadian Fiction 27 (1980): 56.
Return to Article
8. Margaret Laurence, "The Pure Diamond Man," The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990) 187. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
Return to Article
9. See Fiona Sparrow, Into Africa with Margaret Laurence (Toronto: ECW, 1992).
Return to Article
10. Chinua Achebe, "Africa and Her Writers," Morning Yet on Creation Day 26.
Return to Article
11. W. H. New, "The Other and I: Laurence's African Stories," Woodcock 125.
Return to Article