The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

shortcomings failed to register with most of the scores of British and American reviewers who welcomed the book – ‘Said’s Orientalism appears to be a monolithic and uncontested discourse’ marvelled Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg in 1985 (191) – but they became ever clearer. By 1994, Ali Behdad charged that ‘in denouncing the essentialist and generalizing tendencies of Orientalism, Said’s critical approach repeats these very faults’ (11). A few years later, a sustained critique came from Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997), who argued that ‘Said falls back on discredited kinds of essentialism and displays a determinism which reduces the entire Western cultural canon to an archive of bad faith and Orientalist defamation’ (154). Such criticism has reverberated and intensified down the years. Recently Robert Irwin described Orientalism as ‘a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations’ (cited in De Bellaigue 2006, 6–7).

      Yet, while the Occam’s Razor effect of Orientalism has continued to be cited as a major weakness, Said had himself long since pointed the way out:

      Against this static system of ‘synchronic essentialism’… [which] presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant pressure. The source of such pressure is narrative…. What seemed stable … now appears unstable…. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change…. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision (1978/1985, 240).

      This optimistic insight not only undermines much of the main thesis of Orientalism, but in its privileging of the transformative, even subversive, powers of narrative, it has matched my own experience of the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa. Seamus Heaney has remarked that ‘poetry is a symbolic resolution of conflicts insoluble in experience’ (1989, 1412), and this is true also of narrative, especially romance. Mark Currie has explored this notion – ‘Sometimes it is exactly the imprecision of narrative fiction that appeals’ (1998, 51) – and has demonstrated that all narrative encodes ‘values which often subvert what might be called the conscious intention of the narrative’ (5; see also Bruner, 1991 and Van Wyk Smith, 1997a).

      Such reconciliatory and potentially subversive functions of narrative are also implied in Jean François Lyotard’s seminal exposition of postmodernism, La condition postmoderne (1978), as a persuasion sceptical of the ‘grand’ or ‘master narratives’ of imperialism, world faiths, racism and other ‘great metanarratives of legitimation’, and as preferring instead the multivocal and multivalent ensembles of ‘little narratives’ of humanity (Lyotard in Cahoone 1996, 482–483). My reading of the library of Africa had yielded many such by-ways, and they seemed worth exploring.

      Furthermore, Said’s promotion of narrative pointed to another approach that was to prove most valuable in my own investigations, namely Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic imagination (1981). Bakhtin’s proposal that all discourse (even the apparently univocally racist) is in fact polyphonic and based on the reciprocity or at least dialogic nature of all utterance, while at the same time no utterance can ever be wholly inclusive or fully in control of its intentions, would open up new vistas on the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa. I shall return to this thesis in due course.

      Despite Said’s championing of the power of narrative, his own evident neglect of the ‘little narratives’ of colonial encounter continued to draw fire. Aijaz Ahmad, though regarding Orientalism as ‘undoubtedly in the entire career of literary theory the grandest of all narratives of the connection between Western knowledge and Western power’ (1992, 13), nevertheless launched a comprehensive critique of Said’s thesis as being itself Westernised and dismissive of actual Oriental resistance. For Ahmad, Said was concerned mainly ‘to displace an activist culture with a textual culture’ (1992, 1), and was evidently ignorant of a ‘vast tradition, virtually as old as colonialism itself’ (174), of a Western counter-discourse critical of its own colonialism.

      The fear that a theorised postcolonialism born from Said’s endeavours would merely textualise the real agonies of ‘the wretched of the earth’ began to emerge, too. Ato Quayson wrote: ‘From the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism … postcolonial studies have been dominated by a shift from the material specificities of colonialism to the detailing of the discourses and ideas produced by the colonial encounter’ (1997, 137). Indeed, we shall see that the baleful reliance of postcolonial polemicists on the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ proposed by postmodernism would aggravate such preoccupation with the textuality rather than the materiality of the past, and would precipitate a crisis in the activist agenda of postcolonialism. Along similar lines, Nicholas Thomas has deplored the ‘fatal impact’ paradigm implicit in Orientalism, whereby the import of settler cultures is exaggerated and ‘the capacities of colonized peoples to respond to intrusions are denied and ignored’ (1992, 279). We have already seen evidence of such ‘subaltern’ African responses, and they can be duplicated throughout the record.

      But the heady mixture of Fanon, Foucault and Said, mustering the energies of two dominant discourses of the late twentieth century – postcolonialism and postmodernism – continued to develop a recriminatory and dismantling critique aimed at indicting not only Western authors who had explicitly written about empire (Kipling, Conrad and Forster come to mind), but all those who may never, or hardly ever, have written about the Eurocolonial world, yet were deemed to have unconsciously promoted or at least to have benefited from its existence, such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens and George Eliot (Said, 1993).

      Robert Young would later suggest that, like Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, Said’s work ‘holds out the much more disturbing possibility that all Western knowledge is, directly or indirectly, a form of colonial discourse’ (1995, 160). Phrases such as ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, ‘epidemiology of representations’, ‘devices of doubt’, ‘violence of comprehension’ and ‘discourses of dismantlement’, deriving from postmodernist discourse, energised the debate, indicating a combative stance that suited the recuperative project of postcolonialism nicely. ‘Postcolonial theory and colonial discourse analysis have spread like an antibody through the disciplines of history, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies’, complained Rod Edmond (1997, 24). ‘Soon the postmodern category will include Homer’, quipped Umberto Eco (1983, ‘Postscript’). The combined forces of postmodernism and postcolonialism seemed set to rout the remaining outposts of imperialist confidence.

      The main burden of these polemics is not material to the present study, but some of its import is, notably as exhibited in the persistent but self-contradictory assumption that Eurocolonial authors were both guilty of imperialist and racist perfidy, yet also (because of the perceptual grids deemed to confine such writers) cognitively incapacitated and so unable ever to perceive the ‘truth’ of their errors.

      Several critics also pointed out that even where Saidean acolytes would attempt to refine and diversify his thesis, its underlying manichaeism remained unimpaired. Stephen Howe, reviewing works by Bhabha and Spivak, summed up how virtually all contributions to this minatory discourse continued to work: ‘First, monolithic, ahistorical, collective subjects are set up – the colonizer and the colonized – and then their relations are argued to be shifting and equivocal, through the deployment of deconstructive techniques and psychoanalytical procedures’ (1994, 40). The insights yielded by such procedures were always the same: ‘Imperialism is what light skins do exclusively to black skins’ (Sutherland, 1988, 996). Terry Eagleton delineated a critical industry that had become ‘a set of footnotes to Foucault…. [T]he theory is all in place, and all that remains to be done is to run yet more texts through it’ (1993, 8).

      By now it was clear that while many authors might repeat the criticism that Said’s monolithic and ahistorical image of the imperial enterprise was ‘guilty of creating the very monolith [it] purported to condemn’ (Youngs, 1994, 6), few were able to resist the mesmeric attractions of Said’s neatly punitive model – as Tim Youngs, just quoted, himself fails to do in his 1994 book, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850–1910 (Van Wyk Smith, 1999b).