The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

Africa’s crisis demanded a literature of socio-economic conscientising and exposure, a mirror-like recreation of the conditions, repressions and agonies that affected especially black people’s lives. Postmodernist ‘game-playing’, such as that deemed to occupy much of the early fiction of J.M. Coetzee was considered irrelevant, even abhorrent. Magic realism, metafiction, irony and satire were branded the irresponsible distractions of the neo-bourgeois author. Students of Marxist literary theory will recognise the debate, as ‘committed’ South African academics rehearsed the pro-historicist, pro-activist arguments of Lukács (1971), Adorno (1977) and Fredric Jameson (1984). The temptation to expect the poem or novel to be a petrol bomb, or, again as Heaney puts it, ‘a slingstone / Whirled for the desperate’ (1975, 72), is always a strong one in such contexts.

      The relevance of the controversy here is that the ‘Writing in a State of Emergency’ polemic not only demonstrated for me once again the problems created by a postcolonialist critique in confused alliance with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ encouraged by postmodernist scepticism and irreverence, but also continued to sharpen the focus and caveats of my own enquiries. There simply was no such thing as a monolithic, monovalent Eurocolonial discourse of Africa, nor a single ‘master narrative’ of the fraught European-African encounter. Instead, there were many different stories, attitudes, interactions and surprises.

      Postcolonialism still remains high on the international conference agenda, even if the stark binarisms of earlier decades have now been flushed out (Gurr, 1997; Cannadine, 2001; Hall, 2002; King, 2004). As for postmodernism, Raymond Tallis has trenchantly identified the ultimate nihilism embedded in its central tenets: ‘All attempts to demonstrate that the truth about truth is that it is not really true fall foul of the Cretan Paradox’, for if ‘the critique of truth were true, then it would be false’ (2001, 4). Put more simply and with specific relevance to my project, authors who have tried to expose the ‘truth’ about colonialism have generally fatally impaired their project by seeking an alliance with postmodernist iconoclasm. Richard Rorty puts it well: ‘People who wave the banners of multiculturalism typically pride themselves on their postmodernism, but revert to old-fashioned essentialism when they start describing the incommensurable identities of members of diverse cultures’ (1994, 13).

      Similarly, many others, arguing that it is impossible for the European (or Eurocolonial) observer ever to have fathomed the ‘truth’ about the colonial subject while nevertheless holding forth confidently on the ‘truth’ of the colonial encounter from some privileged position already denied, have to be guilty, at the very least, of gross self-deception. By 1995, Robert J.C. Young would remark: ‘We have reached something of an impasse with regard to the theoretical questions raised in the study of colonial discourse’ (164), and the ghosts have not yet departed – see Mishra and Hodge (2005), quoted earlier, or Richard Gott’s scathing review of the new Oxford History of the British Empire (2001) in the London Review of Books (Gott, 2002, 26–28). The untenability of the postmodernist postcolonialism of a sometime doyenne of the discourse, Gayatri Spivak, has been laid bare: ‘Spivak wants to discern politically expedient ideological falsehoods where there can allegedly be no truth; she wants to help reconstruct the history of female literary marginalization whilst denying the possibility of authentic histories’ (Freadman and Miller, 1991, 39). Edward Said eventually had to confess: ‘[The] crucial difference between the urgent historical and political imperatives of postcolonialism, and postmodernism’s relative detachment, makes for altogether different approaches and results’ (1995, 6).

      Other recuperative debates of our time have drawn on postcolonialist discourse and have displayed the same symptoms of unease when allied to or utilising the disruptive and apostate tenets of postmodernism’s ‘posture of suspicion’. One such is feminism. As Annette Kolodny had demonstrated earlier (1975), Helen Carr argues that

      colonialist, racist and sexist discourse have continually reinforced, naturalized and legitimized each other during the process of European colonization…. [In the New World] and in other colonized territories the difference man/ woman provided a fund of images and topoi by which the difference European/non-European could be politically accommodated (1985, 46).

      Yet here, too, the passing years would reveal a growing threat of disempowerment, until Laura Lee Downs would ask: ‘If “Woman” is just an empty category, then why am I afraid to walk alone at night?’ She warned that ‘the politics of identity, feminist and otherwise, rests on a disturbing epistemological ground’ where ‘the group’s fragile unity’ – and, indeed, its powers of advocacy – are under threat (1993, 416). Susan Stanford Friedman agonises over ‘a pressing urgency to reclaim and hold on to a newly reconstituted history of women’ aided by the insights of both postcolonialism and postmodernism, against ‘the subjectivist epistemology [also of postmodernist making] that can lead toward the paralysis of complete relativism’ (1997, 231–235).

      These are the same fears voiced by proponents of a crusading postcolonialism. Thus Nancy Hartsock finds ‘it curious that the postmodern claim that verbal constructs do not correspond in a direct way to reality has arisen precisely when women and non-Western peoples have begun to speak for themselves and, indeed, to speak about global systems of power differentials’ (1987, cited by Mascia-Lees, 1993, 230). Dark surmises that postmodernist scepticism is a secret weapon of a re-mastering imperialism have emerged (Krupat, 1992; hooks, 1995), while Anne McClintock has worried over the dismissive implications of the term ‘postcolonial’ itself when it is supposed to articulate a rallying cry: ‘The word “post” … reduces the cultures of peoples beyond colonialism to prepositional time. The term confers on colonialism the prestige of history proper; colonialism is the determining marker of history’ (1992, 86). We have come full circle back to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s notorious verdict that precolonial Africa had no proper history.

      Out of such anxieties have emerged various proposals for a truce between postcolonialist idealism and postmodernist scepticism, expressed in calls for a moratorium on the use of radical postmodernist insights in postcolonialist critiques, so as not to undermine the latter’s essentialist agenda of reempowerment. Gayatri Spivak has made a plea for a ‘strategic essentialism’, that is, ‘the construction of essentialist forms of “native” identity [as] a legitimate, indeed necessary, stage in the emergence … [of] a fully decolonized national culture’ (cited by Moore-Gilbert, 1997, 179). Linda Hutcheon elaborates:

      The current poststructuralist/postmodern challenges to the coherent, autonomous subject have to be put on hold in feminist and postcolonial discourses, for both must work first to assert and affirm a denied or alienated subjectivity; those radical postmodern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses (1989, 151).

      This is, of course, nonsense. If the tenets of postmodernism regarding the constructedness and contingency of all cognition, identity, ‘truth’ and cultural values are correct and not merely rhetorical postures, we are being asked here to accept a logical charade for the purposes of well-meant but nevertheless fraudulent expediency. Yet such shaky options have attracted other promoters. Despite regarding postmodernism as ‘a discursive practice dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals’ (1995, 118), bell hooks wants to retain its disruptive usefulness for the ‘renewed black liberation struggle’ as long as it is stripped of its ‘critique of essentialism’, since ‘we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics’ (120; my italics – the term sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for racialism, if not racism). That such a stance could no longer qualify as postmodern seems to escape the writer.

      Altogether then, crusading postcolonialists have major problems with the ahistoricity of postmodernism, its clamant decentredness, its inherent scepticism, and its agnosticism about the imperatives of historical materialism and the idealist liberationist programmes of postcolonialism. The political agenda for a better world, free of imperial domination and capitalist exploitation, that lies at the heart of the classical Fanonist enterprise is by definition questioned, destabilised and relativised by a postmodernist verdict – which in its most agnostic manifestations argues that all is verbiage, all is construct, nothing matters.