The Wherewithal of Life. Michael Jackson

      “But these are so typically African, you must have learned to tell such stories—you must have known this style of storytelling.”

      “Yes, the style of telling and the creation of suspense and mystery—that was what I learned as a child.”

      “And the exaggeration!”

      “I was very good at building smoke, as we used to call it. I would build smoke on the story, even if the story was sad. I didn’t want to tell sad stories. I used to turn even the folklore stories that were very sad into something funny, because I didn’t want people to be sad. I wanted people to be laughing, because I grew up not laughing. If you laughed, you’d be asked, ‘Why you are laughing?’ you see, so I wanted people to laugh. People would laugh, and sometimes they would come and push me and tap me, and that felt good to me. And that is how I could survive most of the bullying and the pressure on me. Whenever you make fun and people laugh, they’ll share bites to eat. So I could get my basic necessities that way. It was a survival thing I developed. I started it with my brothers and sisters. Creating stories from what I heard from the older people, making them into funny stories. If I met a person on the way, I might notice his clothes or his way of walking and turn that into something interesting and funny. Instead of abusing someone or describing something that was wrong, I would work out how to tell it in a funny way. But when I started telling stories like that to Nanna, it was lost in translation—she couldn’t get it. She would ask, ‘What do you mean?’ But when you are telling something funny and somebody asks you about a detail, you lose the story. Yeah, you lose the whole trail and it is no longer funny. And Nanna and I began to lose that ability to make fun of the hard things we were up against in our life.”

      Comedy is a common antidote to tragedy. In Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions, his main character, David Zimmer, loses his wife and two sons in a plane crash just one week short of his tenth wedding anniversary. Many months later, Zimmer is surprised to find himself laughing at the antics of a Chaplinesque figure in a silent movie. He searches out more movies by this long-forgotten slapstick star and gradually begins writing a book about him. “Writing about comedy had been no more than a pretext, an odd form of medicine that I had swallowed every day for over a year on the off chance that it would dull the pain inside me.”¹⁹

      It is often said that comedians come from unhappy childhoods. Speaking of the defensive power of humor, Art Buchwald commented, “When you make the bullies laugh, they don’t beat you up,” and John Dryden claimed that “the true end of satire is the amendment of vices.” But it is to Henri Bergson that we owe one of the most compelling analyses of the comedic power of exaggeration.²⁰ An event or experience is tragic because it utterly overwhelms us. We cannot rest for thinking of what has befallen us, rehearsing it in our minds, unable to shake it off. We are, in effect, possessed. We are at the mercy of our situation. Our power to act or speak is nullified, and we are rendered immobile and mute. But by telling a story about the events that devastated us, we reclaim a sense of agency. Not only do we now call the shots, but we separate ourselves from the events as they were originally experienced. However, this dissociation or detachment requires that the events we ourselves suffered be recast as events that befell a depersonalized character. A woman who cannot conceive a child is a potentially tragic figure, but in the tall tale she becomes a figure of fun, a stereotype. We laugh at a situation that in reality is too close, too real, too tragic to entertain. To use Emmanuel’s own words, we “buy off” the situation by rendering it ridiculous. We separate ourselves from the hapless victim and recover our power to determine events as retrospective commentators on the human condition. The comic is not the opposite of the tragic so much as a strategy for countermanding the tragic with distance and indirection. Tragedy befalls us like a bolt from the blue, a natural disaster, a physical accident, a random act of violence. Such traumatic events eclipse and diminish us, and we withdraw into ourselves, feeling singled out, silenced, and powerless in the face of forces we can neither comprehend nor control. Though tragedy is suffered in solitude and silence, comedy opens up the possibility of transfiguring the original event by replaying it in such dramatically altered and exaggerated form that it is experienced as “other.” It is often said of tragedy that healing takes time. With distance comes release. The comedic is the ultimate expression of this kind of distancing and release, and it entails three critical transformations in our experience. First, the comedic restores a sense of agency. Second, it fosters emotional detachment. Third, it entails shared laughter, thus returning us to a community of others. In taking us out of ourselves and eclipsing our emotions, comedy returns us to the world, allowing us to see that we are a part of la comédie humaine rather than a victim of it. In this sense we are able to review the human condition from a general rather than exclusively personal standpoint. This is why comic characters are always stereotypes—“the mother,” “the daughter,” “the senior cowife,” “the wicked stepmother”—rather than particular individuals, why they are often depicted as animals rather than persons, why they have one-track minds rather than complex sensibilities, why their personalities are one-dimensional, and why what they have in common is given more weight than their idiosyncratic features. Moreover, insofar as they transcend private and particular identifications, funny stories can be more widely shared than tragic ones.

      But there must be events that defy such imaginative reworking, that cannot be escaped, disguised, or bought off. And so I asked Emmanuel if we could go back to the time when his aunt tried to force him into an incestuous relationship with his sister.

      “Actually,” Emmanuel said, “I think you are, if I’m not mistaken, only the fourth or the fifth person I’ve told about that. The reason is that one of the main taboos where I come from is against seeing the private parts of your auntie. It is a very big taboo, because aunties have a very serious and strong role in your upbringing, in your mannerisms, in your life, in your future marriage, and so on. So having seen what I should not have seen became something I had to put aside, something I could never tell anybody, because if I told it to someone, especially in Uganda, I would be the person, not the auntie, who would be in trouble. Now, having seen my auntie in that condition and having been made to do what I did became a no-go zone in my life. I never even told my mother. The only people who know of it are Nanna, my sister, and my brother-in-law, because he had to know where his wife was coming from.”

      “So there are things a person simply does not joke about, that are too serious to—”

      “Precisely. You couldn’t make any fun out of it. You cannot make fun out of your aunt telling you to have intimate relations with your sister. It is beyond belief.”

      “It would have been breaking an absolute taboo.”

      “The worst taboo. Nothing rivals it. Even seeing your sister naked is a taboo, or thinking sexual thoughts about your sister. Until I grew up and started dating or having girlfriends, I could never speak of it.”

      “It seems unforgivable.”

      “Yes. If a person was a serial killer, that would be a different issue altogether. You could explain that in many ways. Even though killing is wrong, you could understand why that person might be driven to kill. But if a person tells you to have intimacy with your sister, or with your brother, and they do that—well, until recently, I couldn’t put words on that. It’s what sent me out of the village, it’s what made me dislike or hate everybody related to my auntie, apart from my mum. I excused my mum, but I don’t know whether it is a biological reason or if I had justification for it because she was busy or something like that, but I never really told her.”

      “Did your mother ever find out from others or ever have any idea?”

      “I think she did, or maybe my grandmother told her, because I think my uncle, my young uncle who was also in the same village, must have told my grandmother, yeah. She could have been told. Because I realized later that whenever my mum talked about going to the village, she would make sure my aunt was not there before we went. And whenever my aunt came to visit, my mum was very prickly, you know. But being sisters, that close relationship, I think she had no choice but to avoid the whole topic. But I don’t think she knew about this issue of us being naked in the room. She knew about the punishment my aunt was subjecting