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Introduction

Laura Chrisman

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was, until recently, widely regarded as the first major African novel, with supporting roles given to other 1950s African works by Camera Laye, Mongo Beti, Amos Tutuola, and Ferdinand Oyono. The canonization of Achebe’s 1958 Nigerian work, written in English and published by the London publisher Heinemann, had many serious consequences. One was the neat association of aesthetic with state processes. The publication of Achebe’s novel during Nigeria’s emerging independence from British rule reinforced a view that African literature only properly came into being with postcolonial sovereignty. Canonization of Achebe’s novel also sanctioned European languages as the unquestioned medium of African literature. Over the last fifteen years, however, scholars have begun major revision of African literary history. The assumption that African fiction properly began in the postwar era of decolonization has given way to a far less tidy, but far more historically accurate, understanding that in Africa, as in other parts of the European imperial world, colonized writers were engaged in producing important and original fiction long before their countries succeeded in the struggle for self-determination. Things Fall Apart is increasingly treated now as inaugurating the institutionalization of African literature within the Euro-American metropole, rather than inaugurating the literary field itself.

Scholars, and publishers, are energetically pursuing the archival expansion that this new literary history mandates. For instance, they are discovering and reprinting African texts from the nineteenth century, such as Joseph Walter’s Guanya Pau and the anonymous Marita, or the Folly of Love. Accompanying the growth of archive is the growth of conceptual and theoretical enquiry. In different ways, anti- and post-colonial thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Homi K. Bhabha earlier fueled critical assumptions that imperialism, as an ideological/discursive domain, exercised nearly total control over the cognitive horizons of colonized elites, writers, and intellectuals. This has given way to new analysis that accords both more agency to colonized subjects and more diversity to their cultural, political, and identity formations. Recognizing that these developed not only through the metropolitan-imperial axis but also through horizontal flows to other colonized and racially subordinated populations, scholars are reevaluating the nature of transnationalism itself. At the same time, scholars are now reconsidering the spaces within the colony; in particular, they are giving fresh scrutiny to the ideological and material relationships between early African writing practices and European missions.

If African literary studies are rapidly expanding their historical and conceptual understanding, the pace of linguistic expansion in the field has been comparatively slow, despite Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ongoing and powerful argument, over the last thirty years, for authors and critics to prioritize writing in African vernacular languages. Anglophone and Francophone African literatures continue to dominate scholarly attention, at least within the metropole. However, there is growing institutional recognition of the Lusophone and Hispanophone literatures of Angola, Mozambique, and Equatorial Guinea (and, to some extent, the Afrikaans literature of South Africa). Outside of dedicated translators and specialists, however, African language literatures remain largely overlooked as the major cultural expressions that they are.

For these reasons this publication of The Conscript, Hailu’s major Tigrinya novel, is most timely. Its translation into English helps to reverse the continuing Europhone bias of African literary studies and contributes to the continuing expansion of the historical literary archive. It was composed in 1927, a decade that saw major Europhone and indigenous African fiction (as well as poetry) enter into print. Black South African authors were especially active, producing such Anglophone novels as Sol Plaatje’s 1930 novel Mhudi (written in 1920) and R. R. R. Dhlomo’s 1929 novel An African Tragedy, as well as Thomas Mofolo’s 1925 Sesotho novel Chaka and John Dube’s 1930 Zulu novel Jeqe, Shaka’s Body Servant. Of these four, only Dhlomo’s has a contemporary setting; the other three are historical novels set in the early nineteenth century. In comparison, Hailu’s work is startling for its openly anticolonial stance, modernist style, and international subject matter, Italy’s use of Eritrean soldiers in its war of Libyan conquest.

Hailu paints a devastating portrait of European colonialism. As well as exposing the operations of foreign domination, he confronts the obstacles to liberation for which the colonized Eritreans themselves are responsible, highlighting both their material and subjective collusion with their own exploitation. At the same time that he develops this critique, Hailu celebrates the potential for resistant consciousness, which he sees as already present, albeit embryonically, in existing Eritrean social, cultural, and spiritual formations.

Hailu’s approach to colonialism anticipates the midcentury thinkers Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Like them, Hailu is concerned less with imperial history than with its contemporary expression; the Italian empire is in medias res, like the protagonist Tuquabo himself at the start of the novel. The details of how Italy came to colonize Eritrea and to declare war on Libya are immaterial to the narrative; instead, Hailu simply remarks, “This was a time when there was war going on in Tripoli, and it was deemed fitting for the people of Habesha to be willing to spill their blood in this war” (7). The passive construction is interesting. Italian agency is missing here, and this absence becomes all the more glaring when the next sentence reads, “The youth were singing, ‘He is a woman who refuses to go to Libya,’ and small children in return sang, ‘Come back to us later, Tribuli . . . give us time to grow up,’ dispersing their poisonous words” (7). Hailu chooses to emphasize the prowar activities of local Eritrean youth, children, and also “those Habesha chiefs” who pray for war on the grounds that “the exercise might help trim their fattened bodies” (7). (Sixty years later, in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel Sozaboy, the decision of the eponymous Sozaboy to enlist in the Nigerian Civil War is likewise influenced by a cross-generational spread of local men who promote a particular brand of masculinity.)

Like Fanon and Césaire, Hailu highlights the dehumanization at the core of colonial domination. Césaire emphasizes the dehumanization of European perpetrators: “the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal” (177). Hailu complicates this equation by featuring both colonizer and colonized as animals. In chapter 2, as the ascari prepare to board the train that will take them to war, the military police beat the crowds “with a whip (yes, with a whip like a donkey).” It is the train carriages, the apparatus of empire, that are explicitly bestialized: “the black trucks . . . roared like starving lions, hungry to swallow the Habesha people in their beastly bellies” (12). After the soldiers have entered combat and protected the Italians’ access to water from other thirsty conscripts like themselves, they resemble servile “dogs,” in the narrator’s estimation, “whose eyes, while one is eating, are raised and lowered following the movement of one’s hand” (46). From dogs they sink still further, in the view of the Italian general who abandons them in the Libyan desert, fearful that they will turn against and kill him: “For the Italian, the Habesha was like a weak donkey, which you couldn’t kill for meat or hide and therefore would leave behind to die in the field under God’s hand. The cowardly Italian, who gained his pride and fame from the strong young Habesha, thus escaped when he knew that they were weakened and dying of thirst” (47).

When the few survivors return to Eritrea by train, the same crowd that gathered to bid them farewell now gathers to welcome them, again enduring beating by the station’s clerks and guards. By this time, the crowd itself is likened to animals: “When, after a while, the conscripts came out lined up on one side of the train, they were flooded by the crowd. The crowd seemed like growling sheep or goats which ran about to fetch their little ones, bucking and hitting anything on their way, while the little lambs moaned and jumped to find their mothers. There was noise, chaos, tears, and calling out of names on all sides as people fought to find their loved ones” (54). Colonialism creates a chaos of atomization among the colonized; Hailu uses animal epithets here in order to underscore the loss of human collectivity, which is also a loss of Eritrean national and local community. The self-destructive outcome of this dehumanization is demonstrated again and again, through the stampedes that feature in the first train station scene (12) and most violently in the desert (48), when desperate soldiers discover water.

However, neither atomization nor collusion wholly defines Eritrean people under Italian rule. Hailu represents resistance as emerging in sync with the war itself. If Eritreans have passively acquiesced in Italian colonization of their nation, the international export of their people as cannon fodder triggers an opposition that takes strength from long-standing social and cultural formations. Tuquabo’s parents lament his decision to become a soldier, seeing in it a rejection of sacred family ties: “We feel orphaned. Why do you wish to fight for a foreigner? What use is it for you and your people to arm yourselves and fight overseas?” (8). His community augments this by cursing him for his betrayal of this familial-social contract: ‘What a cruel son! How could he leave his old parents behind” (8). And there are martial precedents for insurgent consciousness: the Habesha are said to “have pride in their history and land, . . . [and] a long history of resistance” (28).

In themselves, the resources of historic martial valor, patriotic pride, and communitarianism may be necessary, but they are not sufficient to successfully counteract the Italian empire. These belong to an ethos and an era that is, Hailu suggests, inadequate to the violence of colonial modernity. Only the battlefield experience can dialectically bring forth an anticolonial awareness sufficient to translate, potentially, into a liberationist practice. Modern resistant consciousness begins to take form as a mysterious “anonymous, internal voice,” which arises when the conscripts first set up camp in the Libyan desert and attempt to sleep, and warns them that “the Arabs are not your enemies. Will you be able to recognize your true enemy?” (21). It does not take much time after that for soldiers such as Tuquabo to arrive at a fuller understanding that builds on this intimation. This anonymous voice is an intriguingly original device through which Hailu synthesizes contemporary psychology and a more archaic mode of divine intercession.

The nativist sociocultural formations that Hailu invokes combine progressive and regressive impulses. Among the latter, Hailu points to xenophobia and antiblack color prejudice as directed against the Sudanese. Hailu draws selectively upon the progressive elements while rejecting the regressive, a practice theorized and recommended by anticolonial activist Amilcar Cabral, in such speeches as “National Liberation and Culture”. He does this to clear the space for a multiethnic, multifaith African political community, founded upon global humanist understanding and shared opposition to European empire. This understanding develops dialectically through the course of the novel, as the soldiers travel across Eritrea by train, along the Red and Mediterranean Seas by ship, then by foot across the Libyan Desert. Hailu’s vision is simultaneously national and international, then, and as such confirms Fanon’s radical argument about their interdependency: “The building of his nation . . . will necessarily lead to the discovery and advancement of universalizing values. Far then from distancing it from other nations, it is the national liberation that puts the nation on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives. And this dual emergence, in fact, is the unique focus of all culture” (180). Some thirty years later, writing from within an antinationalist academic environment, Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism echoes this analysis: “There is . . . a consistent intellectual trend within the nationalist consensus that is vitally critical, that refuses the short-term blandishments of separatist and triumphalist slogans in favour of the larger, more generous human realities of community among cultures, peoples, and societies. This community is the real human liberation portended by the resistance to imperialism” (217).

Hailu’s representation of nationhood both overlaps with and departs from Benedict Anderson’s influential 1983 analysis of nationalism, Imagined Communities. Of the conscripts, Hailu writes that “all of them, together, were thinking about their country at the same time” (16) as they travel on ship; when they awake the next day, the land is still visible, “which made them happy even though they didn’t know the place. It was a vast piece of land that linked with and formed part of their country” (16). This synchronized conjuring of, and attachment to, a shared space beyond knowable locality somewhat corresponds to Anderson’s account of the nation as “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). But rather than unknown humans, it is the unknown land itself that provides the foundation for their imagined communion and identity. When it comes to the human members of this space, Hailu offers particularity, not abstract generality: “Those with parents and siblings and those with wives and children were absorbed in their memories. Those who did not leave behind families thought of their friends or people who were close to them” (16). The shared physical landmass mediates heterogeneous human networks, in a dialectic that is absent from Anderson. Of those networks, it should be remarked that Hailu’s novel consistently features a variety of primary affective relations. The protagonist Tuquabo’s primary relationship is with his parents; for the bereaved woman who features towards the end of the book, her significant relative is her deceased brother. At no point does Hailu endow romantic or marital relationships with an elevated social or ethical significance, nor advocate a rigid gender hierarchy. Arguably, his approach delinks the projects of patriarchy and nationalism and criticizes the version of masculinity that prompts Tuquabo to fight. There is little support in the novel for viewing the nation through the ideological lens of heterosexual reproduction, a view that feminists have critiqued for reducing women to the role of biological reproducers, cultural transmitters, or symbolic abstractions of the nation.

If the land mediates national identity, for Hailu, the sea (helped by God) mediates international identity. The novel’s narrative logic is too complex for detailed discussion here. It involves the spiritual framing of the sea as a sublime, humbling power that causes the soldiers to appreciate the “expansiveness of the human race and culture inhabiting the world” (19) and to become critical of the ethnocentric insularity that frequently accompanies landlocked existence. Hailu celebrates and calls for cosmopolitan connection and exchange in a way that does not seek to erase but rather to complement national, cultural, and religious differences. He positions international Christianity (in the form of the Coptic Church) as a historical precedent for a future pan-Africanism, less for doctrinaire than for pragmatic reasons. For the Eritrean soldiers who sail on this ship, their biblical knowledge works to identify, authorize, and venerate the foreign geography and ancient monuments that they encounter as they travel north. Their encounter with the Suez Canal provides the positive emblem of a modernity that enables Asian and African connection, accomplished through “the ingenious Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps” (20). As such, the canal, and de Lesseps, contrast in chapter 2 with the city of Asmara, which the Italians are said to have made “perfect,” “beautiful and affecting,” “with well-made streets and roads lined with trees on each side” (11). This opening affirmative portrait of Asmara immediately gives way to Hailu’s horrific train station scene, where, as previously discussed, train carriages devour soldiers and the station unleashes violent chaos. What the Suez scene reveals is that the modern technology introduced by Europe is not problematic in itself; the problem lies with the imperial social relations which it has accompanied.