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2 Quivering at the Heart of the Variations Cycle: Labyrinths of Loss in Sweet and Sour Milk
ОглавлениеIn every epoch, writers have grasped the possibility of forming out of words a labyrinth in which to hide. That a maze of language could also hold the reader ‘captive’, because ‘captivated’, was a possibility Foucault had learned from Robbe-Grillet, Roussel, and also Jorge Louis Borges ... The appeal of the labyrinth to the writer’s imagination was therefore doubtless manifold ... a place where a person might come to ‘think differently’, it facilitated, as a literary device, self-effacement and self-expression simultaneously.
(James Miller – The Passion of Michel Foucault, 2000: 147)
A writer’s imagination is always intensely fascinated by relationships – between objects and events in time and space. Certain symbolic, or seemingly symbolic, parallels, convergences, divergences, circles are irresistible to the imagination.
(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – Detained, 1981: 121)
FOUCAULT’S EXAMINERS RAISED A NUMBER OF RESERVATIONS DURING THE defence of his original thesis, with the Sorbonne historian Henri Gouhier expressing his profound unease with this student who ‘thought in allegories’ (Miller 2000: 104). For the purposes of this analysis, I am grateful Foucault refused to alter his approach. The following chapters consider Farah’s first trilogy, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, exploring it in relation to those carceral concerns and tropes that litter Foucault’s early work. Alongside them, what Michael Senellart refers to as Foucault’s ‘taste for the labyrinth’ in Security, Territory, Population also captures the imagination (Foucault 2007: 380). Whilst the labyrinth has various allegorical meanings, the above marriage between power as design and literature as obfuscation is particularly enabling. It corresponds with the murky world of Variations where, as D.R. Ewen suggests, ‘a weird cognitive fog envelops even simple facts’, leaving identities fragmented, disappearances routine and bodies either broken or obliterated (Ewen 1984: 201). Farah’s preoccupation with the insurgent, if ultimately misplaced energies of the Group of 10 (a group of young intellectuals opposed to the General’s rule in Variations) has provoked fierce debate. Whilst his created ‘priviligentsia’ resembles a quasi-clan, focusing on them allows Farah to shed revealing light on the ways in which, to borrow from Eyal Chowers’ provocative study, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination, ‘the individual is enmeshed within a web of power’ (Chowers 2004: 168). Debates concerning webs of affiliation, the entanglements of history and outlets for potential resistance all cluster around the Group. The result is a necessarily claustrophobic portrait of authoritarian society. As I come to illustrate, a key difference between the Variations and Blood in the Sun trilogies is that, whilst a certain uncertainty distinguishes both plot and protagonist in the former, the target of Farah’s critique remains the autocratic regime. With Maps’ exploration of the fallout from defeat in the Ogaden War, the national narrative has begun to unravel, causing Farah’s focus to shift accordingly.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maintains that:
there is no risk ... that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible ‘to the great tribunal committee of the world’ ... The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole. (Foucault 1991: 207)
The carceral environs of the Variations series demonstrate how and why Farah is equally preoccupied with circuitous, surveying systems of power. The individual novels, however, return the reader to this very ‘dark room’, suggesting that tyranny can flourish when panoptic and labyrinthine disciplinary schemes fuse. To initiate the oftentimes compelling dialogue between Foucault’s discourse and Farah’s fiction, I have found the work of Latin American scholars similarly concerned with manifestations of power particularly enabling.1 For both Claudio Lomnitz-Adler and Gerald Martin, for instance, the labyrinth has more than figurative significance. Focusing on myriad tensions within Mexico in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space, the former maintains:
the political importance of national culture and the difficulty in describing [it] in any terms other than the terms of nationalism has generated a circular dialectic, a vicious cycle that is built on the tensions that occur between the maze of social relations that exist within the national space and the ideologies regarding a common identity, a shared sense of the past, and a unified gaze towards the future. I call this complex of issues the labyrinth. (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 3)
This complex of issues can be seen to correspond with the specifically Somali concerns of Farah’s work. Tensions between the competing claims of individual clans cutting against appeals to pan-Somali nationalism, for instance, have and continue to define the (dis)order of things. Lomnitz-Adler argues that many anthropologists and social historians experience ‘literature envy’, finding that novels, for example, explore the labyrinthine construction and dissemination of power in unusually productive ways (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 8). Building on this in relation to the Variations series, I suggest that paying greater attention to the relationship between the texts’ form and content illustrates how and why they allow us to engage more critically with processes and technologies of power. To supplement Martin’s intervention in Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the 20th Century, I maintain that it is the richness of the labyrinth-as-motif that is most appealing when it comes to considering Farah’s work:
The labyrinth is everywhere ... The twentieth century has rediscovered this metaphor with a vengeance, and for contemporary Derrideans and Foucauldians textuality, with its decentring and its difference and its gaze into the abyss, has been repeatedly likened to a web, a forest or, above all, a labyrinth ... it has its own entirely concrete basis in a continent at once unitary and diverse, where identity is never given, and where history and culture themselves have always seemed to be a question of opting between different, already existing choices and alternative forking paths. (Martin 1989: 360)
Whilst this final, Borgesian image has been used to describe Maps, I argue that Farah’s entire oeuvre is preoccupied with ‘decentering’ and ‘difference’, at levels both micrological and macrological as well as in terms of plot and polity. This resonates with the author’s claim that his primary objective, in these and other novels, is not to launch a conventional polemic against the abuse of power by despotic leaders. Farah is rather more concerned with exploring the complex underlying conditions of family, kin and blood that allow autocrats to maintain and misuse power in the first place, as discussed in I.M. Lewis’ Blood and Bone: The Call of Kinship in Somali Society (1994). When the critique is opened out in such a way, issues of hegemony and oppression are shown to be much more intertwined. The onus is placed on individuals to negotiate these structures and, where necessary, define themselves against rather than in terms of various groups.
The Variations trilogy has a necessarily nightmarish quality, as it presents us with an autocratic General imagined to have panoptical power. When Sweet and Sour Milk’s Soyaan refers to father Keynaan as ‘a miniature creature in a flat world dominated by a God-figure high and huge as any mountain anyone has seen’ (S&SM: 83), it is not clear whether he is referring to Allah, the General or both. The slippage is crucial. Once in this position, the General is able to survey all beneath him, watching his intellectual adversaries lose themselves in mazes of both his and, more peculiarly, their own making. As Felix Mnthali suggests in ‘Autocracy and the Limits of Identity: A Reading of the Novels of Nuruddin Farah’:
the remote and shadowy figure of the General is in everything and in everyone’s life and yet the immediate impression is that of clans fighting amongst themselves while the real culprit remains detached from it all. He resuscitates clan animosities by seeming to give power to the clans while closely monitoring their discussions and making sure that his secret police plants the right amount of fear in everyone’s mind. (Mnthali 2002: 178)
The result is that the reader is given a penetrating insight into repressive systems, dependent upon suitably Foucauldian relays for their very existence. Alongside this, an enduring fascination with the relationship between individual body politics and the collective body politic lies at the heart of Farah’s fictional labyrinth. I suggest this can be seen in relation to Diane Nelson’s study, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala:
[because] there is a body in the metaphor, but a body that is deeply contradictory – scarred and wounded by violence – I think the metaphor is useful for describing the body politic of the Guatemalan nation. Guatemala is emerging from a civil war that displaced one-eighth of the population and left some one hundred and twenty thousand people dead or disappeared: the wounded body politic is thus also terribly material. (Nelson 1999: 2)
Whilst analogies with the situation in contemporary Somalia are striking, it is Nelson’s attention to the fleshy materiality of ‘the wounded body politic’ that informs this analysis of Sweet and Sour Milk, as it does the book as a whole. Inevitably, Nelson makes Foucault groan and protest in a Guatamalan context (Nelson 1999: 5). Like her, I again find that Discipline and Punish usefully captures the body/power dialectic I flesh out in this section:
Power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And, although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a ‘head’, it is the apparatus as a whole that produces ‘power’ and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field ... Thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the ‘physics’ of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees and without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force or violence. It is a power that seems all the less ‘corporal’ in that it is more subtly ‘physical’. (Foucault 1991: 172)
For Farah, as for Foucault, processes and techniques of control never operate in monolithic, unilateral ways. As such, if not dismantled at a structural level, they remain in place long after the removal of power’s ‘head’. Events in post-Barre Somalia have provided sombre support to this effect. As the above passage suggests, it is precisely at this rhetorical level that Foucault captures the imagination. Throughout his work, as evidenced in The History of Sexuality, An Introduction, references abound to ‘perpetual spirals’, ‘circular incitements’ and ‘relays’ of power (Foucault 1990: 46–47). As Ali Jimale Ahmed points out in Daybreak is Near, this concept of power has a peculiar resonance when viewed within a Somali context: ‘herein lies the importance of hegemony in understanding the seemingly confusing dialectics of power in Somali society: power is not amorphous’ (Ahmed 1996: 40). Whilst staging a contrapuntal dialogue between Farah and Foucault, I am equally concerned with sites of critical divergence. Whereas Foucault’s Francocentrism leads him to conceive of power in terms of a politics of entrapment, Farah suggests that an escape from the disciplinary design may be achieved through renegotiating the terms of the social contract between the body politic and more intimate body politics. Once again, therefore, I turn to Said as a critical intermediary. Comparing Foucault and Fanon, Said suggests that the former ‘moved from what appeared to be insurrectionary scholarship to the kind of scholarship that confronted the problem of power from the position of someone who believed that ultimately very little resistance was possible to the controls of a disciplinary or carceral society’ (Said 2002a: 53). Whilst there are pronounced similarities between Farah and Foucault’s insistence on the individual microphysics of struggle and the ‘agonism’ that defines relationships between power and resistance, the former’s Orwellian cycle explores the kind of oppositionality that, for Said, is precluded by the latter. In attempting to capture the simultaneously exhilarating and exasperating qualities of these Variations novels, both Derek Wright and Ali Jimale Ahmed invoke the term ‘labyrinthine’.2 In what follows, I consider how and why the image assumes different burdens of significance.