Читать книгу The Disorder of Things - John Masterson - Страница 18

Everything is happening on centre stage and in broad daylight. But let us not forget about the events taking place offstage, in dark labyrinths and deep tunnels where you see nothing, hear nothing, where terror’s powerful pincers grab you by the throat, and where that desperate, superhuman cry that might save your soul while you offer up your body is pulled back into your gut.

(Mouloud Feraoun – Journal, 1995–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, 2000: 240)

Feraoun’s chilling journal entry corresponds with a recurrent analogy throughout Farah’s work. Whilst metaphors tend towards the overdetermined in some of his writing, the image of the theatre as a disciplinary, if shadowy, arena is both enduring and effective. Towards the inconclusive close of Sweet and Sour Milk, Loyaan conceives of his search, and Somalia itself, in darkly dramatic terms: ‘this read like a badly-written play, with stage-directions almost non-existent, the stage dark and hardly lit, the actors and actresses unbriefed, and the dialogue unrehearsed’ (S&SM: 203). Whilst the reader also cries out for direction, this is an almost literal transcription of Farah’s own comments on the Barre regime. In ‘Why I Write’, he states, ‘Somalia was a badly written play ... and Siyad Barre was its author ... he was also the play’s main actor ... he was its stage-designer and light-technician, as well as the audience. You can imagine how Siyad-Barre-as-subject oppressed and obsessed me’ (Farah 2002: 10). Similarly, in Close Sesame, Deeriye describes Somalia as ‘a stage where the Grandest Actor performs in front of an applauding audience that should be booing him’ (CS: 214). To build from this, a theoretical and figurative marriage between Ngũgĩ on postcolonial Africa and Foucault on disciplinary designs proves instructive. The former’s depiction of neo-colonial authoritarianism as extending the architecture(s) of oppressive power has been referred to. Discipline and Punish emerges as a particularly enabling intertext, however, due to its series of imagistic juxtapositions: light and shade, performance and punitive techniques and consequently the stage and prison panopticon.

In Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, Ngũgĩ suggests, ‘the prison yard is like a stage where everything, including movement, is directed and choreographed by the state. The mise-en-scène, the play of light and shadows, the timing and regulation of actions ... are directed by armed stage-hands they call prison warders’ (Ngũgĩ 1998: 56). It is significant that Farah’s imagined General is described, primarily in Soyaan’s pronouncements, as the ‘Grand Warder’ of a Gulag-style society in which he manipulates the bonds of kith and kin to secure his dominance (S&SM: 10). The description is strikingly similar to accounts by detainees of Barre’s regime. In The Cost of Dictatorship – The Somali Experience, Jama Mohamed Ghalib includes ‘Inside Labaatan Jirow Secret Maximum Security Prison’, an abridged report by Mohamed Barood Ali, a political prisoner. Alongside accounts of torture, Ali includes a diagram of the prison compound, describing how its design served as a concrete reflection of the divide-and-rule policies of Barre’s regime (Ghalib 1995: 231–256). Considered in this light, the ‘imaginary intensity’ identified by Foucault also crackles throughout Farah’s work: ‘the panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power ... a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years’ (Foucault 1991: 205). This, in turn, has a chilling correspondence with Wole Soyinka’s carceral account, The Man Died. It is a text that, like Discipline and Punish, casts a lengthy shadow over the entire Variations cycle: ‘interlocking cages, they appear to the uninitiated as mazes designed by mad scientists for testing the intelligence of mice ... From mice to men is one easy intelligent step, cages and mazes to disorientate the mind’ (Soyinka 1972: 124). In Farah’s early work, the labyrinth emerges as the variation on this Foucauldian mechanism of power.

One playful technique established in Sweet and Sour Milk that comes to dominate Farah’s fictional landscape is that of doubling or mirroring, both in terms of events and characters. Here, the comparisons and contrasts are intensified by situating them within the familial sphere. The twin brother juxtaposition comes early, concludes with a typical allusion to openness and is shot through with a dash of self-reflexive irony:

Soyaan: a man of intrigue, rhetoric, polemic and politics. Loyaan: a man of melodramatic scenes, mundanities and lost tempers. Loyaan would insist, for instance, in removing all inverted commas from phrases like ‘revolution in Africa’, ‘socialism in Africa’, ‘radical governments’, whereas Soyaan was fond of dressing them with these and other punctuational accessories; he was fond of opening a parenthesis he had no intention of closing. (S&SM: 14)

Farah uses inverted commas to interrogate constructs such as ‘nation’ and ‘postcolonial identity’, as he does throughout his work. Similarly, it is entirely appropriate that, in a text primarily concerned with deciphering cryptic codes, the narrative should conclude with an incomplete parenthesis: ‘doors untried had begun to open: the hinges of these doors creaked as they opened’ (S&SM: 241). Whilst these motifs represent the tentative interpretative strategies of protagonist and reader alike, Farah pushes against moral doors that, in normal circumstances, have to remain sealed. As such, he engages in an ‘unsettling, antiutopian’ and thus suitably Foucauldian critique in which the seemingly rigid dichotomy between ruler and ruled is problematised. As Foucault states in The History of Sexuality, ‘[there] is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix’ (Foucault 1990: 94). This relational conception of power is critical for the purposes of this study as a whole. In Sweet and Sour Milk, it is only by exploring the contested matrix between ruler and ruled that the reader comes to appreciate the necessity of employing protagonists who belong to a ‘priviligentsia’.

Fittingly, therefore, one of the novel’s principle mazes is that of morality, designed to present protagonists and readers alike with a series of navigational challenges. The contours of this moral maze are illuminated when Loyaan meets one of the General’s ministers in an attempt to piece together some clues regarding his brother’s death. Effectively, it marks his transition from bumbling sleuth to strategic interrogator. He comes tantalisingly close to penetrating the General’s disciplinary labyrinth by scrutinising one of its stooges. It is crucial that Loyaan, like Khaliif in Close Sesame, focuses on the regime’s reliance on torture to deal with opponents committed to speaking out against power. This resonates with a key assertion from The History of Sexuality: ‘since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied [confession] like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins’ (Foucault 1990: 59). In a Somali context, it also intersects with testimony from victims of the Barre regime: ‘[s]ometimes our tormentors concentrated on routinely sensitive parts of the body; on other occasions there were brutal and indiscriminate beatings of the whole body ... The [National Security Service] officers often took part in the torture and seemed to enjoy it’ (Ghalib 1995: 232). In Sweet and Sour Milk, Loyaan speculates that Il Siciliano’s secretary, Mulki, has been dragged into the state’s punitive machinery, only to be subjected to the kind of prolonged intimidation detailed in The Cost of Dictatorship. It also foreshadows the comparably carceral concerns of Close Sesame, which amplifies the Kafka-esque tones of this first Variations novel: ‘[p]eople had strange ways of disappearing into the prison-bowels of the Somali security system; and those who tried to find the missing at times disappeared into another hole just as black’ (CS: 119). The introduction of torture in Sweet and Sour Milk provides Farah with a platform from which to launch a more nuanced critique of relays and networks of power. If Loyaan’s investigative breakthrough sheds more light on the badly written play performed on the General’s dimly lit stage, it also crucially obliges him to turn the spotlight on himself. This forces him to confront his own role as complicit ‘extra’:

Perversely, Loyaan was enjoying himself now ... He believed he would see ... the Minister just fade away ... He saw himself as the torturer, as the powerful pervert who puts the needle between the flesh of the thumb and the nail, screws it in harder, deeper, further and further, until it draws blood ... Drill it in, harder, deeper ... turn the ailing soul’s cry into the scream of the tortured. (S&SM: 182)

The penetrating imagery is necessarily visceral. It allows the comparative reader to consider it in the same bloody company as depictions of rape and infibulation in Sardines, mutilation and menstruation in Maps or, with its chilling reference to ‘enjoyment’, Ali’s testimony about his treatment at the hands of National Security Service officers.

As was the case in Discipline and Punish, I find it revealing that Farah relies on motifs of light and shade, revelation and concealment. It deepens the sense that the narrative action is shrouded in a veil of indeterminacy. The reader thus enters a moral labyrinth, in which the distinction between those carrying the oppositional light of truth against the General’s obfuscations becomes less than clear. To build on this, I find Foucault’s notion of ‘agonism’, as discussed by Chowers, particularly enabling: ‘[agonism] demands the acceptance of this fragmentary nature of power, as well as the lack of easy, nameable targets’ (Chowers 2004: 169). Whilst Farah names his target (the General), the terms in which he does so are deliberately vague, just as the sadistic allure of power in the above passage creates an agonistic ambivalence between those associated with state repression and those seeking to resist it. This is a transposition of the ‘complications’ that characterise Soyaan’s death and, I suggest, serve as a password for the entire text (S&SM: 31). It can also be seen in relation to Chowers’ riposte to those who would charge Foucault’s work with overwhelming quietism and pessimism: ‘perhaps by insisting upon the anonymity of power Foucault seeks to convey another idea: that power is in me as well as in you, that it is internal as well as external, that I am responsible for its operation as well as you are’ (Chowers 2004: 170). This informs what I take to be Farah’s more compelling critique of power, as well as his interest in considering how it might be more effectively resisted. In the above tableau, for instance, Loyaan is represented as having access to the authoritarian regime of power as well as the capacity to oppose or mimic this regime. Typically, the onus is placed on the individual, as moral agent, to take responsibility for such negotiations with power. For Alden and Tremaine, it is the inherent tensions of Farah’s protagonists, invariably situated between rulers and ruled, that make them both convincing and unsettling (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 45). For me, his focus on this vanguard class concentrates rather than dilutes his critique of power. It allows him to explore various ambivalent spaces in something like the disruptive fashion described by Said in Representations of the Intellectual: ‘real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is ... highly problematic ... [and not] all either good or evil’ (Said 1996: 119). In Sweet and Sour Milk, complications abound because caricatures of good and evil are unpacked. The result is that existential burdens are placed on individuals situated within complex processes.

In light of the above, Farah’s preoccupation with power throughout the Variations sequence can be seen in the titular terms of two much later novels, Links (2004) and Knots (2007). By this, I mean that his critique is intensified by gesturing towards those invariably entangled complicities, complications and connections between characters and, by extension, a wider audience. By their very nature, these are often as profound as they are unpalatable. Yet, exploding reductive standards and narrowing the distances between oppressive and oppositional forces does not lead to a conflation of the two. Farah uses his fiction to explore how and why the contestatory degrees of difference between the spheres of despotic regime and its opponents might hold out the promise of genuine change. The most telling signposts, therefore, are in the trilogy’s title. Whilst the overarching concern is dictatorship, it is the variations on this theme that give the critique of power real substance. In the typically elaborate terms of many of Farah’s interior narratives, Loyaan imagines himself ‘challenged like a torturer who couldn’t make the tortured confess after the umpteenth piercing of the needle’ (S&SM: 182). The simile is pivotal here. Likewise, when Deeriye playfully describes daughter Zeinab as a dictator, it obliges reader and protagonist to step back and re-evaluate the construction of comfortable moral distances at a more immediate level: ‘“[y]ou would be a dictator, you act like one, you are a prisoner of your own obstinacy, insisting on being right all the time. Which is what dictators do,” he said teasingly’ (CS: 93). As in Sardines, it is the inherent agonism of, rather than the chasm between, such differences that is vital. This once more corresponds with Foucault’s more relational and therefore more refined conceptualisation of power. He sets this out in ‘The Confession of the Flesh’: ‘in so far as power relations are an unequal and relatively stable relation of forces, it’s clear that this implies an above and a below, a difference of potentials’ (Foucault 1980a: 200–201).

For Alden and Tremaine, ‘it is ... precisely [the elite’s] education and wide experience that make them so attentive to the issue of individual autonomy, that loosen the hold of imposed identities on their consciousnesses, and that place them thereby in a position to recognize and to disclose the lies by which dictators gain and hold power’ (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 84). By foregrounding the activities of his privileged group, Farah knocks power from its pedestal, making it susceptible to challenge rather than capitulating before it. For Barbara Turfan, however, his presentation of the ‘Group of 10’ is inherently troubling:

The reader gets the impression that most of these elite neither know nor care about their fellow countrymen ... it is not clear in these novels whether [Farah] is not interested or whether it is his characters that are so. This is an imbalance ... [and] this weakness ... remains, I think, a very real one ... He cannot be putting over his message sufficiently clearly if the reader remains uncertain as to what that message actually is. (Turfan 2002: 278–280)

I would counter this by once again reiterating that Loyaan’s bumbling quest in Sweet and Sour Milk is presented as an exploration of, rather than an arrival at, certain solutions. The very uncertainty of the process, therefore, becomes its critical feature. As Mnthali suggests in relation to Maps, perhaps some of the unease caused by Farah’s ambivalent portraits comes from a dubious desire to have ‘Africans’ conform to dominant archetypes: ‘we Africans should be excused the exasperation we often feel at not being considered “ordinary” unless we are poor and live in rural areas, a classification which has its roots in colonial anthropology’ (Mnthali 2002: 191). Alden and Tremaine also take up this vital issue:

In Farah’s writing, unlike that of [his] contemporaries, we find no peasants forced from their land, no workers brutalized through rapid industrialization ... Those who resist are drawn from a privileged class ... often educated abroad, widely travelled, multilingual, and materially comfortable. For some readers this choice of protagonists undermines Farah’s political analysis ... Part of the distinctive importance of Farah’s work is that he draws the attention of many non-African readers, by his choice of characters, to a complexity of social experience in Africa that such stereotypes have trained them to think does not exist or is not ‘really African’. (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 83)

Some of the most enthralling and disquieting features of these novels concern the turbulent development and subsequent dissolution of an intellectual cadre. When the prospect of overhaul starts to crumble, the priviligentsia’s program of resistance is reconfigured, brought back home to start again from concrete, local, often domestic sites and struggles. Consciousness on a suitably liberating scale is awakened as they come to see how and why their fellow countrymen are also engaged in pyramidal power relations. Whilst having a head, these cannot be effectively resisted until work has begun on dismantling the structure and system itself. If we are to accept Ngũgĩ’s postcolonial state/penitentiary comparison, as discussed above, I suggest something akin to Foucault’s response to an interviewer’s question in ‘The Eye of Power’ chimes with Farah’s broader aims in Variations and beyond: Perrot – ‘And there’s no point for the prisoners in taking over the central tower?’ Foucault – ‘Oh yes, provided that isn’t the final purpose of the operation. Do you think it would be much better to have the prisoners operating the Panoptic apparatus and sitting in the central tower, instead of the guards?’ (Foucault 1980b: 164–165). Transposed in an anti-colonial context, this is strikingly similar to Said’s description of Fanon’s resistant ideology in The End of the Peace Process: ‘Fanon was right when he said to Algerians in 1960 that to substitute an Algerian policeman for a French one is not the goal of liberation: a change in consciousness is’ (Said 2002c: xxvii).

It is therefore critical that Farah represents the Group’s failure to mount a coherent challenge in terms of factional bad faith. As with the motif of disintegration introduced by spluttering Soyaan at the outset, the reader learns (through Ahmed-Wellie) how the intellectuals separated into two camps:

‘Three meetings at most, and we split. One group was headed by Medina and the other by Soyaan. Medina held on to the belief that the General was the Master of Grand Irrelevances and Irreverences ... and that no intellectual in his senses should take him seriously ... Soyaan and I were of a different opinion. We held the view that there is a pattern studyable, that there is a logic behind almost all the General has done.’ (S&SM: 140)

The key term here is ‘pattern’ precisely because, as Nonno tells Kalaman in Secrets, ‘things look more complex than they seem when you study patterns’ (Sec: 111). In order to speak out against power effectively, its labyrinthine mechanisms must be identified before they can be challenged and, ultimately, changed. Ahmed-Wellie alludes to the Group’s ideological schism in terms of their divided thoughts about the ordered disorder manipulated by the General to retain his grip on power. In unwittingly accepting it as anarchic, and therefore unworthy of their resistant energies, key members appear to evade their resistant responsibilities.

The torture motif also links certain characters, enabling Farah to extend his meditations on the intellectuals’ functions in order to foreground the relativity of their world views. Into Loyaan’s already shaken world walks the mysterious Margaritta clutching her son Marco. Complications intensify following the revelation that Marco is Soyaan’s son. Margaritta holds one key to unlocking Sweet and Sour Milk’s cryptic labyrinth as she has a copy of the memorandum composed by her lover against the regime. In order to reclaim his brother’s legacy, Loyaan must reaffirm his oppositional stance. As such, the document assumes particular importance. Farah tells how Margaritta ‘had a decent and very well-paid job. In addition to that, she had recently inherited her (Italian) father’s wealth ... She was registered as an external student at the University of Rome, registered for a degree in law, and had recently begun to research for her thesis’ (S&SM: 68). Coming from this privileged background, Margaritta considers herself qualified to hold forth on the colonial and neo-colonial woes of Africa’s body politic. She does so in typically visceral terms:

‘Africa, for nearly a century, was governed with the iron hand of European colonial economic interests: these ran Africa as though it were a torturechamber. Africa has known the iron-rod, the whiplash, thumb-screwing and removing of testicles: Africa has been humiliated one way or another ... Came the seventies. Army coups. Barefaced dictatorships. We see Africa ‘taken back’ to an era she had lived through before, the era of European dictatorship, concentration-camps. Africa is again a torture-chamber.’ (S&SM: 124)

This final image corresponds with much of the most exhilarating work that has been done on the carceral realities of many colonial and postcolonial situations, as evidenced in the impressive A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, amongst others.

Whilst the essence of her argument may be correct, Margaritta indulges in what Foucault, in ‘Power and Strategies’, calls ‘scare-quote’ logic, suggesting how and why it compromises the Group’s effectiveness, both individually and collectively (Foucault 1980c: 135–136). Typically, she is less willing to acknowledge the culpability and complicity of the elite she belongs to. Alongside this, the discursive space between the internal evocation of torture to depict Loyaan’s struggle with the vagaries of power and this image of Africa as sprawling torture-chamber captures those micrological/macrological negotiations that define Farah’s work. The reader learns that Soyaan once described his brother as ‘a man less mature politically, less conscious of social and political pressures’ (S&SM: 115). It is again critical to emphasise, however, that this very political unpreparedness makes him an ideal guide. The text is refracted through Loyaan’s quest to crack codes, resist official claims to his brother’s name and navigate a path through the labyrinth of power. Accompanying him, the reader comes closest to deciphering ‘the personal in the political’ dialectic identified by Medina in Sardines. Margaritta’s academic training at once endows and burdens her with a capacity for theoretical extrapolation. Whilst allowing her to forge productive links between despotic states, it means she also runs the risk of eliding the micrological in favour of the macrological. Genuine critique, the text seems to suggest, can only come from analysing their reciprocal relations. For Farah, it is the interrogation of these interconnections, alongside privileging the fleshy materiality of the body itself, that remains crucial.