Читать книгу The Disorder of Things - John Masterson - Страница 20

Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relations in which individuals are caught up.

(Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish, 1991: 202)

Summarising Variations, Alden and Tremaine compare the more overt subversion of Sardines and the outright violence of Close Sesame with Sweet and Sour Milk’s preoccupation with ‘research, documentation and disclosure’ (Alden & Tremaine 1999: 58). Whilst this resonates with a Foucauldian obsession with discourse and its normalising impulses, a supplementary interpretation might consider Soyaan’s original memorandum as a meditation on the technology of power itself. Soyaan’s collaborator, Ibrahim Musse, explains the relevance of its title, ‘Dionysius’s Ear’, to an inquisitive Loyaan:

‘The Syracusan tyrant had a cave built in the shape of a human ear which echoed to him in polysyllables whatever the prisoners whispered secretly to one another. Soyaan and I saw a similarity between this and the method the General has used so far. The Security Services in this country recruit their main corps from illiterates, men and women who belong to an oral tradition, and who neither read nor write but report daily, report what they hear as they hear it ... Everything is done verbally ... We say in our Memo that the General (with the assistance of the Soviets) has had an ear-service of tyranny constructed.’ (S&SM: 136–137)

With the emphasis placed on relays, networks and constructed surveillance systems, the above description places individuals akin to Foucault’s delinquents within a specifically Somali context. As Perrot maintains in relation to the Panopticon’s archetypal design in ‘The Eye of Power’, ‘at the same time one is very struck by the techniques of power used within the Panopticon. Essentially it’s the gaze; but also speech, because he has those famous ‘tin tubes’, that extraordinary invention, connecting the chief inspector with each of the cells, in which Bentham tells us that not just a single prisoner, but small groups of prisoners are confined’ (Foucault 1980b: 154). Once again, this works in an intriguingly contrapuntal manner with Ali’s testimony in The Cost of Dictatorship. In it, he details how inmates devised their own, ingenious method of communication:

our knocking on the cell walls developed secretly into a fine art. We devised an alphabet from the two distinct sounds available to us – a loud note made with the knuckles of the middle fingers and a low drumming note ... I cannot overestimate the value of our alphabet because it was the only method of human contact left to us. The guards could not see us and never made the mental leap of deducing that we were able to understand each other by ‘touching the walls’. (Ghalib 1995: 245)

If this provides a discursive framework in which to read some of Sweet and Sour Milk’s carceral concerns, Ibrahim’s depiction of dystopian design once again confounds Medina’s dismissal of the General as unworthy adversary. The ‘politically immature’ Loyaan illustrates the extent of his development by couching his critique in relation to his fallen brother, even acknowledging the power wielded over posthumous reputations: ‘the Master of Grand Irrelevances? No, Medina is wrong. The man kills. The man has designs on our lives. The man can eliminate a person and then take possession of his soul and have him discredited in the eyes of his friends’ (S&SM: 142).

As with Ahmed-Wellie’s attention to patterns, it is this focus on design and the architecture(s) of power that elevates this opening instalment. It also obliges the reader to consider links between it and the body-politics motif that runs throughout Farah’s oeuvre. The labyrinthine, quasi-detective quest Loyaan is engaged in is ominously reflected in the authoritarian society’s disciplinary designs. He both operates within and is ultimately charged with deciphering and opposing them. Read in this way, Foucault’s notion of getting ‘caught up’ assumes greater significance. Here, the labyrinth is characterised by reverberation, rumour and reiteration, with whispers and echoes amplified to such an extent that they come to sound like ‘truths’. Farah offers something akin to an Orwellian dystopia, in which the entanglements of power relations are such that family members occupying the same space clash with one another. The buffer zone between despotic regime and counter-hegemonic intelligentsia is most obviously represented by Keynaan. As such, Farah can be seen as playing with Foucault’s notion of the relationship between secrecy and the mechanisms of power. In The History of Sexuality, he states that ‘[p] ower is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself ... secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation’ (Foucault 1990: 86). In the General’s Somalia, webs of political affiliation are an open secret; the fundamentally cellular nature of power is veiled by the façade of socialist advancement. What makes the situation even more ominous is that, accepting Ngũgĩ’s concept of the tyrannical neo-colonial African state as penitentiary, the agents of resistance are hampered by the axial invisibility and limited communication depicted by Foucault. Chowers explains it in the following terms: ‘atomized individuals find it difficult to assemble the knowledge and develop the cognitive understanding needed to truly and comprehensively fathom their predicament; moreover, even if such an understanding could be attained, detached individuals lack the mutual trust and social practices necessary for ameliorative collective action’ (Chowers 2004: 190–191). In Farah’s fiction, the oppositional hope manifest in the ‘touching of walls’ described in Ali’s testimony is constantly under threat.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault refers to ‘a microphysics of what might be called a “cellular” power’ (Foucault 1991: 149). He maintains that ‘discipline organizes an analytical space ... Even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular’ (Foucault 1991: 143). With awareness of the alternative contexts in which these concepts are employed, I find something like these notions of cellular power and disciplinary/analytical space at play throughout the Variations cycle. In place of the authoritarian gaze that will come to dominate proceedings in Sardines, Sweet and Sour Milk is concerned with oral resonance within a society where ‘rumour rules’ (S&SM: 116). In the regime’s disciplinary design, it is the peculiar conjunction of surveillance eyes and ears that guarantees the order of things. Soyaan’s ‘Dionysius’s Ear’ document circumvents the channels of oral communication and attacks power on paper. Whilst this largely constitutes the radical threat that must be neutralised, in the guise of its author, it is also its major flaw. In a society more reliant on speech than writing, the transcription of subversive material to print can only ever have a limited reach. Simply put, the ‘captive’ and/or ‘entrapped’ Group fails to spread its oppositional message. The strength of Farah’s critique of power lies in demonstrating how the Syracusan tyrant utilises the essentially cellular base of power in Somalia, manipulating its oral networks and distorting clan logic in order to retain control. As the Barre and post-Barre national narratives attest, the trajectories of fiction and fact run conspicuously parallel.

Beyond this, however, Farah displays the all-too-human fallibilities of his imagined intelligentsia by illustrating how they succumb to cellular power struggles. The multiple meanings of the term ‘cell’, therefore, are of particular significance. To extend the penitentiary metaphor further, Farah’s Group can be seen in terms of the greater prison of the Grand Warder’s Somalia. As in the fractured relationship between Qumman and Beydan, their descent into factional squabbles provides sobering evidence of the success of his divide-and-rule policies. When rumour triumphs, trust evaporates and political allegiances are strained to breaking point. The autocrat sits aloft in his privileged tower surveying the ordered disorder that solidifies his power base. Individual compartments in the imagistic prison of the surveillance state are replicated in the composition of political ‘cells’. Both are defined by paradoxically porous walls; they allow information to leak into the sphere of the General’s control whilst preventing the kind of intercommunication needed to mount a coherent program of resistance. Whilst resonating with Ngũgĩ’s postcolonial state/penitentiary association, Farah’s portrait of the intelligentsia and its failings is also uncannily close to Foucault’s notion of ‘lateral invisibility’, as set out in Discipline and Punish:

Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. (Foucault 1991: 200)

The sinister designs Loyaan identifies as the General’s are replicated in the social structure and architecture of power on the ground. The specificities of this cellular authority are first considered in an earlier work.

Whilst A Naked Needle functions as a conceptual laboratory for Farah, an intriguing and lengthy episode shows protagonist Koschin acting as a guide for his foreign girlfriend, Nancy. Escorting her round Mogadiscio, he identifies the General’s growing personality cult in those incessant reminders of his dominance. For Ahmed, ‘Koschin treats the city both as a backdrop and as a political space both to attack Barre’s regime and to rewrite Somali historiography’ (Ahmed 1996: 92). By the more ominous time of Sweet and Sour Milk, the propagandistic banners and murals remain. His omniscient power is, however, really represented by Orientation centres attended by citizens so that they can be ‘educated’ in the goals of the faux-revolutionary regime. In an Orwellian pastiche, these centres are effectively surveillance cells operating to monitor and, where necessary, neutralise dissent. Loyaan’s evocation of the confined, cellular cityscape and Soyaan’s description of the Grand Warder with the master keys again has eerie associations with Foucault:

‘[Mogadiscio] is broken into thirteen cells, of which all but one is of manageable size.³ The security deems it necessary to break this sandy city into these, have each house numbered, the residents counted ... The General has the master key to all cells, whether numbered or unnumbered. He is the Grand Warder ... Thrice weekly, civil servants should report themselves to the Centres at which they are registered ... If any person is found missing on two counts of six, he or she loses his or her job.’ (S&SM: 87)

The notion of punitive and political cells is again reconfigured as Farah seems preoccupied with the dialectic of disciplinary apparatus and space. When grafted onto the already complex divisions of Somali society, Foucault’s meditations on the authoritarian gaze and the surveillance relationship between (Orientation) centre and periphery can be translated effectively: ‘the perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly ... a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned’ (Foucault 1991: 173). Like the Syracusan tyrant, the General employs parts of the perfect ear that hears all.

The concern with confinement, enclosure and entrapment in Variations is established in both private and public spheres. Mnthali has made a persuasive comparison between such elements in Farah’s work and Sembene Ousmane’s Xala. In both, the transgressive threat represented by beggars must be purged for the benefit of visiting leaders: ‘before any head of state visited a town, the Local Government and the Security swept away these ugly sights and kept them at bay for the whole period the foreign dignitaries were in the country’ (S&SM: 145). If the presence of these itinerant figures shatters the illusion of socialist harmony, it also embodies a challenge to the cellular power and containment procedures relied upon by the regime. Like Khaliif in Close Sesame, the beggars are audience members witnessing the General’s badly written play. Their negligible position means they are under no pressure to keep up appearances. The result is that they emerge as disruptive, and therefore potentially dangerous, hecklers:

They were among the ugly sights of poverty, the bad conscience of the Revolution, beggars who reminded one of the grave situation of the national economy despite the statistics published in government bulletins. One of them started to sing the General’s praises and choked on them. Another tried to lift the refrain from where the other had left it but couldn’t continue ... It was like a theatre audience not agreed on whether to clap: the solitary applause died at the immature stage of ridiculousness. (S&SM: 235)

As in Xala, beggars blur the boundaries of state authority, oftentimes evading the surveillance gaze. As such, they pose a series of ‘complications’. They have a comparably disquieting function to the lepers in Foucault’s discursive imagining. In effect, they are disorder made flesh. It is only through their definitive removal that the disciplinary apparatus can re-establish the normative and cellular division of the wider body politic. Reappropriating Adonis’ notion of the inherent instability of metaphorical language, however, Farah does entertain the possibility of regenerative and resistant hope. An analysis of power and resistance that privileges the microphysics of struggle provides one such outlet. A supplementary, suitably Foucauldian outlet in Farah’s imagining sees a return to the unstable sphere of personal and biological cells.

Ahmed’s project concerns ‘how literature captures in an inchoate form the incremental process: the accretions that caused the original cell (containing the replicating Somali mitochondria) to become dangerously turgid; the fraying at the seams that led to the cataclysmic disintegration of the abode that had hitherto housed the “Somali character”’ (Ahmed 1996: 34). Similarly, Farah’s texts are preoccupied with incremental processes at micrological and macrological levels. Central to both his fictional labyrinth, as well as the disciplinary designs of the regime, is the body. As such, Farah’s work traces the oscillations between body and polity, and how the realisation of these ongoing interconnections offers the most enduring prospect of escape. Whilst writing in a South African context, this is something touched on by Paul Gready in Writing as Resistance: ‘[i]nternal space (the body) and external space (the cell, the prison, and beyond) can be mobilized to transgress the repressive spatial design and its central components: isolation, immobilization, and surveillance’ (Gready 2003: 86). In Sweet and Sour Milk, this point is illustrated through the twins’ sister, Ladan, to whom they offer the gift of reading the world differently:

(It was here that Loyaan’s memory swam away back to days when Ladan was barely two ... How the twins had protected her from those murderous looks of Keynaan and the – at times – indifferent attitudes of Qumman to a girl. They would invest in Ladan their hopes, they would trust their future with her. They used to take turns telling her fables from faraway lands, the sagas of Iceland and Norway, the Nights of Arabia, the stories of Tagore, the tales of Ukraine and those of China. They fed her small brain on figures round, complete and open-ended. They trained her young mind with the aid of circles, squares and trigonometry. She was like them – except she was a girl. The world is an egg and it awaits your breaking it. Clear the mistiness of the white off your eyes and the yolk is yours – yellow and sick, yes, but yours for the asking). (S&SM: 108)

Revealingly framed in parentheses, this incident is distinguished in Loyaan’s memory as belonging to a brighter, more integrated past set aside from the determined indeterminacy of the present. It is essential that, whilst the text ends with an open parenthesis, this memory is complete. Whilst the playful presentation lends it an almost throw-away quality, it strikes me as an attempt to catch the reader off-guard, capturing as it does so many of Farah’s major preoccupations. The regenerative hope invested in Marco and baby Soyaan is given a longer historical perspective within the (potentially oppositional) domestic sphere. The cosmopolitan influences of this first post-Independence group are typically on display. It is the emphasis on design and trigonometry, however, that appears most crucial in relation to concerns with narrative, the construction of various labyrinths and the possibility of release. The gifts bestowed by the twins are both the imagined howl of Saul Bellow’s dog (‘For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!’) and the confidence to construct alternative ways of engaging that world (Rushdie 1992: 21). That these seeds of autonomy should be planted in a cultural context where a young girl is treated with indifference by her own mother lends the act additional hope. The reader may dismiss Farah’s final italicised sentences as indulgent. Yet, considered within Sweet and Sour Milk’s murky context, they do resonate with the concept of deciphering a code in order to find a way through the labyrinth.

Viewed in this light, the mistiness of the white symbolises the novel’s evasiveness, with its yellow yolk constituting the body existing at the core of both disciplinary and emancipatory designs. References to circles and patterns recall the Detained epigraph above. The notable allusion to ‘figures round, complete and open-ended’, however, resonates both with the narrative’s unresolved nature and Farah’s broader aims. His novels and protagonists have been criticised for their inconclusiveness. Narratives taper off, characters disappear and no coherent plan of revolutionary action is implemented. Yet, in a society where confinement, containment and surveillance are the norm, a little indeterminacy is to be prized, rather than derided under the lazy exegeses of what Idelber Avelar, borrowing an epigraph from Foucault, calls ‘self-satisfied postmodernism’ (Avelar 1999: 233). Labyrinths can be fathomed when alternative exits are sought. The reclamation of Wright’s ‘tender pragmatism of the flesh’ represents one such outlet. What he cites as the inadequacy of Ladan’s portrait might, I suggest, constitute her exceptionalism: ‘it is Ladan who, significantly, is left at the end of the book holding the child born out of Beydan’s death and who names him Soyaan ... Ladan seems therefore to hold the key to Soyaan’s posthumous future. Yet she is, puzzlingly, one of the few characters who fails to reappear or receive any substantial mention in the next two volumes of the trilogy’ (Wright 1994: 64).

Ladan is represented as exiting the maze of Farah’s dystopian imagining. Individual agents emerge to take charge of their political being and, in the process, begin to dismantle the very foundations upon which despotic power is based. Fittingly, therefore, one of the text’s most poignant portraits captures the union between the two young women, Ladan and Beydan. In contrast to her indifferent mother, Ladan breaks a myopic cycle by attending to her less privileged ‘sister’ during her difficult pregnancy: ‘the patternless loom of shades, after a while, answered a known design; all those present, save Ladan and Qumman, turned their eyes away. And from that rubble rose Ladan. She came over and took Beydan’s other arm. Of such gestures are understanding sisters made, thought he’ (S&SM: 57). It is one of Farah’s more hopeful experiments in doubling, accompanied as it is by the statement that ‘the universe is round and not flat. It is oval-shaped like an egg awaiting a hand to break it in half like a rubber ball’ (S&SM: 101). The imagery evokes memories of Keynaan’s despotic worldly designs as well as the faded symbols of the Somali Revolution. The act of breaking, however, signals transformative change, bestowing Ladan with the possibility of resistant agency and the chance to form other bonds, more emancipatory than carceral. Loaded with imagistic as well as ideological significance, Farah gestures towards alternative networks of communication: ‘doors untried had begun to open: the hinges of these doors creaked as they opened ... Let creaking doors creak. And use them while you may’ (S&SM: 241). Mysteries are half-revealed until the very end of Sweet and Sour Milk. Crucially, however, some key interpretative doors have been tried and alternative exits from the labyrinth sought. They open onto the associated concerns of Sardines, a novel in which questions surrounding the political sovereignty of the female body are dragged centre stage.