Perceiving Pain in African Literature This page intentionally left blank Perceiving Pain in African Literature Zoe Norridge Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature, King’s College, University of London, UK palgrave macmillan © Zoe Norridge 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-34963-0 ISBN 978-1-137-29205-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137292056 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction – Pain, Literature and the Personal 1 1 Painful Encounters in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins 26 2 Between Minds and Bodies – the Location of Pain and Racial Trauma in Works by Bessie Head and J.M. Coetzee 61 3 Women’s Pains and the Creation of Meaning in Francophone Narratives from West Africa 99 4 Writing around Pain – Personal Testimonies from Rwanda by African Writers 134 5 Responding to Pain, from Healing to Human Rights – Aminatta Forna, Antjie Krog and James Orbinski 166 Epilogue – Literature and the Place of Pain 210 Notes 217 Works Cited 223 Index 235 v Acknowledgements I can trace many people’s footprints through the pages of this book. Eight years is enough time to have acquired hundreds of debts of grati- tude. These are only a few of the key people who have influenced my work with their ideas, energy and enthusiasm. The mistakes, of course, remain my own. First, thank you to Palgrave Macmillan for their swift and seam- less management of the publication process from submission to print. Thanks in particular to the anonymous reader for helpful and encour- aging comments and to Ben Doyle, my commissioning editor, who has been a pleasure to work with throughout. I’d like to thank other editors I’ve worked with in the recent past, particularly Dominic Thomas for offering me the opportunity to think through theoretical approaches to pain. An earlier version of my Introduction was published in Dominic Thomas and Ali Behdad (Eds.), A Companion to Comparative Literature, Oxford: Blackwell 2011, under the title “Comparing Pain: Theoretical Explorations of Suffering and Working Towards the Particular”. A much earlier version of my first chapter was presented at an Inter-Disciplinary. Net conference in 2005 and subsequently published in Peter Twohig and Vera Kalitzkus (Eds.), Social Studies of Health Illness and Disease, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2008, under the title “Perceptions of Pain in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature – Personal Public Narratives in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins”. I revised and edited this book at the University of York. My colleagues in the Department of English and Related Literature were warm and supportive from my very first day. I’d particularly like to thank Jane Moody for her mentoring and direction; Derek Attridge for his gener- ous reading and comments; David Attwell, Helen Fulton and Elizabeth Tyler for easing my timetable; Claire Westall for always knowing the answer; and Emilie Morin for offering perspective. I’ve also benefitted greatly from conversations with colleagues at the Centre for Applied Human Rights, especially Paul Gready and Lars Waldorf, who read (and amicably disagreed with) the chapter on Rwanda. On an international note, Elisabeth Bekers and Michael Galchinsky have both offered advice and suggestions from Belgium and the US, respectively – thank you for taking time to comment on my work. I’d also like to thank two of the writers I discuss here – Véronique Tadjo and Aminatta Forna – for their vi Acknowledgements vii willingness to discuss their work with me at book groups in York and Oxford. Over the past three years I’ve been travelling to Rwanda and have learnt a great deal from friends and colleagues in Kigali, Butare and beyond. These debts of gratitude I’ll detail in full in my next book about cultural responses to the 1994 genocide. Before York, I spent two years in Oxford where I was lucky enough to be mentored by Elleke Boehmer, whose warmth and perceptive advice I continued to seek from up North. Thank you, Elleke, for many exciting conversations about African writing and for your kind patience talking through challenges and key decisions. During my time as the Salvesen Fellow in Oxford, I was grateful for the financial support of New College, the Ludwig Fund and the John Fell Fund. I would also like to thank the many communities I worked with over those years: colleagues from New College, the Postcolonial Writing and Theory Seminar, the African Studies Centre, the Race Equality Network and beyond. I’ve especially appreciated the humour and enthusiasm of James Currey, Carli Coetzee, Leyla Okhai, Laura Marcus, Pablo Mukherjee, Nic Cheeseman, Hélène Neveu and Phil Clark. I began this project at SOAS in 2004. My thanks there go to my super- visor Kwadwo Osei-Nyame for taking me on in the first place, introduc- ing me to many new writers, never imposing limitations to the study and encouraging me to find my own voice. I am also thankful to Andrew Irving for inspirational insights from medical anthropology, in addition to the literary guidance of Nana Wilson-Tagoe and Kai Easton. My PhD examiners, Jack Mapanje and Nicholas Harrison, provided encouraging feedback from very different angles: Jack as a creative writer, Nick as an incisive editor, advising cuts and clarifications. My research at SOAS was funded by a one-year SOAS Research Student Fellowship and a two- year Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Before moving to SOAS, I’d been inspired to research African literature by the excellent teaching I’d received studying Modern Languages at Cambridge. Thanks in particular to Emma Wilson, Martin Crowley, Victoria Best, Robin Kirkpatrick and Ato Quayson. I would also like to thank my academic friends in the UK and abroad for their laughter, feedback and support over the last eight years, particu- larly Ayako Aihara, Charlotte Baker, Lizzy Attree, Vittorio Montemaggi, Isabelle Lange and Piotr Cieplak. Before, during and after my PhD I worked with inspirational colleagues at Cancer Research UK, the Terrence Higgins Trust and VSO Papua New Guinea. My non-academic friends and family have also been a source of ongoing support – I would not have made it through the PhD and subsequent job market without viii Acknowledgements you. I’d particularly like to thank my father, Julian, for his readiness to spot a split-infinitive or meaningless jargon at any time of the day or night, and my mother, Rosa, for her insatiable literary appetite and engagement in African literature from Australia. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Keon West, my husband and partner in dance as in life. You bring me the warmth and love that make the study of such difficult subjects possible. Introduction – Pain, Literature and the Personal You don’t know about the pain. It’s a memory to you, a wound to your ego, a theory [ ... ] You can’t even begin to imagine the pain. [ ... ] Ja, I suppose imagined pain isn’t the real thing. But I’ve lived with it for so long, it’s become real. (Dangor 14) It is a kind of pain that cannot be explained, that is like no other. [ ... ] The experience of suffering remains unmatched in my adult life. I have given birth, suffered from renal colic – each pain is different. (Khady 21–2, my translation) Victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique. [ ... ] It is intolerable to have one’s own sufferings twinned with anybody else’s. (Sontag, Regarding 100–1) This book is about imagining pain. It is about how the written word explores the most aversive of sensations, across time and between peo- ple. I will argue that, at its best, the literary aestheticisation of stories transforms pain into more than a ‘memory’, a ‘wound’ or a ‘theory’, instead lending to hurt the immediacy and poignancy of the present. Achmat Dangor, writing about the enduring wounds of apartheid, sug- gests that pain creates interpersonal divisions, divisions based on the subjectivity of the survivor’s experience of pain and its necessary dis- tance from the imagined suffering of the witness. This emphasis on the particularity of pain is echoed in the other two quotations above. Khady, in her account of female genital excision in Senegal, asserts that each pain is different, that her childhood experiences of suffer- ing remain unmatched by those of her adult life. Sontag, writing about 1