We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.

Transcription

1 Mukoma Wa Ngugi We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone. - Édouard Glissant Writers and scholars from the Global South often engage with one another through their own relationship to the West. But triangulating ideas, whether political or literary, through the West ends up masking historical South- South relationships while feeding and giving cover to cultural nationalism and protectionist scholarly practices. We need to fracture this dialectical linkage to the West and allow South- South cultural, historical and political conversations to take place. Indeed, the major limitation of the otherwise courageous post-colonial enterprise has been a theoretical and conceptual inability to escape the West-South South- West framework. For Derrida, it is the narratives spun by the West about the other that need deconstruction. Anthony Appiah s cosmopolitanism is a lesson taught to the West about opening up to others. And Homi Bhabha s interstices and third spaces are to be excavated in the West, in order to reveal hybrid cultures and peoples. In short, the periphery is always located in the third world and the center is always the West. The European is never a visitor, never in need of hospitality, and never the other even when in the Global South. Unable to escape this locked and unequal dialectic, many postcolonial thinkers end up affirming the very relationships they are trying to undermine. But this is not peculiar to postcolonial theories. When the colonialists who reserved rationality, history, science and philosophy and culture for themselves called Africans irrational and unscientific, the Negritudists could not see the falseness of the rational/irrational dialectic. Leopold Senghor for example could exclaim, Emotion is Negro as reason is Greek. 1 Negritude did a lot of work in allowing black people to come to terms with blackness and their own cultures, but in and of itself it had that limitation of not seeing the world beyond the colonizer-colonized relationship. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Mask, is coming to terms with negritude or rather he is outgrowing it. But The Wretched of the Earth becomes possible when Fanon unlatches himself from the Negritudist false dialectic of opposition by going through it to emerge as a third world revolution theorist. As Jean Paul Sartre rightly observes in his introduction, The Wretched of the Earth is a conversation amongst the colonized.2 Èdouard Glissant s view of being in relation offers a way out of the locked postcolonial dialectics. For Glissant The poet s word leads from periphery to periphery and yes, it reproduces the track of circular nomadism; that is, it makes every periphery into a center; furthermore it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery (31).3 There is no hierarchy of knowledge and aristocracy of

2 aesthetics4, only cultures in relation. Glissant championed composite peoples: those who could not deny or mask their hybrid composition, nor sublimate it in the notion of a mythical pedigree, do not need the idea of genesis because they do not need the myth of pure lineage (141). Composite works better than hybridity. Identity is formed by interactions with the other cultures. I have been formed by Kenyan, Asian, Islamic and Western cultures. In much the same way a composite Asian or Briton has been formed by as many cultures as their cultures have interacted with. In a sense, whether we acknowledge it or not, we live in what Glissant calls a fragmented diversity, and we are all creolized. All theories rest on the shoulders of the theories that came before. In fact, cultural theories emerge from the belly of previous theories. The first rumblings of Southto-South and other horizontal relationships as a way of organizing and talking about a world with no hierarchies of knowledge and cultures are to be heard in the belly of decolonization and the process of its theorization. In colonialism, science, philosophy, culture and history were all a one-way street. In the postcolonial world, knowledge becomes a multiple lane highway in which all sorts of exchanges, some of them equal and others exploitative take place. In the newly emerging third world, Cubans fight alongside South Africa s African National Congress, liberation theology develops in Latin America, and black American liberation struggles, Black power in the United States, becomes Black Consciousness in South Africa; Gandhi s satyagraha is conceived and developed in racist South Africa and then deepened in the anticolonial struggles in India; individuals such as W.E.B.DuBois tie black America both to Africa through Pan- African activismand to the entire colonized world; Che Guevera could just as easily go the Congo or Bolivia; and Fanon born in Martinique could die for Algeria and for the larger third world. At the same time, the Afro-Latinos and Black Americans experience and deal with questions of race and identity differently, in the same way that Afri- centricity, the idea of having Africa as a center, will have different meanings and uses in different parts of the African diaspora. Gabriel Garcia Marquez s magical realism is different from Ben Okri s, yet one hears familiar echoes in each; the same way one hears familiar echoes in Lingala and Merengue music, or in African American blues and Malian blues. This third world speaks to a South-to-South relationship and it needs to be studied using concepts such as Glissant s relation, concepts that makes visible the relationships within and among already composite cultures. The goal is not to sublimate or ignore the West far from it. Indeed the West simply because of colonialism and globalization is a huge part of the dialogue. The goal is to be in relation with the West as with everyone else. Following Glissant, we are simply saying that there are other ways of knowing and relating. And that these other ways of knowing and relating have always been there that is

3 to say, they are historical and at the same time ongoing, and to ignore them is to approach the world with one intellectual hand tied behind our backs. The idea is not to look for what Glissant calls ideological stability (32). To think about South-to-South relations is to enter a place of great intellectual vulnerability. Once we leave the relationship of, let s say, Africa and Europe via colonialism, the world suddenly becomes very vast, complicated, and scary as the knowledge of how just little we know settles in. Yet, this place that is just outside our comfort zone is a beautiful place to be in it s a place of discovery of new ideas and seeing old ideas anew. The goal of the Global South Cultural Dialogue Project, then, is to facilitate conversation among writers and scholars from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia as well as minority groups in the West. Through such a dialogue, we can learn how our different societies have responded to each other, and to questions of language, identity, and the role of culture in the work of decolonization and a contested globalization. The hope is to encourage an honest discussion about the complex ties that bind the South to the South and to help imagine and create a more democratic and egalitarian global culture. At the same time we want the ideas and discussions emanating from this project to be public, to be in public spaces and to be publicly debated, as opposed to remaining locked up in academic journals. Imagine a scenario where you are in a bus in India and the person sitting next to you is reading a newspaper column written by someone from Latin America. Or you are in a bar in Nairobi and you overhear a discussion about Afro-Latino literature, or language and identity in Latin America and how they relate to Africa. The project started innocently enough I read Satya Mohanty s interview, Realism, Indian Literature, and World Literature: A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty, which was commissioned by the U.S. journal South Asian Review but was first excerpted in India s popular national magazine, Frontline, as Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism. I was struck by how Mohanty s discussion of chauvinism in Indian literature was relevant for what in the African context is cultural nationalism where the search for one s singular identity, point of origin, or place in the world often turns one s culture into a fortress within which no contradictions exist. Mohanty also talked about the politics of language and translation not just between Indian languages and English but also between Indian languages. The question of language, whether to write in an African language or English or French, is very central to the African literary tradition. I shared the interview with my father, Ngugi Wa Thiong o, whose recent book, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing also decries, in a similar way, the celebration of mono-knowledge. Ngugi responded to the interview with enthusiasm, saying that he wanted to write a response. We sent that response to India s Frontline

4 Magazine. Then came the idea why not ask other scholars and writers from different parts of the Global South to respond to the interview through the lens of where they are positioned? Several writers and scholars welcomed this opportunity. This was followed by the idea why then don t we ask different journals and magazines in different parts of the world to carry the responses as part of creating a public and international discussion? And finally the question: why not formalize this new process into a South-to-South project to be housed at Cornell University? The amount of support from the editors of various journals has been tremendous. In his reply to the initial query, Daniel Simon from World Literature Today said in part that The cross-cultural aspect of the project is also something that would find a natural home in the pages of WLT something that was echoed by the other editors. As of writing this, World Literature Today (United States), Frontline (India), Sunday Nation (Kenya), National Mirror (Nigeria), Wasafiri (UK), Kwani? (Kenya), Africa Review (Eastern Africa), St. Petersburg Review (United States), Pambazuka News (UK, South Africa, Senegal, Brazil), Chimurenga (South Africa), China Review International (Hong Kong), and of course the Journal of Contemporary Thought (India) all participating. The essays in response to the Mohanty interview in a lot of ways encapsulate our goals of being in relation through honest critical dialogue rather than exchanging intellectual pleasantries. Ngugi s essay, Asia in My life, that first appeared in the Frontline, National Mirror, Sunday Nation, Pambazuka and World Literature Today is not about discovering Asia, but about the realization of just how much Asia and Asians have been a part of his biography as well as of Africa s history of struggle. He writes: After I wrote my memoir of childhood, Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2006, I looked back and saw how much India had been an equally important thread in my life. I had not planned to bring out the Indian theme in my life: but there it was, staring at me right from the pages of my narrative. The thread starts from home, through school, college and after. India is part of what makes him a composite being. If Ngugi s essay is personal, Duncan Yoon s essay, The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On The Afro-Asian People s Solidarity Organization is an analysis of the politics and contradictions surrounding earlier attempts at solidarity between Africa and Asia. The writers bureau, the cultural front of the AAPSO would meet its demise at the hands of cultural and political chauvinists, but the efforts Yoon described are part of an inspiring history of third world solidarity. In Modernity and the Public Sphere in the Vernacular, Purushottam Agrawal argues that to understand the Bhakti movement and the poet Kabir, one has to cast aside European understanding of modernity and recognize that the pre-colonial past of non-european societies was not rigidly determined by prescriptive forces

5 of depersonalized systems of civilizations, cultures and religious beliefs or in the case of India by compulsive caste identities. The Bhakti movement, which also sought to liberate society from the caste system, was not merely prescriptive, but also a cultural movement, which produced poets, musicians and philosophers. Kabir the poet was a product of a society in flux, as opposed to the one fixed in place by the colonial gaze. Sanjay Kumar s The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu is a study of how the search of a pure origin rewrites history and ultimately drives a wedge between people are inextricably linked linguistically. By trying to purge Hindi of Urdu influences, and vice versa, to create two separate languages with distinct but false origins, a history of what was once a shared common language of people of India stretching from Peshawar to the borders of Bengal is lost. Language becomes a barrier between Muslims and Hindus instead of bridge.colonial ideas about different races initiate a process that is not merely linguistic but ultimately socio-cultural, with devastating effects on the South Asian society. In her essay, Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies Tilottoma Misra makes the case that literary histories were constructed in order to obliterate the existence of the earlier robust tradition of interactive cultures. Whereas Sanjay Kumar follows the fault lines of the Urdu and Hindu false divide, she follows the creation of minor and major Indian literatures, a creation that involves the gutting out of the intertexuality of the texts, and a denial of a history of cultural exchange amongst Indian peoples. Writer and critic E.V. Ramakrishnan, in Rethinking Comparative Literature from an Indian Perspective, calls for the use of Western theoretical insights as well as indigenous epistemologies if we are to fully grasp the styles and contexts of Indian writers who were writing against the grain of national hegemonies. He argues that that The oppositional worldviews that call hegemonic structures of power into question did not originate with the encounter with colonial modernity, a reason why Comparative Literature in India needs to go beyond texts to the sub-texts that inform the texts. We need to evolve a discourse that can bring out these socio-political sub-texts. In Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Endeavour through Sociology and Literature, University of Warwick sociologist Gurminder K. Bhambra gives an in-depth review of Colonialism, Modernity and Literature: A View from India, the volume edited by Mohanty that had provided the occasion for the interview. For Bhambra the volume tried to show how values that have come to be seen as intimately tied to the emergence of a specific form of capitalist modernity in the West were also articulated in other geographic and historical contexts that is, in geographic and historical contexts independent of European contact.

6 Shivani Jha in Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism: A Response looks at the role of the readers and critics in developing a cogent idea of what Indian literature is. She is also interested in the challenges and opportunities presented to scholars who decide to embrace vernacular literatures as Indian literature, and to think about Indian literature as world literature. Trinidadian scholar Jerome Teelucksingh, in West Indian Writers and Cultural Chauvinism, gives a lively point-by-point analysis of the Mohanty interview, applying it to a West Indian context. Whereas our other contributors generally saw a future in which chauvinism in literature abates, Teelcuksingh is not convinced. He draws the conclusion that The complexities and multi-layered nature of societies with interactions of nationalism, sexuality, language, religion, migration, gender, ethnicity and class will hamper the efforts of Mohanty s model to eradicate cultural chauvinism. Fatima Sadiqi s Oral Knowledge in Berber Women s Expressions of the Sacred, focuses on Mohanty s challenge to the conventional babu-like view that written cultures are superior to oral ones. As such, her essay is also a detailed answer to E.V. Ramakrishnan s call for a discourse that can bring out socio-political subtexts. Sadiqi doesn t call attention to the work of seeking alternative modernities and combating literary chauvinism; she just does it. Her focus on orality picks up a theme touched on by Mohanty in his interview, as well as by Agarwal and others writing about the Indian context. Sadiqi s success in showing that there are other ways of analysis and knowing prepares readers very well for the next forum on Ngugi wa Thiongo s Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. Like this forum, the Globalectics forum will also appear in World Literature Today, Journal of Contemporary Thought and the other journals and magazines starting in December Notes 1 Hountondji, Paulin J. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983; Sartre writes: Europeans, open this book and enter into it. After a few walk into the night you will see strangers gathered around a fire, get close, and listen. They are discussing the fate reserved for your trading posts and for the mercenaries defending them. They might see you but they will go on talking among themselves without lowering even their voices. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963; xivii. 3 Glissant, Édouard, and Betsy Wing. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997.

7 4 Talking about John Clare s poetry, an anonymous reviewer described his poetry as having no aristocracy of beauty, by which he meant that no subject or object was unworthy of his artistic consideration. I am using the phrase aristocracy of aesthetics along the same lines. See Storey, Mark. John Clare: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1995, 75. Ngugi Wa Thiong o also talks about aristocracy of cultures and language in Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing.