11/28/2017 0 Comments Mirror Tricks & The Rumours of the Resignation of the President Have Been Greatly ExaggeratedPart One:Over the past few days, I have been reading Ngugi’s The Wizard of the Crow. A work of subtle speculative fiction, dense allegory, sharp satire, and socioeconomic observation, this novel follows a long-lived and long-ruling African dictator simply named “Ruler.” Ruler’s characteristics firmly overlap those of Mugabe – pervasive paranoia, a culture of unwavering sycophancy, consolidated one-party rule, control of all media, kleptocratic politicians, indignant anti-neocolonialism... the parallels continue. Even similar is the narrative that the Western media has been happily trumpeting for the past several weeks: “Once the world’s (or Left’s, or Africa’s, or pan-African politics’) darling, his reputation waned as he became ever more tyrannical...” Around the Ruler are a swirling cast of a dozen continuously interlocking and overlapping characters – ambitious dolts, fawning sycophants, manipulative masterminds, suffering wives, Lady Macbeths. The contiguities and juxtapositions, the endless recombinations, make the novel feel like an endless unfolding of a interminable drama. This isn’t a criticism – indeed, perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of the novel is its theatricality. The novel could be staged—granted, over many consecutive nights of unfolding permutations – and this shades the allegory of the novel, about ambition and corruption. In the novel, the eponymous Wizard conducts his sorcery with no items other than a mirror. And the mirror is an acute figure for what mirrors do for us, psychologically (think here of Lacan’s mirror stage in particular). Using the mirror as a prop, the Wizard punctures the fictions maintained by those seeking his guidance, using psychological and social insights in their body language, their confessional language, their narrativizations. It is incredibly wise that, in a work of mild fantasy, the sorcery isn’t magical at all, but pragmatic and materialist – where material bodies, on the other hand, are manipulated and act and behave in some fantastic ways. The conceit of the mirror allows the afflicted to realize their own cure through the psychoanalytical back-and-forth with the Wizard – and that is true power grounded in its fake magic. Even though the Ruler is ultimately irredeemable, even he (or He, in the novel) is promised some measure of salvation through self-awareness and self-realization. That is, if he could set aside his narcissism long enough to reflect self-critically. In one of the weirdest turning points of the UnCoup drama was when Bob took to live television to make a solemn announcement. Flanked by a dozen military men, he took the microphone and... talked for about a half hour. There was no indication throughout the speech what the thrust or import was, other than that everyone knew he was going to resign. “Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy. Some did not realize that they themselves had become hoarse and were now producing barely audible whispers of more, give us more, couldn’t agree with the Mighty One more. Some could barely complete a sentence, then a word, then a syllable. But he got to the end of the speech, it seems – he flipped past a page, shuffled notes, muttered, ... and then concluded without resigning. Whatsapp was aflame with what the mic caught him saying after he finished the speech (“Asante sana,” for one). Whatsapp was also aflame with the rumor that he had foiled the generals by skipping over the paragraph or page wherein he was meant to announce his retirement. For thirty-seven years, Zimbabwe has been ruled by one party, one leader. All of that changed quite suddenly, but to shouts of great joy and pleasure. An era was over! A new one...begun? The coup that wasn’t was ultimately an in-party impasse: warring cliques of politicians escalated a succession crisis exacerbated and accelerating daily with rumors of the untenable and universally unstomachable ascension of the former first lady to the Presidency. But no one who has survived the Purge hasn’t also been there all along – and so the joy of the downfall of the president has quickly given way to misgivings about the perpetuation of the Old Guard. Today a new cabinet is announced – a fact hashed out on ZBC (zed-bee-cee) Radio this morning on a call-in forum. Several callers in a row were anxious to stress that the horizon of the New President’s current tenure – he has promised elections as planned next year – the “at most eight months” – were more than enough for him to accomplish what he wants to accomplish and then step out of the way for a new establishment altogether. Three callers in a row stressed that he should not get more than those eight months – a stark contrast to the thirty-seven years of rule for the Last Guy. Given an inch, I’m pleased to report, Zimbabweans are increasingly demanding a mile – no less than their due for their patience. This November, we Americans completed our first year’s lap with 45. It has been surreal to be living in a country with an all-consuming political spectacle (even well before the UnCoup un-unfolded) away from the political spectacle in which I feel daily more implicated and also distant from, at the moment. Diasporic Zimbabweans felt the same about the UnCoup. Rebecca Solnit, a lovely writer and thinker, has a piece out on LitHub right now that suggests her own kind of “mirror trick” for 45. She describes, as if allegorically, the circumstances poisoning 45’s sense of self/righteousness. She cites a Pushkin fable wherein the insatiably greedy and self-serving are ultimately rewarded with their downfall and comeuppance – a familiar theme in literature, hey? But Solnit’s reiteration of the fable is meant to instill hope – even the darkest possible hope, as the thudding end of her essay: “The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man.” Part TwoThere’s a great Petina Gappah short story that seems prophetic in her 2016 collection Rotten Row. The book is an interlinked fugue of stories about crime and punishment in Harare; it is sometimes sensational, sometimes banal, often transcendent, but it’s her best work. In this acute short story – which was invoked for and by her in her newsshow punditing in the Wake of Bob – rumors of the death of a Mugabelike President begin in a diasporic internet forum by an exiled Zimbabwean man who angrily trolls any and all related to Zimbabwe. One of his online avatars dumps a rumor into the ether - and “the story is now feeding on itself, growing as it feeds...By the time Amai Bhoyi has her electricity reconnected, the news is now the top thread on the column: LATEST FROM ZIM, PRESIDENT COLLAPSES!!...As Fortune puts in his hours, all around the world, in every city where Zimbos have taken refuge, in every city on every continent, there is an ecstasy of typing on Twitter and Facebook and WhatsApp, in Washington and London, in Helsinki and Geneva, in Johannesburg and Gaborone, in Dallas and back in Luton, as his countrymen and women across the world join to discuss the horizons that are revealed by this news. Text message flash from Johannesburg and Leicester, Slough and Scotland.” (172) While the UnCoup was happening, the two WhatsApp groups I belong to – and most here will belong to dozens covering a range of concerns or professional or social groups – were a permanent, ongoing discussion forum. It was a model of civil dialogue, even when it got heated. It is where, as we are slowly adjusting to dawning potential freedom for political speech (it’s so hard to tell), real live political talk happens all the time. In Gappah’s story, the rumor builds over its circulation, gaining flesh and momentum until the Western press catches the story as the Death of the President. “the words ‘BBC Reports President’s Death’ flash on Gift Chauke’s mobile telephone at eight in the morning. Gift Chauke is selling newspapers and airtime at Newlands shops, a few steps from Barclays Bank. He shows the message to his friends Biggie and Nicholas, whose business models see them as vendors and walking purveyors of everything possible. ‘This cannot be true,’ Gift Chauke says. ‘Otherwise it would be in the newspapers.’ The first news of the coup-that-wasn’t came to me, at least, in the form of a dozen or more Facebook messages or posts expressing vague concern over “what was happening,” and it took about a half hour of coffee, wiping the sleep nuggets out of my eyes, and squinting at the New York Times to suss out that we had had a coup. But for the first two days, the headlines of the newspapers plastered on the street corners (public libraries of a sort: everyone, literally everyone, reads the headlines habitually) reflected none of the ongoing “drama,” such as it was – the Western press, however, were coming through with photos of tanks and soldiers, and commandeered the narrative of the UnCoup.
One of the strange things about the newspaper headlines displayed on the corner is that they are never united – as if no two newspapers can compete with the same news (very different from the American context) – and instead, there will be five or six different headline-worthy stories. But if you squint and braid these headlines together over time, they represent a kind of plot arc and narrative periodicity – rises and falls, reversals. It is a complexly woven and highly responsive narrative structure, because as rumors circulate on social media and stories are debated and augmented, the news, too, morphs to accommodate these new realities. One of the major effects of all of this is that everyone here – with very few exceptions – has a deeply complicated narrative of Zimbabwe. In these narratives, personal advantage, family ties, decades of history and histories of conflict, as well as up-to-the-second developments and late-breaking scandals, all collate to form a unified narrative. Interacting with any three Zimbabweans elucidates the subtle differences in the wefts of their narratives, but it is fascinatingly near-universal. And perhaps more impressive is the fact that these narratives are less concretized than one thinks. Indeed, the real coup was in the surprising plasticity of these narratives that themselves drove the UnCoup – in other words, that a ripple of unrest and suspicion could crest in a Greek drama that signalled the sudden reversal of fortune for a Patriarch that had been in place for thirty-seven years. One day, the narrative shifted for enough people to effect a sudden (even if elongated over a week) change in politics. It’s not a fundamental change – the New One is cut from the same cloth as the Dearly Departed – but it is an entire change of frame. It’s like a mirror trick. Asante sana.
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AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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