Postcolonial studies: a spiritual turn.

Chapman, Michael

I take my title from my own recently-published article, "Postcolonial Studies: A Literary Turn" (2006b). My argument began by invoking a paradox. Postcolonialism wishes to value the personal, the human dimension, in asymmetrical power relations between North and South. The fields of expression that capture subjective experience, however, are often sidelined in debates on the postcolonial. Literature is one such expression; the spiritual is another.

Rather, postcolonialism identifies its priorities as political or ideological. A critique of Western totalising narratives and a revision of the Marxist class project constitute its 'conflict ideas'. (1) These operate in repetition with its 'framework ideas': (2) that is, its cultural-linguistic turn, in its utilisation of both poststructural enquiry (the displaced subject) and postmodern pursuit (scepticism of the truth claims of Cartesian individualism). When literature enters the reckoning, the approach is usually to impose upon the text a template (conflict ideas/framework ideas), the purpose being a symptomatic or issue-driven reading. Such voices of pronouncement view the world from a Northern institutional perspective, in which theory predominates over practice and the methodology stands the danger of replicating the very position it wishes to challenge: "the West and the rest of us". (3)

The ordering of the questions--what is a nation, what an ethnic group, how to transform the othered from negative to positive presence?--has led to scepticism emanating from those of South identity, and has prompted Appiah's wicked parody of postcoloniality as "the condition of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery" (1992: 63). What modifications to the currently dominant paradigm of postcolonial studies, therefore, might reveal more of a South accent? Here I intend to link the literary pursuit to the spiritual pursuit. The two in expressive particularity have the potential to intrude people's voices onto the abstract language of postcolonial study.

Having its methodological roots in forms of the secular--liberal humanism, Marxism, the Western university--it is not surprising that postcolonial studies has up to now largely ignored a spiritual dimension. I say up to now, for scattered observations on a spiritual dimension have recently begun to gather coherence. In his influential study on provincialising Europe, Chakrabarty (2000:11-15) asks how European thought--at once "indispensable and inadequate"--may be renewed from and for the margins: revised notions of modernity lead to his consideration of present (Indian-peasant) religious expression not as pre-political or pre-modern, but as part of the real life of the contemporary world. In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction Young points to Gandhi's "spiritualisation of politics" (2001: 337). As he said after attending a syncretic African-Christian dance ritual at the Shembe holy village of Ekuphakameni (near Durban):

What the Shembe experience brought sharply home to me is that outside the issue of linguistic translation there are issues of cultural translation that hardly feature in Western forms of postcolonial studies ... the neglect of the power of spirituality ... the issue of chieftancy ... (Chapman 2006a: 207-8)

Taking note of such contributions Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in the second edition of The Post-Colonial Reader (2006)--a standard reference book on university literature syllabuses--add a section in their Introduction on "The Sacred", in which they say:

 Debates concerning the traditional and sacred beliefs of colonised,
 indigenous and marginalised peoples have increased in importance in
 post-colonial studies. Indeed, it would be true to say that this
 remains the field of post-colonial studies in most need of critical
 and scholarly attention. Since The Enlightenment the sacred has
 been an ambivalent area in Western thinking that has uniformly
 tended to privilege the secular. As Chakrabarty and other critics
 have reminded us, secularity, economic rationalism and
 progressivism have dominated Western thinking, while 'the Sacred'
 has so often been relegated to primitivism and the archaic.
 However, at the end of the 20th century, debates about the Sacred
 have become more urgent as issues such as land rights and rights to
 sacred beliefs and practices begin to grow in importance. A
 paradigm shift has been occurring in this area, particularly in
 post-colonial theory, bringing a new consideration of the complex,
 hybrid and rapidly changing cultural formations of both
 marginalised and first world peoples.... Analyses of the Sacred
 have been one of the most neglected, and maybe one of the most
 rapidly expanding areas of post-colonial study. (2006: 78)

That the 'sacred' is a rapidly expanding area of postcolonial study is not yet self-evident; the research project from which this article emerges seeks to pursue the issue.

The sacred--in the extract above--is utilised as a portmanteau concept in distinction to the secular. Connected to a deity the sacred may embody the doctrines, the scriptures, of an organised religion or church belief; the sacred in other realms of belief may grant less emphasis to creed, more to communication with the spirits of the dead, especially through mediums. While there can be no neat separation of the religious and the spiritual response, my focus is on a spiritual dimension in the postcolony or, more particularly, in postcolonial literary studies.

It is fitting that the spiritual be linked to the idea of the postcolony. For it is at the peripheries of the North Atlantic metropolitan centre, or in marginalised or disaffected communities within the metropole (the black Briton or the German Turk), that an age of globalisation in its belief in the homogenisation of market forces has witnessed, paradoxically, a growth of both religious and spiritual practice. The established churches in the US may have empty pews; Pentecostal variations sing with gusto. Fortress Europe draws up its bridges against Others, but the Turk or the Pakistani, together with non-Christian religious belief, has long already arrived. It is not difficult in the postcolonies of the world to hear voices of religion (for example, flourishing Catholic worship in Latin America) or voices of spiritual need (say, the less doctrinaire hybrids of animism and missionary-imported Christianity in Africa).

Let me then delineate the postcolony. It is racially diverse; heterogeneous in language, culture and religion. It is characterised by sharp economic and educational disparities. It is susceptible to disease and crime. Its civil institutions are fragile. Its literacy and literary life are uneven. Hard won, liberation-movement freedoms can be at odds with the former liberation movement that is now the ruling party. The Big Man syndrome can signal compromised leaders. The 'people' are often at the rough edge of service delivery. In such conditions, in which modern political and economic systems continue to bypass Fanon's (1961) "the wretched of the earth", it is not surprising that there should be a yearning for belief beyond material circumstance. The hardships of poverty, of urban dislocation, of the problematic mingling of tradition and the now, in a pluralising modernity, all lend content and intent to rituals of succour, solidarity, survival and salvation. As Van Beek and Blakely note, religion in conditions of postcoloniality is best studied in its sociocultural context, "to be grasped by being human among humans" (1994: 3).

At least, that is the assumption of the present article: an assumption obviously open to the challenge that faith transcends any physical constraints. Indeed, the yearnings for belief to which I have referred do not usually, I am sure, arise out of the supplicant's analysis of social ills. This notwithstanding, the well-documented lament of Piet Draghoender (see Peires 1984) provides a telling hybrid of the secular and the sacred. Under the provisions of the apartheid Group Areas Act, a whole community in the Kat River district of the Eastern Cape in 1982 was forcibly 'removed' from its long-settled district. Draghoender, whose Khoi ancestry by the 1980s had been classified as 'Coloured', worked his own property in the district. Asked by the historian Jeff Peires "what happened to your neighbours?", Oom Piet [Draghoender] launched into an impromptu declamation of emotional force and poetic density. His lament is a mixture of biblical and colloquial Afrikaans, and reverberates with epic reference to a past of systematic oppression of the Kat River people. (Established in 1829 as a 'home' for the Khoi, the Kat River settlement was cynically manipulated by the Cape colonial administration, first as a buffer between the British settlers and the Xhosa, later as a source of cheap labour to service the surrounding settler farms.)

ek voel baie hartseer so I feel very heartsore
dieoorloge these wars
my vader het vir'n oorlog gestaan my father has stood for a war
my oupa het vir'n oorlog gestaan my grandfather has stood for a war
my kinders my children
my vader se kinders my father's children
het vir'n oorlog gestaan have stood for a war
... ...
omdat die plek vrymaak to make this place free
... ...
die Here sal dit nooit toelaat dat the Lord will not allow you to be
 jy gevat word so taken so
en weggegooi word nie and be thrown away
en die en die afgegee word van and that and that be given away
van van die Here vir vir vir die from from from the Lord for for
Vyand se for the Enemy's
sit hom in die varkhok put it in that pigsty
 sit hom in die varkhok put it in the pigsty
want hy behoort aan niks for it belongs to nothing
wat is what is
wat is hy? what is he?
 (Draghoender 2002: 242,243)

The agonised words capture the dilemma of a person caught between his bitter resentment of historical dispossession and his belief in a just, albeit mysterious God. In explanation of the 'inspiration' in the voice of this illiterate small-holding farmer, critics have invoked theories of the peasant moulded by the land he toils, shaped by the environment, and utilising a language utterly necessary to his anthropological being. Others see the injustice of apartheid etched on Draghoender's social self. Oom Piet himself claims to be moved to touch his Maker, to trust amid his current hardships in his Lord God's greater wisdom.

Piet Draghoender's "Lament" is unlikely to find its way onto a postcolonial literature syllabus. (Oom Piet, of course, did not see himself as reciting a poem.) Whether in the postcolony or in the North Atlantic institution, the syllabus remains attached to a middle-class conception of literature: to the elite work in English by the emigre or multicultural metropolitan author (the Salman Rushdie or the Zadie Smith). The oral indigenous voice, or popular expression from the periphery (African praises, say, or Onitsha market literature), has had limited impact so far on post- debate, where the tendency is to replace Western canons with third-world canons (instead of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, we have Achebe's Things Fall Apart) or where the tendency is to re-appraise metropolitan 'touchstones' through the lens of alternative modernities (Shakespeare's The Tempest in the New World).

The critical apparatus brought to the texts is also that of the centre offering its interpretative key to the periphery: Said, Spivak and Bhabha are the 'holy Trinity' of post- study. Their formulations of Subject and Other are traced to the writings of continental philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida. To avoid embracing the Other, we are told, is to avoid the humanist fault of wishing to turn the Other into a Same. But is such a diagrammatic separation of Same and Other not problematic in postcolonies that have been divided and ruled by incommensurate otherings? It was Belgian colonisation which, in Rwanda, inculcated rivalry between Hutus and Tutsis; in South Africa apartheid denied conceptions of the Same while inscribing into law each group as different.

Draghoender's "Lament" points to questions of 'Same' and 'Other', but also to an accent in short supply in postcolonial literary studies: that of poetic utterance. Let me return to the spiritual. In pursuing their argument that religion in conditions of postcoloniality is best "grasped by being human among humans", Van Beek and Blakely make the suggestive observation (suggestive, at least, to the literary critic) that "aesthetically valued speech acts" articulate meaning in a situation in which "problems abound and answers are scant" (1994:10). Or, as Altieri (2002) puts it in the secular conventions of literary study, ethical criticism explores moral categories; its favoured form is narrative. The lyric, the poetic, the speech of yearning, of ritual, in contrast, captures in its expressive intensity "an excess beyond denotation" (24). It is not that moral conduct is dissipated; rather, it is that by encountering emotional fields we gain the power to affect how we adapt and modify our conduct (41-3). (4)

I may appear to be collapsing the sacred into the aesthetic in granting two kinds of response--the literary and the sacred--equivalence based on the idea of connotative excess and expressive intensity. Indeed, the spiritual has elicited from poets through the ages responsiveness to the character of their articulation:

 But I, to whom Yourself revealed Your work,
 go forth with new and holy knowledge then:
 that this, my darkness, is Your truth and light...

 (Van Wyk Louw, "The Prophet" 2002: 94)
 Trans. Afrikaans, William and Jean Branford

and to the philosophical underpinnings of their art. According to the American poet Wallace Stevens (1957: xv), the major poetic idea in the world is the idea of God. Yet even as he proclaims an inseparability of the poetic idea and the idea of God, Stevens suggests that, despite modes of poetic and spiritual expression being at times analogous and even sharing linguistic devices, the poetic and the spiritual are not simply equivalent: "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes the place as life's redemption" (1957: 158). Both the poetic and spiritual imaginations may tend towards utopia, apocalypse and prophecy; the spiritual imagination, however, is unlikely to follow the poetic imagination in the pursuit of a 'religio poetae', or solipsism, in the sphere of the aesthetic. Whereas the spiritual inclination is to reach outwards to a deity, the poetic inclination might be to turn inwards to the heterocosm of the poetic artefact itself. It is said, after all, that the great theme of poetry is poetry.

Distinctions between the literary and the spiritual notwithstanding, a vocabulary of correspondence may identify an overlapping realm of experience. It is a realm of the 'poetic' which, as Octavio Paz phrases it, "the bourgeoisie, as a class, has proved incapable of digesting" (quoted in Hamburger 1969: 46). This is because poetry attempts to abolish the distance between the word and the self-consciousness that civilisation has erected between individuals and their participation in elemental or transcendental intimations: their participation in moments of poignancy, in experiencing the very spirit of the experience beyond the comprehension of the political or sociological perspective. In the postcolony--uneven, as I have said, in literacy and literary education--expression outside of the prose of life, perhaps the impulsive expression of anguish or joy, can have a more immediate impact (at least, for the majority of people) than the cerebral reward of the extended narrative. It is not entirely coincidental that just as the sacred is neglected in the postcolony, so poetry is neglected in postcolonial literary studies. As far as academic interpretation is concerned, attention to a spiritual turn, whether in the body of literature or the body politic, would be to depart from the abstractions of Northern institutional discourse--to depart from the 'alterities', the 'diasporics', the 'liminalities'--and shape a language attuned to an appreciation of what is powerful in the expression of human experience. As Hyslop has it, "the challenge of thinking faith is the dual one of empathising with the experience without succumbing to its allure, while remaining alert to the possibility that faith 'haunts' our own 'rational' beliefs" (2006: 3). Or as Ndebele puts it in his account of his interview with the "Arch" (the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Desmond Tutu):

 It seems that Tutu pulled the Commission out of its agonies by
 resorting to means beyond the limitations of discursive logic. I
 wondered to what extent his management style resided in his ability
 to recognise those precise moments at which a resort to
 spirituality provides a unifying transcendence that allows him to
 assume, and remain in, authority. (2007: 78)

This authority--Ndebele goes on to qualify--is moral authority, "ecclesiastical authority successfully tested in the long and bitter struggle against apartheid" (80).

But to return in conclusion to one of those moments when the poetic and spiritual find confluence, here are the words of !Kaha, a San/Bushman from the Kalahari district of Botswana. (His words have been translated into an English the metaphorical compression of which seeks to capture the original oral, !Kung-language spirit of the occasion.) For this community the occasion is a troubled one: God promises; God withholds. !Kaha is the intermediary:

 Terrible God perceives, torments,
 God's arms descend into my fingers.
 Yesterday God said, "Be my child and listen.
 Take what I say to the people."
 God's arms
 God's arms
 A young soul lives in the western sky
 And is still learning.

 (Quoted in Biesele 1975)

What is our response? The mood must be placed within a context. Recorded in the mid-1970s, !Kaha's words express a difficulty of communal experience which is ongoing. As in Angola, Namibia and parts of South Africa, so in Botswana the San/Bushmen--remnants of the first people of southern Africa--remain marginalised, othered, like Piet Draghoender eking out a living as an economically and a politically powerless underclass. More recently, the Botswana government--more democratic than most in the postcolonies--stands accused of forcing Bushmen off land containing mineral deposits and into poverty in the towns. In such a context !Kaha's song is a charged social event about solidarity, security and survival. Here we push aside the abstraction of postcolonial theory and say, simply and unambiguously, that this lament strikes a note simultaneously ancient and modern. Its expression exceeds denotation. In the secular postcolony, !Kaha seeks the sacred.

To turn to the postcolonial literary curriculum, the challenge is to find an ethical and aesthetic language of response that, in the same social space, can value both the fiction of, say, Salman Rushdie and !Kaha's voice of spiritual invocation.

References

Achebe, Chinua. 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann.

Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.

Altieri, Charles. 2002. "The Literary and the Ethical: Difference as Definition". In: E B Bissell (ed.). The Question of Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 19-47.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds). 2006. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. (Second Edition). London and New York: Routledge.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. London: Methuen.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Biesele, Megan. 1975. Folklore and the Ritual of !Kung Hunter-gatherers. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Harvard University.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapman, Michael. 2006a. "Robert J C Young in South Africa: Interview". English in Africa 32 (2): 199-208.

--. 2006b. "Postcolonialism: A Literary Turn". English in Africa. 33 (2): 7-20.

Chinweizu. 1975. The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite. New York: Vintage.

Conrad, Joseph. 1994 (1902). Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Draghoender, Piet. 2002 (1985). "Lament". In: M Chapman (ed.). The New Century of South African Poetry. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker: 240-3.

Fanon, Franz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. C Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. A M Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.

Hamburger, Michael. 1969. The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s. London: Pelican.

Hyslop, Jonathan. 2006. "Faith, Fundamentalism and Social Science". The Wiser Review 2: 3.

Ndebele, Njabulo S. 2007. "Moral Anchor: An Interview with the Arch (1998)". In: Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country. Cape Town: Umuzi: 77-83.

Peires, J B. 1984. "Piet Draghoender's Lament". South African Outlook (July): 99-104.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism: Western Representation of the Orient. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

San Juan Jr, E. 1998. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St Martin's Press.

Shakespeare, William. 1997 (1623). The Tempest. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1985. "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations of Widow Sacrifice". Wedge 7/8: 120-30.

Stevens, Wallace. 1957. Opus Posthumous. New York: Random House.

Van Beek, Walter E A and Thomas D Blakely. 1994. "Introduction". In: T D Blakely, W E A van Beek and D L Thomson (eds). Religion in Africa. London: James Currey: 1-20.

Van Wyk Louw, N P. 2002 (1937). "The Prophet". In: M Chapman (ed). The New Century of South African Poetry. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker: 94.

Young, Robert J C. 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Notes

(1.) See Ahmad (1992) and San Juan Jr (1998).

(2.) See Bhabha (1994), Said (1978) and Spivak (1985).

(3.) See Chinweizu (1975).

(4.) I am indebted to Charles Altieri's (2006) essay on distinctions between the 'literary' and the 'ethical'.