J’ai couru vers le Nil d’Alaa El Aswany | Une critique de Caroline Janssen

Comment un littérateur engagé peut-il rendre hommage aux manifestants de la Place Tahrir? Comment peut-il figer dans le temps le moment fugitif et formidable des événements qui s’y sont déroulés en janvier 2011?

Dans son dernier roman ‘J’ai couru vers le Nil’, l’auteur cairote Alaa el Aswany nous explique comment, inspiré par la ‘révolution de jasmin’ en Tunisie, la population égyptienne sort de sa léthargie et occupe l’espace public. La foule se tourne contre le président Hosni Moubarak. La corruption de son régime, les abus des policiers, l’état d’urgence devenu permanent, les handicaps sociaux, le manque d’opportunités de travail et le chômage des jeunes diplomés, les prix élevés des biens de première nécessité, la manqué de liberté d’expression: la liste des frustrations est longue. La suite est connue: les manifestants remportent une victoire qui prend les autorités par surprise. Selon les mots de l’auteur “La place Tahrir était devenue une petite république indépéndante ; la prémière terre égyptienne libérée de la dictature.” (p. 200)

Les journalistes internationaux sont là, et les photographes capturent le moment. Les spécialistes analysent plus tard les causes et les circonstances, la suite et les conséquences des manifestations. Mais comment pénétrer dans l’âme des gens qui l’ont vécu? Ceux qui faisaient partie de cette révolution aussi bien que ceux qui étaient du côté du pouvoir, ou qui étaient déchirés entre deux camps opposés ? Et encore plus important, comment garder le feu sacré de cette révolution allumé?

C’est là le domaine de la littérature engagée.

Alaa el Aswany était co-fondateur de Kifâya (‘Assez!’), mouvement d’opposition à tendance laïque et de gauche, en 2004, qui appellait à une réforme démocratique et aux éléctions libres. Dentiste de formation, il sait comment exposer les nerfs. Voici un auteur qui ose aller où les autres ne vont pas. Il ne s’impose aucune limite. Avec précision, il dissèque le système politique et religieux. Les brutalités du régime sont décrites en grand détail. L’hypocrisie des politiciens et des religieux est mise à nu. Pour lui, il n’y a pas de vaches sacrées. Son ironie est mordante. Il n’hésite pas à utiliser les formules islamiques, omniprésentes dans la vie quotidienne, dans un sens satirique. Sans aucune doute son humour irrévérencieux s’inscrit dans la tradition de la littérature arabe iconoclaste, qui lutte contre l’hypocrisie depuis très longtemps (cf. le grand libertin médiéval Abou l-‘Alâ al-Ma‘arrî).

Ne nous trompons pas. Ce livre est plus qu’un hommage aux résistants. Il tourne autour d’une question lancinante, qui tourmente et hante l’auteur: comment les forces réactionnaires ont-elles pu reprendre le contrôle? Comment il se peut qu’au fond des choses, quand on fait le bilan, il semble que rien n’a vraiment changé? Quels sont les mécanismes qui ont mené à cet échec? Comment déconstruire le discours des tenants du pouvoir et des médias qu’ils controlent pour reprendre les choses en mains? Que faire? ‘J’ai couru vers le Nil’ est un livre riche en information, le résultat d’une réflexion profonde sur les réalités sociales et la révolution; il est aussi le fruit amer des désillusions qui s’en suivirent. Les lecteurs de son roman de début ‘L’Immeuble Yacoubian’ noteront qu’il y a une certaine légèreté d’esprit qui s’est dissipée, malheureusement.

L’auteur fournit un cadre précis pour interpréter ce qui s’est passé dans son pays, non seulement au niveau officiel, mais également au quotidien. Comme dans ‘L’immeuble Yacoubian’, sa plume ignore la censure. Celle-ci réagit comme on pouvait s’y attendre. Son roman, publié au Liban, est interdit en Egypte. Depuis peu, le parquet général militaire égyptien décida de poursuivre l’auteur pour ses ‘insultes envers le président, les forces armées et les institutions judiciaires égyptiens.’ (à suivre).

J’ai couru vers le Nil / ‘l’Etat comme-si’
Le titre français est suggestif: ‘J’ai couru vers le Nil’ évoque des images de l’immense fleuve qui donne la vie au désert égyptien, du temps de pharaons, des débuts de la civilisation et son apogée. Le titre original arabe est beaucoup plus brut: ‘L’état comme-si.’ Voilà un auteur qui le dit. C’est le livre d’un homme qui ose écrire ‘Dans les pays respectables, le gouvernement protège le droit des citoyens à croire ce qu’ils veulent.’ (p. 201) En effet, le titre arabe est emblématique: dans ce roman, il s’agit de l’état profond. C’est un livre sur la corruption, l’hypocrisie, les systèmes d’oppression, le rôle de l’armée, la fake news, les théories de complot, les cruautés, le cynisme et les perversités des dirigéants du pays.

Mais le traducteur français a fait un bon choix. Nous découvrons que le Nil apparaît dans ce contexte précis. Les gens y prennent refuge. Dans les rues, la barbarie reigne: les tanks de l’armée viennent d’écraser les manifestants. Rien de plus humiliant et déshumanisant que d’être forcé à abandonner les morts et les blessés pour se sauver la vie:

“J’ai couru vers le Nil. Les grenades lacrymogènes remplissaient l’atmosphère et moi je pleurais, je ne sais pas si c’était à cause du gaz ou à cause du jeune qui était mort, ou à cause de moi, ou si c’était pour tout à la fois. En revenant j’ai vu de mes propres yeux un grand nombre de morceaux humains laissés par le tank : des intestins, des cerveaux, des jambes, des moitiés de corps. Tout cela je l’ai vu. Mais le plus dégoûtant, c’est que j’ai vu des gens qui couraient, terrorisés, et qui marchaient dessus. Personne ne pense plus.”(p. 340)

Détail saillant: cette description n’est pas sortie de la plume de l’auteur. Alaa el Aswany a entrelacé dans son roman des témoignages authentiques, transcriptions littérales des déclarations faites à chaud par ceux qui ont vécu les traitements dégradants et inhumains dont se servait le régime. Ce qu’ils décrivent est hallucinant. Certains images peuvent hanter le lecteur bien après la lecture.

Les personnages
Comme dans ‘L’Immeuble Yacoubian’, l’auteur nous offre un kaléidoscope de personnages, grands et petits, qui jettent la lumière sur le tissu social. La polyphonie lui permet de confronter le lecteur à une grande diversité d’opinions et de perspectives. Le discours de l’auteur est très inclusif. Son engagement social est évident. Il accentue que la révolution appartient au peuple, à tout le monde, aux musulmans et aux coptes, aux étudiants de la génération ‘Facebook’ et aux ouvriers, aux intellectuels et aux fans de football, aux laïques et aux croyants, aux femmes voilées et non-voilées, …
Ce n’est pas par hasard que le livre s’ouvre sur la routine matinale du général Alouani, chef de la Sécurité d’état, l’incarnation de l’état profond. Il est introduit comme un homme tiré à quatre épingles, un musulman irréprochable, humble et sincère dans ses sentiments religieux. Malgré sa position privilégiée il refuse de s’enfermer dans son enclave de riches. Il prie dans la mosquée parmi le peuple. Mais l’auteur dévoile peu à peu ses côtés obscurs. Il explique, en badinant, que le général est parmi ceux qui font l’amour le matin, tout en ajoutant qu’en islam, c’est une chose licite. Pour rester fidèle à son épouse de 120 kilo, il regarde un film pornographique avant l’acte sexuel. Il se réalise que c’est une chose ‘blâmable’ en islam, mais ainsi il évite d’accomplir ‘des péchés mortels.’ Ce n’est qu’en dehors du cadre familial, lorsqu’il entre dans les bureaux de l’Organisation, qu’il se transforme en monstre bestial. Loin de l’oeil public, il assiste de routine aux intérrogations des prisonniers politiques. Sa sauvagerie devient manifeste et l’auteur nous plonge dans les abysses du régime. La torture et le traitement dégradant des prisonniers ne connaissent pas de limites: l’humiliation corporelle, les coups, des décharges éléctriques sur les testicules, le viol institutionalisé: “Nous avons amené ta femme Maroua et je te jure, fils de pute, que si tu ne parles pas je laisserai les policiers la sauter sous tes yeux.”(p. 15) La femme est déshabillée, ridiculisée, humiliée devant les yeux de son mari: “Les policiers déchirèrent son soutien-gorge, découvrant les seins de la femme qui poussa un long cri. L’homme alors s’écroula: ‘Assez, pacha, je vais parler, je vais parler.’ Le lieutenant s’approcha de lui: ‘Tu vas parler, fils de pute, ou je laisse les policiers la féconder.” (p. 16).

Au fil du chapître, la moquerie de l’auteur devient de plus en plus piquante. Dieu a accordé au général des biens en abondance, entre autres une belle maison à Londres. Le général utilise des ruses pour dissimuler son népotisme. A la fin du chapître apparaît la joie de sa vie, sa fille Dania, étudiante en médecine. Sur ses ordres un officier de confiance écrit des rapports réguliers sur ses allées et venues, et ce qu’il lit cause de l’inquiétude …

Nourhane et les médias
Le sjeikh Chamel, homme de religion, et la belle Nourhane, présentatrice, sont des pilliers du régime. La carrière de Nourhane prend son envol au moment des manifestations. Elle porte la voile pendant les émissions – une faveur exceptionelle qu’elle a obtenue – et s’érige en icône musulmane. Ses programmes sont très populaires; sa mission est de discréditer les révolutionnaires. Elle interviewe des soi-disant manifestants qui se répentent et qui avouent être payés par ‘les juifs et les franc-maçons’, la théorie de complot favorie des autorités. Poussée par une ambition dévorante, elle lave le cerveau des spectateurs qui ont confiance en cette femme modèle.

Les manifestants
Les manifestants sont de tout âge, de toute classe, et de tout obédience religieux. Il y a Asma, la professeur d’anglais qui refuse de porter la voile, de se marier et de désavantager les élèves pauvres. Il y a Dania, la fille du chef de la Sécurité de l’état, déchirée entre sa famille et son condisciple le révolutionnaire Khaled; il y a Achraf, un bourgeois copte, amoureux de sa domestique, qui trouve un nouvel élan grâce à la révolution. Il y a l’image du vieux balayeur anonyme en tenue orange, qui traînant derrière lui un balai dépenaillé, s’écrie: “Les enfants. Maintenant que vous avez commencé, il ne faut plus vous arrêter. Ne reculez pas!” (p. 141) C’est comme si les scènes sont prises ça et là, dans les rues du Caire.

L’auteur précise que l’organisation des frères musulmans n’a pas soutenu la révolution, point important pour lui. Nous savons bien sûr que le parti de Mohamed Morsi, issu des Frères musulmans, a gagné les éléctions qui suivent. Il est renversé par un coup d’état organisé par l’armée après des démonstrations contre son régime. Le nouvel homme fort al-Sissi apparaît à l’horizon. En avril 2019, le Parlement étend le mandat et les pouvoirs du président, après un référendum.

L’intérêt d’Alaa el Aswany a bientôt été reconnu par les grandes maisons d’édition, bien avant le déclenchement de la révolution égyptienne. Le lecteur des éditions Actes Sud a pu suivre le développement de sa carrière, avec la traduction de ‘L’immeuble Yacoubian’ (2006) ‘Chicago’ (2007), ‘J’aurais voulu être égyptien’ (2009), ‘Chroniques de la révolution égyptienne’ (2011); ‘Automobile club d’Égypte’ (2014) et ‘Extrêmisme religieux et dictature. Les deux faces d’un malheur historique’ (2014). Les livres d’Alaa el Aswany documentent un moment pivotal de l’histoire. Dans sa belle traduction, la dernière addition de la série, ‘J’ai couru vers le Nil’ nous montre la fragilité de la démocratie, de la liberté, de la vie civilisée, des fondements des pays respectables.

Caroline Janssen, Université de Gand

This review was published in: Africa Book Link, Summer 2019

Race, Decolonization and Global Citizenship in South Africa | A Review by Elke Seghers

Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa (2018) by Chielozona Eze takes Nelson Mandela’s vision of global citizenship in the decolonized South Africa as a starting point to examine a range of texts imagining post-apartheid South Africa. This idealistic project is “designed to provide a cohesive argument for an inclusive humanity rooted in empathy” (8-9). Empathy is deemed to be key to Mandela’s vision of cosmopolitanism.

The cosmopolitan model this book advocates is one in which otherness, relationality and forgiveness play a central role. Mandela and Tutu function as examples of and inspiration for such empathetic global citizenship. The author scrutinizes texts by Mda, Ndebele, Gordimer, Coetzee, Vladislavic, Mpe, Duiker, Galgut, Krog and de Kok for visions that agree with Mandela’s.

In the theoretical framework, it is argued that it is necessary to “replace the Euro-modernist, colonialist mind-set, built on exclusion, with a cosmopolitan one built on inclusion and openness to otherness” (1). In respect to this, a binary is presented between enlightenment cosmopolitanism and empathetic cosmopolitanism, the latter one being the preferable as it focuses on empathy in order to avoid the elitism associated with cosmopolitanism. In the analysis of Gordimer’s The Pickup, it becomes clear that the protagonist Julie demonstrates such an empathetic cosmopolitanism.

According to the author, conventional postcolonial theories are marked by opposition and therefore to be rejected. Instead, South Africa’s path is denominated with the term ‘decolonial’, which is concerned with going beyond Eurocentric Manicheanism. While postcolonialism has been effective in challenging the colonialist discourse, it has not provided a model for solidarity in a globalized world. Furthermore, this book dismisses essentialist conceptions of self and suggests identity always exists in relation to others.

In short, South Africa’s empathetic cosmopolitanism is “a narrative capable of completely upending Euro-modernist conceptions of identity and solidarity rooted in the abstractions of Logos” (xii). Founded on the philosophy of ubuntu and the spirit of the TRC, an alternative mode of living together in a globalized world is presented.

For a project so opposed to essentialist differences, the theoretical framework sometimes seems overly concerned with terminological differences and sometimes rather arbitrary oppositions. The author differentiates his work from, amongst others, Euro-modernist thinking, cosmopolitanism as a European concept and postcolonialism.

All in all, Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa is a noteworthy and refreshing contribution to the theorization of global citizenship. Some of the negative developments in South Africa of late, such as the violence towards immigrants, make this book all the more relevant.

Elke Seghers, Ghent University

This review was published in: Africa Book Link, Summer 2019

Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel | A Review by John Masterson

2018 was a productive year for Madhu Krishnan. It saw the publication of Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location, as well as Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone novel. As Krishnan maintains with clarity and conviction in the latter stages of this timely intervention, her scholarship is written against the grain of the post-critical turn (175-176). Given her cognate research interests in, amongst other areas, small magazines, literary networks and activism from and on the continent, the materialist thrust of her approach is as robust as it is coherent. It provides a backbone to the monograph as a whole.

Divided into four lengthy central chapters, Writing Spatiality is buttressed by a contextually and conceptually thick introduction and speculative conclusion. This sketches out areas for further research, placing particular emphasis on digital and mediascapes in order to think through ‘the multi-scalarity of space’ (189). It dovetails with Krishnan’s approach throughout the book, focused as it is on emphasising how and why space functions across a range of texts, locations and periods, from Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard to J.R. Essomba’s Le Paradis du nord via Mariama Ba’s Une si longue lettre, amongst others. She sets her discursive stall out early on, maintaining that ‘I attempt to explore the ways in which literary space, so often thought of simply as presence, functions as a dynamic rendering of the colonial experience and its afterlives, acting as the agent through which literature unfurls, and connecting the text with the material world beyond in a co-constitutive engagement’ (2). By foregrounding the dynamism of space from the off, Krishnan sets the tone for what follows. Just as crucially, as suggested in the study’s title, Writing Spatiality must also be seen in terms of a wider disciplinary push to ‘revitalise methods for comparative literary research, an area that has long been neglected in the primarily monolingual (and Anglophone-dominated) sphere of postcolonial studies’ (25). For her contribution to this, we owe Krishnan a debt of gratitude.
If spatial preoccupations determine the discursive terrain of this study, they serve to splice rather than split its cognate concerns. While we begin with Foucault and proceed through some of the most celebrated non-African thinkers of space, from Lefebvre to Soja via Fanon, these are more conceptual jumping-off points than colonising forces. As the reader navigates the study, the quality, quantity and range of research, both archival and contemporary, shines through, with African and diasporic figures, such as Achille Mbembe and Ifi Amadiume, playing more prominent roles. Heeding Mbembe’s invitation to ‘rethink spatiality in the African context’ (10), Krishnan opens up new interpretative possibilities for what she deems her touchstone texts (23). One example amongst many is her engagement with Sembene’s Xala, which ‘registers a spatial order that is far more mutable in its horizons and displays an elastic range of competing visions of spatial ecologies’ (80). As is the case with ‘dynamism’ and ‘dialectics,’ the final phrase of this line is a refrain throughout. Similarly, one of the rhetorical formulations that, for me, ran the risk of being overused at times was ‘and yet,’ which begins many of Krishnan’s sentences. Given her repeated emphasis on entanglements and ‘the multifocality through which the trilectics of space as lived, conceived and perceived emerge’ (23), this reliance is perhaps understandable. As she surveys the extant critical field in relation to a particular writer or text, Krishnan is always alive to how and why her work operates in the kind of supplementary spirit captured by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture. Indeed, by placing such emphasis on the qualifying ‘yet’ throughout, Krishnan attends to genealogical continuities and discontinuities when it comes to what some readers might feel to be peculiarly contemporary paradigms of space. Crucially, therefore, her careful archival work with colonial records and other context-specific documents, such as that on display through pp.45-55, to cite just one of many examples, adds enormous depth to her research.

With the above in mind, one of the distinctive merits of this book is the assured manner in which Krishnan almost code-switches from historical sources to sensitive close reading via theoretical frameworks. That she is able to sustain this across a range of quasi-canonised novels, as well as more contemporary texts on and/or from the continent is to her credit. Given the potentially intimidating nature of some of the conceptual scaffolds Krishnan is wrestling with throughout, I was consistently struck by the clarity of her prose. If this was sometimes hampered by the occasional typographical slip, I thought the sophistication with which she negotiates an array of discrete, if intersecting texts and contexts was a real highlight. A notable instance where attending to a seemingly negligible textual detail recalibrates the readerly experience comes as Krishnan attends to the editorial interventions to The Palm-Wine Drinkard, showing how and why they ‘result in a sea change in the passage’s spatial register’ (36). By refusing to sacrifice forensic attention to the texts themselves, Krishnan is able to suggest how and why they resist some of the more reductive tendencies in extant scholarship. This is aptly captured in a statement towards the end of chapter one. For me, it speaks to much that is most persuasive, not to mention prescient, about this study: ‘Far from serving as a mere container or backdrop for action … space in these … novels is alive, itself a shifting phenomenon and driver of subjective development and action. Space shapes and is shaped, as its rhythms, pulsations and the conflicts therein drive forward in an ever-changing movement’ (57).

If this suggests that attention to the richness of historical archives, in terms of the colonial discourse engaged throughout or insightful close readings, elevate the overall experience, I was repeatedly struck by the manner in which Krishnan urges us to consider the sites, texts and contextual specificities under discussion alongside their enduring prescience in our historical present. If she alludes to the Nigeria-Biafra war as an inherently spatial conflict, she is also alive to the ways in which spatial negotiations inform current geo-politics: ‘It is surely no coincidence that the post-structural adjustment era has seen a startling rise in the presence of fundamentalisms and secession movements on the continent, as well as a renewed force of international intrusion in the name of intervention’ (22). It is at this juncture that she wrestles with the implications of Chinese economic and cultural power on the continent, something she returns to in the conclusion. This testifies to the coherence of her approach throughout. When framing her discussion of Cole’s Open City, for instance, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which a more finely grained appreciation of the particularities of the Nigerian economy in the wake of structural adjustment opens new ways of grappling with the novel, rather than forcing it into an interpretative straitjacket (147). I also appreciated the manner in which Krishnan deployed her texts to read against the grain of some theoretical big beasts. This is notable, for instance, when she recalibrates Frederic Jameson through Xala. While conceding that a surface reading of the text might permit a Manichean binary between capitalism and ‘older collective life,’ Krishnan reads more interrogatively. In doing so, she suggests the text represents ‘a relationship of interdependency between these seemingly discrete spatialities that gives lie to the allegedly benign claims at the heart of these visions of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’’ (88). This echoes her earlier consideration of Armah’s seminal ‘novel of disillusionment,’ The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. Krishnan illustrates how and why it resists the kinds of spatial, liberatory prescriptions imagined in something like Michel de Certeau’s reflections on walking (70). If I was a little surprised by the lack of engagement with Lazarus’ reading of Armah in Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (1990), I found Krishnan’s own analysis of the knottier, more dialogic relationship between text and theory both engaged and engaging.

Given the materialist orientations of the monograph as a whole, the decision to dedicate a chapter to ‘Women’s Writing and Contested Hegemonies’ was critical. By frontloading the section with theory, from Susan Andrade, Maria Mies and bell hooks, amongst others, Krishnan amplifies strains that resonate across the preceding stages of her argument. As she does in her introductory chapter, where she sets out the poetics and politics behind her textual selection (23), the author suggests that her chosen novels, amongst them Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story and Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood ‘each registers a series of anxieties around the interpenetration of incongruent spatial ecologies in the era of decolonisation and independence’ (110). This most directly gendered of sections is, therefore, very much a part of, rather than apart from the cumulative, discursive logic of the study seen in the round. Having established the ways in which ‘the imposition of the colonial order marked a fossilisation of possibility for women through their systematic marginalisation’ (103), for instance, by way of Mies’ paradigm of Housewifization, Krishnan illuminates the oppositional qualities of the fiction under consideration. This culminates in another representative reflection, this time on Emecheta. When seen in terms of earlier arguments, it develops the central thesis of Writing Spatiality: ‘Rather than reinforcing any dichotomous or totalised view of space … Joys develops a nuanced critique of the longue duree of entanglements which produced its setting and which continue to define its context of production. The colonial period thus functions less as a break with than as part of a larger, multifaceted and complex process of spatial production’ (130). With the familiar privileging of ‘entanglements,’ in both conceptual and more methodological senses, Krishnan once more answers Mbembe’s call to reimagine space in the kinds of generative terms that break away from as they challenge more static, quasi-arrested development discourses.
With the above in mind, a particular highlight for me was the gynocentric revisioning of the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth. In what senses do the texts under consideration in this third chapter suggest the creation of new woman, rather than the new man imagined by Fanon (124)? With a rhetorical flourish that anticipates the study’s finale, Krishnan invites her readers to consider how and why the texts under discussion, in this section and throughout, reveal a host of different, more dynamic spatial logics (135).

Such was the richness of this reading experience that it feels a little churlish to pick out areas for improvement. That said, I did feel the actual presentation of the argument itself might have benefited from greater editorial oversight, particularly on the proofing front. While the chapters operated as generative and generous wholes, I thought the author could and perhaps should have made more judicious use of sub-headings. This would have allowed the reader to take stock as they navigate through an overwhelmingly compelling argument. Having noted that, there were a series of rather overwhelming paragraphs (see p.129, for example). These threatened to lose the reader. While I appreciate the necessity to focus rather exclusively on the novel as pre-eminent genre, I also felt that, perhaps in the prospective conclusion, more might have been made of the potential application of Krishnan’s method across different genres, from visual and digital art to poetry, performance and film. There were also one or two moments where I felt a particularly salient point might have been developed further. The rather tokenistic gesture to Beyala (134) is a case in point. Looked at another way, of course, these minor quibbles are more backhanded compliments. But for the limitations of time and our old friend space, I could happily have read more of this penetrating study.

In the final substantive chapter, which focuses on the paradigmatic holy trinity of ‘Cosmopolitanism, Migration and Neoliberalism in the Wake of Structural Adjustment,’ Krishnan turns her attention to more contemporary ‘African’ texts, stretching from Open City to Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. via Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique and Essomba’s Le Paradis du nord. If earlier sections demonstrate the author’s adept handling of archival, invariably colonial material when it comes to spaces as discrete as Nigeria, Cameroon and Senegal, this is extended here into the realm of World Bank reports and ODI papers. As I found to be the case throughout, however, these are grappled with in the service of a more contextually rich and conceptually generative appreciation of the primary texts themselves. Ndibe’s novel, for instance, isn’t drowned out by the white noise of economists. Rather, the energy provided by the titular trilectics of this chapter is used to power Krishnan’s interpretation. In so doing, she is able to demonstrate how and why these peculiarly twenty-first century texts are bound up in longer histories of cultural and economic entanglement (139). She therefore complements the work of other scholars committed to opening up the various genealogies of globalization, rather than settling for deeply flawed because deeply ahistorical formulations. In this vein, Krishnan revisits a text she has written about elsewhere, Open City, to consider how and why ‘the dialectic of territorialisation and deterritorialisation allows for a more robust reckoning with the dynamics of connectivity, symbolisation and isolation that have long defined the African continent’s relationship with and in the world’ (140). By thinking through these ‘multiaxial spatial networks’, Krishnan shows what can be gained from an analytical approach that places ‘the spatial deconstruction of the novel in dialogue with the larger movements of neoliberal capital, developmentalism and financialisation that dominate the production of space of its time’ (141). This sets the tone for chapter four which, in the main, delivers on textual, contextual and conceptual fronts.

As I started this review with a citation from the end of Krishnan’s insightful book, it is fitting to close with one taken from its introduction. If opening sections set up a series of expectations in readers’ minds, the only way to measure its discursive success is to consider how well they have been realised. As all scholars must, particularly in an increasingly saturated critical marketplace, Krishnan makes a claim for the distinction, not to mention timeliness of Writing Spatiality. While acknowledging the vital contributions of texts such as Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor and Quayson’s Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, Krishnan pitches hers as a study of ‘space as a holistic system … and an emphasis on fine-grained specificity’ (12). She goes on to make a claim for the singularity of literary discourse in a manner quite different to Derek Attridge, claiming that it ‘functions as a living archive of spatiality, both enlivening its workings and enlivened by its study, as part of a larger and interconnected system of representation, production, administration and constitution’ (12). As I hope to have suggested above, many of these terms (‘living,’ ‘enlivened’ and ‘interconnected,’ amongst them), serve as co-ordinates for both reader and writer alike. There is refreshing humility in this book, as well as appropriately pitched ambition. This emerges when, in her introduction, Krishnan pins her materialist colours to the mast while simultaneously setting herself the task of thinking beyond and through ‘a holistic account of postcolonial spatiality’ (25). When she returns to this towards the text’s close, she provides us with one of the most satisfying, because methodologically insightful sentences of all: ‘Far from freezing out the aesthetic, … my interest has been in how an attentiveness to the aesthetic, as a form of mediation, placed in dialogue with carefully contextualised readings of the works under study, opens the text to the world and vice versa’ (176). I took a great deal from my encounter with Writing Spatiality in West Africa, which made me reconsider alternatively touchstone ‘African’ texts, from authors ranging from Amos Tutuola to Buchi Emecheta via Teju Cole. There is a liveliness to the prose and a robust dedication to materialist cultural study that does justice to the dynamism Krishnan sees at work in her chosen authors. As such, her latest book lives up to its early promises, and then some.

Madhu Krishnan, Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel, James Currey Publishers, 225p, 2018.

Dr. John Masterson
Lecturer in World Literatures in English
School of English, University of Sussex

This article was published in: Africa Book Link, Spring 2019