4.2.10 – Philopoesis and/as Resistancei

Sam Okoth Opondo, Vassar College
saopondo@vassar.edu

I

The invitation to be one of the keynote speakers at the Representations of Resistance Conference is both an honor and a provocation. I wish to express my gratitude by going straight to the provocation arising from the generous and, I would add, risky invitation. An exposure that can only be reciprocated through further exposure, risk and experimentation.

First, I would like to render thanks to Francois Debrix for inviting me to the conference and for going further to allow me to speak about a topic of my choice in relation to the already demarcated conference theme (Representations of Resistance). When I received the invitation, my initial response to the generous offer was to turn to the problematic of negative preference; to state, "I would prefer not to". In part, this is because my work speaks more to amateur diplomacies of everyday life and the problematics of resisting representations (more so colonial and ethnological representations) rather than the representations of resistance. However, owing to the provocation and generosity of this invitation, and with some abusive fidelityii to my own work and interests, I will explore how philopoesis as a method and orientation presents a heterogeneous site from which one can think about multiple scenes of resistance and representation.iii

Provoked by the simultaneous insistence and hesitation that marked my response to Francois Debrix’s invitation, I will perform the philopoetic work of juxtaposing fragments from a number of literary texts and inter-articulating them with a set of philosophical texts which I hope to read diplomatically — side by side. The discontinuity in the side-by-side reading of these texts proceeds through three main operations and an interlude. First, I engage the prosaics of resistance, negative preference, and the image of a ‘man without references’ in Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Heeding insights from the philosophical and linguistic interference in Melville’s short story, and attentive to the critical locus of enunciation provided by actual and fictional migrants, I proceed to read Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea; a text that invokes Melville’s Bartleby as it explores the entanglements of refuge, nativity and the familial through the perspective of an asylum-seeker whose name, stories, objects and choice of words disturb and redistribute colonial and postcolonial worlds. Through a brief interlude, I read the prosaic (novelistic) representation of the migrant in Gurnah’s text alongside the prosaic (everyday) discourses on migrancy in Europe as presented in a Guardian OpEd piece by the novelist Hanif Kureishi.iv This interlude facilitates a shift from the prosaic to the poetic, as well as from the human to the extra-human migrant/monster. A philopoetic engagement with the gene/genre intertext that enables me to explore the possibilities of coordinating conjunctions and relations by embracing the migrant/monster/daughter in Warsan Shire’s poems Ugly and Conversations about home (At a Deportation Centre) in a manner that raises critical questions for political thought/life.

Rather than attempt to offer an exhaustive account of the capacities of philopoesis as a method in general or as a mode of resistance, I will attempt the modest task of offering an introductory account of philopoesis and then proceed to look at how the interruptions, interferences and genre-mixing characteristic of this practice create the possibilities for a more philobarbaric, or teratologic, orientation from which one can raise questions of resistance, resilience, representation and cohabitation with the figures of the refugee, the barbarian and the monster. Simply put, this is an invitation to experiment with a mode of reading otherwise as an entry point for experimenting with ways of living and relating that embrace the monstrosity that present-day representations moralize, disavow and resist.

II

A Note on Philopoesis

But what is philopoesis? Why philopoesis? Inspired especially by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s definition of philosophy as production of concepts, and of literature as production of affects and percepts in their “What is Philosophy?, Cesare Casarino notes that philopoesis names a certain discontinuous and refractive interference between philosophy and literature that “produces the different zones of indiscernibility between philosophy and literature”.v In order to pose the question of philopoesis, Casarino turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought on interference in order to map an ‘interferential ontology’ which requires one to engage the way in which analogous problems are placed for the “plane of immanence of philosophy, the plane of composition of art, the plane of reference or coordination of science”. For Deleuze and Guattari, what is most significant is the ‘problem of interference between the planes that join up in the brain’, which they divide into three categories; namely extrinsic interference, intrinsic interference and nonlocalizable interference. vi It is worth quoting Deleuze and Guattari at length on the political implications of this last type of inference:

Philosophy needs a non-philosophy that comprehends it; it needs a non-philosophical comprehension just as art needs non-art and science needs non-science. They do not need the No as beginning, or as the end in which they would be called upon to disappear by being realized [it is not the question of the end of history]...Now, if the three ‘No’s are still distinct in relation to the cerebral plane, they are no longer distinct in relation to chaos in which the brain plunges. In this submersion it seems that there is extracted from chaos the shadow of ‘people to come’ in the form that art, but also philosophy and science, summon forth, but which leaves all three behind: mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaospeople – non-thinking thought that lodges in the three.vii

The above formulation is an invitation to call up, and call into question, some of the familiar ways in which resistance is represented through attentiveness to a constellation of interferential expression, relation, and becoming made possible through “extrinsic, intrinsic, and non-localizable interferences”. As a method, philopoesis draws on these interferences to mark “an increasing degree of indiscernibility among the practices” thus making literature and philosophy question each other and by questioning each other they put the whole world into question. Key here is the willingness to “read literary texts as if” one were a “ philosopher who is trying to read as if he were a literary critic” or to read “philosophical texts as if” one were “ a literary critic who is trying to read as if he were a philosopher (but who cannot help himself also to read as if he were a literary critic)”. viii.Given that I am neither a professional philosopher nor a literary critic, I will try and read these two areas diplomatically, or through recourse to amateur diplomacies (amor), where I read each of them ‘as if’ I was reading from their own domains while slipping onto the other plane in a manner that stages an encounter with something beyond the domain of recognition. For in such a reading practice, what is key is the willingness and capacity to engage, or relate, ‘‘as if’’ while recognizing the impossibility of occupying that position. For, as Cassarino puts it, this ‘‘as if’’ is what enables interference. ix It is both lack and capacity. It is a love of poesis; x a love of the making of words, worlds, and the zones where words and worlds collapse into bodies. Bodies that we do not yet know what they can do.xi

III

A Formula for Interference

Let us return to the provocative response, “I prefer not to” with which I began this address. A response that appears numerous times in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, By the Sea (2001) a story on negative preference, colonial and postcolonial entanglements, asylum-seeking, intergenerational family feuds, the social life of things and refuge among other things. This response made familiar in the western literary and philosophical tradition by Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, xii will also serve as my point of entry into an area, not of expertise, but of political, philosophical and aesthetic concern:the world of refuge and the possibilities of refuge in/ through words.

Rendered philopoetically, the response “I prefer not to” provides a model of speech and relation that interrupts normal language and has been the subject of macropolitical concerns insofar as questions of modernity, capitalism, homelessness and urban alienation are concerned. The appropriation and abrogation of Bartleby’s formula also enables Gurnah’s characters to superimpose multiple sensory worlds on the one that Melville makes/depicts, or to superimpose Bartleby’s words/world on colonial and postcolonial worlds in order to create “a combination of different senses of sense” that enables a dis-identification with familial, national and colonial sensory codes. xiii In order to gain a politically perspicuous view of the interferences made possible by the language and textual strategies in Gurnah’s novel, I will take a detour via Melville’s short story and the philosophical reflection it invites before returning to Gurnah’s By the Sea.

In Melville’s story, the repetition of the formula (I would prefer not to) by Bartleby, a scrivener who copies legal documents but prefers not to compare (proofread) them and who eventually occupies his boss’s office, marks an act of resistance that unmans and disarms his lawyer boss. Through the formula (I would prefer not to) and other practices of non-conformity such as turning the office into his living quarters, Bartleby interrupts the language of his scrivener colleagues and redistributes the use and meanings of (office) space. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Bartleby’s mere presence and manner of being reorients the relations in the office thus provoking both ethical and political responses with regard to questions of charity, professionalism, order, the body, language and responsibility.

When Bartleby gives up copying altogether and stops working while preferring not to be dismissed or to be ‘a little reasonable’ with his boss, the lawyer finds a new office to rent while leaving Bartleby in his old office. With the new tenant, Bartleby is exposed to the force of law given the tenant’s intolerance for his (Bartleby’s) supposedly meaningless presence. Not only is he removed from the premises, he is arrested for vagrancy and taken to the Tombs (a prison in New York) where his continued refusal to receive the lawyer’s extensions of generosity and special meals eventually lead to his death.

Bartleby’s obstinacy and passive resistance has become a figure of popular and philosophical imagination. From Occupy Wall Street to Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empirexiv and Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities ,xv the figure of the white / white-collar worker’s solitary interruption of the rhythms of work and life enables us to imagine a figure who, in refusing the authority and charity of the boss and by taking it to the extreme, becomes ‘generic man, being as such, being and nothing more’.xvi At a minimum, this mode of resistance ‘calls up’ and reveals the pretensions of the ways of life or modes of being of those that it seeks to resist. It is also a site of resistance and interference from which we witness the “becoming-philosophy of literature and becoming-literature of philosophy.”

For instance, Gilles Deleuze tells us that Bartleby’s formula (“I would prefer not to”) is an agrammatical formula that ‘stands at the limit of a series of normal expressions’ (I would prefer this. I would prefer not to do that).xvii By being “neither an affirmation nor a negation, a refusal nor acceptance,” Bartleby’s formula simply rejects the “nonpreffered”. However, this rejection of the nonpreffered also eliminates the preferred activity, as evinced by the scrivener’s annihilation of “copying, the only preference in relation to which something might not be preferred”.xviii

Insofar as the question of language is concerned, Deleuze notes that this formula at “first seems like the bad translation of a foreign language”; however, it soon becomes clear that rather than being a bad translation between languages, the logic or “negative preferences, a negativism beyond all negation”, is a “formula [that] carves out a kind of foreign language within language”.xix This carving out a foreign language within a familiar language enables Bartleby’s formula to interrupt the familiar speech acts and gestures that the boss uses to issue commands, or the acts of generosity and responsibility, through which friends and men of faith regulate relations and affects. Through an affirmation of the nonpreffered, Bartleby becomes a man outside the zone of philanthropy, friendship and management. His sadness and suffering exists outside a zone of intervention. His “withdrawal is severe, and this leads to his self-destruction”. As Jane Desmarais puts it, this withdrawal is paradoxical as it “inverts the whole notion of defence which is to keep out the dangerous object”. The denial of others, which is central to Bartleby’s resistance, involves a ‘self-denial’, and ‘withdrawal in extremis’, which results in a slow suicide.xx Through his resistance, Bartleby remains an object of his Boss’s sympathy; a figure of “ miserable friendlessness and loneliness” whose “ poverty is great” and “solitude horrible”; a figure whose resistance draws the narrator to respond by feeling a “bond of a common humanity” that draws the boss into gloom and “a fraternal melancholy” for both he and Bartleby are “sons of Adam”.xxi

If Bartleby’s resistance interrupts the office rhythms and calls up the recognition of a shared humanity, and with it a sense of responsibility for the suffering other, it is precisely the impossibility of such a recognition that underlines the initial engagements with difference, insistence and negative preference in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, By the Sea (2001). Here, the conflicting family narratives of the two main characters, Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud, offer some insights into the violent encounters, displacements, and entanglements between lives in the Indian Ocean Island of Zanzibar and the world at large. Through creative use of language, memory work, and attentiveness to the body and the movement of objects, the novel disturbs official histories and cartographies while pointing to other ways of relating to things, human beings, and being in general. Among other things, Gurnah’s novel invokes narratives from other texts – with Melville’s Bartleby and Shahrazad’s One Thousand and One Nights as anchors – other times, and other places in order to weave or superimpose one literary world on another, and in so doing, revealing the colonial practices that superimposed a colonial imaginary on a more connected Indian Ocean world. For instance, the relationship between Omar and Latif is partly mediated by Bartleby and the story of A Thousand and One Nights where storytelling is the means of survival. As such, tales of “migrating jinns and princes, magic carpets, and enchanted fish” are used to provide a memory beyond the colonial memory and the colonial education provided by the works of Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard and G. Henty..xxii

At the center of By the Sea is the encounter between Omar and Latif in England after the latter is called in to act as a translator for the former. When the two men meet, old family rivalries from Zanzibar are enacted as Latif accuses Omar (who travels under the name Rajab Shaaban as a result of using Latif’s father’s birth certificate to acquire a counterfeit passport) of stealing both his father’s name and their family home. As the narrative progresses, and new dimensions are added to their respective understating of their family history, not only does Omar reveal the shared family history that led to his possession of Latif’s family property, he also reveals how the nativist politics in Zanzibar, and the false accusations by Latif’s family led to his imprisonment, dispossession and the death of his wife and daughter. As each comes to terms with the other’s version of their own “family history”, they also come to terms with the “conflicting narratives of Zanzibar’s post revolutionary identity”.xxiii

Similarly, the family also acts as an allegory of the nation such that the long-lasting family feud between Omar and Shaaban’s family, and their unexpected friendship that develops in a foreign land, leads them to each narrate their own version of their entangled, and contested, family and national history. Speaking about his daughter’s birth and the conditions under which she was named Ruqiya (after the Prophet’s daughter with his first wife Khadija), Omar informs Latif how he had thought of naming her Raiiya, but had to settle for a less provocative name in order to save her from ridicule. xxiv As Omar puts it:.

Raiiya, citizen to make her life an utterance, a demand that our rulers should treat us with humanity, as indigenes and citizens of the land of our birth. It was a name with a pedigree…used for centuries to describe citizens of nations which had been overwhelmed by conquest. It was true that the conquerors in its use were muslims and the conquered were not, and that to offer the vanquished rights after having taken away their freedom to conduct their affairs was hardly magnanimous, but the idea of citizen rights was a noble one, and we would use it for our own meaning.xxv

While the citizen-name relationship above is based on claims of nativity and being well-born, the name as an inscription and passage to refuge is at the center of a significant event in the novel where Saleh Omar/Shaaban pretends to speak no English upon his arrival at Gatwick Airport. From the narratives and flashbacks, it is clear that Omar is fleeing the precarity induced by an intergenerational family feud, the long-lasting effects of colonialism, and the nativist macropolitics of the Zanzibar Revolution that led to his imprisonment and suffering. By acquiring a new name and preferring not to speak English, a language that he is eloquent in, Omar/Shaaban enacts a form of passive resistance predicated on transgressive or tactical use of language and silence.xxvi Out of a rich vocabulary, he chooses to use only two words --“refugee” and “asylum”-- in response to all the questions posed by Kevin Edelman, an immigration officer at Gatwick. While his willful silence enables him to get past the immigration officer, it also exposes him to the bureaucracy induced relationships that make him loose his most prized possession - a mahogany casket containing incense (ud-al-qamari) of the best quality. However, Omar’s silence in the face of official interrogation provides an opportunity for an extended external analepsis, through which he informs the readers of the special place of ud-al-qamari within his own memory, and that of the history of East Africa and the Indian Ocean at large:

Ud-al-qamari: its fragrance comes back to me at odd times, unexpectedly, like a fragment of a voice or the memory of my beloved’s arm on my neck. Every Idd I used to prepare an incense burner and walk around my house with it, waving clouds of perfume into its deepest corners, pacing the labors it had taken me to possess such beautiful things, rejoicing in the pleasure they brought—incense burner in one hand and a brass dish filled with ud in the other Aloe wood, ud-al-qa- mari, the wood of the moon. That was what I thought the words meant, but the man I obtained my consignment from explained that qamari was really a corruption of Qimari, Khmer, Cambodia, because that was one of the few places in the world where the right kind of aloe wood was to be found…I had obtained the ud-al-qamari from a trader who had come to our part of the world with the musim, the winds of the monsoons, he and thousands of other traders from Arabia, the Gulf, India and Sind, and the Horn of Africa. They had been doing this every year for at least a thousand years. In the last months of the year, the winds blow steadily across the Indian Ocean toward the coast of Africa, where the currents obligingly provide a channel to harbor. xxvii

Through his reflection on the Ud-al-qamari and the translation and travel that made it meaningful to his own world, Omar maps a long history of Indian Ocean trade that ties the East African coast to Qamari (Khmer Cambodia), Arabia, the Gulf, India and Sind, and the Horn of Africa. The dispossession at the airport also recalls the history of plunder of the same Islands by the Omanis, Portuguese, Germans, French, British thus revealing that “postcolonial migration, of people and things” is best read in this “ historical context, rather than as a product of the more recent and publicized trend of globalization as something new”. xxviii The resonances between the old and new plunder is well captured in Omar/Shaaban’s depiction of his encounter with Kevin Edelman:

[…] the bawab of Europe, and the gatekeeper to the orchards in the family courtyard, the same gate which had released hordes that went out to consume the world and to which we have come slimming up to beg admittance. Refuge. Asylum-seeker. Mercy. xxix

Earlier in the text, Omar had reflected on how his precarious and fragile life resonated with the “endless catalog of objects that were taken away to Europe because they were too fragile and delicate to be left in the clumsy and careless hands of natives”. As an asylum-seeker subjected to interrogation, he notes that he “knew the meaning of silence, the danger of words” given that his dispossession and imprisonment at home was accompanied by long periods interrogation. xxx Based on his inattentiveness to the specificity of migrant lives and the conditions under which different people seek asylum, Kevin Edelman attempts to discourage Omar/Shaaban from applying for asylum, given that he is too old for this ‘young man’s game’, does not speak the language, and does not belong to the ‘European family’ because he does not “value any of the things” that ‘they’ value, and has not paid for those things “through generations” of familial relations in Europe.xxxi

Rather than respond to Edelman’s claims, the silence, maps, object trajectories and smells (fragrances) that Shaaban/Omar summons invokes a sensory world that disturbs the mode of making sense of Europe that Edelman privileges. Most significantly, the novel’s characters’ movement from Zanzibar to England through migration and within different parts of the Indian Ocean world through narration disturbs the nation-state’s attempt to manage bodies or fix “historical narratives as well as territorial space”. xxxii This world of co-presences that the novel depicts is predicated not on consensus but the “singularities of subjects who find themselves in common” as a result of “a juncture and sharing of a space of encounter” that is mediated by family stories, story books, friendship, enmities and memories of political intrigue. xxxiii While Omar appears before the immigration system as a man without papers, or a man, who like Bartelby, exists without references, the refrain from Bartelby’s story; ‘I prefer not to’, offers a point of reflection and encounter from which friendship, reconciliation and clandestine movement become possible. The narratives that he weaves in concert with Latif, and their mutual appreciation of Bartleby’s formula and disposition, enables them to tell each others’ stories that call into question Latif’s understanding of his family’s genealogy, while enabling them to stand before each other in a manner that draws out their mutual ‘references’ and entangled lives in Zanzibar and England where nativist anxieties about entitlement, the proper and well-born, limit the possibilities of ethical co-habitation. In spite of Omar’s suffering at home and abroad, the image of the asylum-seeker that his flashback provides does not comport with the humanitarian narratives that privilege the image of the refugee or asylum-seeker as a generality of helpless victims, speechless emissaries, or purveyors of familiar testimonies.xxxiv

By highlighting the co-presences, practices and entanglements that a presentist, statist geophilosophy disavows, Gurnah’s novel points to the violences of the postcolonial present and explores ways of being-in-common that existed elsewhere in another time (before colonialism), and can still be explored in the here and now ‘after empire’. During a conversation with the commanding officer at a detention center where he is held with other Zanzibaris of Arabic descent in the period following the Zanzibar revolution, Omar points to the possibility of a shared ancestry and brotherhood with his imprisoners. Interestingly enough, the commanding officer acknowledges that the Arab prisoners are his “brothers too” given that the “Omani’s fucked all our mothers” such that Zanzibar is as much his home as it is Omar’s – they are all “children of the land”. However, he continues listening to radio programs that rewrite history through narratives that privilege autochthony while providing “homespun moralities that justified oppression and torture” he performs as part of his official duty.xxxv

In spite of all the maps and memories of pain and suffering that Gurnah’s novel depicts, By the Sea also presents us with the task and possibility of imagining and exploring how “we might invent conceptions of humanity that allow for the presumption of equal value and go beyond the issue of tolerance into more active engagement with the irreducible value of diversity within sameneness”. xxxvi Not only does it illustrate that “no one had a monopoly over suffering and loss”, the novel also depicts everyday moments and practices of kindness that disturb conceptions of political subjectivity rooted in citizenship, or the privileging of the rights and desires of the well-born.xxxvii Such practices, Paul Gilroy tells us, point to the possibility of a demotic or vulgar cosmopolitanism cultivated “in the ordinary virtues and ironies –listening, looking, discretion, friendship—that can be cultivated when mundane encounters with difference become rewarding”.xxxviii Ultimately, asylum-seeking is presented as a way out of the violence and necropolitics of the postcolony with the asylum-seeker as a complex character with desires beyond generic life and a subjectivity beyond naked life. That is, with Omar Saleh’s story and the multiple layers of his life that are revealed in his conversation with Latif, as well as through his flashbacks, one cannot reduce him to naked life --‘the ultimate biopolitical subject whose life is stripped of cultural and political forms’; a form of life that is best suited for accommodation in camps or “non-places where they are held in a permanent state of exception or detention centers into which they are forced without trial”.xxxix

IV

Interlude: Spectres and Monstrosities

By juxtaposing the asylum-seeker’s practice of negative preference with the stories of the movements of bodies and things within England, Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean worlds, as well as the stasis and erasure arising from colonial, familial and state practices, Gurnah illustrates how various modes of recognition and valuation regimes regulate affective and ethical dispositions, thus framing our responsiveness to the suffering of others. xl Given that it is a story told from the perspective of the asylum-seeker, By the Sea presents an image of the immigrant that is very different from that which dominates popular xenophobic and humanitarian imagination where the migrant is reduced to a generic threat or generic victim. This image of the migrant as a figure with “no face, status or story” is well captured in a recent Guardian OpEd piece by the novelist Hanif Kureishi where he highlights the special place of the migrant in the European political imaginary. xli Unlike Gurnah who used objects, colonial and Arabic texts and Bartelby’s formula to mediate immigrant experiences by going back to another place and time and mining them for narratives that enable him to become otherwise, Kureishi highlights and criticizes the moral panics and teratological discourses that represent the immigrant as a monster. Oscillating between fictional and historical representation, Kureishi’s offers a diagnosis of the European present where:

Unlike other monsters, the foreign body of the immigrant is unslayable. Resembling a zombie in a video game, he is impossible to kill or finally eliminate not only because he is already silent and dead, but also because there are waves of other similar immigrants just over the border coming right at you…we like to believe that there was a better time when the world didn't shift so much and everything appeared more permanent. We were all alike and comprehensible to one another, and these spectres didn't forever seethe at the windows. Now there seems to be general agreement that all this global movement could be a catastrophe, since these omnivorous figures will eat us alive. From this point of view, the immigrant is eternal: unless we act, he will forever be a source of contagion and horror…the migrant has no face, no status, no protection and no story. His single identity is to be discussed within the limited rules of the community. xlii

As a result of this partiality and the imaginary that accompanies it, the immigrant “has not only migrated from one country to another, he has migrated from reality to the collective imagination where he has been transformed into a terrible fiction”. Rather than invite hospitable responses and compassion, this fictionalized uninvited ‘guest’, this monstrous being is also a ghost figure who has been transformed into “something resembling an alien. He is an example of the undead, who will invade, colonise and contaminate, a figure we can never quite digest or vomit”.xliii In addition to their teratological characterization, Kureishi goes on to remind us that the popular European discourses on the immigrant are best read in terms of their hauntological character. That is, the “uncanny, semi-fictional figures” of the migrant is both “ a familiar, insidious figure, and a new edition of an old idea expressed with refreshed and forceful rhetoric”. Not only is the familiar figure of the migrant, migrants lives, and migrant deaths a symptom of the material conditions of ‘our times’, the migrant, and responses to migration, as Gurnah’s novel already illustrated, reveal the entanglements between the past and the present, as well as Europe’s entanglement with places and lives that it tries to disavow, moralize or normalize.

The image of the migrant as a spectre, zombie or monster is not new, nor is it unique, to the European popular imaginary. In a critique of millennial capitalism and occult economies in South Africa, John and Jean Comaroff illustrate how the “disquieting figure of the zombie, an embodied, dispirited phantasm widely associated with the production, the possibility and impossibility, of these new forms of wealth” arise in periods of social and economic disruption. xliv Interestingly enough, the zombie is linked to the figure of the immigrant who is said to be “characterized by their impaired speech”. xlv Thus the wide use of the term makwerekwere to mark the immigrant as one who has limited competence in the vernacular language. One whose voice and language is nothing but unintelligible noise. A barbarian of sorts whose silence, stuttering or noisy voice invites the xenophobe’s machete -- the horror and tragedy of apartheid’s Afrophobic ghosts.

[M]Other Monstrosities

Let us set aside the representation of migrant as zombie or spectre, and focus on the teratological domain in order to think both the quest and desire to resist representation and the conference’s key problematic; the representation of resistance. To do so, we can turn to Warsan Shire’s poem Ugly. Here, Shire illustrates her love for words and worlds through a poetic assemblage that highlights some of the tensions between representation, beauty and being well-born, as well as the manifestation of an image of the monster that exceeds the teratological concern with monstrous races on the edge of European civilization (who are now arriving at Europe’s gates), or gendered discourses on monsters that linked it to “ the female body” through discourses on abnormal reproduction. xlvi Whereas Shire’s other poem, Conversations about home (at a deportation centre), maps the world of asylum-seekers and refugees as their bodies move from a threatening home to cities, camps, deserts and camp-cities, Ugly is a composite nomadic female body that is at once colony, border and camp. That is, in Conversations about home, Shire poetically emphasizes that “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” and then proceeds to highlight the precarious journey where migrants die in Libya’s deserts or drown at Europe’s gates, as well as the tactics of survival, memories and traumas that give the migrant’s mouth/tongue and body multiple meanings and uses:

I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language…. I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can't afford to forget… I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I thought the sea was safer than the land. xlvii 

In addition to highlighting the precarity of the place one considers home, Shire provides a necrography that makes the demand for hospitality more urgent. When one asks her persona how she got here, the signs of the dangerous journey are on her migrant body. However, it is in Ugly that the full force of the migrant women bodies/spaces comes across as a potent site of her poetic interference. Here, Shire presents us with a migrant/monster figure who, unlike the familiar yet suffering human body in Conversations about home or Kureishi’s migrant/monster (who has no ‘face, name or status’), is a feminine/stranger assemblage for which we do not yet have a name, and whose body is pure potentiality. As displayed by the persona in Ugly, this daughter is at once a face/body/object/place. Her form exceeds the familiar and normalized conception of the human body and as a heterogeneous body; she wears the world in a beautiful untamed way. She does not appeal for refuge. She is the riotous carrier of refuge. Here, Shire’s play on aesthetic qualities is quickly transformed into an interferential ontology:

Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly

[…]You are her mother.

Why did you not warn her,

hold her like a rotting boat,

and tell her that men will not love her if she is covered in continents,

if her teeth are small colonies,

if her stomach is an island if her thighs are borders?

.

[…]Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things

but God,
doesn’t she wear
the world well.xlviii

With refuge-natality rather than nativity as one of the scenes of Shire’s poetic interference, we can discern a tension within this poem that is pertinent to how one thinks and unhinges the forms of life that animate some of the categories privileged by modern political thought. To appreciate fully the way the monstrous daughter in Ugly -- as both aesthetic subject and conceptual persona -- frees the question of difference from the representations that seek to domesticate it, we can consider the discourse on monsters that Rosi Braidotti provides in her Nomadic Subjects. According to Braidotti:

Monsters are human beings who are born with congenital malformations of their bodily organism. They also represent the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent as implied in ancient Greek root of the word monster, teras which means both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration…Before any scientific classification was reached, however, natural philosophy had struggled to come to terms with these objects of abjection. The constitution of teratology as a science was a paradigmatic example of the ways in which science dealt with differences of the bodily kind. xlix

Through the image of the ugly daughter born with objects and territories as part of her body, Ugly performs a philopoetic interference that brings the normative space in science, literature and philosophy into conversation with their unthought zones which are often represented as the abnormal or the excess. This teratological concern with difference from the human norm is highlighted in the ways in which the female body and its capacities (reproductive and cyclical) has been the site of thinking and articulating the abnormal. A similar articulation of the abnormal emerges within the domain of immigration where the migrant’s body becomes the site of inscription within a regime of the ‘biopolitics of otherness’, where the feminized or racialized body is presented as a marker of a form of reproduction that introduce bodies with insurmountable differences, while the suffering body is presented as the marker of a “common humanity” that one can live with provided it stays within its proper spaces.l

The full force of the female assemblage (body/border/colony/boat/camp) that Ugly conjures is felt when we read it alongside a philosophical text such as Giorgio Agamben’s ‘ We Refugees’. Read side by side, the poem and the philosophical text present conjunctions that force us to rethink the “principle of the inscription of nativity” as well as the “trinity of state/nation/territory” that the nation-state is based upon. While Agamben already treats the refugee as a human figure that calls into question the law of the citizen by foregrounding that of refuge, such that it becomes possible to think of an “aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge,” Shire’s ugly female body-in-formation is more than human being, she is an inter-being, an extra-being that take us further than Agamben’s extra-territorial promise of making the status of the European that of “the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile)”. li Agamben goes on to illustrate how privileging refuge over citizenship would mean that “European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it)”.lii If the refugee as a human body already holds the capacity to perform such an unhinging function, how much more can the monster/daughter in Shire’s poems do given that she exceeds human, territory and other normalizing categories? How much more does she call into question the normalized human form, as well as the normalized spaces of refuge and their corresponding forms of life? How does the monster reconfigure the representations privileged by citizenship, humanitarian and some critical discourses on biopolitics?

V

Philopoesis, Monstrosity, Resistance

So much for the questions, let us consider some monstrous conjunctions and conjurations made possible by reading philosophy AND literature. Let us be moved by Ugly so that we can move between things and embrace this moving body of disjunctive co-presences and conjunctions. Your daughter is Ugly, Shire tells us. She is part city AND part continent AND part camp AND part colony AND part border…and many ugly things…She wears the world well.

Shire’s poetics of relation(s) expresses and creates something new. It provides what Deleuze characterizes as a “crucial subtension of relations that makes relations shoot beyond their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything that could be determined as being. One, or whole”.liii The conjunction AND is of philosophical, political, aesthetic and ethical significance. liv It generates new concepts, percepts, functions and relations. It is an interferential experimentation that points to the possibilities of new becomings.

Among other things, Ugly calls up a monstrous daughter inter-being who, in her ugliness is also a space of refuge. She is ugly and in/appropriately born. In being ill-born, yet conceivable, she reveals the logic of eugenics that privileges those who are considered well-born, or beautiful, and its place in an ontology that disqualifies the monster or any other being that exceeds eugenic ontology.lv As Antonio Negri notes, the ‘monster is the fable that ontology cannot accept’ and it has only been partially admitted in modern philosophy as a metaphor (most significant being the Leviathan). For Negri, the modern philosophy of the state, in an attempt to make the “monster reasonable, actually makes all the rest, the whole of life and society monstrous”. This means that rather than the Leviathan being monstrous, “what is monstrous now are the plebs or the multitude…within the logic of monstrous reason Leviathan is disarmed; in fact he is completely ineffective in the order of rational courses; he is no longer a monster, he is an instrument”.lvi By situating the monster outside of the domain of sovereign power and capital, Negri is able to illustrate how modern sovereignty has been animated by a deep logic of eugenia that runs through its genealogy down to modern ideas of nationalism and racism, some of which are displayed in the Zanzibari anxieties that Gurnah captures so well in By the Sea. To go beyond this eugenic rationality and its related dispositif, Negri calls upon us to reclaim the monster and imagine the possibilities of monstrous resistances.lvii

It is important to note that possibilities of these monstrous resistances exist. From Shire’s poetic interference, the ugly daughter dis-identifies with men who reject her because she is not well-born. The rejection of monstrous daughter reveals the eugenic rationality that makes us identify more and more with the rationality of power, rather than the monstrosity of suffering. That is, like Negri, Shire, calls upon us to see history and politics from the point of view of the monster. From this vantage point, we can register resistances and suffering of those “deported in concentration camps, those tortured in wars of liberation; the evidence from apartheid; from the Palestinians in their struggle and the African American in the ghettos”.lviii

While others have presented these spaces of suffering in terms of the negations of life and politics, Negri, in his attentiveness to the capacities of bodies and the affective register, asserts that this monster is a positive ghost. It infiltrates life, is moved and moves, or at least attempts to move, around the world. Writing against Giorgio Agamben’s theory of ‘naked life’, Negri notes that it is an ideological formation that “reduces man to negative essence” while affirming the “eugenic constitution of being against the monster’s possible power”.lix That is, rather than allow the monster to emerge, the theory of naked life negates it. Simply put, through theories and images of naked life, “power continually needs to show us the nakedness of suffering in order to terrorize us”.lx Naked life tries to dissolve or dilute the monster by pointing out that any act of resistance is in vain, and in so doing, this theory “repeats the same scenario that Hobbes’ Leviathan is founded on. This is the scenario of undefended life” which is pushed to the limit of “of an impossible resistance”. From this space/time of negation, a new Leviathan appears; one that exalts pity and humiliation and does not even promise peace but only life. lxi

However, hope for resistance persists, and this is because we are dealing with men/women “rather than naked life, with the monstrous rather than the helpless”.lxii This is the same horrific hope that Omar/Shaaban in By the Sea enacts through his negative preference such that he manages to simultaneously invoke and move beyond the space and image of helpless asylum-seeker. It is the wearing of the world rather than being worn out by it that Shire’s Ugly enacts through its juxtapositions that imply a body of multiple conjunctions. And, it is a force that has precedents as evinced by figures like the more vocal Caliban in Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for a ‘Black Theatre’ where Caliban contests Eurocentric and colonial constructions. lxiii Together, these literary and poetic texts interfere with a philosophy and politics that is predicated on eugenic thought. Together, they open a space in philosophy, literature and science where one can interrogate both the ontology and ethics that underlines modern/colonial and postcolonial claims to rights, asylum, refuge, cohabitation and ethical encounter. While the European colonizer in A Tempest considers the Caliban figure the monster to be caught up in “the dialectical struggle between reason and madness, progress and barbarism, modernity and anti-modernity”, Caliban can break from this dialectic. From the perspective of the colonized, he participates in a “struggle for liberation” and is “endowed with as much or more reason and civilization than the colonizers, is monstrous only to the extent that his desire for freedom exceeds the bounds of the colonial relationship of biopower, blowing apart the chains of the dialectic”. lxiv Similar visions of excess or monstrous resistance can be identified today. Following Negri , Shire, Gurnah and others, we can resist the image and representations that reduce “all figures of anti-modernity to a tame dialectical play of opposite identities”. We can resist or interfere with images and imaginations that reduce our capacity to think, appreciate, or be affected by the ‘liberatory possibilities” of “monstrous imaginings” that exist outside of the realm of recognized political life.lxv

Conclusion

Reading the literary and philosophical texts together, we encounter and then disturb narratives that exclude migrants and others who are not considered well-born (or well-spoken) from certain sites of political imagination. By resisting the moralistic representation of the monster and pursuing monstrous resistances, we can call into question the subtle forms of eugenic thought that contain our political imagination and relations, therefore enabling us to imagine or enact scenes where a people yet to come, or a people who are missing, can emerge. Whatever the means through which this imaginative dissensus is formed, it will be useful to heed the insights from practices of interference that provoke or force us to think the unthought, or become otherwise, be they artistic (generating other percepts), philosophical (new concepts) or scientific (new functions). Like Bartleby, Gurnah’s characters, or the Ugly daughter in Shire’s Ugly, philopoesis as the love of words, worlds, and potentiality enables us to resist representations that privilege the figure of generic humanity as “absolute victim” who is “nothing else or other than absolute and essentialized humanity when it is suffering”. lxvi Reading these philosophical and literary texts together interferes with the idea of the citizen of rights or the humanitarian subject who is destined for the camp, and nowhere else but the camp, or its surrogates in Lampedusa, Woomera, Manus Island, Guantanamo, Kasarani,Saharonim etc. These ways of being and their limited representations of resistance will have to be resisted in the name of other ways of becoming.

To highlight the possibilities of such an interference, we can conclude by revisiting Deleuze and Guattari’s call for an interference that has the capacity to summon “mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaospeople”- a people who are missing.lxvii While a disciplined reading of texts and worlds allows for alternative representations, and new forms of resistance by already formed people, the juxtaposition of texts, the engagement with words and worlds, otherwise enables us to think the possibilities of a people yet to come. A people that interferes with our concept of the people. In Shire’s poem, this interference is enabled by refuge in words/worlds that summon bodies and forms of life that are, in themselves, camp-city-border-bodies. The conjunction and bringing together of that which police order and some philosophies set apart, enables us to interrupt the dominant framings of the ‘refugee crisis’ predicated on the notion of naked life destined for the camp. Through such an instantiation of the monstrous or the common body upon which colonialism, refuge and other possibilities are inscribed, the bodies, spaces and words/worlds that Shire invokes force a conversation about hospitality and hostility, love and the impossibility of being in that place one calls or desires to call home. In so doing, she produces a new common body from which ‘we’ can interrogate the partialities arising from eugenic formulations and their idea of the beautiful, the good, and the right; a space of conjunction where people can live and keep company otherwise, or the foreign body can live “as if…”. Here, resilience is not seen as part of trauma or security discourses given that it experiments with multiple ways of making up, and making do, of asylum-seeker women.lxviii

In Shire’s poetry, much like Gurnah’s story, we encounter the exiles of the pitfalls of national consciousness, as well as the unraveling of familial narrative and its fiction of beauty and being born well. We encounter multiple zones of hope and horror, horrific hope. Here, there, elsewhere. Through these moving narratives, we are provoked to reflect on how we are moved, and can relate to moving stories, but remain inattentive to the moving body. While we can accommodate the movement from one genre to another, the body that moves between cities, or from city to city via desserts and seas, remains disavowed, sacrificed or abjected. The philopoetic invitation is to read and live ‘as if’ one were another. To experiment with the AND that joins those that disciplines, genes, genres and borders separate. Ultimately, “philopoesis loves potentialities”, it is the love of poesis; a love of the making of words, worlds and the zones where words collapse into bodies. A love of the literature that makes philosophy confront its own unthought which cannot be thought and yet must be thought. As Casarino puts it, philopoesis is the love of that “which remains unmade in such a making… the love of words as unspent potentials…the love of potentiality is the only love that is worth that name”.lxix

To return to the problematic of representations of resistance, philopoetic engagements have the capacity to reveal how some representations of resistance move us to embrace images of resistance without embracing the resistors themselves in their barbarity or monstrosity. It reveals how ‘we’, in the aftermath of some scenes of resistance, embrace the familiar or normal victims of violence devoid of their political stories; without their monstrosities. The juxtaposition of genres, times, spaces and bodies forces us to reconsider our responses to the representations of those who insist on moving, when presented with the stasis and sanctuary of refugee camps and welcome centers. Philopoesis enables new encounters with the asylum-seeker who flees, swims or drowns in the face of manhunts that seek to force them back into their ‘proper’ places where they can fulfill their ‘proper’ functions. It enables us to apprehend the dead body on the sandy beach, or in the desert sand, as part of a political story; a story that resists easy representation, classification and capture. These body-stories send a message to those who want asylum-seekers to embrace or acquiesce with the current eugenic model of nativist citizenship, refuge and limited conceptions of hospitality. Their message is clear; “they prefer not to.” …Asylum! Refuge! Mercy!... AND…

xvi Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. p.204

xvii Deleuze, Gilles.  Bartleby; Or the Formula, in <>Essays Critical and Clinical . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. p.68-90, p. 70

xviii Deleuze, Gilles.  Bartleby; Or the Formula. p.71

xix Ibid

xx Jane Desmarais, Preferring not to: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”,  Journal of the Short Story in English , 36, spring 2001. p.25-40

xxi Herman Melville.  Bartleby; and, Benito Cereno. p.17

xxii Cooper, Brenda, Returning the Jinns to the Jar: Material culture, stories and migration in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea, Kunapipi, 30(1), 2008. p.80

xxiii Hand, Felicity. 2010. "Untangling Stories and Healing Rifts: Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea". Research in African Literatures.  41 (2): 74-92. p.76

xxiv Gurnah, By the Sea. p.151

xxv Gurnah, By the Sea . p.150-1

xxvi Cooper, Brenda, Returning the Jinns to the Jar: Material culture, stories and migration in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea, Kunapipi, 30(1), 2008. p.91

xxvii Gurnah, Abdulrazak.  By the Sea . London: Bloomsbury, 2002. p.14

xxviii Cooper, Brenda, Returning the Jinns to the Jar. p.90

xxix Gurnah, Abdulrazak.  By the Sea . London: Bloomsbury, 2002. p.31

xxx Gurnah, Abdulrazak.  By the Sea . p.12

xxxi Gurnah, Abdulrazak.  By the Sea . p.12

xxxii Shapiro, Michael J. (2000) 'National Times And Other Times: Re-Thinking Citizenship', Cultural Studies, 14: 1, 79 — 98. p. 82

xxxiii Ibid

xxxiv As Liisa Malkki puts it, the idea of refugee as a helpless being is linked to the constitution of refugees as a speechless sea of humanity in need of protection and someone to speak for them. See Malkki, Liisa H. "Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricization."  Cultural Anthropology: Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology . 11 (1996): 377-404. p.388

xxxv Gurnah , By the Sea. p.228

xxxvi Gilroy, Paul.  After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. p.75

xxxvii Gurnah By the Sea. p.234

xxxviii Gilroy, Paul.  After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. p.75

xxxix Diken, Bülent, (2004). ‘From refugee camps to gated communities: biopolitics and the end of the city,’ Citizenship Studies. Vol. 8, No. 1, 83–106. p.94

xl Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Grievable Life’ Excerpt from: Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2009)

xli Hanif Kureishi, The Migrant Has no Face, Status or Story, The Guardian, May, 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/30/hanif-kureishi-migrant-immigration-1

xlii Ibid

xliii Ibid

xliv Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism in The South Atlantic Quarterly , 101: 4 Fall 2002. p. 779-805, p.783-4

xlv Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Alien-Nation. p.790

xlvi According to V.Y. Mudimbe, one can identify a “geography of monstrosity” in earlier texts by Herodotus and Pliny as a way of speaking about unknown spaces and their inhabitants. See Mudimbe, V Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. p.71; For the racial and gendered dimensions of teratological discourse, see Braidotti, Rosi. “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences.” In Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti Eds. Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1996. 135-151.

xlvii Shire, Warsan, Conversations about home (at a deportation centre)  in Our Men Do Not Belong to Us .  Sleepy Hollow, New York: Slapering Hol Press, 2014.

xlviii Shire, Warsan, Ugly,  in Our Men Do Not Belong to Us .  Sleepy Hollow, New York: Slapering Hol Press, 2014.

xlix Braidotti, Rosi.  Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory . New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. p.77

l Fassin, Didier. (2001). The biopolitics of otherness. ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY.  17, 3-7. p.4

li Agamben Giorgio, .  "We Refugees."   Symposium. 1995, No. 49(2), Summer, Pages: 114-119, English, Translation by Michael Rocke. Available on the web at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/we-refugees/

lii Ibid

liii Deleuze Gilles, and Parnet Claire, 1987 Dialogues, Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam Trans. New York: Columbia University Press. p.57

liv For the implications of Deleuze’s thinking with conjunction and ellipses to see Agamben, Giorgio, (2003) „ Absolute Immanence&8223;, in Jean Khalfa Ed., An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, London & New York: Continuum, p, 151-169, Also see Opondo O. Sam, Cinema-Body- Thought: Race-habits and the Ethics of Encounter in Saldanha, Arun, and Jason M. Adams.  Deleuze and Race . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. p.247-268 p.254

lv Antonio Negri , ‘The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life,’ in Casarino, Cesare, and Antonio Negri. 2008. In praise of the common: a conversation on philosophy and politics . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p193 Casarino, Cesare, and Antonio Negri. 2008. In praise of the common: a conversation on philosophy and politics . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.194

lvi Negri Antonio , The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life. p.195

lvii Negri Antonio , The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life. p.196

lviii Negri Antonio , The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life. P.198

lix Negri Antonio , The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life. p.209

lx Ibid

lxi Negri Antonio , The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life. p.201

lxii Negri Antonio , The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life. p.210

lxiii Aime Cesaire, A Tempest; Based on Shakespeares The Tempest Adaptation for a Black Theatre, trans. Richard Miller (New York; TCG Translations, 2002)

lxiv Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2011.  <>Commonwealth . Cambridge (Mass.): Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p.90

lxv Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2011.  <>Commonwealth . p.91

lxvi Michel Agier , Humanity as an Identity and Its Political Effects (A Note on Camps and Humanitarian Government) , Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2010. p. 29-45

lxvii Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p.218.

lxviii Russell, West-Pavlov. Shadows of the past, visions of the future in African literatures and cultures.  Tydskr. letterkd. [online]. 2014, vol.51, n.2 [cited  2015-03-19]. p. 05-08 

lxix Casarino, Cesare, “Philopoesis”. p.79