An obsession with the wretched
The fetishisation of the wretched aspects of the human body, especially the orifices and what passes out of them, is actually a demystification of power. It’s a way of confronting power and discovering that it’s human after all, just like us.
IAM in the process of compiling my fictional memoirs and one thing I am discovering, much to my mortification, is that the episodes that I regard as the best are those in which I describe or participate in wretched acts and conditions.
It’s an embarrassment to me because I have always participated, in my own way, in the critical bashing of those whose representations of the Zimbabwean or African space aestheticise all forms of wretchedness (like hunger, drought, defecation, urination, rape, madness, faecal matter and so on).
And as many of you will remember, Dambudzo Marechera has been one of the most consistent victims of this culture since “The House of Hunger”. The novella is a literary tour guide’s nightmare. I remember one reserved Pentecostal girl quitting English after an encounter with Marechera. She thought that reading such material would probably consign her to a separate oven in hell. I understood her fears. Farting, open sex, masturbation, bloody river-head births, rape, relentless drops of semen, the toilet seat, flies, stains and many other wretched manifestations of the human condition stare at you from almost every page of this novella.
But now, having actually experienced life, and having grown up in a space that inspires my auto-fictional “Magamba Hostels” (I am still ploughing along), I understand “The House of Hunger” well. I now understand the aestheticisation of madness in Petina Gappah’s “An Elegy for Easterly”, Ignatius Mabasa’s “Mapenzi” or Alexander Kanengoni’s “Echoing Silences”. I now understand the fetishisation of open defecation in NoViolet Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names” or Chenjerai Hove’s “Bones”. I am now comfortable with walking with Brian Chikwava’s narrator along obscure and backyard spaces of “Harare North”, or with Muchuri’s squatter camp characters in “Chibarabada”.
I am now comfortable with all this because I have accepted the fatalistic logic of the presence of the wretched and ignoble in literature. It’s a presence that is so ubiquitous that even literary texts from the developed world feature such wretched fetishes. It’s so ubiquitous that I have failed to avoid it in my own “Magamba Hostels” (work in progress).
So last week I visited one of the best libraries in Joburg - the Alliance Française library. While going through their catalogue (most of the books were in French, of course), I stumbled upon one text that was written in English. The title: “Infinite Possibilities” (Sylvie Germain, 1998). I was drawn to this text because the central character is a literature professor lol! -as you know by now, my love for literature is unquestionable. I wanted to find out how a character of my calling would spend his time in a book.
“Infinite Possibilities” is a story about a literature professor in Prague, Prokop Poupa, who is dismissed by the communist regime and reduced to working as a cleaner in a block of flats. During this experience of marginal life, the professor has a lot of time to think and integrate his surroundings into his sublime philosophies. In one of his philosophies, in which he and his friends ruminate on the possible location of a personal deity’s shrine, Prokop convinces his friends (who are also victims of communist banishment) that the best place to locate such a shrine is a toilet.
The choice of the toilet came from the fact that Prokop paid a great deal of attention to his abject surroundings, including the toilet. He loved the possibilities the toilet offered to the extent that he built a couple of shelves in the toilet: “And then there was the toilet. It was a long, narrow recess, with one little window high up on the far wall which looked out on to another wall less than a metre away, and therefore let in only a meagre amount of daylight. Despite the limited amount of space in the room, Prokop had built shelves along the whole length of each wall which were crammed with empty jars, spare light bulbs, nails, candles, pieces of string, old tap, wornout shoes and various tools.”
Crazy, isn’t he? Wait until you hear him explain why he chose the toilet to locate the shrine of his personal deity: “The lavatory … is the one place in the home we cannot avoid going to. It is actually possible never to go down to the cellar or up to the attic. Some people never go near the balcony, or don’t have one at all.” But, according to Prokop’s reasoning, no one can avoid the toilet.
His choice of the toilet goes deeper than that though: “But that’s not the real crux of the matter. What makes this haven of democracy truly special is that, rather like Descartes’ wood stove, it is quite definitely a holy place of meditation. As soon as you place your posterior on the toilet bowl, you are inescapably confronted by the human condition in all its crudeness, and you are really forced to admit to yourself that the emperor has no clothes.
“Yes indeed, the Emperor and Empress are also just two among many omnivorous, smelly, dung-producing mammals. Try and think yourself superior to your fellow creatures when you know that. The toilet is an excellent school of humility; it’s difficult to mistake yourself for a god in there. It sets the record straight.”
Prokop is not alone in this. We have all, with varying degrees of success, tried to conjure up images of some [unearthly] people astride a toilet seat. The image could not just come up: we couldn’t imagine so and so actually going to the toilet. But then, Prokop’s argument is that the toilet is a haven of democracy: it’s the great equaliser.
But Prokop’s toilet thesis goes further than. It’s a thesis on power. It’s preoccupation with the abject space of the toilet reminds me of Achille Mbembe’s treatise on power in “On the Postcolony” (2001). The fetishisation of the wretched aspects of the human body, especially the orifices and what passes out of them, is actually a demystification of power. It’s a way of confronting power and discovering that it’s human after all, just like us.