Jennifer Wenzel

Petro-magic-realism: toward a political ecology of Nigerian literature

The first Nigerian novel in English to make a splash on the Anglo-American literary scene was not Chinua Achebe’s landmark Things Fall Apart (1958), but instead Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952). Hailed by Dylan Thomas as a ‘bewitching’ tale in ‘young English’, Tutuola’s novel combines the universal appeal of a quest narrative punctuated by encounters with supernatural beings such as ‘Hungry-creature’, ‘Invisible-Pawn’, and ‘half-bodied baby’, on the one hand, with the exotic appeal of an idiosyncratic, perhaps even primitive, prose style, on the other. The journey that structures the narrative is undertaken by the eponymous protagonist, who travels to the abode of the dead*Deads’ Town*in an attempt to bring an important person back to life. Unlike Orpheus, Ceres, or Gilgamesh, however, the palm-wine drinkard seeks the recovery not of a wife, child, or bosom friend, but an employee: a palm-wine tapster, whom the drinkard’s father had hired to tap wine for the drinkard from a farm of 560,000 palm trees, and who falls to his death while on the job. Tutuola’s unusual, yet parallel, syntax conveys the relationship between drinkard and tapster: ‘I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life’, the drinkardnarrator tells us, while the ‘expert palm-wine tapster [. . .] had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day’. Together, the expert palm-wine tapster and the prolific drinkard had formed a closed circuit of production and consumption. Tutuola’s neologism, drinkard , expresses this professionalisation of consumption in a way that neither drinker nor drunkard could. The ‘work’ of drinking palm wine becomes impossible without the tapster, yet the dead tapster cannot return to the land of the living to resume his labour. Embedded within Tutuola’s marvellous tale, in other words, is an economic analysis of resource extraction and labour relations. A similar dynamic appears in at least two other tapster tales from Nigeria* Ben Okri’s short story ‘What the Tapster Saw’ and Karen King-Aribisala’s ‘Tale of the Palm-Wine Tapster’ in her novel, Kicking Tongues*and my goal in this essay is to understand what such seemingly magical stories about natural resources tell us about the multi-layered relationships between Nigerian literary production and other commodity exports. Okri’s ‘What the Tapster Saw’ depicts the superimposition of a petroleum economy over a palm economy in the Niger Delta. The equivalent of the journey to Deads’ Town in this 1987 short story is the nightmarish vision of a palm-wine tapster who falls from a tree while trespassing on Delta Oil Company territory; during a

The Problem of Metaphor: Tropic Logic in Cattle-Killing Prophecies and their Afterlives

‘Cattle are the race, they being dead the race dies’: this is how the Bomvana chief Moni warned the Xhosa king Sarhili against killing his cattle amidst prophecies promising that killing cattle would catalyse the revitalisation of Sarhili’s people. In The Ama-Xosa: Life and Customs, historian JH Soga cites Moni’s warning in his discussion of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856–57 and Sarhili’s pivotal role in it (Soga 1932:122). Moni’s statement has come to function as a proverbial maxim or moral for the Cattle-Killing – a statement of cultural commonsense that pithily captures both the irreducible relationship between cattle and people in the Xhosa worldview, as well as the poignant contrast between the renewed world imagined in Cattle-Killing prophecies, on the one hand, and their devastating aftermath, on the other. In this article, I want to begin by noting and troubling the status of Moni’s statement as a self-evident commonplace, in order to analyse the productive and problematic role of metaphor (what I call tropic logic) in Cattle-Killing prophecies and in the archive that has accreted around them.

Turning over a new leaf

In this paper we explore the potential applicability of evidence of health-enabling effects of elements of the built environment – particularly access to nature – deriving from research in healthcare facilities to evidence-based design in the custodial context. Drawing on comparative qualitative research conducted in the UK and the Nordic region, we argue that although available data lack direct comparability, there is evidence that access to nature generates the same health-enabling effects in custody as are recognised in healthcare facilities. Reflecting on the differing political contexts of imprisonment in the two study areas, we conclude by advocating further research both to better understand health-enabling elements of the custodial built environment, and to better enable robust findings from healthcare facilities to be applied in custodial contexts.

Style as Substance

Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World examines Product RED, an initiative that raises money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria by selling high-end consumer goods that are cobranded with RED and endorsed by Irish rock star Bono and fellow celebrities. Companies selling RED-branded goods have included American Express, Apple, Armani, Converse, Hallmark, and Motorola; in addition to high-profile advertising for these products, the initiative has featured RED-themed issues of Vogue, The Lancet, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Brand Aid’s authors, development studies scholars Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte, take RED as a case study of an emergent approach to international development and humanitarian assistance that marshals the allure of consumerism and celebrity culture, promising consumers the possibility of “low-cost heroism” while enhancing the “cool quotient” of the participating companies and of development itself. The authors call this phenomenon “Brand Aid,” a term that denotes “both a business practice and a development intervention”: Brand Aid conjoins “aid to brands” and “brands that provide aid” (121, 11). They theorize the emergence of the “aid celebrity”—exemplars include not only entertainers like Bono but also more sober experts like economist Jeffrey Sachs and physician Paul Farmer. In an era when celebrities increasingly involve themselves with matters of global concern, Richey and Ponte argue, international development and humanitarian assistance organizations also find themselves having to function more like celebrities (47). My first encounter with the arguments in this book was at a lecture at the University of Michigan in 2007 by one of the authors, who laid out a searching, at times even scathing, critique of the RED initiative while also sporting an Inspi(RED) t-shirt from the Gap underneath her fashionably-cut wool suit. While such mixed messages—which come off as the knowing wink of postmodern irony—might echo Bono’s own half-smirking

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Even if it is not quite accurate to say that the emergent subfield of postcolonial ecocriticism is the house that Nixon built, his essay ‘‘Environmentalism and Postcolonialism’’ has certainly been a seminal provocation for one of postcolonial studies’ most vibrant new directions. When this essay was published in 2005, Nixon was able to point to a conspicuous mutual silence between the two discourses; the intervening years (particularly the past two) have seen the publication of several important books and edited collections, by scholars including Liz DeLoughrey and George Handley, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, and Pablo Mukherjee, that break (and complicate) this silence. Anyone engaging postcolonial ecocriticism today must point to Nixon’s essay (revised as the final chapter of Slow Violence) as an opening salvo—perhaps not quite as ground-breaking as his mentor Edward Said’s Orientalism, but hugely influential nonetheless. Thus, one can hardly overstate the importance of this work, even if (in a temporal torsion Nixon would appreciate) its impact has been felt long before the book’s publication. ‘‘Slow violence’’ is the kind of concept so indispensable that it almost immediately attains the status of common sense: like ideology, once you learn the trick of perceiving it rather than looking through it, you suddenly see it everywhere. Or, perhaps not: one of the core arguments of this monumental book is that slow violence is, by its very nature, extraordinarily difficult to perceive in real time and to represent in images or narratives useful for activism and the quest for justice. By ‘‘slow violence,’’ Nixon means forms of accretive, attritional harm that are nearly impossible to grasp within the rhythms of a 24-hour news cycle. Early in this book, he mentions domestic violence as an example, but environmental injustice is his main concern. Instances of slow violence considered here include climate change, soil erosion and deforestation, bioaccumulation of industrial toxins (including the long aftermaths of spectacular disasters at Bhopal and Chernobyl), marginalization of local communities in the name of resource extraction or infrastructural development, and ‘‘precision’’ or ‘‘smart’’ weapons like cluster bombs and depleted uranium that keep killing indiscriminately long after the cessation of hostilities. In addition to the physical damage done to people and ecosystems, Nixon consistently draws attention to the discursive aspects of slow violence: the representational regimes of invisibility, ‘‘spatial amnesia,’’ and euphemism that abet material forms of harm by keeping them out of sight and out of mind. Slow violence, Nixon writes memorably, is violence ‘‘in the passive voice’’ (131). Its dilated temporalities demand that we rethink, in yet another way, the post in post-conflict, post-Cold War, postcolonial, postapartheid.

Meat Country (Please Do Not Feed Baboons and Wild Animals)

Like Julia Martin in A Millimetre of Dust, I write with an awareness of ‘‘coming after’’—not in Martin’s historical sense of living in the wake of a centuries-long process of displacement and disenfranchisement, but, nonetheless, in something more than the literal, paratextual sense of an afterword that reflects upon the arguments that have come before. Reading the essays collected here, I cannot help but think of Nadine Gordimer’s puzzlement in her 1984 review of J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, as she measured its odd protagonist’s odd commitment to the idea of gardening against the wars raging both in the novel and in the land. A quarter of a century later, after the States of Emergency and the negotiated settlement and the decade or more of democracy, perhaps we can hear Gordimer’s concluding query with a different kind of urgency: ‘‘Beyond all creeds and moralities, this work of art asserts, there is only one: to keep the earth alive, and only one salvation, the survival that comes from her. . . . Hope is a seed. That’s all. That’s everything. It’s better to live on your knees, planting something . . .?’’ Keeping the earth alive—or, as Coetzee or K might have it, the idea of the earth— has become an imperative beyond all others not least because, in the intervening years, we have come to recognize the modern industrial system built upon hydrocarbon capitalism as a longstanding assault upon the earth with consequences more global, catastrophic, enduring, and unpredictable than any literal ‘‘war’’ against which the idea of gardening, the idea of the earth, must be defended. Yet the recent recognition of climate change as threatening ecological collapse has been closely followed by the spectacle of economic collapse; both collapses are, of course, global, with locally differentiated and variously distributed causes and effects. In other words, we now face on a planetary scale the kind of puzzlement that Gordimer confronted in measuring the idea of gardening against the urgencies of the antiapartheid struggle: is nurturing pumpkins as one’s children, or procuring water by