I bring up these developments in Latin America to open a parallax view of two topics in Priya Gopal’s stimulating and forward-looking lecture. The first is the idea from Frantz Fanon about the misadventures of national consciousness in decolonising societies, and the second is the concluding note of her lecture, which proposes literature and culture as reliable agents in moulding a fair and just world. I wish to synthesise these two strands of Priya’s argument by thinking of literature and culture less as national exports but more in the sense that Aijaz Ahmad and also Wole Soyinka intend…
I did not expect Nicolás Maduro to last this long in office; I was always apprehensive that the progressive and radical reforms in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez might not last. The violent, US-led overthrow of the president of Venezuela in the early hours of 3rd January, was the culmination of a series of aggressions, military and diplomatic, long begun but escalated during the presidency of George W. Bush, with the coup attempt on the government of Chavez in 2004. A certain bureaucrat named Otto Reich was Bush’s man in charge of that adventure. In the wake of US attacks on Venezuelan resources earlier last year, there was a wish, coming close to a hope, that the militaries of the leftist governments of South America (if not the entire Latin America) would rally to Maduro’s defence in the nationalist spirit of solidarity that the region had nurtured since Símon Bolivar, the historic unifier.
That has not happened. Yet. Instead, the Nobel Peace Prize committee conferred its honour on Maria Corina Machado, the conservative leader of the opposition in Venezuela. Chile elected as president the far-right politician, José Antonio Kast, who ran on the Trumpian platform of fear-mongering against immigrants, mostly Venezuelans. Election results in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina all favoured rightwing candidates; the spectre of denationalisation of citizens continues to haunt the once-progressive regime in Nicaragua.
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I bring up these developments in Latin America to open a parallax view of two topics in Priya Gopal’s stimulating and forward-looking lecture. The first is the idea from Frantz Fanon about the misadventures of national consciousness in decolonising societies, and the second is the concluding note of her lecture, which proposes literature and culture as reliable agents in moulding a fair and just world. I wish to synthesise these two strands of Priya’s argument by thinking of literature and culture less as national exports but more in the sense that Aijaz Ahmad and also Wole Soyinka intend; that is, as creative activities taking place in specific places but not limited to those spaces, whether they are segmented as nations or regions.
In an important sense, the so-called rightward swing in the region might be a measure of the degree to which electoralism is being instituted, and Kast’s victory is best taken in the same spirit that the world accepted Lula’s three years ago in Brazil. We have observed similar developments in other parts of the world as bourgeois liberal democracy continues to experience all sorts of contortions as does capitalism, its economic rationale. Yet, Latin America is important to this topic of the pitfalls of nationalism partly because of the planetary scope of Priya’s reflections, and partly because that is where, according to the late Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, modern nationalism originated. That nationalism was supra, and its main architect in political terms was the Venezuelan statesman, Símon Bolivar, the general who famously ploughed the sea.
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On the level of description, as Fanon famously quips in that chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, every decolonisation is a success. Written in the heat of the battle, of course, Fanon’s submissions must be placed in context, and for the purpose of taking up the second topic in Priya’s lecture pertaining to literature and culture, I have often found an opening to the potentialities of decolonisation in his critique of national bourgeoisie of an independent country.
This might mean that the nationalist spirit that Fanon describes as a minefield of contradictory symptoms in the wake of flag independence across the world was a deterioration of a more imaginative, though somewhat compromised, form that Bolivar promoted. That form is closer to confederation in the parlance of party politics, and capitalism has been instrumental to its fitful existence. It rears its head every now and then, either as Pan-Africanism via George Padmore and Pan-Slavism through Josip Boraz Tito, or as a chronic beacon in the Cuba Revolution. Anticolonial nationalism was all well and good as it directed all its energy at vanquishing imperialism, but on the eve of that victory, the disconnect that was always there deepened and took a specific form, and what was delivered was a Pyrrhic victory that sundered the social struggle from the national struggle.
To put this in everyday terms and paraphrase Kwame Nkrumah sideways, the political kingdom was largely secured but not much was added onto it. Some justice, yes, but hardly any bread for the many. On the level of description, as Fanon famously quips in that chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, every decolonisation is a success. Written in the heat of the battle, of course, Fanon’s submissions must be placed in context, and for the purpose of taking up the second topic in Priya’s lecture pertaining to literature and culture, I have often found an opening to the potentialities of decolonisation in his critique of national bourgeoisie of an independent country. This is more so because, long after Fanon, another progressive intellectual, called Samir Amin, has taken a more controversial but hardnosed look at the bourgeoisies of African countries, seeing potentials for development in national economies without undue conflicts with regional units such as ECOWAS. The much-maligned comprador elite as an importer of finished goods or commissioned agent is the unexpected arbiter of culture that materialises as a supplement to the social struggle — the making of a variety of art forms with all available technical knowledge — verbal, figural, literary.
Thus, it is to the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The General in His Labyrinth, among others, that we turn for imaginative accounts of the historic and continuous struggle for popular freedom in Latin America. Contrariwise but still within the realm of dialectics, the technology imported by the comprador elites of Nigeria becomes serviceable in the production of music as art and commerce, most noticeable in the work of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti which, paradox of paradoxes, stands as an uncompromising critique of that system. Even in the noncombative genres, including the ones that prioritise the lives of the wealthy, praise-singing quickly defaults as a complex carrier of new cultures.
To conclude on a jovial but relevant note and in tribute to BJ: I deliberately inserted the name, Otto Reich, as a Bush-era diplomat in Latin America, even though he was just another bureaucrat quickly replaced and easily forgotten. According to The New Yorker, Mr Reich was from the family that owned the brand of rum known as Bacardi, having fled Cuba in the wake of the Revolution and settled in the United States. During a visit to Bloomington in 2009 to hang out with his friend, Fẹmi Ọṣọfisan, BJ accompanied us on a trip to buy grocery. At the store, he reached for a bottle of Bacardi, but upon being told that the family that owned that brand was opposed to Castro, he vehemently refused to buy it!
Akin Adesokan is a professor of Comparative Literature/Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
This is a response to Priyamvada Gopal’s symposium lecture for the Biodun Jeyifo at 80 event titled, “Who’s Afraid of Decolonization: Reflections on Persistent Pasts and Planetary Futures” delivered at MUSON Centre, Lagos on the 5th of January.
