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Chapter Two Identities in Transition
We are a people in transition, a people in cultures that are weak in terms of our relationship to global power. There is no doubt that we always feel under assault, culturally that is, especially in terms of music, food, clothing…. At the same time, there is no doubt that no culture can remain isolated. So for me it’s about striking a balance between remaining true to ourselves in the light of cultural interaction and also about changing as a result of that interaction. (Dow 2005)1
The import of the above sentiments lies in Unity Dow’s vision and understanding of Botswana/African cultural identity as caught between the imaginaries of the local and the global; or, in the words of Bhabha, cultural identities are a matter of negotiation in “a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference” (Bhabha 2004: 55). In these imaginaries, Bhabha’s Third Space or a moment of “transition” must be seen as a watchword that keeps either dualities (of Africa and its others) in abeyance. Calling it a hyphenated moment between the “post”, Homi Bhabha conceives of this space as a thinking against and outside absolute contestations of “self” and “other”. It is this elusive and ever-shifting moment, I argue in this chapter, that distinguishes the raison d’etre of Dow’s life and the characters she has created in her fiction. In other words, Unity Dow’s vision and its agency are located in the non-positional and hybrid moment of transition that defines her life and fiction. This kind of agency confirms what Bhabha believes to be the abiding characteristic of any postcolonial critique:
propos(ing) forms of contestatory subjectivities that are empowered in the act of erasing the politics of binary opposition…. The contingent and the liminal become the times and the spaces for the historical representation of the subjects of cultural difference in a postcolonial criticism. (2004: 256)
The undercutting of the politics of binary oppositions is not unique to liminality. As will become clear, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome (and its related registers) works like liminality and is thus invoked in this chapter to explain an ambivalence located in social experience similar to liminal phenomena. In other words, the metaphor of the rhizome is used as a correlative of liminality, in this context what Bhabha would call mimicry – “moments of disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance” (1985: 162). In this rhizomic operation, I argue, the myth central to patriarchal hierarchies and binaries is completely challenged and undermined by Unity Dow’s main characters in the first two novels being examined in the chapter. It is this engagement with the binaries that allows (liminal) spaces of ambivalence, moments of disobedience and signs of resistance to emerge in their lives. In a move which Ashcroft terms “the interpolation of the dominant discourse” (2001: 53) – a tactical contravention of the rules and hierarchies which structure quotidian existence — the rhizomic metaphor enables the characters to address their agency by reflecting on and interrogating notions of the ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ from the conditions of their marginality and, in the process, to negotiate a dialogic, hybridized space of transition within which they can operate.
In an article entitled “Getting under the Skin of Power”, literary critic Anne Gagiano obliquely alludes to that moment of transition in Dow’s writing, describing her as “an important new voice from Botswana” (2004: 36) who “joins the company of African authors like Soyinka, Head, Marechera, Dangarembga and Vera” (ibid.: 36).2 In this article, Gagiano presents the fiction of Unity Dow as symbolizing the author’s capacity to get under the skin of those who not only wield power in her society, but also unfortunately abuse it. As a writer, Unity Dow, like Bessie Head, is concerned about the deleterious effects of power in Botswana. Gagiano summarizes Dow’s social engagement as follows:
Dow as an author holds up a mirror to her own society: simultaneously exposing its wastage of female potential and the harm both traditional culture and modern state structures allow to be inflicted on women, whilst also showing the contributions women can and do make in drawing on the benign potentialities of their culture and the structures of the state accessible to them. Her texts convey the impression of profound loyalty to her country and its people – but it is a love with eyes open to the evils and injustices that tarnish social health and cultural wellbeing. (2004: 48)
Indeed, it is not just Unity Dow’s fiction that offers a testament to her concern about the injustices that taint her society’s social health and wellbeing. Her entire life embodies that concern, one rooted in her profound belief that culture and tradition are oppressive categories. This conviction has prompted her to adopt a self-consciously liminal view of identity, as demonstrated in her interview, in the court case of 1994 and, finally, in her fiction.
In a related but different context, Margaret Lenta, another perceptive critic of Dow, presents her as a writer who tries to interpret the history of her largely traditional society “from within”. Lenta writes:
In interpreting the society in which she lives, Dow joins a tradition of African writing, in which the most famous practitioner is Nadine Gordimer, whose ‘history from the inside’ has offered an understanding of South Africa’s recent past and present to many readers. (2004: 34)
For Dow, this interpretation of the history of her small society has taken two forms, the first by her being “deeply involved in public life” (Lenta 2004: 34), and secondly through her fiction. In both endeavours, Dow presents a society whose tradition and modernity conspire to victimize women, reducing them to subalterns. This victimization is played out most spectacularly in her first two novels
Far and Beyon’ and The Screaming of the Innocent. In conversation with her brother Stan, the main character of Far and Beyon’ rues her gender status as follows:
It might not be fair for me to vent my anger on you but is it fair for the whole society around me to objectify me all the time? Is it fair that I am described as a water gourd with cracks? Is it fair that cows are paid to my father in exchange for my labour, both productive and reproductive? Someone else gets paid so that my children will not be mine! Is it fair that I am reduced to a sexual part? Represented as a hoof cut from a cow? Is it fair that I get instructed to obey my husband? To serve him without complaint? To tolerate his beatings, his unfaithfulness? I am sorry that you have to suffer my my telling you about it. (pp.153-4)
However, in a rather unusual play of cultural memory and patriarchal desire, Stan’s response is couched in absolute terms, that bespeak a realist and concrete narrative of cultural authority, as follows:
I cannot change the society around us. You cannot do that either. People have been doing things this way for centuries. (p. 153)
Stan’s statement demonstrates that his knowledge of (this) culture is that it is a preconstituted, holistic one, containing within itself codes by which it can authentically be interpreted. The statement reflects and echoes what happens in The Screaming of the Innocent in which women are not allowed any space and individuality to function. Indeed, propositions such as those proffered by Stan are neither axiomatic nor false but nonsensical, or meaningless, because their value and truth cannot be validated in any determinate way. It is this language of cultural description that Unity Dow is up against and needs to deconstruct.
Therefore, by being alert to and challenging culture’s oppressive tendencies, Dow represents Victor Turner’s concept of “antistructure” and tries to locate agency in the liminal space of culture. In Homi Bhabha’s words, this kind of “agency … seeks revision and reinscription: the attempt to negotiate the third locus, the intersubjective realm” (2004: 274). This sort of agency is also known as “the iterative … activity of the time-lag” (ibid.: 274) according to which identity is a matter of negotiation and is produced contingently.
This chapter examines specific reportage based on Unity Dow, the reportage read as a social text, and her first two works of fiction, in order to indicate the extent to which these texts privilege what Turner terms “the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with factors of existence” (1992: 106). The first part of the chapter examines the reportage based on Unity Dow’s life of political activism3, fighting for women’s rights, before she launched herself into a second career which involves writing fiction. As I show in the chapter, this reportage concerns straddling two cultures, or, to borrow Bhabha’s expression, Dow’s “compulsion to move beyond; to turn the present into the ‘post’; … to touch the future on its hither side” (2004: 26). By embarking on a legal battle with her Government in the mid-1990s over discriminatory citizenship laws, Unity Dow was able to “affirm the borders of culture’s insurgent and interstitial existence” (ibid.: 26). As I argue in this chapter, her successful challenging of Botswana’s patriarchal bulwark (with its fraught laws) inaugurates a significant moment in her subjectivity, characterized by locating culture in the margins and thereby pointing up the country’s interstitial cultural temporality which is marked by what Homi Bhabha.
Introduction
Chapter 1 Theorizing Liminality
Chapter 2 . Identities in Transition
Chapter 3 Interrogating Modernities
Chapter 4 Borderlands of Cultures
Chapter 5 Cosmopolitan Identities
Chapter 6 Minorities and other Marginals
Conclusion
Works Cited
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