Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola

The subject is a multiplicity.

—Nietzsche

The remarks that follow bear upon the general question of life, sovereignty, and terror. To my mind, life does not exist in-and-of-itself. It does not reflect a generic property per se, but a mode of being-in-the-world, that is, a way of inhabiting the world; in short, a manner of confrontation and familiarity with the world and its full range of potentialities. The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

More precisely, I am interested in these manners of living and risking death that either are situated beyond the political as a vernacular (and socially obligatory) language of the social bond, or push its frontiers to the point of relegating the political to border zones; or, by simply ignoring it altogether, end up revealing its extraordinary vulnerability and weakening the authority and centrality that our era has wound up attributing to it. These forms of existence are born of singular experiences that I choose to call threshold or specular experiences. These are, essentially, extreme forms of human life, death-worlds, forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that confer upon them the status of living dead (ghosts). In the contemporary African context, these extreme forms of human existence are experienced through the corruption of the senses as well as through the horror that accompanies wars and outbreaks of terror (see Mbembe, On the Postcolony).

To treat the question of the languages of life in their relationship with sovereignty, specular violence, and terror, I will depart from what is conventionally called Western thought. Forgetting for a moment its heterogeneity, I will demonstrate how (and implicitly critique the ways in which), when it treats the languages of life, Western tradition—more than any other—accords a critical role to the notions of self, truth, and time. ¹ Using the metaphor of the mirror, I will base my critique on a re-reading of two African texts, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This critique rests upon the notion—developed by Tutuola—of the ghost, or better, of the wandering subject. The metaphor of the mirror, I will argue, allows us to envisage ghostly power and sovereignty as aspects of the real integral to a world of life and terror rather than tied to a world of appearances. Finally, I will show how Tutuola's fiction allows us to conceive of the idea of life, sovereignty, and terror as fundamentally linked to that of the imagination, work, and remembrance.

Dualisms

Five attributes have been decisive in the articulation of a certain idea of being, time and truth in modern Western criticism. The first is the quasi-ontological privilege granted to reason over all other forms of human understanding (emotions, passions, and feelings). Whether the subject under consideration is a knowing, an aesthetic, or a speaking subject, acting or producing and manipulating tools, it is always a question of a self up against an object, in an attitude that aims at the mastery of the said object by means of reason and technique (see Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind; Heidegger, Being and Time; Sartre, Being and Nothingness); Husserl, Ideas). A corollary of reason is the emphasis placed upon self-possession, the desire for self-perfection, and self-mastery (self-government) through the development of interiority (see Foucault, History of Sexuality; Ricoeur, Oneself as Another; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self; Elias, La civilization des moeurs). To these attributes, we must add two others: the differentiation between the human being and other animals through work (Marx), and the importance of desire and pleasure in the calculus of happiness...