Perceiving Pain in African Literature by Zoe Norridge (review)
- Perceiving Pain in African Literature by Zoe Norridge
This important new study challenges us to think about the ways in which pain and suffering have been represented in African literature and the role of the writer and literary critic in relation to this. Norridge weaves together an impressive breadth of critical material from across memory studies, trauma theory, and medical anthropology to inform careful close readings that in turn bring new insights to broader debates in African, postcolonial, and world literature.
Engaging with literary fiction and nonfiction from West, East, and southern Africa published in English and French since 1970, Perceiving Pain in African Literature argues that literature is uniquely suited to exploring both the complexities and singularity of pain. The first chapter lays down the foundations for this argument, using Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins to open up discussion about the ways in which language and narrative can explore extreme suffering, and shows how critical terms borrowed from anthropology (for example “chaotic” or “polythetic”) can help articulate the nuances of pain. Through close attention to Vera’s aesthetic innovation and use of layered imagery, Norridge highlights the potential of fiction to create new systems of meaning—“vocabularies, grammars and image libraries of emotion” (33) that convey the particular intimacy of pain.
The book’s second chapter explores the different ways in which Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Time of Michael K represent mental [End Page 144] and physical pain and, through literary description, blur boundaries between the two. Norridge locates these texts within debates in anthropology and philosophy around somatization and mind-body dualism but also within the context of South Africa, arguing that their rejection of any fixed relationship between minds and bodies acts as a form of resistance to the ideology of racial discrimination that governed apartheid.
The book’s third chapter uses the lens of gender to consider the ways in which pain and suffering are experienced and given meaning within both evolving and pre-existing structures and systems. Building on close readings of an impressive range of texts concerned with female experiences of pain from across French-speaking West Africa—including Ivorian Amadou Kourouma’s Les Soliels des indépendances and three novels by Cameroonian writer Calixthe Beyala—Norridge shows how these writers reveal and challenge the complex relationship of pain to the cultural, personal, and symbolic, and the contentious ways in which gendered pain might be appropriated.
Moving from West to East Africa, the book’s fourth chapter considers literary representations of pain in the context of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, engaging with two memoirs by Rwandan women—Yolande Mukagasana’s La mort ne veut pas de moi and Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s Fuire ou mourir au Zaïre—and texts by Véronique Tadjo and Boubacar Boris Diop written as part of the “Rwanda: Écrire par devoir de mémoire” project. Norridge chooses these texts to highlight the capacity of literary narrative to articulate the personal nature of pain. Her close readings show the ways in which these writers who write around (rather than writing directly about or through) pain use an immediacy of sensory information and confront the moral complexities of responding to suffering in order to convey the individuality or singularity of it. Through this singularity, these texts contest the dangers of a collective narrative and “the homogenizing project of genocide” (23).
The book’s final chapter, the most diverse geographically, asks “can literature heal?” and if so “who?” and “how?” In response, Norridge focuses on three texts grounded in recent conflict: Aminatta Forna’s novel The Memory of Love, set in the aftermath of civil war in Sierra Leone, Antjie Krog’s nonfiction account of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull, and James Orbinski’s memoir of his work with Médicins Sans Frontières in Somalia, Rwanda, and the DRC. She examines how these narratives contain and communicate pain, interrogating ideas of recovery and revealing the power of telling stories to...
