Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction by Michael Jackson (review)

There is a distinctive structure to Michael Jackson’s new book, Harmattan. It is reminiscent, in its effectiveness and its appeal, to the Holocaust “memoir,” Fugitive Pieces (1998), by the Canadian poet Anne Michaels: both are beautifully written books comprised of two unequal parts whose relation is unspecified—and suggestive by virtue of that fact. The explicit concern of both books is the relation between lives despoiled by war and the surface routines that precede and follow violence. Both ponder, too, the relationship between individual lives and the narratives that seem to live through those lives as if possessed of their own identities. Jackson writes that it is

curious…the way in which individuals and their stories metamorphose, each borrowing its identity from elsewhere and leaving us perennially uncertain as to whether we are authors of our own lives and who is the real author of any story told.

(45–46)

This quotation comes at the beginning of the second part of Harmattan, whose title invokes a West African word for a dry, parching wind that takes place at the turn of the year, blowing an obscuring, red, dusty, fog across the land.

Jackson describes his book as a “philosophical fiction.” It continues that interrogation, prominent in his recent works (e.g., Jackson 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), of how best to write the movement of contemporary lives—their power and freedom to access the wherewithal that enables their continuing to take meaningful shape—while also writing of the global forces apparently ranged against them. This writing could also be termed “cosmopolitan” in ethos. Is it not the case, Jackson urges, that their knowledge of the particularities of individual human lives (polis) enables anthropologists to illuminate the general conditions of a universal human nature (cosmos)? Our disciplinary focus is, or should be, this dialectic: illuminating the connections between human being and being human. In this enterprise, furthermore, the genre of expression—ethnography, fiction, philosophy, folktale, or myth—is less consequential than the author’s sensibility.

Is it not the case, for instance, that everywhere one discerns “a human need to live life on one’s own terms” (10–11)? Among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, as in Cambridge (England) and Cambridge (Massachusetts), for instance, Jackson has found people working to determine for themselves the order of their lives, and not to feel determined by a world they have not created. Amid the contingency and unpredictability, the disintegration and humiliation of lives, people endeavour to inhabit a world defined on their own terms and in their own time. It is the fleshing out of this specific human trait—both a capability and a liability—that occupies Jackson in both parts of his text and that gives his book a sense of unity.

The first part of the book is entitled, “Limitrophes,” a Latin–Greek composite term suggesting a sustaining frontier. This concept of a fecund borderland pertains to the process by which human beings hope to effect a personal and social order in their lives. Jackson adapts the term to:

describe ethnographically and autobiographically, the life-giving potential of places, people, and powers [—also states of mind and genres of expression—] that lie beyond the pale of our established lifeworlds and to show that existential vitality depends on going beyond what has been prescribed by custom, internalized as habit, or enshrined in received ideas of truth and reality.

(6)

In order to live on their own terms—to “come into their own” (4)—people everywhere move beyond the given world of culture, routine, and convention, of conformity, normativity, and traditionalism. The “road of excess” they find often gives way to “a palace of wisdom” (5).

Among the Kuranko, this limitrophic insight expresses itself as the perceived necessary and complementary relationship between the myths that support the status quo and the folktales that explore fantastic possibilities. In classical Greek metaphysics, the insight expresses itself as the relationship between nomos (law) and phusis (life), as well as between Apollonian constraint and Dionysian revelry. Every human situation [End...