The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (review)

In her book The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing, Dobrota Pucherová brings together ethical and postcolonial criticism in an analysis of desire in the literature of South Africa and Zimbabwe after 1960. Taking her lead from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, desire is calibrated as an ethical movement toward the other that renders one’s self and identity vulnerable. Privileging Levinas’s early understanding of eros, or erotic desire, but defined broadly to also include longing, yearning, friendship, and hospitality for the other, desire is understood to welcome the other within the self; rather than resulting in the epistemological violence of comprehension or objectification that characterized the functioning of desire in colonial discourse, it propels one toward the other’s ungraspable and inviolable alterity. As such, it can disrupt the binaries of identity politics and is presented as containing a profoundly ethical “revolutionary potential” (9), a potential that is traced in the work of Bessie Head, Dambudzo Marechera, and Yvonne Vera as well as in several more recent South African novels by Achmat Dangor, K. Sello Duiker, and Ishtiyaq Shukri. Although Pucherová’s working definition of desire is perhaps wanting in relation to the theorization of the other, and in particular the differentiation between the Levinasian other and the other of identity politics, it is nevertheless forceful in reading the interventions offered by her selected authors.

That the operation of desire in these works is dissident becomes clear in the context of southern Africa after 1960. The year of the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), in which the apartheid police killed 69 protestors, saw the rise of virulent, polemical identity politics in resistance to the minority governments in both South Africa and Zimbabwe. One of the most significant movements of the period, an account of which delineates the political and discursive context of the book’s main authors, is Black Consciousness. Formulated by Steve Biko and others in the late 1960s and 70s, Black Consciousness was importantly developed by a number of poets, such as Mongane Serote, Ingoapele Madingoane, and Mafika Gwala, whose work is illuminated by Pucherová in establishing the main divisions that ethical desire can be seen to transgress: categories of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and ancestry. Through mapping the prominent motifs in black consciousness poetry—particularly the recurring image of “Mother Africa” and imagery of black versus white—Pucherová shows that it successfully affirms black selfhood, but simultaneously constitutes the position of resistance to apartheid as essentially black, heterosexual, and male. As such, both women and white people are denied a position from which to speak, a difficulty that is emphasized and nuanced through a reading of the successful resistance poetry of two white authors, Wopko Jensma and Ingrid Jonker. Both of these poets’ work, although facing different challenges, most notably due to gender, is characterized not only by the movement of desire toward the other, but also a painful, schizophrenic splitting and self-alienation due to the lack of an appropriable speaking position.

An important argument that arises from this is the interrelation of all forms of othering. Going beyond positing the simultaneity of the binaries of race, gender, and sexuality, what is revealed by the analysis is the mutual constitution of these categories of othering. Thus in black consciousness poetry, the black, male, strong, creative, and virtuous speaking position emerges in opposition to the white oppressor and through the vehicle of the feminine, represented either as “Mother Africa”—passive, violated, and “the medium of male creativity” (32)—or as “treacherous, morally corrupt, and promiscuous” (33). The interconnections of these binaries are subsequently skillfully traced in their various forms throughout the rest of the book. In each work considered, the author is shown to resist and transgress the dominant identity politics, which replicates what it is meant to resist, through the diverse mechanism of desire disrupting oppositional identity formation. As a result, identity is seen as hybrid, complex, and coalescing through...