The Inhuman at the Limits of Literary Imagination

In 2017, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé published a peculiar novel—even a monstrous novel, we might say—that takes up one of the predominant paradigms of inhumanity today, the phenomenon of global terrorism: Le fabuleux et triste destin d'Ivan et Ivana, or The Fabulous and Unfortunate Destiny of Ivan and Ivana. My interest in focusing on this text here lies in the questions it raises about the capacities of literary form to reframe oppositions between the human and the inhuman. More specifically, how should we understand the unsentimental, even playful approach Condé takes to terrorism in this work, and what does it say about literature's purchase on a global problem Condé characterizes as a "human" one: a problem of "human and social dysfunction" giving rise to self-destruction, to a violent conflict between "one part of humanity [who] seems bent on destroying the other" ("Maryse Condé")?¹ What sort of intervention does Condé's unseemly fable make into debates over the role of literature, and an aesthetic education, to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's terms, in violent times? We can only approach "a lasting peace," Spivak herself argues in her essay "Terror," if we exercise a literary imagination, if we "are trained into imagining the other, a necessary, impossible, and interminable task" (An Aesthetic Education 373–74). This work of imagination involves listening to the other and preparing for the "interruption of the epistemological," the interruption, that is, of "the attempt to construct the other as an object of knowledge" (373–74).² If the figure of the terrorist signifies for a Western audience the inhuman par excellence, the irrational and ruthless enemy of humanity and civilization—legitimizing, in turn, an endless War on Terror, and feeding Islamophobia across the Western world—Condé's novel prompts readers to reconsider what it means to see and fear the enemy as (in)human and to allow the imagination to interrupt that knowledge.

The specific events that prompted Condé to write this novel were the terrorist attacks of January 2015 in and around Paris that resulted in twenty deaths, including those of three attackers. The murders at the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo dominated news coverage, but the coordinated attacks spanned three days and also resulted in the deaths of hostages taken at a Kosher supermarket, as well as in the murder of a young police officer, Clarissa Jean-Philippe. It is this last murder—the murder of a black woman from Martinique by another French citizen, a black man of Malian descent—that Condé describes as a "turning point" for her that prompted her to pen this story ("Maryse Condé"). What interests her in this particular attack is the way it breaks with existing paradigms for explaining violence and solidarity. As she puts it, this murder demonstrated the mythic nature of the Négritude movement, the myth that racial identities create affinities that give rise to (anti-colonial) political solidarity.³ But she was also motivated to write in response to what she sees as an unprecedented form of violence—"a violence without regard for skin color, family, or friends"—that cannot simply be attributed to the usual suspects ("Maryse Condé"). "Rehearsing admonishments of colonialism and its aftermath is no longer enough," she states in an interview. "Violence now reigns…. 'Terrorist' attacks, as they're called, are drawing blood from the planet, affecting the world in its entirety: in India just as in Pakistan, in Turkey just as in Europe and America. Why are we in this situation? No one has clear answers. But what seems clear is that literature's mission has to change in response to this new information" ("Entretien" 155).

Condé identifies two challenges here. First, contemporary terrorist violence breaks with prior models of revolt, and thus requires new explanatory frameworks. "The notions that writers used to work with are fading," Condé asserts, continuing,

The Francophone Antillean writer isn't safe from this chaos. As a result of globalization, an invention of the modern world, he, too, is affected. And so, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, the young Martinican [End Page 31...