Wars without borders: Writers at war
Address presented to the Third International Writers' Conference of the Mauritian Writers' Association. The theme of the conference, held in August 2004, was Beyond Borders: Regional Voices in the Global Marketplace
The conference theme is Beyond Borders: Regional Voices in the Global Marketplace. In this concluding session, I would like to return to the beginning and address two aspects of the subject that should have been central to our deliberations and that the conference could have unpacked more methodically than perhaps we had time to do: The first is the significance of borders and the second the contrast between the regional and the global.
We are not in control, Mauritian Writers Association President, Shakantula Hawoldar, says. But we are also in control, dear colleagues and comrades. Those like us are the world’s majority. Yet we are forever looking for validation outside of ourselves. We have no need to look over our shoulders all the time to hear what London or Paris thinks. Those who rule us do so with our implicit or explicit consent. I need not enumerate the countless examples around the world of those like us who chose to rise and kick out tyrants. Where there is a political will there’s a revolutionary way.
"For a boy born in my time and place, attitude guaranteed survival, if not triumph over your environment, better than blades and bullets"
For my part, I learnt from leaders of the stature of Lumumba, Cabral, Mondlane, Nyerere, Luthuli, Sobukwe, Biko, Tambo and Mandela never to allow patronage, however generous, to cloud my values, compromise my integrity, and generally castrate my mind. Writers do not engage in or countenance conspiracies of silence. A story that must be told never forgives silence. Kindly allow me, therefore, to narrate something of my story.
I am a Native. That is what First Nations’ people in my country were once called. But I am a Native with an attitude. For a boy born in my time and place, attitude guaranteed survival, if not triumph over your environment, better than blades and bullets that became basic survival kit among my peers, who were more trapped, however, by their uncongenial environment, like pus oozing from a septic sore, than I was lucky not to be.
As a Native with an attitude, one of the few qualities I came to regard as sacrosanct in life was irreverence, a quality perhaps that every writer needs to cultivate. Irreverence is what translates into attitude – the propensity simply to be and to let be, acknowledging no heights as being too high to scale. As a Native with an attitude, therefore, I learnt to play second fiddle to nobody and to become the Fiddler on the Roof. It was all about self-affirmation but within the context of our people‘s struggles for emancipation – struggles, I might add, that know no borders, because oppression is indivisible. This is to say you are not free until I, too, am free, for when all is said and done, the prisoner and the warder share the same premises.
As a Native with an attitude, I learnt, too, what Iyanla Vanzant teaches that ‘we can make excuses and blame others, but we are responsible to and for ourselves. When we find something or someone creating in our lives that which we do not want, we must muster the courage and strength to stop it’. Perhaps the reason I started writing was to speak up for myself and for others in my situation – or worse.
Something of who I am, who my forebears were, where I come from, where I have been, and where I am going always adheres to my being. I take all that which is me very much for granted. I suppose I have always had a clear sense of self. I never had reason to agonise over my identity. Identity crisis is for me a psychological and sociological construct of no practical import. I never wished to be anything other than what I am and, in the words of St Francis De Sales, ‘to be that perfectly’. And knowing my ideal, I did as Paramhansa Yogananda advises, ‘I lived for that’. That is when I discovered that it is only in your mind that you build or destroy your self-esteem. Borders are barriers to self-emancipation, and self-emancipation is the key to the emancipation of society. They are prisons the mind constructs, if you let it.
‘When you concern yourself with doing only what others think you can do, you lay the floor of your prison,’ Iyanla Vanzant adds. ‘When you conform your activities based on what others might say, you put the bars around your prison. When you allow what others have done or are doing to determine what you can do, you build the roof of your prison…It is our concern over what others say, do and think about us that imprisons our mind, body and spirit.’
I have always endeavoured, therefore, never to be a prisoner of my own mind. I do not consider myself a regional voice anymore than I consider anyone mainstream. I am not a creature from the world of Conrad‘s ‘heart of darkness’, tucked away somewhere behind God‘s back to be produced from time to time at exhibitions as some exotica!
I have great sympathy, however, with Alka Saraogi’s definition of the regional voice in India as writing not in English that ’yet clamours to be heard all over the world’. There is need, nonetheless, to problematise her statement further. Her own work, now translated from Hindi into several languages, contradicts her self-deprecating description of herself as being a regional voice of local significance only. Besides, to be heard in India is the numerical equivalent of being read throughout Europe and America. What makes the one phenomenon regional and the other universal? Moreover, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov were not any more regional because they wrote in the unfashionable language of the Russian Steppes – or Chaucer for not writing in Greek or Latin. The only authors I care to read today (Isabel Allende, Nawal el Saadawi, Giovanni Guareschi, Pablo Neruda, Garcia Marquez, Hasek, Mahfouz) have all come to me courtesy of translation. I am proud to add to that list the name of Alka Saraogi.
The first novel in African literature to enter the body of world literature (admittedly as problematic a construct as any we are considering) was Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (1925), originally written in Sesotho. Two of the leading writers in the world today, and not just in Africa, are Ngugi wa Thiong’o, now writing in Gikuyu, and Mazisi Kunene, who for more than 40 years has demonstrated the sustainability, validity, profundity, integrity and authenticity of African language literature. Kunene’s epics, Emperor Shaka the Great and Anthem of the Decades, originally written in isiZulu and both published in translation in 1982, will no doubt outlive any of our inane, tame creations in English. To Kunene and Ngugi I owe the decolonisation of my own mind.
The world’s best sellers of all time, The Bible and the Holy Koran, have never relied (not even in the colonies) on either English/French or the global marketplace (unless you care to characterise the Vatican or Saudi Arabia as the supreme marketplaces of them all!). The purveyors of such works at the marketplaces we call churches and mosques knew that God‘s people are multilingual (and He the supreme linguist of them all) and want to hear His Word in the vernacular. And writers are gods!
Former University of Mauritius vice-chancellor, Jagadish Manrakhan, cautions against equating influence or literary success with marketplace success; against confusing recognition – and we all crave recognition which inclusion in the Western canon may represent – with accomplishment.
‘Writing is a long process of introspection, it is a voyage toward the darkest caverns of consciousness, a long slow meditation,’ Isabel Allende says. It is thus not the language in which you write that provides literature its lasting appeal but something more innate that has reference to inventiveness and craftsmanship, enabling you to reach down to the innermost recesses of your consciousness and up to uncommon literary heights. It is your ability to articulate uncanny insights into the human condition, irrespective of the language in which you choose to express yourself. It is a colonial mind that equates intelligence with fluency in English or French, even if you speak the language of your ancestors worse than the village idiot.
Literature requires verbal dexterity that command of a language, any language, confers. Verbal art recognises no hierarchy of languages, which exists only in the colonised mind. A national literature project, such as the Mauritian Writers’ Association is engaged in, should be about ’decolonising the mind’, stripping it of the superficial outrageously trying to pass for the essential concerns and characteristics of literature.
The essentials of literature cannot be contained within borders. They are truly universal! My concerns, more than my chosen tongue, confer legitimacy on my life’s self-projects. They have always been and remain mainstream to me, in spite of my deluded countrymen’s efforts, that were doomed to failure from the beginning, to consign those of my skin shade and those whose concerns I share to the margins of social and political respectability, even though we constitute the majority in the beloved country that has shaped my self-image and determined my life‘s self-projects.
But I also lived for 33 years – more than half of my life – as an exile, officially described as a stateless person. Those who remained in my country were also stripped of their citizenship, however, in the land of their birth and confined to some barren areas of the country known as bantustans or homelands. We were a hashish-smoking fiction writer’s creation: a nation of people in their country but without a country we could call our own. I believe only Palestinians know what all that means. "The Palestinians’ right of return is really a principle," says Ray Hanana, former president of the Palestinian American Congress. "Their homes no longer exist. Their lands are changed. Where will they return to? The alternative is one of hope for a future where the Palestinian refugees can rebuild their lives, restore their culture and move from revolution to renaissance." The solution to the "Palestinian problem" will not be any different from that which brought an end to apartheid.
Borders are barricades; they are means madmen ridiculously posing as statesmen devise for containment, control and exclusion. Over the years, therefore, I developed a healthy disrespect for borders and sometimes crossed them without official authorisation. Boys and girls my age who wanted to escape the iniquities of apartheid education and go to school in the neighbouring countries of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland did that as a matter of course. For most of those years, I travelled on a UN Convention travel document. Later, I came to relish my designation as a stateless person for stripping me of regionalism and conferring on me global citizenship. As a global citizen, I could now immerse myself in the struggles of ordinary human beings like myself everywhere and wherever I lived – in Africa, the US, Europe, and Australia. And now Mauritius, too!
Borders are prisons the mind constructs; they don’t exist outside the mind. They make the relationship between the centre and the periphery, at best, a tricky one and, at worst, a mental construct of little literary import. Borders confuse essential distinctions. The distinction of literary significance is not one of an author’s origin. The distinction of vital significance is between what Yorkshire writer, Sean O’Brien, characterises as internationalists and nativists.
The revitalisation of contemporary literature in a country like the US has received considerable impetus from provincials-transformed-into-internationalists such as Jamaica Kincaid and Julia Alvarez, who both hail from the little island of Martinique. Today’s winners of the Nobel prize for literature come from islands most of us would be hard put to point out on a map: Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, etc. It is not your place of origin that matters but your originality. Being born on an island need not consign you to the realm of the insular or to the margins of literary respectability. The trick is not to slip into some kind of insularity or reverse nativism, O‘Brien warns. He also reminds us, in the words of Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, that ‘Gods make their own importance‘.
Writers are gods who countenance no borders of the mind or externally imposed restrictions to the creative process. Insularity erects borders that it is the function of cosmopolitanism to break down. For the average South African and Mauritian, the Indian Ocean separates our two peoples. For Bhishmadev Seebaluck, general-secretary of the Mauritian Writers’ Association, however, the ocean links us. Cultivating a cosmopolitan outlook, indispensable for every writer in the global marketplace (described by Farhad Khoyratty as some ‘juggernaut of homogenisation’), is about breaking down barriers. It is all a state of mind that is sometimes predicated on power relations.
I choose, therefore, to ignore the impertinence implicit in, and the construction of otherness inherent in the notion of borders and the regional – language we often use to say some people’s issues (mostly from the Latin American, Caribbean, African, Asian and Pacific or LACAAP world) are less significant than those of others (mainly in the West). Such a construct leads to marginality – or the maintenance of privilege for a few at the expense of the many, largely through the erection or retention of oppressive, exploitative and exclusive social structures, among which we must number borders and regions. Instead, I will heed the advice of Mauritian Writers’ Association president, Shakuntala Hawoldar, when she says: "Writers shouldn’t accept labels." I am neither a marginal nor borderline case. Rather, I am a native with an attitude!
Clearly, the ironic usage of these concepts should have been an invitation to us to interrogate and challenge their inappropriateness and inadequacy, as we have not done (at least, not sufficiently). We must continue, even beyond these portals, to ask ourselves about what should have been the central questions of this conference: Do such constructs as borders illuminate or obfuscate? Do they confine the human imagination to the most mundane or emancipate human potential, in the direction of devising creative solutions to the human condition gone awry?
There is no doubt in my mind that, beyond their limited usefulness, our notions of borders and regions not only divide but also obscure commonalities in the human condition – all the way from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. As UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, points out, we live in a world with porous borders (the phenomenon we know as globalisation has made sure of that) and we wage unconventional wars that show complete disregard for borders – such as the so-called War on Terror (which is little more than a declaration of open season for random American invasions on the helpless and defenceless whose natural resources they crave) or the War against Environmental Degradation (from which the American establishment is only too happy to step back while, like predators, they plunder the world‘s resources).
"Countries go to war at the drop of a hat over borders that were never of their own making in the first place"
None of us is so naïve as to imagine there will ever be a world without borders. But borders are set up by men and women like us, who can also alter them if they wish. The supreme irony, however, all over the former colonised world is that we never had a say in the erection of these borders that today we revere as if erected by God. Ali Mazrui points out that neither the Arabs nor the Africans ever said ‘this is where Africa ends and Arabia begins’? The borders were created for our separation and exploitation, chiefly at the Berlin Conferences of 1884/85 and subsequently through processes we regard today as bringing about independence but which, in fact, implanted a new imperial or neo-colonial order. One hundred and twenty years later, countries such as Iraq and Iran, India and Pakistan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, etc go to war at the drop of a hat over borders that were never of their own making in the first place, in order to lay claim to lands whose occupants should be the only ones to determine where they belong. We must be wary of fighting wars over identity that only succeed in stripping people of their identity and sense of belonging.
Borders are responsible for the chauvinism we call nationalism, which may be equal to the task of winning soccer tournaments (as in the unprecedented advancement of Iraq’s national team to the semi-finals of the [2004] Olympics) but are grossly inadequate to fight wars that confront most of the world’s people.
Borders are scales the powerful pull over the eyes of the ‘wretched of the earth’. Scourges that know no borders – including poverty, disease, ignorance, and the abuse of women and children – confront society everywhere. Nothing in all this strikes me as regional or tangential. If we cannot mobilise resources from the global marketplace (that ‘new world order’ which was proclaimed by George Bush Sr. and that frankly serves mainly to enrich a few from impoverishing the many, who must begin to imagine that verily they are God‘s step-children) to combat the scourge of HIV/Aids, we are doomed as a global family. "If we do not hang together we shall probably hang separately," Mohamad Vayid cautioned in his opening address.
How then can healthy minds such as ours rededicate themselves to the preservation of borders? How can we content ourselves with borders not of our making or accept imposed distinctions between the regional and the rest (meaning the West)? Writers have a responsibility to expose such fallacious doctrines that endanger the human species across the globe.
Borders are the building blocks of every conceivable phobia – from xenophobia to homophobia. Borders are a dangerous mental construct and an insignia of intolerance. They represent a mindset that breeds wars; they are lines we sketch on a map that signify no-go areas; they are the stuff on which hatred thrives. Borders circumscribe and limit human potential through setting ceilings to human movement and achievement. Writers are supposed to represent the sensitive point in society and their craft is a vehicle for the propagation of love and peace and for implanting a culture of tolerance – qualities that humanise and know no bounds or borders.
We need to disregard borders – at least, those of the mind – since globally we are governed by a bunch of self-seeking imbeciles, morons and cowboys whose respect for borders anyhow is even less than their respect for the sovereignty of nations or even multilateral institutions like the UN.
I come from a country where until recently the discrepancies between black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural, men and women, used to be among the widest in the world. These discrepancies, that are not unknown in the rest of the world, were a creation of some diabolical social engineering we know as colonialism, segregation and apartheid. Their elimination rests on invoking and applying a similar political will that brought them into being in the first place.
South Africa has been conducting two great experiments. The one is seeing if an oppressed, impoverished, educationally disadvantaged people, feeling humiliated and short of self-esteem can be raised. The other is seeing whether two antagonistic races can live together. The ‘wretched of the earth’ have every reason to await the outcome with bated breath since this would be a first in history for, as CLR James points out, "Those in power never give way, and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege."
Succeeding generations of Africans have another liberation struggle to conduct. President Thabo Mbeki told a gathering of youth from the African continent in November 2001 that it is a liberation struggle against poverty, under-development, disease, and backwardness: "A liberation struggle to place the continent where it should be as an equal among the continents of the world." This is only a microcosm and a caricature of the world in which we live.
It is, of course, the traditional function of the writer to give form to the formless, like God creating the universe in six days and coming to Mauritius on the seventh to rest! Also, writers cannot afford compartmentalisation, for life does not come in choice pieces, like meat on a butcher’s tray. They hold a mirror to society and champion the full development of the human personality and its dignity. No one has a monopoly to truth and beauty/And there’s room for us all at the rendezvous of victory, writes Aime Cesaire, poet laureate from Martinique. ‘No single group has a monopoly of truth,’ Malaysian scholar, Noriah Mohamed, echoes. Writers know all that. That is why they have no use for borders. Their region is the whole province of human experience.
"Threshold for war must always be high," Robin Cook told the British Parliament as he stepped down as Foreign Affairs secretary, in opposition to prime minister Tony Blair’s declaration of war against Iraq. A phony war, if there was ever one! But there are just wars and there are unjust wars. We are writers at war among nations, factions and religions at war. We are fighters in the war against misery, sadness, deprivation, loss. The unconventional sense of these wars without borders makes of every writer a combatant as surely as if we were carrying bazookas.
Long may you spread hope, light and understanding!
Power to your elbows!
Amandla!
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Isabel Allende, Paula, New York: Flamingo, 1995.
Iyanla Vanzant, Acts of Faith: Daily Meditations for People of Colour, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Mbulelo Mzamane is Professor and Interim Director of the Es'kia Mphahlele Institute of African Studies at the University of Venda for Science and Technology. He returned to South African in 1993 after three decades in exile. He has held academic posts in the USA, Australia, UK, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Nigeria and Germany.
