4 - Mute Messengers: Solidarity and the Subaltern in Seghers and Spivak

Summary

Keiner gab auf mich acht, mich einzelne. Ich rüttelte an meinem Gitter, ich schrie, ich heulte, sie aber, die im Begriff waren, alle Schwarzen auf der Insel zu befreien, bemerkten mich gar nicht.

[No one paid heed to … me. I shook my bars, I shouted, I screamed, but no one even noticed me—they were in the very act of freeing all the blacks on the island.]

—Anna Seghers, “Der Schlussel” (1980)

It is only in their death that [women outside of the mode of production narrative] enter a narrative for us, they become figurable.

—Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)

THE WORK OF SEGHERS and her contemporaries highlights a tension that was at play in literary institutions of the Comintern era and in the context of socialist states. While these institutions aimed to develop and support authors whose work would be that of fostering solidarity, they also defined the writer's relationship to history in ways that constrained her capacity to highlight people's coevality. Popular Front cultural initiatives supported the writer as bourgeois celebrity who conveyed transcendent truths, rather than as a figure aligned with the proletarian class whose solidarity would engender revolution. The socialist state preferred the author as representative of a historicist and state-sanctioned solidarity vision, rather than an agent that made possible international solidarity based on recognition of shared material conditions. In the anti- and postcolonial moment of the 1970s and early 1980s, Seghers and her younger contemporary, Gayatri Spivak, shed light on another mode through which radical institutions that emphasized the author's role in crafting international solidarity actually constrained this possibility. Specifically, both focus on the way that the very frameworks through which an international left aimed to highlight anticolonial struggles and thus show solidarity with them actually served to silence oppressed women's voices and exclude them from a solidarity discourse.

Rather than examining the limitations to crafting solidarity placed on those who do have a platform for speaking, as Seghers and Carpentier had done, the central issue for Seghers and Spivak is how to imagine the possibility of international solidarity, if the stories of those who experience oppression and engage in resistance are unhearable?