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Jungle and Desert in Postcolonial Texts: Intertextual Ecosystems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

Meg Furniss Weisberg
Meg Furniss Weisberg*
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
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Abstract

This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’s Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert (1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.

Keywords

AfricaMaghrebforestjungledesertecocriticismlandscapeidentityintertextualityadventuretravelogueDjaoutGoyémidéKiplingecosystem
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , September 2015 , pp. 171 - 189
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Goyémidé, Étienne, Le silence de la forêt (Paris: Hatier, 1984)Google Scholar. Djaout, Tahar, L’invention du désert (Paris: Seuil, 1987)Google Scholar.

2 Caminero-Santangelo, Byron, African Fiction and Joseph Conrad (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005)Google Scholar; quotes here are from the introduction.

3 The author notes that “for reasons both good and bad, the study of postcolonial hybridity remains tied to a typology which defines postcolonial cultures in terms of their oppositional relationship with the West” (1), and warns that simply defining postcoloniality by its “attempts to undermine assumptions of the West obscures an incredible spectrum of political concerns” (1–2), including collective identity formation trends associated with nationalism. Caminero-Santangelo points out that recent postcolonial theory “rejects the notion of autonomous, static collective identities associated with both colonial ideology and certain nativist forms of anti-colonial nationalism” (1) and suggests that the cultural and intertextual connections between Western and African (or, more generally, “postcolonial”) texts and societies is “much more complex than has been implied by the focus on parodic revision” (2).

4 Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958)Google Scholar; Tutuola, Amos, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (London: Faber and Faber, 1954)Google Scholar; Odaga, Asenath, The Diamond Ring (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967)Google Scholar.

5 Harrison, Robert Pogue, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Not just Western readers, but readers all over who were brought up on the stories of Rudyard Kipling and the like; see Ngugi, Adichie, Achebe, and many others.

7 Hudson, W. H., Green Mansions (London: Duckworth, 1904)Google Scholar; Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Lost World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912)Google Scholar; Kipling, Rudyard, The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1894)Google Scholar.

8 Etymologically, the word jungle came into French via English, first appearing in 1796. See Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/jungle.

9 “[At dawn] the great forest that has never ceased living gets going again. I’m aware of a feeling of fear in the middle of this immense forest which apparently harbors no hostility toward you, but which, on the other hand, does not demonstrate tenderness toward its inhabitants. It’s the law of the jungle.”

10 “There, I’m at home, the master of my surroundings. But here, here this is the forest....”

11 “is going to penetrate my ‘civilized’ jungle. His position there is no different from mine here. My ‘civilized’ community, whose laws and practices are torturous, inextricable, dubious, and inhuman in a whole variety of ways, is a veritable jungle” (71).

12 “Dans la jungle de Kipling, dans cette immense forêt équatoriale à la lisière de laquelle je suis étendu, on naît tigre, loup, panthère, boa, singe ou éléphant. On ne le devient pas. Et c’est là que réside toute la différence. Cette différence est importante, car celui qui rêve de devenir un tigre, et qui réussit à le devenir, est encore plus cruel qu’un tigre de naissance. On en a vu des exemples à grande échelle. Les premiers sous-préfets et autres cadres de l’administration du territoire, qui ont succédé aux Blancs, se sont bien souvent comportés de façon beaucoup plus sadique et plus intolérable que ceux dont ils ont pris la place. [...] La loi de la jungle sévit partout. Et il est encore mieux de se la voir appliquer par des éléments étrangers que par ses propres frères” (73).“In Kipling’s jungle, in this immense equatorial forest on the edge of which I am stretched, one is born tiger, wolf, panther, boa, monkey, or elephant. One does not become it. And therein lies all the difference. This difference is very important, for whoever dreams of becoming a tiger and succeeds in becoming one is even crueler than a tiger-by-birth. We have seen examples on a grand scale. The first subprefects and other administrative officials who took over from the Whites often behaved much more cruelly, much more sadistically, and much more intolerably than those whose places they took. [...] The law of the jungle rages everywhere. And it is much better to see it applied to oneself by foreign elements than by one’s own brothers.”

13 The novel opens with the date, “Lundi 7 mai 1965.” The Central African Republic became an independent state on 13 August 1960; Jean-Bedel Bokassa grabbed power in a coup on New Year’s Eve, 1965.

14 Faes, Geraldine and Smith, Stephen, Bokassa 1er: un Empereur Français (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2000)Google Scholar, 20. This book is my source for the description of Bokassa’s coronation. “[...] in order to preserve French influence and peace in francophone Africa [...], Paris agreed to pay—including covering a few ‘extravagances’ and misappropriations of funds—the equivalent of what a supplementary armed division through NATO would have cost. ‘And as far as the ritual is concerned, no one really stood in the way of this operation. People complained, because they had to pay, but they let it happen. After all, it was of little importance that Bokassa put a few feathers on his head.’ ”

15 See, for example, French ethnologist Serge Bahuchet, upon whose work I rely heavily for this article, particularly Les Pygmées Aka et la Forêt Centrafricaine: ethnologie écologique (Paris: SELAF, 1985). In addition to Bahuchet’s works, see Bakongo, Daniel, An Inquiry about Mongumba Aka Pygmies’ Social Integration in Central African Society: An Ethnology Case Study (Bangui: University of Bangui, 1997)Google Scholar, as well as the work of Maurice Amaye and Noel Ballif for anthropological studies concerning the Aka, one group of “pygmies” living in approximately the same region of the equitorial rainforest as that in the novel.

16 “the virtues that were inculcated in me at the time of the circumcision ceremony” (74).

17 “vivantes, aérées et humaines,” “froid, indifférent, rongeur, boulimique, avare et exsangue.”

18 Sven E Jørgensen and Felix Müller, “Ecosystems as Complex Systems,” Handbook of Ecosystem Theories and Management, eds. Müller and Jørgensen. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000), 5.

19 “It’s as if the immense forest, which looks at you imperturbably, wants to kill you little by little, before digesting you!”

20 “I feel as if crushed by the power and the majesty of this imperturbable equatorial forest. I have the impression of being in the stomach of an antediluvian monster, that will at any moment begin its work of digestion. The perfumes of the flowers, the odors of the rotten fruit, the miasmas of the sludge pools mix together and become confounded in a reality without name.”

21 Stable is very different than static, as I hope I am making clear. As an example, in her book Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), Tamara Giles-Vernick discusses in depth how one group of forest people, the Mpiemu, have incorporated outside factors and events (including but not limited to French colonialism and its economic offshoots) not only into their ways of obtaining livelihood, but also their environmental outlook and their methods of recounting memory and history. She notes that the “Mpiemu reinterpreted and transformed colonial discourses of dearth and loss” in the framework of their own history-telling, or doli. Unlike Goyémidé’s version of a “pygmy” settlement, “different gender, generational, and regional groups lauded new forms of wealth and authority” coming from colonial intervention and postcolonial state reorganization; they also “lamented elders’ depleted authority, and mourned [...] the disappearance of some sites like old villages and panjo [communal eating structure], even as they used new sites and objects to recall their pasts” (118). In other words, the Mpiemus’ vision of their place in the world and their relations with others is far from static—it adjusts to interventions sometimes with nostalgia and sometimes with enthusiasm—but it remains stable in the sense that these changes get incorporated into doli, or the Mpiemu method of recalling or reciting individual and collective history and identity.

22 Muller, F. and Nielsen, Søren Nors, “Ecosystems as Subjects of Self-Organising Processes”: II.2.1 Handbook of Ecosystem Theories and Management, eds. Jørgensen and Müller (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000)Google Scholar. These terms taken from pages 179–83 are the authors’ elaborations and explanations of a definition of “self-organizing systems,” which include ecosystems.

23 For example, Elisabeth Copet-Rougier discusses the fluidity of clan identity in the precolonial period in the Sangha region, saying that certain clans would opt to identify with stronger groups rather than their original group, while maintaining their particular clan identity within the wider grouping. See Elisabeth Copet-Rougier, “Political-Economic History of the Upper Sangha,” Resource Use in the Trinational Sangha River Region of Equatorial Africa: Histories, Knowledge Forms and Institutions, eds. Eves, H., Hardin, R., & Rupp, S. (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 1998), 59–61.

24 See Bahuchet, Giles-Vernick, and Ballif.

25 In his confrontational monograph, Tropical Rain Forest: A Political Ecology of Hegemonic Myth Making (London: IEA Environment Unit, 1999), Stott performs a sociolinguistic deconstruction of the term tropical rain forest, similar to that of the term jungle in this study.

26 Phillips, Dana, “Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology,” New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 577–602 CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 579.

27 See Giles-Vernick 137–39 for an interesting analysis of this phenomenon, particularly as it relates to gender differences.

28 John McBratney, “Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling’s Jungle Book,” Victorian Studies 35:3 (Spring 1992), 277–293. Quotes from pages 288 and 287, respectively.

29 “the greatest respect for the desert, for its unprogrammable humors, for its scathing caresses.”

30 “This is how the desert sometimes takes revenge on those who refuse to recognize its rigorous law so as to only see it as the ultimate paradise of the eternal vacation, a resort where one can loaf around, sunbathe, and photograph the unexpected totally at leisure. Yes, the desert takes revenge sometimes. For having been too flattened. For having been reduced—while in its belly foments the ultimate calcination of the world—to an inoffensive overlapping row of dunes, to suns setting in a docile profusion of ochre and gold.”

31 “Distention of the dunes, one feels the distance shrink between living and dying, between plenitude and annihilation, between compactness and the void” (28).

32 “manage to get through a good thousand kilometers, eyes closed” (44).

33 “a devouring, unformed time where the car sinks in and gets swallowed up.”

34 “Distance and time are annihilated/annihilate themselves/annihilate each other. There is no center here, no temporality” (28).

35 Including one of the most famous and enduring travelogues, that of Moroccan medieval scholar-traveler Ibn Battuta. See Battuta, Ibn, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325–1354, trans. and ed. H. A. R. Gibb (London: Broadway House, 1929)Google Scholar, particularly the section on Ibn Battuta’s traversal of the Sahara desert en route to the kingdom of Mali, 317-–41. Excerpts of Gibb’s translation of Ibn Battuta’s text are available online via Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook project: http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1354-ibnbattuta.asp.

36 “I follow the trail of the crumbled tribe, I remember the pulverized dynasty. I swim in the bays of chronicles, I go back up apocryphal waterfalls, I leap over times without mile-markers and frightening deserts. I must at all costs build myself a name as a renowned tracker.”

37 In fact, in The Ornament of the World (2003), scholar of Andalusia Maria Rosa Menocal calls the Almohads “an even more fanatical” group than the Almoravids who were already there (43).

38 “rattles inside [his] skull”; “like those skin pouches wherein the Indians, in the course of their migrations, transport the bones of their ancestors.”

39 “to get away or to seek out novel sensations.”

40 “for the desert inhabits and illuminates me since indeterminate times.”

41 “didn’t really know for sure if it was about him or the ancestor, if it was he who experienced the events or if he simply watched them unfold before him.”

42 “look[s] for a long time at the endless sand—to the point of charring [his] cornea. And, all of a sudden, the desert ceases to be in front and around, it enters the limbs and the head.”

43 “something irreplaceable.”

44 “Hard to mark. It wavers under measurements, slides like a serpent between the hands that want to judge.” “The sand has accomplished its task of flattening” (33).

45 “succession of barely real dunes which, under the effect of an unexpected wind, can overlap or swallow one another.”

46 Ibid., 9.

47 Djaout, 9. “He sees himself [as] multiple [multiply], fights with himself/battles himself.”

48 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pratt identifies three techniques used by European explorer-writers that reinforced a sense of “discovery” in their writing: 1) the landscape is aestheticized in the description; 2) Many descriptors, derived either from nouns or from materials, add a level of density to the description, but scientific vocabulary is absent; 3) A relation of mastery is predicated between the seer and the seen, 202–15).

49 Caminero-Santangelo, 2.

50 See Wai Chee Dimock’s book, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009 [2006]). Dimock defines “deep time” as “a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations” (3), as opposed to the view of time as “a measuring tape, with fixed segments, fixed unit lengths, each assignable to a number” (2). She equates the latter with the ideology of the nation-state, which conceives of time and space in proportional relationship to its own spatiotemporal boundaries and asserts the “glaring inadequacy of a nation-based model in world politics” and a “parallel inadequacy in literary studies” (2). In this context, she calls on Braudel’s model of longue durée to resist what she perceives as New Historicism’s insistence on “context” in a very narrow sense.

51 Koceilah/Kusayla/Aksel (d. 690): Imazigh (Berber) leader who led the resistance against Muslim Arab invasion; Okba/Uqba (622–683): an Arab general who led the Muslim conquest into North Africa; Kusayla’s troops defeated Uqba at Tehouda in 683. Al-Kahina: title, meaning “the priestess” or “the soothsayer,” given by the Arabs to Dihya, a Berber queen commonly believed to be Jewish, though there is some dispute over that claim. Al-Kahina succeeded Kusayla and also led the army in resisting Muslim conquest. See Abun-Nasr, J., ed., A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 27–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Koceila/Kusayla and Okba/‘Uqba), 31–32 (al-Kahina). See also the articles pertaining to each in the Encyclopédie Berbère (Edisud, 1984): Koceila in v. 28–29, Kahena in v. 27, and Oqba in v. 35, all available in full text online at http://encyclopedieberbere.revues.org.

52 “simple desolate expanse with skeletons of old dwellings [,] city melted into the dust. City of crumbly earth in the folds of the desert. Little mound, anonymity-colored like the surrounding nature” (emphasis mine).

53 “No commemorative plaque. There is not even a highway sign. For those who keep an inventory of localities, Tehouda is not a place of history; it’s not even a place, period. Tehouda does not exist. Nevertheless, it is here that the history of the Maghreb was played out. Irreversibly. Here was cut open the first gash that would dismember Barbary [the Berber land/kingdom] (the Maghreb—the Night of the Name—became our designation).”

54 “desert of your country with its rustling oases” (105); “time has stripped down to a nudity inscribed there like an irrefutable sign of submission” (81).

55 “it’s stagnation that rules everything, that puts down its stultifying breath” (105); “expanses of sand as far as the eye can see which God created to make man feel his nothingness” (61).

56 It is worth noting at this point that Djaout himself was an activist as well as a writer, of Berber descent, and because of his vocal support of secularism and critiques of militant Islamism, he was assassinated by the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée, al-Jamā’a al-Islamīya al-Musallaha) in 1993.