MARX’S FRENETIC DANCE: PEPETELA AND THE SOUND OF UTOPIA

 

Nicholas Brown – Univ. of Illinois at Chicago

 

 

Today I will be using the word “Utopia” in a specific sense, to denote the possibility of imagining the future as radically different from the present, rather than as the mere continuing development of history along lines already established. It should be clear that this definition excludes much of what passes for Utopian thinking at the moment – for example, the cyber-Utopias, free-market Utopias, and U.S.-dominated “ends of history” that have cropped up in the past decade and which, far from taking on the necessary task of presenting us with what Deleuze and Guattari have called a “resistance to the present,” merely offer us rose-colored versions of our own situation. Utopia itself – as Hegel perceived so well in his critique of Plato – is a much more difficult thing to conceive. When an attempt is made to represent Utopia, the initial groping towards the future tends always to flip over into a Republic which is only an idealization of the world-as-it-is. Actuality cannot simply be “thought beyond” in this way – which is not to say that the impulse towards the representation of Utopia is in any way futile or meaningless. For Hegel, Plato’s Republic foreshadows the birth of the individual conscience in Christianity. But Utopia itself does not admit representation in any straightforward way. As the Mozambiquan writer Mia Couto has put it in his story “Os mastros do Paralém,”[1] “o destino de um sol é nunca ser olhado” (185).

One possible solution to this representational dilemma is posed by those Modernist Utopias where representation itself is sublimated as style or technique, which itself has to be re-read as content before its meaning can be made apparent. The internationalization of this Modernist impulse might be considered the initial cultural expression of a globalization that has, it would appear from current U.S. discourses, only been recently discovered as an historical process. But if this contemporary, free-market globalization, which assumes the mantle of “globalization” tout court, appears to be nothing if not profoundly dystopic, signalling more than anything else the relentless advance of U.S. economic hegemony and the dominance of an increasingly seductive U.S. (primarily visual) culture industry, then we must not forget an intermediate moment of globalization, quite distinct from either and quite left out of the current discourse on globalization; a moment which, if we follow Antonio Negri,[2] was the very motor that drove that re-organization of capital which we are now accustomed to call Globalization.

This intermediate moment of globalization, the great wave of anti-colonial movements that swept through huge swathes of the colonized world, utterly scrambling the old national-imperial order, is, of course, what I wish to address today, particularly with reference to the African independence movements. Doubtless, these movements often expressed themselves in national terms, but we should not forget either that, from Fanon and Césaire on, the most penetrating attacks on colonialism also construed the nation as a merely provisional goal, to be abandoned the moment it was reached, in favor of some post-national – proletarian, pan-African, or what have you – totality. In the mid-60s vocabulary of one character in A Geração da Utopia[3] by the Angolan novelist Pepetela,, nationalism is only “uma fase necessária” (92). But beyond this, we should think this globalization as the movement of these struggles, which jumped like wildfire across oceans and continents: from Algeria to Vietnam, from Vietnam to the United States, from the United States to the Caribbean, and so on, both revealing and forming an immanent totality emerging beneath the imperial system.

If Modernism, even in its most reactive mode, was the expression of the first globalization of the wave of European political struggles following the Soviet revolution of 1917, then this second globalization, the wave of anti-colonial struggles beginning after WWII and continuing through the beginning of the 1970s, is even more closely associated with its own literature. It should be noted in passing that this literature is not without links to the Modernist moment that preceded it. In this context we might think of the ties between, in the Francophone world, Negritude and Surrealism; in the Lusophone, the relationship between Brazilian Modernism and Angolan poetry, richly parodied in the figure of the poet Horácio in A Geração da Utopia;[4] in the Anglophone, the resurgence of Brechtian political theater in the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Nonetheless, the relationship between the historical moment of the African independence struggles and its literature is less mediated than that which generally holds between Modernism and the European upsurge and re-containment of communism; indeed, it is often naively posed as a question of documentary representation. No doubt this is far too simple an approach, but nonetheless we must accept the notion, theorized by Fredric Jameson,[5] that the work of the first great wave of African novelists somehow concerns this moment of national Independence – initially in a straightforwardly Utopian way, but with an increasing sense of disillusion. The extraordinarily rich field of literature from this period I will leave largely to the side for the moment, in favor of what is for us the more pressing issue of how this moment of anti-colonial struggle is to be represented now – and, although our topic today is literary, this is as much a question for scholarship and for theory as it is for literature itself.

After the initial, prospectively Utopian literature of Independence – of which Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God[6] is probably the most sophisticated and successful example – the dominant mode of post-Independence narration is essentially tragic. From Achebe’s No Longer at Ease[7]to Yambo Ouologuem’s Devoir de Violence[8] or, indeed, to Pepetela’s A Geração da Utopia, the tragic hero is the inchoate nation – or, more accurately, the educated elite that was to represent it as a vanguard class; the tragic flaw of this hero is, in Aristotelian fashion, precisely a lack of awareness of its own essential being – that is, that it was not in fact the nation itself, and that its own relative prosperity could not be equated with the health of the political body. The moment of recognition and symbolic death is the descent from mere bad faith to, on the one hand, deliberate political mystification and, on the other, disillusionment in the face of this corruption. Speaking of Aníbal, the protagonist of A Geração da Utopia, a character says that “se não morrer, o que se enquadra melhor com a sua maneira de ser, vai desiludir-se” (131). This symbolic disillusion-death is, then, ironically, a failure to die at the appointed hour, the failure of the national “fase necessária,” the provisional Utopia of militant nationalism, to evaporate in favor of some genuinely new and as-yet-unimaginable social formation. Or, more accurately, it is the failure of this “casca da utopia” (277), having died, to be decently buried, persisting instead as the dead husk of a utopian dream that has “morreu. E hoje cheira mal, como qualquer corpo em putrefacção” (240).

It is this structure of life-in-death, the tragic spectacle of the death of Utopia in its own reification, that A Geração da Utopia allegorizes again and again. The first hint of this allegorical motif is the nom de guerre Mundial, which appears, as though casually, initially only once at the beginning of the book: “Vítor Ramos, que um dia adoptaria o nome de Mundial, vivia com Malongo no mesmo quarto alugado a uma senhora da Rua Praia da Vitória” (12). Thus is unobtrusively inserted into the relatively idyllic lives of expatriate students in Lisbon the hint of their future identities as MPLA guerillas. But of course, like all the noms de guerre in Geração da Utopia, the name itself is meaningful, and cannot be seen outside the very history sketched above, of the global nature of the anti-colonial struggle. By the end of the book, however, Mundial, this same Vítor Ramos, representative of the new economic globalization as the broker of government contracts to foreign businesses and of its cultural expression as the owner of pseudo-European nightclubs, comes to stand for the operation of global capital itself, “o capitalismo mais bárbaro que já se viu sobre a Terra” (277). Thus a single figure allegorizes not only the increasing inseparability of economy and culture, base and superstructure, but also the essential relationship between the globalization of the surge of independence movements and the reorganization of global capital that took place in its wake.

The death-in-reification of Utopia is dramatized in a simpler figure by the armed bandits that patrol the rural highways, ex-guerillas from one army or another, “esquecidas as origens antagónicas dum outro tempo” (359), whose only skill is warfare and whose only means of subsistence is armed robbery. Or, finally, in the figure of the Fanonian Elias, who disappears from the narrative only to return at the end of the book, having transformed during his absence into the “bispo da Igreja da Esperança e da Alegria do Dominus” (330), in whom an older Marxist vocabulary lives a grizly afterlife in the grossly cynical discourse of the marketing of religion. In each case it is the calcified remnant or trace of the hoped-for Utopia that signals this tragic mode – the nom de guerre of the corrupt Minister, the Soviet machine guns of the highwaymen, the language of anti-colonial struggle subsisting in a discourse of neo-colonial opportunism.

It implies no critique of the narratives of disillusionment in general, or indeed of A Geração da Utopia in specific, to suggest that they are no longer sufficient to their object. It is absolutely essential to think the moment of decolonization – despite, or indeed because of, the horror and misery that the intervening thirty years have witnessed – in other than tragic terms. To fail to do so is to fall into the disillusionment or even cynicism that is part of the national tragedy itself. Not so long ago it was possible to think the failure of the African revolutions in strictly national and therefore tragic terms, as though the social body of the nation could be purged of its ills by the pity and fear of the spectacle of the failure of the political class; in this way these narratives could still be said to have presented a kind of “resistance to the present.” I would argue that this conception is no longer viable. The most successful examples of this strategy were the plays staged by the Kamiriithu theater group in Kenya under the direction of Ngugi wa Thiong’o in the mid-70s.[9] These dramas, modeled after the Brechtian Lehrstücke, attempted to re-narrate the Mau Mau rebellion and the subsequent betrayal of nationalist ideals in such a way as to instill a new revolutionary consciousness in the Kenyan peasantry. Unfortunately, I do not have the time here to give these performances the attention they deserve; they were great popular and artistic successes, and almost certainly had, for a moment, a significant political impact. The point I want to make here is that these plays, which attempted to narrate the tragedy of Kenyan history in such a way as to re-open the possibility of collective Utopia, are ultimately returned to tragedy by history itself. The Kamiriithu theater was razed by state police, and Ngugi was imprisoned and later exiled for his role in its creation; meanwhile, the power of the KANU government, whose initial weakness after Kenyatta’s illness and death seemed to open for a moment a space for dramatic change, was finally consolidated, stronger than ever, under Daniel Arap Moi. Nor should this re-containment of Utopian epic in national tragedy be thought of as merely accidental, but rather as exemplifying something like Hegel’s Ruse of Reason; though the precise events that returned the Kamiriithu project to tragedy were more or less unpredictable, it is hard to imagine – with U.S. military bases in Kenya and substantial European interests in the region – that a new Mau Mau was ever very likely. But this, then, is precisely the point: it is history – more specifically, the re-organization of capital and lines of force prompted by the disintegration of classical imperialism – that renders these national tragedies impotent. There would seem to be no way out of this dilemma.

And yet I would argue that, in A Geração da Utopia, underneath this familiar tragic narrative, we are witnessing another, rather different allegory of social forms, indeed of collective life itself, taking shape under the first, and hinting at the possibility of quite a different generation of utopia than that emphasized in the title. The fundamental figure of this allegory is the recurring theme of music. In an earlier draft of this paper I had taken time to justify what I thought might be a surprising move. But, if this conference is at all representative, Brazilian critical discourse is far beyond the North American in taking seriously the relation between music and literature, and so here I will only mention by way of orientation Jacques Attali’s Bruits,[10] which theorizes music as necessarily allegorical. Attali forwards the intriguing thesis that music, which always involves the coordinated interplay of discrete elements, not only represents social order but actually runs ahead of the social order that produces it. Music itself, that is, is Utopian in the sense described above, suggesting in its very form the promise of an as-yet-unimaginable future. In this way classical harmony and time, both based on universal systems of ratios putatively derived from natural law, prefigure the social order later described by political economy. Or, to take a more frivolous example, musical Expressionism finds its social content in the paranoia of Hollywood horror films.

A Geração da Utopia puts the allegorical potential of music into play in a trio of parables that appears initially to reproduce once again the tragic narrative sketched above. In the first of these parables, Aníbal describes a dance where he met Mussole, his fiance.

 

O segredo da dança está na interacção entre o colectivo e o individual.... Na xinjanguila, o colectivo é fundamental.... Tudo combinado com os movimentos de ombros, ancas, braços e pernas. E o particular? Está no breve instante em que a pessoa da esquerda, ao vir do centro, te convida batendo os pés ou dando um sacão de anca.... É realmente um equilibrio constante entre o habitual sentido colectivo da dança de roda e o sentido particular da dança de pares. O prazer... está em sentir o prazer colectivo do rítimo e o de sentir viver, vibrar, o corpo que vem ao encontro do teu, sem o tocar. (149-150)

 

This is plainly enough an allegory of collective creativity, of the self-production of the social totality not as the exclusion of more private pleasure and production, but as the fullest articulation of particular creativity with that of the collectivity. But this Utopia is not projected forward into the future, but rather onto a social organization that is (tendentially) extinct. On one hand, this is a dramatization of the violence visited on older social forms by the colonial project – a violence figured, in a symbol that is also all too literal, in Mussole’s murder at the hands of the Portuguese army. But it is just as plain that this projection of Utopia onto a doomed society harmonizes with the central tragedy of the novel.

The second parable replays this narrative structure, this time with both moments – both the possibility of Utopia and its reification-death – represented in musical terms. Near the end of the book, a younger character recalls the moment of Independence, the approach of the MPLA:

 

Eu tinha treze anos quando Luanda se mobilizou em massa para receber os heróis da libertação.... Marchávamos, ouvíamos os relatos dos mais velhos vindos das matas, cantávamos as cancões revolucionárias, inventámos aquela marcha-dança que se espalhou por tudo o País, misto de fervor patriótico e imaginação criativa. (361)

 

This spontaneous expression of collective creativity transports, for the briefest of moments, the Utopia of the Xinjanguila into the modern urban collective. But Orlando continues:

 

E depois quiseram enquadrar-nos. Disseram, devem marchar como os soldados, vocês são os futuros soldados. Já não podíamos dar aqueles passos malucos que arrancavam palmas a toda a gente, vai para a frente, um passo para o lado, volta para trás, uma piada no meio. Mesmo no Carnaval, anos mais tarde, só se podia marchar como os soldados, os grupos deixaram de dançar. Liquidaram a imaginação... (361)

 

Through the regimentation of the spontaneous dance, it is precisely imagination, the possibility of reaching for an order that has yet to be conceived, that is liquidated. The sovereignty of the Actual – now donning the very “casca da utopia” – is reasserted.

The final parable is the precise inversion of the previous one, in which the creative power of the multitude was subdued, initially in good faith, by the liberating army. In this final parable, a simulacrum of collective joy is manufactured, in bad faith, by a group of former guerillas hoping to profit from collective misery. Vítor, the former Mundial, along with his friend Malongo, backs Elias, the Fanonian-turned-Bishop in his enterprise of starting a new church. It is unclear whether, as a prophet, Elias is completely cynical or all-too-sincere; but it is clear enough that his backers think of the church principally as an investment in the misery and desperation of the Angolan multitude. The final scene of the novel is the bogus spectacle of Elias’s evangelical Church, with the Bishop simulating elements of older religions and ideologies, working up the crowd into a fervor of religious joy that is mainly channeled towards filling the coffers of the church with “o dinheiro e as poucas jóias e até mesmo as camisas” (375) of the celebrants.

But for all that, this final scene is deeply ambiguous. The energies of this multitude, once released, cannot be so easily re-contained, overflowing the boundaries set for them by Elias’s church. In other words, Carnaval returns:

 

Todo o povo dançando e se beijando e se tocando, se massembando mesmo nas filas e nos corredores e depois no largo à frente do Luminar e nas ruas adjacentes... a caminho dos mercados e das casas, das praias e dos muceques, em cortejos se multiplicando como no carnaval, do Luminar partindo felizes para ganhar o Mundo e a Esperança (375)

 

This is quite a different sort of Utopia than the older imagined Nation, and certainly we must see the “Esperança e a Alegria” of Elias’s mercenary church as deeply ironic. But here Elias’s slogan is significantly changed to “o Mundo e a Esperança,” and the explosive proliferation of the dance must be seen in a different light. Indeed, this scene marks the reemergence of the very same collective joy that had been last seen at the moment of independence, fifteen years earlier, when “as multidões [estavam] cantando as palavras-de-ordem da independência com igual fervor” (375). But if Carnaval, which had not been seen since that moment, here returns, this is not the sanctioned Bakhtinian carnaval, the disordered space within order that allows order to exist, but rather a space of collective creativity that constantly threatens the bounds that are set for it in advance, “se multiplicando” without outside impetus or check. The power of this allegory, in fact, derives from its ambiguity, precisely from the fact that the creative joy of the multitude is initially organized for profit. In factory production as well, or in colonial domination, the creativity of the multitude is initially organized only to exploit it; but the powers thus magnified then struggle against this arrangement and must, ever after, be either placated or repressed.

This is all very well, but what is the value of this Utopia when compared to that earlier Utopia that had behind it the weight of an entire discourse of transformative practice? It is one thing to provide a metaphor or allegory of Utopia, but what makes this any different than, say, the very religious escapism offered by Elias’s church, which only exists to profit from the empty hope it offers? I would argue that this musical Utopia is already a transformative practice, and not in a merely symbolic or representational way. We might think of music as a kind of tag or tracer by which zones of flow other than those sanctioned by multinational capital might registered and mapped. If visual culture, particularly television and film, seems to reproduce in its proliferation the dominant flows of a U.S.-dominated global economy, then by means of musical culture we can dimly perceive an immanent globalization quite different from what we are accustomed to call by that name. Of course, music is caught, to some extent, in this dominant flow as well, as registered in A Geração da Utopia by a scene in Victor’s nightclub where “pop” music metonymically comes to represent the present state of multinational capital (326-27). But the global flows of musical culture are much more complex, operating in unexpected directions quite independent of the dominant currents; we might think here of the musical exchanges between Cuba and Congo, between jazz and bossa nova, between the music of the Scottish and Kenyan highlands; of the global proliferation of rap music which, as another panelist has called it, has become the “música universal da reclamação”; or indeed, the “canção brasileira que marcara os bailes da... infância” of the Angolan protagonist of a Geração da Utopia.[11] At the end of Pepetela’s earlier novel Yaka,[12] a young character, the new protagonist, goes off to join the MPLA; not to the sound of the Internationale, nor to a patriotic song, not even to the Ngola Ritmos, but to the sound of Otis Redding: ultimately, this musical globalization which marks the resistance to established flows and the generation of new ones is the same globalization as that which underlay that of the independence movements. The immanent totality sometimes constructs itself openly, but sometimes, as now, it is driven underground, living a subterranean existence whose presence, if we keep our ears open, we can sometimes dimly perceive. Aníbal writes in his notebook that, faced with the seeming victory of the ideologies of globalization, “Marx não deve parar de se remexer na tumba, num baile subterrâneo, o pobre Marx num frenético semba” (275).