Shibboleths: The Production Of Culture

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The ways in which a dominant ideology replicates itself include the generation of values taken for “common sense”—that is natural, normative, self-evident, and even self-creating. This holds as well for culture, the basis upon which an entire panoply of shibboleths about Africa has been generated over time. Culture, understood as that which is bound up in a particular people, requires an understanding of different groups as having distinct or discrete identities. We have for too long labored under the illusion of the culturalist and identitarian paradigm that has resulted in the division of Africans into different people, discretely organized into “tribes” with names, assigned specific traits, and located on the chart of world knowledge organized by those who have set for themselves the task of understanding others. This act of organizing knowledge did not come about by chance or gratuitously, but rather in response to the exigencies of the times, the pressures that molded understandings along certain paths, paths etched by the dominant tendencies within society. This essay looks at Islam, orality, and the politics of cultural identities so as to challenge prevailing epistemological constructions of Africa.

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ulture, understood as that which is bound up in a particular people, requires an understanding of different groups as having distinct or discrete identities. We have for too long labored under the illusion of the culturalist and identitarian paradigm that has resulted in the division of Africans into different people, discretely organized into “tribes” with names, assigned specific traits, and located on the chart of world knowledge organized by those who have set for themselves the task of understanding others. This act of organizing knowledge did not come about by chance, or gratuitously, but rather in response to the exigencies of the times, the pressures that molded understand135

ings along certain paths, paths etched by the dominant tendencies within society. To think of Africa as a land occupied by different peoples requires the division of its inhabitants into groups with identities that can be seen as different. Igbo and not-Igbo is not enough; it has to be Igbo and Ijaw, or Igbo and Edo, with Ijaw understood as different from Igbo, no matter how similar. Thus a binary identity formation: us, them. This difference did not arise spontaneously. The investment in all naturalizing binary identity formations is an investment in some position of power whose returns on the investment are to be protected always through the disguised, or rather displaced, representation of that investment as embodying another, higher cultural function. And inevitably that function will take the form of innate qualities, the building blocks with which we construct identities. Culturalists can always be sighted beating the bush of shibboleths to flush out griots, tricksters, abikus, mammywattas, mermaids, doubles, twins, shadows, handsome or complete strangers, eshus, oguns, shangos, or myriads of other figures. These have long since lost their cultural context and specificity, and been transformed into New World tropes: Brother Johns, signifying monkeys. Instead of concerning ourselves with this seemingly inevitable process of culturalist production, we should turn to the originary concept on whose ground the bush is emplanted. And that identitarian notion is culture itself. To understand the role culture plays in the construction of African literature, we might consider such texts as The Palmwine Drinkard or Things Fall Apart. Both are early, foundational texts that originally appeared as novels, and that now are presented as “authentic culture objects.” The authenticity of Palmwine is that of the restored cultural artifact. When it was discovered that Tutuola’s original versions were altered by his British publisher to render the English more comprehensible to a British audience, that is, less pidginized, the scholarly community determined to uncover the original text and restore it for the scholars to appreciate. Its restoration placed it closer to the original text, and by extension to the “true culture” Tutuola was thought to have presented, or to have embodied in his narrative and captured in his discourse. Similarly, the latest Heinemann annotated version of Things Fall Apart has transformed the novel by mediating the experience of reading it so that now the reader is no longer free to imagine meanings, but is presented with the informed answers to whatever cultural questions he or she might put to the text. The frame insures that the authenticity of the novel as cultural artifact is protected, safeguarded against deviant understandings. It’s not that this is a bad thing, not that the uninformed reading retains some kind of purity. It’s not even a question of an authoritative attempt to control the reader’s response, because even with the cultural framing, meaning will be deferred, will be replicated with a difference, will wander along the 136

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tightest of chains of signifiers. It’s that those who construct the cultural frame itself, once again, in the act of presenting the truth about the culture, disguise the processes by which culture itself is constructed—its constructedness hidden by the act of making truth claims. The power of those making truth claims is displaced onto the mechanisms of disciplinary authority that compel our acquiescence in what is presented to us as natural and normal. This is the premise with which Christopher Miller begins his formidable study of African literature, Theories of Africans, that is, with an apologia for the need for the instrumental use of anthropology in reading and understanding African literature. Miller writes, Thinking programmatically about Western approaches to African literature leads me to one major hypothesis . . . that a fair Western reading of African literatures demands engagement with, and even dependence on, anthropology. The demonstration of this point begins from the premise that good reading does not result from ignorance, and that Westerners simply do not know enough about Africa. (4)

The problem I have with this is not the rejection of ignorance, but the assumption that knowledge can be accessed unproblematically, and even more, that the solution to outsider knowledge can be overcome by turning to insider cultural knowledge, that is, to African anthropologists. That anthropology rests upon an epistemology that is not independent, and from the start has not been independent, of the cultural and historical relations responsible for its creation (relations bound up in the projects of modernism and colonialism), means that we must shift the inquiry away from the question of knowledge and ignorance, and toward the questions of what has been responsible for the creation of our notions of cultural truth and authenticity and what were the investments of those who framed those notions. If we resist this line of inquiry, it is because the processes that lead us to accept our natural approaches to the text as normal are themselves governed by processes of domination in which we must be implicated by virtue of our inevitable immersion in our own social matrices, and our previous interpellation with the pre-existent textualities of society—a two-way interpellation in that we both read and write the texts, in Barthes’s sense, simultaneously. 3()""/,%4(¬/.%

I’d like to get at this through two of the most obvious “truths” that emerge as African shibboleths. First, the altogether “sensible” notion that Islam was imported into Africa as a foreign entity—call it the Sembène Ceddo shibboleth since it sets the authentic, indigenous faith and customs of the Ceddo warriors against the outsider Moor marabout who was responsible for imposing this 3HIBBOLETHS(ARROW

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foreign faith on Africa. How, one might ask, could Islam not be a foreign entity imported into Africa? How could it have already been there? Conversely, if one were to seek a traditional African culture, one might turn to the well-used literary example of traditional Malinke custom, L’Enfant noir. Where else do we get the totem black snake, the initiation in the sacred forest, the ritual of circumcision, and finally the fatality of death? How could L’Enfant noir not be an expression of indigenous traditional culture? If it so happens that Laye is also Muslim, that shouldn’t pose a problem for the adherents of cultural integrity: syncretism can easily be understood as the merging of two distinct, integral, pure and separate entities. But what happens when one asks what was there before the moment these two cultures or religions met? Were all the elements of Malinke traditional belief kept separate from those of Islam? Where were they located? Where are the borders that define Malinke/non-Malinke? If we are forced to acknowledge that traditional customs and beliefs were located in practitioners of these respective cultures, then the only way to insure their true distinctiveness and purity is to demonstrate their previous imperviousness to each other over time. Of course a reading of The Epic of Sundiata would pose problems for us because Bilali was there from the start of Islam and Bilali was Sundiata’s paternal ancestor. As one of the first Companions of Muhammad, we could not pretend that the fathers of Islam and of the Malinke royal lineage were impervious to each other. To be sure, one could reject this as an example of the present projecting back its truths onto the past so as to construct a tradition, the griots here creating for Sundiata an authentic lineage. But in the larger scheme, if we were to ask where the starting point was for Islam, as for Malinke belief, we could never arrive at a point of departure or a point at which syncretism began. No matter how much we might wish to attach originary truth to Muhammad’s experience of hearing the ringing tones of God’s archangel, the resultant Muslim textuality of scripture and commentary was built on texts, that is, beliefs, words, and practices that were already there. And to posit an absolute division between the earlier influences on Muhammad and on Malinke practitioners is to adhere to a racist essentialism. To rephrase that, one could easily postulate that at some earlier period both shared some common cultural influences, directly or indirectly. Bilali was not the first to go east, nor the followers of Muhammad the first Arabs to go west. What is the alternative? Once one acknowledges that there might have been reasons for a cultural guardian, say a guardian of the word commonly called a griot, to project back onto the past the values and privileged positions of those in the present, then one must also acknowledge that the borders that establish lines of difference that sustain pure identities are equally constructed so as to protect certain powerful investments in cultural identities. With that point of view, that imperative that we reverse the perspective that would have 138

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us project the present back upon the past, we can begin to see that there is no such division as Islam and its pagan opposite. When both stand face to face, against each other, Ceddo armed in battle with marabout, in the heat of the fighting each forgets that projected versions of self and other are what define the enemy as enemy. The projection means that each is also there in the camp of the enemy, and that both fight to destroy that other by the reproduction of the same. This is Jean-Loup Amselle’s point when he invents the term “pale paganism” to define the view of non-Muslims taken by Islam in its African jihads. “In opposition to the theory of ‘Black Islam’, which insists on animism’s corrupting influence on Islam, we must no doubt in many cases see paganism as a product determined in the final analysis by Islam” (130). In a sense, paganism was never there, would never have known it was “paganism” until Islam, or Christianity, came along to define it in terms of its otherness in relation to Islamic or Christian sameness. But going beyond that argument, namely that identity never emerges until there is that confrontation with those who are considered, or consider themselves to be different, there is the further, more astonishing argument that underlies Amselle’s main thesis, namely that in this confrontation each is already always infected by the other—that there is no pure difference. This takes us back to orality and written literature, our second shibboleth. 3()""/,%4(¬47/

The “oral tradition” (as it has been defined by its scholars), is presented first as collective, second as ancient, third as unchanging, fourth as anonymous, fifth as always performed, and sixth as always performed by “griots.” Terms such as “griot” are assumed to be universally understood across Africa, where they are elevated as repositories of ancient wisdom or history. And performance, like griot, is deployed equally as though its meaning and features were self-evident, and by implication shared universal traits across different cultures. The oral tradition is separated from literature, or written literature, by psychological divides, with one kind of thinking and one set of values imputed to orality, and another to the written culture. The oral tradition’s emplacement as first occupant of the terrain is assumed, with written literature primarily attributed to the west, and with some cases like Arabic or ajami scripted texts acknowledged as exceptions. What goes unexamined is what oral and written mean, what historical interactions inform the transmission of literature, what space the threshold between the two occupies or occupied, and most importantly, what investments were at stake in the construction of the notions about orality and written literature by those who originally devised those concepts. The shibboleth then doesn’t lie in the simple generalizations, in the broad 3HIBBOLETHS(ARROW

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and indiscriminate brush strokes that painted a Europe as overly rational and Africa passionate and rhythmical. It doesn’t lie in this or that distinction between oral and written, no matter how refined the distinction into patterns or structures involving repetition, intensification, emplotment, digression, characterization, rhetorical complexity, syntactical differentiation, or other linguistic, discursive, or narrative textual features. The more we concentrate and debate the refinements of such distinctions, the more blinded we are to the investments in the power of dominant social value made by those engaged in the pursuance of such constructions. The end result is always the same: the natural association of written texts with more complex and powerful states is inevitably made, an association whose origins are to be found in the colonial notions of superior civilizations. How, one might ask, could the oral, say, be marked by the written, especially since the written came after the oral. There lies the root of the shibboleth. It is the belief that cultural difference can be established by tracing the origins of identity, and specifically cultural identity. “Africans are Africans and Europeans are Europeans.” “Orality is not written literature.” Yet what if orality, like tradition, were a convenient construct—convenient for the anthropologist, the colonial administrator, and the professor of African literature? Where is orality located? If it is located in the performance, it must be a performance by one whose circumstances and history have insulated him or her from whatever there is of the scriptural, the inscriptedness of the written. What a purity of performative expression that must be to have so absolutely excluded everything that goes into the signifying inscriptions of writing! For Amselle this is not possible: The societies that anthropologists analyze and characterize by ‘tradition’ and ‘orality’ could, more often than one would think, bear the mark of societies with a closely related scriptural transmission. Colonial knowledge represents one of those major influences, but it is patent, as has been observed regarding the ‘Bambara religion,’ that the Arab and Muslim civilizations, and no doubt others before, have also affected ‘oral’ societies. (160)

Amselle goes on to claim that the idea that there is some special, unique form of thinking imputable to oral cultures denies them “the right to a historicity by refraining from looking in their oral productions for an influence of writing, which one can never exclude to begin with” (160–1). He cites Goody’s work among the Vai of Liberia to demonstrate the influence of written works on oral epics. If Islam represents the literate tradition, and “Bambara,” say, an oral tradition, we must question not only the thesis of cultural impermeability that would have the two set off as distinct and different, but we would have to ques140

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tion the bases for the notions of literate and oral. George Lang, relying again on Goody, has already made the point that literate has one meaning in Europe and another in the Islamic traditions: “[T]he nature and forms of [Islamic] literacy remain invisible to the West or the Westernized, for they have roots in Islamic theology and in the unique traditions of literacy derived there from” (Lang 304). We are led to Lang’s Islamocentric conclusion that we can understand Islamic literacy or culture only through translation as long as we continue to read it through European categories: “both the literary and the political endeavors of Muslims tend to slip through the grid of Western or Western-oriented analysis” (306). He concludes that “there will be no accurate and sufficiently complex representation of the Islamic world until European languages are no longer the sole curriculum of study” (307), or, he lamely adds, “at least until translation helps understand the variegation of that world” (307). What applies to literacy and Islam also holds for orality. “Orality” cannot be found without those who “discover” it holding to a pre-existent paradigm that is already grounded in values and ultimately in relations of relative power. Further, beyond the question of influence and cultural transmission, there is the key notion that cultures in contact with each other cannot be separated, with borders or contact zones, into distinct entities without the desire to see those entities as entities in the first place. To draw a local example, Virginia did not exist as a separate entity until someone constructed borders around it, and that was not done because Virginia was discovered but because of the need to delimit the extent of dominion over territory. Those notions of dominion and territory, of an identity constructed as a delimited and bordered state, preexisted the notion that there should be a Virginia. What applies to space is equally true of the classification of people. Amselle follows this path in destroying Miller’s ethnology as the basis for providing knowledge when he says, “We would then denounce ethnological reason, that is, an action that consists in decontextualizing certain data so as to define types, and see instead a problematic of the reproduction of the Same in the Other” (161).1 The notion of “civilization” needs the savage” to give definition to itself, i.e., to reproduce the Same in the Other, both notions being dependent on the binary civilized/ savage. Amselle demolishes the notion of difference as Otherness by the ultimate challenge to identity: “If one or another society ‘accepts’ the written, Islam, or the state, it is not because of tendencies to do so, but because that society bears within itself the imprint of these institutions” (161). And those institutions are not already there, he claims, in the final, brilliant move, because of a prior influence, but because they are, he says, “in a certain way ‘already there.’ Far be it from us to invert the problematic and posit a necessary anteriority of the state, of Islam, or of the written. On the contrary, the analysis in terms of ‘mestizo logics’ allows one to escape the question of origin and to hypothesize an infinite regression” (161). Instead of asking what comes 3HIBBOLETHS(ARROW

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first, he postulates what he calls an “originary syncretism,” one not dissimilar from the créolité claimed by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, or from that of Glissant.2 #/.#,53)/.

Shibboleths, especially those concerning identity, arise in our teaching and apprehension of African literature because of our need to ground our understandings in cultural truths. But what if cultural identity, as we construct it, is not there? What if all that there is, once one succeeds in reversing our perspective on cause and effect, is an endless weave of threads, some reaching back in time, others out in space, mixing with more distant threads whose beginnings and endings we can’t see? We can make up a beginning, see the figure emerge after our fashion, and then teach the figure’s presence to our students. But what if that figure is a short black man with a limp, who stands at a crossroad in a mist, and fools us into thinking he is a god? What if Eshu never existed, or better, if he appears to be and can be seen only by those who already know what they are going to see? What kind of knowledge is that? For Amselle it is the self ’s self-deceptive knowledge of itself. For us, it is the knowledge by which we have and continue to constitute shibboleths of African literature. And if it becomes a necessary condition for our discourse on Africa, we should remember that all such discursive constructions are enabled by relations of power that are not only logocentric, but that are built with the bricks and mortar supplied by those whose project is always, ultimately, to sustain the conditions that insure their continuing dominance.

%NDNOTES 1. There is a certain confluence of thought here with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notions on identity and community. Todd May summarizes it thus: To be an individual, then, is to be constituted by what is ‘outside’ one as well as what is ‘inside’ one. The terms ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are misleading, however, since once it is recognized that individual being is always already exposure, then the outside is no longer outside of one, nor the inside inside of one. What is outside of the individual on more traditional views is actually constitutive of him or her, and what is inside is part of the outside that is constitutive of the ‘inside’ of others. See May 27. 2. “Creolization as an idea is not primarily the glorification of the composite nature of a people: indeed, no people has been spared the cross-cultural process. The idea of creolization demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify ‘unique’ origins that the race safeguards and prolongs. In Western tradition, genealogical descent guarantees racial exclusivity, just as Genesis legitimizes

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genealogy. To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of ‘creolized’ that is considered as halfway between two ‘pure’ extremes” (Glissant 140). Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s version is less successful in escaping notions of identity and being, although they reach in the direction of Glissant in countering originary purity: “Creoleness is an annihilation of false universality, of monolingualism, and of purity” (Bernabé 90). Finally, in The Other America (1998) J. Michael Dash puts a postmodern spin on creolization: Formed within a context of domination and subordination, creolization is an unceasing process that does not result in homogeneity but creative contention and interaction. This is precisely the interpretation of the text that is elaborated by the theoreticians of deconstruction. . . . The deconstruction of the notion of the original, of the concept of a unified, transcendental beginning, is the main focus of the ideas of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Their notion of the text as continually shifting—“at play,” as it were— seems to have enormous implications for the construction of a model for social and cultural creolization. The translational impulse then becomes the only reality, as it allows further room for play, improvization, and extension of the boundaries of the permissible. (103) The term Glissant uses to convey the movement that generates creolization is transversality, or the poetics of the transversal, which he sets in opposition to transcendentalism. This Dash finds characteristic of Walcott’s poetry: “If there is a master theme in Walcott’s work, it must be the enactment and the reenactment of the confrontation of transcendental purity and transversal contingency” (99). In short, the poetics around creolité or creolization, hybridity, transversality—all of which are at the core of contemporary Caribbean aesthetics and ethics—echo the tendency that Amselle sums up as a “mestizo logics.” What they share is a resistance to the notions of identity tied up in conventional thinking about culture, a resistance that must lead us to Amselle’s conclusion that no amount of genealogical excavations will lead to an original, pure culture; that cultures are not only constructed, but mixed at any moment in which they are defined; and that the conditions under which they are constructed always entail confrontation and the struggle between dominant and subordinated forces.

7ORKS¬#ITED Amselle, Jean-Loup. Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. 1990. Trans. Claudia Royal. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Eloge de la Créolité/ In Praise of Creoleness. 1989. Trans. M. B.Taleb-Khyar. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Dash, J. Michael. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. 1989. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992. Harrow, Kenneth W., ed. Faces of Islam in African Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. Lang, George. “Through a Prism Darkly.” In Harrow. May, Todd. Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.

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