8

Abjected Bodies

The Bogus Woman and British New Slaveries in the Context of Postcolonial Studies

Pietro Deandrea

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110231-8

The trafficking, exploitation, and enslavement of migrants in contemporary Britain is a phenomenon that has grown, since the early 1990s, to massive proportions, involving economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. In August 2017 the National Crime Agency reported that more than 300 police operations were underway throughout the country “with cases affecting every large town and city” and trafficking “so widespread that ordinary people would be unwittingly coming into contact with victims every day” (Casciani n. pag.).

Both creative and critical literature frequently describe these “new slaves” as leading a hidden, isolated—and therefore invisible—existence; hence, these migrants are often depicted using the trope of the ghost. At the same time, the range of locations where they are secluded inspire comparisons with concentration camps (Deandrea 14–18). This phenomenon is not limited to illegal activities: the flexibility of Britain’s labour market, together with the criminalizing approach of British immigration policies, inevitably worsens the spectral, sequestered existence of these migrants (Deandrea 4–7).

Against this background, this chapter examines the multifarious forms of violence inflicted on the migrant body through a reading of the play The Bogus Woman (2001), by British playwright, poet, and actress Kay Adshead. In the 2001 “Author’s Note” to the play, Adshead explains that she was asked to write a short piece for the Battersea Arts Centre at a time in which she saw a protest on television by the detainees at Campsfield House immigration detention centre. After researching the subject, she decided to write the play in the “hope it [would] give people an insight into what it can really be like to seek asylum” in Britain (n. pag.). She adds in the note: “I also hope it may change minds” (n. pag.). Since 2001, The Bogus Woman has continued to be performed on a regular basis in the UK, which testifies to the enduring urgency of its themes. If compared to previous critical interventions on the play (some of which are cited in what follows), my analysis of The Bogus Woman places this work not so much in the context of contemporary political theatre and feminism, asylum/refugee literature, or trauma studies (however valuable these perspectives are to fully understand the play), but rather in the framework of the wide phenomenon of British new slaveries.1 In the first part of this chapter, Adshead’s play is considered crucial precisely because its protagonist suffers a gamut of violent abuses (physical and psychological, racial and gender-based, within British institutions and outside of them, including sexual exploitation) which are representative of British new slaveries at large. The end of the first part then adds other interpretive perspectives, thanks to the works of Holocaust studies scholars and to political philosopher Simona Forti’s biopolitical concept of abject bodies (see Biopotere; “Corpi democratici”; “Corpi (bio-)politicamente corretti”), theories which are deemed indispensable to examine the dehumanization undergone by the protagonist of the play.

The second part of this chapter constructs a wider historical context for The Bogus Woman by identifying some lines of continuity from two canonical African writers from the post-Independence period, namely Wole Soyinka and Dambudzo Marechera, in order to emphasize the adaptability of the political drive of postcolonial studies. Soyinka’s reflections on political power in its relation to chains, medical invasiveness, and bodily dissolution anticipate the forms of oppression found in The Bogus Woman, while Marechera’s prophetic vision of Africa as a dismembered refugee continent prefigures many asylum issues unveiled by Adshead’s play. Finally, the third part of this chapter presents possible forms of counter-action (including counter-violence) by juxtaposing Adshead’s, Soyinka’s, and Hannah Arendt’s observations on this topic.

New Slaveries, Violence, and The Bogus Woman

The anonymous protagonist (“Young Woman”) of Adshead’s play is a human rights journalist from an unnamed African country. In her homeland, she is the victim of unspeakable violence by a group of political thugs, who rape her and massacre her family; she manages to flee her country and ends up in England, where she has to suffer further forms of violence inflicted on her by the immigration system, thus suggesting a disquieting continuity from the African dictatorship of her unspecified home country to the British democratic system. In the play’s performances, the lead actress performs all the roles (more than forty) and narrates the entire story in a poetic, impressionistic style. Her narration is fragmented and nonlinear, which might be seen as an expression of her traumatic past and present. Consistent with one tenet of trauma studies, the play “seeks to convey the fraught process of shaping traumatic experiences into a coherent narrative and illustrates the random incursion of violent memories” (Woolley 37). As a consequence, this mode of dramatic narration can be viewed as a criticism of “the positivist demands of the adjudication process in its search for a linear, verifiable and authentic narrative of asylum” based on hard facts (Woolley 40).2

After the Young Woman’s arrival in England, the play focuses on the dehumanization that she undergoes. First, her body is medically violated by tactless, uninformed doctors who sedate her with injections (Adshead 18), force-feed her when she goes on a hunger strike as a form of protest, and subject her to an endless series of humiliating check-ups:

Did you hear me?

Yes

I would mind.

I was given

a complete physical examination

shortly after arriving at Heathrow

another four weeks later

another fourteen days ago.

I found the last doctor’s

questions

invasive and upsetting

his manners rude and brusque. (27)

She is then imprisoned in Campsfield Detention Centre, near Oxford, which is run by multinationals. This centre is shown as effecting yet another kind of violence on the Young Woman through the system of indefinite duration and indefinite location, which results in mental torture: she is not told where she is, and a perverse legislation allows for her to be detained for an indefinite period. The detention centre is built and run like a prison, and she is treated like a criminal offender there:

A tangled tower

of twenty foot high razor wire

secretly coils all the way

from Oxford

(Very anxious) Where am I?

How long will I be here?

What happens next?

What happens now?

YOUNG WOMAN AS GUARD:

Shut up

little nigger woman

YOUNG WOMAN

(Whispers.) Group 4

Prisons for profit

wardens

ex army

hired to brutalise

in twelve-hour shifts

at four pounds an hour. (23, italics in original)

In my view, the fact that the wardens are former soldiers emphasizes the confrontational and criminalizing attitude of British institutions towards immigrants. These wardens are also caught up in this exploitative system where government institutions and multinationals collude, as the long working hours and meagre salaries mentioned in the quotation suggest. This systemic violence is then perpetuated by the wardens, as the Young Woman falls prey to their uncontrolled racist abuse. One warden boasts of being able to tell nationalities apart

By the bum …

Hit the Congo

and you can eat

your breakfast

off the bastard’s

fat backside. (32–33; see also 26)

In his discussion of the play, David Farrier rightly compares the racialized, fetishized Young Woman to the figure of “Hottentot Venus,” South African Sarah Baartman, who was exhibited in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century because of her protruding buttocks (102–04). The Young Woman is repeatedly animalized both through words, such as when she is compared to a monkey (Adshead 26), and through actions, such as when she is being made to sleep on the floor like a dog (61). This provides the most evident case of continuity between the UK and her trauma back home, where she was forced to remain hidden in a lair-like “warm hole”: “The lice jump in my hair / My lips infected. I lick the yellow ooze” (37).

During a riot in the centre physical violence breaks out (56) and, as a consequence, after the riot inmates are subjected to “daily body search / another new rule / since the protest” (64).3 She is also the victim of sexual violence: when she realizes that she is spied on by a guard while she is having a shower, she falls into a fit of self-inflicted violence and has a complete breakdown:

YOUNG WOMAN:

Shame is like a fire.

In the shower

I tore at my own flesh

pulling at my cheek

to rip skin from bone,

clawing my own breasts,

banging my skull

against the cracked tiles. (65)

The Young Woman’s traumatic ripping of her flesh to the bone can be linked to the trope of the concentration camp; more specifically, it may be seen as gesturing to the concept of bare life, theorized by Giorgio Agamben as the state of purely physical existence experienced by the camp prisoner who is deprived of any political life and rights (Agamben 171). But it is also a neurotic last resort against the exposure of her naked, defenceless body. In the context of Holocaust studies, Primo Levi describes such nakedness, regardless of gender, as the uttermost form of passivity in the face of violence:

Now a naked and barefoot man feels that all his nerves and tendons are severed: he is a helpless prey. Clothes, even the foul clothes distributed, even the crude clogs with their wooden soles, are a tenuous but indispensable defence. Anyone who does not have them no longer perceives himself as a human being, but rather as a worm: naked, slow, ignoble, prone on the ground. He knows that he can be crushed at any moment. (Levi 90)

I argue that The Bogus Woman, and especially this situation of vulnerable nakedness, constitutes an appropriate example of how the Holocaust subtly continues in our contemporaneity, as claimed by Holocaust scholars such as Agamben, Arendt, Bensoussan, Lal, and Levi (Deandrea 14–18). At the same time, the concentrationary traces in our present condition contribute to confer historical depth to new slaveries and to the so-called refugee question—a kind of long-span contextualization that the second part of this chapter will further emphasize in relation to postcolonial literatures.

To the many forms of violence endured by the Young Woman in the play should be added all the interviews that she has to undergo in order to process her asylum application. She is callously made to narrate her terrible ordeal again and again, so as to verify its accuracy. Her interrogators expect an objective, consistent, and corroborated reconstruction (Woolley 34), whereas the traumatic nature of her experience makes it “by definition implausible” because “trauma is defined as out of the ordinary and a disruption of everything ordinary” (Bohmer and Shuman 153). This psychological and physical violence is compounded by the restrictions to which she is subjected when she is finally granted Temporary Admission: she cannot work or change her address, and she must live on a £30 weekly food voucher—so that, when she tries to buy sanitary towels, she is humiliated again:

YOUNG WOMAN AS CHECK OUT GIRL:

(Slowly and loudly as to a foreigner.)

Your vouchers are for

food

alright?

comprenez?

things to put in your gob?

chew–

come out the other end.

you can’t eat sanitary towels!

well I suppose

you could

with a bit of marmite

on them.

She laughs. (104, italics in original)

The check-out girl’s language is a clear expression of a colonial condescending attitude, and her darkly sarcastic reference to bodily functions constitutes yet another instance of the many ways in which the Young Woman’s body is reduced to a state of abjected infra-humanity.

I wish to contend that the protagonist of The Bogus Woman, and the widespread condition of Britain’s new slaves that she symbolizes, should be read through the lens of political philosopher Simona Forti’s bio-political theorization of “utopian and abject bodies.” Forti emphasizes how our contemporary imagery is monopolized by the idea of a healthy, eternally young body—something that is able to mobilize our deepest, strongest desires. A body’s eternal youth has become not only a cultural ideal, but also the last utopian space: a utopia that, for the first time in history, does not go against any mainstream aesthetic, ethical, and political norm. At the edges of this utopian imagination, Forti continues, the pressure of the real inevitably operates, including entire marginalized groups of bodies who live in the shadows and who are generally perceived as waste. These abject bodies are functional to the workings of the neoliberal system (Forti, “Corpi (bio-)politicamente corretti” 210–15), “bent by those exhausting jobs that athletic bodies do not want to do any longer, scarred by that residual evil that is precocious ageing” (Forti, “Corpi democratici” 161, my translation).

It is important to note that The Bogus Woman humanizes and gives voice and interiority not only to marginalized people such as asylum seekers, but also to those who fall under Forti’s category of utopian bodies. An example of the latter in the play is the Young Woman’s solicitor Mr Pennington, a caring professional who makes an effort to help her out of her situation, in spite of the fact that his wife is dying of cancer. Soon after his wife’s death, at the end of a series of visits, he communicates to the Young Woman that the Special Appeal Tribunal has turned down her application. As he does so, he appears as someone comparable to one of Forti’s utopian bodies running after youthful health:

YOUNG WOMAN:

Mr Pennington

has a new hair do

very short

he looks

like a Caesar

in a blue suit …

He also has

a new smile. …

And a new friend

Jemima.

She is younger than him

articled

and drives a Porsche. (Adshead 94)

Mr Pennington’s ambivalent presence—he is trying to be helpful but is presented as superficial—may be seen as signifying a pervasive, Foucauldian complicity of the citizens’ utopian bodies in the workings of power, in the violence perpetrated against marginalized groups. This suggestion applies even for those who, like Mr Pennington, mean well. For this reason, the play’s complex picture may be seen also as a valid point of reference for enriching the awareness of would-be activists willing to offer help to migrants such as the Young Woman without falling into citizen-centric biases, that is, biases that result from viewing people and situations from a legally entitled citizen’s perspective, without giving due importance to the subjection of non-citizens (migrants).

Utopian bodies can also openly exploit abject bodies in a violent way. When the Young Woman is driven to destitution and desperation by the immigration system, she resorts to selling her body for a pittance. This is the moment in the play where Forti’s concept of abject bodies finds its most concrete example, as the Young Woman is then identifiable as a representative of the condition of Britain’s new slaves. In tune with Forti’s theorization, “the Man” in the following scene declares at once his exploitative desires (creatively presented through consumerist, cannibalistic imagery) and his need to maintain a healthy body:

YOUNG WOMAN AS MAN:

Ten pounds

and I’ll be quick

you’ve got nice tits

and with a condom, right,

one of those extra strong jobbies.

I’ve got a wife and kids.

African drumming.

Mmm nice!

I like a bit of rump

and black meat’s tough

but tasty… (123, italics in original)

In the play, the use of background drumming (occurring on three occasions) usually signals moments of particularly ruthless oppression against the Young Woman. In this specific case, the drumming appears to amplify the prejudice of African “savagery” at the root of the Man’s sexual fantasies, perpetrating age-old colonial stereotypes and abusive practices.

Postcolonial Roots of New Slaveries: Wole Soyinka and Dambudzo Marechera

The rest of this chapter argues that the critical significance of the migrant body as an object of violence must not be limited to our contemporary times, but should be positioned within a longer chronological framework: it is not a caesura from the historical preoccupations of postcolonial studies, but rather represents one of its lines of continuity. For this purpose, I take as my exemplary authors Wole Soyinka and Dambudzo Marechera. I here examine white British playwright Kay Adshead in the context of African and postcolonial literatures because of the themes and preoccupations pervading her play, just as I did in my monograph on British new slaveries with regard to many white (sometimes canonical) authors writing about this topic (Deandrea 187–89). In doing so, I follow the suggestions of the volume Multi-ethnic Britain 2000+ (2008), which studies artistic representations of asylum and immigration by a wide range of authors, regardless of their origins (Eckstein at al. 14). This relates to the need for a redefinition of the confines of postcolonial studies, discussed at the end of this section.

Soyinka and Marechera are both seminal writers for the development of African literatures, albeit in different ways. On the one hand, they share a sophisticated style of writing, characterized by several layers of complexity. On the other hand, they are two widely different, if not opposite, types of figures. Soyinka, the only black African Nobel Prize winner for Literature (1986), is ever at the forefront of the fight for democracy and human rights through his direct political engagement. Marechera is the uncompromising rebel, “the quintessential enfant terrible of Zimbabwean writing—and a shooting star doomed to early burnout” (Roscoe 154). It is through reading these two emblematic writers that I want to show how the issues and imagery pertaining to Britain’s new slaveries should be seen as present developments of key postcolonial paradigms.

Soyinka’s The Man Died (1972) is the memoir recounting his twenty-eight months in detention during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) for his unaligned position and his attempts to organize an arms embargo. Even though imprisoned by Nigerian authorities and not by colonial ones, Soyinka reflects on the continuing, centuries-long racialized enslavement of the oppressed African subject, thus prefiguring the contemporary racialization of asylum seekers such as the Young Woman. When Soyinka’s limbs are chained, for instance, he writes that

the individual does not stand alone, most especially a black man. I had felt it, it seemed to me, hundreds of years before, as I believe I did experience the triggering of a surely re-incarnated moment when at school I first encountered engravings of slave marches in history books. … racial memory … . Surely it cannot be a strictly personal experience. … I was not a ‘convict’ in a chain-gang in South Alabama or Johannesburg … this human antithesis had its enactment in the modern office of a modern skyscraper in cosmopolitan Lagos in the year 1967. (Soyinka, Man 39–41)

Soyinka’s dismay is paralleled by the shock experienced by Adshead’s Young Woman when one of the Campsfield guards gives her thirty seconds to use the toilet:

YOUNG WOMAN AS GUARD:

that’s time

for knickers down

your business

wipe

and knickers up—

I’m counting

leave the door ajar.

YOUNG WOMAN:

This can’t be happening

In England, August nineteen ninety-seven. (Adshead 63)

Like the protagonist of Adshead’s play, Soyinka feels intimately humiliated by forced medical check-ups, and he describes his feelings by making direct reference to his corporeality:

In certain situations even more than the norm, touch becomes a personal, intimate, psychic, political, emotional and intellectual thing. To be touched by a stool-pigeon protected by a medical banner … to be touched, pawed, inspected by such an object was an exercise in degradation. (Soyinka, Man 59)

Soyinka reacts to this degradation by projecting it back, and so presents the doctor in a dehumanized form (“stool-pigeon,” “pawed,” “object”); this strategy gestures at illustrious antecedents related to the transatlantic slave trade and the Nazi Holocaust, who all pointed out how slavery also dehumanizes the oppressor (Deandrea 106, 136). Soyinka’s solitary confinement in an abject state, too, suggests analogies with the inhumane institutional practice of indefinite detention that today’s asylum seekers are subjected to, which also involves psychological repercussions:

Buried alive? No. Only something men read of.

Days pass, weeks, months. Buoys and landmarks vanish. Slowly, remorselessly, reality dissolves and certitude betrays the mind. (Man 153)

This sense of utter isolation is reinforced by Soyinka’s recurrent dream during those months, when he is working with others on a building site. The dream is a recollection of his student years, when he joined a relief mission for helping flood victims in Holland, and experienced “the pure uncomplicated giving and camaraderie” (86). In the dream, this sense of collective solidarity is broken when he falls into a void and towards total isolation: “I am a long time falling in the void … . The rest is horror, the long fall in the abyss, night after night, the awful silence…” (85–86).4 This dream may be taken as symbolic of one of the most effective strategies of political violence—the fragmentation of any dissenting force. As Hannah Arendt writes, the “effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomization” that it manages to establish (Arendt 55). A similar sense of isolation and atomization can be detected in the literature concerning the new slaves of contemporary Britain (Deandrea 70–72); in The Bogus Woman this phenomenon is exacerbated with punitive aims in the detention centre, when complaining inmates are transferred, “forcibly removed” to other distant centres

on some

trumped up

charge

ill discipline

or lack of co-operation

or

simply

usually

‘too much fat lip’. (55)

Adshead’s emphasis on how the violence of the immigration system continues even after asylum seekers are granted Temporary Admission in the country is echoed in Soyinka’s latest autobiographical volume, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006). When he recalls the period after his release from prison, he describes civil society as pervaded by an arbitrary, ruthless discipline imposed by the military, where human dignity was respected much less than in the jails in which he lived for so long:

The only certitude in my mind was a negative one—I had not thought that the prison regimen could even lay claim to leaving the inmate with more dignity than the victims of the dis’pline in which civil society daily acquiesced. (Soyinka, You Must 152, italics in original)

Violence is also pervasive in Marechera’s writings (see Taitz), to the extent that Anthony Chennels argues that Marechera saw art “as a violent medium whose effect was to shock people into new ways of seeing” (53). In accomplishing this, the Zimbabwean writer’s oeuvre also offers food for thought on lines of development between the postcolonial situation of Africa and contemporary migration issues—and, in line with his style, they do so in a visionary way. For example, his posthumous novel The Black Insider (1990) is set in an African city ravaged by an enigmatic total war, whose description uncannily echoes the many civil conflicts of today:

like a kaleidoscope in which every little chink of colour in the shaken picture was fighting every other little chink. News agencies could not keep track of the alliances and counter-alliances, the neutrals and the non-aligned, the ferocious and the hyperferal, etc. Meanwhile, the cities were rotting, becoming mass graves in which there were tiny pockets of plague outbreaks. (Marechera 24)

Within this apocalyptic context, the protagonists of the novel are defined as “all refugees in one way or another, exiles from the world out there” (25). Later on, their meditations on their refugee identity assume prophetic undertones, anticipating today’s exodus from the African continent and the ruthless violence characterizing it:

We are a continent of refugees; one day here, another day there; so much fodder for the boundary makers. There is no sense of home anymore, no feeling of being at one with any specific portion of the earth. … Which is everything to do with the history of this continent. A continent of wounds which no longer knows what it is to be whole and healthy. A country disfigured by scars and broken teeth and smashed testicles can only writhe in nightmare over and over, reliving the horrors that started it all.5 (79)

These lines of continuity identified between major African authors and today’s new slaveries—a phenomenon which clearly shows how prophetic Marechera was in his phrase “fodder for the boundary makers”—may be fruitfully employed in the current debate on the direction to be taken by postcolonial studies in the age of globalization. I wish to argue that, through their reflections on violence, works like Adshead’s take upon themselves the same critical role as that performed by Soyinka and Marechera in the period of post-Independence. The artistic and political significance of Adshead’s dramatic exposure of the coercive oppression inflicted on migrants by the British immigration system rests on the shoulders of earlier African classics, such as Soyinka’s and Marechera’s scathing criticism of post-Independence African regimes and of their colonial imprint.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, several critics have focused on the connections between “older systems of colonial capitalism” and today’s “neo-imperialism” (Loomba et al. 9–13). In the present context, these critics express the hope that postcolonial studies may be oriented towards a practice of dissent, aimed at producing “a critical strain posed within and against … dominant notions of globalization” (Loomba et al. 8) and an acknowledgement of the problems represented by the “underprivileged agencies” resulting from globalization (Williams 88). In other words, postcolonial studies today can and must provide a “historical corrective to the celebratory theories of globalization” (Behdad 77). All the above-mentioned critics push to the forefront political preoccupations that should ensure the continuing vitality of this field, and they call for a convergence of “the ethical and the political with the aesthetic” (Wilson, Sandru, and Lawson Welsh 2).

Within these lines of continuity, there are obvious specificities to be taken into account. In the case of refugees and asylum seekers, scholars such as Simon Gikandi have propounded critical views of cosmopolitanism seen through the lens of oppressed migrants:

Global cultural flows are still dominated by those coerced migrants rather than the free-willing cosmopolitan subjects. The figure of the refugee may not be as visible as that of the postcolonial flaneur, but the refugee’s presence in the heart of the metropolis challenges the redemptive narrative of postcolonial arrival. (Gikandi 28)

Expressing engagement with the invisibility of the refugee which political criticism should make visible, Gikandi thus calls for a more articulated attention towards a form of dehumanization through invisibility that, according to the social psychologist Chiara Volpato, is the subtlest, and the least studied, form of dehumanization (148).

Forms of Counter-action

Besides giving visibility to those who are made invisible, post-independence African writers and contemporary British literature on new slaveries also share a tendency to envision patterns of empowerment for oppressed subjects, as the concluding section of this chapter shows. Soyinka’s 1983 preface to The Man Died (originally published in 1972) addressed “those who are not dead to the language” and conceived of literature as a spur for anti-hegemonic praxis:

When power is placed in the service of vicious reaction, a language must be called into being which does its best to appropriate such obscenity of power and fling its excesses back in its face … . stick up a finger in an obscene, defiant gesture. … Such language does not pretend to dismantle that structure of power, which can only be a collective endeavour in any case; it does, however, contribute to the psychological reconstitution of public attitudes to forms of oppression. Language needs to be a part of resistance therapy. (Soyinka, “Ten Years After” xiii–xi, my italics)

Soyinka and Adshead show contiguities when they point to some of these “public attitudes” capable of countering the violence against the bodies of migrants or African subjects. One of these attitudes precisely involves using one’s body as the main instrument of counter-action through hunger strikes. In The Man Died, Soyinka begins his hunger strike as an immediate reaction to his being chained, and feels that this decision immediately placates his rage, rendering him more efficiently operative: “I have learnt to starve my violence into calm … . My mind was working again, dispassionately” (Soyinka, Man 41).

Inevitably, dealing with the contemporary criminalization of migrants raises issues related to civil disobedience. Like many detained migrants throughout Europe, Adshead’s Young Woman starts a hunger strike too, after a long wait for Exceptional Leave to Remain, until she weighs little more than six and a half stone. Similarly to Soyinka’s medical humiliation mentioned above, the Young Woman is scared by a paternalistic doctor’s graphic description of force feeding (“The whole business / is extremely undignified / unpleasant / and / uncomfortable / for everyone”) and she is abused by haughty xenophobic nurses (Adshead 47–49).

Continuities between these two authors are also represented by other counter-actions undertaken by their protagonists. The Young Woman and her fellow migrant detainees respond to a series of vicious treatments from the guards (56–58) by forcedly occupying the detention centre courtyard (60) and staging a protest in front of people and journalists. If only in part, this experience is reminiscent of Soyinka’s ordeal, which carries “a notable emphasis on the self as strengthened,” not least because of the bond among those who form “a community of suffering” (Whitehead 20). This is why I deem this episode in The Bogus Woman, albeit short and limited to violence against objects and spatial limitations, as a crucial moment for the agency of the Young Woman and her fellow inmates. Once the revolt has ended, there are retaliations which, in turn, exercise further violence on the migrants’ bodies: they are made to sleep on the floor, subjected to daily body searches, legally persecuted by the Home Office (though unsuccessfully), and forcibly removed to other centres (61–67). However, this episode finally makes their situation known, thus showing how intense bursts of violence can help to focus attention on ongoing situations of abuse.6 In Hannah Arendt’s words: “violence does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction; but it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention” (79).

In You Must Set Forth at Dawn, Soyinka likewise reflects at length on “the problem of violence,” as he calls it (79)—that is to say the use of violence as counter-action and its possible repercussions. Sometimes Soyinka feels that the role of literature as “resistance therapy” is inadequate: “Fast receding was that homecoming projection of my role as being no more than that of a truth crier, with weapons no more lethal than my portable typewriter and paper” (81).

Soyinka’s most popular recourse to counter-violence is probably the famous 1965 episode when he took hostage an entire Ibadan radio station at gunpoint in order to prevent the broadcasting of the victory speech by a politician who had rigged the elections (You Must 78–96): “I had never seen myself as a pacifist, never persuaded myself that the liberation of any tyrannized space can always be achieved by nonviolent means” (80). He is faced with the same dilemma much later, in the 1990s, during the period of Sani Abacha’s ruthless military dictatorship (in a chapter significantly titled “Arms and the Man,” 428–53): “To concede genuine revulsion at the phenomenon of violence does not, however, contradict an acceptance of its sometime necessity—and even justice” (430). But violence as an inescapable means of resistance, Soyinka argues, is fraught with lethal drawbacks:

I tried to caution myself, however, about the dangers of unstructured violence, violence that comes to exist for itself, as a glorified end that loses all focus and control and no longer discriminates between its two principal clients positioned at either end of a living axis: Power and Freedom.7 (80)

Soyinka’s misgivings echo Hannah Arendt’s writing on the political value of violence: the “danger of violence,” she writes, “even if it moves consciously within a nonextremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end” (Arendt 80). Significantly, Arendt’s major criticism of violence is centred on the postcolonial world and Fanon’s oeuvre, which at the time of her writing was very influential on the young generations of protesting students in the USA. More precisely, she claims that Fanon was “much more doubtful about violence than his admirers” (14).8 She is therefore scathing in her criticism of Sartre’s famous Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, where violence is openly endorsed for the liberation of the oppressed (12–13) and seen as a self-curing scourge (24). Arendt makes reference to history and scholarship to point to a dilemma akin to Soyinka’s: “To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power” (53). The main drawback, in her view, is the limited efficaciousness of violence as far as long-term objectives are concerned:

The strong fraternal sentiments collective violence engenders have misled many good people into the hope that a new community together with a “new man” will arise out of it. The hope is an illusion for the simple reason that no human relationship is more transitory than this kind of brotherhood, which can be actualized only under conditions of immediate danger to life and limb. (69)

Arendt’s emphasis on the short-lived results of violence invites one to go back to Adshead’s play and to its short episode of collective rebellion. The inevitable questions are: in what directions might it have developed, if authorities had not retaliated against the Young Woman and her companions with further violence? How fruitful would its liberating potential have been? While these questions are left open in the play, there is one form of active resistance that the critical body of the migrant (including the Young Woman and her fellow detainees) undoubtedly incarnates—movement. Here, too, there is evident continuity with Soyinka’s autobiography in You Must Set Forth at Dawn, where he gives prominence to spatial freedom:

I must confess here to an irrational presumption of my ability to penetrate any space, however hostile. It has to do, I suspect, with a deeply lodged rejection of restriction of my movements, be it on the authority of the state, of an individual or circumstance. (350)

Nowadays, migrants travelling to Europe pose a border challenge in the African-Mediterranean area, which Enrico Calamai describes as a vast concentrationary system scarred by torture, de-humanization, slavery, killings, and multifarious forms of exploitation. This system is scattered but unified by an underlying design “perfected” by the political treaties between Europe and African dictatorships. These treaties are pushing frontiers further and further southward, with the aim of making abject bodies invisible to the public eye, in a continental process of “desaparicion” (Calamai 15).

It is precisely against this necro-political, concentrationary system producing invisibility that the migrant body continues to be inherently critical, especially when it gives life to Soyinka’s maxim:

Movement is the palpable essence of freedom. That seems obvious enough, since restraint is its negation, but it needs to be stated and restated. Freedom expresses itself in many ways, but its real essence is movement—that is, the right to exercise the choice to move or not to move. (Soyinka, You Must 490)

Notes

  1. 1 David Farrier’s book Postcolonial Asylum offers an inspirational interpretation of the play by reading it through the lens of Holocaust and postcolonial theory (102–04, 117–18). In this chapter, I wish to use Farrier’s work as a springboard, and to add further theoretical perspectives while developing a more extensive analysis of several other aspects in the play, starting with its connection to new slaveries, as mentioned above.

  2. 2 According to Elaine Aston (the critic who concentrates most on the actual performance of the play), seeing The Bogus Woman was “a particularly dis-comforting experience” (12), not least because actress Noma Dumezweni established long eye-contact with individual audience members.

  3. 3 In her “Author’s Note” to the 2015 edition of the play, Adshead notes how these violent practices have continued unabated, and mentions twelve deaths in immigration removal centres and numerous allegations of physical and sexual abuse (Adshead n. pag.).

  4. 4 In her analysis of The Man Died through the trope of the descent into hell, Anne Whitehead aptly argues that this katabasis is articulated by Soyinka “in order to restage the encounter between Western and non-Western culture” (15). In my view, The Bogus Woman may be seen as yet another variation on this motif.

  5. 5 I concur with Stewart Crehan’s description of Marechera as someone who considered himself an exile, a nationless writer; the alienation that characterizes his works is founded on “the constant presence and pressure of those on the margins” (266). Crehan distances himself from the critical tradition that highlights Marechera’s individualism—rather, Crehan stresses the writer’s “affiliation with the world’s victims and down-and-outs” (266).

  6. 6 It was the trial against the so-called Campsfield Nine that inspired Kay Adshead to write The Bogus Woman, as she states in her original “Author’s Note” to the play (9).

  7. 7 Whitehead’s analysis of Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1972) emphasizes a similar point: “For Soyinka, the claims of violence are compelling; but they are also dehumanizing, of limited political efficacy, and difficult if not impossible to contain” (25).

  8. 8 Arendt argues that only the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth “has been widely read,” while she quotes from the same book (the 1968 Grove Press edition, 61), where Fanon writes of the “unmixed and total brutality [which], if not immediately combatted, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks” (Arendt 14).

Works Cited

  1. Adshead, Kay. The Bogus Woman. 2001. London: Oberon, 2015. Print.

  2. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 1995. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Standford UP, 1998. Print.

  3. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. Print.

  4. Aston, Elaine. “The ‘Bogus Woman’: Feminism and Asylum Theatre.” Modern Drama 46.1 (Spring 2003): 5–21. Print.

  5. Behdad, Ali. “On Globalization, Again!” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 62–79. Print.

  6. Bohmer, Carol, and Amy Shuman. Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.

  7. Calamai, Enrico. “Perché i migranti sono i nuovi desaparecidos.” Il Manifesto 7 Feb. 2018: 15. Print.

  8. Casciani, Dominic. “Modern Slavery and Trafficking ‘in Every UK Town and City.’” BBC News. 10 Aug. 2017. Web. 14 May 2018.

  9. Chennels, Anthony. “Unstable Identities, Unstable Narratives in Black Sunlight.” Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera. Ed. Flora Veit-Wild and Anthony Chennels. Trenton: Africa World, 1999. 43–55. Print.

  10. Crehan, Stewart. “Down and Out in London and Harare: Marechera’s Subversion of African Literature.” Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera. Ed. Flora Veit-Wild and Anthony Chennels. Trenton: Africa World, 1999. 265–81. Print.

  11. Deandrea, Pietro. New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghost and the Camp. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015. Print.

  12. Eckstein, Lars, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Christoph Reinfandt. “A Divided Kingdom? Reflections on Multi-ethnic Britain in the New Millennium.” Multi-ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts. Ed. Lars Eckstein, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Christoph Reinfandt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 9–21. Print.

  13. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. 1963. New York: Grove, 1968. Print.

  14. Farrier, David. Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary before the Law. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. Print.

  15. Forti, Simona. Biopotere: Corpi utopici e corpi abbietti. Modena: Consorzio per il festival filosofia, 2012. Print.

  16. ———. “Corpi (bio-)politicamente corretti.” Vita, politica, contingenza. Ed. Laura Bazzicalupo and Salvo Vaccaro. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016. 203–17. Print.

  17. ———. “Corpi democratici, politicamente corretti.” L’interesse dei pochi, le ragioni dei molti: Le letture di Biennale Democrazia. Ed. Pier Paolo Portinaro. Turin: Einaudi, 2011. 147–61. Print.

  18. Gikandi, Simon. “Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality.” Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium. Ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh. London: Routledge, 2010. 22–35. Print.

  19. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. 1986. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Intr. Paul Bailey. London: Abacus, 1989. Print.

  20. Loomba, Ania, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. “Beyond What? An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Ed. Loomba, Kaul, Bunzl, Burton, and Esty. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 1–38. Print.

  21. Marechera, Dambudzo. The Black Insider. Ed. Flora Veit-Wild. Harare: Baobab, 1990. Print.

  22. Roscoe, Adrian. “Marechera, Dambudzo.” The Columbia Guide to Central African Literature in English since 1945. Ed. Adrian Roscoe (with contributions by Anthony Chennells). New York: Columbia UP, 2008. 154–57. Print.

  23. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Preface. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. By Frantz Fanon. Trans. Richard Philcox. Foreword Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Grove, 2004. xliii–lxii. Print.

  24. Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died. 1972. Ibadan: Spectrum, 1985. Print.

  25. ———. Season of Anomy. 1972. London: Collings, 1973. Print.

  26. ———. “Ten Years After.” The Man Died. 1972. Ibadan: Spectrum, 1985. vii–xxiii. Print.

  27. ———. You Must Set Forth at Dawn. 2006. London: Random House, 2007. Print.

  28. Taitz, Laurice. “Knocking on the Door of the House of Hunger: Fracturing Narrative and Disordering Identity.” Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera. Ed. Flora Veit-Wild and Anthony Chennels. Trenton: Africa World, 1999. 23–42. Print.

  29. Volpato, Chiara. Deumanizzazione: Come si legittima la violenza. Bari: Laterza, 2011. Print.

  30. Whitehead, Anne. “Journeying through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria.” Studies in the Novel 40.1–2 (2008): 13–30. Print.

  31. Williams, Patrick. “‘Outlines of a Better World’: Rerouting Postcolonialism.” Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium. Ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh. London: Routledge, 2010. 86–91. Print.

  32. Wilson, Janet, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh. “General Introduction.” Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium. Ed. Wilson, Sandru, and Lawson Welsh. London: Routledge, 2010. 1–13. Print.

  33. Woolley, Agnes. “Questioning Narrative Authenticity in Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman.Moving Worlds 12.2 (2012): 30–41. Print.

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