for Maleta
“. . .a thing that turned out to be fire, a forest, a
cliff, that suddenly appeared behind me”
--- Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, “MALEJESE, SON OF A KING” (1972)
The Black imagination is haunted by the absolute force that brings it, the Black subject (position), face to face with History, disciplining it into a structural logic of crude accumulation. In one register, Black imagination haunts the vast expansive World that constantly expels it into no-where. In another register, we might say the ‘Black imagination’ is the coming to terms with worlding the world in Black, as Black, with the full might of the terror that subsumes all its spatial and temporal coordinates. These genocidal and epistemicidal dimensions of the World are what concerns us here in our reading of genius storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani.
Like our musings elsewhere, we ask: what does it mean to have things spring up to fight you, grab you by the collar and beat you up mercilessly? What is it about your presence that animates things’ insatiable appetite and desires for your flesh, and desires to be nourished by your flesh? To want to literally eat you up? What does it mean to magnetize all this violence for no apparent reason/s? What makes you so openly vulnerable and available to be violated and accumulated endlessly? Why does it seem like seemingly inanimate things like the natural environment, like landscape, like space, like geography, tend to actively define themselves in opposition to you?
What concerns us here, like it concerned Zenani, are the World’s modalities and protocols of anti-Black violence whose prelogical brutality it is not enough to code as injustices. We wonder, in dialogue with Zenani, what makes this violence so inescapabl(e/y real)? What is the ‘relation’ (we use this word cautiously) between the World and this Black subject? What sustains it? What is the function of this Black subject in this World?
Masithathu’s macabre aesthetics
In the oral narration of Malejese, Son of a King (1972), Nongenile Masithathu Zenani tells us intsomi of a young man, Malejese, the son of a King who finds himself heir of a dead kingdom annihilated by a plague that has ravaged everything and everyone save for a trio of elderly and destitute men who sought refuge in the kingdom. Malejese, sorrowful and the last person standing, is instructed by his wife on her deathbed:
"I too am dying, and you will be left alone. Now, when you leave, you must burn these houses here. Burn the kraals, too. Then travel with all these things [meaning, the livestock]. They will go ahead; you walk behind them. And when you journey, you know that there are two ways. Do not travel by the upper road, travel by the lower one"
A terrified Malejese journeys “through open country” towards his “mother’s parents’ place” to seek refuge. Besides the trio of elders with him, there are the cattle, the horses, the goats, the sheep, the fowl, the hogs, the dogs and his “grief - walking, crying”. A wrong turn on the upper road leads him towards pleasure that quickly turns to horror. “There suddenly appeared a thing that he would never forget,” Masithathu tells us, “it was a thing he had never heard about, even in stories.” This is remarkable when read against civil society’s sanctioned hydraulics of forgetting; that terror could be so totalizing. In a fantastic leap of Black imagination, Masithathu describes the encounter and the creature as:
"On one side, it was fire only. On the other, it was rock. On yet another side, it was a forest. He saw no head, no feet. As the thing came toward him, he could feel its warmth. Nor was it disjointed in the middle - it was one object altogether. It was composed of various elements. When it was a short distance from him, it was hot to him; he seemed to be burning. But this thing was also cold; there seemed to be frost, and he felt as if he were freezing. On one side, it was a cliff; it tended to be continually falling, and he felt that he would be crushed."
What interests us is the gratuitous violence that is set in motion by this encounter; a prelogical violence that pits coercion against the limitations of the politics of refusal. As the ‘thing’ politely commands (an oxymoronic gesture) Malejese to “please make an offering”, he soon realises that the possibility of refusal is not part of the equation; it’s either him or the livestock. For every concession (first the goats, followed by the sheep, the hogs, fowl, and then the cattle) he is allowed to proceed on his journey, or rather “occasioned and allowed”(2) by the ‘thing’. It is our conviction that we’d be remiss if we read the prized livestock as just that, livestock. Something else here is at play, which is to say at stake. What is really at stake is Malejese’s body, his flesh to be precise. We could think of the livestock not as things external to him but rather part of his body that he must give away, or rather, even more crucially, as things/value that is extracted from his Black body, as flesh to be eaten up by the ‘thing’. We can now begin to think about this as grave bodily harm done to him, as forced self-mutilation.
Furthermore, what is most essential to this paper is the nature of this confrontational ‘nature’ and its bloody propensity to proactively feast on Black flesh or sentiency. Put otherwise, what we’re after is an interrogation of Masithathu’s decision to conjure up the geological in support of our claim that geography’s performances, which is to say geography’s genocidal edge, are anti-Black. We want to sit then with this contradiction, investigating the affinities between the structural logics of the World and the natural environment in the reproduction of Black social death. What is it about Malejese’s body that invites the violence of the (natural) World whose drive is to crush him, freeze or burn him to death, or simply eat him-livestock up? What do we hear in and through Masithathu’s narrative strategy of repetition? What could be the relation between this repetition (internal to intsomi as a genre) by the storyteller and the rituals of anti-Black violence enacted both by the ‘thing’ (or broadly speaking, intsomi’s geography) on Malejese’s body (as it coerces him to ‘self-mutilate’, as per our argument above, in the name of “an offering”, whose phraseology has ritualistic undertones) or the extradiegetic naked anti-Black violence that structures not only relations in the World, but the world writ large?
1. Scheub, H. 1992. The World and the Word: Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition/Nongenile Masithathu Zenani. The University of Wisconsin Press.
2. Frank Wilderson III in an interview with Shannon Walsh in “Ties That Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa” (ed. Walsh and Soske, 2016).