What Is the Mousetrap?

In 2016, Jennifer Haigh published the novel Heat and Light, which concerns the dependence on extractive industries for energy, specifically in Pennsylvania. One of the characters, Wesley Peacock, belongs to a family that does not evacuate the Three Mile Island area when he is a child; he later dies of cancer, which cannot be linked with certainty to the infamous radiation leak,1 but which he is convinced is the cause of his cancer. He is not evacuated because he is neither in the womb nor a preschooler. He is home-schooled. He does not want to go to school; he is addicted to the care of his mother and envisions as desirable the position of the boy in the 1976 movie Boy in the Plastic Bubble (directed by Randall Kleiser and starring John Travolta, Glynnis O’Connor, and Robert Reed). He remembers the boy actor explaining that he “is not so unhappy in here as all of you think” (Haigh 2016, 148). I propose that this bubble represents the bubble of Western medical care and its associated cordon sanitaire as I described it in terms of health care as a colonial-settler white’s right. The bubble, then, is metonymically connected to systems of colonial capitalism within which a predominantly privately funded health-care system sits (as opposed to the full public system of, say, Canada, or the dual public-private system of the United Kingdom). In an otherwise realist novel, Wesley Peacock comes back from the dead to continue to assert that his death has been the result of the Three Mile Island leak. This suggests that the bubble-(white)-citizen relation is one of contract: if those who believe in, and thereby make, the bubble support it, they expect protection from it. In short, Wesley Peacock feels betrayed: he took little risk—he even refuses having children, wanting himself to continue to be the apple of his spouse’s eye—and therefore expected no negative consequences to result from his choices. In a microcosm of this context, as a child he plays a game in which a series of dice throws between players lead to the construction of a trap, the end of the game being the release of a cage from the top of a post to trap an “unsuspecting mouse” (149). This indicates that he, like other characters in the novel, does not see that, when the bubble of colonial-settler capitalism bursts, the fallout will land on him. This happens to other characters in the novel, some of whom recognize that the bubble is broken and some who see their misfortune as simply unlucky. That is to say, the bubble breaks whether those party to its contract recognize it or not.

At the time of the Three Mile Island leak, Wesley’s mother keeps the windows shut because the hydrogen bubble, that other actuality, is growing, as if windows are adequate protection against radiation. Ironically, enough, the neighbor asks Wesley’s mother if she has lead windows, as these are said to help keep radiation out. Although the text doesn’t relate whether the Peacocks do or do not have lead windows, or whether the glass or the paint may be lead, current EPA regulations consider the dispersal of lead dust to be so harmful, especially to children, that a lead-safe qualification for lead-detected windows is required for their removal (Environmental Protection Agency 2017). Once again, what is assumed by the characters to save them, whether the bubble or lead windows, is actually, in the event, detrimental to them. Indeed, environmental security is unobtainable and emotional security radically scarce in Heat and Light: whatever one does to protect oneself from being entrapped in the metonymical bubble engages one further in a network of circumstances one cannot overcome through that much-vaunted power of the individual in the American dream. Hence the microcosm of the mousetrap. Like all dice games, the game of the novel has some characters on the upswing and others on the downswing, but all of their actions are determined by, or damagingly contained by, the dictates of colonial capitalism. The trap does not need to be released on the unsuspecting mouse; it’s just that the unsuspecting mouse may suddenly realize it is in the trap.

In this chapter I juxtapose two globally different sites of colonial capitalism: Pennsylvania for Haigh’s Heat and Light and Cape Town for Ntshanga’s The Reactive. The methodology for such a comparison could broadly be identified as an exploration of the theory postulated by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) in their 2015 Combined and Uneven Development, that world literature manifests, in generic terms, Trotsky’s theory of combined but uneven development. In this theory, as I noted in my introduction, the world is globally under capitalist sway, but the movement toward this capitalist “state” is highly differentially, or more precisely, unevenly manifest. The WReC’s critique does not assume a hierarchy in which the most developed state is the most efficient or morally superior, or even the desired goal. In this sense, the core of Combined and Uneven Development is not implicated in the notion that the goal of development is an unambiguously good thing: the WReC is explicit in its disavowal evaluations of development that remain untouched by colonialist-capitalist critique.

Thus the kind of literary “Great Tradition” proposed by F. R. Leavis can be seen, in WreC’s terms, as a manifestation of the Western European genre of the novel intersecting with particular stages of colonialist-capitalist development (Leavis 1948). The same would go for Ian Watt’s 1957 history of the novel: the consolidation of the individual as character, protagonist, or solid citizen we see in Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson is consonant with the individual as commanding human-rights we see in Joseph Slaughter’s 2007 bildungsroman. These are very broad strokes, however. Here I wish to draw specifically on the kind of airlessness or hopelessness of the subjects in Haigh’s bubble—all of whom are affluent, materially speaking, when compared with their effluent counterparts in The Reactive—to demonstrate how genres and communities of effluence, despite their “ungrievability” in Judith Butler’s terms (2009), demonstrate options for different formations of the subject, and thus different futures for the subject, that are foreclosed in the world of Haigh’s meticulous bubble, which ruthlessly demonstrates the need for alternative formations of the subject.

The Myth of the Subject—On Judith Butler’s Precarity

In Butler’s formation of precarity, she claims: “Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (2009, 25). That state has, however, taught us that “to be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state. . . . Precarity . . . characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no option but to appeal to that state from which they require protection” (26). In other words, “To rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices,” Butler claims (26). Further, Butler understands that the human-rights framework cannot render life not precarious, since the only form of life the human-rights regime recognizes is one that (already) has a status of a person: one who has the actual potential to be, or is involved in, the business of creating the good life, both symptom and diagnosis of which can be only that material reality that we recognize as possession. She also argues, and I agree, that the conditions of life are deeply interdependent. She intends this in the sense of human interdependency, whereas I would include nonhuman animals and natural and built environments, with all their entanglements, alongside the human.

Colonial capitalism renders the interdependency that is the precondition of sustaining life invisible in the sleight of hand in which to choose to thrive is to make the choices about what kinds of products are most likely to get one further up the corporate ladder of the business of the good life. That is to say, colonial capitalism, represented by the bubble, likes to make itself invisible, just as the bubble in the film is glass. One practices reliance on the bubble while not noticing it’s there. I suggest a related elision exists in Butler’s work, an elision that speaks to the U.S. context in which she primarily works: the confusion of the state with colonial capitalism. That is to say, one can replace the bubble, as I have described it, with the state in her observations about the state. For example, in Heat and Light, to be protected by the violence of the bubble (its exclusions) is to become subject to the violence of the bubble, when the apparent protection it provided turns out to betray the protected. In literal terms, one can also turn Butler’s thinking on its head in relation not only to the vulnerable but also to the supposedly protected or proper citizen. The supposed beneficiaries of the state are provided security and assume, once a Black Lives Matter moves in, that they are suddenly unprotected. That is to say, one is made all the more less free if one’s security is both granted and threatened by the state, in a situation in which the state is in fact complicit in fusing together the rights of the citizen and the rights of the consumer, literally confusing them. This stands both for the improper citizen, the ungrievable, and the proper citizen, like Wesley Peacock. In this context, we need to go a step beyond Butler’s comments on the state in Frames of War:

Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, “there is a life that will never have been lived,” sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start. (2009, 15)

Communities of the effluent live outside or on the margins of the state in its assumption of the good life as everyone’s business. Many postcolonial communities, Indigenous, and those otherwise rendered marginal are persistent precisely because they no longer or never did believe in the authority and/or capacity of the state to provide basic security, let alone any good life. Furthermore, such communities do not mistake, or confuse, the state with colonial capitalism, although they find ways of speaking the relations between the two, as we shall see. Butler’s theory depends on an optics of recognition that overlooks the affirmation of community, and the grievability and other forms of solidarity that accompany intercommunity bonds within effluent communities. That is to say, Butler remarks on the human who commands rights within the bubble as able to grieve other humans who command rights within the bubble, but as unable to grieve precarious life, which would include communities of effluence outside the purview of the bubble, those who are outside first because the phenomenal cost of a medical intervention such as the bubble would not be borne by the state or capitalism on their behalf, and second because they don’t believe in the bubble and have never contributed to its myth. In this respect, Butler describes Kelly Oliver’s (2001) understanding of the weaknesses of recognition as opposed to affirmation, where recognition relies on the dominant culture (think inside the bubble) to recognize the ungrievable in a gesture of liberal, paternalistic inclusion (think outside the bubble). However, Butler’s paradigm completely overlooks intereffluent affirmation, or affirmation between subjects excluded from the bubble, or subjects who have excluded themselves from the bubble.

Oliver critiques the politics of recognition in its limitations as a liberal form of inclusion: one can be borne witness to only if the subject who commands human rights already acknowledges the other’s right to recognition. Thus Oliver argues that the other—say, in my terms, the effluent community as subject, the outside-the-bubble as “matter”—can never be recognized as subjects except within, and on the terms of, the colonialist-capitalist subject of the bildungsroman and human rights, or on the terms of the subject that, as I have argued (Jolly 2010), is speakable, as opposed to the unspeakable subject, or as opposed to the being that is effluent community. Instead of recognition of rights, then, Oliver argues for a mode of bearing witness to the other that she terms “affirmation,” not recognition, the point being that one can affirm what one cannot fully recognize; one can affirm what one does not know, thereby taking the kind of risk altogether foreign to the bubble, venturing onto ground that is not protected by the contract, and where one does not know whether one will be protected, and even more radically, where one can question whether protection provided by (the myth of) the bubble is even a good thing.

Within the cult of the individualism of the bildungsroman subject, who is also the official subject of certain democracies, such as that of the United States, affirming what one does not know would be regarded as a potential source of threat. However, effluent communities see affirmation of the unknown differently, or as Lindanathi puts it in The Reactive, “there was no need to be fearful of everything we didn’t know” (156). In this respect, the subject of the bildungsroman and human-rights regime, as Slaughter has outlined him for us, aligns with the subject who cannot affirm the other and therefore must fear the strange and attempt to turn it into the self, as colonial capitalism demands. Not only does this breed a politics of paranoia about the unknown at the national level, as has been well documented by numerous political scientists for whom this is their primary topic (Hofstadter 1964) (Knight 2002); it also breeds fear of the unknown on an individual level. However, we need to continue to remember that, within this framework, both the individual subject and the “other” objects that it fears are fictions, otherwise we risk naturalizing both the individual subject and those “it” fears as real, in the mistaken sense of ontologically unable to be reconceived or recreated. Here we can begin to understand the persistence of effluent communities as residing not in adherence to a form of subjectivity alternative to that of the bildungsroman, but in a radical and ongoing understanding of subjects as fictional, and therefore always already available for reconstruction and recreation, despite the myth of the originary or fixed subject perpetrated by other agents of structural violence, such as the state, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and as I argue in chapter 1, the human-rights regimes, in their adherence to the notion of human rights as proper to the anthropocentric subject. To put it a different way, the effluent community does not outsource responsibility for subject-making to the institutionalized forms of structural violence that normalize vulnerability for the marginal and security for the propertied in the Butlerian sense, under liberal structures of recognition.

Before I move to a discussion of the vexed question of resilience and how it fares under liberal regimes of recognition as opposed to risk-taking structures of affirmation, let me engage with the promised comparative reading of Heat and Light and The Reactive, in which Heat and Light performs the bubble, and thus enables us to see it for what it is, as the protagonist of The Reactive indeed does. If Heat and Light points to the violence of the bubble, The Reactive suggests ways of living that deliberately discount its myth; that is to say, The Reactive can be read as just one manifesto of effluent life, but a significant one nonetheless.

Heat and Light and The Reactive: A North–South Comparison of Economies of Extraction and Addiction

Haigh’s Heat and Light rigorously and relentlessly describes the war, rather than the violently presupposed alignment, between the cult of the individual and the struggle for a “better life” in her description of Bakerton, a Pennsylvania town engaged in the intergenerational tradition of depending on the boom and bust of extractive industries for income. Pennsylvania has a long history of exploitation of the land for material goods that coincides with white colonization: first logging by setters, then the first oil well ever drilled in the world, then strip mining, and most recently fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, in which vertical, or more often horizontal, drilling is combined with the propulsion of liquid into the fractures to keep the oil welling up from shale.2 Haigh’s novel is tellingly bookended by two rare references to the Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania. At the beginning of the novel, the unnamed narrator points out that the oldest person in Bakerton, Ada Thibodeaux, came from a family “two counties over, what had been Seneca land, given to Chief Cornplanter by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, until the state changed its mind and took it back again” (3). This colonial history does not reappear until the close of the novel, when fracking has come and appears to be going, at least from Bakerton. One of the protagonists, Rich Devlin, fantasizes about a virtually unimaginable world in which the land is still precolonial, populated by “Indians” (427). This protovision is inspired, unsurprisingly, by a TV commercial, a scene to which I shall return presently.

In between these two bookends, the mouse trap is painstakingly outlined as a series of constraining bubbles, constituted by the structural violence of colonial capitalism’s ruling premises, including its naturalization of these premises as ontological or inevitable, and fixed. The subject of capitalism is itself problematic, in that the very use of “it,” I admit, replicates the primary fiction of capitalism: it presents itself as an “incontrovertible realism,” but is rooted in fiction. According to Emile Benveniste, the pronoun appears to be fixed but is in fact a shifting signifier, one whose meaning is as unavailable for firm identification in inverse proportion to the ways in which the fantasy of capitalism represents itself as commonsensical, transparent, normative, and inevitable: “real” (1971, 227). As Ericka Beckman writes:

Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Mark Fisher have all argued that capitalism today presents itself as an incontrovertible source of “realism,” to which there is no viable alternative. The powerful sense of realism that capitalism evokes is in a strong sense, however, rooted in fiction. As Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner have written, in reference to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, “the economy is the domain of capitalist societies in which the imaginary reigns most completely and most unquestioned, presenting itself as the rationale for the entire society but itself bordering on a ‘systemic delirium.’ ” (2012, 146)

The term “capitalist societies” requires nuancing in the context of this comparison with reference to the WReC’s theory of combined and uneven development.

While the developed capitalism of the United States is able to present itself as natural, inevitable, “real,” the characters of Ntshanga’s The Reactive understand capitalism as a fiction. They don’t deny its effects on their lives, but neither do they accept its inevitability. Thus, while the characters of Heat and Light constantly represent themselves in the binary terms of winners and losers, perpetrators and victims in a game in which material goods are seen as a realm of the zero-sum game par excellence, Ntshanga’s central protagonists understand that their desires and actions and very being are co-constituted through a negotiation between structural factors not within their control and their interrelations with one another. This notion of community as a subject—as opposed to the individual as the subject who wins or loses against rules set by someone or something else—creates a resilience. At the risk of exploiting puns extravagantly, if Heat and Light is about reactors as subjects, it is also about subjects as reactors, and The Reactive, while referring to those who test positive for HIV, is also referring to subjects-as-reactives.

The first sentence of The Reactive makes a statement that initially reads as though the narrator, Lindanathi, has assigned some men to kill his brother: “Ten years ago I helped a handful of men take my little brother’s life” (3). The opening sentence is a stark intertextual reference to Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s now classic coming-of-age story of a female protagonist, Tambudzai, who states at the beginning of that novel that she is “not sorry that my brother died” (1989, 1). Tambudzai refers to the fact that she would not have been afforded a (colonial) education if her brother had not died, owing to the primacy of male children in the distribution of meager family resources (although the older Tambudzai does come to question the violence of the colonial education she delights in as a youngster). In stark contrast, Lindanathi feels responsible for the death of his brother, as they had agreed to undertake the Xhosa initiation ceremony, that of ceremonial circumcision, into manhood together. Luthando, Lindanathi’s brother, has a botched circumcision and dies two days before he is due to come out of the seclusion that circumcision initiates traditionally undertake. Lindanathi takes responsibility for this death because he fled from the ritual, leaving his brother, Luthando, as Lindanathi understands it, at risk.

While Slaughter reads Dangarembga’s novel as a classic type of how postcolonial writers exploit the bildungsroman to claim human rights, this reading downplays the failure of such rights in relation to the protagonist’s (Tambudzai’s) cousin Nyasha, for whom the aforementioned colonial education granted her by her father, a missionary school pastor-headmaster, is fatally toxic. However, this is not territory (re)covered by Ntshange, as Lindanathi firmly tells us that the novel “isn’t a story about me and my brother from the Transkei, about the Mda boys from eMthata or the village of Qokolweni, where my grandmother’s bones lie polished and buried next to her Ma’s. Instead I want to tell you about what happened to me in Cape Town after Luthando had taken his death” (4). Here Luthando actively “takes” his death, rather than dies, as he takes up a position with the ancestors through the ceremonies of the funeral. Further, it is significant that this novel does not oppose tradition to colonial or postcolonial modernity à la Nervous Conditions: the novel is about communal forms of responsibility, not the binary of the early Dangarembga novel.

The person who doesn’t “take up” Luthando’s death, who cannot come to terms with his responsibility in it, is Lindanathi, who subsequently, in his capacity as a lab technician, infects himself with HIV. However, the cult of individual responsibility as either perpetrator or victim does not play out in this novel. Despite the fantasies of Lindanathi and his friends Cissie and Ruan about his (Lindinathi’s) dying year, which they call affectionately his “Last Life” (17), and which he thinks about less and less once he moves to Dunoon,3 he is not a victim of HIV in the traditional sense. Indeed, it is precisely because Lindanathi perceives that he cannot react appropriately to his brother’s call for companionship in the circumcision ritual that he infects himself:

One year after I graduated from tech, and a week before the sixth anniversary of LT’s death, I infected myself with HIV in the laboratories. That’s how I became a reactive. I never had the reactions I needed for myself, and I couldn’t react when Luthando called me for help, so I gave my own body something it couldn’t flee from. (141)

Unlike the selfishness of the majority of the characters in Haigh’s Heat and Light (with the exception of the nurse Rena), Lindanathi listens when Cissie explains his weakness to him. He states: “One of the biggest problems she has with me, she says, is that I never pay enough attention to people. Every time I offer someone a shoulder to cry on, Cissie says, my biggest concern is the snot left drying on my shirt. I’ve told her how I think that’s good, how she’s phrased that” (13). Of course, the inversion in the last sentence enables the reader to think for a second that Lindanathi thinks it’s good for him to be self-centered; but instead, it’s the match between the aesthetics and meaning of her statement about his selfishness he likes; his affirmation is of his own “snottiness.” Preceding this exchange, we discover that Lindanathi tries to make up for his lack of responsiveness with physical affection. When Cissie burns her finger cooking up the glue the trio uses to make their posters advertising that they sell the antiretrovirals that prevent HIV from developing into AIDS, Lindanathi comforts her in a way so intimate that it entirely exceeds his later mechanistic description of his sexual exploits with a pair of prostitutes he hires to make up a trio:

. . . with everything silent and her flat feeling like an old tomb around us, I bent down to touch her on the part of her finger that was dying. With her eyes still closed, Cissie raised her hand and stuck the burnt finger inside my mouth, and, sliding it slowly over my tongue, told me to suck on the skin till it came back to life.

So I did that.

I didn’t mind doing it, either. (13)

Cissie tells Lindanathi he checks the time a lot when people are telling him their problems: “In response, I told her I’d work on it. Then I looked at my wristwatch. I guess I’m still working in it.” (14)

Unlike Lindanathi, the logic that binds the characters of Heat and Light, with the aforementioned exception of Rena, is one of self-promotion through the exploitation of others and a deep assumption, so deep as to remain unstated, that not only material goods, but even sympathy and empathy, like that Lindanathi seeks from within himself, are commodities in a zero-sum game of human interactions. What this leads to is an array of addictions that would baffle Lauren Berlant herself, whose theory of “cruel optimism” (2011) I shall explore later in this chapter. There is the addiction of the Pennsylvanian communities and Americans at large to fossil fuels, an addiction that constructs the boom-and-bust economy of Pennsylvania, based as it is primarily on fossil fuels: “Rural Pennsylvania doesn’t fascinate the world, not generally,” the narrator of Heat and Light tells us, “but cyclically, periodically, its innards are of interest. Bore it, strip it, set it on fire, a burnt offering to the collective need” (11). This resource is seen as a preordained trap, not a set of substances whose usage can be conceived of in any way other than their exploitation, and that of the workers whose “fate” it is to mine the goods:

More than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath. Accidents of geology, larger than history, older than scripture: continents colliding, seas encroaching and receding, peat bogs incubating their treasures like a vast subterranean kiln. In the time before recorded time, Pennsylvania was booby-trapped. Blame the gods for what lies beneath, the old pagan gods, discredited now, vaguely disreputable, the unwashed old men who struck a backroom deal before Jesus was invented. (426)

The odd corollary of this, despite the cycles of the boom-and-bust economy, is that it builds in the citizens not skepticism, but faith in “the next big thing”: faith in the colonialist-capitalist bubble. This faith benefits Bobby Frame, the salesman from the felicitously named Dark Elephant fracking company, which is looking to acquire drilling rights on the townsfolk’s land. Further, the faith in the next big boom is associated by the narrator with the faith of the townsfolk, who the narrator implies invented Jesus themselves and proceeded to have faith in him, just as they do in the (idea of) prosperity:

[The] past [of Bakerton] holds no interest for Bobby Frame, though he owes his success to it—distant memory of boom times, the ghost of prosperity that lingers in the town. Here promises are met without skepticism. The landowners are churchgoers, people of faith. The agnostics—there are a few—need only to look to history: Bakerton has been favored before, tapped by Industry’s magic wand. (12)

The agnostics here are not so much those that don’t go to church—Rich Devlin, for example, prefers to fish, despite his belief both in the fracking promise offered by Bobby Frame and his wife and daughter’s Sunday church attendance—but those few residents who refuse Bobby’s offer: the lesbian couple Rena and Mack, and Con Krug, “a known crack pot. . . . A man of complicated opinions, paranoid theories that require much explaining on Open Mike, the local radio’s call-in show. . . . The sort of eccentric who gets stranger with age, and he’s been old as long as Rich can remember” (75). The faith about which the narrator speaks, then, is faith in capitalism. And (faith in) capitalism requires denial of the historical crises it produces.

Beckman quotes Terry Eagleton in this regard: “Capitalism is incapable of inventing a future that does not ritualistically reproduce its present,” and further, she adds, “capitalism is incapable of creating a vision of the past that does not reinforce its resolute presentism” (2012, 147). Following in this vein, Beckman argues for a privileging of fiction as that which can read the recurring catastrophes in capitalist history without glossing over them: “If we accept that history under capitalism is not one of linear progress but instead one of repetition, reversal, and ruin, literary works of the past can provide a window onto the repetitive and cyclical logic of capital that continues to mark our present” (148). Neither Heat and Light nor The Reactive, both published in 2016, can be considered literary works of the past. But they nevertheless show how the “the imaginative and indeed fictive” underpinnings of capitalism come to light in what Beckman terms the “throes of crisis” (148).

Beckman remarks on fictions from South America, from countries she discusses as accorded a place in, borrowing from Dipesh Chakrabarty, “the waiting room of history,” following the teleologies of modernity and development, at best “emerging,” sometimes simply “underdeveloped,” but sometimes distinctly “backward.” But the postcolonial residents of the South Africa of The Reactive, I argue forcefully, understand themselves to be living in perpetual crisis and have little or no faith in “the next best thing”: they are not interested in entering “the waiting room” because they know the colonialist-capitalist prize to be a swindle. Conversely, Heat and Light demonstrates relentlessly what I experience as the airlessness of a culture in which those who question capitalism are considered both unspeakable and in turn to be the ranters of the insane, à la Butler: like Con Krug, they are considered deeply eccentric and positively obstructionist. In this sense, the community of The Reactive is in some way inoculated against, or resilient in the face of, the faith in capitalism held by the majority of Bakerton’s residents. This is not to say that Lindanathi and his friends deny the material comforts of life, or even the use of so-called recreational drugs, as we shall see; but their faith in them is limited, just as their demonization of them is equally limited.

This is a comparison I explore through the metonymical relation of addiction to capitalism. In Heat and Light, addiction is portrayed as a normalized relation to all resources, human and material, and in fact, the rhetorical gambit of the novel could be described as representing capitalism so realistically, so seamlessly, that capitalism’s artificiality is highlighted by the Teflon description of it: nothing will stick to it, just as it doesn’t stick to itself.

On the other hand, capitalized instrumentalization is seen as having its limits for human well-being in The Reactive. I am not making a moral argument against drug use. I argue, instead, that highly “developed” capitalist countries like the United States relate to all resources through a dominant model of addiction, without recognition that, while they may label as “addiction” only the pattern of chemical dependency on illegal drugs, still other patterns such as “workaholism” and certain relations to foods and to others’ attention may also be classified as addiction, including the culture’s primordial respect for extractive industries.

Before I discuss scenes of addiction and drug use in both novels, however, it makes sense to point out that South Africa is also “what lies beneath it,” from gold to platinum to diamonds and back. It is the world’s largest producer of chrome, manganese, platinum, vanadium, and vermiculite. It is the second largest producer of ilmenite, palladium, rutile, and zirconium. It is also the world’s third largest coal exporter. South Africa is also a huge producer of iron ore; in 2012, it overtook India to become the world’s third biggest iron ore supplier to China, which is the world’s largest consumers of iron ore. It lacks only oil, but it converts its abundant low-grade lignite coal into oil to offset some of this need. Its history of colonial rule, followed by the apartheid regime and collusion with capitalism, have ensured that the benefits of these resources have been profoundly inequitably distributed. Indeed, the resources on occasion ensured that the apartheid regime was upheld. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, for example, supported apartheid vigorously, since they feared the fall of such resources into the hands of both the “Black” (majority population) and “Red” (communist) “perils.”

The exploitation of highly policed, Black, migrant labor forces, from Rhodes’s controlling development of the diamond mines in Kimberly to the so-called hostels of the Witwatersrand goldfields, has at least one positive outcome: the notion that such labor will at some point be of benefit to the laborer, never believed by the laborers themselves, was explicitly denied even by Hendrik Verwoerd, in his role as Minister of Bantu Affairs in 1954, before he became Prime Minister of the Republic in 1958.4 The National Union of Mineworkers, who never held such an illusion in apartheid days, was a huge factor in the African National Congress victory against apartheid in 1994; and the police shootings of mineworkers at Lonmin platinum mine in 2012 in the postapartheid era bear witness to the ongoing history of mineworker abuse and exploitation.5 Indeed, the history of mining in South Africa is simultaneously the history of the violent and deliberate disintegration of Black families over the colonial and apartheid periods, and the concentration of ownership among elites who determine stock market values. This legacy, entrenched by President Thabo Mbeki’s liberal economic policies, will have effects for the century yet to come.

If the United States is among the global leaders in an addiction to fossil fuels, Haigh constructs this addiction not as exceptional, but as part and parcel of colonial capitalism’s entrenchment of patterns of addiction as the normalized human approach to all resources, material and other. This is particularly true, in the world of Heat and Light, of how one garners attention for oneself. Wesley Peacock, as a child, loves being at home with his mother, rather than at school, and fantasizes about being the boy in the eponymous bubble of the movie. Here the bubble is seen as protective, not constricting, and creates risk reduction in the mind of the obsessed Wesley, later to become Pastor Wes. Ironically, it is precisely because his mother refuses to leave the bubble of her house in the proximity of the Three Mile Island core meltdown that, he believes, he later develops the cancer that kills him. In his reflections after his death, which form the only part of the narrative from the perspective of the afterlife and its only unrealistic aspect, he muses that he contained his wife, Pastor Jess, in too much of a bubble that involved just the two of them. The attention he needed made introducing a child into the family impossible. The suggestion that Wes can see the bubble for what it is only after his death suggests that a certain kind of character cannot exist within the bubble. It’s not only that an effluent subject is not admitted to the bubble because the effluent subject is not recognized; it’s also that an effluent subject would be stifled, unable to thrive, within the bubble.

An addiction to attention is also played out in the life of Shelby Devlin, now married to Rich, the brother who bought the farm from his brothers and plans to run it as a farm again, once he has garnered enough money from working as a prison guard—he is placing all his eggs in the capitalist bubble, as his name indicates. Shelby’s sister dies of lupus as a child, at which point Shelby grabs the attention that her sister has held as “the sick one” and thrives on the attention now given to her by Pastor Wes, as the surviving sister. Rich Devlin is attracted to her because he thinks he can control her. Ultimately, though, it is she who forces them to abandon the old farmhouse and move into a prefab on the same property, owing to what she experiences as a mold allergy. (She is the first to point out that the fracking Rich agrees to in order to fund his farming dream is poisoning the water.) Most sinister, however, is her control of her daughter Olivia’s life. Olivia has constant stomach ailments, which Shelby claims prove her child is taking after her own frail health. Inquiries by Rena the nurse into Olivia’s health, on the suspicion that the child is negatively affected by fracking, turn up the specialist’s suggestion, not provable but hideously present nevertheless, that Shelby is feeding ipecac to her child, thus creating Olivia’s illness through Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. This is borne out by the narrative, as elsewhere in the text Rich claims his car constantly smells of the candy-grape scent of Olivia’s illness, which is indeed the smell of ipecac. This notion of an emotional zero-sum economy of attention from others implies that Shelby understands that the only way she can continue to get attention is through her own, or her child’s, ill-being. Hence, she visits Pastor Jess for counseling, jealously guarding her time with the Pastor and eventually writing a note to Jess anonymously to inform Jess that Herc, the fracking-employed boyfriend Pastor Jess takes up with after Wes’s death from cancer, is married. This addiction to ill health as a means of gaining affection reaches its comic-tragic zenith just before Wes’s death when Shelby, bringing him food, attempts to have sex with him. At first, he is willing, but then he shies away. Initially they kiss with abandon, as he is said to “step out of his bubble, into the very short future, . . . abandoning hope, honor, the illusion of consequence” (314; emphasis added). What he sees as Shelby’s “truly exotic” nature because she is “willing to lie down with a dead man” is, in fact, the logical conclusion of Shelby’s repeated pattern of behavior: searching for attention through associating herself with illness, and in this case, with Death personified.

This scene of garnering attention through illness is parodied by the depiction of the drug- and HIV-counseling culture in The Reactive. Cissie, Ruan, and our narrator, Lindanathi, regularly use drugs, but they attend the meetings to garner clients. Lindanathi, as an insured HIV-positive individual, receives his antiretroviral (ARV) drugs as long as he passes on CD4 counts (counts of the viral load in his blood) to his caseworker. He is shoddy in complying with this demand because, rather than take his ARVs regularly, he sells them at great profit to those without access to ARVs, either because they are not insured or because they prefer to purchase the drugs rather than “come out” through an official diagnosis, or both. This was a lucrative industry prior to the Constitutional Court–mandated public provision of ARVs in South Africa in 2003. What is not skeptical, however, is Lindanathi’s observation that, “like most places filled with the sick and the dying, there’s always an opportunity to learn something about being a person here” (33). While Shelby in Heat and Light sees illness as a place for herself to suck up affection like a never-ending sponge, Lindanathi has an entirely different experience with a woman at “group” called Olive, two vowels away from Shelby’s daughter Olivia, felicitously enough for the purpose of this comparison.

Olive’s concern is that her drug addiction has made her son Emile lose all respect for her: “Today, she shares her latest suspicions about Emile. Olive says her apologies have started to harden him, to make him believe she is a woman who deserves nothing better than scorn. Listening to her, the rest of us nod” (35). It becomes clear, however, that this nod, at least on Lindanathi’s part, is not in agreement with her son, but in acknowledgment of her shame. Unlike Shelby, Lindanathi is very aware of the limits of the value of his sympathy for Olive. He is not unsympathetic, but realizes, with a non-selfishness totally foreign to Shelby, that he cannot help Olive; and further, drowning himself in her life becomes an excuse for him to avoid responsibility for his own actions, growth, and happiness:

Olive’s the one I’ve come to feel the most for in our meetings, but there’s nothing I can do to help. She suffers from something I have no treatment for, and I can only watch her when she drops her head in shame. Often, I’ve had to avert my eyes when Olive starts to weep, but today my gaze remains passive and arrested on her frame, I realize my feelings for her have been drained from me, and that I can no longer use her as a hiding place. (35)

On one level, of course, Lindanathi’s statement that he has nothing that can cure Olive means that his ARVs can’t fix her addiction; on another, it suggests first that the lack of self-respect she feels is not remediable by drugs, medical or recreational, and second that Lindanathi himself still has to reckon with his own shame, that of abandoning his brother. If Shelby uses others’ illnesses as her comfort in one way or another, Lindanathi assumes responsibility to give up this flight from responsibility for the self.

Further, he is aware of the limits of the culture of confession imposed by counseling-group mores. While Lindanathi takes what is said by the group members respectfully, he simultaneously knows it’s not the whole story: survival of this effluent community means keeping to yourself some of the story; otherwise, one risks complete colonization, as it were, by those seeking your “full confession.” And they are not the ones who have to go back into quotidian life having bared their souls merely for the sake of “talking therapy.” Resilience under such circumstances looks like this:

In most meetings, half the members don’t make the move to draw close to one another. We enter each session prepared to deflect the counsel leader, whose job is to put whatever remains of us under glass. If you listen to counselors, they tell you they want full disclosure in meetings, but most of us know to hand out the facts in small doses only. Therapy won’t walk you home after you pack up the chairs. Telling too much about yourself can leave you feeling broken into, as if your head were a conquered city offered to the group for pillaging. This how we know Olive won’t finish Emile’s story in front of us. I close my eyes again. (35)

The conquered city of the simile is the city of Cape Town, the primary setting of the novel, and a reference to its deeply colonized past and present. Of all the big cities of South Africa, Cape Town, in part due to its unique geography, remains the most divided city in terms of racial segregation through physical settlement. It was also the nexus of the trade that included slaves as goods in southern Africa, exported elsewhere across the oceans, or kept by the colonizers in the Cape white settlements. Both Cape Town and Lindanathi exceed their recognition as zones of historical shame. When Lindanathi closes his eyes, he is not shutting out Olive, but recognizing that he cannot be Olive, that he is not reduced to witnessing the spectacle of her shame, and that his inward gaze will protect him from living through the emotional lives of others, the latter being the practice to which Shelby is addicted.

There is also an awareness in The Reactive of the danger money brings, and what it can and can’t do. At one point a mysterious man offers Lindanathi and his friends more than they can imagine for a supply of ARVs. It turns out that the man, who is masked because his face is deeply scarred, does not want ARVs at all: he wants to give his daughter, who lives in the same block as the three friends, money and a Canadian passport to offer her a future better than the one she spends with her aunt in Cape Town. He is clearly a person who lives beyond or outside the law, and he does indeed deposit money into the three friends’ accounts after they deliver the money and passport to his daughter, whom he cannot have contact with for her own safety. Before they agree to undertake the transaction, however, Lindanathi, Ruan, and Cissie worry about the danger of being caught by the police; and Lindanathi and Ruan worry about taking Cissie to the neighborhood where the deal is to take place, as being a woman makes her vulnerable to sexual assault. Nevertheless, they agree they want the money and fantasize about retiring to the country to grow dope, just as Rich fantasizes about returning the farm to farming. In the end, however, it turns out that the money is withdrawn from their accounts, probably because of South Africa’s highly restricted currency, in which banks monitor large deposits for money laundering and other forms of fraud. But this disappointment is mentioned merely as a happenstance, not as a deep tragedy.

By contrast, money is the future, especially for Rich Devlin and his father. Darren, Rich’s brother, spoils his future with a drug habit that uses up his scholarship and the money his family gets together for him to study science at Johns Hopkins. By the time we meet him, he is a counselor at a rehab center who staves off his addiction to drugs by spending every possible moment at the center—he has redirected drugaholism into workaholism. When he is forced to take his mandated accumulated holiday, he reluctantly goes back to Bakerton. Here he helps out his father and brother in the bar owned by the family, and has a brief affair with the waitress, Gina, who is herself addicted to crack. He finally returns early to the city, knowing he will start using again in the environment of the bar.

Herein lies a complicated irony: Dick Devlin, Rich and Darren’s father, a former miner, is considered a success story as an ex-miner. He has fulfilled his dream and bought a bar, financed by his brother’s money left to him, accumulated through payments for black lung disease. Dick himself is able to lend money to Rich when Rich buys out his siblings to own the farm outright, as he finally has some money accumulated from his own payments for black lung. Thus, the destruction of one’s body is compensated for in money that feeds one’s dreams, and success is determined by having a fatal disease. Dick is considered a success because he works at this bar, while the other retired miners drink each day at the Legion, waiting for death to come to them. Rich signs the lease to Dark Elephant to enable drilling on his property to fulfill his dream of farming his father’s land with dairy cattle. First, he is forced to move from the old farmhouse owing to Shelby’s mold allergy; then he ends up shipping in water because the fracking has contaminated his well. Finally, he realizes that he will never fulfill his dream: he can’t even go for second best, selling the family farm and buying another one, as Dark Elephant hasn’t paid the companies it contracts to frack his land, and their claim to unpaid fees is represented by a lien against the farm: he cannot therefore sell his own land.

The comparison made by the narrator, focalized through Rich’s reflections in the closing section of the work, is stark: “Who had been the bigger fool, Rich or Devlin, was impossible to say” (426). The relation of capitalism to the body that becomes visible in the Devlins’ collective narrative is that the body itself is an extractive zone: the body is traded for a supposed capitalist gain that never materializes, or if it does, is never quite worth the loss of wellness paid for the ever decreasing and receding prize. This prize, for the ironically named Rich, as in the case of his father Dick, is now also a settlement: a settlement for damages to the farm environment that can never be reversed, just as the damage the loss of his dream does to Rich can never be reversed: “He will never be a farmer. When his settlement comes—if it comes—he could, in theory, buy another farm. The point was to work this land—Pap’s land, bought and paid for by [Rich’s] own hard labor, ten years of overtime at Deer Run” (426). Hard labor here is a pun, as Rich works at the prison called Deer Run. At first, he was attracted to law enforcement by the idea of the noble law-keeper; now he understands that being a prison warder simply means cleaning up society’s messes, the ones everyone else leaves behind. Darren’s drug addiction does not leave him much worse off than his brother. In addition to this, Darren’s addiction puts in high relief the fact that addiction is not the antipathy to capitalism, but its modus operandi. Indeed, it is Darren’s very experience of addiction that renders him able to work as a counselor at the rehab center. It’s made clear in the text that all he does is transfer his addiction from drugs to work at the rehab center.

In contrast, Lindanathi stops feeding off the exploitation of his own body when he quits selling his ARVs. He moves back to Bhut’ Vuyo’s home in Dunoon, a shipping container in which Bhut’ Vuyo and his family live. Bhut’ Vuyo is whom he stayed with after his mother couldn’t bear having him at home after the death of his younger brother, Luthando. Bhut’ Vuyo begs Lindanathi to come home to Dunoon and finally get circumcised, and Lindanathi puts this off for as long as he can, even trying to fend off Bhut’ Vuyo’s pleas with money, which he knows will offend the man: Bhut’ Vuyo cannot be bought off or bought out.

When he does return to Dunoon, Lindanathi helps Bhut’ Vuyo rebuild the long-drop toilet, which Bhut’ Vuyo builds in defiance of the government-provided chemical toilets (portaloos), whose active ingredients have long stopped working. While Lindanathi understands that this is a political project of Bhut Vuyo’s, so as not to be (or be seen to be) dependent on the government for the pathetic toilets offered in mitigation for “informal settlements” where actual plumbing has never been installed, Lindanathi takes part in the effort wholeheartedly. Neither the portaloos provided by the municipality nor the long-drop they build works particularly well, but the point is the labor and its gesture, which are in excess of practical instrumentalization.

By rejecting an absolute logic of instrumentalization, of his own and others’ bodies not least, Lindanathi breaks the metonymical relation between capitalism and the body. It also becomes clear that he has always understood that a metaphorical relation between capitalism and human relations does not exist within the bubble, as such metaphorization would elide the cooption of bodies by capitalism as both the means and objects of extractive industry, means in terms of labor and objects in terms of sexual assault, exploitation, and organ harvesting as commercial exchange. Built into Lindanathi’s narrative is a warning to the reader of The Reactive against following the counselor’s diagnostic reading, a warning not to read the addicts/HIV-positives as victims or objects of diagnostic recognition or to allow the professional counselor to “offer” a reading of the “victim”-sufferer that empowers transition back into the fold of the bubble. First, one cannot depend upon a narrative of full confession for one’s knowledge as a reader; second, one cannot develop a paternalistic approach to a sufferer such as Olive without using this to escape one’s own challenges and/or feed one’s own ego; and third, as if demonstrative of the first two cautions to the reader, the participants may hold within them elements of resilience of which the reader or the participants themselves may be completely unaware.6 In The Reactive, unlike Heat and Light, the mouse may have ways of escaping the mousetrap now and then; and these moments of freedom are—paradoxically, from the perspective of “the land of the free”—garnered through relinquishment of the logic of instrumentalism and accumulation, the very promise of the game of the mousetrap.

When Lindanathi returns to Dunoon, he both is circumcised and takes a job at a spaza shop, an informal shack shop that sells food staples, cell-phone time, cigarettes, and other such commodities. He lives with Bhut’ Vuyo’s family, knowing, as Bhut’ Vuyo warns him, that the family is not wealthy: in fact, it is poor. The same newspapers Bhut’ Vuyo and Lindanathi use to “wallpaper” the inside of the container, Lindanathi wrinkles in his hands to soften before using as toilet paper. Further, the bars of Sunlight soap (a brand known to all across sub-Saharan Africa as economical: the long bar can be cut into blocks for individual use), which are a step up from washing powder, are reserved for washing the body, while the powder is used for hands. Lindanathi has actually “dropped” his “living standard” considerably by moving from inner-city Cape Town back to Dunoon. There is no going to restaurants or drinking wine; he curtails his endless string of substance abuse, although he still sniffs glue and smokes cigarettes. He meets a girlfriend, whose skin he reminisces about in ways completely different from his use of the aforementioned sex workers; and he understands the community has taken him in, just as they take in others who may even be their enemies. But the “taking in” is not the same as a biblical turning of the other cheek, as we shall see.

One morning Lindanathi is on his way to work at the spaza shop when he sees unrest on the street. He quickly surmises that this is not one of the ubiquitous strikes. Ominously, tires are burning at the scene. In earlier novels and Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony, this would more than likely indicate a so-called “necklacing,” in which a township community would place burning tires around a Black person suspected of acting as an undercover agent for the apartheid government. Here, however, it transpires that the youth has tried to take in the pensioners of the community with a pyramid scheme, defrauding them of their money; and, when he is challenged, in a mad act of aggression, he tries to burn the community down, and hence the burning tires. The men of the community, not much older than the youth, drive a shopping trolley over him but are advised by the women not to beat him up too hard and to dress him when they’re done, as his only garb is a green vest, apparently stolen from the clothesline nearby. In a strange coincidence, the young man, whom we later learn is named Siseko, yells that a faceless man will come and the community will then be free, an apparent reference to the masked man of the earlier mystery. The women of the community recognize him as a madman, ligeza eli, and the community does indeed dress him and subsequently take him in, in the reverse of the way he earlier “took in” its pensioners.

Later, Lindanathi sketches the man with the damaged face who got him, Cissie, and Ruan to deliver money and a passport to his daughter, Ethelia. Siseko recognizes the usually masked face as that of the faceless man he has been prophesying will save the community. In this respect, the women of the community recognize as a madman the youth who suggests that the man who makes money off others will come to save them, playing the prophet of that ultimate pyramid scheme, capitalism, but a madman to be pitied, not demonized. And Lindanathi himself refuses to demonize the man in the mask, whom Lindanathi has long since nicknamed Ambroise Paré, after he heard of the so-called headless man of Paré, the first man who developed prostheses to assist men wounded in battle.7 “To me,” Lindanathi tells us, “Monsieur Paré had only been a parent, and Ethelia his daughter: a father” (156). Siseko walks away with the picture of the mask. At this point, the defaced visage and the mask of the man have become indistinguishable in Lindanathi’s narrative, since we do not know whether he has drawn the “faceless man,” as Siseko calls him, or “the mask” Siseko is said to have carried off, which is the subject of the sketch Lindanathi made. However, it appears, what the mask may hide, and indeed the mask itself, is not only not to be feared, but also to be regarded as a reminder of the respect debility commands:

We [Lindanathi and Siseko] smoked in silence after that, and I remember feeling a sense of peace rushing into me as I watched him walking away with the mask. I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to do him a favor that day, to make sure he sometimes landed on his feet. The community had taken him in, like it had done with me, and there was no need to be fearful of anything we didn’t know. (157)

This is, among other interpretations, a parody of a deformed crook claimed as a potential savior for his exploitative practices yet revealed to be (merely) a father. This domestication in the place of demonization prevents capital, which is metonymically indistinguishable from its mask, from becoming a rampant symbol. Rather than capitalism harbingering the prophet/profit, as it desires to be seen doing, its own greatest myth is revealed: that progress, meaning movement into the field of global capital relations, is undermined as both inevitable and desirable, bringing down with it the notion of capitalism as a subject mystically divorced from human machinations. Peace comes to Lindanathi, the peace so markedly absent from Heat and Light, through a negotiation with the future that relinquishes absolute control of the individual: “There was no need to be fearful of anything we didn’t know” is an enunciation of the reverse of the desire to be, and remain, the boy in the bubble (57).

The South African state starts to provide ARVs free of charge and Lindanathi stays on his medication: he also finally gets tested. It turns out that the virus “is arrested in his blood” (156). He is what is known as a slow progressor, or as he puts it, slow to react. His name, Lindanathi, is a girl’s name taken from the daughter of a friend of his mother who works overtime at a factory to get money for her girl-child’s education (perhaps yet another intertextual reference to Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, in which Tambudzai’s education depends on her brother’s death; here, in contrast, the mother seeks to educate her girl-child). Unlike the active principle of doing that characterizes the settler-colonial economy, the injunction of Lindanathi’s name is to wait. The name means “Wait with us,” and it transpires that this is the promise he has made to Bhut’ Vuyo and his Dunoon community: to wait with them. The question “for what?” is not the point; the point is to go through, with the community, whatever life next presents them. Unlike the narrative trajectory of Heat and Light, then, the point is not the consistent deferral of an individual’s dreams from within the unsustainable boom-and-bust economy, but an actual practice of waiting-with in which community resources, material and otherwise, are not envisioned as the basis of a zero-sum game, with winners and losers. The so-called faceless man, nicknamed Ambroise Paré by Lindanathi, is not a winner, but simply a father; and Lindanathi is not a loser, but a community member who loves and is loved back, in turn.

None of this is to deny the privations of poverty, but it is to suggest that getting out of poverty is not always the primary driver of a community’s ways of being in the decolonial world. At the beginning of Heat and Light, as I noted earlier, comes the first mention of the Indigenous inhabitants of the United States through the figure of Chief Cornplanter. At the end of the novel, Rich Devlin tries to imagine what the land would have been like without settler colonialism, his only access to such a vision being through the tawdry genre of the TV advertisement. In this reflection, we understand that, for him at least, being in the face of others having more money is an existential condition, the only thing that matters:

Rich Devlin recalls, often, a famous TV commercial of his childhood: the Indian chief looking over a trash-strewn highway, a single tear sliding down his cheek—a public service agreement, designed to make people stop littering—but the ad hasn’t turned him into a tree hugger, as it was clearly meant to do. It sparked, instead, his fascination with American Indians—who, he discovered, weren’t the villains the old westerns had made them out to be. At nine years old, for the first and last time in his life, he read voraciously: adventure stories, encyclopedias, anything with an Indian in it. Apache, Seneca, Cherokee, Chicksaw. How he had loved those names, the cascading syllables. Reading, he imagined waking up in a teepee or a pueblo to a different life entirely, in which boys weren’t forced to take spelling tests or deliver newspapers or learn catechism, the daily gauntlet of responsibility that had begun for him and wouldn’t end until he was too old to hunt or fish, too old to do anything but watch TV commercials and fall asleep in his chair. (426–27)

The catechism he learns and is repeating is a narrative of victimization through colonial capitalism, of which the religious catechism is only the metonymic part. He reflects that he learned that none of his reflections matter when he was at sea on a vast aircraft carrier sailing to the first Persian Gulf war, “a place that mattered for one reason only”: oil. He and his fellow men called the carrier, the SS Roosevelt, the Big Stick: “When he thinks of it now, he imagines the Big Stick gliding over a vast sea of other people’s money, a thought that didn’t occur to him at the time.” And then the novel ends: “We are all sailors” (427).

Responsibility for understanding how not to victimize oneself through addiction to the injunction to acquire—and acquire the right things according to the principle of mimetic desire, the things everyone else wants—is viewed very differently in The Reactive: avoidance of such responsibility brings restlessness, and acceptance of it brings peace, maturity, and an ability to enjoy the quotidian in life. This is not to say that one form of the experience of responsibility (the responsibility to acquire under settler capitalism or the responsibility not to victimize oneself) is more authentic than the other, although one is certainly more attached to an experience of freedom rather than of containment. Settler capitalism is a spectacularly claustrophobic space in the sphere of Haigh’s mousetrap. Even if the relation between material resources and economies of feeling and affect were metaphorical in capitalism, rather than metonymical, the space between the thing itself and that which forms a metaphor of it might at least leave some breathing room. In metonymy, no such space exists; the realm is airless, filled with the material of the metonym itself.

Effluent Resilience as Persistence under Global Capitalism

This raises the question of the supposed immunity or resilience of effluent communities such as that of Bhut’ Vuyo’s Dunoon shantytown. The politics of immunity proposed by Esposito in his 2010 Communitas and 2011 Immunitas rests on the unstated metaphor of that which is extrinsic being taken in by the nation in small measure, to ward off the danger of armies marching in(to) the nation in the future. The metaphor derives from the actual medical practices of inoculation and homeopathy, although Esposito himself does not recognize these origins, in part possibly because he does not write his philosophy of community/immunity with any sense that the reader is to understand its central metaphor as metaphor. In the light of Esposito’s theory, one could argue that Lindanathi’s HIV is a figure of such a politics of immunity. However, the sheer embodiment of illness in The Reactive, including substance abuse, mitigates taking the body as figure, seeing this metaphorization as a violation of bodily integrity. What I want to spend some time on here, however, is not the question of a politics of immunity as resilience, but the very conceptualization of resilience within effluent communities, or what we might call decolonial persistence.

In her 2016 “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” Butler has argued against resilience as a term that outsources responsibility for disempowerment to disadvantaged communities, what she terms “neo-liberal resilience.” That is to say, she argues that framing resilience as an attribute of communities who are, relatively speaking, unable to access resources to further their own well-being, such as education, health, and environmental well-being, enables the blaming of those communities for their own victimization vis-á-vis the inequitable resources global capitalism requires and sustains (12–17). While I understand Butler’s caution about relatively well-resourced communities using resilience as a way of leaving poorer communities to their own devices under the sign of resilience, I argue that Butler’s caution about resilience stems from a binary that sees effluent communities as victims within a global game of monopoly. That is to say, I argue that there must be a way of conceptualizing resilience such that it neither leaves the vulnerable to their own devices, “outsourcing” responsibility for their vulnerability back to them as Butler fears, nor frames impoverished communities purely within an identity of victimhood, without any agency. What the comparison of Heat and Light with The Reactive seems to teach us is that, within the (non)ethics of colonial capitalism, there is no need to label those who are at the mercy of the system as victims, because they do so themselves. Remember Rich, through whom the narrative voice focalizes the thought that “who had been the bigger fool, Rich or Devlin, was impossible to say” (426).

Berlant describes this apparent self-victimization in her category of “cruel optimism,” in which what one desires stands directly in the way of one’s own well-being (2011). She posits cruel optimism as a relational dynamic whereby individuals remain attached to “compromised conditions of possibility” or “clusters of promises” embedded in desired object-ideas, even when the attachments inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises (24, 23). Put more bluntly, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). She nevertheless argues, in her conceptualization of “lateral agency,” that “people are neither dupes to the interests of power as such nor gods of their own intention” (105). The point is that one would have to know how the interests of power are operating in each case not to be duped by them, which creates a discipline of eternal vigilance verging on the paranoid and the assumption of an ability to know what the interests of power are and the multiple ways in which they might manifest themselves, suggesting that the interests of power are backed by a will that itself can be identified. I agree with the notion of an agency on the part of the citizen that is neither a victimized dupe nor a controlling perpetrator, the two stock figures of the cult of the individual that colonial capitalism breeds; but I disagree with Berlant’s notion that lateral agency expresses itself in the self-interruption of the self from the overwhelming discipline of the self, or what she calls “self-maintenance” in the face of the impossible task of making the good life happen (116).

In her introduction, Berlant points out that the archive of her project is drawn from the United States and contemporary Europe, and I have no intention of accusing her of a generalizability to other contexts, such as that of the postapartheid South Africa at stake in The Reactive. Instead, I wish to use her work as a kind of negative outline to pose the outlines of a postcolonial resilience, or a resilience of the effluent, that we shall call “persistence.” For example, Berlant argues that “food is one of the few spaces of controllable, reliable pleasure people have” (115). Maybe so in the world of which she speaks, but in areas of food insecurity, food becomes the object not only of great desire, but of anxiety about its absence, since its presence is far from reliable. Further, this is complicated by ARV regimens, which create nausea and other digestive problems if not accompanied by food. Similarly, Berlant claims that, “unlike alcohol or other drugs, food is necessary to existence, part of the care of the self, the reproduction of life” (115). Maybe so, but there are many who would feed others of their community before themselves, as the self has a different meaning in Lindanathi’s lexicon. Further, for the HIV-infected, ARV drugs are indeed necessary to life, as much as food is. As Zackie Achmat, founder of the Treatment Action Campaign, demonstrated with his protest comprising a refusal to take ARVs until they were publicly available, HIV-positive people can progress quickly to dangerously low CD4 counts and full-blown AIDS without medication; and “drug” strikes to demand appropriate HIV treatment have a venerable and substantial history in South Africa, including hunger strikes, which highlight ARVs as just as much of a necessity as food in a positive world.8

What then is the difference in context, and how do I construct a sense of nonexploitative resilience, or persistence, to the effluent community of which Lindanathi forms a part? Berlant’s argument is that the genres of striving for the good life continue to be meaningful and essential to people’s well-being long after the actual post–World War II promise of the good life is attainable in actuality for the majority. This addiction to the good life created the structural intensity of cruel optimism and manifests the structural violence of colonial capitalism’s promise, and people’s attachment to that promise, in the face of worsening employment opportunities and lessening remuneration. Berlant eschews the drama of trauma phrased as a singularity, and instead argues for the insistence of quotidian trauma, a nonexceptional set of circumstances that wears down the individual. Here we come to a key point, however: the promise of colonial capitalism was never for Indigenous peoples, as Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, analyzed in my final chapter, demonstrates; nor was it ever for the Black people of South Africa. Of course, there has been the rise of a Black middle class in the wake of Thabo Mbeki’s liberal economic policies, but these are the “exactsame” (to use Haigh’s word in Heat and Light [66, 68, 118, 412]) policies that have maintained and extended poverty among the Black majority.

The key point here is that the good life does not hold the sway it has in places where the nation-state has historically provided protection from violence, à la Butler, as the community knows the state first and foremost as a primary source of structural and actual violence, making the myth of the bubble unsustainable in colonized and Aboriginal communities. Thus, we may rewrite Butler in the case of South Africa: to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state is to be forever (at best) skeptical of, and (at worst) unable to believe in, any protection proffered by the nation-state and what may be its associated capitalist practices. To bring this back to a concrete scene in The Reactive, we can rehearse how the counseling group has a general dislike of Neil, who, unlike the others, has had a precipitous fall from the grace of the middle class through his drug use. Instead of gaining sympathy, like Olive, he is viewed by the group as a parody of the citizen who commands the good life. In fact, precisely because he used to command the good life, had he contracted HIV rather than “just” an addiction to heroin, Lindanathi, Ruan, and Cissie could have made a lot of money off him by selling Lindanathi’s ARVs to him. He would be a perfect target, vulnerable to the shame of declaring he has HIV, not on an insurance program owing to his unemployed status, and yet wealthy enough to pay for them. He isn’t liked by the group precisely because he has been a good-life inhabitant:

He’s a former math teacher from a gated estate in Westlake. He’s been divorced twice and has rails on both his arms, the result of a heroin habit that followed from years of blow. He taught private school for thirteen years, he says, and maybe that’s why no-one likes him here. I’ve heard some of the older members say he won’t make it through the year, and if you look at him, that isn’t hard to believe. This comes from the old users, mostly. . . . They look at him and shake their heads. . . .

Like most addicts, Neil has an excuse for each time he feels his life is cracking open. Today, he wants a mass deportation of all the illegal immigrants in Cape Town. We should start off with the Nigerians, he tells us, and follow it up with Somalis.

I look over and find Cissie rolling her eyes.

Out of the three of us, Cissie’s the one Neil bored the most. I remember how she once asked us why he didn’t just get HIV already. Maybe it was an awful thing to say, but Ruan and I laughed because it was true. Even though Neil’s a serf in his community, he’s a nobleman in ours. We could’ve pulled a lot of money out of him. (32–33)

Neil’s status as a nobleman is hardly desirable in this instance; in fact, it renders him vulnerable to their exploitation of him.

Now let me assay the promised comparison of Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” epitomized so painfully in Heat and Light, and postcolonial persistence, or the resilience of the effluent, as I identify it in the The Reactive. In cruel optimism, what you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing, whereas Lindanathi and company strongly suspect that flourishing is an impossibility, a sell job—hence their complete lack of surprise when the money from the faceless/masked man, Ambroise Paré, in exchange for their drop off to his daughter, doesn’t eventuate. What is interesting, however, is that they make the drop off after they know the money has been withdrawn from their accounts, in an exchange that exceeds capitalist exchange values:

We never hear from the ugly man again. I guess there isn’t much else to say about him. He’s just one of this city’s many ciphers, we decide, one of the strange things that happen in the alleyways of the Southern Peninsula. . . . In any case the money is retracted from our account, laundered most likely, and he never comes back for the ARVs. To the three of us, our planned meeting with Ethelia [his daughter] takes on an inevitable air. (127)

About a week later, they hand over the package containing money and her Canadian passport to Ethelia.

Further, Berlant argues that the situation of cruel optimism obtains as a genre of social time and practice in which a relation of persons and worlds is changing; and the rules for habituation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable. However, the instability, despite its demarcation by quotidian crisis, assumes an original stability, a background historically of a sustainable good life. But in effluent communities, storytelling genres never were about habituation to an impossible fantasy of either unshakable, protected endurance or the good life; further, the subject never mistook itself as a sovereign being, and was therefore never a sovereign individual, but intersubjectively co-constituted and animist.

Berlant’s world assumes the optimism of a “slow death,” or death by colonialist-capitalist attrition, whereas Lindanathi’s community does not assume endurance to be more desirable than a not-so-slow death. And while Berlant’s cruel optimism is definitively secular, Lindanathi’s world is not. He remembers how his uncle, Bra Ishaak, cautioned him as a child for killing crabs merely for sport, “warning us that at night we would be visited by the forbears of these crabs, who would knock on our doors with bodies as tall as men” (100). Lindanathi remembers Bra Ishaak primarily as the person who instilled in him, through reference to the sea, that the natural world has no boundaries. The natural world includes death, as “when Bra Ishaak hung himself, it was . . . a Thursday morning back in Uitenhage; he wore a sailor’s hat on the day he finally chose to leave us, his family, behind” (101). In this sense Bra Ishaak’s choice is not suicide in the shamed sense of the act within a Western topology, nor is death the exoticized end, as it is in both Cruel Optimism and Heat and Light. In fact, the primary relation in The Reactive is between Lindanathi and Luthando, the living and the dead-as-ancestor. When he is finally circumcised, Lindanathi visits Luthando’s grave: “It was a clear day and I didn’t say much to him, down there. We never had to use words to discover an understanding between us” (161). However, the novel ends with an apostrophe to an addressee who is both the reader and, ultimately, Luthando:

Bhut’ Vuyo never explicitly reminds me of my promise, but I remember and live through it each day. My promise, what I told them then, is the same thing I’ll tell you now. My name, which my parents got from a girl, is Lindanathi. It means wait with us, and that’s what I plan on doing. So in the end, I guess this is to you, Luthando. This is your older brother, Lindanathi, and I’m ready to react for us. (161)

The exploitation of the Benvenistian pronoun “I’ll tell you” as a shifting signifier connects reader and Luthando as co-constituents of the being of Lindanathi through the reading of his narrative. It is also a conversation between the living and the dead, one that enables a vision of unboundedness in this life through conversations with a form of subjectivity yet to come, one that is singularly not a fantasy, either in the form of an unattainable future or in that of an idealized past. Thus, Lindanathi is “waiting with” his community, not for an impossible good life, but for whatever may come next for any of them. It is not what-should-come-next that concerns him, but the being-with the community for whatever it realizes will have happened, and therefore whatever comes next. This immunity to an addiction to the good life is not masochistic; after all, Lindanathi greets the news that the government is going to provide treatment to one hundred thousand HIV-positive citizens with skepticism, as mentioned above, but not complete belief or despair: “Who knew, I thought. It was enough to believe them for now” (157; emphasis added). Similarly, Lindanathi makes it clear that the arrested virus in his blood does not make him a modern miracle: “I was still reactive, just slow to develop the [AIDS] syndrome. I have a large number of antibodies, for reasons the two of us couldn’t fathom” (157).

I conclude by pointing out that Lindanathi chooses to live with people whose values he shares, by moving from the city to Bhut’ Vuyo’s shipping container in Dunoon. That is to say, I am not claiming that his form of effluent resilience is shared by his compatriots or even his friends in Cape Town. He has every opportunity to join the growing Black middle class, but he not only feels uncomfortable and unfulfilled with this “lifestyle”; he also later becomes aware that the form of labor he takes when he takes on writing for the Net is not sustainable. When he works for the Laboratory, he explains that he lives in a flat in Mowbray opposite a bar, whereas,

my colleagues, on the other hand, had families. They had satellite TV and good skin that could flush red with gratitude. They were well adjusted and easy to admire.

Even those who came from places redolent with defeat—District Six, Bo Kaap or Bonteheuwel—were happy with what they had. I often felt scrutinized by them, and inadequate when we cornered each other in the hallways. Nothing was lost in the silence of our elevator rides. I’d greet my co-workers with a grin, feeling myself expand with the need to rush after them and apologize for something I hadn’t done. (120)

Lindanathi, then, does not belong to the speakable good life, in which health is defined as the ability to work, and in which “the African” is supposed to be grateful to the philanthropic French boss of the Technikon’s lab, who sees his scientific mission as helping “Africans,” whom he defines as perpetually in health and economic crises. Indeed, even when Lindanathi gets work writing for the internet on hygiene issues, he is let go in a restructuring, in which he conceives of the boom–bust cycles of capitalism: their effect on the workers such as himself, and the very unsustainability of the system, both structurally and in terms of his desire to endure the ups and downs, which does not exist:

The directors led us in a brief discussion of the slow growth of the digital economy, explaining why redundancies were inevitable across the board. . . . In the dark I began to feel as if this crisis meeting, in which my colleagues and I had sat mostly silent, was something that had taken place before. This sense of déjà vu would only fade months later, when I saw that the restructure they’d had in mind included disposing of half the human staff, and that the content was now collected from different sources across the Net. I realized then that the feeling I’d had at the meeting had arisen from the fact that, even as we sat in the ninth-floor boardroom that day, we’d formed part of a historical moment that had receded.

Much like light travelling from the sun, although it had seemed immediate, it had taken time to reach us: the event itself had taken place. We were already obsolete. (122)

Lindanathi, it turns out, has a keen sense of the quotidian crises of capitalism that Haigh documents and about which Berlant theorizes. He never does work in the corporate economy again. He works briefly, part-time, at a movie rental store, purveyors of entertainment used, in Berlant’s terms, to interrupt the brutal discipline of self-development in moments of lateral agency; and he ends up working at the informal shantytown spaza shop, distributing free condoms with the approval of the owner and other goods as he sees fit or feels the urge to do so. The designation of obsoleteness within the colonialist-capitalist economy opens a door in which he seeks to identify reactions within himself that render him noninstrumental, and therefore not able to be made obsolete. To “wait with” the living and the dead—the work he sets himself—avoids assessment of him by self or others in terms of a colonialist-capitalist vision of success; it also creates opportunities for creative persistence within the field of quotidian weariness detailed by Berlant. Yet it appears to be not a temporary escape from accumulation and self-fashioning, as she describes lateral agency, but an entry into an ethics of nonaccumulation and a co-constituted fashioning between self and other, one that encompasses both the living and the dead.

Haigh points to this realm of contact between the living and the dead in the momentary, farcical desire of the dying Wesley Peacock for Shelby and in the “hindsight” he experiences after death of his egocentrism as that which prevented him having children. The instantiation of the colonialist-capitalist world as the real is interrupted both by the impropriety of Wes’s posthumous reflections and by Lindanathi’s living beyond the imprint of capitalist consumer desire. Indeed, the figure of the capitalist as madman or trickster reverses capitalism’s apparent but not exclusive normalization in Heat and Light. The dead Wes haunts the text of Heat and Light, but never receives affirmation from those in the bubble. On the other hand, Luthando, the inspiration for his brother’s “waiting for” whatever comes next, including his own death, has an entire novel dedicated to him at its conclusion: “So in the end, I guess this is to you, Luthando. This is your older brother, Lindanathi, and I’m ready to react for us” (161). Should the novel’s readers be included in this apostrophe, in the first-person-singular pronoun, then the instantiation of effluent community through Lindanathi’s promise to “wait with us” and react outside of the bubble is effected in the aesthetics of the novel itself, which in this context, becomes an effluent artifact. I shall return to the novel as effluent artifact in the final chapter. For now, however, I want to turn to what the body, as it bears a metonymical relation to capitalism, tells us in sexual assault. How does awareness of settler-colonial capitalism enable a reading of rape as an extractive industry? And where can we locate effluent methodology in such a reading?