Pathological Postcolonialism

Neil Lazarus argues, in an interview with Sorcha Gunne, that the field of postcolonial studies is itself a product of the poststructuralist moment, which creates what he calls a “wrong turn” for the discipline (Gunne 2012, 9). That is to say, the focus on discursive play and the features that a certain kind of postcolonialism fetishizes as quintessentially characteristic of a predetermined essence of the postcolonial approach stem from a literary-critical academy too attuned to poststructural play to address the vast exclusions this orthodox “postcolonialism” entails.2

Lazarus says: “I’ve always wanted to read against . . . a certain approach that favors decenteredness, catachresis, instability, ambivalence, the migratory, the diasporic, the in-between, etc. . . . The ‘pomo-postcolonialist’ tendency has led to a hypostatization of certain formal aspects in literary works (self-consciousness, contingency, a stress on incommensurability and the failures of language to signify, etc.) whose one-sidedness again seems to me narrow and impoverishing” (Gunne 2012, 5).

The attention to deconstructive form in the postcolonial canon selected for its amenability to what Lazarus calls “pomo-postcolonialism” is what I call “pathological postcolonial criticism,” because it seems to assume, falsely, that the deconstructive artifices it fetishizes equate to the disassembling of the genre of the human in ways consistent with the disassembling of colonial and neocolonial structures at the level of textual politics. Such pathological reading does not deconstruct the colonizing and colonized human, but simply caricatures the human per se as deluded unless humans, whether colonized or colonizing, “understand” they are at the mercy of poststructuralist play. The pathology lies in the delusion that the cynicism of poststructuralist play marks, rather than masks, material practices of colonization, capitalism, and related forms of tyranny. In this sense, poststructural play can be seen as a recognition of structural violence that masks its impact by divorcing the rules of the game from questions of political power, or at the very least suggests that most citizens are either unaware or incapable of countering such power, or both. It is, of course, only those who have the benefits of commanding human rights who can write off the project of human rightness as fundamentally, necessarily lodged in bourgeois character production and anthropocentrism.3

Lazarus identifies 1975 as the moment at which former radical connections between the West and third-world struggles for anticolonialist nationalisms and self-determination fell prey to the period of postwar austerity (and its attendant crises) that oversaw the installment of neoliberal regimes and entrenched neoconservative ideologies. Thus, when I read The Meaning of Contemporary Realism by Georg Lukács (1962) as a child in South Africa in the early 1970s (because my mother was teaching it at the then University of Natal, Durban), and when I diligently read Georg Gugelberger’s Marxism and African Literature when it first came out in 1985, both texts seemed to me bizarrely ahead of themselves in terms of their political concerns and also strangely behind, or at least outmoded. To some degree, as Lazarus highlights, the focus on poststructuralism and postmodernism in the Anglo-American academy, rather than the more radical strains of anticapitalism and anticolonialism, does more than simply “write off” preexisting forms of anticolonialism prematurely, arguing as it does for the “collapse,” the “exhaustion” and “the falsity of that earlier moment” (Gunne 2012, 10); it also detracts from a sustained history of colonialism across the twentieth century, including the U.S. forays into Iraq and Afghanistan (Gregory 2004).

Pathological postcolonialism insists on the failure, belatedness, and “falsity” of movements such as the international anticolonialist and antiracist alliances that resulted in Russian-backed Cubans fighting heavily against the illegal South African occupation of then South-West Africa and its equally illegal war in Angola to maintain a boundary of white power. This skepticism has left Anglo-American pathological postcolonialism with a skewed version of history, one that has jettisoned materialist readings in favor of the deconstructionist location of poststructuralist play. Its capacity for endless identifications and analyses of imperialist power offers little sense of the postcolonial subject as that which exceeds its victimization by colonial power, in terms both of that subject’s knowledge of worlds in excess of Western epistemologies and of that subject’s manifestations of persistence in the face of—rather than resistance to—colonial and neoliberal powers.4

Here, I critique specifically postcolonial resistance conceived of as that which opposes an assumed neocolonial and neoliberal norm within the Manichean imagination of a “writes back” postcolonialism. This is a temporally limited move that relegates that which is incidental or external to a set of privileged archcolonial moments, surplus to the “struggle at hand” and thus wasted effort. However, pathological postcolonialism is not a solution to the temporal conundrum of “writes back” postcolonialism, in that its love affair with poststructural form confuses deconstructive artifice with the rejection of bourgeois subjectivity; and pathological postcolonialism certainly has no truck with any notion of orthodox human rights or their reenvisioning, since its (to some) comforting skepticism does not simply disallow rightness as excess, but stigmatizes it as wasteful: who could be so naïve as to think of human rights, let alone rightness, as a meaningful category in the current global moment? I include this observation because, firstly, I don’t see the textual or postmodern turn in postcolonialism as having been necessary to the evolution of postcolonialism generally and, secondly, because I wish to highlight the poverty of pathological postcolonialism in relation to actualizing (even) anthropocentric human rights, let alone the extra-anthropocentric human rightness for which I am arguing.

The acceptance of capitalism as the product of necessity, rather than political allegiances of power in the period following World Ward II prosperity, renders many citizens victims of their delusion of the inevitability of current neoliberal regimes of power. Our relative inability to discern the nexus of relations between colonialist, neocolonialist, and capitalist forces as having a material history that has led to the current juncture speaks to the naturalization of history under the rubric of necessity. This aporia also impedes recognition of interventions that exceed resistance, defined as temporally limited, to include persistence, as a form of nonquiescent endurance, or persistence in human right-making, as I outline below.5

The marketing of consumer choice as being an exercise in agency and freedom is enabled by the myth of American equality, which assumes we all start from the same positions of power; and it reduces choice materially to the confines of choosing how to live within the neoliberal state, not whether to live within it. This question does not enter the parameters of the body politic, as the failure of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign illustrated. Communities of effluence live within sight of, or on the margins of, “the good life” (Berlant 2011, 2), and/or they have recognized that the good life is not their “good life” at all.6 What kinds of narratives do these communities produce that exceed the normative materiality of hypercapitalism, and are restructuring the genres of “human rights” into practices of human rightness accordingly?

Resituating Butlerian “Precarity” and “Grievability” in Relation to the Effluent

Judith Butler 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,” and that “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” (26).7 Further, Butler underlines that the human-rights framework cannot render life not precarious, since the only form of life the human-rights regime recognizes is one that 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, the symptom and diagnosis of which can be only that material reality which we recognize as possession. She also argues (and I agree) that the conditions of life are deeply interdependent. But this interdependence in Butler is anthropocentric; it does not explicitly involve dependence on nonhuman subjects.

I have been arguing that capitalism renders the interdependency that is the precondition of sustaining life invisible in the sleight of hand in which the choice to thrive is reduced to making the “right” choices, especially the right choices about what kinds of products are most likely to get one further up the corporate ladder of the business of the good life. This situation 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 the transitioning of the rights of the citizen to those of the rights of the consumer.

In this light we need to go a step beyond Butler’s comments on the state in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?:

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)

The question of who grieves is crucial here, and in the absence of the subject, one assumes that what Butler decries is the lack of recognition of the state in cases of ungrievability. However, effluent communities that live with embodied knowledge of precarity nevertheless create (and have created) forms of grievability that do not depend on the recognition of the state. 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 resilient 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.” Thus, effluent communities, as I describe them, already live always with a sense of the grievability created in the wake of the capitalist state, because that state constitutively renders any life not involved in the business of life, as defined by Michel Foucault (2008) and Matthew Huber (2014) and others after them, to the effluent categories of never-having-been-born, precarious or already dead, and/or “objects,” following the instrumentalist logic of the state. Alternatively, effluent communities can extend the realm of grievability to these and other beings where the state cannot. The inability of the state to support conditions of flourishing for the effluent brings about an issue for Butler’s construction: one cannot assume that, because the state does not provide conditions of flourishing, and therefore of grievability, grief from and for the effluent does not exist. While grievability for the effluent subject may not exist outside of pity in noneffluent communities, it may well exist as a constitutive element of desire, pain, and resilience within the effluent, co-constitutive subject. To respond to Butler: there is something living, or rather happening, that is other than “life,” as we shall see.

I begin by returning to Jackson’s question: “Is it possible that the very subjects central to posthumanist inquiry—the binarisms of human/nature, animate/inanimate, organic/inorganic—find their locus outside of the epistemological locus of the West?” (2013, 673). For the moment, let us reframe her question this way: What does it look like to view death with an effluent eye, one that is in excess of the human as it is conceived of by the Western genre of the human? Once again, some might argue that a Western-trained humanist looking at these traditions may do so with a purely exoticizing eye; yet once again, I argue that recognizing the limitations of the Western genre of the human is possible for a Western-trained academic.

Having lived and worked in multiple Black sub-Saharan African communities as a child, an adolescent, and an adult, I do not count myself as outside of the animist traditions in which I was raised and with which I have been concerned in my domestic and working lives. I am, as it were, bicultural, having been immersed in non-Cartesian traditions but trained as a postcolonialist within the Western academy.

Some cultures, then, never assumed the centrality of the human; they always already saw human being as in relation to, not as having dominion over, objects and the environment. In these cultures, the Enlightenment’s human rationality and the splits of mind–body, self–other, and human–nonhuman are not perceived as that on which the authority of our humanity depends. This means that the death of the human is an event for mourning the transition from human to nonhuman being in those cultures, but is not a termination of being per se. We all mourn the loss of a loved one, but that is different from the existential crisis specifically human death poses to an Enlightenment mind, in which the death of the human threatens the death of the subject altogether, as only genre-of-the-human-conforming subjects and their human associates are considered rights-and-value-bearing subjects in the first place. Put flippantly, post-Enlightenment values are so anthropocentric that, if a human is not there to see the world, the world disappears, as it is not a subject without humans’ constitution of it as such.

Mphahlele’s African humanism exhibits a linchpin of sorts that can move us into understanding the effluent subject, which exceeds the human subject.8 His conceptualization of African humanism offers us a movement from the subject who acquires material, the proper subject of colonial capitalism, to the subject that acquires the status of the material, and thus, in terms of the genre of the human, is in fact immaterial, beyond citizenship, not able to avail “it”self of modes of acquisition or rights of belonging.

Mphahlele’s African Humanism

Mphahlele’s exemplary practice of African humanism bears an apparent likeness to the genre of the human, but simultaneously breaks decisively with it through attention to the unborn, the ancestors, and nonhuman animals. In these nonproper or effluent subjects, we can trace a subjectivity of the effluent, and indeed even an agency.9 This “split” is not a result of a split consciousness on the part of Mphahlele as a primary custodian and philosopher of African humanism; instead, the split appears because the embeddedness of the genre of the human in English, in its post-Enlightenment practices of anthropocentrism, weakens its ability to express the effluent subject and at present is possibly completely incapable.

His African humanism contains within it two characteristic aspects, one consonant with post-Enlightenment Eurocentric humanism and one that pulls away from that tradition. The first is the idea of the centrality and survivability of the human; the second is African humanism’s attempt to reference, in English, long-standing African animist traditions of vast variety through the phrasing of the human being living in harmony with “his” environment.10 Here, however, the point is very much the specific challenge posed to post-Enlightenment thinking by the widespread sub-Saharan African belief in the simultaneity of the unborn, the living, and the ancestors as populations.11

The unborn are those who have yet to live; but because they have yet to live, they are not yet to be grieved, even if the neoliberal postcolonialist state’s inherited genre of the human regards them as immaterial. Simultaneously, the ancestors are the advisers, those who point out when life is not being lived by the living in harmony socially or environmentally, and who have to be appeased for such harmonious living to indeed be accomplished. The unborn and the ancestors are not citizens, but they are subjects who are the focus of hopes, anxieties, and yes, grievability—and they themselves grieve—despite their Eurocentric categorization as immaterial to the genre of the human.12 As practitioners of effluent grief, they form a model of persistence in the face of the reduction of meaning perpetrated by the genre of the human.

For Mphahlele, the nonproper, effluent subject that post-Enlightenment English resists is embodied in the afterbirth. Within Mphahlele’s telling of the proper relations between the ancestors, the living, and the unborn, in a 1997 interview with Richard Samin, the placenta plays a crucial role. In the practice of burying the placenta after the birth of a child, the afterbirth is transformed from that which is dirt or waste into that which constitutes a metonymical connection between the unborn, the newly living, and the ancestors (Samin 1997). This is not “animist materialism” at work in Harry Garuba’s (2003) sense of the term, in which objects are continually and renewably imbued with the spirituality of gods through metaphor. The placenta in Mphahlele’s reading was never just an object, so no “continual re-enchantment of the world” (265) needs to take place. It is, in fact, precisely the placenta’s nonfigurative, but material, metonymical13 role in co-constituting relations between the unborn, the living, and the dead that garners “it” the extra-anthropological agency of the subject, where the subject is the effluent community whose proper noun would be something like “unborn-living-ancestors-earth.”

Mphahlele, in part due to his deep understanding that a discursive move under apartheid to associate the white with the inhumane,14 as both a political and aesthetic act, would merely rehearse post-Enlightenment’s assignation of negative value to the Black in a reversal of poles, rejects Négritude (along with, most famously, Wole Soyinka) in favor of what seems like universal humanism under the title of African humanism: “There’s a kind of piety also on my side that says to me no matter what human beings will survive and there is something intrinsic in the human species to survive” (Samin 1997, 185).15

However, when asked by Samin at the very same time about the meaning of African humanism, Mphahlele talks persuasively about the deep-seated belief of sub-Saharan Africans in the wisdom of the elders and the company of the ancestors. He also remarks on and encourages the tradition of the burial of the afterbirth or placenta by the mother or a close relative in the family compound, as a symbol of the circularity of the lifecycle, where the placenta represents a unique conjunction of the unborn, the born, and the ancestors as a tribute in the very ritual of burial. Mphahlele also addresses embodiment through the buried afterbirth, a metonymical part of the co-constituted effluent subject, unborn-living-ancestors-earth. However, the very relation between African and European humanism is set in tension by the remarks with which Mphahlele reflects upon the importance of the tradition of the afterbirth.

One can perhaps see the “addition” of the ancestors to the notion of enduring humanism as that which makes (Mphahlele’s) humanism African; but to do so would be simplistic in implying that all one needs for an African humanism is the substitution of African ontologies of being for Enlightenment (human) intelligence or epistemology. What Mphahlele says in detail is this:

I should also say that in African humanism there is no dichotomy between the material world and the spiritual world. There is a continuity reinforced by interrelationships and interconnectedness. That is animal life, plant life and inanimate objects have a life of their own which is part of us. (Samin 1997, 184)

What Mphahlele then goes on to describe can be termed rituals, but only in the sense in which ritual is understood as a set of practices that dramatize the interrelatedness of inanimate materials, nature (animal and plant life), and human animals themselves. These rituals are not acts fixed in the nonending and nonchanging time of the Hegelian other that is the African subject of pre-1960s anthropology. Rather, “[when] a traditional healer will use organic matter to heal the body, it will be something plucked from nature, because there is a unity. Part of the continuity is also dramatized by the way in which women will take their afterbirth and bury it in the vicinity because it symbolizes reincarnation, the cyclical pattern of existence” (184).

One could see in Mphahlele’s African humanism a kind of survivalist anthropocentrism with an African twist, that twist being the emphatically not (European) Christian reincarnation and/or the specifically not Western continuity between the unborn, the living, and the ancestors. However, this would be to overlook the important point at which Mphahlele sounds like a cross between a definitively European new materialist and a posthumanist: “Animal life, plant life, and inanimate objects have a life of their own which is part of us” (184).

The conflict between the term inanimate objects and the phrase “have a life of their own” (emphasis added) speaks precisely to that which cannot be spoken in English without making the language work against its historical episteme. In the same interview, Mphahlele expresses a desire to write a novel tentatively entitled And the Birds Flew Away, about two feuding neighbors and the weaver birds who live in the vicinity: “The weaver birds have a typical mythology, indifferent but almost as if they were aware of what is happening, of the conflict. But one winter time, shall I say one Autumn time, they take off, they’re gone” (Samin 1997, 197).16 Mphahlele is at pains to point out this is not some pathetic fallacy, some projection onto nature by the human intellect. “What bothers me here is, how can I convince anybody that this is not the intellect projecting itself into a situation where the relationship between animal life and African life, or human life, shall I say, is thus interwoven?” (198).

It is not accidental that Mphahlele sees the task of convincing others of this interwovenness highly challenging in the immediate wake of apartheid and before the attention had duly been paid to Indigenous knowledge systems in South Africa as valid in their own right, beyond the anthropologizing gaze of the colonizer and not as ever counterproductive to “Black health.” An analogous task is taken up with vigor in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2014 Braiding Sweetgrass and exemplified in Warren Cariou’s 2018 “Sweetgrass Stories: Listening for Animate Land.” But before we get to a place where, as Kimmerer puts it, we can imagine a world in which “people and land are good medicine for one another” (2014, x), we need to attend to the decolonial matter, by which I mean the work needed for us to be able to read the decolonizing stories that form the contours of Kimmerer’s world, work in which this current chapter, and indeed this book as a whole, places itself.

There is a strain of melancholy in Mphahlele’s work, as Samin highlights to Mphahlele himself. But this strain of melancholy is not because the birds fly away, if one may build on Mphahlele’s prospective narrative, but because the birds that fly away are no longer able to do anything but witness human experience, as humans have lost the ability to be in relationship with the birds through the imposition of capitalist modernity: “They [the weaver birds] are now indifferent to human behavior whereas in earlier days we were all interlinked, we had a sense of interconnectedness with animal life” (198). If there is grievability here—and I argue there is—it is not about the migration of the weaver birds (which is in any event cyclical), but the loss of an African-humanist capacity to be in relation with the weaver birds. Understanding the impact of Cartesianism in its colonially imposed power is part of this work.

The need for this excess or effluence as that which is unspeakable to indeed be spoken (in English) is perhaps the root cause of melancholy in Mphahlele’s work.17 While Garuba has argued for materialist animism as a metaphorical ability of several literatures, including the work of Soyinka as a primary example, to express what I would call the animist element of effluence, I do not think Garuba’s materialist animism “fixes” Mphahlele’s conundrum. I argue, with Karen Barad (2003), that Mphahlele’s melancholy rests on the post-Cartesian inability of English in practice to render “matter” and “spirit” simultaneous. It is also to be noted, as Kim (2015) has done, that, in the formulation of “matter” and “spirit,” it is the Black body in particular that comes to represent the denigrated “matter” as opposed to the lofty “spirit” of the (white) human. English is not a neutral medium in which the Cartesian imaginary and the effluent imaginary meet on equal terms. Effluence provides a pathway for grieving what Cartesianism regards as waste, in which grief becomes an affirmation of the effluent subjects.

The emphasis Mphahlele puts on the burial of the afterbirth is probed by Samin in the question, not flippant, of what happens to the tradition of burying the placenta in the compound when one is no longer in the rural areas, but in the city. Mphahlele responds that he negatively sees the interruption of the tradition of midwifery and burial of the afterbirth in the modernization that leads to women giving birth in clinics and hospitals. After discussing the demise of this tradition, he comments that “African humanism has been battered a lot and we need to regain our balance” (Samin 1997, 184). Despite the nostalgic tone of this sentiment, the focus on the burial of the afterbirth, with its insistence on the inevitability of death and notion of the appropriate place for the ancestors as being with the material of the earth, seems to offer the linchpin I noted earlier: the key to comprehending the grievability of the human effluence, or how human effluence “it”self need not be grieved into chronic melancholy if it is attended to appropriately. Mphahlele suggests that grief is attended to appropriately if the rituals that maintain proper relations between the unborn, the living, and the ancestors are both properly undertaken and understood. How is this to be done in the specific context of the grievability we face less than a decade after Samin’s interview with Mphahlele, that which accompanies the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa?

What would a respectful yet nonanthropocentric, or animist, approach to grieving the effluent body-in-community of the HIV-sufferer look like? What kind of interconnection between inanimate material, animal life, and plant life may be entailed in grieving HIV-related death in the sub-Saharan African context that includes, but is not confined to, the HIV “victim” as the citizen who bears the right to HAART and related human rights? What or who is the subject in excess of their rights? How do we grieve the effluent subject? One can ask these questions without jumping to the notion that these deaths are of subjects without claims to rights. In that case, the deaths would be seen as “natural” or inevitable, and thus ungrievable in Butlerian terms. In the case of African AIDS, this approach justifiably invokes accusations of racism and resurrects the category of “African” as one of appropriate ungrievability in the sense of Hegelian racism.18

The AIDS epidemic raises the question of how we might locate grievability in the face of overwhelming death, where such grievability does not depend on state recognition for the “legitimacy” of subjects of which the state may not know and about which it does not care, and where there may not be relatives to grieve the dead, owing to family separations under the pressures of postapartheid South Africa. As J. M. Coetzee’s narrator puts it in Diary of a Bad Year, “Whether the citizen lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead” (2007, 5). Further, family breakdown is so ubiquitous in rural parts of the country that there may not even be a family to grieve the dead, although I am not claiming by any means that this is always the case. But it is sufficiently common that its possibility needs to be reckoned with.

Grieving an Effluent Community: The AIDS-and-Daylily and Chicken-Suffering-Dying-and-Dead as Co-Constitutive Subject

In July 2004, the eThekwini (Durban metropolitan area) cemeteries department determined it would need an additional twelve hectares each year to accommodate the increased burial rate driven by the HIV epidemic. Of particular concern was identifying land in KwaMashu and Umlazi, where the majority of residents live and die. In 2013, the competition between land for development and land for burial became acute. Thembinkosi Ngcobo, head of eThekwini Parks, Recreation, and Culture Amenities, stated at the South African Cemeteries Association conference that land used for burial cannot legally be used for anything else and that burial grounds cannot be established within fifty meters of water sources, and the appropriate infrastructure has to be built according to environmental assessments (Mbonambi 2013).

Despite Gauteng having the largest population in South Africa, in 2010 the registered deaths in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) exceeded those in Gauteng, with the largest number of deaths taking place in eThekwini (Mbonambi 2013). From 2003 to 2011, burial numbers in Durban appeared to gradually decline, but in 2013 the municipal cemeteries manager, Pepe Dass, pointed out that numerous staff had been dismissed for authorizing burials and then pocketing the money (Mbonambi 2013). Because of the respect for the dead and the traditional demands of the living to take care of ancestors’ graves in relationships of mutual protection, the majority of the population of KZN do not view cremation as acceptable. In the case of unapproved and inappropriate burial sites, as well as inappropriate coffin materials, bodily fluids escape the grave and contaminate water sources. In 2010, the East Newlands burial ground became such a heavy source of coffin flies that it was later closed down, after heavier use of pesticides and other measures failed to control the proliferation of these flies in the surrounding neighborhood (Mbonambi 2013).19

In 2015, eThekwini announced that, if leases on graves were not renewed after ten years, those graves would be reused. Most religious leaders responded with horror, but the head of the cemeteries department for eThekwini argued that the practice could not be entirely new, as 1.5 million bodies are currently buried in approximately half a million graves in sixty-five cemeteries in the municipality. Arguably the most vociferous of the objections came from the KZN House of Traditional Leaders chair, then Inkosi Phathisizwe Chiliza, arguing that isiZulu culture does not allow the practice:

In our culture, we respect graves. Once a person has passed away, we respect that person and we can’t do anything to remove the grave except to discuss with the family. . . . If my father died today, even in 10 years, I will go and pay respects to my father at his grave and even my child will go there to respect his grandfather. If you bury someone over my father, what is that? (Comins 2015)

Rural areas are no less under pressure. In 2005, farm dwellers living on white-owned farms in KZN received the right to be buried on those farms. There had been tension over this issue, as such burials were believed by farm owners to prove subsequent support for land claims of farm dwellers against farm owners, and local authorities had frequently prevented such burials. Most rural burials take place in the family compounds.

However, the concern about appropriate burial as it is framed by the Enkosi amaKosi, or Chief of Chiefs, assumes that there is always a family to grieve the dead. But this is not always the case. From 2003 to 2013, I did field research and intervention work on a regular basis at St Apollinaris Hospital, Centocow, a district hospital of 155 beds about twenty minutes from the white farming settlement of Creighton. On one occasion, as we were giving a workshop on gender rights under the Constitution to hospital workers, my peripheral vision was often disturbed by what I would a second later recognize as gurneys coming down the open-air cement ramps from the upper floor of the hospital. These gurneys had bodies on them, many of them being taken to the incinerator, which was the case if the bodies were not claimed for burial. During the hour and a half of our workshop, about twelve bodies were taken out in this manner. The ramp became known to us colloquially, on the project, as Cadaver Way. We did not mean disrespect. We were trying to find words for such prevalence of death.

One day I was asked to meet with a young girl whose mother had just died. The mother had AIDS and was co-infected with (other) sexually transmitted infections. She left behind a daughter, whom I guessed, taking malnutrition into account, to be anywhere between eight and eleven, although I cannot of course be sure. The nurses were very embarrassed by the girl’s behavior. After her mother died, she kept on flipping up her skirt to strangers in the hospital on the ward, and she had no underwear. They told me they had no idea of “what to do with her” until care was found, in the form of an orphanage willing to take her. Nursing is a highly respected and respectable profession, and in the rural areas it enables women to live away from men, in the nursing quarters attached to the hostels. In this context, the nurses were expressing the strangeness of the girl’s behavior in their eyes, although having worked with abused children, I did not find her actions inexplicable. They were also overwhelmed by taking care of the sick, and this orphan was not visibly sick but certainly troubling to them. I explained to them that, in my view, she was seeking attention in the wake of her mother’s death as best she knew how, which is why the nurses telling her to stop lifting her skirt was not working. I also convinced them that the most urgent act was not to find her underwear, but to engage her in a task with a nursing assistant or another patient, folding linen or making beds, but at any event to keep her focused on a task with a companion. At this point I was completely focused on the challenge of respectful support of the girl myself, and not at all concerned about my own coherence in the scenario. I had not yet addressed the question of how I stood as a griever in relation to effluent subjects such as this girl, who had no one to grieve for and with her, as a newly orphaned child whose very behavior was perplexing to her current caregivers.

Later that day, I stumbled down the hill between St Appolinaris Hospital and the Centocow mission and was faced with a compound outside of which a chicken was tied up in forty-degree (Celsius) heat, obviously on hand to be slaughtered in the next few days, as it was Christmas week. The chicken was dying of heat exposure. I had no energy, nor the appropriate authority, nor the right as a privileged person with access to meat all year round if I wanted it, to do anything for the chicken, but I sat down and cried inconsolably in the land-cruiser, in the back seat, with my head down so no-one would see me. I have no idea how long I was there, nor did I know what I was crying for—a subject that in retrospect I identify as the effluent community of mother-orphan(with no relatives)-dying-daylily. Then I got up, let in a number of women seeking a lift to the closest transport stop on my way to Ixopo, and drove back to the project digs.

Once I saw Father Ignatius in a similar state. Father Ignatius is the priest at the Centocow mission, who attends every death at the hospital that he can, regardless of patients’ religious affiliations, teaches the community boys football, and soothes his soul by growing daylilies just outside the mission, in the most extraordinary burst of colors ever found in the Centocow valley. (He used to “do” orchids, but these proved too difficult to tend in the climate of the Sisonke/Harry Gwala District.) Hemerocallis is called “daylily” because each bloom lasts only a day. Each scape (a stem that itself yearly grows and dies back) carries many blooms that open in succession, but each bloom itself is a one-day wonder. Father Ignatius was just a few months away from his sabbatical in his native Poland but was collapsing in view of this “finishing line.” I sat as he told me a number of broken-up stories, all about how deaths had ravaged through the families he knew and did not know. He kept repeating that these were all “good people.” He could not stop weeping from the most enormous set of blue eyes I have ever seen. (Ignatius is tall and thin and has dark hair, which makes the blue eyes even more dominant on his visage than would otherwise be the case).

I listened until he had no more energy to talk. We sat looking at the daylilies for a while, and they looked back at us. Then we went our separate ways, back to what I call coping life, which is not quite the same as coping with life.

Father Ignatius Stankiewicz, now returned from his sabbatical, is still at the Centocow Mission, which celebrated its 125-year jubilee in 2020.

When anyone asks me about the hardest moments of those years, before the widespread rollout of HAART and its beneficial effects were anywhere in evidence, I am embarrassed to say I just shake my head and change topics. How do you explain that your worst moment was when a chicken was dying of dehydration in a Christmas compound, or when a frog snuck into your computer bag at night to keep warm and you didn’t know and the next day they were the soft squish you put your computer onto and you couldn’t stop grieving?

The clinical way of explaining this, as I know perfectly well, is that the nonhuman animals’ suffering is a trigger for the grief of all the dying and suffering and human deaths witnessed. True. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it.

If the bodies of the human animals and the bodies of the chicken (yet to die) and the frog (already dead) and the orphan inspire grievability in me, this is certainly not a grievability the South African state would countenance, nor yet empathize with. That African bodies have been too long rendered as mere animals would be a predictable response. Why would you dream of repeating the racist paradigm of the Black body as patently nonhuman and animal instead? A correlative response would be: Why would you pathologize the otherness of the HIV-positive Black body through its association with animalization?

The problem here is that the primary identity of these beings does not, in African humanism, depend on the binary alive–dead. Indeed, many of us who worked in and through the height of the epidemic prior to widespread HAART rollout developed an intimacy with the almost dead and dead bodies, such that our grief was not dependent on whether, or did not change if, the person was visibly dying or dead, a he, a she, a they, or an “it.”

Once I was in Ixopo with a colleague to visit the district health officer. We were waiting in the land-cruiser until the December thunderstorm let up a bit. We saw two men get out of a tiny bakkie, one of those Hyundai trucks that looks like it just came out of a matchbox. They seemed to be carrying something very slight between them, like a sheet or a blanket, something very two-dimensional, and almost as tall as they were, but not quite. It wasn’t glass because they were lined up in parallel: a man, the thing, and another man, with this narrow thing between them.

Once they came a meter or two closer we realized it was a very sick man between them. So sick, in fact, that he was barely there, like a slip of a man: one slip and you wouldn’t have known he had been there. We sat shocked to the core that there could be so little difference between the barely living and the dead.

Later, we became more used to this weird fact, that near-deathness or death made no difference to the grief. It just felt slightly, I don’t know, sacred maybe, to witness a being between death and life and then also a being between death and whatever that death means to the being that is dead, in the process of becoming-ancestor. Mother, chicken, frog, even daylily—they were becoming different, ancestors bearing witness to us, we who were flailing about trying to cope-live. We thought we were bearing witness to them, but somehow, each time, they seemed to be grieving for our inability to make our joy and our grief adequate to their being. We were always struggling to exceed our own grief to pay them the respect they properly commanded. Our grief was “all about us.”

So I began to think about these effluent bodies (unclaimed humans, almost dead chicken, dead frog, daylily dying on its one day of glory) not as subjects for the elegy, but as subjects in excess of their rights: in excess of the rights of the human to full citizenship, antiretrovirals; in excess of humans as victims of “failing social and economic networks of support . . . becom[ing] differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler 2009, 25); the frog as one whom one should not mourn as much as the human; the chicken as continuously disposable, the daylily as built for what we might call natural disposability. What, Mphahlele might ask us, can we hear these beings saying? Can we listen? Can grievability be a listening? Can grievability be anything other than a bearing witness? Is there a way of modeling effluent grief when there are no families to undertake extra-anthropocentric rituals?

Firstly, many of the people who(se bodies) remained unclaimed at Centocow were always living without networks of social and economic support due to the apartheid and postapartheid family breakdown I was talking about earlier. One can think about this as people living in the cracks the state leaves open in a metaphorical road, only in rural KZN there are more cracks than there are roads, metaphorical and literal; and family erosion and poverty during and after apartheid make these cracks intergenerational. Further, these effluent bodies prove that the recognizable grievability of the state or the person, as conceived of in Butler’s formulation, may capture the experience of grievability from an anthropocentric viewpoint, but not from the perspective of what we might call a latter-day African humanist, a descendant of Mphahlele’s narrative. For, what is the unborn but precisely something that is most categorically of life, just as that which is dead is not “not of life,” but an ancestor?

When Stephanie Nolen was completing her 2008 28 Stories of AIDS, she asked me what the center was of the crisis that the sub-Saharan epidemic had precipitated. I explained that one could describe it in Stephen Lewis-like terms:20 that grannies were being forced to raise young children, that men and women of income-earning age were dying, that the South African state under President Thabo Mbeki21 seemed impervious to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but what was one to do if people were dying before they had enough experience to become ancestors to the living? This seems to me to be the cosmological crux of the grief of the epidemic: the inconsolable grief of the living that the dead might not become ancestors, or adequate ancestors, owing to their youth. What we could be being asked to hear from these unauthorized ancestors in graves from East Newlands, to the compounds of KZN, to the dead frogs and flowers in garbage heaps and to the incinerated is not to stop demanding rights, but to assume that human rightness might be reconceived from the perspective of the dead, because orthodox human rights assume that death has no subjectivity. A correlative of the dead-have-no-subjectivity assumption is that the effluent body (leaking waste or dead, and therefore becoming waste) cannot be grieved, and therefore cannot be thought to have lived.

But the effluent body speaks. Sometimes it yells through the unseemliness of its effluence, as when “it” pushes away a computer from its absurd frog-ly dignity, or brings down a plague of coffin flies on those who look to ignore “it,” or permeates the air of the valley with the smell of burning flesh from the incinerator, or resounds with its claims to beauty on the day of “its” “death,” with human and nonhuman animal “death” all around “it,” like the daylily. If we don’t listen, that’s not yet another responsibility of the effluent being.

It’s ours.

And in relinquishing such listening, we give up material forms of persistence; we give up whole realms of desire that can and do resist their condemnation as effluent, toxic, a kind of metonymical necrophilia—indeed, waste and waste of time. Mourning, desire, and beauty are the language in which the desired and desiring “dead” speak to us. This is not an exotic call to action, but a quotidian exchange of extra-anthropocentric beings, and the rightness of such being. Its value is unspeakable within the current genre of the “human,” but lies in the imaginative reordering of human rightness that would render conventional genres of the human and their constructions of disposability not only visible as profoundly wasteful, but indeed as toxic to nonanthropocentric human rightness.