Multidirectional Multiculturalism: The Mobilization and Migration of Memory in Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, and J.M Coetzee's
Table of Contents Introduction:
Multidirectional Conceptions: Selecting the Facts of History and the Everyday
3
Chapter One
The Secret Russian Roman Catholic: Selecting the Facts that are J.M. Coetzee in J.M Coetzee's Boyhood
11
Chapter Two
“The Coming-Back Babies”: Moving Amongst Past-Futures in Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
24
Chapter Three
“The Demon that Shit on the Kitchen Floor” Goes to Hollywood: Trevor Noah's Born a Crime
36
Conclusion
Heterogeneous Difference: Structuring the Cause of Multidirectionality
Introduction: Multidirectional Conceptions: Selecting the Facts of History and the Everyday
[T]he way my mind works with language, even when I’m hearing other languages, they get filtered into English as I’m hearing them. My mind stores them in English. When my grandmother and great-grandmother were hysterically praying to God to destroy the demon that had shit on their kitchen floor, all of that transpired in Xhosa, but it’s stored in English. I remember it as English. So whenever I lay in bed at night dreaming about Babiki and the moments we’d spent together, I felt like it had transpired in English because that’s how I remembered it. (Noah 178)
Trevor Noah, in his memoir Born a Crime, recounts a moment outside of his seminal high school dance when it is abruptly revealed to him that Babiki, his date and a girl he has come to regard as his girlfriend, does not speak English (111). After a quick mental recall of their encounters, Noah realizes that during each of the occasions they were together they never actually spoke to one another. Babiki's older sisters speak English, but Babiki speaks only Pedi, a language Noah does not understand. Noah attributes this ignorance to his tendency to remember events in English, but this automatic transcription into one language is not necessarily unique, but may be seen as a reflection of what Michael Rothberg has notably called the multidirectional nature of memory (3). Memory does not function like a recording device, but instead is continually open to construction and reconstruction, and occurs not in the past, but in the present. As a synthesis of language, past and present experience, and individual and collective narratives about identity, memory is essentially multidirectional in that it relies on various other, often ignored structures and experiences to be seen as a comprehensive whole. Trevor Noah does not, until the previous moment, comprehend that Babiki does not speak English because his memory has already
processed and stored the information for him. An affinity for learning languages paired with the elastic nature of memory has allowed him to subconsciously configure, through many small processes of comparison, memories with complete stories in a language he understands. The multidirectional nature of this process is concealed by the ability of the mind to create a comprehensive image and narrative of the past in the present (Rothberg 3). The perpetual past-made-present-ness of memory means that both individual and collective memories are
continually changed and manipulated by outside forces. Cultural translations and productions exist as central links between the individual and the collective and are, therefore, integral to understanding the construction of individual memories which come to shape the collective memory which envelops historical consciousness. Furthermore, the memoir, as a genre which privileges experience over grand historical narratives, forces the reader to engage in various processes of comparison while making links to one's own (seemingly unrelated) life.
As a document which represents individual memories through the lens of local
experience, and then, through publication and circulation, translates those memories into global discourse, the memoir is ideally suited to examine the inherently multidirectional nature of identity and memory. Multidirectional memory is primarily concerned with “seeking points of contact between apparently separate histories,” a process which Rothberg argues may be used “[i]n order to understand the extent of racism's relevance to the disciplinary and interdisciplinary production of knowledge.” He goes on to suggest that in order to do this, “we as critics need first to map the conceptual and material lines of demarcation that hold together as well as divide histories” (115). Multidirectional Memory, as a theoretical tool for mapping history, constructs links between seemingly disparate cultures and demonstrates their continued, though often silent or miniscule, interactions. Through a consideration of Trevor Noah's memoir Born a Crime alongside Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and J.M Coetzee's Boyhood, this
research aims, firstly, to examine the multidirectional nature of memory as an analytical tool which highlights links existing between seemingly disparate histories in order to break up the artificial construction of cultural and national homogenization, and secondly, to demonstrate that these links come into being through practices of the everyday and are inherently relational and multicultural. My use of multidirectionality is descriptive in that, like Rothberg, I attempt to describe certain ways in which memory functions. However, deviating slightly from Rothberg's approach, by shifting the emphasis of multidirectional memory to individual experience while also moving away from trauma studies, I aim to examine multidirectional memory not as bound to a latent trauma effect, but as a conceptual network and flow of information which is
continually restructured and acted out as a result of everyday events in a life.
To do this, I will draw from two main theorists in addition to Michael Rothberg: Judith Butler and Michel De Certeau. Judith Butler's theory of relationality discussed in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence and Michel De Certeau's examination of the "grid of discipline" in The Practice of Everyday Life serve as helpful supplements to this investigation. Rothberg contests that our job as critics is to “map the conceptual and material lines of
demarcation that hold together as well as divide histories,” which is to say that we must discover the arrangement or organization which links mental concepts or constructions to the world of material things and other living beings because those links are responsible for both the homogeneous and heterogeneous dividers of history and culture. To begin demarcating these lines, one must reimagine the conceptual links which humans create for themselves as a result of interactions with other living creatures, not as relations which are held like possessions, but as relations which are inhabited and construct the identity of all living beings (Butler 23). In addition, one must consider the material links constructed through what De Certeau has called a user's “'way[s] of operating'” so that everyday practices “. . . no longer appear as merely the
obscure background of social activity. . .” (xi). Together, these theories provide a
multidirectional frame of analysis which may contribute to a more accurate picture of the vast and varied heterogeneous links which exist in each and every organic or material relation. Identity and memory would not be multidirectional if it were not for the tiny, miniscule changes which occur in each repetition in each practice in each day of everyday life. These changes are most powerfully affected by environment, relationships, and time in the present moment. By placing these three theories in conversation with one another, I aim to make light of the integral connections between these three factors and the effect this might have on the human perspective of historical consciousness.
The memoirs which serve as the objects of this study are the works of three writers who vary widely in style and context. Central to this research is the understanding that memory is contextual; it changes as it travels through time and space. J.M Coetzee, born in 1940, depicts a reserved, if occasionally temperamental child. Alexandra Fuller, born nineteen years later, describes a childhood spent moving in and out of war zones in southern Africa. Trevor Noah, born some forty-eight years after Coetzee, shortly before the end of Apartheid, was "born a crime" in his own country. Separated by age, time, sex, race, and temperament, their stories and memories cover an expanse of more than fifty years, but certain themes which act as key
elements of both identity and collective memory formation traipse uncannily in and out of each: the role of religion at home and at school, the context of generational transfer, the presence of brutality and suffering, and the subsequent roles of temporality, geography, and the context of the everyday there within. Each of these memoirs documents a form of self-writing which supports the idea of the ongoing composition and improvisation of the self and which highlights the framing of the self through self-writing as integral to memory production.
Memory does not work like a recording device; it is not a record of facts, but rather a selection of facts. As J.M. Coetzee suggests, ''Among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that [all writing] yields, are there any that are truer than others?' . . . [Autobiography] is a kind of self-writing in which you are constrained to respect the facts of your history. But which facts? All the facts? No. All the facts are too many. You choose the facts insofar as they fit in with your evolving purpose'” (Lenta 161). Margaret Lenta cites J.M. Coetzee in an interview with David Attwell in Doubling the Point to illustrate the difficulty of defining autobiography. She suggests that Coetzee implies “the writer of autobiography will not falsify, though he must select” (161). This process of selection, of deciding which facts to represent and which to leave out, is continually carried out in both miniscule and macro levels. On the most infinitesimal level, when in social situations, individuals are constantly engaged in the process of deciding which thoughts to share and of which to dispose, on which to act, and on which to ignore. Indeed, an awareness of and a conscious interaction with one's own process of selection is elemental in group development and community formation. On the most capacious of scales, the selection of facts to be included in collective historical memories can determine the political landscape both in local contexts and across vast portions of the globe.
Ideas cross borders. Indeed, discourse is built upon this very precept. Archetypes of thought are rarely constricted by sovereign boundaries, despite the many rhetorical tricks existing for just such a purpose. Each idea comes further enclosed in the caste of a memory, the recall and subsequent representation of an image, a structure, or a bit of knowledge. But not all memories are equal. Certainly in the global collective discourse which structures collective memories, certain narratives take prominence over others and many links to seemingly disparate histories are ignored or overlooked. This does not make memory, collective or individual, less productive or relationally and presently constructed. In fact, certain histories are ignored or
overlooked precisely because conceptual modes of competitive, rather than multidirectional, memory have been used to discuss nationality and historical consciousness since their creation. Since local and global politics are now, and to a large extent have always been, increasingly defined by the role of multiculturalism, it is critical to understand the interactive networks of discourse and memory and the mediums or vehicles in which memories are transmitted. While multidirectional memory faces limits as a European-based model of memory dynamics, by resituating Rothberg's theory in an African context and examining it through the lens of the individual-made-collective (the memoir), I hope it may offer new ways for situating memory dynamics in conversation with power structures and hierarchical discourses which are not necessarily Eurocentric.
As an analytical tool which seeks to uncover links between seemingly disparate histories, multidirectionality acts as a kind of antithesis to historicism and modes of thinking that
inexplicably link race with geography. As Achille Mbembe elaborates in his text “African Modes of Self-Writing,” much of recent discourse which has emerged on the “African collective
imaginaire” has vacillated between the two poles of historicism applied to African writing: Afro-radicalism and nativism (239-40). According to Mbembe, Afro-Afro-radicalism “used Marxist and nationalist categories to develop an imaginaire of culture and politics in which a manipulation of the rhetoric of autonomy, resistance, and emancipation serves as the sole criterion for
determining the legitimacy of an authentic African discourse. The second current of thought developed out of an emphasis on the 'native condition.' It promoted the idea of a unique African identity founded on membership of the black race” (240-41). These two modes of thinking are determinist and neglect to account for intersecting and everyday practices. As a tool that relies on historical contingency and subject creation, multidirectionality is aptly suited to discuss southern
African writing, not as the result of “fictive and wholly invisible” outside forces, but rather through human experiences of the world.
This research then necessarily focuses on three main aspects of memory formation and transfer within each memoir: experiences produced by racial, geographical, or linguistic divides, subject-identity formation, and the relation between power structures and practices of everyday life. As the scope of this project suggests, this research cannot profess to be a comprehensive analysis of overlapping histories. Furthermore, as a researcher based outside of southern Africa, access to the inner workings of the complex societies represented in the memoirs is limited. However, through an analysis of existing links between histories examined through the lens of experience, I aim to gain insight into connections which are often overlooked, but largely visible.
This work consists of three main chapters. Chapter one, entitled “The Secret Russian Roman Catholic: Selecting the Facts that are J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood,” examines identity as fundamentally multidirectional and relational. Through an examination of artificial
homogenization as a force for structuring inequality, this chapter dissects the effect of this homogenization on identity through the lens of the young-Coetzee. I demonstrate that a holistic idea of identity is fiction and often constructed in support of various nationalisms.
Chapter Two, entitled “'The Coming Back Babies': Moving Amongst Past-Futures in Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight,” discusses the role of white writing in southern Africa and the relationship between geography, race, and locality. Responding to criticisms waged by scholar Tony Siomoes Da Silvas, this chapter examines the relationship between personal and historical narrative and who has the right to write. Through the myth of the Coming Back Baby, I consider the role of myth in individual and collective memory.
Chapter Three, entitled “'The Demon that Shit on the Kitchen Floor' Goes to Hollywood: Trevor Noah's Born a Crime” seeks to highlight multidirectional links in present-day local and
global politics. Through a series of connections made between Noah's memoir, the comedy he produces as host of the American political satire series, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and the documentary You Laugh But It's True, a film highlighting his life and first one-man show "The Daywalker," I will address how humor can be tactically used to create individual and collective memories and to subvert power structures which shape global conversations. Through Trevor Noah's skills as an effective code-switcher, I will demonstrate the need for a
multidirectional perspective.
Finally, the concluding chapter, “Heterogeneous Difference: Structuring the Cause of Multidirectionality” will highlight the role of heterogeneity as the central linking factor in each theory and memoir. While often necessarily ignored, a remembrance of the plethora of
differences which exist everywhere, at each and every moment, and as a constantly expanding multiplicity may lead to a less violent, more empathetic understandings of human history.
Chapter One: The Secret Russian Roman Catholic: Selecting the Facts that are J.M. Coetzee in J.M Coetzee's Boyhood
One of the great fears of the young half-fictionalized-Coetzee's1 life is that he will be transferred to an Afrikaans class – that he will, one day, due to some force or other, be “consigned to an Afrikaans life” (136). He hates the Afrikaans songs he must sing at school, describes most Afrikaans boys as bullies, and mocks his father for not using the word 'you' when he speaks to anyone older than himself. He remarks that “[h]e is relieved he is not Afrikaans and is saved from having to talk . . . like a whipped slave” (49). The boy-Coetzee sees Afrikaans as a rigid and fixed structure, lacking in freedom of expression. Furthermore, it inhabits a cultural identity to which he feels he does not belong. And yet, throughout Boyhood, he describes several experiences speaking Afrikaans which bring him great joy. At his father's family's farm,
Voelfontein, he “[g]reedily...drinks in the atmosphere, drinks in the happy, slapdash mixture of English and Afrikaans that is their common tongue when they get together. He likes this funny, dancing language, with its particles that slip here and there in the sentence. It is lighter, airier than the Afrikaans they study at school, which is weighed down with idioms that are supposed to come from the volksmond, the people's mouth, but seem to come only from the Great Trek, lumpish, nonsensical idioms about wagons and cattle and cattle-harness” (81). Coetzee blissfully absorbs the atmosphere of his family's intertwined languages, but he resents the Afrikaans which is forced upon him at school. Coetzee dismisses the Afrikaans language as a kind of imposter, calling itself the African (Afrikaans) language when it was actually brought forth by Europeans, with idioms composed of words meant for pulling weight and harnessing animals that would otherwise be free. Traditional use of Afrikaans like the Afrikaans he hears at school creates in Coetzee a feeling of outside-ness: a box in which he and his family do not fit.
1 Highlighting the instability of words and story-telling, Boyhood is narrated from the perspective of the third person. It remains unclear precisely which parts are and are not fiction.
But this is an artificial box in which no one fits. Artificial homogenization, as a
cornerstone of apartheid, continues to function as a powerful source for structuring inequalities in multicultural societies and selecting collective memories. Tensions between the English and the Boers which contributed to the pursuit of the Great Trek were arguably the historical
constituents of the system of racial discrimination and segregation that was apartheid, but it was precisely this division between the English and the Boers that led to a system empowering the artificial homogenization of whiteness. As Dominic Griffiths and Maria L.C. Prozesky discuss in their article, “The Politics of Dwelling: Being White / Being South African,” it is important to recognize the diversity of English-speaking groups of people precisely because it is often this artificial homogenization of the dominant white class which is in part used to structure power dynamics in material reality. In actuality, “[t]he English-speaking group was culturally diverse, consisting of descendants not only of British immigrants, but also of other, smaller, social groups, such as Germans, Portuguese, and Greeks. And, as pointed out by Goodwin and Schiff, Afrikaners themselves are descended from diverse European nationalities (not to mention that the genealogies of most of the older families include Malay and black ancestors too); the concept of a 'pure' Afrikaner ethnicity was created to serve the interests of growing nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s” (Griffiths 26). The “concept of a 'pure' Afrikaner ethnicity can be conceived of only in the mind; 'pure' ethnicity or identity does not exist in material reality, but its
conceptual construction certainly shapes it and contributes to the frame of memory and identity as competitive rather than multidirectional. Coetzee, born in 1940, grew up shortly after the rise of the nationalism of which Griffiths speaks. Nationalism, as an ideology which fervently advocates the interests of one's own nation above all others, is built on a deep mythology of racial and social constructs. Coetzee's resistance to the nationalism of Afrikaans and, to some extent, the English, raises several relevant questions about the necessity of a multidirectional
perspective. If the categories of 'English' and 'Afrikaans' are actually composed of individuals of multiple countries and cultures, what is the role of such categories in individual and cultural identity? If nationalities may be used to construct power dynamics, what is the effect of undermining those dynamics with multidirectional invocations and discourse? Through an investigation of the many multicultural elements which construct the identity of the boy-Coetzee, as well as the representation of his own memories to others, Boyhood demonstrates that memory is multidirectional in part because identity is fundamentally multidirectional, relational, and lacking in definitive origin. Identity seizes from this or that; it borrows from the stories it likes and ignores the parts it does not and is constructed in the present moment, much like memory.
Identity, by definition, is the absence of difference, the condition of sameness, the repetition of an equation; I am what I repeat. But humans do not simply repeat they perform: they act, they play, they imitate, and they represent based on “[s]enses relating to the action or process of commemorating, recollecting, or remembering” (“memory”). It is worth noting that both identity and memory are dependent on one's senses - 'how do I experience the world? Which facts stand out to me? Which facts matter more because of my values and the values I have inherited from others?' Each repetition of memory is selected from an array of apparent facts and then embedded within a story used as a means for identifying oneself, either to oneself or to others. Not far into Boyhood, Coetzee recounts his first memory in a self-invented memory game which exhibits the previous process of representation:
One day, in a mood of reckless intimacy, he asks Greenberg and Goldstein to bring out their earliest memories. Greenberg demurs: it is a game he is not willing to play.
listens to. For the point of the game is, of course, to allow him to recount his own first memory.
He is leaning out of the window of their flat in Johannesburg. Dusk is falling. Out of the distance a car comes racing down the street. A dog, a small spotted dog, runs in front of it. The car hits the dog: its wheels go right over the dog's middle. With his hind legs paralyzed, the dog drags itself away, squealing with pain. No doubt it will die; but at this point he is snatched away from the window.
It is a magnificent first memory, trumping anything that poor Goldstein can dredge up. But is it true? (30)
This is not Coetzee's first memory. Later on, the narrator reveals that his true first memory is one which embarrasses him, a secret, and yet this memory is nothing more than the recollection of letting a candy wrapper fly from the window of a bus on a cold day. He remarks that “[h]e thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it” (31) He dreams of going back to rescue it. Why does Coetzee find his real first memory embarrassing? Why does he feel he must go back for something as
insignificant as a candy wrapper? And what is the significance of the memory he relates to Greenberg and Goldstein about the dying dog with the broken back?
Insignificance, at least for the boy-Coetzee, is embarrassing. John is embarrassed by his real first memory because he does not wish to be associated with it; he does not wish to
incorporate it into the representation of his identity which he relates to Goldstein and Greenberg. This is likely for several reasons. Firstly, it is not a romantic memory. He is not “leaning out of the window watching an empty street,” he is sitting on a bus in the cold with his mother (31). In the grand narrative of storytelling, artists lean out windows; poor, insignificant people ride the
bus. Secondly, not only is he with his mother, he asks for her permission. Throughout the narrative, Coetzee is at times ashamed and bewildered by his mother. He worries that he will always be a baby and will never grow up, that he will forever be inexplicably tied to his mother, always a reflection of her image as the person closest to him. Finally, he rejects this memory because it reveals his vulnerability. This insignificant candy wrapper is left to flap around in the vast empty space, and John aligns himself with it, alone in a hostile world, but “still bravely flying” (31). The main difference between his true first memory and the story he retells to his friends is that in the true memory he is insignificant and vulnerable whereas in the other memory he is independent and uninvolved, watching safely at a distance. He is snatched from the
window, but by who remains unknown. He is the solo protagonist. In the story he tells he is the creator, the storyteller, the witness, the independent observer; in the other, he is constructed through relational details: his status on the bus next to his mother, the child-like red leggings and bobble cap no doubt provided by his parents, his request for permission to let the scrap of paper go, and his subsequent desire, but lack of ability, to go back for it. All posit Coetzee as existing in a world full of constricting relations which he can hardly control. He holds his true first memory as a secret he must never repeat to anyone because it reveals the wholeness of his identity as a fiction. He is not a detached, independent observer, but a dependent human and a child no less, vulnerable to the cold, to the will of his mother, the movement of the bus and the wind, and a great many other outside stimuli.
Relationality is, in essence, vulnerability, in that it requires a network of different components and is thus vulnerable to the failure or removal of each of those components. To admit that one is not only dependent on others, but also, to a large extent, constituted through them, is to admit that one's identity is multidirectional and continually constructed. This is most
frequently revealed through extreme affective experiences: love, passion, violence, pain, and grief. As Judith Butler outlines in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence:
Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the 'we' is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against; or, rather, we can argue against it, but we would be denying something fundamental about the very conditions of our social formation. (Butler 22)
Butler's theory of relationality highlights key elements in identity formation which structure identity and individual and collective memory as multidirectional. As Rothberg is also apt to point out, grief unionizes. "While on the level of individual, lived experience it often feels prohibitively privatizing, on the side of constructive social relations it can solidify powerful community ties" (Rothberg 4). Butler interrogates this conundrum by asking what it means to 'have' social relations. She notes that while one can easily sit back and narrate a story about the significance of each relationship in one's life, this process exaggerates an artificial detachment from others and aggregates oneself as “a detached narrator of [my] relations” (23). In actuality, we do not 'have' social relations, we inhabit them. Throughout Boyhood, Coetzee remarks on the way he inhabits his relationships with his mother and father. He wishes for his mother to hover over him and yet feels he will erupt in a rage if she does (13). He feels he will never be able to pay her back for all of the love she has given him and yet is simultaneously ashamed and
exasperated by her. But what is perhaps more significant in this pretext is the relationship John inhabits with his father. "He has never worked out the position of his father in the household. In fact, it is not obvious to him by what right his father is there at all" he remarks early on in the memoir (12). As the boy-Coetzee grows up and his father makes a series of poor financial decisions followed by the loss of his job, their relationship further deteriorates. Because John sees little reason to respect his father, he does not see him as occupying a space in his life, certainly not the kind of space his mother does. And yet his life, and arguably his identity, is similarly shaped by his father and mother.
Chapter twelve depicts the memory of a startling and intimate interaction with his father. One night, John and his father stay up late to hear the radio broadcast of the bantamweight championship. After hearing the announcement that Viccie Toweel2, the first South African to hold a world title, has become the new bantamweight champion of the world, the boy-Coetzee, in the grip of a particular elation steeped in a peculiar relationality which seems to arise only from sporting matches, engages in a violently intimate moment with his father. "Impulsively he grips his father's hair, tugs with all his might. His father starts back, looks at him oddly" (109). Later on, in the final sentences of the chapter, Coetzee recalls the experience. "In his hand he retains the feel of his father's hair, coarse, sturdy. The violence of his action still puzzles and disturbs him. He has never been so free with his father's body before. He would prefer that it did not happen again" (110). To retain is "to hold or keep something . . . within itself; to contain" ("retain"). It is also "to continue to have or possess." Coetzee retains the impact of this memory in his mind as well as his body. With his imagination he can feel the coarseness of his father's hair, the uncertainty of a recklessly intimate moment, and the sensations which such a moment stimulates. The freeness he experiences with his father's body makes him uncomfortable because it does not stay in his father. He can feel it in his own body and the memory, as one of many 2 Viccie Toweel was a South African boxer of Lebanese descent. He retired in Australia in the 1980's.
fragments of everyday interactions with others, serves as an important yet minute reminder of the rules and consequences of interaction.
The peculiar type of relationality and community ties which construct sporting competitions are not, in many ways, unlike those which unionize community ties in times of grief. After Viccie Toweel wins the world title, Coetzee notes that:
For days the newspapers are full of pictures of the fight. Viccie Toweel is a national hero. As for him, his elation soon dwindles. He is happy that Toweel has beaten Ortiz, but has begun to wonder why. Who is Toweel to him? Why should he not be free to choose between Toweel and Ortiz in boxing as he is free to choose between Hamiltons and Villagers in rugby? Is he bound to support Toweel, this ugly little man with hunched shoulder and a big nose and tiny blank, black eyes, because Toweel (despite his funny name) is a South African? Do South Africans have to support other South Africans even if they don't know them? (109)
Political community formation is often more concerned with whom one does not share relations than the antithesis. What is important in this context is not that Coetzee support the South African so much as that he not support the foreigner. Like language, social and political
communities are often composed of casual and distant relations and are formed through a series of negatives rather than positives.
Coetzee must make these kinds of choices repeatedly. He must choose: English or Afrikaans, Jewish or Catholic, Russians or Americans, Shakespeare or P C Wren. While he has little background information about each of these four decisions, the process of being forced to choose renders each concept an important fragment of identity. First, when his father tells him
Shakespeare is the greatest author in the world, but is disinterested in reading Coetzee's favorite author, P C Wren, Coetzee decides "If his father likes Shakespeare then Shakespeare must be bad . . . [n]evertheless, he begins to read Shakespeare" (104). Secondly, "When the Russians and the Americans were first set before him as antagonists between whom he had to choose . . . [h]e chose the Russians in 1947. . . [and] having chosen them, he threw himself into reading about them" (27). When Coetzee later finds out that liking the Russians is not allowed he puts his drawings in a drawer and professes to prefer the Americans, but the choice has now been made an integral part of his identity: a secret. Then, on his first day at a new school, when he is asked what his religion is he does not know and thus makes a spur of the moment choice. "He chose to be a Roman Catholic, that fateful morning, because of Rome, because of Horatius and his two comrades, swords in their hands, crested helmets on their heads, indomitable courage in their glance, defending the bridge over the Tiber against the Etruscan hordes" (20). Finally, in the case of English and Afrikaans - the choice which allows him the least amount of freedom and control - this artificial choice inhabits in Coetzee the place of an agonizing fear. In each of these examples, the sublimation of difference through choices which support a facade of wholeness leads to further fragmentation. Coetzee constantly worries that he will be found out: that it will be discovered that he has an Afrikaans name and will be transferred to the Afrikaans class, that it will be revealed he is not a real Roman Catholic, or that he secretly prefers the Russians to the Americans. He remarks that, “[h]e begins to think of himself as one of those spiders that live in a hole in the ground with a trapdoor. Always the spider has to be scuttling back into its hole, closing the trapdoor behind it, shutting out the world, hiding” (Coetzee 28). In the process of individual and community identity formation, certain aspects are highlighted while others are ignored, but ignoring those aspects does not erase them. In fact, such blatant dismissals of the minute and elaborate network of multidirectional cultural links which underlie categories like
English or Afrikaans, Catholic or Jewish, and Russian or American often ensure violence and confrontation.
It is no coincidence that Coetzee's memoir is written in the third person. Such an unusual autobiographical subject position may be easily accidentally mistaken to signify that Coetzee's text is not, indeed, a memoir. But, as Margaret Lenta has outlined, this is a mistake. Lenta contends that “[t]he third-person of Boyhood and Youth is . . . carefully chosen: the device means that both author and reader relate to him as to a biographical—rather than autobiographical— subject” (158). Unlike the two subsequent memoirs by Fuller and Noah, Coetzee's memoir is purposefully removed from the autobiographical, lived experience of the 'I.' By forcing the reader to relate to a detailed and intimate description of Coetzee's life through the lens of a detached narrator, Coetzee “weaken[s] the autobiographical pact with the reader” which is present in standard autobiographical representations of the memoir (Lenta 161). By representing aspects of his memories from the perspective of a biographer – a role typically understood as a detached observer who is not present during the unfolding of events - Coetzee enters a
conundrum of relationality: the biographer cannot see clearly because he was not present; the autobiographer cannot see clearly because he was. Caryl Phillips suggests in A New World Order that the third person biographer "suggests construction rather than confession" (29). Through this lens Coetzee provides the ultimate support for a fundamentally multicultural, multidirectional, and mutually constructed identity.
Coetzee's third-person memoir written in the present tense reflects the chasm which exists between historical narrative and the experience of everyday life. This chasm is extensively examined in Edouard Glissant's text Caribbean Discourse. He aptly dissects the problem of experience and historical consciousness when he points out that ". . . the lived circumstances of this daily reality do not form part of a continuum, which means that its [history's] relation with
its surroundings (what we would call its nature) is in a discontinuous relation to its accumulation of experiences (what we would call its culture)" (61). Experiences of everyday life do not link together as a continuum. The present is ubiquitous and the facts of history are selected, which implies, on an individual level, that identity is constructed and memory is the play it is
constructed through. If 'I' cannot access the person 'I' was yesterday except through memory, and memory is not a record, but an everyday selection of facts repeated with small changes, memory and history are not 'truth' but, rather, fragments of truth. The multiplicity of heterogeneous events which take place at any given moment renders any complete or true account of history absolutely incalculable. This calls for a fundamental re-thinking of what is currently called history, not as series of truths, but as a series of political choices and a manner made to impose certain facts and relations onto others.
Glissant's discussion is primarily concerned with Caribbean history, but has demonstrable consequences for history at large. Like Michael Rothberg, Glissant calls for an examination of the material and conceptual boundaries which have served to demarcate certain histories from others. “History is a highly functional fantasy of the West . . ." (Glissant 64). It can only be undone or re-thought "'where the histories of those peoples once reputed to be without history come together'" (64). What might such a re-thinking entail? How might such history be accessible when such an unequal selection of the facts of history has often meant the loss of historical memories and experiences within the historical record? Glissant argues that this re-thinking of history cannot be left exclusively to historians, but must be executed by writers; experience must first be imagined before the creation of a historical timeline. Art, literature, storytelling, theory - aspects of a cultural production and translation - provide key insights to the imagination of experience which might be responsible for the re-thinking of history.
Central to this re-thinking is the recognition of what J.M. Coetzee has called "foundational fiction[s]" (14). In the first essay of Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, entitled Taking Offense, Coetzee suggests that life is predicated on a great many foundational fictions which are responsible for constructing the experience of everyday life. Coetzee writes:
Affronts to the innocence of our children or the dignity of our persons are attacks not upon our essential being but upon constructs - constructs by which we live, but constructs nevertheless. This is not to say that affronts to innocence or dignity are not real affronts, or that the outrage with which we respond to them is not real, in the sense of not being sincerely felt. The infringements are real; what is infringed, however, is not our essence but a foundational fiction to which we more or less wholeheartedly subscribe, a fiction that may well be indispensable for a just society, namely, that human beings have a dignity that sets them apart from animals and consequently protects them from being treated like animals. (It is even possible that we may look forward to a day when animals will have their own dignity ascribed to them, and the ban will be reformulated as a ban on treating a living creature like a thing). (14)
Central to an understanding of identity and memory as multidirectional is an understanding of "foundational fictions." In the same way that people agree to call a custom a 'custom,' custom, not truth, determines the central pillars of civil society such as innocence, dignity, and justice. Humanism is predicated on human rights, rights which do not exist outside of their current customs. In an effort to further the "foundational fiction" of justice which always necessarily favors one community over another, history selects rather than records. In a world that is
increasingly planetary, singular, and global, historians would do well to remember their similarities with writers.
Chapter Two: 'The Coming Back Babies': Moving Amongst Past-Futures in Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
According to Alexandra Fuller, “everything we do is political from the decision we make to wake up in the morning to the clothes we put on our bodies, to the words we have the courage to speak” (Steven Barclay Agency: Alexandra Fuller). This can be seen through the
representation and reception of Fuller's memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, which has occasionally been criticized for its representation of whiteness in South Africa. Tony Simoes Da Silva argues in his article “Narrating a White Africa,” that whiteness in many African narratives, particularly Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Coetzee's Boyhood, is used as a method for reclaiming influence and contributing to the national story of white sovereignty. He argues:
Faced with the rapidly changing political conditions that once framed the White self in Africa as a 'stable' locus of privilege and power, self-writing forms allow White writers in Southern Africa to reclaim some of the influence they once held over the telling of a national story and the making of cultural memory. Through a 'public rehearsal of memory', these narratives confound the historical and the personal by resituating the personal story above the collective one, at times obfuscating the relationship between knowledge, power and privilege by divesting whiteness of the ideological weight it holds still in the history of Southern Africa (471).
Tony Simoes Da Silva's argument negotiates a vision of what Michael Rothberg calls competitive memory in that he contends that the “'public rehearsal of memory'” exercised in
white self-writing obfuscates collective memory and cannot be productive. Central to Da Silvas argument is the contention that by publicly telling their stories, Coetzee and Fuller struggle to re-seize a portion of privilege and control held by white South Africans. Writing is indeed a force and a power struggle, but who has the right to write? Which words convey the 'correct' selection of facts which might be included in various public memory games and given the label of history?
Michael Rothberg begins his analysis of multidirectional memory by interrogating its effective opposite: competitive memory. He begins chapter one with an example from literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels in which Michaels discusses the absurdity of the existence of a Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Washington DC Mall, when there is not a museum to commemorate African American history and the brutal legacy of racism in America3. Rothberg argues:
Michaels implies that collective memory obeys a logic of scarcity: if a Holocaust Museum sits on the Mall in Washington (or just off of it, as is the actual case), then Holocaust memory must literally be crowding the memory of African American history out of the public space of American collective consciousness. There are plenty of legitimate ways to engage critically with the fact and function of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and there is certainly a great need to engage with the ongoing fact of American racism, but Michaels's argument begs some important questions: Does
collective memory really work like real-estate development? Must the claims of memory always be calculated according to their relevance for national history? (2)
3One hundred years after efforts to erect an African American history museum first began, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington DC on September 24th, 2016.
These questions are directly applicable to Da Silva's assertions that Coetzee and Fuller muddle the distinction between the historical and the personal, the individual and the collective, and seek to regain control over a white national narrative. Da Silva claims that through the "'public rehearsal of memory'" the self-writing by Fuller and Coetzee obfuscates structures of power and creates a white innocence divested of responsibility. But is it, then, not at all possible for
Coetzee and Fuller to write accurate depictions of their white childhoods in South Africa without promoting white privilege and obstructing history? Must their "claims of memory always be calculated according to their relevance for national history?" I propose that as antithesis to Da Silva's argument, Fuller's memoir provides a level of layered-ness which would be eliminated and unauthenticated if she had created a more explicitly political rehearsal of memory. Through a presentation of identity as not original and whole, but fragmented and composed, and the multiplicity of mobility, Fuller's memoir promotes an image of future-orientated thinking which does not attempt to answer the monotonous historical interrogation of what is Africa (a questions inherently tied to origin), but, rather, questions what new ways of thinking might be developed from southern Africa and seen through the practices of everyday life. This promotes
multidirectional ways of thought which account for the fluidity of culture and memory, not as tied to specific individuals, but as products of the circulation of memories which do not know the boundaries of mind, body, or country.
Da Silva's contention that Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight "confound[s] the historical and the personal by resituating the personal story above the collective one," bolsters the artificial construction of history as a timeline with a date and a fact. History is not a truth, it is a manner made to impose certain facts and relations. Da Silva argues that Fuller and Coetzee do not portray a realistic representation of historical events, but one must then wonder which facts qualify as the realistic representation of historical events. How might an everyday event or
experience be real but not historically accurate? This conception comes from a competitive and unilateral fiction of historical consciousness, which might in turn be said to be based on a unilateral, whole, and stagnant image of the nation-state and of the self. Early in Alexandra Fuller's memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller describes a discrepancy between the image her mother has of herself and the image Alexandra portrays of her. Fuller writes, “Mum doesn't know who she is, either. / She stayed up all night once listening to Scottish music and crying. / 'This music' – her nose twitches – 'is so beautiful. It makes me so homesick.'/ Mum has lived in Africa all but three years of her life. / 'But this is your home.'/ 'But my heart,' Mum attempts to thump her chest, 'is Scottish'” (8). Fuller's mother's self-identification with a country she spent comparatively little time in is indicative of the relationship between identity and memory. Central to the construction of memory and identity is myth, both constructed for oneself and for others, both on an individual and a structural level. Myth, as a story which provides an untrue or exaggerated justification for a phenomena, behavior, or experience, is necessary and problematic, as well as sometimes dangerous. Alexandra Fuller outlines both the need for and consequences of myth in an interview with James Dean Le Sueur:
I think . . . we all have a myth of ourselves . . . we have a myth of ourselves for a good reason [in] that living within a myth helps us to survive sometimes quite difficult situations, or . . . if we've got lousy politics you can live with the myth that you're fighting for freedom when really you are part of an institution that supports apartheid, which is what my mother was doing. And the myth of herself I think - and in part this is a myth based on truth like most myths are – [was] that she was this incredibly resilient, very glamorous woman, terrifyingly fearless . . . and so I think when Don't Let's Go to
the Dogs Tonight came out and she read what she looked like from her child's perspective it really undid her. (UNL History Department: 4:07)
Myth is necessary for the construction of identity; it allows one to survive difficult, even
traumatic events, as well as one's own shortcomings and minor to major imperfections. But these myths may come back to haunt; Fuller's mother's furiousness at her daughter's portrayal in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is a symptom of memory discrepancies which have a dialogical relation to identity. Because Fuller's mother knows she comes from Scotland, she has
incorporated that nationality into an image she has of herself. Because she has an image of herself which is necessarily viewed as a reflection of that self, when she remembers Scotland she remembers the parts she likes - the old Scottish songs she can revisit on her records, the
photographs of men playing bagpipes in kilts, and the English radio she spends hours attempting to receive through dozens of feet of electric wire wrapped up in African trees. The ideas she has about her identity make her remember differently, and these memories further inform a
continually reconstructed and remediated identity.
Conversely, Fuller portrays her mother's self-identification with Scotland as endearing but foolish; Fuller has no experience of her mother as Scottish. But her mother's memories of Scotland, whether they be romanticized or not, are based on memories of experience. When Fuller's mother declares her heart to be Scottish, Alexandra is quick to point out that her mother actually hates Scotland. “She hates drunk-driving laws and the cold. The cold makes her cry, and then she comes down with malaria” (9). Her attachment to it represents an image she has of herself, an image which is neither provable nor irrelevant. As Charles Altieri outlines through the declarations of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “[a] man can see what he has but not what he is. What he is can be compared to his height above sea-level, which you cannot for the most part
judge without more ado” (Altieri 184). He suggests that because the author of any work, style, or identity is a result of a whole host of beliefs and values which may not be available even to the individuals themselves, one cannot respond only to isolated elements, but must instead evaluate the complex network of relations at hand. The unavailability of the self means that identity is constantly being revised and rewritten, and in those revisions, memories – as the past made present – are recalled not as concrete structures or finite happenings but as multidirectional, often allegorized representations. Fuller's mother makes these statements about her Scottish heart in a drunken haze in Zambia in 1987. In another state, time, and place, she would undoubtedly remember differently.
The generational transmission and translation of stories and narratives which become collective memory is further multidirectionally constructed through movement and migration. The question, 'where are you from?' is used as a marker for identity all around the globe and is directly and indirectly asked several times in both Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Born a Crime. But what is really being asked with this question? How is locality used to define identity? Alexandra Fuller recounts being asked 'where are you from?' repeatedly, eventually arriving at the following answer, “I say, 'I'm African.' But not black. / And I say, 'I was born in England,' by mistake. / But, 'I have lived in Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe) and in Malawi (which used to be Nyasaland) and in Zambia (which used to be Northern Rhodesia).' / And I add, 'Now I live in America,' through marriage. / And (full disclosure), 'But my parents were born of Scottish and English parents.' / What does that make me?” (8). It is significant that at least three of the countries Fuller lists used to be considered other countries. Any country which stands in for the answer of the question 'where are you from?' presupposes that a country exists as a fixed entity, unmoving and stagnant. For this reason, each of Fuller's answers is followed by a qualifier – she must specify that she is African but is not black, was born in England but only by mistake, that
many of the countries she has lived in exist or used to exist under other names, that she lives in America only through her marriage, and that regardless of all of the previous information, she is actually descended from the Scottish and English through her grandparents. In each of these examples, Fuller adds an additional specification because no one answer can stand true alone; any understanding of a human necessarily exceeds the narrative of nationality. Yet the last detail Fuller included implies that the question 'where are you from?' is actually preoccupied with origins. It wants to know where she was born, where her parents were from, and where their parents came from. It seeks to prescribe to a person the available stereotypes of a particular country. But 'the country' is a fiction just as imaginary as the lines on a map which represent its borders. The question 'where are you from?' privileges the fiction of the nation-state over human experience.
Writer Taiye Selasi, author of "Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?),” an article published in 2005 describing the Afropolitan consciousness as “a refusal to oversimplify” (Selasi 1), suggests that a better way for understanding origin, migration, and nationality is through the lens of multi-locality. As a person that was born in England, but grew up in the United States with parents of Nigerian and Ghanaian origins, Selasi, like Fuller, also grapples with the consequences of the language of 'where are you from?' In a recent TED talk discussing the difference between origin and locality, Selasi concludes:
I am not a national. . . I am a local. I am multi-local. See, 'Taiye Selasi comes from the United States,' isn't the truth. I have no relationship with the United States, all fifty of them, not really. My relationship is with Brookline, the town where I grew up, with New York City where I started work, with Lawrenceville where I spend Thanksgiving. What makes America home for me is not my passport or accent, but these very particular
experiences and the places they occur. Despite my pride in ewe culture, the Black Stars, and my love of Ghanaian food, I've never had a relationship with the Republic of Ghana, writ large. My relationship is with Accra, where my mother lives, where I go each year, with the little garden in Dzorwulu, where my father and I talk for hours. These are the places that shape my experience. My experience is where I'm from. (Selasi: 5:01)
By privileging experience over nationality, multi-locality acts multidirectionally. Selasi's contention that she is not a national, but instead a multi-local, relies on memories of her experiences in different locations. Her contention that her experience is where she is from implies that her identity is derived from her memory of these experiences in these places. While nationality typically relies on narrative as an account of facts or events which link an individual to a country (Selasi's American passport or accent), locality relies on stories told to oneself again and again, not through facts, but through memories, and through the dimmed sensory experience that often occurs with the recollection of one's most cherished experiences. Taiye Selasi is not a national because neither America nor the Republic of Ghana can conjure the experience of remembering being a child in Brookline, or the memory of the taste of fufu and spicy Ghanaian stew. Memory is intimately tied to experience and experience knows not the borders of country. It is for this reason that each of the countries Alexandra Fuller lists in relation to where she is from are paired with a list of contingencies; nationality is not a sufficient bases for an
understanding of identity or of the histories which come with that identity. A list of countries in which an individual and her relatives have lived will never tell the stories of an actual life.
Nevertheless, while national borders are colonial and fictional creations, they also
construct a jurisdiction and jurisdictions can and often do have a profound impact on the lives of individuals and communities. Trevor Noah is a striking case in point. By being born in the
wrong jurisdiction his very existence was made illegal. It is notable that Noah was born in Hillbrow, an inner-city area of Johannesburg that, at the time, was multi-local and multicultural, and provided the avenue for the meeting of Noah's parents. Noah writes, "As a former trading colony, South Africa has always had a large expatriate community. People find their way here. Tons of Germans. Lots of Dutch. Hillbrow at the time was the Greenwich Village of South Africa. It was a thriving scene, cosmopolitan and liberal. There were galleries and underground theaters where artist and performers dared to speak up and criticize the government in front of integrated crowds . . . Integration by its nature was a political act, but the get-togethers
themselves weren't political at all. People would meet up and hang out, have parties" (25). The parties in Hillbrow, the galleries, and the underground theaters - the elements of everyday life which construct experience and form relationships between people from often vastly different experiences of life, these are the experiences which construct identity. Multi-locality, as a multiplicity which eliminates fictive origins, allows for an understanding of both identity and locality through their relatedness, and as an element of multidirectionality, allows one to
recognize an individual based on the sharing of memories which create links to various countries with overlapping histories rather than investing in grand nation-state narratives which often stimulate beliefs in national stereotypes.
Multi-locality, multilingualism, multiplicity, multidirectionality: the 'multi-' is always impossible to see at once. Multidirectionality, being more than two and extending in different directions, is rooted in the miniscule, microbe-like processes of the acts of everyday life. Moving away slightly from the experience of individuals which is relationally and affectively constructed, as is the case with Fuller's relationship to her mother and to her own locality, multidirectionality must also be considered on a schematic level. Michel De Certeau outlines a schematic model which functions multidirectionally in The Practice of Everyday Life when he
examines everyday practices as "'ways of operating' or doing things, [and] no longer . . . as merely the obscure background of social activity" (xi). He goes on to argue, "If it is true that the grid of “discipline” is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also “miniscule” and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what “ways of operating” form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or “dominee's”?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order" (xiv). Collective myth, particularly in non-Western cultures, is often regarded as background noise. Yet, myth is a central tactic and strategy4 used by operators with varying levels of room to maneuver determined through a plurality of social relations, and a central method used for resisting grids of discipline as well as implementing them. It illustrates that culture is not passed down or inherited as prescriptive elements, but is a process which is constantly being manipulated and re-written by users through miniscule processes of everyday life which are only ever available to a limited audience.
At the center of Alexandra Fuller's memoir is both a historical and a personal trauma. Fuller was conceived after the death of the baby that would have been her older brother, Adrian. This is one of three deaths of Fuller's baby siblings, and a trauma which causes her mother serious psychological harm. In the chapter before "Coming-Back Baby," Fuller tells the story of Adrian's death which she has heard through the drunken cries of her mother more than a hundred times. Her mother tells her, '"You were the baby we made when Adrian died'" (31). Fuller notes at the end of the chapter, ""The plunging roar of the Zambezi in my ears at conception.
Incongruous, contradictory in Derbyshire at birth" These factors of fragmentation which Fuller
4 De Certeau makes a central distinction between tactics and strategies, asserting that the tactic belongs to the Other. This is not, however, to suggest, that tactics and strategies may always be isolated from each other, or are not in many ways intertwined.
inherits - the death of her brother, her conception in Africa, birth in Europe, and subsequent return - led her to the myth of the coming-back baby. She suggests:
My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English nor am I of the sea. Meanwhile, Adrian's restless African soul still roamed. Waiting. Waiting to come back and take another baby under the earth./ Adrian is a Coming-Back Baby, if you can believe what some Africans say./ I should have been a Coming-Back Baby, but I didn't believe what some Africans say./ That Coming-Back soul searched for me. Undoubtedly, there was a struggle for my soul on the train coming up from Cape Town. That was the closest I came to being a Coming-Back Baby. (35)
What is the effect of inheriting this myth? According to Elleke Boehmer, the Coming-Back Baby is a variation of Chinua Achebe's motif of "the ogbanje, abiku or fatefully returning child" and is related to "the potential for growth and the frustration of that potential," as well as "the perils and distortions accompanying the transmission of traditions, practices and knowledge from one generation to another" (143-44). The coming-back baby is, therefore, a symbol of cultural translation and, within the frame of Fuller's memoir, cultural production. It is uncanny, spectral, and always in transition. As Boehmer points out, Fuller's use is hardly specific. However, by incorporating a generic image of the obanje, Fuller is at one displacing and changing the myth while also building on its symbolic power (Boehmer 146). In doing so, she engages in a "practice of the self" which highlights the self and the memories therein contained as unstable and multidirectional.
Central to Mbembe's argument about afropolitanism and artificial homogenization is the notion of "practices of the self" (272). As Mbembe is apt to point out, "To be sure, there is no
African identity that could be designated by a single term or that could be named by a single word or subsumed under a single category. African identity does not exist as a substance. It is constituted, in varying forms, through a series of practices, notably practices of the self. Neither the forms of this identity nor its idioms are always self-identical. Rather, these forms and idioms are mobile, reversible, and unstable" (272). The artificial homogenization of the self has long been believed to be a reality. Long after many theorists have expanded upon and criticized such theories such as Heidegger's ideas of essence and Hegel's descriptions of the Other, the self is still largely regarded as an essential, static, innate entity. Through an understanding of the collective imaginaire as unstable and shifting and as a reflection of those who compose it and out of which it is composed, we may come closer to understanding the networks of discourse and memory which compose human lives.
Chapter 3: 'The Demon that Shit on the Kitchen Floor' Goes to Hollywood: Trevor Noah's Born a Crime
One afternoon, when I was around five years old, my gran left me at home for a few hours to go run errands. I was lying on the floor in the bedroom, reading. I needed to go, but it was pouring down rain. I was dreading going outside to use the toilet, getting drenched running out there, water dripping on me from the leaky ceiling, wet newspaper, the flies attacking me from below. Then I had an idea. Why bother with the outhouse at all? Why not put some newspaper on the floor and do my business like a puppy? That seemed like a fantastic idea. So that's what I did. I took the newspaper, laid it out on the kitchen floor, pulled down my pants, and squatted and got to it. (43).
This memory recollected by Trevor Noah in a chapter entitled "Trevor, Pray," depicts an act of everyday life and its multidirectional consequences. Through a comedic lens and the eyes of a child, Noah details how "a mix off the old and the new, the ancient and the modern" (33) in South Africa and his relationship with his mother turns the most basic act of everyday life into a sequence of cultural translations. It is here that the three theories of De Certeau, Butler, and Rothberg most fruitfully come together, with Noah executing a primal act of everyday life with a tactic that (inadvertently to a five-year-old) resists the harsh “grid of discipline” which is
everywhere implemented in his life.
Michel De Certeau makes a careful distinction between tactics and strategies, a strategy being “. . . the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power . . . can be isolated from an 'environment.' A strategy assumes a place that can be
spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other” (xix). Central to the separation between a tactic and a strategy is the notion that users operate by more than one kind of logic, a logic that is complimented by practice and context. Noah's ways of operating are tactical in nature - “clever tricks, [a] knowing how to get away with things” which amount to miniscule operations in a system of small subversions which disregard rather than push back against the system. The five-year-old Noah decides to defecate in the kitchen because ". . . no matter how fancy you made your house, there was one thing you could never aspire to improve: your toilet" (42). Trevor Noah was five years old in 1989, and according to South African law, still a crime. He was constrained by the absurd illegality of his existence, by a system that was stacked against him and everyone he knew, and by poverty that made a working, indoor toilet seem like a silly dream, so he goes in the kitchen. While these factors would certainly be unbeknownst to a child as young as Noah, he nevertheless exhibits the same pattern of behavior seen in conscious adults. When the "grid of discipline" forces him to use a shared, outdoor toilet in the rain with
newspaper in place of toilet paper and hordes of flies causing the "irrational, all-consuming fear that they were going to fly up and into [his] bum," he tactfully skirts around it. However, in the case of Trevor Noah (as is often the case with the tactics of children) his tactic is not a success. Not having the adult awareness which might predict his great-grandmother would be in the kitchen and that his feces would smell when left in the dustbin, Noah's tactics produce unintended consequences which reveal the relational constructed-ness of his life.
The chapter, “Trevor Prey,” begins by stating “I grew up in a world run by women." (35) Later on, Noah explains “The fact that I grew up in a world run by women was no accident. Apartheid kept me away from my father because he was white, but for almost all the kids I knew on my grandmother’s block in Soweto, apartheid had taken away their fathers as well, just for
different reasons. Their fathers were off working in a mine somewhere, able to come home only during the holidays. Their fathers had been sent to prison. Their fathers were in exile, fighting for the cause” (38). The consequences which arise as a result of Noah's decision to "do his business like a puppy" on the kitchen floor are entirely shaped by the women in his life and the "grid of discipline" that is apartheid. It is this "grid of discipline" and the relational construction of his own identity which make his memory and its practices so multidirectional. Living in Soweto at the time, a township of Johannesburg and “a prison designed by [our] oppressors,” Noah
recounts how he found ways to use this particular “grid of discipline,” despite its dire conditions. He recounts, “In America the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto” (40). In this case, the way users operate is essential. In a township of a million people lacking even the most basic amenities such as stores, paved roads, and adequate electricity and sewage, people learn to tactically seize moments in order to “make a life for themselves” (Noah 41).
Multidirectionality functions as a concept precisely because life is organized around "the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order" and the "ways of operating" which form its counterpart (De Certeau XIV). These processes produce a plethora of heterogeneous experiences which make memory a constant exercise in borrowing and
subtraction, a mathematical calculation complicated by qualitative (how am I feeling/where am I/how does this affect me?) analyses which take place in the present moment. While an analysis of the South African comedian and writer Trevor Noah defecating on his kitchen floor as a five-year-old, and the subsequent frame of his memoir, might initially appear to have little to do with power structures and collective memory, the representation and re-presentation of this memory highlights the role of comedy in subverting power and confronting censorship. "Comedy is about conflict, human interaction and conflict," asserts talent manager Takunda Bimha in a
