DILIP M. MENON

Most books are written as a result of compulsions arising from a profession, the fashions of the industry, or a gentle narcissism. A few arise from a sense of calling and the need to bear witness. Hugo ka Canham’s deeply felt book on life, death, and being in Mpondoland ends with plangent words that tell us how the book came to be; the urgent summoning up of a “vast deathscape of ancestors that demand witnessing” (211). By the time we read these words, we have been taken through the realms of history and the present, the dead and the living, and the landscape in which being human is forged. The pages are shot through with an emotional charge; Canham never departs from a deeply affective register in a book that is theoretically sophisticated as well as ethnographically rich. He writes through his life and the vicissitudes of those around him; his fragile and beleaguered mother and his maimed brother trapped in a landscape of violence – yet surviving. His mother reminds him, “remember all your age-mates” (142); those who were felled by disease, hunger, in the slow burn of a setting in which men cannot find a sense of themselves through employment and caring for their own. One is reminded of Seamus Heaney’s lines from the time of the troubles in Ireland, “I shouldered a kind of manhood/Bearing the coffins of dead relatives”. However, death is something that one lives with in a space suffused with “black survivance and livingness” (103).

This is a visceral book that militates against despair and debilitation and compels us to think about a space in which time appears stuck, lives appear stuck, until we are taught to hear and see.

What does it mean to see, to look, to dwell on devastation in a region left behind, bearing just the weight of history and none of the lightness of a future? Canham asks us to see, know and live differently, to adopt the manner of ukwakumkanya: to look side-eyed, askance, shielding one’s eyes with one’s hand at the energy of a landscape thrumming with “ancestral frequencies” (140).

He commands us to “look unflinchingly into the faces of the dead” (141) and think vertically of life-in-death and death-in-life rather than the mere horizontal linearity of time bookended by birth and effacement. This requires a rethinking of the archive of meaning premised on writing, reading and the conceit of literacy. We need, “focused looks, tarrying gazes, perked ears” (7); an epistemology that is not merely ocular or textual. It requires us to think beyond the habituated melancholy of “black trauma” to construct what Canham calls a vernacular theory of being which is located along many vectors. The first is a situatedness of being in nature, not separate from it nor triumphing over it. The second is an emphasis not only on survivance but on death as part of a continuum of being, where life itself becomes one of the “genres of dying” (141). The third, is a thinking beyond place and locality to see, from the shores of Pondoland, the presence of a global history of oceanic connections. What does it mean to think a “theory from the unhumaned” existing on the margins of national life and reflect from the edges of theories that grant black lives merely the condescension of victimhood? Canham asks us to look, to look again, and wrestle afresh with the “the being of being black” (13). Mpondo people become “thinkable beings” because they are indigenous and black, not the result of an implantation from elsewhere, and with histories that are rooted and redolent. These are not lives that have been stripped bare by abduction, slavery, transportation and forced to reinvent themselves anew from what Hortense Spillers called the bare identity of flesh.

This requires a departure from a readymade theory that comes from elsewhere and describes other black lives. Can lives in Pondoland only become legible through a relation to north American and Caribbean scholarship? What does it mean to think being – black being – from a South African location? Moreover, to summon up a capacious blackness from Africa; a sea-level theory that stays at the shoreline and is not consumed by the oceanic subsumption of black life in Black Studies with its recurring tropes aspiring to universality?

While refusing translation in the image of the contemporary moment of black studies (23), Canham’s move is not to argue for an ineffable authenticity, or a rendering opaque. He cautions us that the “fear of legibility should not render one mute” (33). But what does it mean to think with the shoal and the shoreline, to pause at the edge, be in a relation of ukwakumkanya and “wrest blackness from the exclusively oceanic”?  (52).

If empire, colonialism and the demands of a capitalist slavery required a hardness of identity – of subjecthood premised on the intransigence of race – it is ironic that an anti-colonial politics seeks its redemption in identity politics.

Canham writes about the presence of many bloodlines in his ancestry from white to Xhosa and the indigenous; perhaps even the odd Indian castaway slave. When he visits his relatives and peers in Pondoland he is referred to as mtshana (niece/nephew), bringing him into a circle of the familiar relative but also rendering him relative to themselves as foreign. The abatshana (plural) are the objects of a double take (another variant of ukwakumkanya); how to look at someone who looks like one; yet not. On the hinterland there are the miscegenated bloodlines of the Bantu, Khoekhoe and the San and on the shoreline, the genetic pool of the castaways – whites, enslaved Indians and Africans. These are “layered fugitives” (41) from hard identity, evidencing an openness to relatedness, and the “Other within us”. There is no race for authenticity; Canham qualifies indigeneity as a shared marginality rather than a claim to “firstness”. Between annihilation and assimilation there is the interstitial space of a joyful miscegenation: the amaTshonana (constantly in relation, collapsing the histories of water and land). As Titlestad and Kissack have argued^{[1]tandfonline.com}, the white settlers themselves can be seen as castaways from another geography and history.

Canham cautions against a valorization of ideas like hybridity and metissage that in a reaction against ideas of racial purity risk the forgetting of histories of violence, anti-blackness and white supremacy, and result in an anodyne history pleasing to the liberal. One must keep in mind the rhythms of agency alongside the dissolution of indigeneity, the making of what he calls “energy from the ruins” (63). As in the case of Nongqawuse, and her moment of epiphany by a river mouth, resulting in the great cattle killing of the mid 1800s. It is a theory of freedom arising from a particular black and Xhosa identity and history, a looking askance (ukakwumkanya) at the hubris of imperial power as much as indigenous patriarchy. The forging of a hard identity must be seen as contextual, conjunctural, and strategic. The land – ocean, rivers, mountains – imbues personhood and marshals an active nature against the rendering inert of nature under a colonial modernity.

Rivers fortify rebels, investing magical powers in them. The oceans represent an openness to forces of redemption, as in the belief of African Americans coming by ship to overthrow the colonial government in the 1800s, or in the Mpondo revolt of 1960, the idea that Russians would introduce a new paradigm of insurgency. Mountains become the spaces of disobedience and renewal; elevation becoming both refuge and redoubt as in the recent rebellion at Marikana. The idea of nature as a political resource sits alongside the calling to another rationality – practices of “magic” and purification calling upon earlier and ever-present lives, that fortify the body against a state power alienated from Nature. Within a territory of seeming loss and ruin, Canham argues that it is this permeability to nature and the ancestral deathscape that bypasses the pathology of melancholia (100). What we have is black mourning instead, that marshals both the here and now, as also the ancestral realm. The response to devastation is “black survivance and livingness” (103).

The “riotous possibilities of being” (105) are at times gendered. There is the phenomenon of ukukhuphuka izizwe, also identified as “possession” experienced by adolescent girls enjoined to virginity and constantly prey to charges of promiscuity. While experiencing the patriarchal restraints on land, possession allows for a fugitivity in water masses where their actual selves are temporarily with the devil out at sea. Nature redresses the balance, as does the availability of a world that is porous to spirits, magic, and an alternative domain of fugitivity from suffering. Canham is careful to avoid functionalism – possession as letting off of steam – and makes a nuanced argument for the making of adolescent being. Within the deathscape of Pondoland, riotousness expresses itself too in the possibilities of porous identity, that of the transformation of human being and an elision into animal selves: humans who glide into being pigs and snakes. Nature allows fugitivity (117), respite, and reinvention.

In a landscape characterized by death, stuckedness, and the unbearable heaviness of being it is this relation to nature that allows for a combating of the “consequences of being the dregs of the human” (174). There is the resultant despair and involution of lives and a seeking of refuge in imbibing the life force of others. Canham describes with great sensitivity the lore of vampire and cannibal activity – the amavondo – in Mpondoland. Healing the flesh with the flesh of others; redemption as consumption, the desire for life resulting in the ingestion of the living. Amidst the vibrations of life and death, a deep sensory intelligence is always invoked; it is not the desolation of the academic cliché of a “bare life”. What is the potentiality, Canham asks, of “animalism for blackness”? (162). In a resonant sentence, he challenges us to think

What is the value of bickering with animals for a rung above them in order to represent a kind of superior place on the hierarchy when our lived experiences are so contiguous and enmeshed in the natural world? (162)

Canham’s beautifully wrought prose compels us to engage beyond our anthropocentric conceptions in the social sciences, arguing for a sense of wholeness arising from a being at one with the porousness of selves: to death, to nature, to the animal. He conveys with much sensitivity the texture of being in Pondoland, and the networks of affect and history that create filiations between the living and dead. At the same time he argues against the subordination of a local experience to the demands of a universal theorization from elsewhere. We must dare to think from where we are, and with what surrounds us; what Canham terms as an attunement to frequencies that go beyond the framework and demands of facile political affinities. Indeed, we must cultivate that habit of scepticism, of looking through and away from – ukakwumkanya – the habits of reflection that separate us from an expanded realm of experience. This is a profound and magisterial work that sets standards for all future writing from the global south; an exegesis that moves beyond mere critique to an astonishing exposition of an expanded idea of Being itself.

Photos courtesy of Hugo ka Canham.