On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South

African Transition: Zakes Mda's

Ways of Dying
RITA BARNARD

It is then a question of what kinds of "subjects" are trying to be born and grow
themselves in the African city.

Abdou Maliq Simone, Urban Processes and Change in Africa

Every act of world history was accompanied by a laughing chorus.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World

In his agenda-setting book Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process?, Ato

Quayson bypasses the tedious issue of the exact dating of the "postcolonial mo-
ment" and the supposed rupture the term implies by calling for an anticipatory
critical practice: "one which recognizes that the condition it names does not yet
exist, while working to bring that condition into being" (9). The critic's task, he
argues, is to "postcolonialize," to align himself or herself with an ongoing strug-
gle against colonialism and its aftereffects. While oriented to the future, this
work-in-progress requires a complex sense of historical configurations. It must
be attentive to the dialectical interrelation of the residual and the emergent, to the
ways in which "the dying" and "the being born" may be reconstellated to pro-
duce new perspectives and realities (16). If this project is Utopian, it is also mind-
ful of the despair and misery that has so often been the lot of the colonized
world, and of Africa in particular. The postcolonial, as Quayson puts in one of
the most revealing passages in the book, is "almost a palpable affect." When we
consider the deplorable stories from the continent that incessantly accost us in
the newspaper and on television and the internet (the hanging of Ken Saro-
Wiwa, the murderous violence in Algeria, or, more recently, that in Liberia and
Darfur), "the two domains of pain and discourse seem impossible to separate
completely" (46). Thus postcolonial studies (more so than other fields of literary
and cultural scholarship, in Quayson's view) would seem to demand an urgent
ethical response.
To say this is not to jettison theoretical sophistication or textual play in favor
of some sort of grim realism. On the contrary: it is no accident that Quayson's

This essay is affectionately dedicated to Eder Williams, Ben Foley, and Karen Reyes, who read
Ways of Dying with me in Juneau, Alaska, of all places, and shared with me their sharp and
sympathetic insights into this novel and many other South African works.
278 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

book should kick off by drawing readers' attention to a funny article about the
urgent need for vowels in the Balkans (especially in cities like Sjlbvdnzv and
Grzny) and the U.S.'s heroic response to this crisis with a speedy deployment of
aid, code-named Operation Vowel Storm (5). The parody serves to underscore a
crucial methodological point, namely that defamiliarization—an ability to "look
awry," in Slavoj Zizek's phrase—is an indispensable part of any progressive cri-
tique. More: it reminds us that a productive estrangement may result not only
from erudite academic innovations and inventive interdisciplinary perspectives,
but also from a humorous inversion of received ideas and pieties. The postcolo-
nial critic, in other words, may at times be a laughing one.
In the subsequent chapters of his book, Quayson strives to realize these possi-
bilities. He works by juxtaposing a number of strikingly disparate texts in order
to achieve a deliberately angular and estranged view of postcolorual studies. And
he judges other critics by the degree to which they present or fail to present such
an optic. A case in point—and one that is particularly pertinent to my present
interests—is his commentary on Achille Mbembe's redeployment of Bakhtin's
work in the controversial essay "The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of
Vulgarity in thePostcolony." Quayson's response to Mbembe is complex. One on
the one hand, he heartily approves of Mbembe's innovative mating of political
science and cultural studies as a startling new way of viewing the dynamics of
oppression and submission in postcolonial Africa. Quayson is also sensitive to
the literary qualities of the essay, which, as he puts it, achieves a kind of "drama-
turgical intensity": the readers, whom the text "locates ... as spectators" (44) are
given a powerful sense of the absurdities and cruelties of the scene that Mbembe
so vividly and yet so abstractly surveys. But it is also here, in this affective
drama, that Quayson detects a problem. The reader is left uncertain whether he
or she is supposed to be angry or to laugh and, if laughter is to be the response,
at whom to laugh: at the African dictators with their cruel whims and crass appe-
tites, or at their subjects who cleverly monkey around with the dictators' idiom.
Mbembe's "dramaturgy," or so Quayson finds, "sheds light, but ... dissipates
anger" (44) and thus diminishes one's sense of the ethical urgency. The properly
postcolonializing agenda, he implies, requires not only a startlingly new perspec-
tive (something that Mbembe's essay unquestionably provides), but one that is
also a potentially liberatory: an angle of vision that will help us view the terrain
of African culture from "the standpoint of redemption," as Adomo might put it,
or from standpoint of "social emancipation," as Quayson prefers (32-33).
It is with these broad critical considerations in mind that I would like to turn
my attention to Zakes Mda's novel Ways of Dying (1993). I wish to consider this
uneven, but immensely important work in relation to a riotous assembly of fic-
tional and theoretical texts concerned with the power of laughter at times of
crisis—including, perhaps most signally, Chris Van Wyk's The Year of The
Tapeworm (1996), a neglected comic novel of the South African transition which I
will briefly consider in the later sections of this essay. Ways of Dying (as well as
Van Wyk's novel) is Janus-faced. While it looks hopefully toward the post-
apartheid future, it also takes a backward glance: not only to the apartheid years,
but also to the history of other African nations, where juridical independence
 RITA BARNARD | POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 279

was rapidly succeeded by disillusionment. Because of this awareness of what

Loren Kruger has called the "future imperfect" of national liberation in Africa
(185, emphasis in original), Mda's novel performs—and helps us
perform—something of the task Quayson holds out for the postcolonial critic. It
compels us to contemplate one of the most striking thresholds of recent
history—the demise of the apartheid regime—in an antic and even grotesque
fashion, and as part of an ongoing and far from straightforward process of
decolonization.

How to Live: A New Prosaics

Set in the volatile and violent years between the unbanning of the resistance
movements and the inauguration of the democratically elected ANC govern-
ment, VJays of Dying is essentially an optimistic work. The novel's comic plot
brings together a loving couple, Toloki and Noria, two destitute but creative mi-
grants, eking out a living on the margins of an urmamed port city. The romantic
union, however, does not function as a reward to the pair of characters for hav-
ing learned the lessons that will allow them to take up their rightful places in a
given social order (as is so often the case in the Western romantic comedy). In the
world of migrants and "squatters," where nothing is given and ordinary—where
violence is so pervasive that there are no more "normal deaths" (157)—the happy
union must be based on something much more fluid and open-ended: a resolve
to "teach each other how to live" (115). While broadly didactic, the novel does
not offer a ratification of received codes of conduct, so much as a commitment to
leanung and inventing new ones.
Mda's pedagogical agenda in ^Nays of Dying is strikingly revealed in two con-
trasting scenes of instruction. The first of these concerns the rigorous program of
political education that "Young Tigers" of the resistance movement offer the
even younger children of Noria's shack settlement. The militants teach their tiny
disciplines about "the nature of oppression" and catechize them on the history of
the liberation movement: how the armed struggle became necessary, how the
government was forced to negotiate, and why the "tribal chief" (the novel's code
phrase for Mangosutho Buthelezi) had become an enemy and was "doing ...
dirty things to the people" (181). The aim of their lessons is Spartan: the Tigers
hope to tum the children into "committed freedom fighters, and upright leaders
of tomorrow" (182). But even though the novel's historical flashbacks show Mda
to be sympathetic to the people's increasing politicization during the "wars of
freedom" (65), he does not present the young Tigers as ideal educators. Their
lessons, he tells us, "floated over the heads" of their audience (170). Worse yet,
these teachings are salted with poorly understood fighting words like "sell-outs"
(177), an epithet that is subsequently used to instigate and justify the gruesome
"necklacing" of Noria's six-year-old son. It makes sense, then, that the novel's
second scene of instruction, described in its final pages, should represent a com-
pletely different vision of education. In this instance, the settlement's children
gather spontaneously around the eccentric and creative Toloki for an impromptu
art lesson. They laugh delightedly at his fanciful sketches of children on merry-
280 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

go-rounds in the clouds (199), and try their hand at producing similarly
imaginative drawings. The novel's narrative desire, as these two contrasting
scenes suggest, is to transform fighting children ir\to playful ones: to replace a
sober militancy with gaiety and laughter.
South African literary critics have been quick to register this desire and have
described ^Nays of Dying as a decisive turn away from the rhetoric of protest of
the 1980s (Mervis 42, Farred 187). For a critic like Grant Farred, who remains at-
tached to the "grand narrative and rallying cry" of "the struggle" (195), this turn
is not entirely to be welcomed and it has led him to denounce the novel as a kind
of symbolic necklacing (if I read his outrageous play on the recurrent trope of
burning correctly), or at best a suspiciously rapid interment of the "charred
body" of the previous decade's radical politics (Farred 204). But Mda was far
from alone in feeling the need for a new aesthetic sensibility in South Africa. His
novel shares common ground with two influential critical interventions, which
we may describe (in Loren Kruger's useful, if ungainly term) as "post-anti-
apartheid" in spirit (Kruger 191): Njabulo Ndebele's essay "The Rediscovery of
the Ordinary" (1984) and Albie Sachs's position paper "Preparing Ourselves for
Freedom" (1989). Both these pieces called for an art that would express and help
to bring into being a more complete and humane subject: for an art that would,
as Sachs proposes, ban the cliches of the "struggle"—especially the notion that
"culture is a weapon" (239)—and make a space for subtlety, irony, and humor.'
Mda's novel suggests a similar stance: it is "post-anti-apartheid" not only with
respect to its thematic preoccupations, but with respect to its form: a multi-
layered, fantastic plot, which decisively breaches the generic constraints that the
culture of resistance, with its demand for realist immediacy, had for years placed
on the black writer.
But this is not to say that the question of genre is therefore unproblematic. It is
worth bearing in mind that the chronotope that anchors Mda's narrative—that of
impoverished "squatter camps" or "informal settlements" on the fringes of the
African city—is a fairly new one in the history of human experience and in the
history of narrative forms. African political theorists and urbanists have already
speculated in fascinating ways about the new forms of subjectivity that these
ever-waxing factories of poverty with their largely wageless, improvised econo-
mies are likely to produce: subjectivities shaped not in relation to the (former)
colonizer, but by the sheer effort to survive in extremely unpredictable circum-
stances and temporalities. The residents of the "squatter" camps, as Abdou Maliq
Simone has observed, live on a kind of temporal verge: "a cusp where things can
happen very quickly"—where fortunes can change in the blink of an eye—even
though from the perspective of global capitalism nothing "seem[s] ... to happen

' One of Sachs's examples of an aesthetic practice that eschews the cliches of militant protest is
strikingly relevant to Ways of Dying. He recalls that the artist Dumile (Mslaba Zwelidumile
Fene) was once asked "why he did not draw scenes like one that was taking place in front of
him: a crocodile of men being marched under arrest for not having their passes in order. At
that moment a hearse drove slowly past and the men stood still and raised their hats. 'That's
what I want to draw/ he said" (241). The rediscovery of the ordinary—and of the more
capacious and nuanced artistic practices Sachs advocates—is here linked with what Mda's
Toloki would call "funeral etiquette" (11).
 RTTA BARNARD | POSTCOLONL\L LAUGHTER 281

at all" ("Globalization" 175). In situations where the usual benefits of urban life
such as employment, legality, and shelter cannot be relied on, a capacity for con-
tinual self-invention becomes an essential skill. The destitute, one might say, are
forced to become survival entrepreneurs, constantly struggling to keep afloat,
and to "piec[e] together provisional mechanisms for maintaining a coherent
sense of who they are" ("Globalization" 176). But a coherent identity may be
problematic in the fractured world of a (post)colonial slum, where a person may,
at different moments, have to rely on affiliations of kinship, ethnicity, religion,
custom, political party, or professional grouping, and where making the wrong
choice among all these cormections can have fatal consequences. "Becoming a
subject" in such circumstances, or so Achille Mbembe has argued, requires the
mobilization of not one single "identity," but of several fluid "mitotic" identities,
which "by their very nature, must be constantly 'revised' in order to achieve
maximum instrumentality and efficacy as and when required" ("Banality" 5).^ It
is for this reason that a certain degree of deviousness, or theatricality, or simply
"a willingness to do the extraordinary" becomes an essential survival skill: a
situation which surely contributes to the view that the "squatter" settlements are
impenetrable and alien to the global economic system of which they are, at least
in part, the product (Simone, "Globalization" 174).^
Now, students of the history of the novel may be struck by the difference
between personal traits of the contemporary survival entrepreneur, as described
by Simone and Mbembe, and, say, those advocated by Defoe in The Complete
English Tradesman and exemplified in his novels. Credibility, transparency, and
consistency, for instance, may have been essential values in a rising bourgeois
economy of credit (see, e.g., Sherman), but they are distinct liabilities in the in-
formal economies of contemporary world, which make strenuous and very dif-
ferent demands on a person's capacity for self-invention. If one assumes, as I do,
that forms of economic activity, temporality, and subjectivity are functionally
interrelated with narrative forms, the implications of these speculations are far-
reaching; and there is no telling yet what cultural forms will eventually arise
from these historically unprecedented sites. While it is evident, as Abdou Maliq
Simone puts it, that "empty stomachs" will not "terminate the existence of the
imagination" {In Whose Image 128), it is also the case that the new urban

I cite from the version of Mbembe's essay that appeared in the journal Public Culture rather
than from the slightly revised version reprinted in On the Postcolony (2001). The reason is that
some of the passages that interest me (including the one I just cited) have been cut from the
book. Moreover, the language of this earlier version strikes me as (at times) more vivid, more
metaphorically suggestive than is the case with the book chapter.
In the light of these speculations, the theatricality of Mda's Toloki (who deals with his poverty
by donning an elaborate Dracula outfit and setting himself up as professional mourner) is by
no means entirely fanciful. Nor are his contradictory observations on the temporality of the
settlements where "nothing ever changes" even though "people [lead] the life of birds, in fear
that they would not see the next day" (65). The fate of Shadrack the taxi-driver, who connects
himself with professional and religious organizations (the taxi-drivers union and the
Amadodana of the Methodist Church), but runs into trouble because he fails to play up his
tribal connections, also comes to seem characteristic of a new social (dis)order.
 282 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

circumstances to which Mda responds are likely to put considerable strain on

existing narrative forms and geru-es—including the novel.
This strain is clearly registered in Ways of Dying and it is no wonder that critics
have struggled to find a satisfactory way of classifying the work. For the sake of
argument, we might consider it as "a unique South African black KUnstlerroman":
the most intriguing among several generic rubrics proposed by Margaret Mervis
in her useful essay on the novel (42).^ It is certainly possible to trace Toloki's de-
velopment as an artist (from professional mourner, to decorator, to draftsman, to
teacher) over the course of the novel; but one immediately notes that the narra-
tive of his self-discovery is constantly undercut by flashbacks, diverse anecdotes,
and editorializing commentary, all of which impede the developmental dynamic
and give the novel something of the digressive structure of oral narration. The
narrative line of the hypothetical KUnstlerroman is also repeatedly fractured by a
series of funeral scenes in which a more collective concept of narrative is
presented, but also—I would insist—problematized. Each funeral scene is a per-
formance, featuring a "Nurse" or funeral orator, who must give a public account
of the way in which the deceased met his or her end (Mervis 43). But Mda shows
again and again how the task of the Nurse—as narrator, historiographer, and
storyteller to the people—has become complicated and contentious in the volatile
social context of the transition. This is not only because the causes of death have
become absurd, pointless, or mysterious for those on the urban margins. The
very basis of all narrative genres—the implicit contract between teller and
audience—is no longer clearly understood. Each funeral scene therefore involves
some kind of debate or negotiation about the conventions that should apply;
there is no consensus whether factual accuracy, eulogy, self-expression, commu-
nal solidarity, social critique, or consolation should be the decisive factor in the
Nurse's performance.
It therefore seems to me that Grant Farred misses the point when he holds up
the trade-union performance poets of the 1980s as an ideal from which Mda's
novel has sadly lapsed (192-96). It is not that Mda has no interest in collectivity or
performance. On the contrary, the whole novel has a dramaturgical quality (to
recall Quayson's phrase); but what it stages or performs is precisely the collective
problem of genre. Or to put the point differently: Ways of Dying dramatizes the
need for what we may call a new prosaics. I use this term in its full ambiguity as
a new kind of thinking about narrative (a prosaics as a counterpart to a poetics)
and a new kind of thinking about the everyday, the customary, and the
ordinary—a notion that Ndebele's essay has so effectively revivified in the South
African critical vocabulary. The productive ambiguity of the term, gesturing as it
does to textuality as well as to lived reality, is particularly significant when we
are talking about periods of rapid historical change: times when neither narrative
form nor the form-shaping practices and ideologies of daily life can be taken for
granted, but are, for this very reason, matters of great importance.

* Mervis also describes the novel as drawing on "the traditions of folklore," so that the results
"can [ultimately] be read as a kind of magic reaUsm" (39). What interests me is the fact that so
many different generic definitions, or none at all, seem to fit Ways of Dying.
 RITA BARNARD POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 283

Reinventing Carnival

With the idea of a prosaics, our attention must revert to Bakhtin (the term is the
invention of two prominent scholars of his work) and to my original proposal
that VJays of Dying, along with other texts in the broad archive of the South Afri-
can transition, shares the transgeneric worldview of the camivalesque (Emerson
and Morson 15-36). It seems to me entirely possible that Mda may be consciously
importing and rewriting a number of tropes from Rabelais and His World in his
novel. After all, he is, among other things, an academic and one who insists that
foreign or "heterophilic" connections may be productive of fresh and progressive
insights {When People Play 47,84-85). Even so, it remains a tricky matter to deploy
Bakhtin in an African context, and I do so almost reluctantly, especially when I
consider the fast and loose way in which literary critics have tended to use
Bahktinian terms over the past decade or two. The "camivalesque" is no excep-
tion.5 In countless essays, including several on South African literature, the term
serves as little more than a term of vague approbation with which one may ges-
ture at any form of transgressive or rowdy behavior. An entirely typical example
is Losangake Losambe's reading of Mzala, Mbulelo Mzamane's humorous collec-
tion of Soweto stories. Losambe celebrates not only Mzamane, whom he terms
South Africa's master of popular humor, but also his comic characters, whose
propensity for "drinking, violence, and free sexuality" (44) is unhesitatingly
equated with popular resistance against apartheid. Even the behavior of a teen-
age girl who sneaks out of her mother's house at rught to meet up with a band of
township toughs is grandly glossed as an effort to "link herself ... with the popu-
lar carnival action of the masses" (44)! While Losambe's reading offers a valid
critique of earlier "Jim Comes to Joburg" narratives and their pathologizing of
black urban space, it lacks nuance and historical specificity. It gives no considera-
tion, for instance, to the fact that the culture of resistance contained a strong puri-
tanical strain (one thinks of militant school children's attacks on shebeens) and
that a validation of "drinking, violence, and free sexuality" seems something of a
recipe for disaster in the crime- and AIDS-ridden society of contemporary South
Africa.*
The loose application of critical terms, however, is only one of the risks one
runs in applying Bakhtinian concepts to African texts like Mda's or Mzamane's.
One also invites the charge that by relying on European critical ideas (especially,
in this case, ideas that are deeply imbedded in European folk culture), one also
brings the oppressive discursive structures within which such ideas might

^ A decade ago, Emerson and Morson had already identified this problem: "Much of Bakhtin's
fame today rests on a few neologisms and new uses of existing words that have rapidly been
reduced to cliche. Polyphony, the double-voiced word, carnival and carnivalization, the
chronotope, heteroglossia, metalinguistics, the surplus, the loophole, and a host of others now
circulate in sometimes creative, sometimes merely curious, and at other times flatly mechanical
paraphrases and applications" (10). In the case of the term "carruval," a certain degree of
critical confusion is to be expected, since Bakhtin uses it in different ways in different parts of
his oeuvre (6).
* For a somewhat more considered Bakhtinian reading of a South African writer, see Smith's
essay on Gordimer; see also Johan van Wyk's brief comments on Mda and carruval (80,88-89).
284 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

originally have been framed into play.^ My response to such a charge is that
literary theories are just as capable as any other cultural artifacts of being refash-
ioned in new contexts, and in Bakhtin's case we already have the example of
Achille Mbembe, with whose ideas about the fate of laughter in African I will
engage shortly. Suffice it to say at this point that to write about the grotesque in
the context of postcolonial Africa is to enter into a lively debate about power,
aesthetics, and the circulation of signs, and one that may cast light on South
Africa's belated postcoloniality.
Now, some readers of ^Nays of Dying may protest that Mda's novel (which at
times almost seems to advocate frugality and celibacy) residually shares some of
the prissiness of the culture of resistance I have noted above. But it is worth re-
membering that vulgarity, obscenity, and parody per se are not for Bakhtin the
defining elements of the carnival spirit. "Bare negation" (11) is in fact a sign of
the declining powers of laughter, revealing the loss of the positive and creative
aspects of folk humor—of that joyous affirmation of the "highest aims of human
existence"(9)—without which there can be no real festivity. The quintessential
aspect of the carnivalesque vision (and one that is emphasized again and again in
the Rabelais book) is a peculiar and productive ambivalence. It is in this crucial
respect that Ways of Dying is wholly congruous with the Bakhtinian vision. The
grotesque image, as Bakhtin repeatedly asserts, is one that emphasizes the in-
completion of the human body—its openness to the world. For all its gross mate-
riality, the grotesque body is therefore also figurative: standing on the "threshold
of the grave and the crib," it serves as a sign of particular temporality—of the
moment when the old is making way for the new (Bakhtin, Rabelais 26). At stake
in this ambivalence is thus a vision of the profound and regenerative corvnection
between life and death, of the world of the living and the earthy netherworld.
This vision is captured in the controlling oxymoron of Ways of Dying, which is
best expressed in Toloki's observation: "Our ways of dying are our ways of liv-
ing. Or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying?" (98). The utter-
ance could be taken as a lament; but, viewed in the comic spirit that ultimately
obtains in the novel, it also captures the hopefulness inherent in the human
capacity for change.
It is in the light of this carnivalesque ambivalence that the long procession of
funeral scenes recorded in Ways of Dying may be viewed. Mda is clearly at pains
to emphasize the social cost of the staggering numbers of violent and pointless
deaths he records: these are, as Noria puts it, "serious matters" (163). Yet the
possibility that laughter and mourning might be connected—that they might
even be capable of mutating into each other—is hinted at from the very start: the
first funeral Toloki ever attends, after all, is that of a girl who "died laughing"
(44). This mutation finally occurs, with all due boisterousness, in a story Toloki

' Judith Butler articulates this kind of controversy as follows: "Can Foucault and Bakhtin be
used to describe the postcolonial situation, given that they theorize from within the colonial
discourse of France and represent what some might see as a further expression of colonial
hegemony?" While I would want to argue with this way of locating Bakhtin, Butler's question
about whether the use of a European theoretical framework necessarily constitutes "a
recolonization of the postcolony" remains a nagging one (Butler 67). But her answer, Uke mine,
is no: it is possible to rewrite, rather than ratify the authority of the theorists one invokes.
 RTTA BARNARD | POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 285

recounts towards the end of the novel about the hilarious situations that some-
times result from the tragic overcrowding at the cemeteries. Four funerals are
being held simultaneously in a single graveyard. Just as the preacher at one fu-
neral solemnly prays for the portals of heaven to be opened for the deceased, an
orator at another funeral, a man with a very loud voice, tells a naughty joke
about the man he is burying. The joke is infectious, with the result that the whole
graveyard breaks into laughter. The collective hilarity is so irrepressible that by
the time the four processions finally march off, any semblance of solemnity has
evaporated; some mourners are still cracking up, and other's stomachs are ach-
ing from their guffaws. The point of the anecdote is right in line with the gay
counter-theology of carnival: it is by means of laughter that the doors to a better
world will be opened. Toloki sums up the incident with a fitting piece of folk
wisdom. "In our language," he reminds Noria, "there is a proverb which says the
greatest death is laughter" (164).

In the Funeral Parade

At moments like these Toloki sounds rather like Bahktin at his most
universalizing; but Mda's concerns with a peculiarly African chronotope requires
us to move from the universal and folkloric to the local and geographic. The
bourgeoisie, as Stallybras and White have shown in The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression, historically relegated the carnivalesque—all that is ugly, dirty,
excessive, and undifferentiated—to the margins of geographic and psychic space.
The same psycho-spatial urge seems evident in the design of the apartheid city,
with its prosperous white centers and its impoverished, unruly black peripheries.
Urban planners, both in South Africa and all over the developing world, have
been guided by (ostensibly) aesthetic concerns that are quite reminiscent of those
at stake in the banning of fairs and market places in Europe. As the geographer
Chris Rogerson has shown, these planners' attachment to the idea of "the city
beautiful," has meant that the "informal sectors" of the city were consistently
stereotyped as "imsightly." "The activities of common hawker, backyard artisan,
or shebeener," Rogerson notes, "were viewed as contrary to official images of
what constituted a 'modem' South African city"(163).*
In Ways of Dying, Mda takes up this stereotyped discourse of beauty and
ugliness in allegorical fashion, and subjects it to a grotesque inversion. This strat-
egy is suggestively encapsulated in the novel's first funeral scene, during which
Noria's son is laid to rest. The disputatious ceremony concludes, fittingly
enough, with a traffic jam involving two processions trying to go in opposite di-
rections. One is the funeral procession, headed by a scruffy taxi, and the other is
a wedding procession, with a fancy convertible in the lead and a row of vehicles

^ This attitude seems to have persisted well into the post-election period. Simone writes in a 1998
working paper that debates in the Johannesburg city council about a new urban vision and a
new strategy for development often seemed to get bogged down in an obsession about
cleanliness: "The predomirant feeling amongst the councilors is that if only people would stop
hanging their laundry on their apartment balconies, stop selling vegetables on the streets or
putting notices and posters on walls, that Johannesburg would be able to attract the foreign
investment necessary to improve the lives of urban dwellers" ("Urban Processes" 56).
286 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

"embellished with colourful ribbons and balloons" (10) in tow. The driver of the
convertible insists that the wedding should be given precedence: "We are a pro-
cession of beautiful people, and many posh cars and buses/' he brags, "while
yours is an old skorokoro of a van, and hundreds of ragged souls on foot" (11).
This taunt sets up a symbolic opposition that remains resonant throughout the
novel: an opposition not only between the celebration and mourning but be-
tween the "beautiful" and the "ugly" and, by extension, between the world of
official power and prestige, of the central business district and the shopping
mall, and the world of the informal economy, of the "spaza shop" and the shack
settlement.
The novel's sympathies, of course, lie entirely with the ragged mourners in the
funeral parade. Thoughout Ways of Dying, Mda satirizes the high and mighty airs
of the "beautiful people"—from the bureaucrats, who natter on about expensive
city boutiques while they treat the ordinary people who come to them "like dirt"
(18), to the leaders of the national resistance movement, who silence their rank
and file members by talking at rather than to them (162). The democratic spirit,
essential to a just new dispensation, seems only to reign at the funerals of the
poor. Though the food may be simple at these events (everyone eats the samp
and beef from communal basins), the hierarchies and "ranked strata" (161) that
pertain at the funerals of the better off are cast aside. It therefore makes sense
that, in the allegorical funeral scene I have described, the wedding procession
should eventually yield to the funeral parade. The hope for any kind of change
or progress, Mda suggests, lies not with the beautiful people, but with the im-
provisational ways of living of the poor. One might even say, somewhat fanci-
fully, that the "ragged souls" of the funeral parade reappear, transmogrified, as
the revelers in the carnival parade that closes the novel. TTie procession of clowns
and cross-dressers both mimics and displaces the privilege of the "colourfully
clad" beneficiaries of the economic order (10). The "ugly" people ultimately be-
come "beautiful" and express the possibility of social and self-transformation in
their antic festivities.'
It is significant in terms of the economic and geographic oppositions I have
described that the word "ugly" should most consistently be applied to Toloki,
the novel's best example of a survival entrepreneur in the unofficial economy.
His invented vocation as professional mourner can be viewed as a parody of the
self-important labors of the "first world" professionals. There is an element of
debunking comedy in his hopes that people will eventually pay set rates for his
harrowing wailing and in his belief that his ragged outfit (a black velvet cape,
complete with broach and tassels, slim trousers, and a top hat) is comparable to
the frayed robes which bestow dignity to the more senior lawyers at the bar. But
the humor is not entirely parodic. Toloki, we are told, procures his costume from
a shop that supplies the theatrical world with outfits for plays "that were about
worlds that did not exist anymore" or "did not belong to any world that ever

' Though the geography of Ways of Dying is not wholly realistic, it will be clear to any South
African reader that the New Year's festival described at the end of the novel is based on Cape
Town's so-called "Coon Carruval," held annually for over a century. For a discussion of this
event, which compares it to other rituals of passage and renewal, see Martin.
 RITA BARNARD I POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 287

existed" (26). This symbolic provenance suggests that the costume serves
precisely the function Bakhtin attributes to the carnival mask: it is related to a
transition from the fixed, existing world to the worlds of memory and imagina-
tion. The outfit's exaggerated gloom (it served previously as a Halloween cos-
tume) has a similarly metamorphic quality. In its very theatricality, it has the
potential for becoming festive, for "mak[ing] people laugh" (26).
The unofficial entrepreneurship represented by Toloki's career as mourner is
readily contrasted with that of the successful businessman, Nefolovhodwe.
Though originally also a migrant and a shack dweller, Nefolovhodwe makes it in
the "first world," an achievement that is expressed most decisively in geographi-
cal terms. He is able to maintain a downtown office, with an army of white man-
agers, as well as a house in the white suburbs, complete with security guards,
Alsatians, electrical fences, and any number of stout doors. Insofar as he makes a
living out of death (he is a carpenter by trade and an expert coffin maker),
Nefolovhodwe is Toloki's counterpart or alter ego. But while Toloki remains
identified with the netherworld of the ragged and ugly people, Nefolovhodwe
tries to elevate himself to heaven: he decorates the doors to his inner sanctum
with monstrous imitation pearls and grandly welcomes visitors—in case the
obvious point is lost on them—to his "Pearly Gates" (165). His association with
the "second world" of the funeral procession, moreover, is increasingly exploita-
tive. Though he starts out by providing sturdy, cheap, collapsible coffins,
Nefolovhodwe ends up dealing in gleaming marble and onyx tombstones and
hineialhaute couture for the widows of millionaires. He even has the horn of his
Cadillac limousine play a few bars of one of the people's favorite funeral hymns
as its signature tune. In translating the people's suffering into profit and the em-
blems of the funeral into luxury goods and "beautiful" display, Nefolovhodwe
becomes, as it were, a parody of grotesque parody. His "ways of living" are ul-
timately a betrayal of the ludic and metamorphic capacities Mda's novel
celebrates.
It makes sense in terms of Ways of Dying's patterns of opposition that
Nefolovhodwe should also be the character who most vigorously denies his rural
origins in the mountain village. For in the course of the novel's many flashbacks,
the village emerges as the source of considerable bawdy humor, and it is largely
because of these earlier rural scenes that Ways of Dying so successfully conveys a
sense of folkways and oral traditions freshly breaking into literary form. The sto-
ries of sexual exploits in the village—of Noria's "dispensing pleasure"(73) to the
bus drivers and of her mother's high jinks with a lusty health worker—are
narrated without moralistic censure. Even Toloki, who eventually becomes an
"incarnation of gloom and dignity"(99), is represented in some of the flashbacks
to his childhood as the very embodiment of debunking laughter. Two incidents,
in particular, bring an irreverent vulgarity into play. In the first, Toloki and some
friends get drunk on brandy stolen from the preacher's house. Filled with an
"unnatural elation" (102), the boy barges into a church service, staggers to the
pulpit, and, before collapsing into a drimken stupor, shouts, "Ndinxaniwe! Ek is
dors! Ke nyoriloe! I am thirsty" (103). The scene shows Toloki as an irreverent
interpreter (his name derives from the Afrikaans word "tolk")—one who
288 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

translates Christ's dying words not only into isiXhosa, Afrikaans, and seSotho,
but, more signally, from the sacred into the secular, from the Lenten into the car-
nivalesque. In the second comic incident, Toloki and his friends tangle with the
village's self-proclaimed "Prophet Extraordinaire" (105). The man's rhetorical
self-elevation to "Archbishop of the Apostolic Blessed Church of Holly Zion on
the Mountain Top" (104-05) is brought down by precisely the kind of ribald im-
agery Bakhtin associates with the lower bodily stratum. The prophet, we are told,
started out as the town's nightsoil man, who happened to get the call to higher
things at the exact moment the village acquired pit-latrines and could dispense
with his services. Even in his elevated new incarnation as prophet, he actually
has to make his living from selling tripe (a substance on which Bakhtin meditates
at some length). The rituals he invents for his church, moreover, are equally fix-
ated on the gross and open body: the key ritual in his church is the "sacred
cleansing" during which the Apostle and his entire congregation take powerful
emetics and then go up the "Holly" mountain to shit and throw up—much to the
amusement of Toloki and his spying friends, for whom the "row after row of fat
buttocks decorating the hillside" is the comic rather than sorrowful "highlight of
their Easter" (106).
The secularizing and degrading humor we see in these scenes is perhaps the
closest thing to the early modern grotesque that we will find in Mda's novel.
Reading this scene one cannot but be reminded of Rabelais's blasphemous priest.
Friar John, whose specialty it is to turn lines like Christ's dying words "Sitio" (I
thirst") and "Consummatum est" ("It is consummated," or, for Friar John, "It has
been consumed") into celebrations of gross bodily pleasures (Bakhtin, Rabelais
86). But secularization is not the most important element of Mda's carnival
vision—as only makes sense, given the fact that the "first world" to which his
novel's grotesquerie is juxtaposed is associated with economic and political
power rather than religious officialdom. Mda's emerging prosaics seems rather
to tend towards a curious resacralization of the body and bodily pleasures, some-
thing perhaps best seen in the scene where Toloki and Noria wash each other in a
ritual of mutual cleansing, reminiscent, despite its sensuality, of the practice of
washing one's hands after a funeral. The novel's ending is also telling in this re-
gard. Toloki's art class spontaneously builds up to a feast of sorts: a traditional
comic finale. But the meal of which Toloki, Noria, and the children partake—a
Swiss roll, some green onions, and a few cakes—is so frugal that it seems more
like a communion than a gormandizing banquet. Each individual's share, while
delicious, melts in the mouth like "sacramental wafers" (211).
And yet one carmot quite say that Mda offers a sublimation of the grotesque of
the sort that Stallybrass and White describe in the final chapter of Politics and
Poetics of Transgression: the emerging culture he is outlining is not puritanical and
bourgeois. At the end of the novel, the traditional trappings of carnival are
clearly in place, complete with drunken carousers in costumes and masks, and it
is in the description of their revels that one of the most crucial elements of the
Bakhtinian carnivalesque is foregrounded. This is, in a word, freedom: freedom
from the fear and intimidation that was pervasive in the unpredictable world of
the South African transition. Amidst the din of the New Year's celebration, tires
 RITA BARNARD POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 289

are still burning; but, as Mda assures us in the very last sentence of the novel,
they smell only of "pure wholesome rubber" (212). The violence of the
past—specifically, the dreaded practice of necklacing, which mingled the smell
of rubber with the "sickly stench of roasting human flesh" (212)—has been
eliminated. The meaning of the novel's recurrent image of fire is thus redeemed;
it is transmuted from an instrufnent of vengeance into the "sparks of the carnival
bonfire which renews the world" (Bakhtin, Rabelais 17).

Mbembe's Vulgate

The complex historical optic offered in Ways of Dying, however, emerges most
strikingly if we set the novel in dialogue not only with Bakhtin, but also with
Achille Mbembe, whose dystopian vision of a postcolonial grotesque I alluded to
earlier. Mbembe's essay is fueled by an impatience with certain familiar assump-
tions regarding the culture of the dominated classes (the very assumptions, in
fact, that underpin Losangake Losambe's essay on Mzamane). In terms of this
"vulgate," as Mbembe wittily terms such academic pieties, the practices of
ordinary people—their songs, jokes, drinking habits, dances, and so forth—must
all and necessarily be viewed in terms of "cultural resistance" ("Prosaics" 128-29).
The danger of this reading, Mbembe argues, is that it blinds the observer to the
possibility that acts of servility and acts of opposition might not always be neatly
separable, and that the behavior of the rulers and the ruled may not always be
irreducibly antagonistic.
There is much validity to this aspect of Mbembe's critique. But his own con-
ception of the relations between the rulers and the ruled, between what he calls
the commandement and the cibles (targets), is a disturbing one. He presents this
conception in the form of a challenge to Bakhtin, questioning in particular what
he sees as the two quintessential assumptions of the latter's conception of carni-
val. The first is the idea that the vulgarity, obscenity, and excess of carnival is the
proper and exclusive domain of the powerless, and the second is the idea that
such vulgarity undermines the high and mighty by turning them into figures of
fun. Unlike the officially ascetic medieval culture against which Rabelais pitched
his writings, the official culture of the postcolonial commandement, or so Mbembe
argues, tends to be lascivious in temperament and immoderate in appetite: "the
grotesque is no more foreign to officialdom that the common (wo)man is imper-
vious to the charms of majesty" ("Banality" 14). What arises, consequently, is a
relationship of "conviviality" or even a kind of mutual seduction between the
rulers and the ruled: the official world appropriates popular vulgarity (and, in so
doing, ensures its hold on the people), while the people borrow their forms of
expression and "ideological repertoires" from officialdom (14). The leaders put
on sumptuous displays of their own glory, while the poor, in their desire for
splendor, "clothe themselves in the flashy rags of power" (29) and thus ratify and
recycle rather than criticize the epistemology of the commandement. It is in this
intimate symbolic entanglement—where the distinction between the "beautiful
people" and the "ragged souls" is erased—that Mbembe sees the source and
perpetuation of powerlessness and tyranny in the postcolony.
290 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

If Bahktin's study of the carnivalesque is in essence a meditation on the fate of

laughter—a lament, in fact, for its "diminishing power and shrinking gifts" in the
age of the bourgeoisie (Emerson and Morson 435)—Mbembe's implicit history of
laughter seems to be an even darker one. His fear is that far from being the quin-
tessential "sound that outsideness makes," in Emerson and Morson's interesting
phrase (435), postcolonial laughter has become just another token in the symbolic
games that the powerful play with their imderlings. Though humor is ubiquitous
in the postcolony (the lascivious habits and obese physiques of the
powerful—not to mention the copious shit that flows from their gluttonous
bodies—provides ample material for lewd and scatological joking), it is not nec-
essarily subversive. Indeed, it assumes the quality of a symbolic scavenging or
ragpicking: "people who laugh," Mbembe declares, "are only reading the signs
left like rubbish in the wake of the commandement" ("Banality" 10).
The pessimistic nature of this conception of postcolonial power is in good
measure historically determined. It is important to remember that Mbembe's es-
say dates from 1989-1992, and that he is reflecting on a situation of authoritarian
rule. In fact, he extrapolates grandly from his observations of Cameroonian soci-
ety in this period, with the result that his essay oscillates between the particular-
ity of his startling vignettes and the vast generalization of his theoretical claims,
leaving one uncertain exactly where his analysis is supposed to be applicable.
This uncertainty, I would argue, is registered in the essay itself: one senses a de-
gree of hedging about whether the vulgarity of the powerful is a universal phe-
nomenon, or whether it is specific—or specific in certain deplorable and
pathological forms—to "the postcolony" (wherever that is), and to sub-Saharan
Africa (see Trouillot 77). Mbembe is careful to insist that there is "nothing spe-
cifically African" about "defecation, copulation, pomp, and sumptuousness"
("Banality" 11), yet there are many details in his essay that suggest otherwise. All
the features that fuel the grotesque (and I should emphasize that Mbembe uses
the term in a much more judgmental way than I have so far in the essay) are in
fact rather stereotypically "African": Mbenibe makes it clear that we are dealing
with situations of scarcity, in which food and voraciousness are particularly po-
tent tropes, and of political clienteUsm, in which the powerful must, in a sense,
be rapacious since they must feed not only themselves but their hangers-on.
Moreover, the characteristically "anxious virility" ("Banality" 14), which exacer-
bates the need for sumptuous display and sexual excess, may also be read in rela-
tion to the Africa's colonial past, as the psychological legacy of a racist
exaggeration and denigration of the sexuality of African men. One commentator
on Mbembe's essay has even suggested that there is a disturbing similarity be-
tween "the postcolony" and the imperial vision of pre-colonial Africa: "the view
of a place before Civilization arrived, where natives subsisted, laughed, and tus-
sled ceaselessly to no end" (Coronil 100). Mbembe's extravagant description of
the postcolonial power relations as a case of theophagy ("Banality" 16), where
the masses consume the autocrat who proclaims himself as a god, gives further
credence to this reading. While the intention is to express the way in which the
discourse surrounding the postcolonial autocrat seems to be focused, fetishisti-
cally, on the body (as though Mbembe seizes the image of the devoured god
 IOTA BARNARD I POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 291

from Jan Kott and George Bataille), the figure is nevertheless uncomfortably
evocative of the stereotypical cannibal banquet.
Mbembe's vision, in short, has a grim force, but it is open to criticism from
several directions. His response to Bakhtin skates over a vast accumulation of
details that would arrest a literary scholar, and this inattention, while under-
standable, does skew the overall interpretation. One might point out, for
instance, that carnival imagery—especially when one imderstands it in the light
of the various imagistic series Bakhtin lays out in the essay on the chronotope—is
the figurative expression of a new linkage of human fates to the redemptive and
regenerative capacities of the earth: it represents an unfinished and open-ended
possibility and is pertinent to a time not of stasis, but of transition. Thus the
"vulgarity" of a zombified public ("Banality" 5), which Mbembe describes so hor-
rifically, is strictly speaking not in the domain of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque at
all. We are dealing, in short, with a strong misreading—a practice Mbembe quite
openly confesses to, when, in a forum on his essay, he appropriates the term
"prosaics" and announces that he will deliberately stretch it to assume a mearung
far different from that proposed by the Emerson and Morson, the two Bakhtin
scholars who coined the term. The idea of a "prosaics" for Mbembe is neither a
theory of narrative, nor a validation of the ordinary and the demotic, but a dy-
namic of social control: an account of how the powerful bring their episteme to
the people, and how that act of domination is made to seem mundane and un-
remarkable ("Prosaics" 128-29). It is, in a word, ideology: ideology as shared and
lived grossness.

South African Excess

Given all these considerations, one is tempted to say that Mbembe's diagnosis of
the vulgarity of power in the postcolony has little relevance to the South African
situation. It would seem to be especially inapplicable to the early 1990s when the
old oppressive regime was on its way out and a new leadership was only just
begirming to move into a position of power—a time of great fluidity, when it
would have been difficult to identify a commandement in the sense of a single
power elite, and when the ordinary citizeru-y was mobilized, rather than trapped
in passive laughter.
And yet it is also around this time that the crude and arbitrary character of
power in South Africa began to acquire a new visibility. The actualities of life in
the late 1980s and early 1990s often assumed a quality of outrageous excess—one
thinks, for instance, of the laughable yet deadly buffoonery of the "Battle of
Bop," when drunken right-wingers rallied to bolster the puppet presidency of
Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana, or of the exorbitant cruelty of the death
squads at Vlakplaas, who eventually confessed to having roasted the body of an
activist while also braaiing some meat for themselves to eat.'" On a completely

'" One nught bear in mind here Soyinka's rhetorical question about a dark period in Nigeria's
history: "Was or was this not a period of public executions which provided outing occasions
for families, complete with cool drinks, ice cream, akara, sandwiches, and other picknickers'
delights?" (qtd. in Olaniyan 48). Bracketing for the moment the question of African
292 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

different ethical scale, it is fair to say that an element of tasteless display on the
part of the new ANC leadership was beginning to reveal itself, with leaders ap-
pearing at luxury spots like the Lost City Resort (that ne plus ultra in sub-Saharan
kitsch) and hobnobbing with the likes of the "King Sol" Kerzner, the hotel mag-
nate who made his fortune out of casinos in the Bantustans. More foreboding
than such indulgences per se (who would, after all, begrudge Nelson Mandela
and his comrades a taste of the land's luxuries?) was the manner in which flashy
life-styles were sometimes defended. In 1996, just two years into the ANC's first
term, the ebullient provincial premier Tokyo Sexwale, embroiled in a dispute
between squatters and middle-class homeowners, defended the fact that he had
installed himself in a particularly glamorous Hough ton mansion, by arguing that
that the squatters whose cause he had espoused wanted him to live in such high
style, that they basked in his status as a symbol of black achievement (Johnson
27). For all Sexwale's vaimted populism, such a remark reveals a profoundly un-
democratic symbolic dynamic and one that, in the light of Mbembe's analysis,
does not bode well for the future.
The literature of the transition, responsive to such matters, seems increasingly
to record a sense of the vulgarity of power." It begins to represent the agents of
apartheid not in terms of their supposed Calvinist rigor, but in terms of the same
crude physicality that characterizes the corpulent strongmen of Mbembe's post-
colony. Chris Van Wyk's The Year of the Tapeworm is perhaps the clearest exem-
plar of the very physical grotesque sensibility I am trying to describe (though one
finds examples of it even in such unexpected places as, say,Coetzee's Age of Iron,
in which the Apartheid leaders are envisioned, at one point, as men with "meaty
bellies" and "full bladders" pissing on the populace [10]). Van Wyk's narrator, a
harum-scarum, hard-drinking journalist called Scara Nhlabatsi, relishes all man-
ner of rude jokes, bawdy abuse, malapropisms and puns and provides a slew of
images of the vulgar excess of power. Scara describes both the white leaders,
who build a "mammoth shrine" to celebrate their language, and the government
stooges, who build palaces, TV stations, and airports (even though they have no
planes), in all their ridiculous exorbitance (163). More surprisingly, the novel also
diagnoses the potentially dangerous immoderation in the discourse of the

exceptionalisn, which many critics feel Mbembe's essay raises, I would suggest that the
comparison between this scenario and the one at Vlakplaas raises very uncomfortable
questions about the much vaunted exceptionalism of South Africa—its prideful sense of being
different from the rest of the continent.
The trend is continued in such post-apartheid works as Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), an
inventive dramatization of TRC testimony, and Big Dada (2001), a play about the Ugandan
dictator Idi Amin. Ubu and the Truth Commission is particularly relevant in the present context.
Pere Ubu (who is transmogrified into an absurd but terrifying apartheid-era power monger in
Taylor and Kentridge's adaptation of Jarry's surrealist classic) can be seen as the perfect
embodiment of the postcolonial commandement, with its cruel belly politics. The connection is
deftly made by Michel-Rolphe Trouillot, who prefaces his response to Mbembe's essay on the
banality of power, with a fitting quote from Jarry: "Soon after he usurped the crown. King Ubu
assembled the crowd in the palace yard, threw money at his happily crawling and jumping
subjects, and invited them to an orgy. 'Here I am,' he mused, king of this land, and I have
already granted myself an indigestion" (75).
 WTA BARNARD I POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 293

opposition, with their biblical "charter" promising "the earth to everyone:

houses, cars, jobs, the works. There shall be, there shall be..." (183). Gross im-
agery characterizes leaders of all political persuasions and the ordinary people as
well. The young cadres, far from being glamorized, are subjected to a debasing
humor: one comrade is said to have bad breath, the sad result of his decision to
boycott "the white man's toothpaste" (32). The white president, De Vries, is con-
stantly associated with shit, most comically so in a scene describing a TV docu-
mentary intended to celebrate the man's achievements and humanity. Orie of the
stills from this film, a baby picture of the president sitting on a very uncomfort-
able black nanny's lap, strikes Scara and his stoned companions as so laughable
that they promptly provide it with a scatological caption: "The president trainirig
to shit on us" (72).'^
The humor, in this instar\ce, has a critical edge: the excremental joking is
clearly a way of deflecting and reassigning such racist insults as "Kaffir shit"
(175) to which the characters and their historical counterparts have been sub-
jected. But the riovel's scatological aggression also carries what Joshua Esty, ir\
his excellent study of the "excremental postcolonialism" of Soyinka and Armah,
has described as "a secret charge of self-implication" (34). No one—not even the
narrator or the author—is free of filth or contamination in this atmosphere of
uneasy ar\d desperate hilarity." The political implications of the satire therefore
end up being rather troubling and murky. Potentially, at least, the novel's con-
clusion is optimistic: Sibisi, the fictional counterpart to Mandela, is released from
prison and the narrator's life takes a turn for the better. But when, in a trium-
phant address to the nation, Sibisi describes his intimacy with the former white
president in very physical terms ("we have eaten from the same plate, drunk
from the same cup like true African brothers" [202]), Scara's imagination takes
off in characteristically gross fashion:

Van Wyk's satire here alludes to an actual TV documentary, entitled P.Vl. Botha, die Mens [P.VJ.
Botha, the Human Being]. Designed to win hearts and minds and improve the public image of
the notoriously unappeaUng "Old Crocodile," this program presented many ostensibly
endearing details about the former president's character. Botha's wife Elize attested, for
instance, to his great fondness for custard! (Heyns 83). Needless to say, the film failed to move
the populace, except to laughter.
Esty's argument proceeds along the following lines: excrement, while readily metaphorized in
a discourse of abuse and critique, is a "sign of undifferentiation," and therefore a fraught
matter for those who would sit in judgment of the politics of others. Thus it would seem that
scalatogical satire, from Swift, to Beckett, to Soyinka, is motivated by its practitioners'
recognition of their own implication in ethical, aesthetic, or political failure. Armah's "aesthetic
dissent from (his own) comprador class," or so Esty proposes, "requires double-edged attacks
and self-reproaches whose most characteristic expression comes in excremental tropes" (34n).
A case could be made that a writer like Van Wyk, a "coloured" South African, cast by the
apartheid regime in an uncomfortably "in-between" position, might be particularly vulnerable
to this "schizoid" sense of simultaneous dissent and complicity. The ubiquitous images of shit
and contaniination in The Year of the Tapeworm could therefore be read not only in terms of
satirical abuse, but also as signs of a sense of guilty complicity with his characters' bawdy
irresponsibility. For all the indulgence in wild and irreverent pleasures, the text—and the
author—may not be as fully liberated from the prescriptions of committed literature as one
might originally suppose.
294 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

Eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same cup, slept in the same bed maybe.
Used the same toilet. Where? Some rusty corrugated-iron toilet buzzing with flies,
stinking to the high African heavens far away in the bush on the banks of a
stagnant green river. Germs, disease, worms.... De Vries's tapeworm lays its eggs
in a chunk of pork and dies. Sibisi eats the meat.... (202)

The sinister "conviviality" hinted at here prevents Scara from wholeheartedly

experiencing the elation of national liberation: "Sibisi will just have to wait" for
his attention, Scara declares (203). The narrator's individual redemption, in other
words, is not fused with the national destiny, which appears ambiguous at
best—and too close to the belly politics of postcolonial Africa for any reader to
feel at ease.
In this respect The Year of the Tapeworm is curiously reminiscent of the bitter
satirical novels that constitute the second wave of African literature (a body of
work which includes not only Armah and Soyinka, but Ouloguem and Tansi, the
Francophone novehsts from whom Mbembe takes his inspiration)." The novel's
connection with Armah, and particularly with his 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones
Are Not Yet Born, is in fact so strong as to constitute a homage to the Ghanaian
writer. The characteristically disgusting imagery of The Beautyful Ones are recy-
cled in Van Wyk's novel: one thinks of such details as the rusty, stinking out-
house mentioned above or the hobo in a greasy overcoat flinging rubbish out of a
KEEP YOUR CITY CLEAN bin (101). More: the earlier novel's grim climax, in
which the corrupt leader escapes the wrath of the people by descending via the
protagonist's outhouse into the city's sewers, is clearly alluded to hi The Year of
the Tapeworm, in the form of a rumor that a Soweto inyanga has hidden the white
president away in his toilet. And, as if these intertextual details were not enough
to clue the readers in. Van Wyk even has his characters discuss Armah's novel
and its protagonist's disillusioned journey through the filth and squalor of
Ghana in Nkrumah's final years (88). We are dealing, in short, with a curious, but
quite deliberate stylistic and historical telescoping: Van Wyk proleptically in-
scribes the "not yet" of Armah's postcolonial dystopia in his fictional account of
the South African transition. The promiscuous vulgarity and physical grossness
that in Mbembe's account presents such a threat to liberty and justice, already
seems to be on the cards, even as the new era of (potential) liberation dawns. The
last few lines of The Year of the Tapeworm therefore seem to suggest that the cele-
bratory image of the "rainbow nation," much in evidence at the time of the
novel's publication, might best be replaced with the more cautious image of "the
monkeys' wedding" or "Umshado weZinkawu" (203): the expression people use
when it rains and shines at the same time.

Esty has persuasively argued that these novels, far from being national allegories in any simple
way, tend to reveal a gap between subject and nation, between political desires and their
fulfiUment (49-53).
 RTTA BARNARD | POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 295

Comic Moristers

If Mda seems less inclined to defer celebration and to despair about the promises
of liberation, it is not because he is any less aware than Van Wyk—or Mbembe,
for that matter—of the disappointments that decolonization brought in its wake
elsewhere in Africa. Both in his academic writings and in his plays (especially
The Mother of All Eating, And the Girls in their Summer Dresses, and We Shall Sing
for the Fatherland), he confronts the possibility that the people who fought for
freedom may be betrayed by a rapacious bourgeoisie, all too ready to "sign loans
for the poor to repay" {When People Play 180). At times, he even implicates him-
self in the elite's "noble tradition of eating" (Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating 24).
The preface to When People Play, for instance, includes humorous reminiscences
of a 1988 UNICEF conference Mda attended in Zimbabwe at which writers,
movie stars, and politicians were lavishly fed and entertained, served imported
wines, and treated "like the 'stars' [they] were"—"all in the name of the poor"
(X).

It is not surprising therefore that an aesthetic of vulgarity, gross appetite, and

cruelty, in which both blacks and whites participate, should be inscribed in Ways
of Dying, despite its generally optimistic thrust. The dangerous failings of the ris-
ing black bourgeoisie are most obviously satirized in the caricaturish
Nefolovhodwe, with his ballooning figure, his fleet of cars, and his bevy of girl-
friends; but they are also displayed in the bad behavior of the "bejeweled" lead-
ership of the resistance moveraent, who at one point visit Noria's impoverished
settlement. In terms of the novel's grotesque oppositions, the leaders are clearly
"beautiful people," arriving, as they do, in a big black Mercedes-Benz and a con-
voy of other cars, and assuming their right to the few chairs the community has
provided.'^ Their undemocratic attitudes and desire to control the symbolic ex-
change at the meeting, moreover, is disconcertingly evocative of the dystopian
prosaics (in Mbembe's sense of the word) of the autocrats' postcolony. It is telling
that the settlement's men, demonstrating what Mbembe might well call an "anx-
ious virility" ("Banality" 14), should scold the women for serving only bread and
cabbage to the dignitaries: such a frugal meal, they protest, is not the "proper
food that befits [their] leaders" (174) and will disgrace to the whole settlement
before the nation. The dynamic at work here is identical to the mutually ratifying
and convivial mirroring of the rulers and the ruled described by Mbembe: the
commandement of the future grandly displays itself to the people, who obligingly
sing their praises, and expect, in turn, to be praised and to bask in the reflected
glory of the bigwigs.
An even more sinister kind of vulgarity is displayed by the whites in the
novel, whose cruel excesses repeatedly take the form of a kind of grim joking. A

'^ Mda's description of the visit of the glamorous national leaders to the violence-ridden shack
settlement has a historical correlative. In December 1990, a convoy of new BMWs and
Mercedes brought Nelson Mandela to the war-ravaged East Rand "squatter" can\p of Phola
Park to give its impoverished ANC-aligned residents a "pep talk." But in terms of glitzy
display, Mandela was outdone that day by his rival. Chief Mangosutho Buthelezi, who arrived
at a meeting of equally disadvantaged Inkatha supporters at a Thokoza hostel in a helicopter!
(Reed 57).
296 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

case in point is the notorious "hell-ride" to which the police subject Shadrach, the
owner of the old "skorokoro" van of the funeral parade, and his fellow taxi
drivers. The officers kidnap the drivers, take them to the morgue, and force them
to "make love" to the corpses of beautiful women (143). In this sadistic jape, co-
lonial power is detached from its usual justificatory rationale (that of ensuring
control for the sake of productivity) and assumes the brutal pointlessness of tyr-
anny: it is precisely the kind of violence that Mbembe associates with the post-
colonial commandement ("Banality" 13). The most terrible example of this ludic
cruelty is offered in the scene where a white manager, described as "a big white
baas [who] is very friendly and likes to play with [his] black labourers" (65), ar-
ranges an ostensible practical joke in which a friend of Toloki's is doused in pet-
rol and burned alive. The victim's father is understandably unconsoled when he
is told that the perpetrator meant no harm and thought that his son's agonized
writhing was just a funny dance. In both these incidents, power assumes a
sinister semblance of "conviviality" and expresses itself as brutal laughter.
But in contrast to Van Wyk's novel, where an awareness of the "future
imperfect" of postcolonial Africa puts a damper on the celebration of the new,
Mda's novel deals with this awareness in homeopathic fashion: the aesthetic of
vulgarity is included, exposed, and disarmed. While he shows the men's suscep-
tibility to vulgar and self-deceiving display, he also offers a critical alternative to
it in the attitude of the settlement's women, who firmly assert their distance from
the "beautiful" and greedy leaders: "We are poor people," they explain. "We can
only give them what we ourselves eat. They must see our poverty. We caruiot
pretend to them that we are meat and rice people, when in fact our daily supper
is pap and water. As a matter of fact, we gave them a treat. We don't normally
eat bread" (174). It is by way of this dignified realism that Mda counters the
pathological and self-deluding excesses of the Mbembean postcolony: a world
"hostile to continence, frugality, and sobriety" ("Banality" 14). But he also, sig-
nificantly, turns his attention in the final pages of the novel, to wbat we may see
as a redeemed form of laughter: one that may serve as an inoculation against the
laughter of helpless passivity or cruelty that resounds in situations of oppression.
The chief agents of this redemption are the iron figurines that Nefolovhodwe
retrieves from the rubble of Toloki's father's smithy in the mountain village and
delivers, out of the blue, to the settlement. These "metal monsters," which in-
stantly fascinate the settlement's children and reduces them to "paroxysms of
laughter" (210), are richly suggestive—both in terms of the novel's own
figurative patterns and in terms of its intertextual resonances. Their socio-
symbolic implications are strikingly revealed if we read them in relation to what
Lars Engle has called the poetics of the political uncanny in (white) South African
writing, a mode best exemplified in Gordimer's 1974 novel The Conservationist,
where a corpse that will not stay buried becomes the threatening sign of the re-
pressed but ultimately undeniable claim of black South Africans for inclusion
and representation. Coetzee's Age of Iron, the great masterpiece of late apartheid-
era literature, presents the final and most disturbing expression of this vision.
The novel's narrator comes to think of her very presence on South African soil as
a nightmarish walk over the faces of buried black children: "They are dead," she
 RITA BARNARD I POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 297

thinks, "but their spirit has not left them. They lie there heavy and obdurate,
waiting for my feet to pass, waiting for me to go, waiting to be raised up again.
Millions of figures of pig iron floating under the skin of the earth. The age of iron
waiting to return" (125-26). In Mda's novel, the figures of pig iron do return, but
the event is entirely free of the frisson of terror that is the hallmark of the un-
canny: the children of the settlement, as I noted, find them hilarious, despite their
"strange and sinister-looking" appearance (210). The conclusion of Ways of
Dying, while completely fanciful and magical (Nefolovhodwe functions as a
charmless deus ex machina), is thus cogent and logical in terms of South African
literary history. At the very moment of the transition to democracy, it replaces
the outworti mode of the uncanny with a version of the grotesque in which
laughter retains something of its ancient liberating power. It is as if Mda wit-
tingly alludes to Bakhtin's account of the psycho-symbolic meaning of the carni-
val mock-up of hell in which "the awesome becomes a 'comic monster'" {Rabelais
91): Jwara's "monsters that make people happy" (212) enable the community,
especially the children, to "[laugh] ... without a trace of fear" (Freud 109-10), and
to turn their gaze from the horrors of the past to the future.^*

Coda: Beyond the Grotesque

At the beginning of this essay I referred to Ato Quayson's account of the

Mbembean postcolony as a dramaturgical situation in which the reader's laugh-
ter (since it could be directed equally at the oppressors and the oppressed) dissi-
pates any clear ethical response to the situation described. I would like to suggest
in conclusion that Mda's novel, with its laughing finale and its compelling
dramaturgical construction, does present its readers with an urgent ethical and
social agenda. To understand this agenda, it is worth bringing to mind again
Mbembe's despairing description of "the people who laugh" as mere recyclers of
the symbolic rubbish of their leadership. This remarkable description exposes,
perhaps more strikingly than anything else in Mbembe's work, his conception of
the postcolony as the site of terrible poverty, a poverty not only of food and
goods, but of signs. It is a peculiar vision (after all, signs are not finite and
pricey—they need not be scavenged like secondhand clothes) and one that strips
the people of any ability to produce their own ludic resources.'^ In stark contrast

'* By citing Freud here, I wish to invoke Stallybrass and White's chapter on bourgeois hysteria
and the carnivalesque, in which they suggest that in some of Freud's early therapeutic project
involved the reir\flexion of grotesque material into comic form and refer to several cases in
which horror is abrogated through laughter (171-72). It is important to note in this connection
that the communal laughter that rings out at the end of Viays of Dying is not exactly refined: the
figurines, significantly, are said to give pleasure to the children in the same way that Noria
"gave pleasure to the whole community back in the village" (210).
'^ Mbembe's sense of the culture of Africa's urban poor, though it overlaps in some respects with
that of Simone, is ultimately far more pessimistic: Mbembe seems to preclude even those
"small glimmer[s] of the cosmopolitan" ("Globalization" 178) that Simone detects in
impoverished communities all over Africa and that allow even the poorest of the poor to play
with signs from places far beyond the control, symbolic or otherwise, of any national
commandement. There is thus considerable validity to Fernando Coronil's description of the
298 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

to Mbembe, disappointed (or so one senses) by the imitative and impoverished

culture of the postcolonial cibles, Mda celebrates the generative power of African
popular creativity. The closing pages of Ways of Dying represent the people not as
consumers, recyclers, and scavengers, but as fertile and imaginative producers.
Jwara's bequest to his talented son is vast: so vast that Nefolovodwe, confronted
with the difficulty of transporting the sculptures, comes to wonder if they did not
"multiply on their own, giving birth to more metal monsters" (208). The figurines
are so numerous that they fill up a "mountain of boxes" (212), so high that it
dwarfs Noria's little dwelling: they "occupy [a] space," Mda emphatically notes,
"many times bigger than the shack in height, breadth, and length" (210). The in-
sistence on the matter of scale here is significant. The figures represent an urgent
demand for a shelter adequate to the enormous energies they embody: a shelter
far ampler than that offered by all existing homes—even the prized "four-
roomed township matchbox house" (209), the height of imaginable luxury for the
settlement dwellers. More: the arrival of the figurines, though grotesque in ap-
pearance, begins to challenge the aesthetic and spatial binaries that have struc-
tured the novel's symbolic patterns up to this point. Before delivering the figu-
rines to the settlement, Nefolovodwe has them appraised by two of his posh
friends, an art dealer and a museum director. The two agree that the figurines
will fetch a good price on the art market: sophisticated consumers, they argue,
have developed a taste for the "kitschy" and the "folksy" (209). Though Toloki
and Noria close their ears to this pretentious reclassification of objects that would
formerly simply have been rejected as "ugly," they are nevertheless alert to the
cultural capital this redefinition has suddenly brought them. They consider, first
and most practically, the possibility of selling the figurines and using the money
to support the settlement's orphaned children. But they also muse about the pos-
sibility of building a gigantic new structure in which to display their comic
treasures: they consider the creation of a museum, in other words, where the
children could come and look at the figurines and laugh whenever they pleased.
Either option (and Mda leaves it undecided which one is likely to win out) will
initiate an erasure of the rigid social, aesthetic, and symbolic geographies that
have been the legacy of oppression. If the figurines are put up for sale, they will
enter the world of the shopping mall and the central business district: they will
be recognized as "beautiful" objects, as the "'in' thing for collectors with taste"
(209), despite their provenance in the officially despised "second world." If, on
the other hand, they were to stay in the settlement, housed in the big display
shack, the figurines may begin to transform the marginal "squatter" settlement
into a cultural center: they would help to shift the domain of aesthetic pleasure
and cultural authority to the dwelling places of the ragged souls. Either way, the
arrival of these fascinating figurines allows Mda to gesture towards the need for

Mbembean postcolony as a "world with no exit" (100), an abstract space, enclosed by largely
theoretical walls, which includes no possibility for creativity and responsibility. These qualities
are, of course, essential to Mda's pedagogical project (and one might remember here that
Toloki gets the idea for his unofficial vocation as professional mourner from a source beyond
South Africa's borders: a pamphlet distributed in the harbor area by pink-robed devotees from
India).
 RITA BARNARD | POSTCOLONIAL LAUGHTER 299

a more enduring contestatiori of the existing sites of discourse and powder than is
possible in tbe transitional mode of tbe grotesque. Wbat seems ultimately to be
required for a nev^^ political and aesthetic education is not just a momentary
inversion of aestbetic categories, but a wbolesale remapping of tbe geograpbies
of cultural production and consumption.'* It is, I tbink, witb tbis bope for the fu-
ture tbat Mda sends out bis own "strange and sinister-looking" work, wonder-
fully twisted by tbe strenuous demands of its place and time, to bis readers in
Soutb Africa and tbe world beyond.
But let me retain for one last moment tbe grotesque's topsy-turvy optic. I
would like to gatber togetber several of tbe motifs tbat bave run tbrougb tbis es-
say by reflecting briefly on a fascinating passage from tbe Polisb journalist
Ryszard Kapuscinski's African memoir. The Shadow of the Sun. He meditates as
follows on the miraculous birtb of a sbantytown on tbe fringes of Lagos:

A neighborhood will come into being.... [FJirst, people collect building material. It
is impossible to figure out where they get it. Do they dig it out of the earth? Do
they pull it down from the clouds? The one thing is certain: this penniless throng is
not buying anything. On their heads, on their backs, under their arms, they bring
pieces of corrugated iron, boards, plywood, plastic, cardboard, metal automobile
parts, creates, and all this they assemble, erect, nail, and glue into something
halfway between a cabin and a lean-to, whose walls configure themselves into an
improvised, colorful collage.... These neighborhoods, these monstrous African
papier-mache creations, are made up of everything and anything, and it is they,
and not Manhattan or the Parisian La Defense, that represent the highest
achievement of human imagination, ingenuity, and fantasy. An entire city erected
without a single brick, metal rod, or square meter of glass! (115-16)

Tbese lines force us to look awry at modernity, invention, and progess. Here, as
in Mda's novel, we are confronted witb tbe monstrous fertility of tbe creative
imagination. We are not called upon to produce tbe usual sentiments evoked by
descriptions of poverty (pity, or sadness, or guilt, or anger), but ratber a kind of
awe; and we are invited to see in tbe ingenuity born from destitution, tbe buman
capacities tbat may eventually bring about its transformation. Tbe papier-mache

I am mindful, in this reading of the novel's conclusion, of Stallybrass and White's argument at
the end of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, that "the endless 'rediscovery' of the
carnivalesque within modern literature" (or, significantly, in products imported from the
colonial world [171]) is not necessarily subversive in and of itself Against Kristeva, who
attributes potent transgressive capacities to carruvalesque discourse—in effect equating its
challenge to proper linguistic codes with a challenge to official laws—Stallybrass and White
insist that political transformation can or\ly occur when the "hierarchy of sites of discourse" is
challenged (201), This argument may enable us to bridge the projects of Mbembe and Mda: if
the former suggests, like Stallybrass and White, that an automatic and abstract validation of
the grotesque as "resistance" is inappropriate and ineffectual, the latter, also like Stallybrass
and White, suggests that we ultimately need to turn our attention from grotesque forms and
their putative political valences, to the domains of power where such valences are
defined—and where they may be productively contested.
300 NOVEL I SUMMER 2004

city, one migbt say, is a dialectical image: it conjoins grim desperation witb pos-
sibility, an eartby materialism witb idealism, tbe old and discarded witb tbe ut-
terly new. It is on tbe ever-sbifting and ambiguous site of sucb monstrous
improvisation tbat tbe laugbing postcolonial critic may be required to take bis or
her bearings.
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