Maps and mazes: Pathways to the folkloric imagination

abstract

This article considers the symbolic methods of reading the text through black women’s experimental strategies of abstract cartographies and labyrinthine imaginations. It thinks about the problem of ‘transnational’ mapping and motion from the experimental and symbolic realm of (playful) abstraction. I am primarily concerned with Katherine McKittrick’s reinvocation of Sylvia Wynter’s play on the mathematical concept of “Demonic Grounds” and Nongenile Masithathu Zenani’s labyrinthine puzzles in the realm of isiXhosa folkloric imagination. According to Katherine McKittrick, cartographic methods that arise from plantation modernity symbolically render black people “ungeographic” (McKittrick 2006). That is, geography as a scientific and discursive method of interpreting and mapping the material and immaterial conceptions of the world tends to mark out or make absent the presence of blackness in space, time, and motion. If we were to read the modern spatial world as a text (Harris 1999; Hateb 1990), then cartographic logics would submerge blackness under “sub-zero degrees” of knowledge and the imagination (Spillers 1987; Morrison 1995). This is what Sylvia Wynter calls the “demonic grounds” of abstract conception (McKittrick 2006, p. xxiv). McKittrick asserts, “In mathematics, physics and computational science, the demonic connotes a working system that cannot have a determined, or knowable outcome. The demonic is a nondeterministic schema: it is hinged on uncertainty and non-linearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future” (McKittrick 2006, xxiv). My question is: How do we begin to excavate, move through and fashion different models of the world in this submerged space of ‘demonic grounds’? Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, a master Xhosa folklorist and mythologist, traces a legendary figure’s journey through a puzzling labyrinthine journey under these ‘sub-zero zones’ or ‘demonic grounds’ of symbolic abstraction. This article synthesises and conjoins black women’s abstract and symbolic practices from different parts of the black world.

keywords:

• labyrinths
• cartographies
• folkloric imagination
• symbolism

Notes

1 Here I am particularly referring to Henry Louis Gates’ use of the Yoruba orisha Eshu-Elegbara’s figure as a method of interpreting semiotic elements of African American literature in The Signifying Monkey (Gates 1988). Gates derives the method from Western philosophy’s derivation of hermeneutics from the Olympian deity Hermes, who served as the herald and messenger of the gods in the Greek pantheon. Since Eshu is also a messenger deity who manipulates the codes of Ifa that were invented by Orunmila and passed down to the sacred sect of the Babalawo as a means of interpreting the language of the spirits, Gates thinks of Eshu as the befitting figurative model of interpreting and playing with the coded language of highly complex literary and symbolic texts in the African American tradition of the figurative imagination.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayabulela Mhlahlo

AYABULELA MHLAHLO is a first-class Master’s graduate in the African Literature Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is currently completing her second Master’s, in Political Studies, at the University of Cape Town. Her first Master’s project was on the riddling metaphysics of reality in Credo Mutwa’s myths. Her second project is on mystical elements of canonical texts in Black Studies. Her work is largely interested in experimental criticism, avant-garde philosophies, imagination studies and Southern African mythologies. Email: [email protected]