Feeling Implicated by Fiction: Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were and the Remaking of Human Rights Narrative

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mbue, How Beautiful We Were, 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

2 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 1.

3 In Responsibility for Justice, Iris Marion Young defines ‘structural injustice’ as occurring ‘when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them’ (52). The violence against Kosawa is, of course, also well-described by Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ – ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (2). I opt for Young’s concept here because of its emphasis on responsibility for structural injustice.

4 Moyn, Not Enough, ix. See also Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. and Parikh, Writing Human Rights for similar assertions about human rights’ lingua franca status, and Moyn, Last Utopia for the argument that human rights ‘broke through’ in the late 1970s.

5 Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator, 179.

6 Goyal, Runaway Genres, 40.

7 Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator, 172.

8 Dawes, Novel of Human Rights, 17. See Dawes for a full account of the US human rights novel as a genre.

9 Julien, “The Extroverted African Novel.” Julien describes the extroverted African novel as ‘a particular type of narrative characterized above all by its intertextuality with hegemonic or global discourses and its appeal across borders’ (681) and is frequently ‘[w]ritten by novelists who…are living beyond their countries’ borders’ (684).

10 How Beautiful We Were participates in an extensive tradition of ‘oil curse literature.’ See Iheka, Naturalizing Africa, “Rethinking Postcolonial Resistance: The Niger Delta Example” and Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, “Hijacking the Imagination: How to Tell the Story of the Niger Delta.”

11 Noji, “The Implicated Reader,” 22.

12 “Combahee River Collective Statement,” 30.

13 Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights, 3. See also Parikh, Writing Human Rights; Dawes, Novel of Human Rights; Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., among other scholarship on literature and human rights.

14 Ibid.

15 Bernstein, “Rights,” para. 10, emphasis original. In this paragraph, Bernstein builds his own argument by glossing Joel Feinberg’s “The Nature and Value of Rights,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 4, no. 4 (1970): 243.

16 Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights, 4-5.

17 Ibid., 4.

18 Ibid., 6.

19 Keen, Empathy and the Novel, xxi.

20 Ibid., 14.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., vii. See Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity and Hunt, Inventing Human Rights for the argument that narrative empathy cultivates moral citizenship. See also Wilson and Brown, Humanitarianism and Suffering and Ganguly, This Thing Called the World for the argument that empathy can be mobilised to contest ongoing human rights abuse.

23 Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator, 31.

24 Ibid., Keen. Keen’s own research suggests that the ‘case for altruism stemming from novel reading’ is ‘inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated in favor of the beneficial effects of novel reading’ (vii).

25 Bloom and Zaki, “Does Empathy Guide or Hinder Moral Action?.” As the psychologist Jamil Zaki has written, ‘arguing for or against empathy makes no more sense than arguing for memory or against attention’. Likewise, scholars have developed models of ethical forms of empathy, such as Stefano Bellin’s ‘disorienting empathy,’ which ‘does not lead to an appropriation of the other, but to an expropriation of the self’ alongside a ‘self-aware perspective-taking that can lead to a critical reconsideration of our potential implication in the violence produced by the global border regime’ (9).

26 Bellin, ‘Disorienting Empathy,’ 8. Likewise, Xine Yao writes in Disaffected that ‘To depend upon white feelings as the catalyst for social change reinscribes the world that enables their power’ (2).

27 Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 45, 4.

28 Parikh, Writing Human Rights, 3.

29 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 32.

30 Habila, “Crude Reality.”

31 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” As an adult, Thula’s brother Juba eventually becomes part of this complicit class.

32 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 8.

33 Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 26.

34 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 9, emphasis original.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 8

37 Ibid., 7.

38 Felski, Hooked, 95.

39 Abbott, Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 235.

40 Herman et al., Narrative Theory, Phelan and Rabinowitz, 140.

41 As I discuss in what follows, the novel’s representation of the Restoration Movement’s failures punctures the liberal human rights optimism I have described –the kind that operates by raising awareness of injustice and building empathy for victims. This deflationary effect only works if the implied reader is understood to already have some familiarity with these tropes of international human rights work.

42 Julien, “The Extroverted African Novel,” 684. Of course, a text’s implied reader need not be a single homogenous figure but rather can shift as the text develops. Again, the tropes of postcolonial fiction are instructive here: extroverted novels can address both a metropolitan implied reader and another implied reader who is (in Brian Richardson’s words) ‘aware of indigenous culture, geography, and history,’ such as through the inclusion of untranslated words that the average metropolitan reader might not be able to access, Herman et al., “Reception and the Reader,” 158.

43 Noji, “The Implicated Reader,” 22.

44 Ibid., 23.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., emphasis original.

47 Ibid. Of course, not inhabiting the role of the implied reader can also be a deliberate effect of the text, as when extroverted postcolonial novels address a domestic implied reader, making a metropolitan implied reader feel disoriented or estranged. So it is not necessarily a ‘failure’ of the text for the actual reader to not feel an identification with the implied reader. Alternatively, it is possible that readers who do not actually identify with a text’s implied reader can feel implicated in the forms of injustice a text depicts.

48 See Noji, “The Implicated Reader,” 30-34.

49 Herman et al., Narrative Theory, Warhol, 145.

50 As Helon Habila notes in his review of the novel, ‘Most Americans don’t want to expose the ugliness of their dependence on oil and seem disinclined to dwell in this murk, which leaves the task of documentation to immigrant writers’.

51 These chapters are organised around representing what Jan Assmann terms ‘communicative memory,’ a kind of cultural memory that is ‘non-institutional’ and instead ‘lives in everyday interaction and communication’ (111). Communicative memory is more ephemeral than other forms of cultural memory: it ‘normally reaches no farther back than eighty years, the time span of three interacting generations’ (111).

52 Mihai, Political Memory, 9.

53 Ibid., 55.

54 Ibid., 49.

55 See Alexis Shotwell’s discussion of propositional knowledge and ‘implicit understanding’ in Knowing Otherwise.

56 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 110.

57 Ibid., 109-10, emphasis original.

58 Wenzel, Disposition of Nature, 9, emphasis original.

59 “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 30.

60 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 12.

61 The question of violence becomes a point of contention between Thula and the Five when the latter insist that the only way to force Pexton’s hand is to blow up their equipment.

62 Goyal, “When Was the Afropolitan?” 783.

63 One possible historical inspiration for Thula’s movement (which Helon Habila has also noted in his review of the novel) is the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), founded by Ken Saro-Wiwa. Between 1990 and 1991, MOSOP presented to the Nigerian state the Ogoni Bill of Rights, which declared the Ogoni people’s ‘right to the control and use of a fair proportion of Ogoni economic resources for Ogoni development’ along with the ‘right to protect the Ogoni environment and ecology from further degradation’ (8). Like Thula’s movement, the document links socioeconomic and environmental rights in the same liberatory project.

64 See Mihai, Political Memory for a discussion of ‘impure resistance,’ especially the Introduction, 5, 13; and Chapter 1, “Tracing the Double Erasure,” 31-40.

65 Rich, “Notes,” 231, emphasis original.

66 This is the kind of disorientation Bellin writes of in his discussion of ‘disorienting empathy’: ‘not being racially disoriented and not having to think about race are precisely some of the privileges of whiteness. But […] I would argue that white and advantaged people should have experiences of disorientation that dislocate ossified and subliminal racial hierarchies. White disorientation cannot be compared to the racialised experiences suffered by people of colour or to the troubles of refugees. But when it avoids usurping, trivialising, or impersonating’ others’ perspectives, ‘disorienting empathy’ can be ethically productive (9, emphasis original).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arielle Stambler

Arielle Stambler is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her current research project, entitled The Social Rights Imaginary of the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel, examines how twenty-first-century African and Caribbean fiction remakes international human rights discourse to contest contemporary economic imperialism. Her writing has appeared in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. Email: [email protected]