The infrapolitics of subordination in Patrice Nganang's Dog Days

Abstract

Patrice Nganang's award winning novel Dog Days illustrates a recent trend in African literature in French from the mid-1990s, namely a move away from narratives about rulers to narratives about the ruled, a move away from studying the socially dominant to analyzing the socially subordinate. This paper aims to foreground some of the thinking on social subordination in recent African literature by examining Patrice Nganang's Dog Days in the light of James Scott's work on power relations and resistance in his book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, as well as Achille Mbembe's reflections on power relations in his book, On the Postcolony. Unlike earlier works of African literature that either underscore the process of victimisation of social subordinates and/or the place of resistance in their everyday acts, these more recent works exude pessimism about the willingness of subordinate subjects to engage in resistance, while affirming the necessity for, and efficacy of direct resistance as the primary antidote for social disorder. In the theory of social subordination elaborated upon in this novel which accords with, but also contradicts, Scott's analysis of the nature and process of resistance at particular points, acts of deference on the part of social subordinates do not necessarily conceal hidden transcripts. Furthermore, and to the extent that we occasionally encounter hidden transcripts, such transcripts are noteworthy mainly in so far as they instigate direct resistance against those who exercise power unjustly.

Keywords:

• Nganang
• fiction
• social subordination
• infrapolitics
• resistance

Note on contributor

Moradewun Adejunmobi is a professor in the African American and African Studies programme at the University of California, Davis, and has published essays on several African authors. Her current research focuses on new media, popular culture, and performance in Africa. She can be contacted at: [email protected]

Notes

1. Nganang's Temps de chien was originally written in French and published in 2001. All references in this article will be to the English translation, Dog Days, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2006. Where English-language translations of literary works originally published in French are available for all the other African literature texts referenced in this paper, I will refer to the English-language translation and title.

2. For both criticism of, and support for, claims of ‘deficient characterization’ in African literature, see for example, Ayo Bamgbose (1969), Abiola Irele (1975), J. Kronenfeld (1975), Charles Larson (1972), Es'kia Mphahlele (1974), and Eustace Palmer (1974) among many others.

3. For more on African ‘dictator novels’, see Spencer (2012).

4. I draw specific attention to the domain of politics because the representation of the socially subordinate as victim persists in works focused on subordination due to race and gender.

5. The most extensive discussion of the new politics of political commitment in African literature in French is to be found in Cazenave and Célérier's (2011) Contemporary Francophone African Writers and The Burden of Commitment.

6. All three authors were responding principally to Mbembe's articles published in the 1990s, especially ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’ (1992a), and ‘The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony’ (1992b). However, and since Mbembe's arguments were subsequently reproduced in the 2001 volume, On the Postcolony, the criticisms remain valid.

7. Quayson (2000, 36) correctly notes that Mbembe's rejection of binarisms (and especially the resistance/passivity binary) leads him to suggest a certain equivalence between the acts associated with postcolonial power and those associated with subordinate populations in systems of postcolonial power. In the concluding part of this paper, I seek to avoid this implied ‘production of equivalence’ between the dominant and subordinate classes in my reading of Nganang's novel.

8. Docta's initial refusal to acknowledge paternity of his own son speaks to the inability to imagine a future, and a sense of responsibility for bringing that future into reality.

9. There is a clearly a gendered element to this pursuit of procurable indulgence since it is more frequently men than women who are presented as being engaged in this kind of activity in the novel. We see the contrast between male and female characters in the two cases of attempted suicide. A male character attempts suicide because he has been cuckolded (or so he claims), while a female character attempts suicide because she cannot provide for her children and family. Young males like Docta's son Takou, and Massa Yo's son Soumi, respond to the growing sense of anomie by turning to delinquency and crime.

10. Bangala means penis in the local parlance of this neighbourhood.

11. There is very little evidence to suggest that the Crow is a creative writer. We can however conclude from the fact that his documentary text shares the same title as Nganang's novel that in systems of domination, fiction (Nganang's text) can provide as reliable a documentary as non-fiction (the Crow's text).

12. I use the term ‘rents’ here with the meaning ascribed to it in scholarship on political economy. Nathan Jensen and Wantchekon's (2004, 817) comments on rents and rentier states in Africa are relevant here: ‘A rentier state is characterised by a high dependence on external rents produced by a few economic actors. Rents are typically generated from the exploitation of natural resources, not from production (labor), investment (interest), or the management of risk (profit). Rentier states tend to be autonomous because states with large natural resource endowments are more detached and less accountable; thus they do not need to levy taxes’.