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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the relationship between literary naturalism and supernaturalism, with an emphasis on the latter. The supernatural genre, a common avenue of representation in African cultural production, combines fantasy and horror as it deals with the social and psychological anxieties surrounding the unknowns of its time. While the natural world can appear to some extent knowable, the supernatural world according to Moradewun Adejunmobi, refers to ‘the unknown and potentially unknowable or that which cannot be apprehended.’ This essay argues that to discern the ‘super’ in the ‘supernatural,’ it is first necessary to understand how the genre represents the ‘natural.’ Social transitions or crises are often framed in the 19th century naturalist novel with reference to ideas about nature and what is natural, with nature and society presented on both sides of a metaphoric equation. A close look at references to nature can demonstrate how naturalist narratives sees social change as primarily socially or naturally generated. Naturalism has been criticized for reducing social problems to laws of nature. Theorist Biodun Jeyifo has noted that in African versions of naturalism, social crises can similarly appear to follow a supernatural trajectory, making social movements appear static or determined by supernatural forces. The novels that I examine – Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s House of Jasmine – are set in anxious times of economic transition. I analyse these works to show how supernatural forces can appear to be primarily aligned with the social or natural world, before considering what this says about the depiction of social possibility. When the supernatural appears to be socially generated, the genre can expose the increasingly apprehensible logic of capital or what Marx calls ‘the value form,’ in its haunting social contradictions. In these works, capital itself is the supernatural.
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Notes
1. Marx, Karl, Capital Vol. 1. See pp. 138–162.
2. Garuba (Citation2003), and B. Cooper (Citation1998) focus more on the phenomenological aspects of representation, or the ‘logic of animist thought’ (Garuba 284) whereas this analysis is more interested in the depiction of the illogical and its relation to social possibility.
3. As part of west African mythology, Uhamiri (Igbo), or Mami Watta (Pidgin) is a typically female, immortal water spirit who can bring health and well-being to her followers, but often with a price.
4. For example, Efuru mentions how people are deceiving others by selling counterfeit products like chalk as medicine or powder (p. 113).
5. See for example how Ajanapu of the new rich is ruthless in her attempt to collect from her debtors, showing no sympathy for their misfortune of losing groundnuts to the river, and gari to the rain (p. 46).
6. Note the tension between creditors and debtors, as well as the many instances of thievery, such as when Nnona’s ferrying business is ransacked (p. 171) and the story that Omirima tells of a woman who loses her husband’s money to a thief (p. 161).
7. Note the dispute between Efuru and Gilbert over the profitability and availability of corn and groundnuts, and how this dispute marks the beginning of their marital problems (p. 140).
8. Murphy (Citation2012) discusses the collective memories of slavery in literature, ‘ … to engage the violence and terror that the slave trade imposed upon the African continent, not simply for those African people who were its direct victims as enslaved captives, but for all those who remained in West Africa and their descendants’ (p. 3).
9. This understanding of metaphor comes from Quayson (Citation2003, p. 87).
10. See Osinubi (Citation2014) for a larger discussion on the way the novel also examines the continuation of different forms of slavery such as domestic slavery and debt bondage, with an important analysis of the character, Ogea.
11. See Nnaemeka (Citation1995).
12. See Condé (Citation1972).
13. See an interview with Flora Nwapa by Marie Umeh (Citation1995), where she says that ‘women must have economic independence’ (p. 28).
14. See Hogan (Citation1999) On pages 47–48 he explains how women lost their livelihood and economic independence with the coming of European colonialism.
15. See how she blames the church for the anger of Uhamiri (p. 195).
16. See for example, how Omirima exaggerates and gossips about Efuru’s loan to Nwosu and Nwabata (p. 185).
17. For example, after Efuru dreams of Uhamiri, indicating that she has been chosen to be one of her worshippers, Efuru sees immediate improvement of her financial situation. She says, ‘when I went to the market I sold all the things I took … Debtors came of their own accord to pay their debts’ (p. 147). Efuru’s father mentions that her ‘mother had similar dreams,’ indicating that Uhamiri favors Efuru’s family (p. 147).
18. See interview with Flora Nwapa and Marie Umeh Nwapa says, ‘I would say that Chinua Achebe influenced me a great deal.’ (p. 26).
19. Note Abdu al-Fakahani, the builder of the apartment complex, his blackmail of Shagara, along with Holy Yahya, and the discussion of the irrational housing market on p. 59 to justify his actions. Also note the eerily empty apartment complexes on p. 90 meant to house those working in Gulf countries. Only one family ever comes to visit, but they leave after a terrible marital dispute on p. 93.
20. Note the many times Shagara is tempted to ‘waste’ his money (p. 17) in spite of his precarious living situation. Also see how Shagara remembers he left money in his mattress on p. 143 when he thinks of the woman who set herself on fire for the loss of that sum of money. Throughout the novel he is haunted by the feeling that he ‘was trying to remember something but couldn’t’ (p. 136). The waste of this money, along with the waste of other commodities, such as medicine, as noted by pharmacist Magid on p. 17, haunts the story as other characters suffer with want.
21. See Osman (Citation2013).
22. See translator Noha Radwan’s historical notes to the text in the afterword (p. 149).
23. See Radwan (Citation2016), who places Meguid’s novella in line with realism as delineated by Lukács. She sees a ‘return of realism during the Sadat-Mubarak era.’
24. See in Lukács (Citation1920) how first nature is that which appears to be separate from the social, while second nature is nature as it is socially generated under capital.
25. I take the neoliberal period in Africa to be the time of ‘structural adjustments’ starting in the 1980s when, as Frederick Cooper says in Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation State (F. Cooper, Citation2014), ‘In the name of market openness and financial rigor, African states were ordered to cut their budgets, lay off personnel, curtail protection of infant industries, and end the subsidies that enabled many workers to buy consumer goods’ (p. 29).
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Notes on contributors
Amy Riddle
Amy Riddle is a PhD candidate in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis.