A Kafka-machine is thus constituted by contents and expressions that have been formalized to diverse degrees by unformed materials that enter into it, and leave by passing through all possible states. To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it—these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation. The line of escape is part of the machine. Inside or outside, the animal is part of the burrow-machine. The problem is not that of being free but of finding a way out, or even a way in, another side, a hallway, an adjacency.
… As Kafka himself say, the problem isn’t of liberty but of escape. The question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any.
Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip—and here I have in mind malicious gossip—be challenged, everyone can disavow responsibility for having originated it. The Malay term for gossip and rumor, khabar angin (news on the wind), captures the diffuse quality of responsibility that makes such aggression possible.
The character of gossip that distinguishes it from rumor is that gossip consists typically of stories that are designated to ruin the reputation of some identifiable person or persons. If the perpetrators remain anonymous, the victim is clearly specified. There is, arguably, something of a disguised democratic voice about gossip in the sense that it is propagated only to the extent that others find it in their interest to retell the story.13 If they don’t, it disappears. Above all, most gossip is a discourse about social rules that have been violated. A person’s reputation can be damaged by stories about his tightfistedness, his insulting words, his cheating, or his clothing only if the public among whom such tales circulate have shared standards of generosity, polite speech, honesty, and appropriate dress. Without an accepted normative standard from which degrees of deviation may be estimated, the notion of gossip would make no sense whatever. Gossip, in turn, reinforces these normative standards by invoking them and by teaching anyone who gossips precisely what kinds of conduct are likely to be mocked or despised.
13. The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly. I do not mean to imply that gossip cannot and is not used by superiors to control subordinates, only that resources on this particular field of struggle are relatively more favorable to subordinates. Some people’s gossip is weightier than that of others, and, providing we do not confuse status with mere public deference, one would expect that those with high personal status would be the most effective gossipers.
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun.
| Ernest: | Have you ever made love to a truly great woman? |
| Gil: | Actually, my fiancé is pretty sexy. |
| Ernest: | And when you make love to her you feel true and beautiful passion. And you, for at least that moment, lose your fear of death. |
| Gil: | No that doesn't happen. |
| A.C.: | I don't deny French influences myself. Whether I want to or not, as a poet I express myself in French, and clearly French literature has influenced me. But I want to emphasize very strongly that—while using as a point of departure the elements that French literature gave me—at the same time I have always striven to create a new language. In other words, for me French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character. |
| R.D.: | Has surrealism been instrumental in your effort to discover this new French language? |
| A.C.: | I was ready to accept surrealism because I already had advanced on my own, using as my starting points the same authors that had influenced the surrealist poets. Their thinking and mine had common reference points. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything. This was very important because the traditional forms—burdensome, overused forms—we crushing me. |
| R.D.: | This was what interested you in the surrealist movement . . . |
| A.C.: | Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor. |
| R.D.: | So you were very sensitive to the concept of liberation that surrealism contained. Surrealism called forth deep and unconscious forces. |
| A.C.: | Exactly. And my thinking followed these lines: When then, if I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces. This, for me, was a call to Africa, I said to myself: it's true that superficially we are French we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plump the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black. |
| R.D.: | In other words, it was a process of disalienation. |
| A.C.: | Yes, a process of disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. |
| R.D.: | That's how surrealism has manifested itself in your work: as an effort to reclaim your authentic character, and in a way as an effort to reclaim the African heritage. |
| A.C.: | Absolutely. |
| R.D.: | And as a process of detoxification. |
| A.C.: | A plunge into the depths. It was a plunge into Africa for me. |
| R.D.: | It was a way of emancipating your consciousness. |
| A.C.: | Yes, I felt that beneath the social being would be found a profound being, over whom all sorts of ancestral layers and alluviums had been deposited. |
| from: | "An Interview with Aimé Césaire" (1967), trans. Maro Riofrancos in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 83–84. |
… The throne in the desert is absurd because there is no political power in a state of nature. Politics begins with the creation of meaning, which is always shared, reciprocal, a process of display and response. There is nothing to be appropriated that cannot also be withdrawn, and nothing so useless as a prop without a play.
… [Frank] Lentricchia [in his reading of Kenneth Burke] has grasped the radical implication latent within any recognition of political style: To the extent that power is a product of performance, it is spontaneous, actualized, and unstable. … In this conception, power is available potentially to anyone because it is entirely crafted, and sufficient to command the entire human being, but dependent on the thousand contingencies of audience response. This is why critical awareness of decorum is disturbing to those accustomed to the routinization of charisma. In place of rational governance, organizational structure, and political accountability, the analysis of political style suggests that often political decisions turn on transitory aesthetic perceptions, that a political system is continually reinvented through performances both scheduled and spontaneous, and that political power is very difficult to grasp. In other words, power can be a relation created through performance, or a residual property of previous or repeated performances, but it is not likely to be the same thing as the application of force or the rational operation of administrative practices.
The Bokoor House and the BAPMAF Center, the world’s premiere archive, museum, and NGO of West African and Ghanaian popular music, was tragically hit by a flood last month. Under the direction of Professor John Collins, BAPMAF is a truly unique and essential place for the preservation, study, and creation of African popular music. The impact of the flooding includes both human and archival dimensions. It is not only the Foundation’s rare holdings that were threatened by the waters; Professor Collins’s family narrowly escaped drowning and the Collins family house, located on the same grounds, is now in disrepair. In the aftermath, the family has sought out higher ground, and are “squatting” until they can find a way to return.
Any fan of highlife, afrobeat, afro-funk, or African folk music has Professor Collins and BAPMAF to thank. Collins is a Full Professor at the University of Ghana–Legon, and is a performer who has been at the center of Ghanaian and West African music scenes since the 1960s. He has collaborated with Fela Kuti, E.T. Mensah, Koo Nimo, Victor Uwaifo, Kwaa Mensah, King Bruce, and many, many more. The flooded compound is on the same grounds where he founded the superlative Bokoor Recording Studio in 1982—this is the spotwhere many classic highlife records of that era were recorded to tape. Today, with all of the amazing independent music labels and reissue projects that are bringing African beats to audiences across the globe (from the likes of Analog Africa, Soundways, Strut, Voodoo Funk, etc.), the blow to the Foundation and the Collins family are potentially devastating. Look in the liner notes of your favorite afro-funk compilation or highlife reissue, and you’ll undoubtedly see Professor Collins thanked—if he didn’t write the liner notes himself, that is!
The tragedy has been covered by the BBC and Afropop Worldwide. The official BAPMAF website was knocked down by the disaster, so we are setting up a temporary BAPMAF blog. The photos of some of the damage accompanying this post are sent along by Professor Collins.
What is needed now is donations to help Professor Collins and his family continue the process of repairing the Foundation and their lives. If you can donate any amount, please do so with the PayPal “Donate” button below. Any amount helps. You can be assured that all funds are going directly to the rebuilding efforts—no middlemen, no overhead, and no waste. The convenience of donating directly to the BAPMAF PayPal account ensures that every single dollar, pound sterling, or euro sent along will reach the relief effort directly. When donating be sure to mark your contribution as a “gift” for PayPal accounting purposes. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
The good news is that the recovery and restoration is underway. Professor Collins reports that, miraculously, the rarest and most essential of the holdings appear in-tact and functioning. (For example, although the 4-track tape machines are lost, the master tapes are undamaged. In addition, swift action was able to save many of the rarest paper materials, including original letters and unique documents.) Items without hope for recovery include the compound’s backup generator (required for living in Ghana, as anyone who has travelled in the region knows), all of the recording equipment, electronic and computer equipment, and Professor Collins’s car (to name just some of the damaged property).
Please help with the recovery by donating today. Many thanks— “medaase pii” —in advance.
On behalf of Professor Collins and BAPMAF (Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation),
As unusually well-informed officials knew, this stereotype bore little relation to Tanganyika’s kaleidoscopic history, but it was the shifting sand on which Cameron and his disciples erected indirect rule by ‘taking the tribal unit’. They had the power and they created a new political geography. This would have been transient, however, had it not coincided with similar trends among Africans. They too had to live amidst bewildering social complexity, which they ordered in kinship terms and buttressed with invented history. Moreover, Africans wanted effective units of action just as officials wanted effective units of government. Many Africans had strong personal motives for creating new units which they could lead. Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to.
During the twenty years after 1925 Tanganyika experienced a vast social reorganisation in which Europeans and Africans combined to create a new political order based on mythical history. … The effort to create a Nyakyusa tribe was as honest and constructive as the essentially similar effort forty years later to create a Tanganyikan nation. Both were attempts to build societies in which men could live well in the modern world.
