MARU LECTURE NOTES

These are my very rough and ready notes for the Maru lecture series. Note that reading these notes is not a substitute for attending the lectures – the lectures cover a lot more ground much more thoroughly.

Daniel Roux, University of Cape Town, 29 April 2003.

• We are looking at Head’s Maru in the context of postcolonial literature. What do we mean by “postcolonial”?

• What we now call “postcolonial studies” really started in the 1950s, when European colonialism started dismantling. In the 1950s, France’s involvement in Indochina ended, the Algerian war broke out, the Mau Mau uprisings took place in Kenya, and King Farouk was deposed in Egypt. Europe was losing power over its colonies, and a new generation of writers and theorists tried to understand the implications of the new world order, and to deal with the damage done by the old. Frantz Fanon, the Algerian philosopher and activist, published his seminal work Black Skin, White Mask. In the same decade, the political theorists Aime Cesaire and Albert Memmi published their famous critiques of colonialism, and Chinua Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart in 1958. This became a benchmark postcolonial novel and in a sense inaugurated a new kind of literature, which now includes writers as disparate as Ben Okri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, JM Coetzee, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Ba, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, etc. etc.

• One definition of the word “postcolonial”, from Bill Ashcroft’s The Empire Writes Back – it “covers all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day”. In this sense, a “postcolonial” literature is any literature that “speaks back” to the processes of (especially European) imperialism. Click here for a more thorough definition of the term “postcolonial”.

• What do we mean by “speaks back”? Firstly, in an obvious sense – it “speaks back” by deploring colonial practices, by speaking against the politics of colonialism.

• But postcolonial literature and theory are also involved in reclaiming our own stories, our own way of seeing the world, our own sense of reality, against an imposed European notion of what is real. “Speaking back” becomes about insisting on a different epistemology.

• Maru is interesting because it deals with the oppressive power of ideas. There are no overt European “colonialists” in the society that Head describes; instead, the text looks especially at those places where European and more traditional African beliefs and opinions collude to take agency away from women and to fuel racism. Maru also asks the question – how can these disempowering ideas be resisted? Especially if one is doubly disempowered – first because of race (the protagonist is a despised Masarwa), and second because of gender (women are seen as less important than men).

• Margaret Cadmore’s mother, also called Margaret Cadmore, is a very complex and ambiguous character. She narcissistically gives her daughter her own name, divests her of her birth-culture and uses her in order to prove her theory concerning the ascendancy of nurture over nature (p.15). In this sense, she is a typical patronising colonial figure, treating her Margaret Cadmore Jnr more like a servant than like a daughter (p.16). However, she also resists racism, sometimes genuinely seems to love her daughter, and tries to empower her.

• When Margaret Cadmore Snr leaves, her daughter is in a typical postcolonial predicament. Her British education has empowered her, lifting her above the abject slavery most Masarwa people are reduced to, but at the same time it has dispossessed her. She therefore truly belongs nowhere – with her British education, her polished accent, she clearly does not belong to Masarwa culture, yet she is despised by the Batswana people in Dilepe for being a Masarwa. As a woman, she is further relegated to the margin, belonging everywhere and nowhere, forever between identities and cultures. One can look at this “in-betweenness” as a site of plenitude (p.20), but at the same time it is a kind of plenitude that impoverishes and exiles her.

• In a way, Margaret is paralysed by this lack of determinate identity. This stasis and dissociation is prefigured by the lack of rain at the beginning of the novel – its action takes place both literally and symbolically during a “stagnant interregnum”.

• Does Margaret have any agency in the novel? First, let’s look at what disempowers her, then at what empowers her.

• First, being a Masarwa takes power away from her. Her ethnic identity renders her radically “other”, both from a colonial point of view and, Head suggests, from an indigenous African point of view: (p.12). The Masarwa are silenced through other people’s racist projections.

• Second, Margaret Cadmore Snr appears to offer her a degree of status and freedom through her Western education. But her education is a double-edged sword. If it allows Margaret Jnr access to the dominant group, it cuts her off from her own people, while at the same time placing her in a position where she never really belongs to the dominant group because she is always seen as a Masarwa. If people like the school principal, Pete, is empowered by his English education, one can ask questions about the extent to which this education empowers Margaret. This is not just because she is a Masarwa, but also because she is a woman – yet another disempowering category. Often educated women have to try harder than their uneducated sisters to fit into their communities – a great deal of African literature by women deals with society's patriarchal fear of educated women.

• We also need to be suspicious about the nature of an English education. While it affords a certain social status, and translates into social and economic power, colonial education always served to internalise the values of the coloniser.

• Finally, Margaret is disempowered by her “postcoloniality” – by the way in which she belongs everywhere and nowhere. She cannot assume a determinate identity because in a sense she always lives “on the border”, between different states, different identities.

• Are there any ways in which she does exercise agency? Let’s start with her sense of being split. While it is identified as a paralysing condition above, postcolonial interstitiality or hybridity can also be liberating. It allows a kind of fluidity of identity; we are never identified by our race, or our tribe, or in a simplistic way by our nation. (p. 94) As hybridised postcolonial subjects, we are skeptical of all ideology, and by nature self-reflexive. The worst evil is perpetrated in the name of a determinate identity erected at the expense of difference – but postcolonial fluidity allows for the free play of difference (and therefore allows the possibility of change.) If there is any moral dichotomy in the novel, it is between fluidity and stasis, change and inertia – the good is always on the side of change and openness.

• When Margaret finally declares “I am a Masarwa”, is she therefore falling back into this conservative notion of identity? Is she returning to the world of stereotypes and labels? No, precisely because when she says “I am a Masarwa”, she in fact changes how people understand the term Masarwa: in other words, she doesn’t say “I am a Masarwa” in a way that fixes her identity, but in a way that makes both her own identity and the identity of the Masarwa people complicated and fluid. We could say that this statement, “I am a Masarwa”, is one of the powerful moments where Margaret exercises agency in the text. Saying she is a Masarwa doesn’t make life simpler for anyone – in fact, it complicated people’s sense of reality.

• Another important way in which Margaret exercises agency is through her art. If Margaret is very quiet and passive, she does speak through her art – this is where she finds a voice. Her art is described as a kind of raw, rebellious energy: “Something inside her was more powerful than her body could endure. It had to be brought under control, put on a leash and then be allowed to live in a manageable form.” (p.102) In her art, she transforms the ordinary and the everyday into a force for change: ( p.107 – p.108). In this sense, her art is revolutionary – a demonstration of how art doesn’t have to be overtly “political” in order to carry the message of political change. You might want to ask yourself – does art really have this power? What makes this description interesting is that she just represents normal things that she sees around her, but her art transforms them into something sublime. This is quite a romantic idea of art. It is interesting that she inherits this talent from her mother: another example of the ambivalence of her mother’s legacy. The sense in which she exercises agency through her art is complicated by the fact that Maru seems increasingly to exercise control over her imagination – or at least, he imagines he does. He secretly buys her art equipment, takes her paintings for himself, eventually he even colonises her mind, confusing her dreams and his.

• Nonetheless, while Margaret is painting, she seems more in control of her own life than at any other point in the novel. She is happy, this is also the time she starts painting seriously. It is significant that this is also a time of isolation. Other people seem more often than not to disempower her. Where she does draw strength from others, it is always in a fraught and doomed way. Dikeledi is a kind of sister, a comrade – for instance, Margaret is known as “Dikeledi’s friend”, which gives her at least some status. Dikeledi protects her and provides company, ultimately helping to make her feel human. But if Dikeledi helps her to feel alive, Dikeledi also kills her (p.118). The novel is deeply ambiguous about the value of community and the intersubjective bond.

• The strength that she finds in her isolation becomes embodied by the arrival of the goats. They are like her spirit companions. The Queen of Sheba is a powerful matriarchal figure, an embodiment of power. Margaret’s inner strength is revealed through the figure of the goat. When she learns that Moleka has declared his love for Dikeledi, her despair is echoed by the death of the Queen of Sheba. It is nearly as if Margaret loses her authority and potency by allowing herself to love: it almost seems as if other people are always poisonous. A central question in the novel: do I have power through others, through community and solidarity, or do I have power only outside my community? In a way, the novel almost suggests that it is either/or, it can’t be both.

• Nonetheless, Maru’s love seems to bring her back to life (p.123). Here it seems as if another person can be empowering. But one can read this in another way: she becomes like his puppet, and he exercises the power of life and death over her. An important question in the novel is why he decides to marry her. Is it to prove a political point, like her mother? Is she just another experiment? Or does he love her for herself? “Being so highly individualistic himself, he dreaded working out any conclusions along those of tribe or race. But the conditions which surrounded him at the time forced him to think of her as a symbol of her tribe and through her he sought to gain an understanding of the eventual liberation of an oppressed people.” (p. 108) He seems to marry her at least in part to “change the world”. To what extent is Margaret merely sacrificed for the freedom of a people?

• A final note about the way power operates in Maru: it deals with revolution on a micro-scale. It is a story about just a few people in a small village, not about a large social revolution. It deals with ordinary, domestic things. It is about people who refuse to collaborate in the power game in small ways. Margaret refuses to pretend she is coloured. Dikeledi befriends her even though she is a Masarwa. Moleka eats with the Masarwa slaves in his home. Maru marries a Masarwa woman. These events do not seem to justify Head’s claim at the end of the novel that “the wind of freedom had reached the Masarwa people”. Her claim seems to big, given the size of the events she describes. But the point she is making is that change always starts in these small ways, in a shift of perception and habits of behaviour. “They thought he was dead and would trouble them no more. How were they to know that many people shared Maru’s overall ideals, that this was not the end of him, but a beginning?” (p. 126) The point here is not really that Maru and Margaret somehow transform society through their actions, but that society is slowly inexorably transformed through the actions of many.

• Finally, a few notes concerning schizophrenia. Above, I’ve observed that the postcolonial condition is characterized by schizophrenia. But how can a mental illness characterize a cultural situation? Surely mental illness is a medical condition? In fact, no-one can say with any certainty. For instance, hysteria has all but disappeared in the modern world. It was really a Victorian disease, in the same way that we can say schizophrenia characterizes our postmodern, postcolonial condition. Certain social conditions invite a specific psychological response. How we deal with mental illness is also cultural – for instance, many people who would be seen as schizophrenic in our society and treated in a mental institution might be seen as visionaries in another culture and accorded a specific social role and status.

• Maru is full of “schizophrenic” descriptions. Maru himself is described as a kind of schizophrenic subject. He hears voices (p.8), there is a strange paranoid symbiosis between him and Moleka. (p.58): it seems as if he is Moleka, they are the same person split into two (p. 35). He has “indefinable ailments”. These schizophrenic characteristics become associated with Maru’s visionary qualities. One way of looking at schizophrenia, is to say it is a failure to enter the symbolic order of society successfully. For Maru to be a true leader, he needs to transcend his narrow social order, he needs not to be symbolically integrated into the fabric of his community. With Maru, we could say that his “schizophrenia” is a kind of strangeness, almost god-like qualities, that place him beside the norm and allow him the messianic potency to change the world.

• Margaret is another “schizophrenic” character, constantly described as divided against herself, split from within (p.71). Her split consciousness is a psychological response to a social situation; a kind of “nervous condition” that comes with her subject positioning, always halfway between worlds

• In addition, it is as if the novel is itself schizophrenic; its strange, surreal (and in some ways typically modernist) style reflects its status as a postcolonial text. As readers, we are drawn into a kind of schizophrenic consciousness – and this consciousness is intimately tied to the novel’s politics. It is both a result of its postcolonial situation, and part of its reaction to it – it resists the social order through the slippery, unreal, dissident language of schizophrenia. To put it differently – the characters, the novel itself, is driven to a kind of schizophrenic state by the political conditions of its postcolonial context, but the schizophrenia is also a form of resistance, a place of dreams, of violence, of a curious, twisted form of freedom.

• One more example – Margaret’s dissociation from her body. Often she seems to occupy an almost cataleptic state, dissociated from her body (p.120) This is significant, because she is torn between what her body represents to other people and her own experience of her body. We can say there is a search in the novel to belong to her own body, that she is denied ownership of her physical self. Her comatose dissociation from her body is therefore significant precisely because her body is so politicised. It reflects the kind of damage that society inflicts on her. One could even say that her “death”, her broken neck, is a form of resistance: both to her heartache when she loses Moleka, and to attempts by society to inscribe meaning on her body.

LINKS

Biography

Emory University biography of Bessie Head.

Online criticism of Maru

Stan Galloway, “San culture in Bessie Head’s Maru”. The representation of San people in Head’s novel.

Sunday Times, “Strange mixture of Maru.” An analysis of the “contrasting sides” of Maru’s character.

Sunday Times, “DAD will help you to tackle study of themes”. An analysis of alienation in Maru.

Contextual information

Leon Marshall, “Busmen driven from ancestral homes in Botswana”. Recent National Geographic news article about the San people’s ongoing struggle for political rights and land in Botswana.

Neil Parsons, “A brief history of Botswana”.

Postcolonial literature and theory

The Postcolonial Web. Authors, theory, links, etc.

Postcolonial Studies website. Emory University.

John Lye, “Some issues in postcolonial theory”. Brock University.