Bisulo's Pig , livre ebook

Hybrid Publishers - Taz Liffman

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201 pages

English

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It’s the turn of the nineteenth century and a small contingent of British colonialists has been dispatched to a (fictitious) African country, their mission: to establish colonial dominion over an ‘unclaimed territory’. While some of colonialism’s cruelties have by this stage been realised, the ‘Scramble for Africa’, under the auspices of Darwinian theory, Christian charity and Eurocentrism, has assumed the guise of philanthropy. Colonialism’s ‘noble duty’ – the ‘white man’s burden’ – is ‘to save the savages from themselves’.

Told with a dry, caustic humour that lampoons the era’s language and sensibilities, Bisulo’s Pig aims to situate the reader in the colonial mindset, typical of the time, that fictionalised Africa and rendered its native inhabitants as pitiful, barbarous or subhuman – and to reveal that a great many of us might not be quite as free of an imperialistic outlook as we may fancy.

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‘In recent decades, countless novelists have been criticised for the ways in which they’ve treated Africa and Africans in their works. And often justly so: many of these handlings have been crude, prejudiced, ignorant and dehumanising.

‘The purpose of Bisulo’s Pig is to examine whether swinging too blindly in the other direction can also present problems …

‘Ultimately, Bisulo’s Pig is all about cultural relativism and suprarationalism: Anthropology 101. It aims to show there can be logic couched in absurdity, science undergirding superstition, reason amid randomness. While the book’s aim is to darkly parody the colonial project as an exercise in farce, its overriding purpose is to reveal the multifarious guises under which racial prejudices persist.’ – Taz Liffman

Sujets

Historical

Fiction

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Publié par	Hybrid Publishers
Date de parution	01 août 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781925736861
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
Taz Liffman 2022
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, VIC Australia 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2022

ISBN 9781925736854 (p) 9781925736861 (e)
Cover design: Gittus Graphics www.gggraphics.com.au
Acknowledgment is made to Georges Borchart Agency for permission to use the Michel Foucault quote
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.
This passage quotes a certain Chinese encyclopedia in which it is written that animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed,
(c) tame,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) sirens,
(f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera,
(m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.
In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.
- Michel Foucault, Preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Author s Note
This book employs language, ideas, and imagery that some readers will - indeed, should - find discomfiting.
That it does so is intentional; the point is to make a broader one about how much of the West used to (and in many cases still does) look upon foreign people and their cultures.
I would refer readers who find the work s content offensive to the book s Afterword, which explains in greater detail what it seeks to achieve.
Some readers may also be struck by certain parallels between this book and Chinua Achebe s Things Fall Apart . While Things Fall Apart certainly helped me find how to tell this story (for which reason I have included several tributes throughout the text), I had formed the preliminary plot of Bisulo s Pig in my mind before ever reading or hearing about this book (and only read Achebe s follow-up work, Arrow of God , after I d finished writing it - so any parallels here are coincidental). Another work that inspired my forming of the idea for this book was Walter Russell Crocker s On Governing Colonies: Being an Outline of the Real Issues and a Comparison of the British, French and Belgian Approach to them (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1947).
I dedicate this book to my parents, whose support, feedback and encouragement were instrumental to my finishing it.
- TL
Part 1
Chapter 1
Bisulo had just about dozed off when the lizard fell on his head. The morning s toil had caught up with him sooner even than it had the day before, and, as one who esteemed his instincts highly, he had been sure to heed them with a quick nap. Indeed, on several occasions in Bisulo s life, heeding his instincts had saved it.
One particularly balmy evening several seasons previous, a chap in Bisulo s clan had accidentally beaten his new wife to death, the inconvenience of which, as we soon shall learn, had presented a great calamity for the village. Bloody and protracted inter-tribal conflict, liable to persist for generations, wasn t at all uncommon to the part of Africa wherein our tale takes place - and so it was for Bisulo s clan, the Chupame, who had come to regard their incessant raidings of their foes, the Chiwanga, and the expectation that they would be summarily raided in turn, as simply another of life s many vicissitudes.
The effects of this fractious history on village life were many and manifold. From a tender age the clan children had learnt it was unsafe to pass beyond the village s Western boundaries; in the women it had become second nature to be constantly looking over their shoulders while carrying out their daily chores; and for the poor men it was an anxious walk back to the village each day from their mid-morning hunt for the fear that they would find their huts burnt down, their women in various states of distress, and their beer all gone.
Therefore, although the Chupame were the more powerful clan, when an unarmed Chiwanga messenger had one day arrived requesting an audience with the Great Chief Mklonkwo, the move had been received with cautious curiosity. He had been sent at the behest of the Chiwanga chief with news of great import, the man had nervously explained, stationed ten paces from the chief s hut - and so Mklonkwo had let him stand out in the hot sun for a very long time before coming out to receive him, by which time a great crowd had amassed to hear what the loathsome Chiwangano had to say.
As it was soon revealed, it was indeed on a very important purpose that the messenger had been deployed. It concerned the women in their village, he had explained; they had so tired of living in fear that their husbands beer might be thieved that, following the Chupame s last raid, a small contingent had approached their chief, despondently inquiring as to the reason for the conflict. And, in what had proven a rather embarrassing circumstance, neither he nor any other of the village elders had been able to recall it! Why, it was downright humiliating! Would the Great Chief Mklonkwo therefore be so kind as to remind him of the reason for their enmity, the messenger had asked, in order that their chief might redeem himself in the eyes of the women and the men continue fighting the good fight? It wasn t that their warriors were scared, he was quick to add. Not in the least! But the women were now so poorly disposed to the conflict that, what with their incessant moping and whining and pestering, they were really making life in the village quite unpleasant.
When situations such as these usually arose, there generally existed somebody in the clan who could remember and relay to the messenger the origins of the violence. The latter would then be invited to sit and enjoy a customary meal of fofo , and, upon his finishing this, be immediately chased from the village, whereon the warring would resume afresh. On this particular occasion, however, neither Mklonkwo nor any of the other Chupame elders had been able to recall the source of their acrimony. And thus, faced with little other choice, it was agreed that a temporary truce should be installed until such time that somebody could.
For the five full moons that this precarious detente had prevailed, the Chupame had actually come to find the ensuing state of relative peace one not entirely without benefit. Once more could the village children play along the village s western boundaries, the women were found to run their errands more efficiently, and the men were greatly cheered by the extra time it offered them of directing their energies to other worthy pursuits - such as raiding their enemies to the East, the Nirefu .
Upon the rising of the fifth full moon it was therefore agreed between the chiefs that there would be no dishonour to either side in the truce s being established permanently. Each clan conducted one final raid, for old time s sake, and a virgin niece of each chief was then married off to a Big Man in the other tribe, the rationale of this being that, should the conflict s cause ever one day recur to someone, her vulnerability should serve as a deterrent to it reigniting.
Now, as you might by this point have guessed, it was precisely this very woman who had been killed by Bisulo s clansman. And so, fearing that the peace might unravel, Chief Mklonkwo had ordered the Big Man to go to the Chiwanga chief with an apology and invitation to name his compensation.
As this particular Big Man s older brother, Bisulo was obliged by custom to accompany him on his journey. Yet, on the morning that they were to depart, he had started feeling uneasy about the whole thing. His gut felt twisted and queasy, his hands were shaky, his thinking was muddled and, as though to attest to all this, he had experienced a rather dramatic episode of diarrhea just as they were preparing to set out. Interpreting this then as his intuition advising him against going, Bisulo, drawing on his prerogative as second eldest brother, had refused.
It was a good thing that he did. For, as things had transpired, the Chiwanga chief had had Bisulo s older brother burnt to death as compensation for his niece s murder, and, as the price for keeping the peace, had had Bisulo s younger brother - who had had to go in Bisulo s place - decapitated.
Whilst it had naturally saddened Bisulo to see his only brothers lost to such tragic ends, his wasn t such a gloomy soul as not also to recognise something to be savoured from knowing that his impulses had rung true, and, for many days thereafter, he had spoken candidly to those of his clansmen polite enough to listen not only of the cruel fate that had befallen him, but of his excellent sense of intuition.
Bisulo s supreme instincts had again come into effect several months later, when, it being believed that a small child who d not been seen for several days had wandered off into The Spooky Forest, Mklonkwo had selected a small contingent of the village men to venture in looking for her. Although he barely knew the child, Bisulo had again been one of those selected, and again he