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Spectral Atlantic: Embodiment andHaunting in Hershini Bhana Young'sHaunting CapitalAshleigh Harris aa University of the Witwatersrand ,Published online: 30 Mar 2009.

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South African Historical Journal, 56 (2006), 219-227

Spectral Atlantic: Embodiment and Haunting inHershini Bhana Young's Haunting Capital

ASHLEIGH HARRISUniversity of the Witwatersrand

Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body. By HERSHINIBHANA YOUNG. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.232pp. ISBN 1 58465 519 4.

In her introduction to Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black DiasporicBody, Hershini Bhana Young outlines her project as part of a broader initiative totheorise `the black body ... as a collective, remembering body' (p. 2, originalitalics). The book, following this theoretical premise which Bhana Young outlinesin the introductory chapter, makes its contribution to scholarship of the Africandiaspora in fairly straightforward ways in its discussion of novels from both sidesof the Atlantic and its engagement with the theoretical questions and debates thathave come to define the area. Indeed, what might be seen as Bhana Young'sidiosyncratic approach to academic style and methodology is itself part-and-parcelof black Atlantic critiques and re-workings of the western rationality andmodernity that constitute the foundations of hegemonic, white academies. Shestates at the outset, that against the belief that any `departure from the myths ofobjectivity, from a legitimizing expert testimony and vocabulary, is ... a sign ofdiminished academic capacity', her work seeks to `close the chasm between theoryand praxis, to intentionally and courageously depart from academic writing that is"stable, static, formal"' (p. 14).'

Her methodology, then, rejects `those critical voices that insist on definingrigorous scholarship as devoid of the "anecdotal" and emotional' (p. 14). Shefurther insists that this inclusion of the affective and the personal, and herresistance to the absolutisms of Western rationality are politically motivatedchoices that go some way towards re-vocalising the muted voices of the Africandiaspora. The methodology of the text mirrors and enables the discussion of thetexts to hand. This approach might be seen as a version of Paul Gilroy's notion of

1. Quoting P. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge,MA, 1991), 7.

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a black vernacular culture, elaborated in his seminal work The Black Atlantic,' inwhich the forms of recording black histories, articulating black self-expression, orproducing black cultural products, are seen to be organically linked to the culturalrepertoire that these `texts' elaborate, emerge from, and speak to. In this respect,Bhana Young's attempt at a black vernacular approach to questions of blackmemory, traumatic historical pasts and the articulation of diasporic identities, isadmirable, although the text does not sustain the idea, and the tensions that resultbetween a somewhat hegemonic academic form and moments of anecdote orpersonal memory are, at times, awkward and not always convincing. .

An example of such awkwardness emerges in Bhana Young's elaboration ofher central trope in the text: that of the ghost, or of haunting. Bhana Young makesa convincing argument for the trope of the ghost's resistance to modernity and theproject of the Enlightenment. She argues that the ghost is liminal, a peripheralfigure that articulates its critique of western Enlightenment discourses from theedges of those very discursive absolutes. Yet, in its haunting nature, the ghostleaves its footprints on the terrain of the center: it is not simply relegated to themargins. Developing the trope via the cultural archive of the African diaspora,Bhana Young does well to trace the trope's lineage in African American andAfrican epistemologies and, more significantly, textual practices, and is convincingin her argument that ghosts `enable us to rethink the relationship betweenknowledge and power, between an authorised and a vernacular witnessing of racialinjury itself' (p. 33). Following Toni Morrison's indispensable notion of `re-memory', in which the past exists, not as psychological effect, but as real,corporeal and affective, Bhana Young attempts, here, to use the ghost to 'incorpo-rate' (in the senses of both including and embodying) the traumatic memories ofthe African diaspora into the present moment. Yet, the argument becomes awkwardand oddly self-defeating when Bhana Young turns to Jacques Derrida's Spectersof Marx to substantiate her point, arguing that the `morphology of ghostlinessrepresents an alternative to ontology, where the remains of dead (sic) are localizedand fixed' (p. 35). 3 It is unfortunate that, despite her courageous urge towards ablack vernacular, she should rely on the theory of Derrida to validate her point.This is not to suggest that the inclusion of western models of philosophy areinadmissible in the creation of a black vernacular, but rather that Bhana Youngseems, paradoxically, haunted by her own need to `ground' her vernacular in thevalidating discourses of the western academy.

I have further concerns with Bhana Young's trope of the ghost. She arguesthat the past, re-membered' through the ghost, avoids the problem that one `cannot

2. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London, 1993).3. J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Interna-

tional (New York, 1994).4. Toni Morrison reads re-membering as a response to the dismembering of black bodies in

America's past. Re-memory, then, is a method of recalling the dis-remembered dead, andreturning those dismembered black bodies to a state of, at least, narrative coherence. The idea

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simply enervate the corpus, for it no longer exists in its prior form and to do sowould crucially silence the resistance signaled by the specter's presence' (p. 35,original italics), and, later in the text, she argues that the ghost enables speechagainst subaltern silence (p. 70). This raises two related concerns. First, if thesubaltern's speech can only ever exist spectrally, then it is in danger of being, onceagain, relegated to the margins, the feint and transparent, the disembodied.'Second, if Bhana Young's project is, at least partially, to bear witness to thetraumatic histories experienced by black bodies, then the trope of the disembodiedghost becomes somewhat problematic. While, as I have already established, theghost is a useful trope in its ability to transcend material boundaries and thusenable the critique of western rationalism and the very process of modernity thatcannot be extricated from the history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, I am notconvinced by its efficacy in conjuring the `embodied memory of Africa' (p. 4) thatBhana Young uses to elaborates her understanding of the African diaspora. Eventhe most influential haunted fiction of African American literature, Toni Morri-son's Beloved,' needs to embody the return of the ghost (who provides ametonymic trace to the re-memory of slavery). As a disembodied ghost, Belovedonly haunts; as a re-incarnated and embodied woman, she insists on the re-membering of the past of slavery. The ghost cannot manage this metonymic (andmnemonic) trace alone: it needs to be incarnated in a body.

Furthermore, the trope of spectrality also tends (somewhat dangerously)towards two related myths in Bhana Young's analysis. The first is the notion ofancestry as the authenticator of the individual remembering the traumatic past, orbearing witness to it (surely the ancestors can only speak to or through theirdescendants, the argument goes). The second is the idea that the embodiedtraumatic past can only be articulated as spectral; that there is no acknowledgmentwithin contemporary rationalist discourse of that traumatic past and that Westernmodernity cannot bear witness to and, thereby, incorporate the significance of thehistories of trauma inflicted on black bodies and the continued emotional affect ofthose histories. This argument insists that the ways in which traumatic histories ofthe African Diaspora become what Paul Gilroy would call the `nodal points'around which contemporary notions of blackness are organised,' matter only to

is developed in her novel Beloved through which she traces the `process of re-membering thebody and its parts, re-membering the family, the neighbourhood, and our national history': T.Morrison, `Home' in W. Lubiano, ed., The House that Race Built: Original Essays by ToniMorrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics inAmerica Today (New York, 1998).

5. It might be argued that in the absence of actual testimony from the experiences of the MiddlePassage, for example, the only way to recuperate that historical epoch (especially affectively)is through the language of metaphor which, whilst always in danger of becoming generalisingand historically vague, could be an important form of re-memory. However, Bhana Young doesnot put forth such an argument for the role of metaphor in archiving the traumatic past.

6. T. Morrison, Beloved (New York, 1987).7. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 198.

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those who identify as black. Yet, surely everyone should be haunted by this past?Surely if, as Gilroy suggests, the project of modernity was largely built on the backof the Atlantic slave trade, the global imaginary and all its modern subjects shouldunderstand the traumatic global histories of racial domination, oppression,enslavement, torture, and trauma in the names of colonisation and slavery to beconstitutive of their present day national and personal identities no matter whattheir race?

I am concerned, then, that the trope of the ghost might reassign such historiesto the non-material, and thereby, once again, deny the corporeality of thesetraumatic histories. Bhana Young claims that the ghost speaks about thedestruction of the evidence of the injury done to black peoples and the necessityof that injury to be remembered in embodied, nonlinear ways'. The `ghost becomesthe body of testimony, a witness to unspeakable things' (p. 44); however, whileBhana Young goes on to argue that ghosts are both `flesh and ghost, alive and theliving dead' (p. 45), her own trope remains, in its generality, quite vague anddisembodied. It is interesting to note, for example, that the book barely mentionsthe contemporary realities of HIV/AIDS in present-day Africa, the sick and dyingbodies that are neither ghostly nor merely traces back to the traumatic past, but areontological presences in pain at this very moment. If one wants to think about theinjury of the collective black body, how is it possible to simply erase this presentreality, specifically given Bhana Young's insistence that writers of and in theAfrican diaspora must be in dialogue with the contemporary reality of Africa, notonly the anterior, mythologised version of the pre-colonial, pre-slave tradecontinent?

It is precisely because of this point that I find Bhana Young's argument thatthe trope of the ghost enables the embodiment of memory (and reality) problem-atic. She states: `The real ghostly body can function as a trace, and sometimes inthe shadowy realms of the margin, metaphors assume beautiful faces. Thisambivalence is part of the methodology of haunting that refuses the solidity of arational, ordered, and three-dimensional world' (p. 46). Yet, if Bhana Young were,indeed, engaging in a dialogue with contemporary Africa, she would surelyreconfigure her trope: yes, black bodies are haunted by the violent histories ofcolonisation, apartheid, and slavery, but the haunting is not spectral, it isconstitutive of contemporary life and is lived through contemporary, three-dimensional, bodies, primarily, in ways that (despite her insistence that memoryis embodied) she fails to recognise. And these bodies are not only haunted bycolonisation, but also by the failure of the contemporary African nation state Sucha critical engagement with the contemporary African nation state is evaded throughwhat can only be seen as the idealisation of African ancestry in statements such as:

8. It is problematic that Bhana Young does not engage with any instances in which contemporaryblack bodies are abused by the African nation state itself, except incidentally and indirectly inher discussion of Maryse Condé's Hérémakhonon at the end of the book. This seemssymptomatic, despite her claims to the contrary, of Bhana Young's idealising of the continent.

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`our embodiment of our re-membered injury exists simultaneously with ourremembered ancestors; we turn our head to the left to drum like the Congoleseancestors; we break pottery on graves like they tell us, and we choke on the painof speaking English, on the taste of iron and saliva from the dirt-eating mask' (p.46).

Bhana Young's outline of her book's aim sums up my problems with hercentral trope. She states:

An imperfect remembering of the circum-Atlantic diaspora seems pressing, whereby webear witness to the ineffable violence perpetrated on Otherized bodies while recognizingthat our hidden transcripts are never static, always performative and continuallyreembodied. Haunting Capital enacts just such a witnessing and recognition through acareful dialogue with critical and imaginative texts that help perform and reshape the raced,classed, and gendered circum-Atlantic world (p. 7).

I would argue that a more pressing nodal point, to paraphrase Gilroy, in theorganisation of the contemporary African diaspora, is the way in which blackness,across the African continent and in the African diaspora, is currently the site of`ineffable violence perpetrated on Otherized bodies'. This is not an anteriorapproach, suggested by the trope of the ghost, but a desperately immediate one.

Bhana Young does attempt to avoid the dismissal of contemporary Africa byreading African literary texts alongside black diasporic ones. Yet, even in this, I amnot sure that she achieves her aim not to `neglect the active participation ofcontemporary Africa' (p. 12) in the constitutive dialogues of the African diaspora.For a start, her analysis includes Bessie Head's A Question of Power and TsitsiDangarembga's Nervous Conditions, published in 1974 and 1988 respectively.These novels, whilst central to the canon of African writing, and specificallyAfrican women's writing, are products of their times, and do not allow for the`active engagement of contemporary Africa' that Bhana Young seeks to achieve.Furthermore, many of the critical lenses through which these texts are read areAmerican or European, which disallows the development of some of the conceptsdiscussed in the text through contemporary African theoretical debates. 9 Thisapparent division between theory and text (precisely the kind of division that thebook is attempting to collapse) is deeply problematic here, since it upholds a moremenacing binary of the `theoretical', on the one hand, situated firmly here as thedomain of the West, and the `cultural', on the other, which, taken to include fiction,is posited as African. I do not see much evidence of Bhana Young transcending,

9. I am thinking, for example, of Bhana Young's regular use of Eduoard Glissant's notion of`points of entanglement': E. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J.M. Dash(Charlottesville, 1989), discussed in Bhana Young, Haunting Capital, 3, which have beenbrilliantly developed by Achille Mbembe in his influential, and more contemporary, On the

Postcolony (Berkeley, CA, 2001).

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in this book, the damaging consequences of this pernicious binary in thecontemporary global academy.

A further consequence of an understanding of contemporary diasporicblackness, based more in the past than in the present, is that it lends itself togeneralisation and dehistoricisation of that past (and, as I have argued above, thepresent too). This is already noticeable in Bhana Young's somewhat blurred notionof ancestry in which her re-memory links her to the enslaved `Congolese ancestors'in such an embodied way that she `choke(s) on the pain of speaking English, on thetaste of iron and saliva from the dirt-eating mask' (p. 46). The creation of such acorporeal bond to the past is metaphorically resonant, but Bhana Young'spersistent use of the definite article in referring to `the black body'; `the injuredblack body'; `the Congolese ancestors' et cetera, falls into the danger, faced in allAfrican diaspora studies, of reducing the complex specificities of the histories ofcolonisation and the trans-Atlantic slave trade to generalisations (often configuredthrough unspecific metaphor). It is unsurprising, then, that Bhana Young goes onto make the transition from `the black body' to `our collective black body' (p. 3).I acknowledge that this slippage from the generalised black body to a generalisedcollectively shared body is done as part of her project to incorporate the affectivein the work; that the inclusion of affective histories and memories is criticallyimportant in bearing witness to histories of pain and trauma, since personalmemory and feeling provide traces to an endlessly complex, rich and valuablearchive of traumatic pasts. However, I am not convinced that this (double)slippage, (first, from individual black bodies to `the' generalised black body, andsecond, to a claiming of that metaphorically totalising construct as `our blackbodies') actually aids bearing witness to the traumatic pasts Bhana Young isseeking to re-member. The first slippage emerges in her assertion, followingArchbishop Desmond Tutu's foreword to the final Truth and ReconciliationCommission report, that `the idea of the wounded individual body ... stands in forthe body of the nation itself' (p. 17, original italics). Yet, as Leon de Kock states,considering questions of nationhood in South Africa at the time of the TruthCommission, it is `highly problematic to shift from the first-person singular to thefirst-person plural ... to move from "I" to "we" or "us"', 10 since this kind ofslippage leads to what he calls the `totalizing fictions' of nationhood. 11 The shiftfrom the individual to the collective body requires a metaphorical leap that, for me,effaces the individual, subsumes his or her traumatised body into a generalisingand reductive metaphor of black historical trauma. Thus, whereas Bhana Young'sstatement that `black bodies function not only as individuals but also as metonymsfor larger historical forces that constitute social bodies' (p. 89) suggests that thismetonymic shift from the individual to the collective can keep the individual's

10. L. De Kock, `South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction', Poetics Today, 22, 2(2001), 272.

11. Ibid., 290.

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narrative intact, I do not feel that her articulation of the relationship between theindividual and the collective is careful enough to ensure the cohabitation of thesetwo narratives - as, for example, Paul Gilroy manages in his excellent redefiningof tradition as the `living memory of the changing same'.' It is a pity, in thisrespect, that Bhana Young does not develop to its full potential her notion of raceas `the repository for an alternative history' (p. 25) rather than fall into what canonly be the essentialising and totalising fictions of a generalised racial collective.

The strongest part of the book, and where Bhana Young's trope of hauntingenables the argument in interesting ways, is in her literary analyses which comprisethe bulk of the text. In her discussion of literary fictions, Bhana Young'smethodology is used appropriately and her tropes and metaphors do not delimit theanalysis of the texts. In her reading, in Chapter Two, of Bessie Head's A Questionof Power, she makes a convincing argument that considers the dynamics betweenhysteria, madness and blackness in relation to the haunting and haunted protagonistof the novel, Elizabeth. In the third chapter, her analysis of Gayl Jones'sCorregidora starts to motion towards a re-embodiment of memory in which thebody (through physical scarring) becomes a palimpsest for trauma, rather thanlanguage or the psyche being the single repository for the past. This supports, farmore convincingly than her theoretical engagement with such questions, herassertion that, in the text, the `black body ... not only enables one to bear witnessbut also is a living and breathing text that testifies, in and of itself, to the injury ofblackness' (p. 110).

In Chapter Four the discussion of Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditionsis similarly astute, particularly in Bhana Young's assessment of the role of dirt inthe novel. I do have some reservations about her reading of African patriarchythough, which she sees as a direct consequence of colonisation. She argues that inblack Rhodesia, `[m]ales need to be educated first, primarily due to the southernAfrican colonial state's desire to create a tier of African patriarchal elites whowould make up the backbone of the imperial system of indirect rule' (p. 149, myemphasis). While this was undoubtedly a dynamic in colonial Rhodesia, theanalysis skims over the complex and pervasive nature of African patriarchy itself(something that Dangarembga is deeply concerned with). Also, while this analysisis, in and of itself, interesting, it departs quite significantly from the central tropesof the ghost and re-memory in the book.

It is only in the final chapter of the book that Bhana Young starts to critiquethe idea of a mythic Africa existing anterior to modernity in her analysis of MaryseCondé's Hérémakhonon. It is, therefore, late in the text when she considersEduoard Glissant's insistence that diasporic engagements with Africa cannotproduce a `reversion' (p. 190) model, but rather `diversion' (p. 192) model which`demands the demystification of diasporic African's overdetermined imaginingsof the continent as well as an engagement with a contemporary nationspecific

12. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 198.

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Africa' (p. 192). It is a pity that Glissant's ideas were not more carefully engagedin the introduction to this book, since this might have diminished some of theproblems that I have discussed above. Moreover, Bhana Young's excellent use ofGlissant's `points of entanglement' here, brings together the best and mostconvincing aspects of her trope of the ghost. She argues: `The ancestors, both asghostly evidence of wounding and as real beings, are not located in an Africa thatis fixed at the moment of captivity. Rather they constitute the point of entangle-ment performed via the performance of affiliation and identification with thecontemporary legacy of slavery and imperialism' (p. 194). It is unfortunate that thisunderstanding of `entangled' pasts and presents was not more thoroughlyconsidered throughout the book.

While these textual analyses are forceful and nuanced, Bhana Young does notnegotiate the shifts (historically or geographically) between Head and Jones,Dangarembga and Condé. I see this omission as a symptom of the trope of ghostsbecoming the (single) code for reading diasporic blackness, and, as such, effacingthe specific social contexts (and the complex multiple relationships between thesecontexts) and, once again, generalising black experience.

Similarly symptomatic of the theoretical knots that Bhana Young ties aroundher enquiry at the start of the text, is the fact that she does not, (as initiallypromised) slip into the emotionally affective and anecdotal or personal very often, 13

and when she does the text seems in danger of upholding the very myths ofreversion that she seeks, in the final chapter, to undermine. A noticeable exampleoccurs on page 137 where Bhana Young narrates a personal memory in which, ata reading in an art gallery, a passing car backfired, and (she writes): `Everyone inthe room ducked, bodies stiff and bent over, eyes blinked shut, breath held. ... Amicrosecond later, we all inhaled and laughed at our absurd short-circuiting, at thatsingle collective moment when our nerves, raw from centuries of attemptedextinguishing, sparked out of our nervous conditions (p. 137, my emphasis). Thisshows the worst of Bhana Young's use of the notion of collective black memoryand illustrates my concern that such observations diminish, rather than enable,bearing witness to the raced traumatic past. The `nervous conditions', in whichbodies symptomatise immediate, lived, experience, in texts such as Dangarembga'sNervous Conditions and James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, are powerful(bodily) symbols and symptoms for the ravages of colonisation and slaverybecause the bodies immediately experiencing the traumas become the site ofexpressing resistance to those traumatic lived conditions. Yet, the extension of such`nervous conditions' to the collective, in a statement such as this, is absurd. Indeed,Bhana Young seems unaware of a further incongruity at this moment: the locationin which these black bodies recoil from their collective racial trauma is an art

13. The `Coda' section that concludes the text, and takes the form of a short story, stands apart fromthe rest of the text and, as such, does not, to my mind, provide much of a challenge toconventional academic style and method.

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gallery. Bhana Young might do well to consider a different ghost altogether: aneconomic one referred to by Paul Gilroy when, discussing the `relatively privilegedcastes within black communities', he comments on their `increasingly problematicrelationships with the black poor, who, after all, supply the elite with a dubiousentitlement to speak on behalf of the phantom constituency of black people ingeneral'. 14

Perhaps this is the phantom that most haunts Bhana Young's text: thephantom of a black collective that exists only spectrally. Until this phantom can beexorcised, I am not sure that a text such as Haunting Capital will be able to achieveGlissant's diversion in which we see `a turn to the messy and noisy points wherecurrents of re-memory, contemporary, ancestral, sacred, brutal, and painful, cometogether' (p. 195), but rather remain in the endless circuit of reversion where theindividual, historically specific and contemporary brutalities experienced by blackbodies can only be spoken of in the softening language of generalising metaphor.

14. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 33.

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