[W]hat is so hard for us today, and is hardest of all for the young generation, is to meet the challenge of such an everyday life.
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”
1In Ghanaian writer B. Kojo Laing’s novel Woman of the Aeroplanes, the small community of Tukwan has an antagonistic relationship to the rest of its home country. On the first page, Kwame Atta (the “bad twin”) is asking:
- 1 Laing frequently uses this typographical trick of using a word twice, one set directly below the ot (...)
2He is referring to the second largest city in Ghana, and even at the very end of the novel the “hordes” of potential visitors from Accra and Kumasi are portrayed as “a final attempt to reduce Tukwan” (257).1 Between these two moments of internal resistance, the Tukwan community engages in a series of adventures, in fourteen chapters that Laing directs the reader to experience as numbered lessons (“Class One,” “Class Two,” etc). The community is far from utopian: lust and greed are the main motivations of several of the characters (including Kwame Atta), and the many adventures of the Tukwan people are often silly, surreal, and satirical, as when the cola farmer Moro begs Kwame Atta to invent a “stupidity machine” to stop the residents from questioning received wisdom (134). Tukwan is paired with Levensvale, a seemingly ordinary Scottish town that turns out to be similarly outside conventions of time and factuality, and a large part of the novel consists of supposed trade missions between the two, which culminate in Class Eleven with a “conference of humanity,” in which the travellers from Tukwan and their Scottish “twins” receive and debate with theologians and officials, “guests … in from ordinary time” (200). Laing, himself in interview having professed a distrust of institutional Christianity, stages a confrontation revealing the church’s hypocrisy over racism and colonialism. This is just one of a number of scenes in the book that see rule-bound institutions such as town halls and football matches subverted by Laing’s cast of colourful characters, not least by animals such as the old spaniel of the Gilmours which barks every time there is a logical contradiction (217).
3One of the elements that makes this novel so fascinating is Laing’s sui generis style, which incorporates enough “Ghanaian words and neologisms” that the novelist feels the need to provide seven pages of glossary at the end of the book (280-286). The impression that his prose leaves is one of constant movement, of shifts in the reality that is supposedly being described, for example in the following account of the Tukwan townspeople’s first flight to Scotland:
Kwaku de Babo, strangely quiet throughout the journey, had ducks in his inner, and ducks in his outer; having bathed the two sacred ducks in a tight and crowded corner of the upper-lip plane, he went to sleep … and then woke up in a sweat because he next dreamt that his pen was busy writing without him, finding that this was precisely what his chalky pen was doing …. ‘Safety belts please you gari-chopping momoni-chewing people, I beg!’ shouted Amoa and Akyaa sharing the words between them. (82)
4Even after consulting the glossary and discovering that momoni is “aromatic fish” and gari foto is “a food,” it is hard to follow what exactly is happening (282-283). The novelist blends sleep and waking states, allows for magic to operate in the story (the sacred ducks under Kwaku’s charge carry the “soul of the lake” (61)), includes surreal elements (one plane is called the “upper-lip” because it stands at the height of Pokuaa, the titular “woman of the aeroplanes”), and uses language to open up possibilities, forcing the reader into a state of active imagination (e.g. what is “inner” and “outer”? Who is saying which of the words in the safety announcement?)
- 2 It may be that this feeling of affinity is a natural side effect of Laing’s humanistic philosophy. (...)
5As is the case for many readers, my first encounter with the works of Kojo Laing was an experience that intermingled confusion with deep joy in encountering such a wild imagination and such a strange, brilliant prose style. It was also for me a moment of resonance, one of those odd moments where two writers who seem on the surface to have nothing to do with each other somehow end up seemingly in sympathy at some deep level. I was immediately struck by the strange similarities between this Ghanaian novel, written from a country and a set of historical circumstances of which I knew little, and the works of Gerald Vizenor, the Anishinaabe writer and cultural critic.2
6Vizenor’s The Trickster of Liberty concerns a small community, the Baronage of Patronia, which, like Tukwan, is shown as existing at one remove from the country in which it is situated. Indeed, not only is it not fully a part of the United States, but it is also not fully a part of the White Lake Reservation on which it sits, as we learn in the opening chapter that Luster Browne and his heirs have been granted heritable title to the land in perpetuity. The fourteen chapters that follow are arranged in pairs, each pair being dedicated to one of Luster’s grandchildren and depicting their often surreal and always comic adventures. The main characters, often referred to in the narrative as tricksters, disrupt the rules and conventions of structural events and sacred spaces, as when Tune Browne summons tribal ghosts to the commencement ceremony of the University of Berkeley, California, or when Father Mother Browne brings herbs and miniature windmills into the church where he has established “the liberal council of the Flat Earth society” (102). The baronage, in its independence, sets up trade negotiations with the Chinese government, and sections of the novel are set in China, with China Browne finding empathic connection with “gatekeeper and warrior clown” Wu Chou (32). Throughout the novel, animals provide a constant chorus on human affairs. These range from the mongrel Parastata, “ravished with priapism, [who] mounts and humps whatever is upright and pretentious” (xvi), to the “testicle ticks [engineered] to seek the groin sweat of authoritarian personalities” that are released into the federal court convened at the end of the novel (153).
7All of this trickster chaos is conveyed in Vizenor’s much-celebrated style, which brings together wild comedy, quotations from diverse thinkers, an attention to nature that as Kimberley Blaeser has pointed out owes much to his background writing haiku, and a fondness for neologisms such as “socioacupuncture” and “holosexual” (Blaeser 146). As with Laing, the experience of reading Vizenor is one of having to keep up with the narrative voice as it speeds from one idea to another, one level of narrative to another, in an agonistic discourse:
[H]e told stories about tribal tricksters who lived in compasses, clocks, watches, and church organs, where the best of them recast tunes, overturned time, and reversed magnetic directions in the manifest white world. The children learned … to imagine their connections to the earth; each child earned a characteristic nickname and a comic temper to endure the ruthless brokers of a tragic civilisation.
The children learned that the old tribal tricksters turned ‘rose window malevolence’ into comic beams and enlightened those who lost their shadows on the concrete. (11)
8Like Laing, Vizenor is fond of strategies that open up the multiple meanings of words. In this excerpt, “manifest” refers both to something that is evident or obvious, and also to “manifest destiny,” that old shibboleth used to excuse the expropriation of Native American lands, and, given the context of the mapping and allocation of tribal lands, to the idea of a ship’s manifest listing the goods on board. Unlike Laing, however, Vizenor’s work is highly academic, and he often includes passages of distinctly postmodern textual theory, including the following manifesto: “The active reader implies the author, imagines narrative voices, inspires characters, and salutes tribal tricksters in a comic discourse: an erotic motion under the words absolves the separation between minds and bodies” (155). This dynamism, I believe, is also a part of Laing’s textual game, intended to turn reading from a disengaged, intellectual act into an embodied experience that bridges gaps. Creating works that were more likely to be read outside the communities (Kumasi and White Earth) that they describe than inside them, Vizenor and Laing turn the tables on critics and readers who may feel themselves at a cultural distance, obviating any sense of cerebral metropole observing a marginal specimen in favour of a communal act of wild imagination.
9I have spent some time establishing these connections between the novelists, and I hope by now that it will be clear why I felt that these two books, published in the same year, were resonant. Yet the comparison is not, it should be admitted, an obvious move. After all, neither writer is or was aware of the other’s works as far as I can tell, and the White Earth Reservation, where Vizenor is a tribal citizen, is roughly 10,000 kilometres from the home in Accra, Ghana, where Laing did most of his writing. The novels, too, are written from seemingly very different circumstances. Ghana in the 1980’s was a recognized nation and, though impoverished by the falling price of cocoa and crippling external debt, was nonetheless a leading state in post-colonial Africa. The White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, of which Vizenor is an enrolled member, resides in a tiny portion of unceded land guaranteed to them by treaty within the settler state of America.
10Bringing together two writers from such different geographical, economic, and cultural spaces carries specific dangers for a white European critic, and I have tried to be very alert in the analysis that follows to any fatuous attempt to read these very different writers ethnographically. Specifically, my analysis refuses a few routes that might seem obvious. I reject any analysis which uses a broad concept of colonialism to elide the very different realities of White Earth and Ghana, thus (inadvertently) recreating colonial categories of centre and margin. As a non-African critic, I also eschew the idea of a trans-Indigenous reading, knowing as I do that “Indigenous” is not only a very tricksy and contested label in African contexts, but also one that does not apply to Laing in particular. And, finally, I also wanted to avoid approaches which used deterministic frameworks drawn from European ethnography, despite the easy potential I saw to think of both writers as exemplars of either the “trickster novel” or the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. This is not to say that there is no possibility of deriving useful readings from such approaches, but rather that I am taking my cue from the writers themselves. I am thinking here of Vizenor’s words in the Prologue to The Trickster of Liberty: “The trick, in seven words, is to avoid historicism, racial representations, and remain historical” (xi). Laing generally rejects even this level of playful exposition of his overall intention (“It’s nothing systematic, they are no theories, no ‘-isms’” (Laing “This is not” 103), but given his frequent rejection of racism and general emphasis on jouissance, I do not believe that he would argue with the idea that his work seeks to break free of historicization and stereotype.
11I place this analysis within the paradigm of “world literature” as defined by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who argues that setting books free from the narrow bands of nationality recognises literature’s existence “in the vastness of the sea and the ocean” (72). Such a paradigm also fits the definition offered by David Damrosch of world literary studies as being concerned with literary texts’ effects and meanings as they circulate outside their original cultural contexts (19). This is not to deny the relevance of the particular contexts of these very culturally specific (yet outward looking and hybrid) works. Rather, I am building on an argument first made by Rebecca Macklin, who has done much of the pioneering work in linking African and Indigenous American writing. In her article “Unsettling Fictions,” which compares the works of South African author K. Sello Duiker with those of Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, and drawing on the ideas of Anibal Quijano, Macklin argues that modernity was and is in its essence colonial. Thus, finding moments of “relationality” (what I have in the analysis above called resonances) between postcolonial and Indigenous literatures serves to break down philosophical and institutional barriers between the frameworks that more commonly structure discussions on these literatures, allowing for a decolonial reading which establishes what she calls “spaces of co-resistance” (35). The possibilities are exciting. As Kate Shanley, who has written the only previous scholarly article I have located that puts Ghanaian and Native American writers in conversation, put it “[i]n the process of imagining inclusion, we hope to expand understandings of global citizenship and of what constitutes civilization and indigeneity” (106).
12However, even this vision of planetary solidarity still makes for an uneasy fit for the works of both Laing and Vizenor. While these authors certainly write back against racism and dispossession, they share a definite ambiguity towards modernity, which Macklin elsewhere, and in my view correctly, defines as extractivist in its logic (Macklin 40). Both the novels being discussed here engage with international trade (the trade mission to Levensvale in Woman of the Aeroplanes; the competing missions by Asian countries to buy wild ginseng in The Trickster of Liberty) and, as I will argue below, petromodernity in the form of the personal aeroplane is a key liberatory element in both novels.
13It is my argument that these novelists are engaged in similar projects, both aiming to resist the bureaucratic rationalization of time and space, the disenchantment of modernity proposed by Max Weber. In doing so, their intention is decidedly not to return to some prelapsarian state of premodernity (that would mean failing to “remain historical” after all): indeed, their writings have strong elements of speculative fiction and are futurist in orientation. Rather, I will argue that Laing and Vizenor are both better placed as alt-modern, seeking in remarkably similar ways to reimagine space and time as fluid and radically coterminous. In doing so they disrupt the project of compulsory modernization while continuing to imagine an inclusive, imaginative, empowered present.
14The year these books were published, 1988, can in retrospect be seen as the final year of a particular idea of world history. As the Chinese intellectual Wang Hui writes: “The year 1989 was a historical watershed; nearly a century of socialist experimentation came to an end. Two worlds became one: a global-capitalist world” (Wang 9). Wang’s argument, born from his own experience as a participant in the Tiananmen Square uprisings, is that after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the simultaneous collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, it became clear that socialism and capitalism were not competing ideologies so much as they were interdependent responses to modernity. Describing the way that the Western post-Enlightenment period appears from a Chinese perspective, Wang Hui notes that whereas Marxism and capitalism are often seen in the West as opposites, in practice both functioned in China to promote a specific idea of modernisation as a good in and of itself (“An Interview” 72-79; “Rethinking” 108-109). In Wang’s formulation, Weber’s concepts have been used in both left and right wing politics as a form of teleology to insist that modernization is a linear process with inevitable outcomes. Wang’s discomfort with this idea of modernisation as unalloyed good is plain. It can be seen, for example, in his discussion of Lu Xun, the great intellectual revolutionary of 20th century Chinese literature. For Wang, Lu’s legacy lies in his understanding of “the secret connection between the legitimation of knowledge and unequal relations” (“Dead Fire” 209). In other words, Lu, himself a fervent modernizer, nevertheless recognizes that the rationalisation that is a key component of modernity is also highly destructive of “self-reflective and folk culture.” As we will see, this ambivalence is also what links Vizenor and Laing.
15In his analysis, Wang draws heavily on the sociology of Max Weber. As Weber would have it, the history of modernity, tied up as it is with the emergence of Protestant mercantile capitalism, is characterised by an increasing emphasis on bureaucracy—rules, certificates, paperwork. In rationalizing the ways that they conceive the world, Enlightenment era Europeans replaced older ways of seeing the world with a focus on scientific explanations and their concomitant technologies. As with the China of Lu Xun, these older ways include the loss of traditional animistic ways of seeing the world and belief in magic as something that can affect it—a process that Weber refers to as disenchantment. For Weber, this is a nuanced and value-neutral process that comes with significant costs in the form of alienation, creating comprehensible “a wholescale widening separation of those practically affected by rational techniques and rules from the rational foundation of those rules, which, on the whole, is likely to be more mysterious to those affected than the meaning of the sorcerer’s magical procedures is to the ‘primitive’” (179). This disenchantment is not, as many popular accounts of Weber would have it, a finished process of secularization in which mysticism (“enchantment”) has been permanently banished—Weber did not intend such a teleology (Josephson-Storm 31). Rather, it reflects a specific experience of living in modernity, in which the individual is increasingly bound by rules and bureaucracy—the “iron cage” in Weber’s term—and in which a scientistic rationality seems to be making the world simultaneously more understandable, via the scientific method, but at the same less comprehensible as questions of value lose their meaning.
16Literary fiction might seem to be diametrically opposed to such cold rationality, but, as Amitav Ghosh has pointed out, in fact the novel is precisely the product of just such a process of rationalization—it is no coincidence that the English novel saw its rise in the late 17th century, became popular in the 18th century, and has remained a major element of Anglophone cultures into the 21st. As Ghosh writes, “Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience” (14). As a form, then, the Anglophone novel generally prioritizes interactions between individuals, promoting an idea of logical and explicable human relationships, emphasizing interiority, psychology and social systems rather than magic or the irrational. The novel form can be considered a key technology in the modernization process, setting out a bounded, rule-driven universe both in the physical worlds that novels describe, and also in the ways that characters interact. Such an emphasis in the novel tradition on descriptive prose and comprehensible psychologies is a form of Weberian disenchantment. And, as Ghosh further argues, this form also arises during a period of unusually stable global climate, which encouraged writers and storytellers in the colonial West to think of the world as safely predictable and therefore to move away from traditional modes in which gods and spirits interfere with human affairs unpredictably.
17These stories that Western culture was telling itself about the world had particular resonance in the period when the two novels I am discussing today were written. In common with many other African countries, Ghana had suffered economic collapse in its early decades, driven in large part by the interest on loans from creditor countries and banks and fuelled by extractivist policies on the part of Western governments. The attempts in the early years of Jerry Rawlings’ military government to control inflation through price control failed, and in 1983 Rawlings was forced to devalue the currency, and largely surrender control of fiscal policy to the IMF and the World Bank (Herbst 17-18, 29-37). Although modernization theory was increasingly being challenged, the goals set by these institutions were and are largely based in the idea that Weberian modernization is both inevitable and desirable in the context of technological progress and globalization. In the period that Woman of the Aeroplanes was being written, Laing was living in a Ghana that was still undergoing profound restructuring in return for more than a billion dollars in aid, most of which was used to pay off debt (Nowak et al. 37-38).
18The White Earth Reservation, too, was and still is a target for the rhetoric of modernization. The reservation was created in 1867 by a treaty between the United States and the Mississippi Band of Chippewa Indians as land supposedly guaranteed for the use of Anishinaabe peoples. The 1887 Dawes Act, promoted with modernizing rhetoric that emphasized the entrance of Indian peoples into techno-modernity, divided the reservation into allotments that were granted to individual tribal members, many of whom were soon swindled out of their land (Meyer 52). In the 1970’s, the period when Vizenor as a journalist was covering local Native affairs, major legal battles were being fought to preserve the treaty-guaranteed right to hunt and fish on their own land: in response, the Department of the Interior and the state government of Minnesota frequently used language that suggested tribal members should have to follow the same rules as everyone else in the state (Krausová 142-144). This is Weber’s “iron cage” of modernity, where every subject is constrained by rules designed to prioritise bureaucratic efficiency. In 1986, as Vizenor was writing The Trickster of Liberty, the White Earth Land Settlement Act was passed, in which the tribe received $6.5M for economic development along with 10,000 acres of state land to be added to the reservation, in return for the tribe dropping its claim to 100,000 acres of private land (Suzack 171-172). The funds were used to start a casino after the 1988 passing of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, with much rhetoric about the money from the casino being used to create opportunity on the reservation. However, Vizenor would have had good reason to be sceptical about the benefits of this supposed modernity: the land title has not been handed over up until the present day, and the money flowed into the pockets of corrupt tribal officials. White Earth remains one of the poorest areas of Minnesota even now.
19Mark Rifkin, in his book Beyond Settler Time, notes that the rhetoric of modernization functions in settler contexts to exclude Native peoples from the present day (vii). Insistently, US colonial rhetoric frames Native peoples as pre-modern, meaning that any symbol of modernization—whether outboard motors on canoes, university degrees, or rap music—is used to frame present-day Native peoples as inauthentic and thus to justify, as in the example of White Earth, land expropriation and the breaking of treaties in the name of progress. Considered more broadly, especially in an African context, the phenomenon Rifkin describes can be seen as a part of the modernization process, given that “Modernity’s rise, its hegemonic propagation and its shine is continually subsidized by hierarchies, by exclusion, negation and repression” (Aumaab 336). In the case of Africa, in particular in the rationalization, development and economic restructuring urged on Ghana by creditor nations and institutions, the effect is to question the compatibility of indigenous Ghanaian worldviews and political structures with the modern world. Although the ostensible aim of both settler and extractivist rhetoric is race-neutral, the effect is teleological, in that both groups must adopt a European definition of the best way to exist in the bureaucratic modern world.
20This argument should not be taken to imply that either Laing or Vizenor are advocates for a simplistic return to traditional structures or religions. Laing puts it well in interview with Adewale Maja-Pearce, saying that “When I deal with the traditionalists … I criticize them not necessarily in relation to anything external, but in relation to [stagnation …] I’m not saying that there should be sweeping change across the board, some sort of mindless change … but I think that the attitude to living with these rites and rituals and symbols within this century must change” (27). Vizenor invents the term “tradition fascists” and satirically attacks those who would mindlessly return to or reiterate old rituals, or who would claim a permanent victim status (Shrouds 5). His first book of published journalism, indeed, was attacked in the White Earth tribal newspaper for urging Western ideas of economic development and surrendering to Eurowestern ways. Both Vizenor and Laing have been distinguished from more overtly nationalist writers, and in some cases attacked for their supposed cosmopolitanism and defeatism. However, a better characterization might be that they seek a new modernity, one that protects gains of science and technology, maintains the freedom of thought that comes from rationalization, yet also creates a space for heterogeneity of perspective and cultural insight.
21For both Vizenor and Laing, the aeroplane is a key element in this project. I have not found a written history of personal aviation in Ghana, but the 1980s generally was a period in which the number of ultra-light aircraft around the world increased, and this seems to have inspired both authors. The titular Aeroplanes in Laing’s book vary in size according to narrative mood, being sometimes described as “jets” and sometimes as having the same wingspan as a vulture (68), but in the main they are described as microlights, being shorter than a human (with one craft being the height of its owner’s lower lip, and the other the upper lip). Vizenor, in the chapter “Microlights and Avian Dreams,” has his character Slyboots Browne sell a worthless “college tribe franchise” (127) to buy a biplane: Slyboots then tricks the federal government into funding a factory to build microlights to be sent to all reservations. For both authors, air travel is represented as a confluence of the magical and the scientific, and in both aeroplanes allow for space and time to be reconfigured.
- 3 This story directly continues from Vizenor’s previous novel Griever: An American Monkey King in Chi (...)
22In terms of spatiality, Native American literature is often discussed as a matter of two contrasting psychic spaces, the urban and the reservation. In an essay published a year before The Trickster of Liberty, indeed, William Bevis argues that the central plot of much of Native American writing is that “a lost young Native protagonist ventures out into the world, becomes psychically and physically wounded, and returns home to heal” (Gamber 96). Vizenor uses two ways to rethink this paradigm. Firstly, he sets the story on the fictional Baronage of Patronia, created after the mixedblood Luster Browne pissed over the “breach in communal tribal land” (4). The Baronage is neither settled land nor reservation, and the ironic title reverses and deconstructs the act of allotment. Vizenor’s second trick, as mentioned earlier, is to internationalize his narrative. The first of seven sets of paired chapters which form the body of the novel, follows the character China Browne as she travels in the country of China, where she discusses the overlaps between the Chinese Monkey King trickster and the Anishinaabe figure of Naanabozho.3 Another set of chapters is principally concerned with the attempts by Ginseng Browne to negotiate the sale of his namesake crop, inviting bids not only from the People’s Republic of China, but also from Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan, and Japan. Throughout the book there are frequent mentions of the space of the reservation as having an international border: as Bad Medicine Lake is more than a hundred miles from the Canadian border, this border is between the baronage, the sovereign territory of the White Earth Reservation, and the United States. The Baronage also gets an international airport that gives it direct connections with China and with every other reservation in the US, as well as a miniature International Tribal Exposition diorama in the cabin of an old trickster.
23In The Woman of the Aeroplanes, Laing also creates a community that is ambiguously situated in relationship to the nation state that surrounds it, the town of Tukwan. The word “tukwan” means “to travel” in Twi, the language that percolates through the novel to the extent that a glossary is provided at the end, and Laing goes to some trouble to shake the reader’s sense of where and when it exists, mentioning that it is of “doubtful existence” to the rest of Ghana, surrounded by an “eternal mist,” and the town is “near enough Kumasi to be far enough away never to be seen by residents of that city, except rarely; and if it had not been situated over 100 miles from Accra but was nearer Koforidua than Ho, you would not have seen how far it was from Bolgatanga” (Woman 9). Like Vizenor, he insistently internationalizes the narrative, twinning Tukwan with the Scottish town of Levensvale, another community of immortals, with multiple trade missions conveying the residents between the two spaces. Towards the end of the novel, at the “Conference of humanity,” delegates discuss shared and differing concepts of God. The effect is to erase the idea of geographical distance as being necessarily a bar to community (Levensvale and Tukwan both being more threatened by near neighbours than each other), and thus to remove any hierarchy of access to truth. As Pastor Mensah’s nonsensical equation attempt to “mathematicalize God” puts it:
24The truth, whatever it is and whatever relationship it may have to the God of the Christian Bible, must have space for both the tama (Ghanaian waist beads) and the tam o’shanter (Scottish traditional bonnet).
25Just as space is shown to be malleable and its effects to be anything other than inevitable, so both writers radically disrupt modernist teleologies. Vizenor, in a courtroom scene, uses the oral tradition to put past events in the present time. In other places he disrupts temporal linearity altogether, especially when Ishi “the last Yaqui Indian” returns to a graduation ceremony alongside the ghosts of other tribes and the anthropologists who worked with him in his last years. Vizenor’s trickster characters defile clocks, erase other characters’ pasts and describe the present moment as “a natural reservoir where tricksters learn to dive and swim the backstroke” (Trickster 53). Laing, too, makes a great deal of play with temporal fluidity. His cast of immortals—who are nonetheless very recognizably of the present day—are sometimes thrown physically back in time, or choose to be reincarnated, or lend each other years. He stresses the simultaneity of time, with characters suddenly finding themselves in the first day of an Independent Ghana or removing flags after a coup. Indeed, the entire thrust of the novel is a fight against encroaching time: the characters in both towns are threatened with an outside world that wants to create order and unity, and in the process will render them mortal in linear time. This invasion of clock time is clearly a metonym for modernity: as one character says, “the first invasion was physical and it failed; this second one, as we have been openly warned, is more subtle .... Subtle for the reason that you may feel you are wrong if you fight against it. It is a phantom: ignore it and you look a fool, fight it and you look outdated!” (262) The logic of the modern, as per Rifkin, is that to push back against modernity is to align oneself with the past and thus remove oneself from the conversation with the present.
26Here I want to return to Amitav Ghosh’s comments about the modernity of the novel form, and in particular to his observations on the rejection of specific types of writing. As the climate begins to break down and the world becomes less predictable—in other words, as the contradictions inherent in Western modernity’s teleology of infinite growth become apparent—the genre of science fiction, or speculative fiction, seems to carry the best chance of representing the world’s past and future. Yet, Ghosh argues, literary discussions most often function to ghettoize science fiction and its near relative fantasy as mere genre writing, while the equally speculative genre of realist fiction is enthroned as soberly representing reality. Both Laing and Vizenor have at times been labelled as science fiction (Chukwunonso; Higgins), but the label seems unpersuasive given that science and speculation is rarely the main concern: Francis Ngaboh-Smart’s phrase “science fantasy,” which he defines as “a hybrid form in which the narrative momentum depends on the overlap between elements of science and fantasy” seems more persuasive (59). For Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso, Laing’s novels are futurist in orientation, seeking new possibilities for future Ghanaian society. African futurism finds a partner in Indigenous futurisms where, for Ryan Poll, works by Vizenor and other writers “reinforce that the future is radically open. Indigenous futurism is a genre and mode of thinking that sees the racist genocides of the past and present and simultaneously sees a future not determined by these histories.” However, the emphasis on futurity here seems to buy into much of the teleological and linear concept of time inherited from the modernization project. As Ghosh recognizes, the world of the Anthropocene, which encompasses all of recorded human history including early moves to agricultural society and predicted massive climate disruption, challenges us not to think of new futures but rather to rethink the present.
27Vizenor and Laing in their novels are attempting just such a relimning project, drawing on the disruptive potential of traditional stories, something that also shows in the endings of their novels. The Trickster of Liberty finishes with a trial: Ginseng Browne is prosecuted for breaking international regulations on endangered species by selling wild ginseng to the “China National Medicines and Health Products Import and Export Corporation” (142). This is an irony given that he had always intended to substitute commercially grown plants for the wild ginseng that the traders wanted, another of the schemes, like “pinch coffee” in his film Harold of Orange, in which tribal characters outwit traders to retain the essence of their culture while seemingly engaged in capitalist exchange. He marries the Chinese translator, She Yan, allowing her to circumvent American immigration rules by becoming a tribal citizen, and the geneticist See See Arachnidan proclaims that “This is [She Yan’s] original homeland” (144), reflecting the transnational truth of the genetic relationship between Native Americans and North East Asian peoples (a relationship Vizenor would go on to explore further in his 1991 novel Heirs of Columbus). Ginseng successfully plays the Chinese government off against traders from Hong Kong, the Taiwanese Republic, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the novel ends with an affirmation of survivance: “When these agreements between traders, spies, agents, shamen, sisters, heirs, and a wild genetics engineer were presented to the judge, he … dismissed the charges against the trickster. The nuns undressed in the back of the courtroom, and the mongrels barked on the meadow” (154). As Vizenor says in the brief epilogue listing his main sources of fact and inspiration, “the novelist continues in a comic discourse that overturns historicism and representations” (155): like the “last lectures” that Father Mother Browne organizes, the novel refuses the terminality of an ending.
28The last few chapters of The Woman of the Aeroplanes are concerned with the end of Tukwan’s existence outside time, the end of the villagers’ immortal ability to reincarnate, all of which symbolize the coming of modernity to the Ghanaian and Scottish communities. As Kwame de Babo, the “good” twin, writes in his Minutes Book, “Magic was becoming small steps in rational processes” (239). While the villagers have been able to fend off the direct invasion of the territory by forces symbolized by “a huge Ghana flag … with one word written on it: TIME,” they have not ultimately been able to prevent mortality and unidirectional, rational time from coming to their community in the form of visitors from other towns, modern confectionery, and television (234). The result is “immortality being slowly forgotten, journeys too, and even magic and sacred ducks, but especially the stupidity machine, which had tragically become a trick-laden video screen” (258). But if time has come to the communities, just as international law has caught up with Ginseng Browne, then at least the people of Tukwan and Levensvale are able to negotiate it on their own terms. Using some stored fragments of immortality, the characters are able to ensure that the village will have “the power to regulate its own rate of change, and its own way of change,” while Levensvale will “develop new and relatively immortal stupidity machines that would continue to give a tolerable taste … to the future” (277). As Pokuaa gives birth to a baby that resembles Babo, the future is tentatively assured for at least the next fifty years as traditions survive to adapt to a transformed world.
29In my introduction, I argued that Vizenor and Laing’s works might be better seen as “alt-modern,” and much of the rest of this article should be seen as exploring the possible meanings of this term. By placing these novelists together, and stressing the similarities between their works while emphasizing the distance between the circumstances in which they were produced, we can see two writers who have often been discussed in terms of being sui generis as in fact formulating a similar response to the conditions of extractive modernity. This response, as I have shown, rests on resisting the over-rationalization of human experience by emphasizing the continuing power of enchantment that resides in local tradition, but at the same time refusing to deny the benefits of existing in technologically advanced and cosmopolitan societies. Reading them together is productive in that it removes this critique from overly narrow explanations rooted in local conditions, instead allowing us to see a broader aesthetic and political project that accepts the Weberian analysis but subjects it to imaginative play. Vizenor and Laing reclaim the imaginative space flattened by the logic of bureaucratic rationalism, re-enchanting the novel form from within, reminding us of the enduring vitality of stories that unsettle boundaries. If Weber feared that modernity might make the world “disenchanted,” then these authors offer us a counternarrative of spiritual mischief and narrative flight in aeroplanes that may be small, but carry the potential for personal and communal imaginative renewal.