ZAMBIA LETTERS, 9

Albert Einstein in the Belgian Congo by Chisimba M. Lumbwe

I try to read Sarah Stridsberg but cannot find the peace of mind. It was easier in Oslo. There I was able to read the first few hundred pages. She is of course an interesting author.

In Lusaka, I experience a resistance towards her book. I remember something the poet Aina Villanger, who reads scripts for Oktober, said to me a few months ago. ”Almost everything people write and submit these days is about relationships”.

For the same reason, I have not been able to bring myself to open Han Kang since the day I arrived in Zambia. Unlike Stridsberg, she does not write about Stockholm, but her book is also concerned with relationships.

Both novels begin with fantastic chapters that promises surprising and magnificent prose, but as I go on reading I find myself disappointed. The bodies of the novels are only interested in framings of empathy and in relationships. 

Reflection: It is impossible to isolate your reading from the site where you are doing the reading, from its influence on how you receive the material.

The library at LuCAC is made up of theory. It has volumes on topics such as mask, colonialism, climate issues and aesthetics. The collected works of Nietzsche. All of this suits Hannas project. She is reading Gadamer, Sontag and Heidegger. I also appreciate some of the books available at LuCAC, but it is important for me to continue to read literature. 

The only book that draws my attention, from the ones I brought with me, is ”Rannsakningen”. It might be because it is a theatre play. It may also have to do with the type of language Peter Weiss employs. He writes sparingly, directly, very raw and matter-of-factly. The subject is terrible from beginning to end. He leaves a lot to his reader. When I read his piece, I immediately come to think of Bertold Brecht and his style as a playwright, especially in those plays where the situation plays out in a, to him, distant culture. I do not write “foreign”, or ”alien”, because he would not use those terms.

In his Lehrstücke Maßnahme all the main characters are from Moscow. The play is set in China. Brecht avoids suggesting any cultural differences between himself, the main characters and the environment they travel to. In his world everyone are subjected to the same materialism and the same struggle. It is a conflict which centers around means of production, basic human needs and exploitation. Beyond that there can be only ignorance. He has no use of cultural fetischism and he never dwells on exoticism. 

This attitude, which recurs in texts from other German playwrights and writers, refrains from reinforcing differences and recognizes that which we have in common. It is also the essence of what Chuang Tzu arrives at in his ”Inner Chapters”.

Comparatively, I am just done reading a few volumes of Jean Genet, particularly his novels ”Rosenmiraklet” and ”Matrosen och stjärnan”. What ties him to Peter Weiss is that he is also a post-war writer, but Genet has chosen a completely different strategy for dealing with the experiences of WWII. He aestheticizes and eroticizes. His criticism is directed at the winners, the good-doers, those who defeated evil and who represent the norm. The only thing left to him is to idolize that which is loathed by them, so he writes through radical positions of desire. In his world, the revolution is not an idea but something that is lived. It has no place among the bourgeoisie, the working class, the academics or the analytically minded. 

Afternoon. We are passing a bookstore. I pick up, as if on a whim, a book by a Zambian author. It contains a couple of very different texts, which he presents together, and the whole edition screams instrumentalization, identity issues and crude naïveté. The uncompromising nature of his approach is insistent and I find myself buying the copy. Of course, I have to read Zambian literature when I'm here, so the act of purchasing it isn't odd, not in itself, but I could have found something less lightweight if I wanted to. I have a feeling that this little publication contains something I need.

Afterwards -the Cultural village. It is a collection of huts, probably built in a traditional aesthetic, where you can buy Zambian souvenirs. Families live there but the people who are selling the goods are reportedly from other parts of the country. It is a bit unclear to us whether they have family connection to one another, or not.

The village sells masks and Hanna becomes interested in them. It is of course difficult, if not downright impossible, for us to value them or judge their origin. They could be patinated and newly made, or excavated from an ancient mound somewhere. They could also come from Congo, we have no idea. But that doesn't bother Hanna, she is interested in the stories the sellers will tell her.

I buy an African chess set, Ndoso. The game is both simple and complex. I also buy two pen holders. I thought I needed them, for some reason, but that was a mistake. One has a rhinoceros on it’s template and the other has an elephant. I'll gift them to someone who hasn't read these posts when I get back.

I also buy a holder for coasters, with coasters included. Those, we do need. The day before we left, Hanna polished our old wooden table and it turned out really nice. When I saw it, I immediately thought it would be a shame to put glasses on top of it. So that´s one purchase I can live with.

There were screams and then a repeated smacking sound, coming from the backside of the hut. Hanna and Irpa reacted, but I wasn’t in a position from where I couldn't see what was happening. The men in the hut, who were selling things, reacted as well. They started shouting. There was a child screaming, like crazy. There was also a woman shouting. She sounded furious. The men started to scold the woman, obviously to make her stop. The whole thing went on for quite a while. Both Irpa and Hanna saw the whole scene, but whenever I was trying to move, in order to see, I couldn't position myself so that I had a clear view.

Things got quiet. Hanna and Irpa walked around the hut and up to the people there, but the men had already taken care of the matter. We decided to leave the place and Hanna told me what she and Irpa witnessed. A woman had been whipping a girl, maybe four years old, by pulling her pants down and holding her still, by her shirt.

Afterwards, Irpa had many questions. It was probably the first time she ever saw real violence. Of course, child abuse also occurs in Norway and Sweden, but as a rule, it is not something that happens in public.

How does this story continue? Maybe the woman gets whipped, not because she beat up a child, but because her actions drove away all the clients. It could also be that the people in the village sat down and talked, together, about the incident. Maybe wise men and women assembled all the villagers and got them to agree on a few common principles on how to behave towards children. An old philosopher was watching the event from a position at the back of another hut, at the far end of the village. He saw the whipping as it unfolded and started crying, mindlessly, before he was taken away and admitted to a sanitarium, somewhere in Turin.