"Una guerra tra buffoni?" Censura e autocensura nella letteratura postcoloniale
10.13125/2039-6597/1412
Nel loro rapporto di costante imbricazione reciproca, censura e autocensura riguardano molte opera letterarie postcoloniali, appartenenti a periodi e collocazioni geografiche diverse tra loro. In virtù della grande varietà degli oggetti d’analisi, un approfondimento di ricerca che riguardi censura e autocensura nella letteratura postcoloniale deve potersi avvalere di molteplici approcci comparativi.Infatti, mentre gli effetti censori dello stesso discorso coloniale influenzano le questioni di razza, classe e gender che interessano le popolazioni colonizzate, producendo un fenomeno transnazionale noto come “esotico postcoloniale” (Huggan 2001), la necessità di un’indagine comparativa si afferma anche in epoca post-coloniale, nel caso di censura da parte dello Stato o delle gerarchie religiose.Ciò permette di prendere in considerazione le specificità di ciascun contest nazionale e culturale, tenendo presente, allo stesso tempo, l’esistenza di aspetti politici, culturali e letterari condivisi. Per quanto riguarda l’impianto teorico-metodologico sul quale si può basare questa comparazione, esso implica spesso un’analisi dei processi generali di costruzione della nazione postcoloniale, così come le relazioni di questi ultimi con l’uso dell’allegoria postcoloniale (Jameson 1986, Slemon 1988). La lotta contro la censura, difatti, implica la decostruzione e insieme la riaffermazione di una stereotipata dicotomia orientalista (Said 1978) tra liberalismo europeo e “dispotismo asiatico” – producendo una situazione di relatività e ambiguità politica o, nelle parole di Rushdie, “una guerra tra buffoni” (1990: 179).L’articolo si concentra su due case studies specifici – Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) e Shalimar The Clown (2005) di Salman Rushdie, e la trilogia di romanzi “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship” (1979-1983) di Nuruddin Farah – nei quali gli autori rappresentano e al tempo stesso mettono in discussione fenomeni di censura e autocensura. L’investimento tematico sulle figure del folle e del buffone, sulla doppia soglia di verità/falsità e parola/silenzio, diviene lo snodo cruciale neltentativo di entrambi gli autori di riconsiderare la censura postcoloniale come inerente in modo specifico alla costruzione della nazione postcoloniale e, al tempo stesso, come operazione di decostruzione della dicotomia la posizione liberale occidentale (nonché coloniale) e le forme di autoritarismo postcoloniale.
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Lorenzo Mari
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Norman Manea
“A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial Literature
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Lorenzo Mari
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Norman Manea
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“A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial Literature
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5
      “A War Between Buffoons”?
    Censorship and Self-Censorship in
         Postcolonial Literature
                               Lorenzo Mari


      1. Censorship, Self-Censorship and Postcolonial
                          Allegory
      While Censorship Studies is a flowering discipline with notable
outcomes (Jansen 1991, Holquist 1994, etc.), its developments in the
field of Postcolonial Studies are still tentative. In particular, the lack of
definitions such as “postcolonial censorship” might be due to a
number of reasons, including the absence of comparative surveys in
favor of the specific analysis of individual case studies. On the other
hand, an enduring suspicion of Orientalism (Said 1978) is equally cast
on the attempt to represent the postcolonial world as a homogeneous
political entity. From the perspective of censorship, such a koiné would
be inevitably affected by severe limitations to the “freedom of
expression”, reinforcing, thus, those clichés which are inextricably
related to the stereotyped conception of “postcolonial dictatorship”.
The latter, in fact, often works as a mystification of that postcolonial
nationalism which was, in turn, an essential historical stage in the
constitution of many postcolonial nations (Lazarus 2011).
      While avoiding such clichéd representations, the main goal of this
article is to show how issues of censorship – in particular, their cultural
and political implications, rather than their impact in terms of textual
philology – are crucial to at least one definition of postcolonial
literature, considering allegory as its dominant rhetorical mode
(Jameson 1986, Slemon 1988). «In the simplest terms», in fact, «allegory
says one thing and means another» (Fletcher 1964: 2): it is
fundamentally distinct from the mimetic mode, as «this double
meaning is indicated in the work in an explicit fashion: it does not
proceed from the reader’s interpretation (whether arbitrary or not)»
(Todorov 1975: 63). This conventional definition of allegory, as
historically codified in the tradition beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics,


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Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
Literature


underlines the necessity for writers to find a rhetorical solution for
their struggles with censorship and self-censorship without necessarily
putting their lives or their works at risk.
      In view of this, some critical perspectives on postcolonial allegory
might also contribute to this conjectural discussion of “postcolonial
censorship”. Stephen Slemon, for instance, conceives allegory as
«involved with questions of history and tradition», since «[a]llegorical
writing involves doubling or reduplicating extratextual material»
(1988: 158). This leads to a relationship of anteriority/posteriority
between textual and extratextual worlds which – following Paul De
Man’s notorious study on the “rhetorics of temporality” (1969) – places
«an awareness of the passage of time […] at the heart of allegory»
(Slemon 1988: 158). The nexus of allegory and history turns out to be
different in Western literature, where allegories are concerned either
«with redeeming or recuperating the past», and in postcolonial
literature, where allegories specifically intend to transform «the
imperial myth of history» (1988: 158). By restoring those histories
which were systematically denied and/or omitted within colonial
narratives, postcolonial literature struggles against the silence imposed
on the colonized populations as a peculiar form of colonial censorship
(Chin 2009). At the same time, the transformation of history which is
inherent to postcolonial literature is based on a series of elements
which are inevitably marked as “new” and “other”. This leads to a case
for «paradoxical doubleness or ambivalence», as postcolonial literature
is «already constituted within institutional and generic constraints
whose work it is to package and displace the counter-discursive force
[…] under a sign of secondariness, derivation, simulacrum, or
mimicry» (Slemon 1989: 100).
      “Newness” and “otherness” are not only ambivalent: they are also
what the «postcolonial exotic» capitalizes on, that is «both on the
widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the
worldwide trafficking of culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods»
(Huggan 2001: 28). As a consequence, the struggle against the
censorship of colonial narratives is always coupled with the
neverending entanglement of censorship and self-censorship which is
specifically due to market rules (Jansen 1991). Market-produced
censorship and self-censorship are also part of that «negotiation»
which Holquist (1994: 17) considers to be the characterizing feature of
all types of censorship – avoiding, thus, the interpretations of the
relationship between freedom of speech and censorship as either a
bourgeois romantic opposition to the political order or an entirely
bureaucratic issue.



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                                            Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2013)



      According to Fredric Jameson, on the other hand, postcolonial
allegories are inextricably linked to the national. He establishes this
relationship on the basis of a different nexus of public and private in
the Third World, compared to the First World1: «[t]hird-world texts,
even those which are seemingly private and invested with properly
libidinal dynamic, necessarily project a political dimension in the form
of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is
always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world
culture and society» (1986: 69, emphasis in the original). The public-
private split characterizing Western societies is eventually reconciled
within postcolonial literature, since, according to Jameson, «third-
world cultures» act according to Deleuze and Guattari’s «conception of
desire that is at once social and individual» (1986: 79), as proposed in
their fundamental essay titled Anti-Oedipus (1977). Although social
desire can be explored in many different ways, due to its “de-
territorialization”, Jameson argues that its main “re-territorialization”,
in the case of third-world cultures, should be found in the realm of the
postcolonial nation.
      As a consequence, the national allegories theorized by Jameson
should not be read as pure literary renderings of postcolonial nations
or of the postcolonial bourgeois nationalism (Irr-Buchanan 2005: 173-
188). For Jameson, «[t]he “nation” is the name for a discursive,
epistemological problematic […] a reified “cultural pattern” that
“having once been part of the solution a dilemma, then become[s] part
of the new problem”2» (Szeman 2001: 816-817). Being a cultural
pattern, the nation works like the cultural logic of late capitalism – in
Jameson’s theory of postmodernism (1991) – or like the political
unconscious (Jameson 1981), that is, as a «metacommentary»
(Buchanan 2006: 16). This is a crucial argument in Jameson’s work, as it
directly derives from Jameson’s conception of the work of art:

        The work of art does not make […] things meaningful – they
     are already meaningful – but rather transforms their meaning, or
     else rearranges them in such a way as to heighten and intensify
     their meaningfulness. This process is not arbitrary, however, but
     follows an inner logic that can be abstracted […]. Jameson’s
     hypothesis is that this logic takes the form of a censorship, the

     1
       Jameson’s terminology derives from the Cold War political lexicon, as
he explicitly contends (1986: 67), avoding, thus, the axiological
considerations which are linked to the use of these definitions in neocolonial
discourses.
     2
       Both quotations are taken from Jameson’s essay (1986: 78).


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Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
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      internally consistent and inwardly felt need not to say some things
      and try to say other things in their place. […] Metacommentary
      “implies a model not unlike the Freudian hermeneutics””3 […],
      provided it is understood that the object of the game is not to
      redeem or to restore the suppressed content, but to uncover the
      logic of that suppression. (Buchanan 2006: 14-15)

     In other words, national allegories clearly expose the content of
the Freudian process of repression and censorship which is constantly
faced by any work of art. In view of this, Jameson’s focus on the
national is far from restoring the idea of “postcolonial censorship” as a
purely national issue, pointing, instead, at that entanglement of
censorship and self-censorship which is common to the work of every
writer, be it from the First or the Third World.
      Whether postcolonial allegory entails a transformation of colonial
and postcolonial history or a metacommentary on the form of the
newly decolonized nations, both interpretations are of an help in the
deconstruction of the nexus of “postcolonial censorship” and
dictatorship. In particular, they avoid the emphasis on the romantic
opposition between the freedom of art and political constraints, as well
as the identification of the latter with the clichéd, colonial figures of
“bloody dictators”, suggesting, instead, an allegorical interpretation
which enlarges the scope of the analysis beyond the clichés and their
ideological outreach.
     Given these premises, this article focuses on some literary texts –
Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Shalimar the
Clown (2005), as well as Nuruddin Farah’s trilogy “Variations on the
Theme of an African Dictatorship” (1979-1983) – in which postcolonial
allegory is deployed as a means to resist the nexus of “postcolonial
censorship” and “dictatorship”, be it of political or religious origins. In
addition to this, all these texts resort to a specific narrative device in
order to deal with censorship and self-censorship, as they invariably
include a couple formed by the clown (as a peculiar embodiment of the
writer) and the dictator in their narratives. The relationship between
“clowns/artists” and “dictators” is at once staged and deconstructed,
partially coinciding, thus, with the most renowned theorization of this
coupling, which can be retraced in Norman Manea’s 1992 book On
Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist.
     Triggered by his own experience of censorship during
Ceauşescu’s regime (1967-1989), as well as by Fellini’s film I clowns

      3
      The quotation is taken from Jameson’s The Ideologies of Theory, Essays
1971-1986. Vol. 1: The Situations of Theory (1988: 13).


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                                           Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2013)



(“The Clowns”, 1970), the reflections of the Romanian writer are based
on the assumption that both the artist and the dictator are buffoons.
Differently from Rushdie and Farah, however, Manea strongly
emphasizes the polarized dichotomy existing between the two figures.
Whereas the artist embodies the “poor Auguste” – the definition is
taken from the title of Manea’s previous book Auguste the Fool’s
Apprenticeship Years (1979) – trying to expose political evil by causing
laughter, the dictator is the «White Clown» (Manea 1993: 37) who
laughs while committing atrocities.
      Later in the essay, Manea eventually admits that the two buffoons
share much more than expected: according to him, this is due, first of
all, to human psychology, which is intrinsically ambivalent (1993: 55).
Therefore, he points at the authoritarian behaviors of artists, while he
also investigates the possibility of an artistic penchant in the attitude of
dictators and tyrants.
      Despite his interest in human psychology, however, Manea does
not conceive the work of art as a perpetual entanglement of censorship
and self-censorship in a Freudian, or Jamesonian, sense. Neither is he
concerned with issues of market censorship as producing self-
censorship, as his criticism exclusively regards political and
institutional repression.
      Finally, his treatment of the couple formed by the clown/artist
and the dictator is clearly essayistic (holding a clearly subjective and
detached point of view), rather than novelistic and allegorical. Manea’s
suggestion about «history of the circus as History» (1993: 37) is more
ironic than allegorical, as it does not lead either to the transformation
of history or to the constitution of the work of art as a
metacommentary on the “cultural pattern” of the nation. The analysis
of Rushdie’s and Farah’s works, on the other hand, might help to shed
a proper light on these two aspects of postcolonial allegory.

2. Salman Rushdie: from Haroun and the Sea of Stories
            (1990) to Joseph Anton (2012)
     Published in 1990, Haroun and the Sea of Stories – hereafter called
Haroun – is Salman Rushdie’s first book after The Satanic Verses (1988)
and the fatwa issued in 1989 by the Iranian ayatollah Khomeini.
Starting from this evidence and from the specific genre chosen by the
author – the children’s tale – Haroun has been often read as Rushdie’s




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Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
Literature


creative response to the censorship caused in many countries by the
fatwa4.
      In this regard, Haroun’s plot seems to be quite revealing, with
most of the names of characters and locations being taken from the
Hindustani language and providing the text with multiple linguistic
and semantic layers. While the storyteller Rashid Khalifa is touring the
country of Alifbay (“the alphabet”) to support local politicians with his
wonderful tales, he suddenly loses his ability to tell stories. He is
travelling with his son Haroun, who soon discovers that his father had
taken his inspiration as a storyteller from the legendary Sea of Stories.
Thanks to some magic helpers, they both embark on a journey to the
Sea of Stories, in order to restore Rashid’s power. They reach the land
of Kahani (“story”), where two populations are at war: the Guppees
(living in the illuminated part of the country, where reality is
thoroughly based on the inventiveness of imagination), led by Prince
Bolo (his name means “speak!”, in Hindustani), and the Chupwalas
(living in the shadow, without any capacity to speak), led by the priest
Khattam-Shud (meaning “completely finished”, “over and done
with”). Haroun plays a decisive role in the battle in which the Guppees
defeat the Chupwalas, eventually restoring the alternation of light and
dark all over the land. Once returned to the country of Alifbay, Rashid
recovers his storytelling skills, but he does not intend to use it anymore
on behalf of politicians.
      The allegoric potential of the chosen genre, the easy identifications
of Rashid with Rushdie and the priest Khattam-Shud with ayatollah
Khomeini, as well as the repeated dichotomy of “words” and “silence”
have contributed to the interpretation of Haroun as a fable about the
opposition between censorship and freedom of speech, which is
eventually won by the latter. Haroun, however, is not only a «banal
didactic fiction» siding with «pluralist individualism» (Aravamudan
1995: 327-328): it is, instead, a contemporary postcolonial allegory with
multiple layers of meanings, which are not even exempt from
contradictions5.

      4
        A fatwa is a legal opinion or learned interpretation provided by a
qualified Islamic jurist or religious leader. Although a fatwa does not require
full conformity in the whole Islamic world, The Satanic Verses was banned in
several Muslim countries, as well as in other nations like India or South
Africa.
      5
        In this regard, Eva König maintains that Haroun should not be
qualified as an allegorical fable at all, since «the narrative has several
elements that contradict this allegorical level of signification. Allegory must
have a decodable meaning if it is to signify at all, and its meaning cannot


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     It might be fairly argued, for instance, that the war between the
Guppees and the Chupwalas does not represent a neat binary
opposition between an army defending “freedom of speech” and
another one supporting “censorship”. There are many similarities,
indeed, linking the Guppees and the Chupwalas, starting from
linguistic evidence: «[t]he very words in the phonetic minimal pair
Gup and Chup sound very much alike to English-speaking readers.
This underlines the essential similarity of the two cultures and points
to the fact that the perceived differences between the worlds they
signify are only arbitrary» (König 2006: 55). In addition to his, after
meeting both the Guppees and the Chupwalas, Haroun concludes:
«’Opposites attract, as they say’» and, more importantly, «[…] silence
had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and
ugly)» (Rushdie 1990: 125).
     Decisively, it is the similarity between the two armies in the final
showdown which entails a cultural and political reconsideration of
their opposition:

        Chup City was in the deep heart of the Perpetual Darkness, and
     the air was so cold that it would freeze into icicles on people’s
     noses, and hang there until it was broken off. For this reason, the
     Chupwalas who lived there wore little spherical nosewarmers that
     gave them the look of circus clowns, except that the nosewarmers
     were black. (1990: 179)

     However, also the Guppees wear nosewarmers: «Red
nosewarmers were issued to the Pages of Gup as they marched into the
Darkness. 'Really, this is beginning to look like a war between
buffoons,’ thought Rashid the storyteller as he put on his false red
nose» (ibid.). The identification of both the Guppees and the
Chupwalas with clowns, wearing red or black nosewarmers, erases
much of the difference between the two factions, whose war might be
apparently codified as the opposition between censorship and freedom
of speech, but it is only slightly different from a «war between
buffoons». Earlier in the novel, Haroun had also noted that: «”I always
thought storytelling was like juggling. You keep a lot of different tales


stand in contradiction to its own textuality» (2006: 54). Whereas the first part
of her contention proves to be true, the conclusion is not equally evident, as
internal contradictions might undermine the unilateral didacticism of a fable,
but they do not necessarily clash with the structure of a contemporary
allegory (Copeland-Struck 2010: 267).


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Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
Literature


in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't
drop any. So maybe juggling is a kind of storytelling”» (1990: 109).
      While this helps to neutralize the opposition between storytellers
and dictators, the double linkage – between storytellers and jugglers
and between Guppees and Chupwalas – does not lead, however, to a
complete cultural and political relativism. The war is eventually won
by the Guppees and the only casualty – although he is not directly
killed by anybody – is Khattam-Shud, embodying Khomeini.
      In this regard, Butt the Hoopoe, one of Haroun’s magic helpers,
comments: «“[W]hat is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech,
if you then say they must not utilize the same? And is not the Power of
Speech the greatest power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to
the full?”» (1990: 119). It might be fairly argued that «the Hoopoe’s
response, however it appears predicated on a monologic view of
freedom and democracy, yet points to the inherent use as well as abuse
of such freedom» (Krishnan 1995: 70), by placing this analysis in the
context of the relationship between freedom and responsibility. The
same passage, however, could be also read as an enlargement of the
allegorical scope of the narration, towards that transformation of
colonial and postcolonial history which is, according to Slemon, the
main goal of postcolonial allegory.
      Other elements are equally relevant to this interpretation. The
land of Kahani has been divided into two regions – the Guppee’s side
is illuminated, while the Chupwalas’ one is left in the darkness – since
the tecnocrats working for the Guppees, significantly nicknamed
Eggheads, actually stole light from the Chupwalas’ territory (Rushdie
1990: 80). In addition to this, the Sea of Stories is polluted not only
because the Chupwalas poisoned it, but also because the Guppees let it
rot, as they explictly confess: «”We let [the stories] rot, we abandoned
them […]. We lost touch with our beginnings, with our roots”» (146).
Both elements can be interpreted as references going beyond the case
of censorship suffered by Rushdie: they point, instead, at colonial
history, which saw colonial powers purportedly exporting Western
liberal values, including “freedom of speech”, while they were
technologically enforcing their brutal -rule on the colonized
populations, with native cultures rotting in an irremediable way.
      Following Slemon’s theory of postcolonial allegory, Haroun might
be read, then, as an attempt to transform both colonial and postcolonial
history, restoring light and darkness – that is, “words” and “silence” –
on an equal basis. In addition to this, Haroun is also an attempt to face
the “postcolonial exotic” which is connected to the emphasis of
“newness” and “otherness” in postcolonial literature, as Rushdie
manages to do through the character of the Walrus. He is «the Grand


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Comptroller» (1990: 58) of the land of the Guppees, ruling over the
Eggheads and the Processes Too Complicated To Explain (P2C2E)
which help in the creation of stories. His name might be related to the
Beatles’ song I Am the Walrus (1967), where «eggmen» are actually
quoted, but it could also be interpreted as a subtler reference to the
literary market. In fact, considering the role of the Walrus in the story,
as well as the metaphorical analogy linking walruses and penguins (as
both species live in the arctic and subarctic regions), the Walrus might
be identified with the Western literary market, which is led and
organized by some majors like Viking Penguin.
      In addition to this, the Walrus is modeled upon the Wizard of the
Wizard of Oz, «who is at once at the heart of things, the fount of
wisdom towards which the travellers journey, and the rather
disappointing reality that awaits them at the end» (Cundy 1996: 93). In
fact, although the Walrus lends a happy ending to Haroun and
Rashid’s own stories as a special gift to Haroun (1990: 199-202), he still
rules over the construction of stories in the land of Kahani at the end of
the war; therefore, he might order the Eggheads to steal light again
from the territory of the Chupwalas. In addition to this, the last chapter
is titled «Was It The Walrus?» (1990: 195), casting a doubt on the
responsibility of the Walrus, as the chief of the story-making industry,
on the conflict between the two populations.
      If the role of the Walrus (representing the insidiousness of market
censorship) cannot be fully compared to the one of Khattam-Shud
(representing Khomeini and his fatwa), the ambivalence in the
description of the Walrus is a further nuance of the differences between
Guppees and Chupwalas and, on the allegorical level, between
Western liberalism and radical Islamism, degrading once again the
dichotomy between freedom of speech and censorship into «a war
between buffoons».
      Both the allegorical investment on the figure of the “clown” and
the reflections about the relationship between Western liberalism and
radical Islamism are not limited to Haroun, as they also have an
influence on Rushdie’s later production. Both these elements, however,
change in time, leading to a different political and aesthetic position for
Rushdie’s oeuvre.
      Although the novel does not directly deal with issues of freedom
of speech and censorship, a clown is, indeed, the major figure of
Shalimar the Clown (2005), where the couple “clown/dictator” is
replaced by the one formed by the “clown” and the “terrorist”.
Similarly to the previous book, where the opposition between the
Guppees and the Chupwalas is very nuanced, also Shalimar the Clown
simultaneously stages and deconstructs the dichotomy it is based on.


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Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
Literature


This happens through the figure of Shalimar, alias Noman Sher
Noman, who is an acrobatic clown – rather than a proper buffoon –
and, at the same time, a terrorist.
     The emphasis on the description of Shalimar as a clown is
particularly important as it regards the political positioning of the
novel within the historical setting of the plot, the Kashmir conflict6, and
the ideological context of its publication, after the 9/11 events (O’
Gorman 2013). The inspiration of the novel, in fact, is to be found in an
earlier work by Rushdie, the feature-length documentary The Riddle of
Midnight (1987), as the author recalls in his subsequent “third-person
memoir” Joseph Anton:

         In Kashmir he spent several days with a group of traveling
      players who performed bhand pather or, literally, “clown stories,”
      of Kashmiri history and legend, one of the last such troupes,
      driven to near penury by the harshness and violence of the
      political situation in Kashmir, but also by movies and TV. […]
      Because he could not get their story on film he had to cut them out
      of the final version of the documentary, but he never forgot their
      unfilmed stories, never forgot the woodland glade full of tumbling
      and tightrope-walking children where a next generation of
      “clowns” was being trained, clowns who might no longer have an
      audience to perform to, who might even, when they were grown,
      relinquish the fake swords of actors and pick up the real guns of
      the Islamic jihad. Many years later they became the heart of his
      “Kashmir novel” Shalimar the Clown. (2012: 83)

      These «clowns without an audience», however, cannot be
compared      to    artists,   as   they     are   going    to    become
“jihadists”/”terrorists” right away. It might be fairly argued, then, that
here Rushdie exclusively aims at an ironic representation of terrorism
on the basis of its buffoonesque side, without comparing the freedom
and the constraints of his own artistic role with any type of clownerie.
      On the other hand, Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s third-person memoir
about the fatwa years, constantly goes back to the issues of censorship
and self-censorship. Rushdie’s own statements are committed to the
fictional character of Joseph Anton – whose name is formed by the
ones of two writers loved by Rushdie: Joseph Conrad and Anton
Chekhov (2012: 163) – but they are still quite explicit: «Freedom of

      6
      The Kashmir conflict is rooted in the decolonizing processes of India
and Pakistan and from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, leading to other two
major conflicts, in 1965 and 1999.


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speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the
beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner.
He would never again flinch from the defence of these things» (2012:
283)
     This position is only partially contradicted by Rushdie’s
embodiment of «[a] contemporary, male Sharazad» as, after the fatwa,
«he […] acknowledges he needs to feed the media a different story to
keep himself, and public attention on his case, alive» (Guarracino 2014:
20):

        Tell us a new story, that was the general opinion, or else please
     go away.
        There was no point telling the world it was wrong. No mileage
     in that approach. So, yes, a new story. If that was what was
     wanted, that was what he would provide. (Rushdie 2012: 339,
     emphasis in the original)

     In other words, Rushdie here complies with the imperative of
“newness” of the postcolonial exotic (Huggan 2001), as fully
manifested by the clichéd reference to Shahrazad. This shows that
Rushdie now fully accepts the rules of the literary market: although
Joseph Anton provides the reader with a continuously judgmental
commentary on Rushdie’s literary environment, there is no Walrus,
like in Haroun, who can be held responsible for a market-led
censorship which could be as despicable as political or religious
censorship (or, if there is, «there is no point» to fight against it). With
Joseph Anton, Rushdie aims to write «something other than a simple
autobiography» (2012: 340), but he does not resort anymore to that
form of postcolonial allegory which had characterized his previous
attempts to deal with his own condition of censorship and self-
censorship.

 3. Nuruddin Farah’s Trilogy “Variations on the Theme
        of an African Dictatorship” (1979-1983)
     Rushdie is not the only postcolonial author engaged in the staging
and deconstruction of the dichotomy “clown/dictator” within the
mode of postcolonial allegory. Another postcolonial author who
resorted to the same narrative device was the Somali writer of English
expression Nuruddin Farah, in his trilogy of novels titled “Variations
on the Theme of an African Dictatorship”: Sweet and Sour Milk (1979),
Sardines (1981) and Close Sesame (1983).


                                                                                11
Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
Literature


      Farah suffered censorship at the hands of Siad Barre’s regime
(1969-1991), starting from the suspension of the publication of his only
novel in Somali language, Tolow Waa Talee, Ma…! (“We Need to Take
A Decision…!”, 1973), and culminating with Farah’s decision to go into
exile, in 1976. Although Sweet and Sour Milk (1979) is not the first novel
published by Farah after these events7, it is the first one which deals
with Barre’s regime through postcolonial allegory.
      The whole trilogy, in fact, is based on the deployment of a
Jamesonian national allegory, where, as many scholars have pointed
out (Petersen 1981, Wright 2002), Somalia is depicted through the
narration and representation of individual families. The relationship
between family and nation varies throughout the trilogy8, showing that
this nexus is not exclusively based on the analogy of microcosm and
macrocosm; it points, instead, at a particular osmosis between the
private and public dimensions of life, echoing, thus, Jameson’s
arguments (1986: 77).
      Sweet and Sour Milk clearly insists on this connection between
different levels: Keynaan, the authoritarian father, recalls the figure of
Siad Barre – as explicitly suggested by Farah himself with a quotation
from Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933): «In the
figure of the father the authoritarian state has its representative in
every family, so that the family becomes its most important instrument
of power» (Farah 1979: 98) – while his sons Soyaan and Loyaan
represents the resistance both to his father and to the Somali regime.
      The story begins with Soyaan’s murder and Loyaan’s choice to
investigate on his twin brother’s death. Soyaan, an economist in the
service of the dictatorial regime, appears to have been involved in
clandestine political and military activity against the dictator. The
cause of his death cannot be ascertained, but Loyaan discovers the
existence of three documents written by Soyaan: Soyaan’s own diary, a
mysterious “Memorandum” and a short essay. Loyaan, however,
cannot draw any sensible conclusion from them.


      7
        A Naked Needle (1976) is Farah’s second novel in English. It deals with
Somali intellectualship under Barre’s regime; the mode is mainly mimetic,
however, rather than allegorical.
      8
        In Sweet and Sour Milk, Keynaan is the authoritarian father of two rebel
sons, Soyaan and Loyaan. In Sardines, the main characters are all women,
providing a gendered version of the Somali nation and its power system. In
Close Sesame, the old patriarch Deeriye tries to avenge his son, killed during
his attempt to attack the dictator, by resorting to his experience as an anti-
colonial fighter.


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      Soyaan’s diary, in fact, includes cryptical entries, such as this one:
«M to the power of 2. I/M comrade in project» (Farah 1979: 27).
Whereas “I/M” might refer to two characters of the novel – Margaritta
and Ibrahim Musse Ilmoog, nicknamed “Il Siciliano” – holding a copy
of the Memorandum, “M to the power of 2” are equally explained as
«Margaritta. Marco. Marco mio. Margaritta mia. M to the power of 2»
(1979: 71, emphasis in the original) and as «Mogadiscio/Moscow»
(1979: 127). The interpretation given by Farah himself is explicitly
linked to the Somali government’s close involvement with the Soviet
state. Farah’s opposition to Barre’s regime, however, does not coincide
with the Western, liberal position against Soviet influences in Africa.
As Turfan argues,

        Farah’s fundamental concern does appear to be the position of
     Africa (and of Somalia in particular) in relation to the colonial and
     neocolonial powers. […] Farah seems to be pleading for a native
     settlement of native problems and a native development within a
     native-inspired framework. (Wright 2002: 75)

      Farah’s plea «for a native settlement of native problems» is
evident in the beginning of Soyaan’s essay, where he exclusively
attacks the ruling class of his country, by defining them as: «Clowns.
Cowards. And (tribal) upstarts» (Farah 1979: 33). This might recall the
identification of clowns and terrorists in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown
for its degrading of the political enemy as buffoonesque. Farah’s take
on the Somali ruling class, however, is much wider, as it entails the
reconsideration of the orality/literacy divide within the Somali nation,
as well as its tight relationship with issues of censorship. As Derek
Wright resumes,

         [i]n the Somalia of Sweet and Sour Milk power is still largely
     oral-based. According to the system of “Dyonisius’s Ear”, the oral
     network uncovered in Soyaan’s Memorandum, a barely literate
     General recruits his security corps of spies and informers from
     illiterates working entirely in the oral medium and reporting
     verbally everything they hear. (2002: 349)

     If the repressive apparatus of the Somali state is largely based on
the existence of oral networks, this does not prevent it from concealing
Soyaan’s documents or, in the case of the real Nuruddin Farah, from
banning his novel in Somali. It is, therefore, the perverse collaboration
of orality and literacy on behalf of Barre’s regime which, according to



                                                                                13
Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
Literature


the Somali writer, has to be exposed and resisted. A possible resistance,
based on a different combination of orality and literacy, is
foreshadowed in Farah’s subsequent novel, Sardines (1981):

         [Farah] presents in the barely, literate, eloquent figure of
      Dulman in Sardines a revolutionary image of an ancient oral
      Somalia, a guest in a century of high-technology which it now
      turns to its own account by fighting despotism with its own
      weapons. “Our tradition is oral,” says Dulman. “One can
      communicate with the hearts of Somalis only through their
      hearing faculties” (1981: 170). […] Dulman has […] joined the
      struggle against the regime by smuggling underground tapes of
      subversive poems, recorded straight from the mouth, then learned
      and worked into unscripted theatrical pieces for outside
      performances. Significantly, the girls arrested for painting anti-
      government slogans sign themselves ‘Dulman,’ with the
      implication that the voices of protest have combined, the power of
      the spoken word added to that of the written one. In Sardines the
      cassette becomes the oral tradition’s answer to the debased oral
      techniques that help to keep the General in power. (Wright 2002:
      246-247)

      Dulman is eventually arrested, with a brutal repression of her act
of resistance against the regime and its censorship. Her gesture,
however, is very important in order to understand the third novel of
the trilogy, Close Sesame, where Farah’s investment both on
postcolonial allegory and on the couple “clown/dictator” is certainly
stronger.
      In Close Sesame, in fact, the old pater familias Deeriye embodies the
resistance against the regime, as a counterpoint to the authoritarian
power represented by Keynaan in Sweet and Sour Milk. Deeriye draws
his influence over the family – which can be considered as a
“resistant”, rather than as a “conformist” family – both from his
experience as anticolonial fighter against the Italian rule on the country
(1889-1960) and from the tapes of Islamic chants he listens to. Whereas
the anticolonial roots of the family support their resistance in the
present – providing, thus, a global interpretation of Somali history,
both during the colonial rule and in the present – the use of tapes
underlines the mix of orality and literacy which had been already
exploited by Dulman in Sardines.
      In addition to this, the figure of the clown is replaced by a
contiguous one: a minor character, Khaliif, is repeatedly qualified as a
“madman”. Due to his performative abilities, however, Khaliif could



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also be a clown, or an artist: he appears from time to time, with his face
painted in black and white; his street performances draw the attention
of the audience to his “mad” speeches. There, he makes cryptic
references to the regime, such as the following one:

        There are wicked houses and in them live wicked men and
     wicked women. Truth must be owned up. We are God's children;
     the wicked of whom I speak are Satan's off-spring. And nights
     plot conspiracies daylight never reveals. (1983: 19)

     Although Khaliif himself claims that «truth must be owned up»,
the possibility of a complete truth is lost within his character, who
might embody the dictator or a political opponent to Barre’s regime.
His position remains unclear until the end of the novel, paralleling the
uncertainty about Deeriye’s ultimate and desperate attack against the
General. As Khaliif himself says, «nights plot conspiracies daylight
never reveals»: this statement regards both Deeriye’s acts of resistance
and Khaliif’s performances. Like in Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
freedom/freedom of speech (symbolized by the “light”) and
violence/censorship (the “night”) cannot be neatly separated.
     However, both Deeriye and Khaliif are, in different ways, positive
characters: if Deeriye is the anticolonial cum anti-Barre hero, Khaliif is a
«wonderful mystery» (1983: 17) who deserves, at least, being listened
to. There is no reason to stone him, as some children try to do at the
beginning of the novel, since

        [m]admen, with whom a saintliness of a kind is associated, are
     stoned by children--but not by adults; for in children, in a manner
     of speaking, dwells the divided and unseasoned man or woman.
     Nobody ever stones the object of one’s love (1983: 62).

      Khaliif deserves «one’s love» because he shares «a saintliness of a
kind» with the devout Deeriye and, more importantly, because he
could be an embodiment of the dictator, but also a clown and an artist:
his obscure speech might interpreted in several different ways, but it is,
finally, an allegorical speech, where Khaliif «says one thing and means
another». Khaliif, thus, represents the mise en abime of postcolonial
allegory, that is, of Farah’s own possibility to speak and write, beyond
the binary alternative between political censorship and the Western,
liberal myth of “freedom of speech”.




                                                                               15
Lorenzo Mari, “A War Between Buffoons”? Censorship and Self-Censorship in Postcolonial
Literature



                                   4. Conclusion
     Although Rushdie’s and Farah’s texts enact two different kinds of
postcolonial allegory, they are engaged in a similar gesture of
representation and deconstruction of the couple formed by the
clown/artist and the dictator, as quintessential to their take on
“postcolonial censorship”. The names of the protagonists of this
gesture, Rashid Khalifa, in Rushdie’s Haroun, and Khaliif, in Farah’s
Sweet and Sour Milk, derive from the same etymology, which can be
retraced in the Arabic word for “caliph”, a leader holding both the
political and religious power in the Muslim cultures such as the Indian
and the Somali ones.
     By playing with this analogy and underlining differences as well
as contradictions, these authors show that the clown/writer has a very
similar power. Differently from Norman Manea’s essayistic treatment
of the same argument, which sticks to the ambivalences of human
psychology, both Rushdie and Farah place this peculiar representation
within the cultural and political frame of postcolonial allegory.
     Such a choice allows them to show that the power represented by
freedom of speech, though being a political response to censorship,
should not be idealized, as it may reinforce colonial, as well as
neocolonial, discourses. In order to avoid these risks, their take on
postcolonial censorship and self-censorship is always placed within a
larger scope, pointing at the transformation of colonial/postcolonial
history or at a metacommentary on the newly decolonized postcolonial
nations.9




      9
       As for the researches leading to this article, I would like to
acknowledge the financial and research support which I received from the
FMSH (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme) and the LabEx
TransferS (CNRS/Paris 3) within the research program “Fernand Braudel”
(COFUND).


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Manea, Norman, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, New York,
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                                     The Author
Lorenzo Mari

      Lorenzo Mari is Postdoctoral Fellow at the LabEx TransferS
(CNRS/Paris 3) with a “Fernand Braudel” IFER Incoming Fellowship
(COFUND) provided by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de
l’Homme. He holds a PhD in Comparative and Postcolonial Literature
from the University of Bologna. His research interests include East
African, as well as South African colonial and postcolonial literature.
Together with Dr Gabriele Proglio and Dr Valeria Deplano, he co-



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                                           Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2013)



edited the anthology of essays Subalternità italiane. Percorsi di ricerca tra
letteratura e storia (Aracne, 2014).

      Email: lorenzo.mari4@unibo.it



                              The Article
Data invio: 15/01/2015
Data accettazione: 15/04/2015
Data pubblicazione: 15/05/2015



                     How to Cite This Article
     Mari, Lorenzo, “«A War Between Buffoons»? Censorship and Self-
Censorship in Postcolonial Literature”, Censura e autocensura, Eds. A.
Bibbò,    S.    Ercolino,   M.     Lino,    Between,    V.9     (2015),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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