Tema-II's Pen

THABOLWETHU TEMA MAPHOSA

Sometimes we stumble on a piece of literature not knowing that it will transcend just being a mere intellectual treatise. It takes us on a journey of complexity, intellectual musing, despair, and hope. Ka Canham’s “Rioutus Deathscapes” fits this description and even more. In “Rioutus Deathscapes” Ka Canham (2023) takes us on a journey of theorizing. In wanting to propound what he ultimately calls the Mpondo theory, Hugo engages on the development of theory from a black perspective. He embraces the complexity, liminality, fluidity, and the terribleness of human existence. He strives to capture the profundity of suffering and the hope that stems from it.

Hugo Ka Canham seeks no permission to theorize from below. His is somewhat of a grounded theory approach and more. The book centers the ways of life of those the theory emanates from. It takes place somewhere in the rioting hills of Mpondoland. A land where people, in their lifestyle, continue to contest and protest the persona that must be embodied to fit within a neo-liberal capitalist democracy. Here Hugo does not fall into essentializing and/or ethnicizing the Mpondo people. Rather, Hugo seeks to foreground the lived realities of the Mpondo people in creating a theoretical framework that allows us to see black people’s lives as they live them. Through a critical and complex historiography, Hugo draws us to the History of the Mpondo people that contextualizes their current realities in the ragged landscapes of Mpondoland. This historiography troubles the notion of linear temporality. Through the use of language, Hugo engages with temporality in ways that make Mpondo history a retrievable and available present reality. Hugo, in Ramose’s (2007) terms, presents the Mpondo people as “abantu.” That is, beings becoming. Beings in a perpetual state of motion. In so doing Hugo resists the temptation of obscuring some of their complexities in order to paint a glossy image bereft of convolution.

Hugo centers ukwakumkanya to tend and make sense of that which is far by obscuring the immediate. This, in my view, tells of Hugo’s intellectual courage. As the be-ing and experience of black people is obscured by the immediate impositions of the necropolitical state, Hugo transcends this through ukwakumnya to excavate and center black ontologies. He writes; “by centering ukwakumkanya, I amplify the lives of my protagonists and treat their truth claims with the gravity of theorists. I rely on stories, allusions, traces, and residue that I read off surfaces. I am preoccupied with how one accounts for a history that is undocumented in the written form.” For Canham ukwakumkanya offers the “simultaneous vision across sensorial registers.” It allows Hugo to travel to distant elesewheres of potential and possibility. It is in so doing that Hugo frees himself from the limitations of scholarship that ends at critique. Hugo transcends critique into imagination. Hugo allows one as the reader to consider possibilities of existence beyond the current socio-political order. In so doing, Hugo underscores the fragility of the neocolonial, neoapartheid, neoliberal capitalist empire. As Kathy Weeks (2011) opined that the limitations of our imagination are shaped by the limitations of present systems, the powerful undermining of the hegemonic status quo by Hugo Ka Canham therefore leads the reader to potentialities beyond the immediate.  

Of cause, Hugo does not externalize himself from this whole process. Ka Canham rather inhabits a perpetual state of reflexivity in the book. He lets the reader know of his presence and how it shapes how one ultimately sees and engages with the work. Ultimately Hugo allows himself to be the vantage point through which the reader experiences the canonization of a theory from below. Hugo through empathy, awareness, and thoughtfulness esteems the voices of those for whom he is seeking to theorize.

Hugo’s active awareness allows him the space to reveal the complexity of blackness as he concomitantly unravels the Mpondo theory. Added to this is an ability to also rope in queerness as not only a way of being but more importantly a way of seeing and relating to the complexity albeit terribleness of the world. In this he writes, “my definition of queer emerges from Mpondo life…It gestures to the nonnormative, emergent, incomplete, evolving, spectral, boundless, and therefore that which is inappropriable by the necropolitical state and global capitalism.” By inhabiting such a way of seeing, Ka Canham allows himself the freedom to use diverse theoretical tools at his disposal.  As he theorizes, he borrows from nature’s objects that sustain and coexist with Mpondo life. For example, Ka Canham uses the sea to tend to the relationship between Mpondo people and water. In this, he excavates the history of black people with water. How water holds their dead as it is simultaneously a site for rituals of cleansing and healing. Ka Canham (2023:78) here also contends with the properties of water to draw out theory. He writes:

I do not suggest that the sea is inherently evil or that black people only fear it. I am interested in the potentialities of the ambivalence evoked by water masses. As I illustrate, black sociality is intimately tied to various bodies of water, and some black communities have more proximal relations to water than others. Rather, I point to those who force others into the ocean as cargo meant to serve the interests of capital and white supremacy.

I concede that all of what is mentioned above does not adequately capture the depth and intellectual vastness of Hugo Ka Canham’s “Rioutus Deathscapes.” My language will always fail to capture the psychological experience that is evoked by reading Hugo’s book. My reflection will always be inadequate at capturing the essence of Ka Canham’s work and how, in my estimation, it ultimately gestures at a different form of psychotherapy. A therapeutic framework that allows us to contend empathically with the tragic episodes of our lives. It is this that I will then endeavor to engage more with by showing how the book made me feel by borrowing from my own current experience.

I am a Ndebele person from Bulawayo, a city in Zimbabwe. This means studying in South Africa I need to have a study permit. With potential of doing my education in 2024, I recently applied to renew my study permit/visa. This is well and fine save for that I cannot travel home during the processing time of my study visa. The process takes about 8-12 weeks thus I am confronted with the grim reality of spending the festive season without communing with family and home. A gripping loneliness pervades my daily life in this moment as everyone has gone back home for the holidays. Seeing others communing with their families only cements my reality of loneliness and a looming despair. Time seems to be dilating, with days spanning weeks. I contend with this loneliness by reading and reflecting. I try circumventing despair by engaging with art and literature. Sometimes it works. I am able to transcend my terrible material reality by engaging with distant elsewheres. Sometimes it does not work. In those days I stare and experience the reality of loneliness and its encroaching despair. I miss home so bad my heart aches. Though home has its own realities of droughts and economic instability, at least if I am there I can share in collective grief. At least there the burden becomes lighter as I cry together with others of the same ethnic persuasion.

Faced with this, I exercise ukwakumkanya in Ka Canham’s terms as a way of tending to the terribleness of my situation. My situation has led me to the absurdity of colonial borders. This situation as subjective evidence allows me to face the jarring results of colonial borders. It allows me to engage with the pitfalls of nationalism as a necropolitical formation. I am daily faced with the reality that borders have deemed it impossible to spend the most important time of the year with my mother. The lack of unity in our continent has dictated that without a document I am unable to access the human need of belonging and interaction. Already by being Ndebele I inhabit a nebulous identity. I lack a proper claim to place and citizenry. Being Ndebele in Zimbabwe means by not being Shona my sense of belonging is sometimes questioned. Being the same in South Africa means, even with a permitting genealogy, I have no claim to place and belonging because I was not born here even though my ancestors were from here. This coupled with continental disunity represented by borders has ultimately rendered me a “non-being” in Fanonian (1961) terms. How is this different from the pass laws of the apartheid? How is it possible that after liberation I am inhabiting some of the material realities of my ancestors? Realities that rendered black love impossible through the imposition of psychological and tangible distances between black bodies.

I recently got word from home that ten of my mother’s cows have died due to the drought. As my mother was presented with the idea of selling all her cows, she refused. As much as the village people are somewhat jealousy of her livestock, my mother has refused countless times to leave the village. She continues to love and show up for the village folk even when faced with the hate they extend towards her. I have grown to understand that that hate stems from patriarchal violence. My mother’s success as a widow irks the patriarchal idea that women are mentally inept to adapt and engage with the world with a sense of control and urgency. Ka Canham explicates on this by borrowing from Mudavhanu (2019) in saying “powerful black women who live outside of normative values have historically been made crazy as a pretext for limiting their impact. Their very means to power is delegitimized by contending epistemologies of personhood.”

I also concede that my mother’s spirituality also sustains her. Umama communes with God daily through song and prayer. But her enduring daily experiences are punctuated with episodes of despair and hopelessness. My mother cries often as she is burdened by her realities. In times when I travel home, I usually bask in the limited joy that I sometimes can hug her and cry with her. I am sometimes able to sing together with her. I sometimes humor her into temporarily forgetting the terribleness of her life. I therefore worry and despair at the thought that I will not be with her this festive season.

I know that when an animal dies my mother grieves. She grieves because animals are not only important to her because of their commercial value. Animals to her represent so much more. Among other things, they represent the memories of her deceased husband, my father. To her, cows therefore are a modicum of remembering. They represent a nostalgia of the better days when my father was still alive. I therefore worry about how the death of ten of them means to her. I worry for her mental health. I draw on Ka Canham’s ability to center the voices of the protagonists in his book to extend radical empathy to my mother. A sought of Carl Rogers’ unconditional positive regard with extensions of deep connection and understanding (Cain & American Psychological Association, 2010). Through the possibilities created by ukwakumkanya I intersect my mother’s despair with my own.

In this season of utter desolation, I survive on the elsewheres propounded by Ka Canham. As a black man who can’t afford therapy, Hugo’s work allows me the therapeutic space and impetus to face my despair. Hugo’s work gives me the language and tools to engage with my depressing reality. It allows me to engage with the terribleness of my current situation whilst envisioning possibilities. Hugo’s theorizing allows me the space to extend radical empathy towards myself.

References

Cain, D. J., & American Psychological Association. (2010). Person-centered psychotherapies. American Psychological Association.

Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Kwela Books.

Hugo ka Canham. (2023). Riotous Deathscapes. Duke University Press

Mudavhanu, S. (2019). “Girl, You Are a New Species of Krazy’: An Analysis on YouTube to Dr. Stella Nyanzi’s Nude Protest in April 2016.” Communicare, 38(2), 74–92.

Ramose, M. B. (2007). African philosophy through ubuntu. Content Solutions. Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work : feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Duke University Press