Why we must embrace cultural terrorists

Britain’s government website on Kenya begins its ‘Terrorism’ section with this: ‘There is a high threat from terrorism in Kenya’. While we might rightly object to specific Travel Advisories, it’s undeniable that terrorist attacks have been relatively frequent in Kenya over recent years, from the Westgate siege to cowardly grenade attacks on matatus and churches. 
Terrorism is a horribly cruel crime.

As gifted Kenyan diplomat Martin Kimani has recently written, terrorism of the sort experienced in Kenya stems from the desire of certain individuals to return to nostalgic, misremembered pasts; it is the abhorrent consequence of fundamentalist thinking, whether this be the religious ideology of any faith, or a narrowly political ideology. 

Kimani convincingly argues that terrorists are responding to Kenya’s attempts to create a more open and democratic society, although I’d add that our ‘open society’ is something more promised through our Constitution than really visible on the ground.  Indeed, many argue that Kenya is becoming less open and democratic.

We also find ‘terrorism’ in literature. I don’t mean terrorism of the specifically Al-Shabaab type.  I also don’t mean, by ‘in literature’, thriller novels featuring heroic CIA agents and caricatured Arab-types. 

Rather, I mean ‘terrorism’ as a literary critical term.  We rarely encounter ‘terrorism’ used like this, but perhaps we should.

Corrupted and die
French literary critic Jean Paulhan used the word ‘terrorism’ in his early 20th-century essay, The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terrorism in Literature. He defined ‘terrorism’ in opposition to ‘rhetorical’ or rule-bound uses of language in literature. 

Paulhan’s neglected contention was that rhetorical literature is that which is clichéd, derivative and conventional in its structures and language use. 

Rhetorical literature, therefore, is that which rocks no boats, offends no-one, and fits snugly into already existing genres and attitudes; Paulhan believed that rhetoric consequently ‘stultifies the spirit’, impoverishing human experience, even though it may superficially appear ‘beautiful’ or comfort us with its recognition. 

In reality, it merely meets our expectations and confirms our prejudices. Terroristic literature, on the other hand, rescues culture and its players from the stagnating effects of rhetorical literature. Terrorism shakes things up, employing language in new, unexpectedly inventive ways, refreshing society in the process. 

Later literary theorists employing Paulhan’s terminology, such as Gerard Genette, have gone further, suggesting that rhetorical/conventional literature is ‘Imperialist’ insofar as it becomes the easy default way of writing, loved by lazy capitalist publishers and authors who like to produce books that fit saleable profiles. 

Genette argues that rhetorical literature colonises bookshelves across the globe, with terroristic literature emerging only periodically to shake things up. 

Let’s return to Kenya. Here, we have a literary machine that has stalled and stagnated after some thrilling work in the early post-independence years.

Our writing (not all, but certainly the Anglophone stuff) has become derivative, or at least it was until shortly after 2000, when Moi departed and when Kwani? (now celebrating ten years) emerged: our bookshops remain dominated by textbooks; our poetry, where it exists, still often struggles to break free of the ‘O Afrika, thou hast been raped’ mode of cliché; our novels feature youngsters growing up in the ‘authentic’ homestead, which they leave to visit the ‘Westernised’ city, where they become corrupted, and die.

Then, ‘terroristic’ Kwani? came along, bursting with innovative writing that broke the rules, clearing shared space to enable other exciting writers to similarly break convention and jump into the rule-free game of terror. 

Englishes and Dholuo 
Recently, our leading writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, went further and published what we might call a ‘Terrorist Manifesto’, which, like an Al-Qaeda recruiter, he uploaded as YouTube videos, the same year he broke Kenyan ‘rules’ on sexuality.  In these videos he condemns our dependency mindset, the one that leads us to believe that we must, like mimic-men, copy Western habits, economic systems and writing. 

It’s the rhetorical mindset that makes us write as eternal victims.  Instead, he argues for locally-inspired forms of cultural creativity; in effect, he proposes a glorious form of Paulhanian terrorism against rhetorical complacency.  Terrorism is something Binyavanga practices, both in his unique staccato prose style and in his choice of YouTube over traditional print media.

We see such terrorism at play in other contemporary Kenyan texts, such as Yvonne Owuor’s excellent novel, Dust, which uses language in extremis, plaiting diverse Englishes with Dholuo and other forms.

If poet Tony Mochama was once dismissed by a Kenyan literary commentator as a ‘Literary Gangster’ (something Mochama took pride in), we could adapt Paulhanian terminology to praise our writers as proud Cultural Terrorists.

Against miniskirts
In the Paulhanian universe, then, terrorism in literature is a creative virtue, the skill of writing outside the rut of expectation.
Confusingly, other theorists argue that terrorism in its negative form is really something practiced by establishment literary critics and journalists, not the positively terroristic writers. 

The Grand Anarchist of postmodernism, Jean-Francois Lyotard, for example, argues that negative terrorism is the attempt by establishment critics ‘to eliminate, or threaten to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him’. 

So, the negative terrorist might be the critic who simply dismisses a fellow writer as a ‘charlatan’, who scatters nastily irrelevant value judgements such as ‘This writer is gay, so bad’, or who tells someone she may not have an opinion on Kenyan literature because, say, she looks Asian. 

The below-the-belt, gatekeeping commentator is, according Lyotard, the real terrorist in the negative sense. 
Let’s return to Kimani’s excellent thoughts on Kenyan terrorism. 

What he rightly condemns in Al-Shabaab sounds very close, doesn’t it, to the attitudes of our more conservative literary commentators with regard to innovative writers? 

For instance, the fundamentalist belief that literature must be rhetorical and fit a pre-existent mould; the nostalgic, mythical desire to have a Kenyan literature ‘as it used to be’; the attempt to unfairly stifle the ‘open and democratic’ voices of young creators! 

Which begs the difficult question: ‘Who are the Cultural Terrorists, then?’ The thrilling rule-breakers amongst our younger writers, or the establishment bullies who’d prefer that the young wrote novels against miniskirts? You decide.