Whereas in much of the West after 1789 the Bible became increasingly irrelevant theologically, its influence spread in many parts of the developing world, transmitted as part of 19th-century imperial expansion but taking on a postcolonial life of its own. The dynamism of African Anglicanism contrasts with the decline of the Church in England; the relevance of Roman Catholicism is more strongly felt in Latin America than in European Catholic countries, including Italy. Since 1945, the influence of Scripture is felt strongly in developing countries and their literatures. In some of the notable literature of the Third World, the Bible remains a living force, a source of meaning for the present and an agent of progress.
There is irony in the fact that Western economic systems which often degrade the poor tend to benefit them far more than theological systems which speak of the pure and holy poor. Where biblical influence is greatest today, in Africa and Latin America, poverty predominates and liberation theology grows with the power of the Church. In much (though by no means all) of the West, poverty has declined along with the influence of the established Church. Scripture itself anticipates this development, for it associates wealth with the corruption and abandonment of faith (for example, in Deuteronomy 32: 15 and Matthew 6: 24); the poor are more loyal to their faith than the rich. Though signs of decline should not be exaggerated,1 in traditionally Christian European countries where extreme poverty was eradicated, Christian observance weakened and Church attendance declined. Scripture is often most meaningful among the poor in fragile or failed states, where rule of law is weak or has collapsed.
In the literature of late 20th-century developed countries, ‘the poor’, holy or not, and the entire subject of extreme poverty, practically vanish; but in developing countries, where the Church grew strikingly, the biblical image of the poor has had powerful influence. Among writers who draw on Scripture (specifically, the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, and the Koran) in their depiction of the poor are Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1958), J.M. Coetzee in The Life and Times of Michael K. (1974), Naguib Mahfouz in The Harafish (1977), and Clarice Lispector in The Hour of the Star (1977). These writers love the poor as individuals and hate inequality and injustice, not coldly but with deepest passion, with outrage, fury, satire, compassion, disgust, and horror – at the people and institutions, sacral and secular, which let poverty fester; often they speaks not just to their time, but also with the voice of the downtrodden of the ages.
The binding of Isaac in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
The African novelist, Chinua Achebe, wrote Things Fall Apart in the 1950s, as British colonial rule in Nigeria ended, but he set the story about 60 years previously, in the 1890s, when it began. Achebe looks back at the world of his parents and grandparents, when tribal rule collapsed, at the end of Victorian era. Achebe’s parents were Christian missionaries, while his great uncle was a tribal chief. Born with his feet in both tribal and colonial camps, he learned as a child to love both the Bible and Ibo tribal culture. The richness and originality of his style comes from these dual influences.2
Among the questions Achebe raises in his novel is: why did so many Africans willingly join the Church, as his father did, though it was the religion of the imperial subjugators and exploiters? In particular, how does Nwoye, son of a tribal chief, become Isaac, a Christian missionary? The religious culture of the colonial power took root for reasons largely having to do with the ‘grim struggle against poverty and misfortune’3 in a drought-plagued land where crop failure and famine are regular visitors. The British open the eyes of many Africans to their poverty and to the value of better education, medicine, and farming methods. Many native Africans welcome Christian missionary efforts, particularly in the creation of hospitals and schools. In a world threatened constantly by drought and floods, disease and famine, Christianity offers hope. Some become passionately attached to the Bible, not as a tool of imperialism but as a charter of liberation. Women, in particular those maltreated by their husbands, seek to escape patriarchal control. Children, too, are at times revolted by tribal customs. Some come to prefer the more egalitarian way of life taught by the missionaries, and the faith symbolized by the central biblical reference in the novel – the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac.4
Achebe performs a delicate balancing act: he lovingly recalls his rich tribal culture while making clear the social and psychological forces which made his father a missionary. The result is a remarkable synthesis of a rich and proud African culture and European Christianity; Achebe takes the language of the empire and makes it his own.
In the colonial era there was a popular saying: ‘When the white man came to our country he had the Bible and we had the land. Then the white man said “let us pray”. After the prayer, the white man had the land and we had the Bible.’ In Things Fall Apart, however, Africans accept the Bible is a priceless gift. Christianity brought by imperial conquest taught the love of the poor and the defeated, the virtues of meekness and kindness, and salvation from sin. The Bible is deeply critical of empires, though they are not without a divine purpose (Isaiah, for example, famously describes Assyria as the rod of God’s wrath, though Assyria destroys the kingdom of Israel). Christianity proved an even greater challenge than imperial firepower to warrior-based native authority as Africans were drawn to the moral power of the Bible. African tribes took the Bible to their hearts, loved it, and remained loyally devoted to it – far more than in England, where knowledge of the Bible and its authority steadily declined. The novel owes much of its sensitivity to biblical influence. The Bible is itself opposed to imperial conquest, plunder, and arrogance. It contends with empire: the Mesopotamian empires in the Hebrew Bible and the Roman empire in the Greek Bible. The only true empire in the Bible is of truth and justice, charity and love. Achebe acknowledges the power of missionary Christianity to change lives for the better.
The novel has detailed descriptions of West African culture, its beliefs, customs, and oral literature, and it is not Achebe’s aim to attack the tribal way of life; rather, he describes it on its own terms. However, in the late 19th century, in the words of the title, taken from Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’, the tribal way of life fell apart as Christianity spread.
The main character in Things Fall Apart is Okonkwo, belonging to a clan of nine West African villages (Umuofia), with about 10,000 men. These villages are a microcosm of Africa, in the process of being forced into the British empire. Okonkwo starts as a young impoverished sharecropper, who does all the work and is paid one-third of the harvest. He has his mother and two sisters to support, and is at first too poor to marry. After many years, his enterprise and hard work pay off, and he becomes a tribal leader, famous as a wrestler (‘Roaring Flame’) and admired as a ‘great man’, a rich, powerful farmer and warrior. Okonkwo’s ‘wealth’ is set out not without irony: he has two barns full of yams, two titles, three wives, eight children (of whom six are sons); and five heads of his enemies, whom he had killed in tribal wars, hang as decoration on the walls of his huts. These signs of distinction are futile against the arms and organization of the White colonialists and, as even some natives gradually come to feel, weak against the moral values of the Bible. The Christian challenge to the tribal of life, however humiliating, opens the prospect of a better future, with improved health and education, and better life chances.
Okonkwo is obsessed by fears associated with his father, a miserable failure in life, repellent in death. He hates any form of gentleness or idleness, any compromise or admission of weakness. These traits prove fatal when the tribal land becomes part of the British empire, and the greatest warriors are humiliated by their subservience to the colonial power, or crushed if they oppose it.
Rich in his tribe, Okonkwo is among the very poorest according to the main international yardstick of poverty – infant mortality. His second wife, Ekwefi, has one daughter from ten pregnancies. Even more tragic is the tribal leader, Uchendu, who has lost five of his six wives, and buried 22 of his children. Medicine, Achebe reveals, is represented in African lore as an old woman with a fan; the ‘medicine-house’ is for worship of gods. The medicine man dispenses remedies which Achebe, university educated, a BBC employee at the time when he wrote the novel, presents from the tribal viewpoint, a logical extension of communal beliefs, part of a rich culture, without judgment, yet implicitly primitive and futile. The medicine man mutilates dead children to discourage their spirits from becoming ogbanji, wicked children who, after death, re-enter the womb to cause further deaths. The Christians oppose such customs as evidence of what Joseph Conrad describes as the ‘heart of darkness’ – though Conrad in fact finds the ‘heart of darkness’ less in Africa than in Europe, its arrogance, greed, and criminal exploitation of slave labor (in this case by Belgium), and the corruption of European cultural ideals as represented by emissaries of ‘enlightenment’ such as the corrupt megalomaniac, the ivory trader Kurtz.
In depicting graphically such tribal customs as infant murder and child sacrifice, and the treatment of the outcast, of women and the sick, Achebe lends credence to Marlowe’s formidable aunt who, at the start of Heart of Darkness, encourages her nephew to go to Africa to improve the lives of the ignorant masses. Achebe portrays African hostility to the missionaries. Colonialism brings the humiliation of foreign rule, the questioning and attenuation of local customs, theft of resources, even extermination of some of the natives. The natives retaliate by burning down the newly built local church, and the colonials crush them with their superior firepower. These are small rumblings in the history of imperialism – lodged neatly in a book by the Commissioner, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger – but seismic to the natives.
Yet, in Things Fall Apart – unlike Heart of Darkness – the natives increasingly recognize the good the missionaries bring. Many feel that Christianity speaks to their lives. Some convert – without coercion. Converts include mothers tormented by the deaths of their babies, whose corpses are mutilated, adding an extra sorrow to their grief. Others are cursed with twins, stuffed live in pots and, still crying, abandoned in the forest. To these Africans, Christianity is less a colonial curse than a comfort and salvation. Okonkwo’s own wife, Ekwefi, after losing nine children, joins the Christians. Another mother, Nneka, has four sets of twins, all killed according to tribal custom; she too becomes a Christian. Education, too, promotes conversion: the missionaries build schools where children learn to read and write. In the mission schools, the Bible is the main text for study. Things Fall Apart is a product of a society that loves a good story, and has the art of language and conversation, in which the Bible is a source of wonder and wisdom.
Achebe portrays African women drawing close to Christianity. The missionaries give voice to women’s grievances in the tribal world. Their schools teach greater equality of the sexes. In the tribal world, women are totally dominated by their husbands. Marriage is dictated by men. Wife-beating is common, for the slightest reason. Okonkwo beats one of his wives for not cooking lunch in time; he shoots his gun at another when he is angry at her.
Whereas in Yeats’ poem, Christianity falls apart, in Things Fall Apart, Christianity is a beacon of hope, as it has remained in Africa long after the colonial era. Things fall apart, but there is also reconstruction. Achebe in effect presents not just a drowning of the ‘ceremony of innocence’ but also its re-establishment. Achebe describes the Church as a haven for men and women who for various reasons are outcast (osu) in tribal society. Shunned by the tribe, they are welcomed in church and comforted by the Christian message that human beings are created equal in the eyes of God. (Similarly, in India under British colonial rule, most Hindus who converted to Christianity came from the lower castes and untouchables, the powerless and disenfranchised.)
To Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, tribal culture, though beautiful, pales in comparison. Okonkwo wants him to be his successor as tribal chief. Drawn to the poetry and humanity of Scripture, Nwoye disappoints his father. He commits the ultimate betrayal in converting to Christianity. Okonkwo beats him and he leaves home, never to return. Later he becomes a missionary and converts his mother and siblings. A tipping point is the sacrifice of his friend, Ikemefuna, an exile from another village. Several years previously, Ikemefuna’s father was complicit in a murder. As part of his punishment, his son was taken from him. (Ikemefuna never learns the cause of his exile.) Okonkwo, part of a tribal delegation dealing with the case, was given charge of Ikemefuna. He took the boy into his home and became a surrogate father to him. Nwoye came to love him as a brother. Years passed, and the village chiefs decided that Ikemefuna must be sacrificed. This was done in a forest ritual with Okonkwo, terrified of being thought a weakling, giving the death blow.
Nwoye, shattered by this loss, finds in Christianity a religion that would not tolerate child sacrifice – as in the story of Abraham and Isaac: he changes his name to Isaac. Other biblical echoes include the warning given to Okonkwo, ‘Do not bear a hand in his death’, and the angel who appears to Abraham in Genesis; as well as the unwanted children abandoned in the bush, recalling the abandonment of Ishmael. Okonkwo himself become a sacrificial victim. Violently opposed to the white government and Church, he commits a murder and hangs himself, a tribal Jesus, degraded and scourged, who dies – is it for the sins of the tribe or those committed against the tribe? Achebe does not romanticize colonialism, but he concedes the benefits welcomed by many Africans, leading to the modernization of tribal society.
The poor and the lost paradise in Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.
Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K. continues a tradition of describing the poor in language of great richness: it recalls the depiction of peasants by Wordsworth, Turgenev, Manzoni, Hugo, Carlo Levi, and Steinbeck, for whom the poorest are beacons of a humanity threatened by so-called civilization. On the surface, Coetzee tells a simple tale of a homeless vagrant, Michael K., in South Africa during the violence of the apartheid era. Michael finds his way to a deserted farm. There he becomes a modern Adam, tending the land with his own hands, growing his own food. He recreates briefly a blessed state of communion with the earth.
The name Michael K. echoes Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, an outsider and victim who does not give up. Michael K.’s ‘life and times’ from childhood, spent in an orphanage, consists of a string of Kafkaesque run-ins with bureaucracy and authority: police, soldiers, petty officials, people behind desks in hospitals and railway stations – but in Third World conditions in time of war and social collapse. Yet Michael K.’s story is also one of spiritual growth in defiance of poverty. Biblical echoes are frequently heard in Coetzee’s meditations on the nature of power, wealth, and consumption, on the bond of human beings with the earth which feeds us and the tragic consequences which follow the violent severing of this bond.
Michael K. works as a low-paid gardener in Cape Town. His sole relative is his ailing mother, who put him in the orphanage when he was a child and whom he now looks after. Michael lives a life of isolation, a Robinson Crusoe on the island of himself. The country’s essential services, its utilities, welfare, hospitals, transport system, break down. He loses his job. A person can be shot just for walking the streets. Travel from one town to another is a bureaucratic nightmare, taking weeks. Officials paid to provide services routinely humiliate the poor, waste their time, and often deceive them, rob them, and endanger their lives. Hospitals overflow with war casualties. The hospital in which Michael’s mother dies is a place of neglect, dehumanization, and death. Her body swollen with disease, unable to walk and barely breathing, she is admitted to hospital where she spends five days in a corridor among dozens of victims of gunshot wounds and stabbings. The nurses ‘had no time to spend cheering up an old woman when there were young men dying spectacular deaths all about’.5 No one even brings her a bedpan. After six days she leaves this purgatory, preferring to be sick outside the hospital. K. flees on foot. He builds a kind of rickshaw on wheels using a wheelbarrow and bicycle and pushes his dying mother in the direction of the provincial town of Prince Albert where she was born. She dies on the way and Michael, carrying her ashes in an urn, continues to Prince Albert. He finds an abandoned farm and scatters his mother’s ashes on the earth.
Living in a cave-like dwelling by day, he emerges at night to cultivate the soil. He plants pumpkin and melon seeds he has found, and grows his own food. Michael finds his greatest pleasure when he waters the field, feeling it is his nature to be a gardener. He feels a ‘cord of tenderness’ with the earth and the danger that human corruption and violence break this cord.
Michael does not belong to the world of war surrounding him: he plants seeds, the army plants mines. He resists the idea of ownership while the army violently asserts territorial control. He returns to a state of nature, living like a lizard, a sparrow, a mouse, a squirrel, an ant, or a bee. Nothing he touches belongs to him. Yet, the earth, belonging to no one, belongs to all. When, hungry, he takes from a field, he is obeying instinctively a divine law: ‘It is God’s earth, he thought, I am not a thief.’6 The pumpkins he grows are not his – they ‘weren’t mine’, he says, ‘They came from the earth’7 – but as a human being in need of sustenance he has a right to eat them, and the privilege of blessing them.
In contrast with other African fiction, such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in which the Church, however tainted by missionary colonialism, nevertheless brings benefit to the natives, the Church in The Life and Times of Michael K. seems to have no role. Michael is determined in any case to escape the humiliation of charity. Yet, there are many biblical echoes in his transformation. He is a kind of Adam returned to paradise or fallen from paradise, a ‘handful of dust’ – recalling the passage ‘dust you are and to dust shall return’ (Genesis 3: 19); his travels on foot recall the Israelites in the desert, eating his ‘manna’, his ‘bread of freedom’; building his own temporary home as the Israelites did; cultivating the land and making it bloom; and many other phrases recall the Bible; he has, for example, ‘a time for everything’, an echo of the book of Ecclesiastes. There is also something Jesus-like about Michael: he too is in his early thirties, a man of suffering and endurance, stigmatized by society, a suffering servant of peace in time of war, who in turning the other cheek unwittingly discovers a philosophy of life which some treat as a sickness or absurdity and others recognize, rightly or wrongly, as profound wisdom.8 Children keep entering the story, as if to remind us of the Christian association of childhood innocence with the kingdom of heaven. Children play on Michael K. as though he were part of the earth. He has an instinct for turning punishment and humiliation to affirmation, his disabilities to a form of creation, his ashes to hope. In a world of murderous Cains, he becomes an Adam, recreating paradise. Even his harelip, which he has from birth and could easily be corrected, becomes a mark of individuality. In childhood, when his teacher punishes the class by making everyone sit in silence, hands on heads, almost as if preparing them for a life of confrontation with the police, Michael allows this punishment to lull him into a delicious state of drowsy contemplation. Humiliation becomes a source of insight also after Michael’s mother is cremated by the hospital, without his permission. He is given the ashes, coldly. When he starts tending the land, he realizes the ceremonial use of these ashes – and his calling in life:
[He] set about clearing a patch a few metres square in the middle of the field. There, bending low so that they would not be carried away by the wind, he distributed the fine grey flakes over the earth, afterwards turning the earth over spadeful by spadeful. This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator.9
Michael K. is a victim but an unusually resourceful one: he builds the vehicle on which he transports his mother; he uses the lens of a toy telescope to make fire; he makes a catapult and a sling to catch birds; he mends a pump; he builds his own home with a pit for fire, and a vent-tunnel for smoke. Michael K. seems to have escaped the fate of Kafka’s K., in returning to a paradisal moment before history and before human beings corrupted the earth.
Then history catches up with Michael K. Soldiers looking for terrorists discover him. He is thrust back into the world of Kafka, of cruel officials and unfeeling bureaucrats. Now he resembles less the character of Joseph K. and more Kafka’s hunger artist, a man who starves himself in a public performance.10 Michael K. is put in a camp but refuses to eat. This is not a hunger strike but, like Kafka’s hunger-artist, a loss of appetite: Michael K. hungers for freedom, he resists history and human depravity.11 In the camp hospital, an unnamed doctor observes him with growing sympathy, sensing in him an original soul, beyond the reach of the law of nations, in touch with timeless existential truths crushed in war. Perhaps Michael is an idiot. Even so, he seems to have transcended his time. The doctor realizes that food to Michael is an expression of humanity. If humanity is lacking, he is not hungry.
Moments in the book when Michael does eat tend to stand out: when someone, often a stranger, offers him food in a spirit of kindliness and humanity; and particularly when he eats the food he has grown himself. At the hospital where Michael’s mother is dying an anonymous man generously gives him money to buy a chicken pie; he eats it with appetite and joy. When food is not blessed, when it is not the bread of freedom, he cannot eat. His eating disorder becomes symptomatic not just of the rampant poverty and injustice in South Africa and other countries in the world, but is also an inadvertent form of protest. ‘I am not in the war’,12 he says at one point; and more than that, he seems not to belong to history but to have rediscovered and re-entered a form of existence pre-dating and transcending history. The doctor, witness to much of the violence and cruelty tearing the country apart, imagines that he might become K.’s disciple, follow him and learn his secret of achieving a primordial state of blessedness.
The paucity of his needs is a source of strength, empowering him to rediscover the essence of human existence. After K. escapes from the camp, he returns to Cape Town where the book ends as he plans to start again, this time better equipped with seeds, to realize more fully his purpose in life as a modern Adam, cultivating the earth.
The Koran and the poor in Mahfouz’s The Harafish
Like other writers on the peasantry (e.g. Clare, Hugo, Chekhov, and Silone) Mahfouz takes a religious ideology teaching compassion for the poor and shows how in practice that ideology fails: Islam does not effectively protect the poor and is defeated by poor governance.13 The Muslim faith of the common people, the harafish, helps them endure hunger, humiliation, poor living conditions, high mortality rates, corruption in government, poor life chances; yet, as was often the case in European countries, their very faith paradoxically allows their leaders to manipulate them, making them relatively passive and ineffectual in agitating for their own interests. Islam, Mahfouz implies, helps the harafish survive and gives their lives meaning and spiritual richness, but it also holds them back from asserting the freedom of choice which might lead to genuine and lasting improvements in their lives.
Mahfouz, a career civil servant, empathizes with the impoverished masses, in their faith, their fundamental goodness, intelligence and desire for a better world and, given good leaders, in their power to create one. The Egyptian poor are the centre of The Harafish, one of Mahfouz’s late works, published in 1977, when he was in his sixties. It opens with echoes of the story of Moses, with an abandoned baby crying in an alley, found and adopted by a blind man of God: the harafish – the common people – are similarly abandoned by their rulers, and led by blind faith in a world of corruption and poverty. The abandoned baby, Ashur, becomes the founder of a powerful and influential family.
Mahfouz’s work in government administration in Cairo, like Kafka’s as an insurance assessor, gave him good knowledge of people – of how things work, or don’t work, of why people succeed or fail, and particularly of good and bad government, and how bureaucracies can improve or ruin people’s lives. Though Mahfouz had a Western education in the British colonial period – he studied philosophy and European literature – the poor and badly governed were always prominent in his writings. He was fascinated by how they came to be as they were, and why they tended to remain so. For in their downtrodden state, Mahfouz’s poor are a jewel in the mud. Even after winning the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz remained among the poor in Cairo. The Harafish is the work of a master with a lifetime of achievement behind him. Set in some indeterminate earlier time, with no reference to historical events, but clearly set in Egypt, the story reads like a legend or fairy tale, with timeless universal significance. This is how things are and always have been, sanctioned by fatalistic teachings of Islam as taught in the Koran schools – the only schools in the book. For most Egyptians, poverty is, as always, inescapable, manifested in familiar indicators which are constant in the novel: high infant mortality, malnutrition, disease, low life expectancy, poor education and medical care, widespread superstition, discrimination against women, poor governance with widespread corruption.
In years when the Nile fails to overflow, there are poor harvests and famine. Babies are often abandoned by mothers who cannot feed them. Hunger, disease, and superstition are widespread. Medicine is based on superstition and folk remedies; there are no trained doctors. Housing is often unsafe and inadequate, and countless homeless people live in the cemetery. Among indicators of poverty in the novel are wife-beating, a custom allowed on the grounds that wives owe obedience to their husbands. These are described in detail. A husband is criminally charged only if the wife dies. Children too are normally beaten, both at home and in school.
Without actually calling for revolution, Mahfouz clearly identifies chronic Egyptian poverty with poor governance. The harafish are usually governed by corrupt ‘notables’, who control the clan chiefs and run protection rackets and deal in crime, drugs, and prostitution. There is no separation of government and the judiciary. The notables are usually in league with the religious leaders. The police are corrupt, the courts are rigged, and justice is usually in the hands of the clan chiefs. Lip service is paid to the notion of justice for the poor, yet the ‘notables’ have a belief not unlike Calvinism, that the rich and influential are favored by God and deserve power. The basis of government is the clan, the clans are led by chiefs whose authority usually rests not on their ability and wisdom but on intimidation, bribery, and sheer brutal power. The harafish is chronically discontented by poor governance but, it seems, psychologically incapable of changing its existence through rational means. The basis of clan leadership is not a popular and fair election process with candidates trained in government, law, or business, but a physical contest in which the rivals fight it out. (There are a half-dozen or so scenes of this kind in the novel.) Most of the victors, however good they are as wrestlers, turn out, not surprisingly, to be poor leaders. In much the same way, Mahfouz the civil servant implies, good governance is not usually achieved by the brute force of an army or a charismatic leader.
The harafish are the main victims of incessant clan warfare, permanently in conflict with the ‘notables’ of their own clan, the rich and powerful who might believe in justice and equality – but only for themselves. Mahfouz describes the entire clan system as a calamity. The only good that can be said of it is that it cannot be mistaken for anything other than it is: ‘The wicked are harsh but honest teachers.’ The clan chiefs see the poverty and misery of the harafish not as their responsibility to overcome but as a weakness to despise and exploit. They treat the harafish as women or children, with no minds of their own, easily deluded and controlled; at times they run amok, goaded into wild frenzies of destruction, though, without leadership, to no advantage of their own. The harafish accept their suffering as an inescapable fate and trap, and console themselves in the fact that their tormentors will one day fall from power. Koran education offers no way out. The Muslim clergy are not unlike some of their pre-modern Christian and Jewish counterparts in their wariness toward non-religious education. In a predominantly religious society, the privileged have little interest in the spread of education beyond the Koran schools; they do not want people to think for themselves, to believe in free will and self-improvement, above all that they have the ability and initiative to create a better world for themselves.
In the course of many generations in the novel, hardly anyone in a position of authority seems to care at all about the poor. Yet, sometimes fate brings a blessing to the harafish. In the first story in The Harafish, good governance become possible, with tragic irony – when plague wipes everyone out. Ashur, a humble carter, is led by a dream to leave with his family before the plague strikes. They live in a cave for several months and there Ashur begins to question the notion of historical inevitability, for he realizes its danger. Many people could have been saved if they had left in time. They did not have to suffer in powerlessness. Ashur and his family return to find the alley deserted; they move into the house of a former clan leader. As the starving and unemployed people slowly drift back after the catastrophe, Ashur distributes the abandoned wealth around him to them. He pays for public facilities: a fountain, a trough, a mosque. Then he is arrested by officials who are themselves looting. Imprisoned for a year, he emerges and becomes clan leader by popular acclaim. He sets an example by living modestly in a basement flat, working as he did before, as a carter.
He obliged all his followers to work for a living, thus eliminating the thugs and bullies. Only the rich had to pay protection money, which was used to benefit the poor and disabled. He subdued the chiefs of neighboring alleys and gave our alley a new dignity. As well as the respect of the outside world, it enjoyed justice, honor and security at home.14
Yet even Ashur, the best of the clan leaders, a legendary figure in his lifetime and for generations after, is faulted between the lines. Extraordinary circumstances should not be necessary to break the cycle of fate and allow a good clan leader to emerge. Ashur’s selfless devotion to the harafish, though rare and admirable, is limited in practical terms. He evidently builds no school or hospital; he creates no welfare system for the poor; nor does he try to create a democratic system of governance that will limit corruption.
In The Harafish, Mahfouz presents the case both for and against historical inevitability. He regards the rich and powerful as more rational than the common people. One of the ‘notables’, a local sheik, points out:
I don’t trust our people’s imagination. They believe good began and ended in an obscure past and they don’t distinguish between dreams and reality. They think with their emotions and their judgments are clouded because of the wretched conditions they live in. They think an angel came down from the skies every now and then to protect their ancestors.15
Ashur is such an angel, a legend after his mysterious disappearance, possibly murdered by an envious rival; and as time passes he becomes the focus of almost messianic hopes, that he will return and uproot the evil in the world. Such beliefs help the harafish accept their fate but also make them a potential danger to the ‘notables’.
At moments, out of sheer moral outrage the harafish erupt spontaneously with the force of a flood or earthquake, destroying everything in their path. One such moment occurs at the end of the book, when the once-powerful family of Ashur is reduced, like hundreds of thousands of other Egyptians, to living in the Cairo cemetery. But then miraculously, Ashur, the namesake of the original hero of the harafish, and practically a reincarnation of him, challenges the corrupt clan leader, Hassuna. Hassuna’s gang of thugs, about to kill Ashur, are stopped by the harafish who pour out of the slums and streets in a great roar, wielding sticks, bricks, stones, whatever weapons come to hand. They surge forward like a flood, enraged by a history of chronic injustice and generations of oppression, and drive away their corrupt leaders and lackeys and make Ashur the new clan chief. The dream is not unlike that in Germinal or The Grapes of Wrath, novels which envisage the final triumph of the poor. In moments such as this, Mahfouz reveals the potential for an ‘Arab Spring’, indeed for revolution of any and all peoples denied good governance in a modern world, in which lack of effective health and welfare, transport, water, and electricity supplies is no longer an ‘act of God’ – but a crime.
The love of the sacred poor: Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Macabéa, the central figure in Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, is linked by her unusual, ironic name with the Apocrypha – works which remained ‘on the outside’, unincluded in the biblical canon: her name recalls ‘Maccabee’, or ‘hammer’ in Hebrew, the name of the heroic ancient Israelite family that fought the Syrian-Greeks and won a victory commemorated to this day in the festival of Hanukkah. In her poverty, there is nothing heroic about Macabéa, the embodiment of inequality and injustice, trapped by pervasive Latin American poverty. At 19, with her life theoretically ahead of her, she in fact has reached the end. She is destined to be like all the other poor, as Orwell observed in Marrakesh in 1939:
They arise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mound of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.16
Lispector writes of Macabéa, to ensure she is remembered.
As in the Scriptural view of the poor, Macabéa, is associated with sanctity, dignified by a past of which she is ignorant. So ancient is she as to be ‘biblical’, and biblical allusions (for example, to Moses and the ‘divinity of words’ and Pharaoh) are scattered throughout her story.17 Macabéa, might be compared with Ruth in the Bible inasmuch as she, too, is spiritually elevated by privation. She comes from the impoverished northeast of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro to find work and joins the anonymous mass of exploited, undernourished women struggling to survive. In Brazil, the inferior status of woman is in part the residue of a slave society. Macabéa, is a poor, single Brazilian woman in Rio, without family or friends, a symbol of millions like her, rich in humanity, poor in education and life chances, vulnerable to harm. Lispector, in her immense sympathy for the poor, brings to mind the pre-Holocaust Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe, where most of the world’s Jewish population was concentrated, and where millions lived in almost medieval conditions which were made worse by anti-Semitic persecution. Yiddish was the main language of the Jewish milieu where she was born, in Ukraine during the Russian civil war and the horrific pogroms of 1918–21. She may be alluding to a once-famous Yiddish story – Isaac Leib Peretz’s ‘Bontshe the Silent’ – in the references to the one luxury Macabéa, allows herself – sips of cold coffee. Bontshe, tormented but stoical in life – he is called ‘Bontshe the Silent’ as he never complains – arrives in heaven to be greeted by all the heavenly hosts as a paragon of virtue. Asked what he would like, all he can think of is a coffee and a roll, this being the height of luxury he can imagine. Macabéa, shares with Bontshe a ‘legacy of misfortune’ and differs from countless others perhaps only in the extent of her naivety, protecting her from seeing how sordid and disadvantaged her life is. If she could see how ground down by life she is, she would want to kill herself.
The narrator is troubled by Macabéa’s poverty: he is well-to-do, as are his readers; her story will never reach the poor. Her life is not romanticized – it is ugly and narrow and full of privation. The narrator finds his own life intertwining with hers and yearns to share her life, her nothingness: ‘I want to walk naked or in rags’; through Macabéa, ‘I utter my cry of horror to existence’. Macabéa’s life is illumined ‘so that you may recognize her on the street’. But what is her life? She never loses faith, and even her sorrow is ‘an abortive form of happiness’; and her emptiness ‘replenishes the souls of saints’. Faced with the question, ‘Who am I?’, Macabéa, replies: ‘Since I am, the solution is to be’; she seeks the glamor of Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe and awaits her hour of stardom. Yet, Macabéa, is unneeded and unwanted, her existence ‘one long meditation on nothingness’.18 Her anonymity is such she goes unnamed for nearly half the book. She is taken up by a petty thief, Olimpico, himself impoverished, a self-important loser, who callously sees Macabéa, as being lower than himself. Her name, he says, has the sound of a skin disease, to which she replies:
I agree but it’s the name my mother gave me because of a vow she made to Our Lady of Sorrows if I should survive. For the first year of my life, I wasn’t called anything because I didn’t have a name. I’d have preferred to go on being called nothing instead of having a name that nobody has ever heard of, yet it seems to suit me – she paused for a moment to catch her breath before adding shyly and a little downhearted – for as you can see, I’m still here … so that’s that.19
Lispector seems at times not so much to tell Macabéa’s story as to hang out the scraps of her life. Fragile from birth, she is prone to typhoid fever, calcium deficiency, and lung disease. She loses her parents at two. Even their names are lost to her. Raised by an unloving aunt, she kisses the walls as a child. She has three years of school. Of languages other than Portuguese she knows nothing. In Rio, alone and starved for food and for love, she shares one room with four other girls in a slum in a red-light district. Earning less than the minimum wage, she works as a typist. Animals are better-fed than she is. She lives on hot dogs and coffee, soft drinks and mortadella sandwiches. Sometimes she eats paper: her body is ‘drier than a half-empty sack of toasted breadcrumbs’;20 and she coughs with a persistent cold. All sorts of ordinary things are luxuries to her: coffee with milk, cod liver oil, lipstick, and just to have a future, to live … Macabéa’s world in Rio consists of a boss who exploits her, a boyfriend who abandons her, a workmate who steals her boyfriend. Yet, as the narrator observes, happiness was in her nature:
Macabéa, didn’t worry too much about her own future: to have a future was a luxury. She had learned from her favourite radio programme that there were seven billion inhabitants in the world. She felt completely lost. But it was in her nature to be happy so she soon resigned herself: there were seven billion inhabitants to keep her company.21
Macabéa, sees a doctor once in her life, and he diagnoses pulmonary TB. This is a doctor of the poor. She is so ignorant of medicine that she cannot see what a rotten doctor he is, a parasite on the poor:
He saw medicine simply as a means of earning a living. It had nothing to do with dedication or concern for the sick. He was negligent and found the squalor of his patients utterly distasteful. He resented having to deal with the poor whom he saw as the rejects of that privileged society from which he himself had been excluded. It had not escaped him that he was out of touch with the latest trends in medicine and new clinical methods, but he had all the training he was likely to need for treating the lower orders. His desire was to earn enough money to do exactly what he pleased: nothing.22
Lispector, like a defense attorney, and using the narrator as a mouthpiece, articulates all that Macabéa, thinks and feels, but cannot express. When the doctor diagnoses her as having TB, and tells her to ‘get the hell out of here’, the narrator, a man, exclaims:
Yes, I adore Macabéa, my darling Maca. I adore her ugliness and her total anonymity for she belongs to no one. I adore her for her weak lungs and her under-nourished body. How I should like to see her open her mouth and say: ‘I am alone in the world. I don’t believe in anyone for they all tell lies, sometimes even when they’re making love. I find that people don’t really communicate with each other. The truth comes to me only when I’m alone’.23
The narrator insists that he alone loves her, he longs to be her parent, to look after her. Malnourishment has left her with ‘ovaries as shrivelled as overcooked mushrooms’:
Oh, if only I could seize Macabéa, give her a good scrubbing and a plate of hot soup, kiss her on the forehead and tuck her up in bed. So that she might wake up to discover the great luxury of living.24
The narrator reveals the extent of her degradation on what turns out to be her last day on earth. Here we find something of Lispector’s relationship to Macabéa. For Lispector knew that she, too, was about to die, and The Hour of the Star would be her final work. As Macabéa, lies dying at the end of the story, feeling supremely happy to be ‘born for death’s embrace’, the narrator confesses that ‘Death is my favorite character in this story’: ‘She is finally free of herself and of me … I have just died with the girl … I now understand this story …’; the narrator joins her in death: ‘Macabéa, has murdered me.’ The identification of narrator and character seems to be why the narrator, obsessed with Macabéa, has such trouble with her, with her solitude, her privations and stunted sensuality, her blessed ignorance, the randomness and meaninglessness of her life, and the absurdity of her death. Lispector seems to be aiming for a distillation of the truth in all its horror and degradation but in all its magnificence and hope, culminating in Macabéa’s last words, ‘as for the future …’.25 In Macabéa. Lispector seeks the wealth of an impoverished human being in an impoverished narrative. In a foul rag and bone shop of humanity that is Brazil, a land of fabulous natural resources blotted by favelas, Lispector reaches for a summing up, a final affirmation, the apotheosis of the ‘holy poor’, involving as she calls it, ‘the greatness of every human being’. The ancient biblical purity and holiness of the poor is rediscovered in Macabéa: ‘in her poverty of body and soul, one touches sanctity’.26
Notes
1 See Trentmann (2016).
2 On the biographical basis of Achebe’s writings, see Achebe (2012).
3 Achebe (2001: 20).
4 For other biblical echoes in the novel, see p. 221.
5 Coetzee (1983: 5).
6 Ibid., 39. On the rejection of private property in the Bible, see Leviticus (25: 23); also Psalms (24: 1). See p. 31.
7 Coetzee (1983: 139).
8 Coetzee follows a long literary association of poverty with a higher morality and the crucifixion: Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment (1865) and The Idiot (1868–9) and Flaubert in ‘The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator’ (1877) assert the traditional links between poverty and Christ-like goodness and self-sacrifice and the supreme value of individual acts of charity.
9 Coetzee (1983: 59). Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath (1939: ch. 19), refers to secret gardeners in California, migrants who illegally cultivate a patch of unused land and, like Michael K., are discovered and turned off.
10 On the hunger-artist in Kafka and other writers, see Ellmann (1993); see Chapter 8, this volume.
11 For a comparable resistance to History, see Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, discussed above, p. 205.
12 Coetzee (1983: 138).
13 On Islam and the ‘holy poor’, see Aberbach (2018). Monotheist Scriptures have in common an elevated perception of the poor.
14 The Harafish, Book 1, Epilogue.
15 Ibid., Book 4, ch. 43.
16 Orwell (1984: 30).
17 Lispector (1992: 30, 79).
18 Ibid., 19, 33–7.
19 Ibid., 43.
20 Ibid., 38.
21 Ibid., 58.
22 Ibid., 67.
23 Ibid., 68.
24 Ibid., 58.
25 Ibid., 84–5.
26 Ibid., 21.