adminElliot Ziwira @The Bookstore
Neurosis is a mental disorder that causes obsessive fears, depression and unreasonable behaviour. According to Boeree in “A Bio-Social Theory of Neurosis” (2002), neurosis, which is hereditary, refers to a variety of psychological problems involving persistent experiences of negative effect including anxiety, sadness or depression, anger, irritability, mental confusion, cognitive problems, such as unpleasant or disturbing thoughts, habitual fantasising and cynicism.
Cultural background is crucial in one’s interpretation of his or her surroundings, even if he or she is displaced from the source of the initial discernment. His or her understanding of the world is steeped in his or her own experiences. Thus burdened, the individual seeks to avoid or mitigate his/her situation through vigilance, escape behaviours and defensive thinking. He or she has to create a surreal world which offers him or her respite from the oppressive one which is believed to be uncompromising.
The creation of a make believe world as an elixir from the burdensome reality may be destructive if what is expected turns out to be a travesty; leading to anger, anxiety and sadness, (Boeree, 2002). Freud (1904, 1923, 1930) also examines the clinical notion of neurosis as posited by Boeree (2002). Jung ([1961], 1989) intimates: “I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life,” (Jung, 1961, 1989:40).
However, neurosis as a mental or psychological condition in post-colonial states has its roots in imperialism, which makes it more than just a clinical condition, but a metaphorical response to oppressive tendencies which affect not only individuals, but whole groups, or entire nations (Fanon, 1952, 1967). In both literal and metaphorical senses a whole nation may be crippled as a result of neurosis, as a plethora of neuroses converge on hope’s horizon.
In “Black Skin White Masks” (1952), Frantz Fanon, though adopting Freud’s clinical concept of neurosis as “a conflict between the ego and its id,” (Freud, “Neurosis and Psychosis,1923), he examines the psychological responses to imperialism by fore-fronting the phobi or “neurotic reactions” of the Africans to colonialism.
The detrimental state of the self is more profound than just a clinical response to a situation, but as expounded by Boeree (2002), there is a bio-social link which has its roots in socio-cultural background, thus Fanon (1952) advocates the investigation of “the extent to which the conditions of Feud or of Adler can be applied to the effort to understand the man of colour’s view of the world,” (Fanon, 1952:109).
According to Lacan (1973) in “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III”, neurosis is deeper than a specific condition, but assumes the form of “legible” delusion that is structured like a language.
Because of its impact on the psyche, imperialism is a kind of disease (neurosis) that is not curable, in the sense that to the oppressed it is a condition that is lived, and relived; generation after generation, thus becoming an intricate social system, (Lacan, 1973:45).
The political, social, economic and cultural practices which shape establishments in post-colonial Africa have their source in imperialism whereby individual experiences of the coloniser (master) and colonised (native), shape the way they think, hence in the end an overall social neurosis ensue, as purveyed in Spivak’s “retrospective hallucination,” (Spivak, 1967:275).
It is against this backdrop that At The Bookstore examines how post-colonial literature, through the use of nihilistic traits of modernism and satire, holds up the erstwhile coloniser, as well as African leaders, responsible for the paralysis of individual aspirations—culminating in neurosis, paralysis and malaise.
In “Harare North” (2009) Brian Chikwava captures the universal neurosis at the core of the national discourse, through the use of a problematic and unnamed anti-hero, who is so much imbued with freedom, yet ironically subscribing to the very anti-thesis of the concept of freedom, because his own freedom strangles others’ freedoms.
In “Hunting in Foreign Lands and Other Stories” (2010), avarice and individualism know no class castes, as it involves the wretched of the earth and those in social and political positions of influence, which makes the quagmire that society finds itself in, universal; with no solution in sight, as everyone is caught up in the rat race to material fruition, and anything that may mitigate poverty and suffering. The universality of neurosis also obtains in Shimmer Chinodya’s “Chairman of Fools” (2005) and “Queues” (2003).
Abject poverty and the desire to acquire wealth, reduce the entire nation to fools, perverts and vagabonds. Crime becomes the order of the day and corruption a way of life. The dog eat dog situation that ensues forces many to look beyond the borders for salvation.
It is on this thorny bed that the unnamed narrator in “Harare North” is thrown. Having served time in prison for an undisclosed crime the anti-hero finds himself at sixes and sevens as bankable opportunities elude him, because of the economic embargo that the West imposes on the Motherland.
Devoid of choice, the youths who are supposedly the leaders of tomorrow, are caught up in the ruckus that plays hide and seek with their dreams. The quest to survive becomes an obsession to live, for the situation that the narrator and his fellow comrades encounter on the ground reduces them to perverts, as the voyeur inherent in them rears its head. Using humour, sarcasm, ridicule and irony; tropes of the satirist spectrum,(Studies in Literary modes, 1946), Chikwava pokes at political intolerance.
A man becomes violent, not because he was born violent, for violence is inherent in all humanity, but he becomes violent because it is the normal thing to do, if all he sees around him every day is violence; in all its forms—physical, emotional and psychological. As a cognitive response, he seeks escape from his frustration and whatever the real world offers him.
Because of unrestrained anger and political intolerance, the narrator finds himself in trouble, and in the end he joins the bandwagon to Harare North, which is street parlance for London or the United Kingdom. The neuroses that grips him and his “jackal breed” are aggravated by the fact that they suck in the leadership and the police; the pillars that should hold the precarious house in place. It is this state of affairs that causes the paralysis, malaise and stasis at the national level.
Individualism and the obsession with gain and money are central to the universal neurosis explored in “Harare North”. It is not only the narrator who is caught up in this web, but almost all the characters in the Diaspora and back home. For starters, the rush for ‘gold’ in the Diaspora has its roots in colonialism. All hope, it seems, is in the whiteman’s land or in African countries who are friends of the West. Imperialism, as Fanon (1952) points out, is as intrinsic as life itself to the African psyche, a mask that needs more than willpower for it to be defeated.
As the migrants converge under the chestnut tree to chance on meeting fellow Africans and brothers from home, the different neuroses that burden them become a universal condition that cannot be simply wished away. Dave and Jenny who are white and British, as well as the Polish hooker that Shingi loses his virginity to, do not only complete the coloniser-colonised relationship, but are symbolic of the universality of neurosis. Characters who meet here are drawn from different trades, and level of academic qualifications, but share a common visionless hope. Inasmuch as the former colonial master would want to project a clean image as far as poverty, violence and social ills are concerned, characters like Dave, Jenny, the Polish hooker and the lunatics of the mental streets, put the empire to shame.
In the end, restless, irrational, schizophrenic, mentally disjointed and unschooled in the complexities of life, the narrator assumes “Shingi’s head” and hobbles towards the mental streets of death, thus sealing not only his fate but that of his family, nation and race; paralyzed, defeated and hopeless. As postulated by Jung(1989), his pretence at philosophy regardless of his lack of proper academic achievements, but based on his own experiences as a “military person”, (Chikwava, 2009), he finds content in “wrong answers to the questions of life,” (Jung 1989:40), and as a consequence, his world and that of those close to him, crumbles, and with it the entire nation is taken back to square one, “straight and square”, (to use his own phrase). Childless, loveless, his vulnerability exposed and his cover blown, the narrator succumbs to his fate.
It dawns on the anti-hero that, “he is possessed by “powers” that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food—and, above all, a large array of neuroses,” (Jung, 1964:82).
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