ASYMPTOTE
Nibir K. Ghosh reviews Twilight of Torment: I. Melancholy by Léonora Miano
translated
from the French by Gila Walker (Seagull Books, 2022)
Anyone
familiar with the novels of the Francophone Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano
would not be caught unawares by the title of her recent work Twilight
of Torment, translated from the French by Gila Walker. Following on the
heels of Dark Heart of the Night (translated by Tamsin Black;
Bison Books, 2012) and Season of the Shadow (translated by
Gila Walker; Seagull Books, 2018), Twilight of Torment visibly
enhances the terrain of Miano’s exploration of African diversity. As one flips
open the first page of the book, the reader’s eye is immediately struck by an
epigraph from the Black celebrity writer Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Present”: “there
is no place for a soft/black/woman.” The opening line of the novel, “It’s
suffocating like before a storm,” seems to suggest the anxiety that precedes a
calamitous situation and prepares the reader for becoming acquainted with
the “subterranean wounds” from which Black women “never recover.” The main
protagonist, Madame, readily avers, “There’s no room for romance, for soppiness
in the lives of women here. In these lands where the sky is neither shelter nor
recourse, being a woman means deadening your heart.”
In providing this backdrop at the very outset of the novel, the author reveals
her intent to confront head-on the predicament of women, especially of African
women, for whom even day-to-day existence is fraught with the perennial torment
of “deadening your heart.” Observing a stony silence rather than giving vent to
the bottled-up anger, rage, and discontent stemming from the curse of being
Black and a woman seems the norm. However, not content with being an accomplice
in the conspiracy of silence, Miano allows her protagonists to believe that
“being a woman in these parts means evaluating, probing, calculating,
anticipating, deciding, and shouldering.” Consequently, Black women are free to
realize what Virginia Woolf stated in her essay A Room of One’s Own (1929):
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope that surrounds us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end.”
It is by delving deep into the consciousness and interiority of events, memories, desires, ancestral history, and tradition that Miano’s four protagonists are able to convey not only their agony and anguish but also their resolve to discover panaceas located beyond torment and torture.
The novel is spread into four distinct narratives that showcase the life and experiences of each of the significant figures—Madame, Amandla, Ixora, and Tiki. The blurb indicates how the four women speak to the same man, who is not there. He is the son of the first, the great-yet-impossible love of the second, the platonic companion of the third, the older brother of the last. Speaking to him in his absence, it is to themselves that these women turn, examining their own stories to make sense of their journey, from twilight to twilight, through a mysterious stormy night in the middle of the dry season.
Dio is the absent character addressed by the four women in turn. Their
tales show how each one of them, in their complex relationship with him, have
been affected by Dio's inexplicable approach to life and people. Léonora
Miano, as the blurb continues, skillfully brings together various stories to
offer a panoramic view of “femininity, sexuality, self-love, and the intrusion
of history into the intimate lives of people of African descent.” Through these
interconnected narratives, Miano successfully creates a comprehensive picture
of women caught in an intricate web of multiple relationships that governs
the action the course of action that each may adopt to survive in a seemingly
hostile world impacted by considerations of gender, patriarchy, masculinity,
ancestry, lineage, superstition, and violence.
The Madame Mususedi’s narrative occupies significant space in Twilight
of Torment, and she articulates the relationships with the other major
characters in the novel. In marrying Amos, who carries with him the tag of
royalty, she bargained her material resources for the reflected glory that she
thought she would find in the union with him. The marriage took place in the
north, against her parents’ wishes. Disillusionment soon follows, as the
brutality of Amos’s domestic violence becomes a regular feature of her life.
Amos’s sisters also play their part in taming her to keep her in her “place.”
She exclaims wistfully: “Royalty is forged in women’s wombs, but the power that
it confers is held by men.” She also accepts that “What I lived in this house
is an atrocity.” It may be pointed out that the “North” figures quite a few
times in the novel though there is no reference to any specific country.
Perhaps, Miano is using the term to designate a space inhabited by black
African women irrespective of nationality and culture.
Madame’s
son Dio and daughter Tiki who constantly witness the spectacle of violence at
home deeply resent Amos’s inhuman behavior and often encourage their
mother to abandon her husband and live a life of freedom and dignity. She
does give the prospect serious thought when she goes on a vacation with her
children and meets a lady called Eshe. Through her brief but intense
relationship with Eshe, Madame experiences the feeling of warmth and security
that a durable association with her could provide: “A door opened, revealing an
expanse within that I did not even know it existed. A territory so vast that I
had no idea how to cross it. What I would find at the end of the road was
visible from the threshold. All I needed to do was make the journey. Make up my
mind to set out on one of the courses, all of which would bring me safely to
harbor. I was free.” While she is contemplating going ahead with what her heart
and soul earnestly desire, the ghosts of propriety, fear, and shame make their
presence felt and dissuade her from giving free rein to her personal desire. As
a result, she returns to her husband with her children.
In
due course, Dio leaves for the North where he develops a deep friendship with
an immigrant. Following the sudden death of his friend in an accident, Dio
reaches out to the deceased’s family and takes on the
responsibility of looking after his wife Ixora and son Kabral. He
gets close to them and ultimately leaves the North and returns home to his
mother with Ixora and her son. The return of Dio with the two newcomers greatly
offends Madame, who takes an instant dislike to Ixora but gradually warms
to her son. Madame scorns Ixora for her lack of a family lineage. She finds her
ordinariness detestable. Madame’s narrative also includes a description of
Amandla and her relationship with Dio, which somehow never matures into a union
of any kind. In comparison with Dio’s ambiguous relationship with Ixora,
Madame finds the relationship with Amandla more acceptable.
The
three narratives that continue the novel poignantly bring into focus not only
the experiences, trials, and tribulations of Amandla, Ixora, and Tiki with
respect to their relationships with Dio, Madame, and other characters who
appear in their lives, but also reveal the author’s concern with bringing
into bold relief elements of African culture that were cast into oblivion and
replaced with French culture through stratagems of colonial design. In
this regard, the novel may be seen as in conversation with Gabriel
Okara’s poem “The Piano and the Drums,” where he writes of the colonial
strategy of overpowering the sound of the drums with that of “a wailing piano /
solo speaking of complex ways / in tear-furrowed concerto.”
Amandla’s story begins with the reference to her relationship with Dio, which began while she was a teacher at Heru School, an institution that she had founded with the avowed purpose of teaching the values of African culture and tradition to girls. She acknowledges that she had, by choice, taken responsibility for the preservation and propagation of African customs against the onslaught of what the colonial powers call modernism. She recounts:
I was a
child when my mother taught me to reject the names used to trample on our
identity. Words by way of which our humanity was denied. I knew very early on
that the land where the human race was born was called Kemet. That we were
Kemites. Not Blacks. The Black race was invented purely to cast us outside
humankind. To justify the transatlantic dispersion. To make chattel of us to be
bought in instalments.
She
points out that the invaders never bothered to learn the language of the
people they colonized. They, according to Amandla, prioritized material
happiness over the love for life: “They disdain us for not always asking more
of life than what it gives us. For not setting our sights on where they set
theirs. Our civilization is at odds with all their conceptions. This is why
they still know nothing of us. This is why modelling on their example would be
suicide.” Amandla’s view echoes what Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American
Transcendentalist philosopher, had warned his fellow Americans about blindly
following the British in his essay “Self-Reliance”: “Imitation is suicide.”
Amandla attributes the failure of a union with Dio materializing
to incompatibility arising out of his lack of concern for her as a
person. He was there and yet not there. What seems to characterize Amandla is
her faith in a relationship based on what D. H. Lawrence would call the
“religion of blood.” The fulfillment of her desire comes to her in the form of
her new lover, Misipo, an already married man. This is made apparent when she
declares to the memory of Dio:
I don’t
love him like I loved you but he gives me what you always denied me. What your
body withheld. What I need more than anything. I can admit it now. I am a woman
with him. It’s important to me. To be touched. To be taken . . . What happens
between two people who surrender completely to each other is beyond the flesh.
It’s a spiritual act . . . To discover too that desire is more than a craving.
It’s a feeling.
Ixora’s account begins with her disclosing how she had been beaten violently by Dio and thrown out of his car amid a torrential downpour for breaking off her engagement with him. Even in such a perilous moment of agony, Ixora experiences a feeling of deliverance from her plight: “I don’t care, I feel free, even though I’m lying here in the mud, without the slightest idea how I’ll get out of this situation, I’m not in pain, you bashed me too hard for there to be any pain left, it hit me like a torpedo blast, causing numbness all over, such things happen it seems, when the pain is too strong, you feel nothing anymore.” What is evident from Ixora’s outburst is her resilience in fighting back against injustice without fear and anxiety about what the future has in store. She reminds Dio that they were an odd pair “that never mates, that never seeks warmth from each other’s bodies, a couple founded on the loss of a friend . . "
The epigraph from Audre Lorde’s poem “Who Said It Was Simple,” placed at the
beginning of the fourth and final chapter of the novel, offers a glimpse into
the consciousness of Madame’s daughter, Tiki: “There are so many roots / to the
tree of anger / that sometimes / the branches shatter / before they bear.” Like
the trees and people that face the ravages of the storm, Tiki is determined to
“rebuild again.” She points out the importance of ancestral language in
preserving and sustaining time-honored traditions that unite communities. Tiki
calls it the folly of destiny that their mother, Madame, had to contend with
“two lineageless women, two descendants of slaves” in her life. She makes a
reference to Eshe, whom they had met on their vacation, and the letters from
her to Madame that Tiki discovered in her mother’s closet: Letters that spoke
of the pain of “having dreamed too brightly, of having to wake up and learn how
to breathe again.” Accusing her brother Dio of not showing any concern, Tiki
says, “You know nothing of the forces that have always oppressed her, you
didn’t take enough interest in your parents to find out who they were, the kind
of people they were.” She adds, “That’s the way it is for everyone in our
community . . . we know we are the fruit of a tree that no one will take
responsibility for cutting down.”
Towards the end of the novel Tiki muses over her relationships with various men
and remarks how, in her conversations with her mother, she has cleverly avoided
answering “specific questions on the thorny subject of my love life. The fact
that she loved a woman will not enable her to understand my way of loving men.
It’s my life, my affair.” It is obvious that Tiki assumes responsibility for
her own future and mentions about her present companion that “Our sexual
needs are in harmony, we like alternative medicine and we’re vegetarians. I’m a
bit down in the dumps, but no one dies from that. You’re going to call, Big
Bro, I’ll be here.”
Taken
together, the four different, though interconnected, narratives provide a
comprehensive foray into the issues and challenges that African women have to
contend with in freeing themselves from the oppressive fetters imposed by
social, political, and cultural mores that torment them ceaselessly. The hope
of redemption lies in this connectedness despite their individual differences,
a fact that is outlined by the epigraph from Ayi Kwei Armah’s
novel Two Thousand Seasons (East African Pub. House, 1973) in
the section on Amandla: “Our vocation / goes against all / unconnectedness. It
/ is a call to create the / way again, and where / even the foundations / have
been assaulted / and destroyed, where / restoration has been / made impossible,
simply / to create the way.”
It is
pertinent to mention here that Léonora Miano moved to France as a student in
1991, where she adopted the French language as a medium to give expression to
her creative endeavors. In the manner of Chinua Achebe, Miano intuitively chose
the language of the colonizer to ascertain her African identity. Going against
the norms of assimilation that demanded forsaking one’s own cultural roots,
Miano, unlike many Francophone-African writers, opted to ground her
concerns in clearing the mist of anonymity that shrouded the “dark”
continent. While African-American writers celebrate “Black is Beautiful”, it is
heartening to see Francophone African writers beginning to proclaim to the
world the innate beauty of Africa in terms of both natural and human resources.
Miano’s
statement that she “thinks and writes” in French brings into the limelight the
credit that must go to Gila Walker for translating Torment of Twilight into
English with obvious expertise. The powerful and lucid passages cited from
the translated version amply show that not much has been lost in the process of
translation. On the contrary, Walker’s aesthetically beautiful renderings will
win for Miano a hugely enlarged audience in comparison to those who read her in
the French original. The context and the content of this novel are bound to
draw both lay readers and scholars who agree with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” 
Nibir K. Ghosh was a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the
University of Washington, Seattle, USA, in 2003–2004, and is currently UGC
Emeritus Professor of English at Agra College, Agra, India. He is chief editor
of Re-Markings, an India-based international journal of English
Letters in its twenty-second year of publication. He has authored or edited
fifteen books, including Calculus of Power: Modern American Novel (Creative
Books, 1997), Multicultural America: Conversations with Contemporary
Authors (Unistar, 2005), W. H. Auden: Therapeutic Fountain (Raj
Publications, 2010), Rabindranath Tagore: The Living Presence (Author
Press, 2012), Gandhi and His Soulforce Mission (Author Press,
2014), and Beyond Boundaries: Reflections of Indian and U.S. Scholars (iUniverse,
2007). His most recent works include Mirror from the Indus: Essays,
Tributes and Memoirs (Author Press, 2020) and, with Dr. Sunita
Ghosh, Republic of Words: Conversations with Creative Minds from Around
the Globe (Author Press, 2022).
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/leonora-miano-twilight-of-torment-i-melancholy/
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