This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/13/blackass-a-race-rewrite-of-kafkas-metamorphosis
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Blackass: a race rewrite of Kafka's Metamorphosis | Blackass: a race rewrite of Kafka's Metamorphosis |
| (about 17 hours later) | |
| Last year, I received a review copy of A Igoni Barrett’s Blackass from his Nigerian publisher. I knew it was a rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I just didn’t know what to expect. To be quite frank, I was a bit worried. Kafka has not always lived a happy life in Africa. When Guinean novelist Camara Laye wrote a Kafka-inspired novel, he was dragged through a gauntlet of scandals. Kind commentators called his work derivative and unoriginal. Others were less kind. They accused him of borderline plagiarism. Some even went as far as suggesting that he couldn’t have written the novel without the help of a ghostwriter of some kind. But Blackass, it turns out, is different. Barrett essentially subjects Kafka’s classic to the pressures African literary conventions, and, in the process, gives an iconic European story an extreme, but much needed makeover. | Last year, I received a review copy of A Igoni Barrett’s Blackass from his Nigerian publisher. I knew it was a rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I just didn’t know what to expect. To be quite frank, I was a bit worried. Kafka has not always lived a happy life in Africa. When Guinean novelist Camara Laye wrote a Kafka-inspired novel, he was dragged through a gauntlet of scandals. Kind commentators called his work derivative and unoriginal. Others were less kind. They accused him of borderline plagiarism. Some even went as far as suggesting that he couldn’t have written the novel without the help of a ghostwriter of some kind. But Blackass, it turns out, is different. Barrett essentially subjects Kafka’s classic to the pressures African literary conventions, and, in the process, gives an iconic European story an extreme, but much needed makeover. |
| Both stories share the premise of a human body undergoing a change so abrupt and so drastic that the old body is unrecognizable in the new one. But there is a key difference. The Metamorphosis tells the story of a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one non-descript morning and finds he is a human-size bug. But in Blackass, Furo Wariboko wakes up and finds he has been transformed into a white man while his buttocks remain black, hence the title Blackass. This shift from animal to racial metamorphosis initiates a series of aesthetic interventions that reveal just how much Kafka’s beloved story was begging to be upgraded for the contemporary reader. | |
| Kafka’s Metamorphosis is one of the most iconic attempts in fiction to challenge the idea that we are made of unchangeable essences. His novella forces us to confront the possibility that the tidy compartments – the human, the animal, and so on – that we use to make sense of our world are not as stable as they appear. In doing so, it poses difficult and scandalous questions about what happens when the chain of being that anchors the logic of the world is disturbed. Within the context of our contemporary moment, however, the metaphysical establishment that Kafka sought to overthrown seems to have become a rusty, dusty old thing. It appears to have been replaced by the problem of identity. Thanks to Kafka, we understand the futility and the dangers of chasing after essences. We also seem to have moved on to the far more interesting question of how we come to be identified as one thing versus another. In a world of social media and Rachel Dolezal, identity trumps being. It is no longer a question of who we are in our most inner essence. It is now a question of how we identify versus how we are identified by the powers-that-be and how this affects our access to power, wealth, recognition and dignity. | |
| Furo – not Gregor – is the poster child of our moment. He is a down and out college graduate, pounding the streets of Lagos in search of a job. There is nothing cool about him. In a city of hustlers, tricksters, and go-getters, where the right dose of swag and gumption gets you farther than a college degree can, Furo is a bumbling non-entity. But the moment he becomes white, everything changes. Without brains, money, or charm, he rises through the hierarchies of Nigerian society. He is given money, cars, a place to stay, business opportunities, sex, trust, respect. In Furo’s world, racial difference is not biological. It is not some kind of unchangeable essence, either. It operates like a high-tech photographic filter that defines how value and power are assigned to lives and bodies. | |
| In a world of social media and Rachel Dolezal, identity trumps being | In a world of social media and Rachel Dolezal, identity trumps being |
| There are a few aesthetic differences in Kafka and Barrett’s narratives that are worth pointing out. It doesn’t take more to realize that Kafka and Barrett have very different methods of building fictional worlds. I remember reading Metamorphosis for the first time and being slightly suspicious of one seemingly minor omission. Why, I wondered, was Gregor never allowed to leave the house? It seemed to me that Kafka had trouble imagining a universe where Gregor the Bug scurried about on the street, doing all kinds of wild things. Gregor experiences the discrimination of a family that saw him as grotesque and threatening even as he is shielded from the horrors of a world that has no way of making sense of what he is. The inconveniences, shame, pain, and frustrations of his new life as a non-human take place within the narrow limits of the home. Kafka generates the conflict in the story solely from the private and domestic interplay of the family’s disgust and Gregor’s shame. I should, perhaps, mention that this tendency to wish away or downplay the significance of the outside world is something one finds quite frequently in the European tradition of the novel. It is always about how the individual is fashioned (or damaged) by the intimacies (or dysfunctions) of the cradle. The outside world is this unwanted thing always hovering and casting a shadow over the promise of comfort and protection of the private, interior world. | There are a few aesthetic differences in Kafka and Barrett’s narratives that are worth pointing out. It doesn’t take more to realize that Kafka and Barrett have very different methods of building fictional worlds. I remember reading Metamorphosis for the first time and being slightly suspicious of one seemingly minor omission. Why, I wondered, was Gregor never allowed to leave the house? It seemed to me that Kafka had trouble imagining a universe where Gregor the Bug scurried about on the street, doing all kinds of wild things. Gregor experiences the discrimination of a family that saw him as grotesque and threatening even as he is shielded from the horrors of a world that has no way of making sense of what he is. The inconveniences, shame, pain, and frustrations of his new life as a non-human take place within the narrow limits of the home. Kafka generates the conflict in the story solely from the private and domestic interplay of the family’s disgust and Gregor’s shame. I should, perhaps, mention that this tendency to wish away or downplay the significance of the outside world is something one finds quite frequently in the European tradition of the novel. It is always about how the individual is fashioned (or damaged) by the intimacies (or dysfunctions) of the cradle. The outside world is this unwanted thing always hovering and casting a shadow over the promise of comfort and protection of the private, interior world. |
| Barrett, it turns out, is steeped in a different literary tradition – one in which storytellers are smart enough to know that it takes much more than what happens between the bedroom and the living room to make us who we are. Barrett has no trouble discarding the household – the one thing that Kafka finds indispensable. The moment Furo realizes he is white, he escapes the household and roams the city. In Blackass, everything takes place in public places – offices, the mall, the nightclub, the hotel, the passport office, traffic holdup, the canteen. As Furo moves through these spaces, he exposes the complex mix of myths, prejudices and institutions that sustain racial hierarchies. How else do you make the point that whiteness is a racial currency that allows bodies to circulate close to power except by letting Furo play out the absurdity of his metamorphosis out there in the world. | |
| Barrett upgrades the simple, domestic drama of Kafka’s story to a riveting urban adventure. In this adventure, metamorphosis is not such a tragic affair. Gregor’s body is as monstrous as his life is sad. His transformation into an insect shrinks his world to the confines of the household, the bedroom, and, towards the end of the novel, a corner of the room. Barrett reconstitutes metamorphosis as something less monstrous. Furo is a white man with a black butt – not a giant caterpillar. This aesthetic tweak instantly airs out the story and gives Furo a little more room to act out the absurdities of his upside-down world. Furo’s transformation enlarges his world and clears out a space for all kinds of experimentation with identity and personal history. | |
| Related: Blackass by A Igoni Barrett review – a cocktail of Kafka and comedy | Related: Blackass by A Igoni Barrett review – a cocktail of Kafka and comedy |
| Aaron Bady recently advised against making the “Kafkquosity” of Barrett’s novel the starting point of critical commentary. Shouldn’t we have more to say about the novel than its “superficial resemblance to a white man’s novel?” Bady is right to caution lazy critics against simply cataloging what is Kafkaesque about Blackass. But he is wrong to reduce the link between Kafka and Barrett to a “superficial resemblance.” Blackass does not resemble The Metamorphosis. It reinvents Kafka’s classic beyond the point of recognition. Blackass is the metamorphosis of The Metamorphosis. It is that beautiful moment when the original Metamorphosis is destroyed so that it can be refashioned for a global community of readers in dire need of new forms of storytelling. | Aaron Bady recently advised against making the “Kafkquosity” of Barrett’s novel the starting point of critical commentary. Shouldn’t we have more to say about the novel than its “superficial resemblance to a white man’s novel?” Bady is right to caution lazy critics against simply cataloging what is Kafkaesque about Blackass. But he is wrong to reduce the link between Kafka and Barrett to a “superficial resemblance.” Blackass does not resemble The Metamorphosis. It reinvents Kafka’s classic beyond the point of recognition. Blackass is the metamorphosis of The Metamorphosis. It is that beautiful moment when the original Metamorphosis is destroyed so that it can be refashioned for a global community of readers in dire need of new forms of storytelling. |