Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

Not every literary study opens with an account of a political hanging. Even fewer risk the vulnerabilities that come with dramatizing the author’s anguish in the face of an undeserved death. Ato Quayson, though, describes how he paced his office, raising his fists and holding his head in his hands after hearing of the judicial execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 in Nigeria. Far from gratuitous, the anecdote helps us understand why he set off on this lonely road of the study of tragedy while at the same time striking a note true to the rest of the book – his frequent return, despite the text’s philosophical ambitions, to the terrible contemporary world of migrants, the hungry, the recently enslaved, and the unemployed. One of the striking features of the book, in fact, is this mixing of a rather remarkable erudition with a compulsion to jolt us again and again into the headlines. We read of Syrian refugees, Africans drowning in the Mediterranean, and (in one of the book’s later tropes) the peripheral poor’s experience of waiting in a bidonville or refugee camp in a state of anomie for what never arrives. Book-learning is never allowed to rest, in other words; the author feels the suffering of the destitute too strongly and insists that postcolonial studies care about such things; even more, that these concerns should guide the study itself. As both literary genre and existential state, then, “tragedy” would seem ill-fit for such a reformer’s sensibility. In its everyday sense, after all, the term invokes irremediable disaster, wasted opportunities, and an unspeakable, and avoidable, loss; in its classical literary sense, it alludes to the bitter fruits of arrogance, forbidden desires, and bad choices. All of these meanings are upfront and personal in this book, but only as a kind of false flag. It is as though the author wanted us to mistake his meaning by supposing that he was saying that the postcolonial world was just a sad place for contemplating misery while washing one’s hands. Here, though, the scholar is the politician. By going back to Aristotle, he reminds us that tragedy is – as literary form in The Poetics and as worldview in The Nicomachean Ethics – about freedom, discovery, recognition, and