In Kafka’s Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa Seloua Luste Boulbina examines the interplay between health, philosophy, and decolonization. To start it’s important to note what her idea of health entails. Boulbina is not simply looking at the physical health of individuals though that is encapsulated as well, it is the health of the people in the society physically, mentally, and culturally that she is concerned with. Boulbina is likewise concerned primarily in the book with the damages to this health that are posed by colonization, and colonial attitudes in a society (pp. 193-194). These can be physical issues such as the actual overtaking of a colony that leaves people dead, or the lack of medical resources to more subtle things like the striping of pre-colonial languages and customs (pp. 193-194). In all cases these actions are done to try to assimilate the colonized and to allow their pre-colonial lifestyle ‘die’ (p. 23). It is important to note that this ‘dying’ of a lifestyle is perpetuated down to the colonized descendants. This process is to the degree that many of them don’t even know their histories well enough to understand what they’ve lost, or what’s been changed (p. 212-219). One of the most salient examples she presents in more contemporary colonial practices in France is the ‘veil affair’ (p. 24).
Regarding the ‘veil affair’, in French society to maintain and further develop a sense of secularism (or laicite) there was a ban placed on face coverings. Primarily religious face coverings such as burqas were targeted with this ban (p. 24). Largely this was done to keep Muslim children from being able to ‘spread’ Islamic culture throughout schools, with Ernest Cheniere going as far as to call it a “virus that infested the school” (p. 25). The consequences of this are the complete alienation to those who want to preserve and live out their culture while living in French society. Anyone who is living in a French colony that previously had a Muslim culture is as Boulbina puts it “… in the situation of an invader even at home.” (p. 83). This assimilation even applies to something as simple as language wherein the colonizers will often exchange the language of the country for the colonized language (pp. 219-226). This then creates an even further divide where now not only are people alienated in their own country, but there is an academic underclass developed where those who fail to adapt quickly are considered of esser intelligence (pp. 72, 220, 233-234). This point on languages however does have a small exception that Boulbina mentions. In Africa for example there were more than 2000 languages, and overall doing governance on a large scale was impossible without standardizing on a language or set of languages (pp. 221, 236, 224-225). Boulbina thinks this is a reasonable concession, but even in this case choosing an African language or set of languages would have been more optimal than a colonial language. However, in most cases of colonizing it is simply a matter of taking the single or few languages spoken and completely irradicating them in place of a single language, so this exception is minimal.
Boulbina considers much of the colonial attitude as one that closes itself off from the culture it is taking over and trying to replace it with the colonial culture (p. 72, 83). This process Boulbina claims can be only truly explored and potentially resolved through analysis that is open to the colonized people’s perspectives (p. 65, 75). Within this Boulbina argues that philosophy and literature are cases where the analysis they produce is more adequately capable to account for additional perspectives as opposed to typical ‘historical analyses’, or historiography (pp. 177-178, 198, 201-202, 206). These more rigid historical analyses Boulbina argues have colonial attitudes baked into them since they are being done through the lens of someone who typically has these attitudes instilled in them through their society (pp. 201-202). This even goes for what Boulbina calls the ‘monumentalization’ of history wherein history is presented entirely from the perspective of those who write it (pp. 65-70). Specifically, she says “it only takes a small step to go from a monumental past to a mythical fiction” in relation to her reading of Nietzsche’s view on history (p. 67). Essentially you can create any story you want, with any heroes, and remove any wrongdoings (often referred to as phantoms) so long as the people who know what happened are unable to push back meaningfully.
For literature Boulbina gives the example of Franz Kafka, who she argues in many of his works expresses the struggles associated with colonialism cohesively (pp. 22-24). For example, she notes that his story A Report to the Academy in which a monkey recollects his ‘becoming civilized’ is an effective analogy for how many colonized peoples feel about ‘becoming colonized’ (p. 22). Effectively as is the case with the monkey they are rewarded for acting in the manner that ‘their betters’ want, and they can feel their past selves die off as they transition to their new way of life (p. 23). Likewise in the Arab and the Jackal there is a jackal who wants to “purify” the area by making the Arabs of the area “invisible and inaudible” in any way, up to and including slitting their throats (pp. 36-40). The question then for Boulbina becomes how you can begin to decolonize these societies and repair the damage caused.
For Boulbina the process of decolonization is just that, a process. In fact, she believes it is an ongoing process that does not necessarily have a defined end point (pp. 164, 184-186). It is largely a process of allowing the colonized to understand and explore the effects of their colonization on their health as a society (pp. 187-189). Again, this process needs to have the voices of the colonized heard and can be facilitated primarily through mediums that allow this openness such as philosophy and literature (pp. 74-75, 184-186, 195-196). Once that exploration has begun then they can begin process collaboratively to decolonize and build a society that incorporates the concerns of the colonized in the society in its political attitudes, and policies. This progression of exploration through openness into an integration of policy is exactly the sort of process Boulbina wants for the colonized to be able to go through in order to begin their healing
Works cited
Boulbina, Luste Seloua. Kafka’s Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa. Indiana University Press, 2019.