Monsters, Masters: Artists And Their Personal Life Violations

“The night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.” Few sentences capture the ironic but inevitable sequence of the different stages of colonialism—the military violence of the battlefield followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. Hard and soft power in perfect symbiosis for Europe to control Africa.

These words by the Kenyan writer wa Thiong’o never fail in the classroom. So far, they have never failed in my teaching career—not in the years in North America where power is easily understood in terms of race relations, not here in India where power, status, and privilege are just as easily grasped as colonial inheritances from the Western world. I’ve often taught ’s powerful, polemical plea for the use of African languages in literary creation. It is one of the most vivid and incisive illustrations of the power of ideology—the soft power of religion, culture and education, as that has been pointed out by Marxist critics of the capitalist State. Leading among these critics is the French political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose essay on the ideological work of family, church, and education prepares the ground richly for the class’ understanding of the ideological invasion by European colonialism when we read’s polemic.

Althusser is the creator of some of the most pointed and trenchant insights into power and control in the modern state and the free market. Althusser also killed his wife, the sociologist and activist Hélène Rytmann-Légotien—strangled her in a fit of depression, for which he was sent to the clinics, not to prison. How does one square these two facts with each other? And how do I feel teaching his works for so many years, writing about his ideas, sometimes taking recourse to them to articulate my own? A fatal agent of male violence on women, no matter what his mental state?

The critics of power fall fast. The writer and academic Mukoma wa Ngugi announced on X (then Twitter) that his father wa Thiong’o had physically abused Nyambura, Mukoma’s mother and ’s wife. He who had laid bare the intricate folds of colonial power and its ravages on Black Africa was himself an abuser. What does it tell us about the nature of power? Of the life of the mind? Of activism through literature and philosophy?

These questions have crawled out of the night and spread like a pandemic across the literary world all over again since it has come to light that the recently deceased Nobel Laureate in literature, the Canadian writer Alice Munro had, for many years, looked away from the reality of her husband sexually abusing her minor daughter born of her previous marriage, at certain points even blaming the nine-year old for “seducing” the older man into “adultery”!

This revelation has flooded the world of readers and writers with shock and disgust. How else can it be? But this goes far beyond knee-jerk ethico-political reactions, which burn like wildfire hashtags on social media and are then quickly forgotten. What we need to examine carefully are the principles with which a writer and a thinker has come to be identified—and the relationship between these principles and the violations in their personal life. Sometimes the relationship is one of ironic reversal. Sometimes it is more complicated.

I must admit that I regularly use, cite, and teach the writings of Althusser, particularly his canonical essay on the ideological forces at work in the family, church, and educational institutions. So do hundreds of writers, thinkers, and academics around the world. None of them are possibly ignorant of the fact that he’d killed his wife. Indeed, that sensational fact about his life is far more widely known than his intricate and often challenging works of political philosophy. What is this great irony of reading power and oppression in society through the works of a man accused of uxoricide?

The philosopher William S Lewis looks long and hard at this question. There is, he says, the externalist approach to this, which invokes biographical facts to evaluate the relevance of a philosopher’s work to particular problems. The internalist approach, on the other hand, claims that philosophy would be much poorer if we expunge the work of vicious philosophers. But it is the mutual relationship between the two approaches that is key here. Althusser’s case is complicated by the fact that not only are his ideas “deeply and presciently feminist but that feminist theorists have made interesting and productive use” of them, including Laura Mulvey on visual pleasure and Judith Butler on gender, which have changed directions for entire disciplines. The fact is that Althusser probably would not have become a communist were he not imprisoned in a Stalag or if he never met Rytmann-Légotien. At the same time, the importance of his idea of communism as a condition of mutual respect in a climate of non-exploitation can also be debated outside the facts of his life. One doesn’t need to exclude the other.

The personal life, particularly the personal ethical violations of writers and thinkers, can make us reject them on a personal level. However, a crucial factor is how such violations affect our understanding of the principles they have come to signify. When Mukoma wa Ngugi brought to light his iconic father ’s physical abuse of Nyambura, it helped us see the cultural narratives about sub-Saharan Africa in a new light. “We have always,” wrote the Nigerian academic Ainehi Edoro, “told the story about African literature with people like Ngugi as the protagonists. What is lost in this triumphal history are the traumatized children and neglected wives, homes ravaged by the twin power of patriarchy and colonial violence.”

Indeed, African literature—and in general, cultural narratives from Africa—have become synonymous with the struggles of valiant men. This has made invisible the women, the mothers, sisters, partners, who made, or were forced to make sacrifices so that these men could reap the benefits of colonial institutions. “For every male author that is christened “father of African literature,”’ writes Edoro, “there is a community of actual mothers who gave up so much to get them to the spotlight.”

Mukoma’s statement, feels Mona Eltahawy, an expert on intimate partner violence, should be treated with the gravity of a #MeToo story. “I salute Mukoma for his statement,” she said. “So often, women plead for the men in their lives to believe them and speak out. That this is a son exposing his father’s abusive behavior is incredibly important.”

Ngũgĩ hasn’t responded to this accusation, and there have been declarations of solidarity around him from many—including his daughters. The worlds of literature and postcolonial activism have been divided over this issue, and it’s fair to say that the outrage has been quite muted. I think it is important to see this accusation not as nullifying ’s achievements as a writer, teacher, and activist–but as one that importantly modifies the narrative about him, and of the larger cultural leadership of sub-Saharan Africa. The most significant of these modifications would be about the erasure of African women from these narratives, their easy invisibility facilitated by patriarchal structures—be of direct oppression or of simple denial by silence.

I repeat: What matters is what they stood for. The hauntingly resurfaced stories of the deceased Alice Munro going so far as conniving at her daughter’s abuse, chilling as it is, needs to be understood beyond the immediacy of a visceral response. Across the long arc of cultural history—and the urgent domain of ethics—the importance of this personal violation cannot be fully appreciated without measuring it against the unique feminism with which Munro has come to be identified. What is crucial for this history and this field of ethics is that Munro has been celebrated—and awarded the Nobel Prize for—the psychological complexity of the feminine “Gothic” as embodied in the tragic and eroticized female lives depicted in her short stories. The terrible question with which we are now left is this: Is her female Gothic purely a picture of oppression?

The Gothic offers dark and terrifying visions of the feminine: strangely sexualized young girls, haunting memories of dead mothers, tragic pasts and family skeletons. Second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s prompted the critic Ellen Moers to revisit the Gothic in terms of its revulsions as well as its delights: the joys of creating and nurturing life fighting the erasure of one’s self.

Now that we know the conscious and unconscious source of Munro’s imagination of the female Gothic and its deeply sexualized terrors, her stories, even for those who care to read them, will never be the same again.

(Views expressed are personal)

(This appeared in the print as 'Monsters, Masters')

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University