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ABSTRACT
This essay argues that waste-as a symbol, a trope, and a material condition- permits us to reimagine the link between post-independence novels of disillusionment and contemporary works preoccupied with the tenuousness of national prosperity and identity. From KofiAwoonor's This Earth, My Brother (1971) and Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) to Chimamanda Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun (2006) and Zeze Gamboa's recent film O Heroi (2004), waste is not merely an aesthetic oddity joining together these selected texts. Transforming literary representations of waste reflect a revaluation of our received notions of nationhood, the distribution of wealth and value in society, the aims of political liberation, and the legitimate means of political engagement. I argue that waste has become an ambiguous symbol of both the uncertainty resulting from national and social disintegration and the possibility of forming renewed social bonds.
I. SALVAGING WASTE
This essay contends that waste-as a symbol, a trope, and a material condition- permits us to reimagine the link between post-independence novels of disillusionment and contemporary works preoccupied with the tenuousness of national prosperity and identity. The waste is there, from KofiAwoonor's This Earth, My Brother (1971) and Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) to Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Zeze Gamboa's film O Heroi (2004). Furthermore, as our notions of the nation, the just distribution of wealth and value in society, the experience of history from below, and the aims of political liberation change, so too do representations of waste. We may find waste ponderous, unsettling, or obscene, but we cannot dismiss it as merely an uncommon aesthetic curiosity. It takes many forms throughout African literature and film. What is more, our encounter with waste is always framed within a particular relationship between aesthetics and politics-what I will call a text's regime of waste. More than a viewpoint or mindset, a regime consists of the language and images through which waste is made visible and intelligible. I borrow the term "regime" from Kenneth Harrow where he writes that:
theorizing around trash moves from the material to the psychological, sociological, and political, with regimes of trash recycling discarded objects from one order to another: discarded, worthless people...