Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3

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Becoming Nomadic: The Radical "Demonic" Geographies of M. NourbeSe Philip's Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence / Kate Siklosi

Keywords: Place & Space; Literature

Black matters are spatial matters [1].

-Katherine McKittrick

how does one

write

poetry from a place

a place structured

by absence

One doesn't. One learns to read the silence/s [2].

-M. NourbeSe Philip

<1> When the protagonist of M. NourbeSe Philip's novella Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) resolutely declares that she will "open a way to the interior or perish," (7) she is at once reappropriating a colonial expression of geographic domination while enacting a "demonic" respatialization of African cultural representation. The statement, taken originally from Scottish missionary and explorer Dr. David Livingstone's travel diary, (re)presents the colonial metaphor of Africa as the unknown "dark continent" and its embedded representation of the eroticized black female body. This "opening of the interior," a central motif of Philip's text, thus announces the united geographic and sexual violence of colonial imperialism, but it also articulates a transgressive space of resistance—the protagonist's nomadic odyssey across time and space, undertaken without maps or guides, displaces the linear geographic "truths" of colonial exploration with a demonic spatiality. Feminist human geographer Katherine McKittrick utilizes the concept of the "demonic" in her groundbreaking critical text Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006) as a means of "rethink[ing] the complex linkages between history, blackness, race, and place" (143). The term "demonic," appropriated by McKittrick from Caribbean cultural critic Sylvia Wynter, demarcates sites of productive geographic and subjective alterity, oppositional spaces and places for black geographies that are rendered invisible by traditional geographic epistemologies [3]. Demonic grounds thus provide "a very different geography; one which is genealogically wrapped up in the historical spatial unrepresentability of black femininity and ... one that thinks about the ways in which black women necessarily contribute to a re-presentation of human geography" (xxv-xxvi). The "demonic" as a spatial schema thus (re)presents the historically "unrepresentable" black female body by uniting the geographical and sexual concerns of spatial allocation, for it exposes the dichotomous relationship between "geographies of domination" and systemic attempts to control and exploit the reproductive capacities of women, particularly black women (McKittrick x).

<2> Further, in her assertion that "racial-sexual domination is an ongoing spatial project" (121), McKittrick's analysis of the demonic underscores the ways in which the production of geographical space is inextricably linked with racial ideologies and experiences. Indeed, black geographies have largely been rendered invisible by traditional geographical discourses, which are built on capitalist systems of value and metanarratives of dispossession that "require black displacement, black placenessness, black labor, and a black population that submissively stays 'in place'" (9; original emphasis). Such metanarratives of domination operate from a singular vantage point, one that serves to "naturalize both identity and place, repetitively spatializing where nondominant groups "naturally" belong" (xv). The demonic mode thus involves interpreting the landscape with a tripartite epistemological, linguistic, and spatial lens; this multiscalar geographic approach disrupts the colonizer's view of the land and its occupants as transparent and objectively knowable. This colonial assumption of geographic and bodily transparency extends to the female reproductive system, for as McKittrick argues, "Geographic conquest and expansion is extended to the reproductive and sexually available body" (45). The demonic mode proceeds beyond such geographical and reproductive exploitation by means of spatial contestations and occupations, and intensive corporeal mobility. That is, the demonic alters the very notion of territory: rather than existing as a stable marker of naturalized "place," territory becomes a fluid and local ground that develops with, rather than against, the subjectivities that inhabit the land.

<3> In Looking for Livingstone, demonic grounds are established as alternative spatial lands from which such geographic agency and mobility can be achieved. These grounds are both created and embodied by the text's female protagonist, known only as "The Traveller," who ventures into the interior of Africa to challenge the "discoveries" of Dr. David Livingstone. Livingstone's legacy of exploration represents Africa's mythological place in the European imaginary as an uncharted, virginal frontier that, lacking origins and its own geographical arrangements, needed European intervention to "discover" the land. Livingstone is said to have been the first European to see "the falls of Mosiotunya," which he then renamed "Victoria Falls" (Philip, Livingstone 7). He was also shown other African natural sites by indigenous Africans, such as the local main river systems such as the Zambezi, which he then afterwards claimed to have discovered. The Traveller sets out to reinstate the silence created by Livingstone's imperialist exploits, while also venturing across the land to reclaim the stolen inherited silences of her foremothers.

<4> The Traveller's journey takes place across time and space, as her creation narrative spans thousands of years. The mock-Biblical style of the text, as well as its self-reflexive appropriation of the travel narrative (the book is constructed in a series of dated diary entries of her "discoveries"), represents a counter-hegemonic (re)imagining of historiography on geographic and linguistic terms. This allegorical journey into the African interior is mirrored by The Traveller's own exploration of her inner geography, the mapping of her own silence, "not a thing to be discovered, so much as recovered" (10). Livingstone's quest through Africa is also paralleled by The Traveller's journey, although they do not share the same teleology; whereas Livingstone's quest to "discover" Africa imposes European meaning and authorial word on the native silences of the land and on the black female body, The Traveller's quest recovers the meanings of these silences outside of Eurocentric systems of signification.

<5> In light of Philip's geographical allegory, McKittrick's discussion of demonic grounds—with its focus on oppositional methodologies and constructions of space—lends itself to Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual framework of nomadology in A Thousand Plateaus. The demonic involves a nomadic negotiation of space outside of hegemonic bounds, and Philip's text demonstrates a union of these two spatial theories in its narrative. Indeed, along The Traveller's journey, the demonic ground is established rhizomatically by means of bodily interaction with the land and the relations between objects in the local landscape. Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of the rhizome [4] as a trope to characterize the movements and ideology of nomadic cultures. As opposed to the vertical hierarchy of the State (in which the upwards growth of a tree is symbolic) the nomad negotiates space horizontally, arriving and departing between various paths as opposed to a fixed point. Without the use of traditional maps and tools, The Traveller's nomadic journey thus displaces linear colonial narratives of time and space.

<6> The Traveller's movements through time and space unites McKittrick and Deleuze and Guattari's common theoretical entanglements of geography, epistemology, and corporeality into a demonic nomadic spatial mode. Along her journey, The Traveller thus embodies the interventions of these theorists upon traditional spatial arrangements that render certain knowledges and bodies invisible. In applying the theories of demonic geography and nomadology to Philip's narrative of colonial history, certain binaries surface—namely, the confrontation of nomos and logos (figured as "nomad" versus "royal" science), and "smooth" versus "striated" space—all of which result from systemic geoepistemic processes and the friction between hegemonic and alternative spatial practices. By means of The Traveller's intensive mapping of smooth space, her balancing of imperialist-imposed binaries, and her displacement of colonial logos with localized nomos, a demonic ground is established from which the black female body can enact real and material resistances that supersede systemic sanctions of geographical, corporeal, and epistemological space. Such spatial contestations undermine the naturalist geographic discourses that ground imperialism, for as McKittrick writes, "black women's geographic experiences and expressions reveal new and innovative spatial practices: if one moves through, rebuilds, contests, or even 'says' space, 'natural' geographic arrangements are called into question" (145-146). The demonic mode suggests that black women's geographies-whether said, imagined, or lived-have innovative capabilities that are not marginal, but central to historical and ongoing contestations of spatial domination.

<7> These binaries surface in the movement of Philip's Traveller through the African landscape by means of what I call intensive mapping-a non—Euclidean measure of geography that expands upon McKittrick's notion of demonic geography by inflecting it with the Deleuzoguattarian notion of nomadic intensity (as opposed to statist extensity). "Geography," as Deleuze argues, is "no less mental and corporeal than physical in movement" (Dialogues II 38) and thus becomes a discipline of various intensities rather than of static substances. Intensity is closely linked to Deleuze and Guattari's conception of nomadology, the movement of agential vectors across planes of "smooth space." Smooth space stands in contrast to striated space, wherein the landscape is viewed as a planiform, homogenized surface consisting of fixed points that are assigned definite values and can be "counted" according to traditional geographic and cartographic means. Land so precisely calculated and lineally striated, and viewed from a universalized external perspective, allows for space to be readily reproduced. On the contrary, smooth space resists such totalizing impulses by disallowing an externalized point of view. As Deleuze and Guattari explain,

Smooth space is a field without [parallel] conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentred, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without 'counting' it and 'can be explored only by legwork.' They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them; an example of this is the system of sounds or even of colours, as opposed to Euclidean space. (409)

Moving through smooth space "by legwork" thus involves traveling intensely as opposed to extensively (528). Such a constellatory cartography presents a challenge to the historical fixity of origin, for drifting between multiple sites on the land reterritorializes the local beyond its sited bounds: "Here the absolute is local, precisely because place is not delimited" (494). Constellated, nomadic movement creates an anarchic mapping of place, for these unpredictable and "demonic" pathways both resist and permeate the controlling order of state-instituted structures of human movement.

<8> Philip encapsulates this radical geographic intensity in her critical work A Genealogy of Resistance, wherein she elucidates her spatial practice of writing from place, the "from which, rather than about which, one writes" (57; original emphasis). Indeed, the demonic mode is articulated in the radical intensity of the "from which," for as McKittrick asserts, the resistance of demonic spaces is not marginal but central, as demonic grounds are not located "outside" of dominant categories of space, but are instead internal and oppositional to hegemonic norms. Philip translates these alternative practices in The Traveller's intensive mapping of the land using a counter-hegemonic, nomad cartography that ruptures statist, European cartographic modes that render the alterity of black geographies silent and "ungeographic" (McKittrick 5). Traditionally, the study of geography is concerned with mapping and organizing the land according to Euclidean measurements. More recently, the material, physical tenets of geographical discourse have been fused with the semiotic—spaces are no longer meaningful in terms of strict calculation alone but are also semiotic planes that are imbued with signification beyond the physicality of the landscape. Thus, for the purposes of this discussion, "geography" will be considered as a tripartite entanglement of spatial, epistemological, and linguistic discourses with which we can view the land, or as McKittrick defines it: "space, place, and location in their physical materiality and imaginative configurations" (x). As both McKittrick and Philip assert, both the material reality and imagined potential of space are integral to geographical discourse; because traditional cartographic abilities are denied to black women, they must forge new casts of the land using alternative semiotic lenses. One of the vectors of this alternative geographic and cartographic mode is language—the semiotic resonances and reverberations of the landscape that make previously bounded and colonized territories penetrable and alterable.

<9> Indeed, Philip's Traveller negotiates the African landscape using language as a means of reimagining the geography outside of the imposing spatial projects of imperialism, which attempt to naturalize the spaces and places of colonized subjects. The text unites space and language in the word/silence dichotomy that reverberates throughout the novella. This dichotomy is a spatial metaphor for the struggles between colonizer and colonized, for it points to the historical rendering of silence as invisible and immaterial, and subject to displacement by the patriarchal power of the word [5]. Over the course of The Traveller's journey, however, silence is rehabilitated from its colonial circumscription as immaterial and ungeographic; no longer categorized as stagnant or passive, the "travelling silence" she embodies destabilizes the word as an authorial colonial tool of naming and claiming the land. This notion of land as a material and semiotic assemblage comes together in what Philip elsewhere theorizes as the "word/i-mage equation," a volatile method of destructing the language of the colonizer that The Traveller uses in order to reorganize physical space and reinstate subjective presence for the colonized. According to Philip,

The power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these i-mages succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness … This can only be done by consciously restructuring, reshaping and, if necessary, destroying the language. ("Absence" 12, 21)

Philip's bifurcation of the term "image" into "i-mage" references "the Rastafarian practice of privileging the 'I' in many words" (12) and serves to overturn the denial of African subjectivity in dominant discourse and to correct its misrepresentation in hegemonic historiography. The historical dislocation of the i-mage from the word is marked by spatial dispossession and forced oppression under the foreign tongue of the colonizer. The geographical violence of the imperialist project is underscored by both spatial and linguistic displacement that must be reinstated.

<10> If, as Deleuze suggests, "there is always a way of reterritorializing oneself in the voyage," (Dialogues II 38) Philip's Traveller is a nomadic subject par excellence who effects demonic ground through her nonlinear intensities and reterritorializations of the landscape. As opposed to calculated, two-dimensional maps, nomads rely on the interactions between themselves and the intensities of their environment to negotiate the land. In so doing, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, nomads are "vectors of deterritorialization," for they act upon the landscapes they inhabit and are simultaneously acted upon by these spaces: "The nomads inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it" (421). In this way, the land itself becomes text-a nomos, a textual locality that is subject to revision and improvisation and possesses a demonic potential. Indeed, the (dis)organization of the demonic is central to its effectiveness as an oppositional geographical mode, for it opposes hegemonic linearity and thus "invites a slightly different conceptual pathway—while retaining its supernatural etymology—and acts to identify a system … that can only unfold and produce an outcome if uncertainty, or (dis)organization, or something supernaturally demonic, is integral to its methodology" (McKittrick xxiv).

<11> Indeed, much of The Traveller's methodology throughout her journey is founded on the "supernatural" wisdom she gains from various mystical rituals assigned to her by the African tribeswomen that she encounters. Along her journey, The Traveller visits the Museum of Silence that houses the various "labelled, annotated, dated, catalogued" (Livingstone 57) silences of the anagram tribes. When leaving, The Traveller sprinkles white "powder of unforgetting" (58) in the manner of the voodoo vèvè outside the museum doors. The vèvè is an African-Haitian ritual in which specific deities are invoked by drawing on the ground using chalk or corn flour. As Harold Courlander explains, "the vèvè is not a permanent record … In the ensuing ritual and dance, the vèvè is obliterated by the feet that pass across it" (125). The impermanence of the vèvè, with its impetus of improvisation, subverts European claims to stable, static truths about the land. Lamenting the silencing of these voices by the museum, The Traveller (re)inscribes the space with the ancestral silences represented by the sacred drawings—she reterritorializes the ground by invoking the silenced spirits of her foremothers. The alter/native reclamatory signature of the vèvè undermines the authorial possession of the "word," embodied by the "royal science" of the museum and by extension, Livingstone. The Traveller's redrawing encroaches on the territory of the museum by improvising space with specific ancestral locality. Such reterritorialization imbues State space with a specific and pointed intensity, a transgressive process of emplacement. Indeed, as philosopher Edward Casey observes, this process of creating place involves modifying space by radically localizing it: "more important than locality (qua unit) is the 'local operation' (the action), whereby I make my way through the localities that punctuate a region, modifying them along the way" (The Fate 305).

<12> Nomadic geography thus combines the spatial and corporeal as interdependent variables in the creation of space and place. The Traveller must negotiate these demonic grounds using nomos-the learned local wisdom of the tribeswomen and her inner silence-as her epistemological guide. The names of the tribes she encounters all form anagrams of the word "silence," which subverts the colonial circumscription of African silence as singular, transparent, and unvarying. While visiting the CESLIENS tribe, The Traveller is put into the centre of a circle drawn in the dirt, and she is given a string with which she attempts to measure the circle's circumference using the mathematical constant "pi." Each attempt to measure the circle in this traditional scientific manner fails, as the string transforms into a snake and an umbilical cord in her hands. Recalling both the Fall of Eden and The Traveller's own birth, the string comes to symbolize the word, which creates a circle of memory that circumscribes history. The string, the word, proves to be no more than an empty illusion, useless to The Traveller aside from reminding her of what is within—her memory and her Silence. The calculative, linear measurements of royal science do not serve The Traveller in this space; she remains caught in the circle until a thought comes to her to draw her own circle inside of the one drawn by the tribe women. While inside this other circle, she is enlightened as to the anagram puzzle given to her by a previous tribe, which, when solved, would tell The Traveller something about the object of her quest. By means of this demonic methodology, the necessary words surface: "SURRENDER and WITHIN" (38), symbolizing the need to give in to her own history, her own memory of silence.

<13> As this episode demonstrates, The Traveller must negotiate space rhizomatically—without the use of traditional tools of objective measurement—by relying on the relations between intensities in her environment. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, smooth space is "a space of affects, more than one of properties" (528), and so The Traveller must proceed nomadically, by "haptic rather than optical perception… intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities" (528). Trapped in the mystical circle, The Traveller must forge new connections between her body and the physical environment, engaging with a "topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations" (421). This geographical schema, wherein the body is immersed in the landscape and interacts with local culture culminates in a living, demonic geography from which new productive and meaningful subjectivities can emerge. Further, these creative relations between the body and the landscape lends new agency and "sayability" (McKittrick xxiii) to geographical spaces, for as McKittrick argues, "'saying,' imagining, and living geography locates the kinds of creative and material openings traditional geographic arrangements disclose and conceal" (144). Indeed, such vibrant geography is central to the demonic mode, for the reaction between the body and the intensive qualities of the environment transform the land into transgressive spaces of integrated, "living" geographies that resist spatial oppression.

<14> The Traveller's journey itself takes place across various "circles" of history, for she "travels in circles … circles upon circles" (Livingstone 10) in a manner that mimics the encircled nature of various historical narratives. As Philip declares in the text,

The traveller seeks

contentment

in silence

containment

of press of circle upon circle

that cleanses

the pollute

the profane in word    (39; original spacing)

Formally speaking, the narrative of the text is repeatedly broken by these poetic commentaries on the nature of the relationship between word and silence in historiography. Philip constructs the majority of these passages in a divisive line structure that mimics a ledger, which poetically enacts the process of balancing the word/silence equation. Uniting form and content, these intermittent poetic excerpts disrupt the circular continuity of hegemonic historical narratives—represented by the word—by inserting ulterior hermeneutical circles of agential silence into the narrative. The circular motifs in Philip's work thus render both time and history as alterable sites, changeable by memory and the intensity of silence against the extensive word. In her own discussion of Philip's work, McKittrick also employs the circle as a somatic symbol, for she asserts that the "geography of the body touches elsewhere—it moves between the local (the inner space between the legs), the outside (the place of oppression, the plantation) the New World, and circles back again to reinvent black (female/New World) disapora histories" (50). Memory, as the force of circumscription in Philip's poetics, acts as the thread of discourse between these above elements of black subjectivity.

<15> Moreover, Philip's proposition of the circle as an alternate approach to logic opposes the one-way linear progression of Western discourse by adopting a more Eastern way of thinking cyclically. Philip's text also challenges the linear, "either/or" logic of Western colonial geographic narratives by allegorizing the conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call nomos, or "nomadic" science, embodied by The Traveller and her silence, and logos, or "royal" science, embodied by Livingstone and his word. Whereas "the word" represents the violence of the colonial word—its erasure of Africa's subjective and geographical agency—silence becomes representative in the text of stolen African history, its culture, language, and place. Livingstone's "naming" of Victoria Falls according to a logos is an attempt to impose colonial boundaries, to encamp the land as a "site." Throughout her quest for the recovery of inner and outer silence, her movements through time and space create a "demonic" geographical mode that undermines Livingstone's authorial quest for discovery using "the word" as a tool of naming possession and exploitation of the land. The Traveller's demonic geography thus results in a "minor" cartographic mode that is reflective of nomadic interventions on statist mappings of the land. "Sanctioned geographic knowledges," according to McKittrick, "position the black subject, and her/his politics of location, as symbolic (rather than real) interruptions in the landscape" (14, 19). In contrast, a nomadic and demonic landscape—that is, landscape imbued with interpretability and alterability—breaks away from static notions of territory, and allows for the placing of inventive and imaginative strata upon the striated land.

<16> In her final encounter with Livingstone, The Traveller renegotiates colonized geography in the text by binding the language and logic of silence to upset the colonial assumptions of objective truth about the local land. She thus imbues the land with an interpretative nomos, an alternative epistemology that parallels the linearity of the European logos. Traditionally, nomos denotes a local particularity in opposition to universalizing, rational absolutes; further, it characterizes the territories outside the fixed borders of the city-state, and is therefore exempt from the laws and organization of the polis. However, nomos can also be translated as "custom" or "rule-of-thumb" (Holland 21). As an epistemological mode, then, nomos is founded on local proximities rather than precise empirical validation. In Philip's allegory, nomos is appropriated by the Traveller as a resistant epistemology that is guided by her intensive (re)imaginings of geography. In her study of postcolonial women's writing, Indira Karamcheti explores the possibilities for resistance latent in such imaginative geographies. As she observes, these writers "register geographic violence as the origin of their writing and attempt to recover local geography as a way to contest colonial and gender domination" (127). Indeed, the competing epistemologies of The Traveller and Livingstone render the landscape as a material, textual body. Viewing the land as text also reflects Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of textuality and worlding: "The notion of textuality should be related to the notion of the worlding of a world on a supposedly uninscribed territory … the imperialist project … had to assume that the earth that it territorialised was in fact previously uninscribed … Now this worlding actually is also a texting, textualising, a making into art, a making into an object to be understood" (1). In The Traveller's recovery of the local geography and its silences, a demonic ground of resistance is established; the land is no longer a transparent textual object of the imperialist gaze, but becomes (re)textualized with the peculiarity of locality that exceeds sanctioned geographic knowledges of the land and its people.

<17> McKittrick's demonic geographical mode, with its focus on local geography as a means of resistance, thus radically engages with the "'the where' of alterity" (xix). To be sure, the locality of the subaltern has been a subject of heated debate in critical discourse, where it centers on discussions marginality and centrality. McKittrick challenges postcolonial spatial metaphors of centers and margins, specifically bell hooks's conception of the margin as progressive, as a "radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds" (hooks 149-50). Along with Patricia Hill Collins, who asserts that the margin has become "a flattened theoretical space," (129) McKittrick denies the legitimacy of the margin based on its precarious geographical locality and critical potential:

The trouble with the margin is also connected to its geo-conceptual spatial stasis; theoretically, the margin is always already marginal, peripheral, because it also carries with it—in its metaphorical utterance—the materiality of real margins and real centers … This language, the where of the margin, shapes it as an exclusively oppositional, unalterable site that cannot be easily woven into the ongoing production of space because the bifurcating geographies-margins are not centers—prohibits integrative processes… The margin…is a site of dispossession, it is an ungeographic space. (57-58)

In insisting that "black femininity is a location" (56), McKittrick establishes the radical positionality of the demonic mode for the black female subject in place of exhausted marginality. Moreover, as McKittrick's study suggests, the margin is an inaccurate locale for the female black body which has occupied a central place in history, especially during periods of enslavement, where the female black body was a site for racial, gendered and sexual hierarchies to be enacted.

<18> Indeed, discourses of the margin are perhaps too hastily applied to subjects of difference, for this concept of the "outside" is exhaustively—and perhaps dangerously—overused in its demarcation of the oppressed. Moreover, marginal discourse depends on the abstractness of space to make its case, whereas the bodily space of Philip's epistemology is first and foremost organic and tangible as a bodily centre. Philip's focus on the embodied centre in her work concurs with McKittrick's critique of the margin, for in her discussion of what she calls "bodymemory," Philip states: "The Body African henceforth inscribed with the text of events of the New World. Body becoming text. In turn the Body African-dis place-place and s/place of exploitation inscribes itself permanently on the European text. Not on the margins. But within the very body of the text where the silence exists" (Genealogy 95; original emphasis). Philip's "bodymemory" establishes the body as rightfully belonging to a centre, with history at its heart, encircled by memory (She Tries 96). This encircling is enacted in her 1989 poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks:

each word creates a centre

circumscribed by memory…and history

waits  at rest always

still at the centre   (96)

In her book Frontiers, Phili&#160;p attests to the radical positionality of the "from which," the profound "sayability" of imagined geographies [6] from occupied centres instead of outside margins: "dreaming—the imagination—the one faculty of the human that can resist colonization. To construct imaginative and poetic worlds AS IF we were at the centre. To design imaginative and poetic scapes with us at the centre. We speak from the centre and are whole" (69-71). Philip's work thus unites the imaginative possibilities of space with "a flesh-and-blood worldview implicit to the production of space" (McKittrick 122).

<19> This dichotomous relationship between the colonizer's word and the African's embodied silence becomes representative of the power structures in place that secure European geographical domination over Africa. As Eva C. Karpinski observes, in this battle between word and silence in Looking for Livingstone, "Silence means not so much absence as a different form of presence juxtaposed to the colonizer's phallic Word" (187). By means of occupying a "different form of presence," silence becomes a demonic ground from which The Traveller can erect spatial and subjective agency. However, as McKittrick reminds us, it is crucial that the demonic acts as an alternative mode, and not a replacement. To explain further, McKittrick notes how Wynter's "analysis does not lead her to discuss Man verses other" but that the demonic ground "makes possible a different unfolding, one that does not replace or override or remain subordinate to the vantage point of 'Man' but instead parallels his constitution and his master narratives of humanness" (xxv). This conceptual distinction between replacement and paralleling is central to the understanding of Philip's polemic, for The Traveller does not set out to replace dominant discourses; rather, she sets out to reterritorialize the place of black women by proposing a parallel mode of epistemology that is rooted in silence.

<20> As such, The Traveller's quest does not mirror teleological imperialist conquest by filling gaps with word; rather, she rehabilitates historiography by means of asserting the concrete presence of silence within the spatiality of historical discourse. In her final exchange with Livingstone, which spans several pages and hundreds of years, The Traveller alludes to the imperialist project of replacing found silences with the authorial word. She addresses Livingstone and states: "'You captured and seized the Silence you found—possessed it like the true discoverer you were—dissected and analysed it; labeled it—you took their Silence—the Silence of the African—and replaced it with your own—the silence of your word'" (70) [7]. It is imperative that The Traveller exposes the epistemic violence of colonial discursive domination without simply replacing it with the metanarrative of silence. As Karpinsky observes, by seeking "not to fill the silences in the historical record but to testify to their presences," The Traveller "undermines the record, as well as the way of reading other people's histories and cultures presumed to be represented" (189). The Traveller's exposure of the symbiotic relationship between historiography, the word, and the silence of the colonized marks a demonic ground wherein "subaltern lives are not marginal/other to regulatory classificatory systems, but [are] instead integral to them" (McKittrick xxv).

<21> The claimed "truths" of Livingstone's geographical discoveries are continually undermined by The Traveller's nomadic geo-epistemologies in her Socratic-like final exchange with Livingstone. Here, the volatile binaries between nomos and logos and smooth and striated space come to a head, and imperial power structures are dramatized, plundered, and destabilized in the process. In so doing, The Traveller undermines authorial, hegemonic historiography by exposing the circumscription and misrepresentation of silence by colonial conquest. In the confrontation, The Traveller challenges Livingstone's accolades—the "royal" honorariums of books, awards and keys to cities—as markers of "fact" and "proof." The Traveller exposes "fact" as a construction that is supported by power structures, for as she explains to Livingstone, "a fact is whatever anyone, having the power to enforce it, says is a fact" (67). In the exchange, Livingstone and The Traveller debate the geographic validity of silence compared to the word. The Traveller reveals that she has discovered her silence throughout her journey, yet Livingstone denies such a possibility based on its immateriality: "I don't understand how you can do that—discover silence, I mean. It's not a thing like a river, or a waterfall, or a country" (69). Livingstone thus renders African silence "ungeographic," for its presence does not adhere to traditional Euro-centric "sanctioned geographic knowledges" (McKittrick 14). These traditional geographies impose rigidly bound spatial patterns on the land, such as "regions, nations, boundaries, geometries, maps, and paths" (McKittrick 104-105), and do not take into account the topology of local intensities, customs, and epistemologies.

<22> In their heated exchange, Livingstone also denies the material and semiotic validity of silence, for he has "dissected and analysed" the silence of the African people with his "word" (70). Indeed, this enigmatic silence that The Traveller embodies cannot be circumscribed in the royal science of his trade as explorer and missionary. The Traveller nonetheless insists on the materiality of her silence, for as she declares: "I assure you I have mapped and measured my own Silence to the last millimeter, and it exists … so tangible I can even touch it at times" (70). Earlier in the narrative, the NEECLIS tribe challenge The Traveller to weave a tapestry of her silence using word as the suturing thread (51). After first denying that silence has words and tangible materiality, The Traveller learns that silence and word share a symbiotic relationship, and she finally succeeds in weaving her tapestry, "a multicoloured quilt—of Silence—[her] many silences—held together by the most invisible of stitches—the invisible but necessary word" (55). After recovering the materiality of her silence, The Traveller enters the Museum of Silence, where the stolen African silences are put on display, and she perceives the silences as material and tangible objects with obvious spatial parameters, "a structure, an edifice I could walk around, touch, feel, lick even" (57). In their confrontation, The Traveller uses this quilt of inherited silence against Livingstone's word. The Traveller's silence forces Livingstone to encounter the "unimaginable" silences she bears and thus serves as a geographic disruption—indeed, a rehabilitation—of the Eurocentric space that has staked false claims of African land and its peoples.

<23> Repeatedly throughout the exchange, The Traveller undermines Livingstone's linear logic and renders him speechless. Livingstone's speechlessness when faced by the real materiality of The Traveller's silence reflects McKittrick's discussion of the "surprise" and "wonder" invoked by long-standing, black geographical presences. According to McKittrick, "the element of surprise is contained in the material, political, and social landscape that presumes—and fundamentally requires—that subaltern populations have no relationship to the production of space" (92). Moreover, the encounter is "surprising" to Livingstone because The Traveller assumes a dominant role by charging the exchange with sexualized language and bodily suggestiveness, thus parodying imperialist geographical and sexual domination. Whereas earlier in the text, a fellow explorer named Stanley [8] suggests to Livingstone that "a continent awaits us-like a whore" (25), here the colonizer's gaze is reversed by The Traveller assuming the objectifying role of "explorer" and invading Livingstone's fixed sense of reason and logic with the material "soundness" of her silence.

<24> The Traveller thus counters Livingstone's denial of the colonized subject's geographic capability by reasserting the material and spatial qualities of silence, as mapped throughout her journey. In her exchange with Livingstone, the unheard African silences she embodies establish a verbal and tangible presence alongside the word of the colonizer. As McKittrick argues, this notion of geographic "sayability" is paramount to the demonic mode: "The combination of material and imagined geographies is intended to unfix black women's geographies from their 'natural' places and spaces by bringing into focus the 'sayability' of geography" (xxiii). By the end of the confrontation between Livingstone's word and The Traveller's silence, silence prevails as the only thing left "uncontaminated," (Philip, Livingstone 65) as it resists appropriation and representation by Livingstone and his representative hegemonic systems of signification. By means of silence's reclaimed agency at the hands of The Traveller, the word/silence dichotomy becomes balanced, and this is figured in the conclusion of the text when she holds Livingstone's hand:

I  touched  something  warm familiar   like  my  own  hand  human

something I could not  see in the SILENCE  reaching out  through

the SILENCE of space  the SILENCE of time  through the silence of

SILENCE I touch it his hand held it  his hand  and the SILENCE

(75; original emphasis and spacing)

As critic Paul Naylor has noted, Philip has been criticized for ending the text in this "gesture of reconciliation," and he quotes Philip from an interview where she comes to terms with the criticism and reaffirms her choice: "She can reach out and take Livingstone's hand or not take it. She chooses to take his hand, and it all ends in this Silence. Upper case silence speaking to something larger than both of them" (qtd. in Naylor 199). As Philip observes, this final act is far from a passive submission; accordingly, I would contend that the "something larger" signified by the insistent presence of the capitalized silence in the final passage marks the Traveller's inhabitation of a productive and meaningful (re)imagined geography—a demonic ground—wherein the languages of word and silence are balanced. Earlier in the text, Philip foreshadows this symbiotic relationship between word and silence:

Word

and Silence

balance in contradiction

Silence and Word

harmony of opposites

double planets

condemned

to together (34; original spacing)

This final act, then, as Naylor observes, enacts a demonic "displacement" (199) of spatial hierarchies between colonizer and colonized, not a replacement of one by the other.

<25> Indeed, the poetic and fictional writings that span Philip's vast oeuvre commonly acknowledge and confirm that "land-possession, ownership, rejection, abandonment or merely recognition and acknowledgement of it" (Genealogy 57) plays a significant role in the production of the individual and place. Such affirmation of the agency of subaltern geographies is what unites Philip, McKittrick, and Deleuze and Guattari in their projects, for their theories (re)present the spaces and places that seemingly lay outside—but nonetheless prove to be integral—to traditional geographic discourses. The Traveller's intensive mapping of the imagined, allegorical landscape establishes a demonic geography that reasserts the presence of transgressive black geographies in a hegemonic historiography that has rendered them unrepresentable. Moreover, The Traveller's eventual possession and occupation of the demonic geography of silence corrects the binaries of imperialist discourse by asserting silence's integral (as opposed to marginal) presence in historical narratives. The oppositional spirit of McKittrick's demonic geography is made all the more vibrant by Philip's Traveller, who, in her nomadic reconfigurations of striated, colonized land, becomes an unstoppable agent of past, present, and ongoing spatial reterritorialization.

Notes

[1]. (Demonic Grounds xiv)

[2]. (Genealogy 120)

[3]. Wynter originally uses the term "demonic" in her postcolonial analysis of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Wynter focuses her discussion on the connection between reproduction and land reclamation. As she suggests, the absence in the play of "Caliban's potential mate through whom the reproduction of his race might occur" (McKittrick xxv), prevents the island from being reclaimed by its native population. See Sylvia Wynter. "Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/Silencing the 'Demonic Ground' of Caliban's 'Woman.'" Out of Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Eds. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990. 355-67. Print.

[4]. In contrast to trees, rhizomatic plants (such as the potato) have no central root but a series of nodes that spread their roots horizontally and adapt to the contours of their environment.

[5]. It is noteworthy that Philip's collection of poems She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Looking for Livingstone originally began as one work, but eventually became bifurcated into two separate threads to the same fabric. She Tries introduces the competing terms of word and silence, and Looking for Livingstone is the narrative demonstration of their confrontation.

[6]. In my discussion, "imagined geographies" signifies a practice of spatialized resistance. In this way, it differs from the concept as it is originally discussed by Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978) as a critique of the objective gaze with which critical discourse views other regions and societies. According to Said, imagined geography is a means of reinventing meanings of landscapes in order to justify imperialist seizure and control over coveted territories and their inhabitants. For further discussion of the critical implications of imaginative geographies, see Derek Gregory, "Imaginative Geographies." Progress in Human Geography 19 (1995): 447-485. Print.

[7]. Throughout Philip's narrative, the word "silence" appears both capitalized and uncapitalized. As Karpinsky observes, throughout The Traveller's journey, "the signifier 'silence' acquires different meanings, finally crystallizing in the small—'s' silence and the capital—'S' Silence, the former inflicted on the African by colonizers and the latter representing the totality of African heritage" (189). The capital—"S" Silence of African culture, geography, and heritage under colonial rule is embodied by the various tribes The Traveller encounters, the names of which all form anagrams of the word "silence."

[8]. The "Stanley" alluded to here is Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), a British explorer who, along with David Livingstone, explored central Africa. Stanley was also famous for his commissioned search for Livingstone, who was presumed missing in the African continent. Legend has it that upon locating Livingstone, Stanley uttered the infamous words ironically reverberated throughout Philip's text: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

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