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Writing in Difficult Times: Ebola 2014

by Thato Magano

On Tuesday, October 1st, 2019, the Department of French, Program in Comparative Literature and Center for African Studies hosted celebrated novelist, poet, painter, illustrator and visiting professor in the French department, the Paris born, and Côte d’Ivoire raised Véronique Tadjo. The event Writing in Difficult Times: Ebola 2014 was styled as a premiere of the anticipated English translation of her 2017 novel, En compagnie des hommesThe Whispering Tree. Sharing that Rutgers felt much like home as this is her third visit, Professor Tadjo described the visceral sensations that went into her writing about the 2014 iteration of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa broadly and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, specifically.

Reflecting on the dynamic circumstances that shaped her life and worldview – a child that was born out of and to travel, an adult who has lived in at least Rwanda and several countries on the African continent – her constant curiosity was the ways the local, to mean Abidjan and Côte d’Ivoire, was always altered by the experience of returning after months and years of being away.

This is why it hadn’t seemed strange that it was in late 2013 while living in South Africa when she first heard the news that a mysterious disease had been discovered in Guinea, later identified as Ebola, and in her travels throughout the continent and to Europe and the United States that she started questioning some of the perceptions the global reporting on the epidemic was creating. This is where the idea of the novel was birthed as she wondered about the quality of spectatorship. “What was the implication of this strange way of reporting the disease that is always mediated by commercial activity (advertising),” she asked herself. It was the incommensurate quality of experiences that created the story.

The novel became a meditation on the ways the epidemic changed social life in Abidjan due to the shared borders with Guinea and Liberia, where the disease was most prevalent. The intent was to highlight the human experiences and to demonstrate the ways in which we are all interconnected through various factors precipitated by capitalism and globalization:

“I wanted to show that much more happened with the epidemic than the media had reported on … One of the difficulties with Ebola is that there are five strains hence the difficulty to eradicate it. The current vaccine does not work for all the strains and different strains affect people differently … I wanted to start with people and end with people and show that the social and cultural dimensions of the disease are important.”

Readings from The Whispering Tree revealed that the novel embodied forms of the oral traditions to speak about the epidemic, employing various first-person voices that spanned human and non-human beings. These multiple voices, using a well understood medium in African literature, sought to make the scientific link between deforestation and Ebola to highlight the ways that the disappearance of animal habitation has resulted in a proximity to humans that makes the spread of the disease possible. It is the voice of the baobab tree that affirms the role of the forest to the past and future of mankind:

““We are the link, we bring humans to their past, to their present and their unpredictable future … Our consciousness dwells beyond space and time … You cannot cut down the forest without spilling blood … I am baobab, the everlasting tree, the mythical tree … Our roots search for water, our roots call the rain.”

This delightful experience was followed by a Q&A that delved more into questions of orality and voice; the ways ecological genocide has not been fully explored to give greater context to the epidemic, and how social life has evolved since the epidemic was first contained in 2014.

 

NEW GRAD STUDENT PROFILES, FALL 2019

Rutgers Comp Lit is thrilled to introduce the two students of this year’s incoming cohort: Sneha and Xingming.

Sneha Khaund attended St. Stephen’s College in Delhi for her undergraduate degree in English Literature. Following her studies in Delhi, she moved to London to study for an MA in Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). As a Commonwealth Scholar at SOAS, she explored how multilingualism is a productive lens from which to think about world literature. She looks forward to developing these interests at Rutgers by focusing on eastern India. Prior to joining Rutgers, Sneha worked in the publishing industry and hopes to combine her interest in writing for popular media with her academic training.

Xingming Wang’s research interests lie in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, with theoretical concerns centering on animal studies, environmental humanities, and trauma and memory studies. He was born in Xuzhou, a city renowned for the culture of Han Dynasty, ancient battlefields, and heavy industry, where his critical awareness of historical memory and environmental protection has taken root and grown into an academic passion. At Soochow University, Xingming majored in English and focused on trauma in modernist literature, especially the works of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. He was also fascinated by the novels of Charles Dickens and thus ventured into a close reading of Nineteenth-century British literature. Meanwhile, he got affiliated to Jingwen College, an institute accommodating students from fifty different majors and endorsing interdisciplinary academic projects, where he honed his research skills. After that, Xingming went to Nanjing University for graduate study in English language and literature. While working on his M.A. thesis on critical animal studies, he took courses outside the English Department and found his interests gravitating towards animals in modern Chinese literature. At Rutgers, Xingming hopes to probe how representations of animals engage with the discourse of “human” and how literary animals embody a site of testimony to the painful moments in modern Chinese history.

Welcome, Sneha and Xingming!

NEW GRAD STUDENT PROFILES, FALL 2018

Rutgers Comp Lit is delighted to welcome four students to this year’s incoming cohort. Meet Amanda, Milan, Yingnan, and Phil.

Amanda González Izquierdo was born in Havana, Cuba, and has lived in Miami, Florida for the past nine years. Surrounded by palm trees and cafecito, she has spent several years thinking about how to speak of diaspora and what languages are available to speak of the various ways in which feelings and traumas of diasporas of various kinds are experienced. Amanda completed her BA at Florida International University, where she majored in English, minored in Philosophy, and completed a certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The research she plans to partake in while at Rutgers situates itself in the dialogue between continental philosophy (focusing on deconstructive ethics) and postcolonial Caribbean theory and literature. She hopes that her work will raise questions about postcolonial and diasporic experiences, the role that language plays in the fashioning of postcolonial identities, and the challenges and the ethical imperatives of bearing witness in the Caribbean.

 

Milan Reynolds’s interests revolve around processes of memory, identity and language. His work is rooted in postcolonial theory, conceptualizing silence within narratives, and the psychology of displacement and nostalgia. His mother moved from Italy to the U.S. as a teenager, and his own relationship to Italian culture developed through frequent trips, language acquisition, and translation. He has worked as an actor, musician and composer, in guitar repair, and ceramics. Sound, in its many forms, is incredibly important to him. A California transplant to New York, he completed a BA at NYU Gallatin, working on interdisciplinary projects that explored the borders between history and literature. Living in New York City has reinforced his belief in the importance of diverse communities and platforms for alternative narratives. He is involved in immigrant advocacy within his neighborhood. Milan is excited to join the Comparative Literature Department at Rutgers and develop research on transnational literature and cultural production in Italy and the Mediterranean. He has predominantly interacted with European and Latin American texts, so is excited to deepen his knowledge of Middle Eastern and North African sources.

 

Yingnan Shang majored in English literature in her undergraduate years at Peking University. Her major field of interest was clustered around modern and contemporary fiction and critical theory. While receiving graduate training at King’s College London, her interest in modernity and the city took shape within writings that contribute to the understanding of cultural conditions in modern metropolis. She took particular delight in reading urban literature and architectural history in the mid-nineteenth century and the twentieth century. She investigated a range of literary and cultural issues not unrelated to social and political concerns: the “mass”, resistance, and changing concepts of heritage, memory and nostalgia, amongst others. For her MA research in comparative literature at Dartmouth, Yingnan worked with contemporary visual artists in the art history department to investigate cyber-surveillance and digital activism. She studied the representation of shapes and forms with color relations, as well as the figure-ground relationship in Cézanne’s paintings in studio art. In her own abstract paintings, she worked with creative mediums and techniques to achieve a sense of complexity in representing urban space. Her experience working with city documentaries extended to an interest in experimental documentary and the intersections of cinema and art. In future practices, she hopes to experiment with unconventional ways of expressing alternative subcultures and urban aesthetics through independent filmmaking.

 

Phil Yakushev is interested in exploring how literature under capitalism deals with issues of crisis, memory, and madness. Born in Russia and raised in California, he received a BA in Comparative Literature, Politics, and Philosophy from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. He is currently working on a novel that follows a Russian-American family over multiple generations. At Rutgers, he is studying Russian, German, and American literatures of the last 40 years.