“Rotten English”: Excremental Politics and Literary Witnessing

Abstract

This chapter explores the language and literature of abjection in Nigeria. In his 1985 novel Sozaboy, writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa experimented with a form of literary language that he thought could best articulate the experiences, sufferings, and desires of those populations constituted as excessive, useless, and disposable by the Nigerian state. This language, which he called “Rotten English,” expresses linguistically and narratologically the ways in which the Nigerian state fails to adequately “represent” all its citizens. Claude Levi-Strauss (1961: 386) classified societies as “anthropophagie” or “anthropoemic,” depending on whether they “consume” and assimilate, or remove, exclude, or “vomit” out their adversaries. In Saro-Wiwa’s assessment, the Nigerian state features both tendencies, vampirically consuming the bodies and resources of its micro-minorities, by exploiting their oil resources and using ethnic conflict as an ideological “fix,” only to excrete these remainders by abandoning them to a space where the law and the political are suspended. Critically indicting the disjuncture between the state’s “big grammar” rhetoric of democracy, representation, and national unity, and its “rotten” or necropolitical exercise of power in the oil-producing regions, Saro-Wiwa argues that the fate of minority populations, like his own Ogoni, can be productively read as an exemplary case (the example as that which is taken-out) for understanding the nature and effects of sovereignty in his country.