Reimagining the colonial wilderness: ‘Africa’,imperialism and the geographical legerdemain of the Vorrh

Introduction

Of all the places on the planet, Africa has suffered the longest and most acutely from pejorative representation in the mind’s eye of the western spectant. Since their very first attempts at what we now call ‘geography’, Europeans have cast a culturally informed gaze towards the great continent that lies to the south of the Mediterranean Sea, often failing to see Africa as it is, yet never being at a loss for words to describe what Africa means. Using a variety of technologies from maps to museums, western observers – explorers, anthropologists, missionaries, scientists, doctors and tourists – have produced a mythical realm called ‘Africa’, a ‘politicised aesthetic’ burdened by a list of negative epithets from the ‘Lost Continent’ to the ‘White Man’s Grave’. ¹ This spected, imaginated and fictionalised Africa ² functions as a ‘remarkably tenacious metaphor’ within western civilisation, one which symbolises a ‘web of dualities’ such as light/dark, lost/found and tame/wild. ³ Landau refers to what those in the west ‘know’ about this realm as nothing more than an ‘image-Africa’, a visual mimesis (re)produced through inchoate social and cultural structurations based on extreme alterity. ⁴

This trend was painfully reinforced in early 2018 when a sitting president of the United States casually and collectively referred to the nations of Africa as a bunch of ‘shithole countries’, ⁵ a geopolitically inflected discursive discharge that reified centuries of (pop-)cultural marginalisation. However, Donald J. Trump’s dark imagining of Africa ⁶ suffered a sharp rebuke a few weeks later with the stunning success of Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), and the worldwide adulation of the fictional African country Wakanda. ⁷ However, as both interventions reveal, Africa remains a fantasyland, an elsewhere, a mirage; or as Mayer notes, ‘Africa is an artificial entity . . . invented and conceived by colonialism’, a place where dreams and nightmares find purchase in the western mind. ⁸ Despite centuries of sustained engagement between the various nations of Europe and Africa, the global north – through a process of cognitive mapping girded by popular culture – continues to labour under a stultifying ignorance about the everyday lived realities of the world’s second largest and most populous continent. As a consequence, ‘Africa’ continues to serve as a popular setting for story-telling and meaning-making, which in turn shapes geopolitical codes in the current era of globalisation.

For more than two millennia, western cultural producers have used the African continent, and more specifically, sub-Saharan Africa, as a geographical palimpsest to tell wild tales of adventure, intrigue and horror, conjuring a place ‘governed by the forces of nature and not those of reason or civilisation’, evinced most dramatically in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). ⁹ Geographically speaking, as the unmarked areas on the globe were coloured in with cartographic detail during the period of so-called High Imperialism, ¹⁰ those lingering zones where maps failed ultimately came to serve as rich fonts of imagination. As geographers filled in the details of the interior of Africa (and other ‘unconquered’ realms), many fiction writers turned their attention to the stars birthing the new genre of science fiction (sf). Consequently, sf became indelibly linked to the apex of imperial conquest. ¹¹ Seeing the world as ‘too small’, Victorian-era novelists felt compelled to expand spatial imagination from the real to the unreal as the final hurdles of terrestrial discovery were overcome in the early 1910s with the successful mapping of the North and South Pole. ¹² According to Rieder, ‘Having no place on Earth left for the radical exoticism of unexplored territory, [these] writers invent[ed] places elsewhere’. ¹³ Arguably, this trend began in the Francophone world with Jules Verne, whose ‘ego-geographies’ of impossible journeys and otherworldly spaces shaped a generation of younger writers. ¹⁴ More than a century on, novelists operating in the sf, speculative fiction and fantasy genres continue to engage with those ‘blank spaces on the map’, ¹⁵ finding mystery there and tethering their imagined geographies to a wide array of (geo)political concerns.

In the case of B. Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, these representational trends collapse upon one another, recursively linking the unmapped realms of early 20th-century Africa to the sublime and the monstrous. Published in 2015, The Vorrh is the first novel of the English sculptor and performance artist Brian Catling (b. 1948). ¹⁶ Opening with epigraphs penned by German ethnologist Leo Frobenius and Anglo-Indian writer Rudyard Kipling, The Vorrh follows an English colonial officer, Oneofthewilliams (né Peter Williams), who has ‘gone native’ ¹⁷ in a numinous realm that may hold the remains of the Garden of Eden. Williams carries with him a sentient bow hewn from the dead body of his wife, Irrinipeste. ¹⁸ His story intersects with those of Ishmael, a one-eyed youth raised by Bakelite replicants known as the Kin, his two Teutono-African lovers (Ghertrude and Cyrena), as well as a variety of assassins, imperialists and the Erstwhile, forlorn Nephilim who once served the god of the Hebrews. Catling’s foray into literature has proven quite successful, with the film director and former Python Terry Gilliam naming him a ‘genius’, and famed novelist Michael Moorcock calling his inaugural effort ‘one of the most original works of visionary fiction since Peake or Carpentier’. ¹⁹ Going further, the graphic novelist Alan Moore labelled The Vorrh ‘easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy’. ²⁰

Set in an unnamed former German colony in a parallel Africa, Catling’s speculative fiction reimagines the folkloric space of the ‘Dark Continent’. ²¹ Like poets, authors and artists before him, Catling’s ‘Africa’ is a world of antediluvian enchantment, populated with lost angels, anthropophagi, cyclopes, homunculi, the undead and men with evil hearts. And as with countless stories that preceded it, The Vorrh features a ‘male European explorer’ (i.e. Williams) journeying into a place that is ‘presented as having no history or pre-existing social order of its own’. ²² Blending stylistic elements of China Miéville’s monstrous world-building with Joseph Conrad’s surrealist depiction of the Belgian Congo, ²³ the Vorrh trilogy likewise uses colonial fiction to comment on the debasing nature of overseas empire (for coloniser and colonial subject, alike), while ineluctably replicating imperialism’s attendant exotic othering of Africa and its peoples through the use of legends drawn from Herodotus, Pliny, the Old Testament and Shakespeare (among other sources). Consequently, this article interrogates Catling’s built-world, focusing on the mythological/intertextual heritage of his ‘Africa’ and its spatial representation on the page. This is primarily accomplished through a critical reading of the anamorphic forest known as the Vorrh – ‘the strangest of places [where] the natural laws of the world, which were known and trusted, came unbound and bent’ ²⁴ – and its colonial gateway, the fictional city of Essenwald, ‘a facsimile of Europe nailed to the core of Africa’. ²⁵

Answering Campbell and Power’s call to recognise the ‘scopic regimes’ ²⁶ that frame western understandings of Africa and employing an interdisciplinary amalgam based on literary geography, postcolonial studies and popular geopolitics, this article aims to link the geocriticism of speculative fiction (and its analogues sf and fantasy) to geopolitical visions, codes and orders. ²⁷ In doing so, this contribution seeks to continue the work of geographers to elucidate how patterns of human culture, especially those represented in popular culture, influence contemporary geographies of power and add to or detract from the intensities of influence. ²⁸ Informed by Crowley’s recent work on ‘narrative geographies of Africa’, ²⁹ I begin with a brief assessment of the ways in which ‘Africa’ has been geographically imagined through Eurocentric lore, rumours, glimpses, reports and visual artefacts, ³⁰ and popular-cultural syntheses of these blinkered ‘ways of knowing’. ³¹ Subsequently, a geocritical analysis of Catling’s built-world is provided, adapting Piatti and Hurni’s mixed methodology for interrogating those literary mappings of zones, which are neither genuine ‘real-world geospaces’ nor completely ‘imaginary realms’. ³² From here, the article proceeds to interrogate Catling’s fantastical ‘Africa’ within the context of speculative fiction norms, paying close attention to the geopolitical codes that frame the un-knowing Africa in the Anglophone west, therein binding the Vorrh trilogy to (popular) cultural praxes that continue to ‘invent’ the continent as a mysterious, dark and dangerous otherworld. ³³ In doing so, I aim to advance Csicsery-Ronay’s argument that sf is a ‘creature of imperialism’, inspired by ‘geopolitical myths’, in an effort to understand how empire continues to shape popular conceptualisations of spaces, places and people in the global periphery (with sub-Saharan Africa functioning as a case study). ³⁴

Dreaming (of) the colonies: imperialism, imaginative geographies and the (pop-cultural) construction of ‘Africa’

Imagination precedes understanding, particularly in the realm of geography. Daniels reminds us, ‘geographical imagination in its various forms and meanings is a powerful ingredient of many kinds of knowledge and communication . . . [it is] a way of envisioning the world, experiencing and reshaping it too’. ³⁵ One need only to look at an old map bearing the warning ‘Hic sunt dracones’ to be reminded of the power of cartographical representation on geopolitical vision(s). Drawing inspiration from Said, Spivak, Gilroy and others, scholars of popular geopolitics have shown themselves to be particularly well-situated to unpack the myriad ways that geographical imagination manifests in everyday understandings of world politics, and, increasingly, how pop culture makes the world what it actually is. ³⁶ Figuratively speaking, Africa is ground zero for such analysis. As Bassil argues, a ‘century on from the height of European conquest’, Africa continues to function as a ‘western imaginary’, a space where reality is suspended. ³⁷ The continent is the perennial imagined geography, where the ‘colonial present’ continues to manifest without regard for the passage of time or the evolution of global politics. ³⁸ Whether we speak of the mediaeval reinterpretations of the Book of Genesis, Mandeville’s Travels and Othello, or more recent artefacts such as Live Aid (1985), Survivor: Gabon – Earth’s Last Eden (2008) and the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign (2014–present), ³⁹ the accretive inheritance of centuries of western popular culture’s depictions of sub-Saharan Africa continue play a key role in geopolitically situating the countries of the region, subtly informing debate and prefiguring policies. Such a state of affairs is troubling, especially given the demonstrable role of such ‘imaginings’ in fuelling challenges faced by countries in the region and how such ‘discourses shape power’ and how ‘power shapes discourse’. ⁴⁰

Imperialism, when viewed with a geocritical eye, is closely linked to imagination and cannot exist outside of it. The quotidian bureaucratic output of any empire is grounded in representation, from population statistics and ethnographies of subject peoples to the mapping of frontiers and collection of symbolic artefacts to financial analysis of resources and recording of new ‘discoveries’, all of which present in The Vorrh and its sequels. Power is established and maintained between the metropole and the periphery via the circulation of information (visual, textual, statistical, etc.), which inevitably constructs a complex, but unusually stable system of hierarchical relations. ⁴¹ Hence, the ample literature on the ‘imperial gaze’, ⁴² as well as its reversal within postcolonial studies. ⁴³ The interior of Africa, central Asia and other ‘impenetrable’ zones tended suffer most from such tendencies. ⁴⁴ The field of geography served as a wellspring for the myriad ways of seeing Africa through the lens of popular culture, from Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878) up to contemporary geographical studies of African corruption, conflict and disease. ⁴⁵ Indeed, the embeddedness of what actually constitutes ‘Africa’ in the west remains so narrow and faulty that the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak resulted in quarantine measures being applied to travellers from parts of the continent as from the contagion zone as cities in central and northern Europe. ⁴⁶

Sources of ‘knowledge’ about far-flung realms, especially those of colonial interest, have long been a varied lot (ranging from simple descriptions to sophisticated representations such as maps, reports, drawings, landscape paintings, collected specimens, photographs and films), with the subjects of study being just as diverse (including peoples, cultures, flora, fauna, climate, terrain and resources). Historically, the most important agents constructing the geographical imagination of such places were explorers, imperial administrators and missionaries, with this being particularly true of sub-Saharan Africa. ⁴⁷ However, pre-existing understandings based on popular sources about ‘Africa’ unflaggingly coloured such reportage, from the use of Biblical references and classical texts to tracts on social Darwinism. Arguably, two of the most important ‘bridges’ from imperial action to popular culture are the map and the museum.

As a ‘pictorial’ medium, maps were once ‘crowded . . . with strange pageants, strange trees, strange beasts’ that were ‘drawn with amazing precision’, producing horrific-yet-tantalising images in the viewer’s mind space (see Figure 1). ⁴⁸ Writing on the subject of cartography in National Geographic, the novelist Joseph Conrad, whose 1899 novella Heart of Darkness still casts a pall over the continent (even becoming synonymous with the landmass’ interior for some), noted:

And it was Africa, the continent of which the Romans used to say some new thing was always coming, that got cleared of the dull imaginary wonders of the Dark Ages, which were replaced by exciting spaces of white paper. Regions unknown! My imagination could depict to itself the worthy, adventurous and devoted men nibbling at the edges, attacking from north, south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling. ⁴⁹

Just like maps, which demand visual literacy if not necessarily fluency with the written word, museums serve to impicture distant spaces. As a ‘flagship institution of knowledge dissemination’ ⁵⁰ and an optimal medium of ‘disciplining knowledge’, ⁵¹ the museum (via its colonial exhibitions) was a powerful vehicle for shaping perception of the African continent. This fact is highlighted early on in The Vorrh via Tsungali, an African character whose serves as a paid assassin charged with hunting down Oneofthewilliams. In a particularly moving passage, he engages with a collection from his own village, inverting the colonial gaze through the subaltern seeing his village’s holiest artefacts on display (ostensibly in the British Museum). The installation includes a photograph of an elder: ‘It was a significant image of anthropological value, a first-contact that showed an uninterrupted culture in domestic vigour’. However, for Tsungali to ‘find his father trapped behind glass and nailed to a wall, so far from his earthly remains, was beyond sacrilege and blasphemy. It gnawed at him, along his genetic ladder’. ⁵²

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Figure 1.

Sebastian Münster’s woodcut map of Central Asia, Tabula Asiae VIII (1540).

Specifically connecting museums to pop culture, Hoenig points out in his analysis of Belgian museums’ treatment of imperialism in Congo that the curators did not display artefacts associated with what the ‘Congolese actually experienced’, instead offering up writings by Europeans about such atrocities, specifically, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, therein reinforcing the notion that geographical imagination of Africa systematically trumps the reality of the lived experience. ⁵³ Framing Congo as a synecdoche of sub-Saharan Africa, Dunn notes that the country is ‘overly textualized – a discursive space onto which numerous actors – internally and externally – have projected characteristics, images and meanings’, a process, which has had deep impacts on the region’s international relations. ⁵⁴ Taken together, the map and the museum paved the way for a wide variety of cultural production that assumed a base level of ‘knowledge’ about the continent to Europe’s south, including – at least for the purposes of this article – Catling’s fabulous reimagining of the colonial African wilderness, which both displays a knowledge of historical critiques of the imperial gaze, while replicating key aspects of this cultural bias for dramatic effect. Coming at a time when sub-Saharan Africa is achieving a host of positive and long-sought goals, reading Catling’s ‘Africa’ through and against the text offers a number of insights for the cultural geographer as she seeks to better delimitate how popular culture signifies, articulates and mediates systems of transnational power. ⁵⁵

Penetrating the Vorrh: a geocriticism of Catling’s built-world

The Vorrh trilogy, as a form of near-past sf set on a parallel Earth that utilises real-world events and historical figures, sits comfortably within a field of speculative fiction that includes steampunk and alternative history works such as Ronald W. Clark’s Queen Victoria’s Bomb (1967) and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990). However, as a world of ‘men, women, monsters, machines, animals, ghosts, and some things in between’, ⁵⁶ it shares certain traits with China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy (2000-2004) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (1995–2000), both of which are ‘adventures in an immanent, lateral cosmos’. ⁵⁷ And like these trilogies, Catling situates his narrative in spaces and places that are familiar, yet alienating via their ‘re-naming, re-modelling or overlaying’ of the geo-historical space that was a bloody Pax Britannica. ⁵⁸ In its close attention to technologies of surveillance, ⁵⁹ the Vorrh trilogy also instantiates a post-9/11 aesthetics of fear, ⁶⁰ while at the same time reflecting the ‘God’s eye view’ that is integral to very notion of geopolitics. ⁶¹ Yet, the novel also pays homage to a long line of fantastical fiction across a variety of media that feature the ‘white saviour’ engaged in an ‘inner journey’ to find one’s ‘European self’ amongst the primitives, from the Quatermain adventures (1885–present) to Avatar (2009). ⁶² In doing so, Catling’s self-described ‘occulted ekphrasis’ ⁶³ the one succours a Eurocentric reading of the developing world that underpins, even encourages untutored utterances such as made by Trump referenced above.

Reflecting a particular trend in steampunk, Catling impresses real-life personages into service, including the physician William Gull (1816–1890), photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and the painter Raymond Roussel (1877–1933). As Johnson points out, the use of the latter figure provides a parallel to the unrealness of Catling’s opus; inarguably, neither Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, a proto-Surrealist travelogue, nor the Vorrh trilogy are actually ‘about Africa’. ⁶⁴ Interestingly, Catling addressed imaginative geographies (if indirectly) in a reference to Impressions’ original invention of the wildwood known as the Vorrh, stating, ‘Roussel had no real interest in the forest, just a savage backdrop to the events that he invented there’. ⁶⁵ Much the same can be said for Catling’s own work, and, in a possibly self-referential fusion of himself, his fictionalised Roussel and the real Frenchman, Catling writes,

He had read all the fact and fiction, and in later days of need and intrigue, he had created his own version, cut out of the jungles of all other words, their slippery shadows of meaning translated into a rich weft of description. He has re-seen each moment and the backdrop of the eternal, savage forest. His writing had given it life, with all the detail of its population. ⁶⁶

Catling’s Vorrh is a feral, green cacotopia, the antithesis to European spatial coding: ‘Nobody could work for more than two days in the Vorrh without contamination’. Some blamed it on ‘an unknown toxicology of plant and oxygen’, while others saw a ‘magnetic disturbance’ as the cause, or perhaps it was just ‘haunted’. ⁶⁷ The forest is home to a variety of chimerical creatures, most notably the Erstwhile, a preternatural species whose failure to keep Adam pure resulted in their eternal marginalisation. The series’ resident expert on the Erstwhile, Reverend Gervasius Lutchen, annotates, ‘These are not fallen angels, but lost ones, physical creatures created to interact with a physical world’; they roam the primordial wilderness ‘without resolution or meaning’. ⁶⁸

Catling writes that the Vorrh is the ‘elsewhere of the Erstwhile’; ⁶⁹ confined to the wilderness, these once-celestial beings – whose ‘lightweight skeletons of spun coral and honey’ have grown heavy with ‘water and time’ – have merged with soil, trees and rocks, becoming not-yet-dead but mostly lacking in sentience. ⁷⁰ While lesser animals live in the Vorrh, it is a place of peril for the sentient (perhaps explaining why the Erstwhile entombed there are effectively catatonic). To enter the forest, which encompasses the majority of the colony’s interior, is to subject oneself to madness. Hearkening back the ‘White Man’s Grave’ motif, the elder Seil Kor states, ‘A man can only visit the heart of the Vorrh three times in his life . . . more is forbidden’. ⁷¹ Purportedly, the original Eden lies somewhere within, thus explaining its transitory properties, as well as the jungle’s self-defence against most (though not all) invaders. It also serves as a medieval bestiary, an ‘open zoo and keeper of lost treasures’ ⁷² where the creatures that once populated the fictional realms of Sir John Mandeville’s live, hunt and die. ⁷³ The distorting wilderness of the Vorrh is most often contrasted against the urbanised Teutonic order of Essenwald, the capital of the (purposefully) nameless African colony that serves as the primary setting for the trilogy’s first two novels.

Catling leans heavily on the uncanny to flesh out his built-world. Similar to Miéville’s Bas-Lag, the world of the Vorrh is a baroque manipulation of the vicious realities of British imperialism, a fantastical rendering of the period when ‘Europeans mapped the non-European world, settled colonies in it, mined it and farmed it, bought and sold some of its inhabitant and ruled over many others’. ⁷⁴ The Vorrh – via its organic mystique, (meta)physical impenetrability and seemingly sentient antipathy to interlopers – represents the epitome of the heimlich in the novel, spewing forth its offspring to upset the order of Essenwald. The forest’s elementary power to repulse ironically combines with a constant magnetism that destroys unfortunate souls bent on profit, revenge or something darker or even more primordial. As the reader learns, ‘The Vorrh had its own time, its own climate, and its own mind. It was ancient before Adam was a supposed twinkle in God’s eye’. ⁷⁵ It is here that Catling most resembles Conrad, who revelled in obscurity, ‘paradoxically because there [was] nothing obscure left on this earth to write about’. ⁷⁶ Catling’s Vorrh reenchants the geographical realm:

[N]othing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species, and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate. ⁷⁷

Curiously, this description can be equally applied to Trump’s ‘shithole Africa’ and Black Panther’s technoparadisiacal ‘Wakanda’.

The Vorrh devours lives: it is ‘unfathomable’, and one passing through would need to wait a week in its centre for their soul to ‘catch up’. It has no patience for the technological improvisations of man, disrupting all contrived forms of navigation; as Catling tells us: ‘No planes dared fly over it’. And like those spaces at the edges of medieval maps, the ‘tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human . . . Creatures beyond hope’, echoing Conrad: ‘Horrors’. ⁷⁸ Perhaps one of the most explicit (and disturbing) of Catling’s geopolitical interventions is the zombie-like force known as the Limboia (or, in German, Die Verlorenen), who serve the colonial masters’ efforts to denude the Vorrh of its precious lumber:

The slaves had been superseded by a deformed generation that developed inside them, replacing the stolen workforce with another that had been hidden all along. Continual, forced exposure to the Vorrh bred an alternative clan of beings, and within the original slave army grew the seed of another: the seed of the Limboia. Most of their number were black and of local origin, some were white, and a very few had strayed from Asia. Getting them to work was easy: They all longed to be in Vorrh, and their addiction was easily exploited by controlled, rotating shifts. ⁷⁹

In sharp contrast, the dehumanising power of the Vorrh, the colonial capital presents as a well-structured, familiar and heimlich space:

Essenwald was a European city, imported piece by piece to the Dark Continent and reassembled in a vast clearing made by the perimeter of the forest. It was built over a century and a half, the core of its imitation now so old that it had become genuine . . . It was prosperous, busy, and full of movement, with solid roads and train lines scrolling out from its frantic, lustrous heart. Only one track crawled through into the dark interior of the forest. Into the eternal mass of the Vorrh. ⁸⁰

A model of Teutonic efficiency, Essenwald soldiers on without regard for the passing of imperial rule from the Germans to another power (which remains unnamed, yet clearly marked as Britain).

For a colonial city to exist and thrive thousands of miles from its homeland and on a completely different continent takes two essential things: an unquestionable sense of rightness, being demonstrated through its constant display of blind superiority, and an unlimited supply of raw material of great value.

Essenwald had both. ⁸¹ Here, Catling departs from Conrad who viewed imperial activities as ‘absurdly ineffectual’, destined to make the affected space ‘humdrum’; ⁸² Essenwald defies this notion. Its European-born and creole denizens comport themselves in Prussian fashion rejecting ‘all forces of corruption and paganism’, ⁸³ while its native population respect the order of this transported space on their continent. ⁸⁴ As one reviewer noted:

Early on in the novel, Catling describes the city of Essenwald, which has been transported from Europe into Africa and reassembled stone by stone . . . I can think of no better metaphor for the unsettling mixture of the near and far, the familiar and the foreign, that characterized the unheimlichkeit of the colonial endeavour, and insights like this surface regularly throughout the novel. ⁸⁵

Yet, Essenwald is bound to the Vorrh, producing an umbilicus that links the ancient and the modern:

Essenwald is a library to the forest, an appendage. It was attracted here when the Vorrh was already ancient. The physical closeness of some many people gives God a direct index to the current ways of mankind; his angels can learn there. It is an open shelf. ⁸⁶

Writing shortly after the British assumed control of Germany’s African colonies, Conrad pointed out those portions of Africa, which still remained largely ‘blank’ on the pages of his atlas, a tabula rasa ready to be inscribed with tales of derring-do. ⁸⁷ It is in one of these poorly plotted zones, most likely an alternate Kamerun (see Figure 2), that Catling situates that ‘great fist of vegetation in the centre of Africa, its proportion immense’. ⁸⁸

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Figure 2.

The forest zones of (former) German-ruled Africa, or a map of possible locations for the Vorrh.

Othering as (perpetual) practice: reimagining the monstrous ‘Dark Continent’ via speculative fiction

Since the publication of Mandeville Travels, Africa has been a ‘place of wonder, mystery and monstrosity’ ⁸⁹ , a realm that ‘represents everything that Europe is not’. ⁹⁰ Following the medical revolution of the mid-19th century, European imperialism moved from the coasts to the continental interior resulting in the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’. The newly unified powers of Germany and Italy, alongside the Belgian king, joined British, French and Portuguese forces in an attempt to annex as much of the landmass as possible. In this colonial scrum, dreams and nightmares proliferated, often finding their way to the pens of poets and brushes of painters. In this context, empire became the ‘consummate replacement of nature by artifice’. ⁹¹ As Africa came to be presented as the most ‘wild’ place on the globe, manifesting the most extreme example of ‘Otherness’, ⁹² it became – by logical extension – the realm that is most antithetical to imperialism, yet at the same time the most tantalising quarry for the imperialist. For Catling, like Conrad before him, the interior of Africa conceals an antiimperial force majeure, an anamorphic realm of organic material (plants, animals and ‘natives’ – including in this case, the acephalous Anthropophagi) ⁹³ that short-circuits European imperialism. In undoing this ‘complex machine that distributes – and thereby produces – force’, dystopian spaces such as Conrad’s Congo, Miéville’s Scar and Catlin’s Vorrh all disrupt and ultimately make preposterous the ‘imaginary political domain of Empire’. ⁹⁴ However, we should be careful not to validate Catling’s novels as emancipatory, given that they trade in hoary stereotypes and jaundiced chronicles that sustain centuries-old geopolitical orders that continue to hobble African states and subjugate the peoples of the continent in a world governed by neoliberal technoscientific regimes.

The Vorrh is home to monsters (see Table 1); even its ‘angels’ are capable of inspiring horror, living as they do enmeshed in roots and covered in soil, decaying over aeons. The novels’ antagonists are monstrous in their own ways. Oneofthewilliams’ first act is to scrape muscle from bone, skin from fat and ligaments from joints to convert his wife’s cadaver into a magical bow that he will wield throughout the first novel. Ishmael the Cyclops is physically monstrous, sporting only one eye alongside other deformities, but he is also sexually depraved, growing increasingly violent in his amorous activities as the series progresses. ⁹⁵ The Limboia are pitiful creatures, inhabited by a mysterious and monstrous force known as the Orm that seeks to combat the even greater monstrosity that is the (European) exploitation of the holy and haunted wilderness that is the Vorrh. Speaking of his monsters, Catling remarked, ‘A monster is a relief for us. And then it gets blamed for things. Once we decide it’s not ever going to be something perfect, we can blame all sorts of things on it!’. ⁹⁶ Extending this idea to the geographic realm, we must then be attentive to locating of monsters in specific places, whether this be the irradiated ruins of Chernobyl, the white desert of Antarctica or the darkened swamps of Louisiana. Due to what Kneale calls the ‘troubling collapse of representations of Africa’ ⁹⁷ from Conrad onwards, the continent is a convenient, if sometimes unoriginal setting for contriving such fear-inducing geographies.

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Table 1.

The supernatural creatures of the Vorrh.

	Description	Spatial–narrative role
Erstwhile	Neither plant nor animal, they are forgotten angels who have merged with nature, becoming moribund	The failed guardians of the Tree of Knowledge; reinvigorated by the presence of the Bow (Irrinipeste), they become mobile, humanlike and find their way out of the Vorrh (e.g. London and Heidelberg)
Ishmael	A cyclops of European appearance, whose kind were only found in ancient times	Symbolises the merger of the Vorrh with Essenwald, becoming an active player in the city’s events following a magical surgery to give him the appearance of a normal human
The Kin	Highly intelligent machinic homunculi possessing a Bakelite carapace and filled with white pus	Guardians and teachers of Ishmael; confined to the house at 4 Kühler Brunnen
Limboia (Die Verlorenen)	Mindless slaves drawn from Africa as well as the colonial reaches	Harvesters of the lumber, sap and other natural resources of the Vorrh; they are constantly attracted to its anamorphic power
The Orm	A nonphysical being that inhabits the Limboia	Ignited by a ‘fleyber’ (an aborted foetus who is resurrected as an undead), the Orm triggers the Vorrh’s vengeance against the imperial intrusion
Anthropophagi	Acephalous, yellow-and-pink cannibals whose faces appear on their chests	Predators of the Vorrh, who lure visitors to their deaths

In her primer Interrogating Popular Culture, Takacs reminds us of the centrality of outlandish, often horrifying geographic imagination in the very formation of what we call popular culture:

Crusades and pilgrimages . . . created a new literary genre – travel writing. The lurid and exoticised nature of this literature – which featured tales of cannibals, sea monsters and human-animal hybrids – made it ripe for popular interest, and though access to such texts was restricted by low literacy rates, the tales were shared orally and broadly. ⁹⁸

It is then no coincidence that those teratogenic quasihumans who occupy the ‘unchartered territories of old maps’ make an appearance in Catling’s spatially inflected tale of empire, given that the ‘unexplored darkness’ of certain continents are the stuff of monstrous geographies. ⁹⁹ In his monster-centric othering of German Afrika, Catling carries on the tradition by placing a fanciful, postcolonial patina on his speculative fiction (which often borders on horror given its liberal use of the grotesque and supernatural). In doing so, he draws our attention to the fact that monsters are border-crossers, the consummate agents of transgression and violators of the proper order of things. As Gallacher states, ‘Monsters may be grotesque, dangerous and/or impure, this is not what makes them monstrous; their monstrosity derives from their improbability. Monsters breach the accepted norms of ontological propriety and do not fit the possibilities conceived within normal science’. ¹⁰⁰ Catling revels in this geographic phantasmagoria, digging up fabled oddities to frame the very real horrors of Victorian imperialism.

Shifting away from monsters, Catling’s imagining of Africa compresses, exaggerates and refines more than two millennia of mythology upon the page. Echoing the obsessions of many early 20th-century British administrators and ‘native experts’ who ‘mapped’ Semitic (and thus Biblical) origins onto sub-Saharan Africans, ¹⁰¹ Catling roots the Vorrh and its denizens in Old Testament lore via the ministrations of the wise man Seil Kor (who also appears in Roussel’s Impressions of Africa) and his recounting of the Garden of Eden, Adam and the (Fallen) Angels. Yet, the author also weaves in the character Sidrus, the Boundary Holder, a member of ‘hieratic faith’ with ‘Roman blood’, ¹⁰² whose secret charge links his order back to the classical era. So when these anachronistic elements collide with Roussel’s imagined Africa, German imperial practice and Victorian-era technology, African places and peoples are thus positioned as ‘quintessential objects’ that are ahistorical, or simply out of time, thus rendering a canvas on which any story can be inscribed. ¹⁰³ As Catling noted in an interview:

A few years ago I travelled in the red heart of Australia and came across landscape so ancient that it had not even noticed that humankind existed. A vast total indifference, A system that dealt with itself. I think the Vorrh is about like that. ¹⁰⁴

In framing his colonial space as so primordial it lacks cultural geography, Catling departs only slightly from the overall trajectory of speculative fiction and its more encompassing analogues, sf and fantasy, as such genres

have long and deeply problematic histories of depicting conquest and colonialism as glorious enterprises, and they also often engage in the othering of indigenous people to the point where the latter become nonhuman: that is to say, they appear only as aliens. ¹⁰⁵

Consequently, novels of otherworldliness tend to eschew, whitewash or otherwise diminish the ‘postcolonial guilt’ ¹⁰⁶ that characterises other works of fiction that deal with similar issues of exploration, exploitation and control. ¹⁰⁷ Black speculative fiction, especially the works of Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor, certainly work against this trend. ¹⁰⁸ Of course, readers are also free to read against the narrative, turning villains into heroes (and vice versa), thus allowing for wide variety of engagement with the text; however, I would suggest that when it comes to depictions of landscapes, particularly hostile zones pulsing with alien threats, there is less room for interpretation and counter-readings.

More remote than ever? The west’s unwavering deterritorialisation of sub-Saharan Africa

From a geopolitical vantage, the Vorrh trilogy presents a quandary for analysis, given Csicery-Ronay’s claim that sf reflects the historical and geographical content in which it is created. While the aforementioned examples of steampunk and alternative history are paragons of imperial thought (reflecting the British, and to a lesser extent, American traditions), Catling’s decision to conflate, and even confuse British and German imperial traditions within an African theatre follows a more fluid tradition and one which echoes the work of Conrad, whose Polish–British identity informed his prose. ¹⁰⁹ Arguably, Catling’s writing is a poststructural response to imperialism, one which disassembles the actual history of the colonial project in favour of a bricolage that exemplifies Takacs’ assessment that ‘texts are conventional arrangements of signs that are haunted by alternative possible arrangements’. ¹¹⁰ As the soothsayer Seil Kor recounts, ‘The Bible says that Adam died . . . There are different Bibles, with different tales . . . In these regions, the truth is told’. ¹¹¹ From a geocritical standpoint, this passage is of particular interest in its revelation that competing truths clamour to be heard and believed, particularly those related to place and space in the (western) mind. As Smethurst notes, ‘As places succumb to repeated bouts of deterritorialisation through geo-political forces, the scars of history lie just beneath the surface, in shallow graves’; this process results in the creation of ‘exotic non-places’, as well ‘dreadful simulacra’, which are disinterred from imagined pasts that never occurred. ¹¹²

When compared to the ‘worlded fiction’ ¹¹³ of the authors referenced in the section above, it becomes clear that The Vorrh and its sequel are not postcolonial fiction by any stretch of the imagination. Besides lacking the necessary credentials to speak for the subaltern (the author is a white Englishman), Catling is clearly not ‘interested in exploring what it was like to be either a perpetrator or a victim of colonial violence’. ¹¹⁴ Rather these novels (and the third and final book in the series) are colonial fiction for the 21st century, building what Deleuze and Guattari might deem a deterritorialised assemblage of countless overlaid refrains of an ‘Africa’ that never existed. ¹¹⁵ Despite speculative fiction’s well-established capacity for engaging the politics of postcolonialism, ¹¹⁶ the Vorrh trilogy takes another path (and one which, sadly, is well-trod). Linking sf to colonisation, Rieder reminds us of Said’s prescription that the novel and imperialism are ‘unthinkable without one another’, ¹¹⁷ and – it seems – unwilling to part ways. While Catling’s reimagining of the colonial wilderness provides redress for Conrad’s criticism of imperialism as an unstoppable force that ‘led to the eradication of the world’s unknown spaces’ ¹¹⁸ – in that the Vorrh series serves remap Africa in blank spaces, zones where explorers may not go for fear of being devoured by the unknown – Catling’s reimagining of the colonial wilderness re-imposes imperialism on ‘image-Africa’ rather than critiquing it. Yet, like Conrad before him, we should not read Catling’s ‘textual strategies . . . as isolated responses’ to this or that stimuli, but part of a ‘larger historical process’ in which European ‘spatial imagination leaves its imprint on literary form’ ¹¹⁹ , and – as evidenced by President Trump’s recent (racialised) ‘shithole countries’ invective – shapes everyday geopolitical understandings.

As I have argued, popular culture has long obsessed about Africa and its various real and imagined attributes, presenting its lands as a liminal zone where ‘illusion, magic and contradiction’ reign (Campbell and Power 2010: 167). ¹²⁰ The continuing popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series (1912–1944), as well as a host of other media that use Africa as a backdrop – from Hollywood films to graphic novels to first-person shooter videogames – attest to its perennial allure among western cultural producers. This attraction is rooted in the perceived primordialism of Africa, a space that has been left behind by the flows of modernity, ¹²¹ this despite recent geopolitical trends that suggest sub-Saharan African states are embracing multilateralism and international engagement at time when western nations (e.g. the United States, the United Kingdom and Hungary) are turning inward and isolationist. ¹²² Such representation is increasingly recognised by scholars of popular geopolitics (and others) as an impediment to sub-Saharan states’ abilities to operate as sovereign states within the western-dominated structure of world affairs (as most recently evidenced by Trump’s comments associated with immigration from the region). As we have seen, geographic imagination has played a foundational important role in shaping western popular culture’s depiction of Africa from the apocryphal tales of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1357) to Tintin au Congo (1931) to today’s big-budget films such as The Legend of Tarzan (2016). This is partly due to the role of cartographic representations’ sociospatial distancing of Africa from Europe (and other parts of the world). However, maps need not simply be conceived as static outlines fixed on a piece of paper or digital schemas projected on a screen; they can exist in the mind’s eye, functioning as latent canvases waiting to be called upon to serve political purposes. In this article, I have endeavoured to locate Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy as a contemporary and paradigmatic manifestation of this aesthetic trend, one which is far from neutral in its (geo)political engagements despite its novel use of old stereotypes. This is of particular importance at this moment when sub-Saharan African nations are poised to flip the script on centuries of western imaginings of ‘Africa’ as the dark continent.