Custom. Thank you so much for being here. Um, to talk about, uh, Kafka.
Um, we're talking to various people about different sort of national receptions of Kafka, but also about ways of thinking about him.
And you're here to talk about a bit of both, actually. Um, particularly race.
I think that's something that you're interested in. That's right. Exactly. I think thank you very much for having me.
Um, I'm generally interested in how, um, authors and theorists have looked to Kafka for models about how to capture the form
of things that feel sort of impossible to think or put into words thematically.
So that's where my interest comes into.
And race is one of those and so unspeakable things genocide, colonialism, racism, terrorism, environmental collapse.
Okay, so we won't be talking about humour then. Um, but I mean, on the face of it, talking about metamorphosis, for example,
as a starting point, it's not an obvious place necessarily to think about race or is it?
Well, it's funny because as a thematic trope,
it seems to crop up all over the place in authors thinking about questions of racial othering or exploitation of racial passing,
hybridity, or counterfactual realities where one's usual markers of race have been inverted somehow.
And there are loads of examples there. Um, authors from all over the world.
He's he's borrowed it from Kafka for that reason.
Um, I mean, I can I can list a few. Well, give us a taste of um, so there's Nigerian author, a Coney Barrett, his black ass, um,
is about a man who a black man who wakes up white, with the exception of the body part mentioned in the title.
Uh, there's British Pakistani author Mason Hammett's the Last white Man there.
It's a white man who wakes up black South African author Ahmad Dong.
Or, um, his novel is fittingly called Kafka's Curse, the post-apartheid novel where a white passing protagonist, uh, is transformed into a tree.
Um, there's Martinique, and also Patrick Shum was his the old slave, and the mastiff,
both slave and hound, transform a sort of colonial prey and predator together.
Uh, Haitian author Marie. You're sure they have postcolonial love?
Anger, madness, uh, features a vengeful protagonist that's a cunning, a cunning bedbug.
Uh oh. So. So there's it's a lot, a lot.
And but actually, the interesting thing, if we look at them more closely, is that although there's the obvious thematic metaphor,
what they're really interested in isn't the trope of transformation, but it's the process of becoming other.
So can you tell us a bit more about that?
Um, I mean, uh, in what sense of, uh, um, and what does it mean in these context?
And what does it do, uh, as a reading? It's I think Kafka sort of gives us all of this in his first sentence already.
And what the authors are really bringing out is what's already there in his works.
But the very first sentence which which in English reads As Craig was, um,
I woke up one morning from Uneasy Dreams, uh, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.
And it's even clear in the German, because of the quirks of German syntax, the stresses on the last word of the sentence, which is the verb.
So it's on transformed, not on the object of the transformation.
And even in the English, we can see it's some kind of monstrous verb and is already vague.
The German has ungenerous um, gets even with a double negation, which really does make it appear as a nonentity.
And Kafka was adamant that he didn't want the critter featured in an illustration anywhere in the book.
He didn't want people to have a specific form in mind, so the emphasis seems to be on transformation.
And what's more is not only is it not just about the metaphor,
but that The Metamorphosis isn't a single completed one, it's not an actual state change.
I mean, we see that in the bit where it says he found himself transformed.
That means we're not sure how long the metamorphosis has actually been going on for the moment at which cake or awakens to it.
And of course, it also has an over at the moment to which he wakes up. Um, it keeps going until he isn't even a creature anymore.
He's just a monstrous brown stain.
And then it continues as his family members keep transforming in relation to him and after his death, um, although of course,
he's never, as you say, he's never completely transformed because we always have the the sense of his inner self as a human self.
That's exactly right. That's the one thing that he found himself tells us, isn't it?
The fact that actually it's not so much a transformation,
it's a doubling in the splitting because he retains his human consciousness even as he shape shifts and tries to adapt to his new physical form.
And in fact, he retains its human consciousness up until the very end.
Even once he's completely internalised the dehumanising othering, he still retains a human consciousness, an almost superhuman consciousness.
At the end, when he considers his death a sort of sacrifice willingly undertaken and so a kind of internalised otherness,
um, that's where we are again, with race. That's exactly right. That's where the interest comes into it.
For authors thinking about the question of race. Um, I mean, in a really striking parallel thought construct, if you look at someone like, um,
Frantz Fanon, who's a, uh, Martinique comes from Martinique, which back then was a French colony.
He's a political philosopher and the psychiatrist and one of the most important, um,
thinkers in the process of the struggle against European colonialism in the earlier 20th century.
Uh, he writes in a study called Black Skin White Masks from 1952 about the experience
of being a black man in a white world and likens it to transformation and says,
um, it's being transformed from a subject to an object from a me to a him, from, um, a man into something that and as he puts it,
precedes by crawling and with its long antennae, creeps into corners and hides there in fear and shame.
I think he says so. Obviously the insect imagery is really interesting to note there, but actually more striking is that,
again, what we've got is, is a sort of doubling and splitting rather than actual transformation.
The human consciousness is fully retained. Um, but and the sort of the human who's being othered remains aware of his humanity on some level.
But at the same time, uh, there is a real risk that the dehumanising perception imposed by others will be internalised.
And that leads to a sort of double whammy. Uh, African-American civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois is quoted double consciousness in in 1903.
Um, and that, yeah, as you say, is is where the interest comes into it.
For authors and thinkers grappling with the question of race.
Um, I know you've got a particular novel that you want to talk about and, and, uh, this regard,
um, uh, and again, I've been really excited to read lots of new things doing this.
Um, can you tell us a little bit about, uh, three strong women?
Yes, it's in French.
It's called twist some pissant in English, as you say, three strong women, um, by French author, French author, Senegalese background.
Um, Marines. Yeah. And it's it's heavily influenced by Kafka to thematic level.
But again, we also see the kind of structural process of of becoming other that runs like a thread throughout.
And, um, so I know this sort of shapeshifting and animal and, uh, you said heavily influenced by Kafka.
I haven't read everything. I'm finished yet. Um, tell me a little bit about how you think it.
Well, writes back to Kafka or transforms Kafka in its own way.
So the book is a trip to three stories, and in each of them, um, the main protagonist is a black woman whose skin colour renders her vulnerable to,
um, to being exploited in an environment that proves whiter and therefore stronger than she is, but also stronger and therefore whiter.
Um, so, uh, and in each of the three stories,
the experience of being dehumanised proves over time so corrosive that it can no longer sustain human form.
There is lots of shapeshifting, but the main metamorphic theme is avian, so birds abound.
And again, it's not just the women, but also the people around them who transform in relation to them.
Um, in the. So if I briefly summarise each, it'll become apparent how there are thematic connections to Kafka in the first one.
Uh, the protagonist is, uh, a mixed racial woman called Nora, and she's caught between her black father and her white lover,
and her white lover is a German speaking immigrants called Kaleb. Uh, who with his daughter.
Who's telling? You know, Greta moves into Nora's flat and makes himself at home there and, um, takes advantage of her.
And there are really if you read very closely, there's some interesting connections, so you know where he goes.
Father embeds in Gregor's flank and apple.
It says in an earlier story that the coal plants in Norris flank his tiny bobs.
And so there are tiny little connectors there.
But the sort of the end of the day, it's that the father, the violent, domineering father figure who wins out, um, and Nora, uh, transforms into a.
But in order to be able to join the father of a tree where he is perched entirely phosphorescent, the text has.
And it's striking how each of the male figures, regardless of their actual skin colour, appears in a white to light.
The more they gain control over Norah and by the end of the text her she has petals on her dress which have morphed into the flowers of the tree.
And so she's been completely animated. Um, and then the kind of the interesting thing is how the father's.
Response to his own daughter, in a way, is, is, um, racist or racialized because, um,
his response to his own racist objectification that he's experienced is to pass it on to someone weaker than him.
Um, and so we find that he abandoned her as a child because of what he termed the irremediable defect she had of being too much like him.
And by this he means to black. Um. And yet still she comes back to him to join him.
So we've got sort of racist, racist othering that, um,
is rooted in an attempt to really stabilise one's own sense of self in relation to a weaker person.
And that then pans out into the next narrative, um, where the main protagonist is called Fanta and is a teacher of French literature in Senegal,
where she attracts the attention of, uh, her white husband to be rude.
Uh, and Rudy tricks Fantine to leave France with him, uh, even though he knows that she has no professional prospects there.
Uh, and once they're there, she keeps vacillating in his perception of her between being a small hand with clipped wings vertically,
a vengeful bird of prey, a buzzard who he thinks is is preying on him,
uh, and correspondingly, his treatment of her switches between him saying to her that she should go back to where she came from,
but at the same time ensuring that she absolutely has no chance of escape.
Uh, and by the end of the text, he, um, has run over the buzzard in his car and now feels light as a bird again himself.
Um, and yeah.
And the final paragraph again has, uh, fonts are completely animated and merged with a tree retaining her bird like features, but merged with a tree.
So there's an interesting play, isn't that between, um.
Being other and, uh, and being a victim.
Um, then liberation uh, some level.
So some characters are liberated and of course birds, we associate them with a kind of liberation,
um, which I guess is also the ambivalence is also there in Kafka, isn't it?
Because do we read, uh, the family coming out of the apartment into the light as liberation,
or are they going to turn on Gretta and it's all going to start again?
Uh, how does how how does how does it come out, really?
It sounds to me like it's going to end badly in this text.
Um, I mean, Indigo himself. You're quite right. He there are moments of liberation for him in his new body where he feels better and that he's and,
you know, sort of release from his some of his duties and responsibilities.
And the same is true in the eyes. He plays with the, the idea of liberation.
But but it's always only ever a short lived illusion.
Um, uh, and particularly painfully actually.
So in the reading is quite painful of it.
In the last story of the three, where the protagonist is called Katie and she is probably the closest actually to to Kafka's original,
so much so that it's hard not to hear. Her name is the French homophone cul de sac hyphen decode.
Okay. Almost. Um, so Katie is a widowed woman from an unspecified African country who, uh, the text houses has willingly turned herself into a, uh,
poor, selfish facing creature after her husband has died and her husband's family have, um, separated her from the human community.
It says in the text. And they then kick her out, tell her she has to migrate to Europe and send back money to support them.
And she tries to turn herself into a bird of passage. And so there's a moment there of potential liberation of individuals determination, self agency.
Um, and she, uh, is taking control and has a moment of awakening, a bit like Kagawa.
But then she meets a fellow migrants.
Initially they are lovers, but he then takes advantage of her, then prostitutes her, steals her money and leaves her in the desert.
Uh. She eventually makes it to the border that she is marked out as a dead woman walking.
You see that she has blackish marks on her skin that suggests she may have an active.
Aids infection when she dies trying to scale the water wall, uh, where she gets impaled on the barbed wire and then falls out of the sky.
Um, and it says in the text, uh, as less than a breath, barely a puff of, uh, which,
of course, makes us think of the last breaths that faintly flows from Cagle or as he expires.
And in Kafka's original. Um.
And the the fellow migrants, uh, makes it to the West, uh, at her expense.
But then, um, is shown to in turn or he's shown in turn to be the product of colonialism and sort of post-colonial inequality,
and that once he's in the West, of course, he's then taken advantage of and exploited, um, having to sell his services undocumented and, and, um,
valued so that the panning out is quite interesting from the first story that gives us the father's racist othering,
the intern is embedded in his own dehumanised experience of being treated in a racist manner,
which then pans out to the white husband as the exploitive who is also a representative of the former colonial regime.
And that then pans out again to the black exploiter.
But he's embedded in a critique of racism and colonialism more broadly.
So, yes, it ends badly. But there's also a gender aspect in there.
And there's a gender aspect, um, in that. And that's really interesting to read Kafka and Die alongside each other.
So he's Didn't Die has remained faithful to the dynamics in The Metamorphosis,
but she's also up the stakes, as it were, and is sort of saying, you know,
um, like Kafka, she shows us the, the double consciousness in an individual who's had dehumanising, othering imposed on them from the outside.
Um, but she also says that for a black woman, um, this is so much more precarious that the, um,
and particularly a black migrant woman, uh, the precariousness of this position is significantly enhanced.
And that consciousness isn't just doubled. Its, as it were, multiply split.
Um, one thing I've been thinking about quite a lot is, um,
it's sort of obvious why Russian writers or Czech writers or writers from East Germany latched onto Kafka as soon as they could.
Um, but why does a writer like Andy, um, treat these really important themes via Kafka?
Um, there's something very odd about that. Isn't that going via a white European male, um, Jewish with all the history that that brings into it?
Um, what do writers gain by going via Kafka to express these very contemporary events?
It is that sense that somehow, despite the very, very different background,
this is an author who has captured the experience of being two souls at once,
of being the self that tries to live its life, and the self that is, uh,
constantly looking at itself through the lens of how others perceive it all the time.
And that is a form of double consciousness which doesn't have the same race mark as in Kafka.
Although, uh, recent scholarship on Kafka has been expanded by being read, uh,
under the rubric of postcolonialism, or through its invocation of racial exploitation.
And the metamorphosis itself has been read as a figuration of of racial blackness, I think,
most persuasively by, um, Mark Thompson in his brilliant study, uh, Kafka's Blues.
So it's it's maybe the I don't know, but but it's a structure that have some double or multiple split consciousness at the same time.
And, and Kafka offers the form for that, for capturing that, not just the theme.
So, um, and the I does this as well very extensively.
In Kafka, we find that his, um,
his use of narrative perspective and the structures that arise from this in his texts exhibit the property quite often of,
of being, of hovering between two or more perceptual states without resolving the ambiguity.
Um, and that these I think where he becomes interesting so his hybrids this perspectival
hybrids of first and third person within one individual a things that authors borrow.
But what di then was again in in the vein of upping the stakes is um, that she um,
she takes that form but uses it ends up using it against her protagonists almost so that in each case,
by the end of the story, the female's point of view can't be sustained.
It becomes so weakened from the outside that it's ultimately displaced entirely by someone else's third person perspective.
As happens and as happens in Kakko, of course. Yes. Well, though in Kafka he kind of manages to hang on to, at least in The Metamorphosis.
There is something about the way in which his death can be viewed, or at least is viewed by him as a sacrifice,
and that gives him just a tiny measure of control, because that way he gets to control the timing of it.
But also, of course, he gets to retain a points of view right up until his death.
And it's a point of view that, in turn, informs the reader's point of view.
And that's not the case for this character's cousin is fascinating.
Thank you so much for talking about this today. Thank you so much for having me.