Doomed to Walk the Night: Ghostly Communities and Promises in the Novels of Alex La Guma

Abstract

In his personal and political life, the South African writer Alex La Guma was consistently committed to a Marxist-Leninist ideology that informs all his writings and his communitarian ideal. Jean-Luc Nancy’s point of departure in The Inoperative Community (1991) is precisely the failure of communism and its problematic notion of community one whose essence is the labor or work produced by human beings, defined as producers (2). Nancy, in his theoretical proposal of an inoperative and unworked community reacts against this “immanence of man to man” (3) and the conception of community as arising from the domain of work. From a political and historical perspective, Nancy, writing in Europe in the 1980s, is obviously influenced by how “the justice and freedom—and the equality—included in the communist idea or ideal have in effect been betrayed in so-called real communism” (2). In an entirely different context, South Africa in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma is a representative example of how Marxism, both at a political and literary level, provided effective means to fight against the prevailing totalitarian apartheid regime. La Guma, hence, endorses the communist ideal of community, as described by Nancy:

the word “communism” stands as an emblem of the desire to discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization. .. (1)