Germany

2.1 Stanzel’s narrative situations

Franz K. Stanzel starts from the idea that every narrative is mediated (Mittelbarkeit) (Stanzel 1979). In his authorial narrative situation a narrator outside the fictional world tells the story, comments on it and knows more than the characters. In the figural situation (personale Erzählsituation) this narrator seems to disappear, and we experience events through the consciousness of one character, a reflector. In the first-person situation the narrator belongs to the story world. Stanzel arranges these types on a circle, so real texts often lie between them or move from one to another. For my topic the most useful of his three axes is perspective: whether we are given an inside view (Innenperspektive) of a character or only an outside view (Außenperspektive).

2.2 Genette’s focalisation

Gérard Genette (1972; German translation 1994) separates two questions which Stanzel’s model mixes, which we learned as “Wer erzählt?” and “Wer nimmt wahr?”. His answer to the second is focalisation. With zero focalisation, the narrator says more than any character knows. With internal focalisation, the narrator says only what one character perceives and knows; this can be fixed, variable or multiple. With external focalisation, the narrator says less than the character knows, so we only see behaviour and hear speech. Martínez and Scheffel (1999) point out that focalisation can change from one passage of a text to the next, so I use Stanzel for the general situation of each part and Genette for the close reading.

In Songs of Dust and Water the narrator stays outside the story world throughout, so in Stanzel’s terms the novel moves between the authorial and the figural situation. The interesting question is which characters are allowed to become reflectors, and when.

3.1 Part One: Adam as reflector

The first time we meet Adam, the narrative is already inside his head. In the Ministry conference room in Bakoro the air conditioner rattles, and we read: “To his mind, the room was a list of uncontrolled variables” (p. 6). “To his mind” signals internal focalisation, and the list is an engineer’s way of seeing a room full of people and dust. The sentence sets up a pattern that runs through Part One: we are given Adam’s categories from the inside, and these categories leave out the people.

The same pattern appears when the smith Malik repairs a broken bracket in his forge. We see the object through Adam: “A part of his system, fixed. Heavier now, no longer machined to specification, its temper unknown. An uncontrolled variable in a balanced design” (p. 15). The fragments imitate his thinking (free indirect discourse in a figural passage). The reader understands why a trained engineer distrusts a hand-forged part, but Malik has just done in minutes what the contractor said would take a week, so we also see the gap between the variable and the man.

Part One also lets us share Adam’s reasoning at the moments of his worst decisions. Under the meeting tree, when Samba raises the disputed grazing line, we read “He could already hear the clock running” (p. 18), followed by his reasons for trusting the official signatory Mustapha. In chapter 4, when Minister Dunia hands him the amendment, the narrative follows his calculation step by step: “He saw it rusting behind a padlock” (p. 39), “He made himself swallow the protest” (p. 39), and finally the sentence that matters most for the plot: “He knew a change like this should go to Proxima’s lawyers first” (p. 40). Because we know that “He felt the village watching” (p. 40) and that he remembers the faces under the lights, we cannot simply call him a villain.

3.2 Part One: a narrator who sees further

The inside view in Part One is never the only view, and the narrative regularly tells us more than Adam is willing to admit. The clearest example is Aisha’s pre-filter trial. Adam tells Talib that the data was “inconclusive” (p. 31), and the next sentence reads: “The intake with Aisha’s box on it had run cooler and quieter all week” (p. 31). This is dramatic irony: the reader knows that Adam is lying, and that he knows the truth, while Talib believes him.

Sometimes the irony sits inside the figural passage itself. When Aisha shows him the grey paste of salt and clay, “He produced a smile that he hoped looked gracious” (p. 26). We are inside his head, but “produced” and “hoped” let us see the effort, and we suspect that the smile did not look gracious at all. A similar small distance appears when Talib shows him his drawing: “For that moment, Aisha’s grey paste and Samba’s grazing line went out of Adam’s head. Here was someone who got it” (p. 30). The colloquial “got it” is Adam’s voice, while “For that moment” is the narrator marking that the feeling will not last.

At the most serious moment of Part One the inside view stops. When Talib shows him the evidence that Minister Dunia’s brother’s bank is draining the plant, Adam walks away, and “When he turned round, his face was blank” (p. 51). Here the focalisation is external. We hear him say “Data can be misread” and “Complex systems have noise in them. This is noise” (p. 51), but we are not told whether he believes it. Later, alone, he says to the empty room: “I can fix this” (p. 52). At a moral turning point, the narrative already does what it will do in the whole of Part Two and shows Adam only from outside.

Other characters give us views of Adam that he cannot have of himself, as when Aisha tells Talib, “Mr Sterling believes that, because it is easier to be beaten by an enemy” (p. 74). Part One ends with a short authorial summary in iterative form: “Somewhere far from the Sahel, Adam Sterling would wake some nights with the taste of dust and smoke in his throat, where it had no business being” (p. 77). The narrator steps far back, gives us a habit, the piece of glass in the drawer, and then closes the door: “He would not tell anyone why, and no one who knew him well enough to ask ever did” (p. 77). Even the narrator, who could tell us, keeps the reason back. “Madina did not hear from him again” (p. 77) is the last sentence of Part One.

3.3 The bridge: Adam in his own words and through Arramata’s eyes

Between the two parts there is a bridge section in which Adam appears twice. First, his one-page statement is read out to the Proxima board. It is the only text the novel gives us in Adam’s own written words: “I signed an amendment I did not read to the end” (p. 82). This document inside the authorial narrative names the facts and the guilt in four sentences and contains no feeling at all.

In the second scene Dr Arramata visits his office, and the focalisation is internal, but now through her. “He was younger than she had expected” (p. 83) shows whose expectations shape the description. She sees his palms, “tight and shiny with old burns” (p. 83), so the fire of Part One has become a mark on his body which others look at. When she says that he must have seen ownership fail, he answers “I’ve done it”, and the narrator adds: “He did not look away when he said it, and he did not explain” (p. 83). From here on, the novel tells us what his face does and leaves the rest to the reader.

3.4 Part Two: external focalisation and borrowed eyes

Part Two is told in a figural situation with variable internal focalisation. The reflectors are Kadiatou, Fatou, Hassan, Dr Arramata and some others, and several of them are given first-person interior monologue. Kadiatou thinks at the well: “This water is slow poison, and I am the one who serves it” (p. 87). Hassan, lying awake after a day in council, thinks: “I am becoming the one they wait for” (p. 177). Adam, a reflector in Part One, is never given a single such sentence about the present. He becomes the object the reflectors look at.

The first chapters show the method. On the day after the first meeting, Kadiatou watches him assemble the demonstrator, and the narrator says “Kadiatou kept to the shade and watched Adam closely” (p. 94). What she sees is behaviour: “He did not move like a conjurer” (p. 95), he lays out his bolts on a cloth, and when Dr Arramata corrects an angle, “he paused and redid the fitting” (p. 95). For a reader who remembers Part One, the man who refused Malik’s bracket now redoes his work when someone corrects him. The narrative does not say whether he remembers Malik, so the reader has to make the comparison alone.

Silence becomes Adam’s most frequent action. At the reading of the agreement, after he has answered that the committee keeps the padlock, “He said nothing else that afternoon” (p. 101). In the soil meeting with Ousman we only read: “Adam opened his mouth” and “He closed it again” (p. 104). When the committee suspects Sirawol of sabotage, “Adam said nothing” (p. 118). In this pure external focalisation we do not know whether he stays silent out of respect, shame or strategy. In Part One the narrative would have told us.

Other characters are allowed to guess. The most revealing guess comes from Hassan, who lies awake after a long council day and wonders about Adam’s silence at the charter meeting: “Whether the Tubab had once been the man a room waited for, and had seen where that led, and had taught himself to keep his hands still” (p. 177). The theory is Hassan’s, and the text never confirms it.

His most emotional moment in Part Two is reported in the same way. At the opening of the academy, Kadiatou puts the last millet seed into the hand of her great-granddaughter Halima, and Hassan, turning back, “saw the Tubab look away and press the back of his wrist briefly to his mouth” (p. 150). The gesture is an unmistakable sign of feeling, and we receive it through a young man who does not comment on it. We are not told what Adam is thinking of, perhaps Talib’s notebook or the children at Madina.

I wanted the inside view most at the dinner with Evelyn Reed in chapter 24. Reed presses him with a strong argument about the villages that will wait ten years, and the narrator writes: “He did not answer that, and she did not wait for him to” (p. 195). Then “When the bill came, he paid for his own half” (p. 195), and Reed says, “You know that’s a gesture, don’t you?” (p. 195). Adam only answers that he knows. Reed’s interpretation is the only one we hear, and whether he agrees with her or simply does not want to owe her anything, the narrative leaves open.

Only once in Part Two does Adam speak about his own feelings, and then it is about the past. Walking the old test fields with Kadiatou, he says: “I remember thinking I had failed you” (p. 211), and then: “There was a weaver’s son at Madina who filled notebooks with machines. I taught him to trust mine over his own hands” (p. 211). Both sentences are memories. Even here Kadiatou “kept her eyes on the field” (p. 211), and there is no answer and no comment from the narrator. The reader of Part One knows exactly who the weaver’s son is. Kadiatou does not.

The last scene with Adam shows the method most clearly. His vehicle breaks down on the causeway at night, and a young woman mechanic from a road crew, not from Nafawol, repairs the connector. “He held the lamp. He held it where she told him to and did not let it move” (p. 215). The sentence closely echoes the scene in chapter 4 in which Hawa, Talib’s sister, holds the torch for the midwife during the blackout in Bakoro: “she held the beam where the Major told her to hold it, on the woman’s body and on the Major’s hands, and she did not let it move” (p. 32). Adam, who once told Talib “You don’t fix things by feel or by hand” (p. 30), now holds the light for someone else’s hands. The narrator makes none of these links. “She did not ask his name” (p. 215), and then: “For a long way he watched the mirror more than the road” (p. 215). The last image we get of him is of a man looking back.

At the end of the novel, Halima asks Kadiatou whether she trusted the Tubab, and Kadiatou answers: “Some days” (p. 230). This is the closest the novel comes to a final judgement on Adam, and it comes from a reflector who saw only his actions.

3.5 Effect on the reader

The first effect of this technique is that it moves the centre of the story. If Part Two were focalised through Adam, the novel would become the story of a foreign engineer’s redemption in Africa, with the villagers as the background to his inner development. Because his mind is closed, the people of Nafawol keep the inner life. Adam has to stand among them like any other member of the community.

Second, it changes how we judge him. In Part Two we can only judge him the way Kadiatou does in her first scene: “Words are wind, Tubab” (p. 91). We see that he lets the boys on the road crew correct the way he carries his basket “until he carried it their way” (p. 112), that he hands the last key to Fatou, and that he stands at the lorry park after the Teranu family has gone, “until the dust had settled on the road” (pp. 204–5). Whether these actions come from guilt, love, duty or habit is left for us to decide.

This reminded me of Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, which we read in German lessons in Year 10. There Hanna’s illiteracy is withheld because Michael is a first-person narrator who cannot see into her, and the reader has to reconstruct her from her actions. In Songs of Dust and Water the situation is different, because the narrator could see into Adam and did so in Part One. The withholding in Part Two is therefore a choice: the novel shows us Adam’s mind while his mind is the problem, and closes it once his actions are what matter.

2.1 Historical background

Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen (1818–1888) was born in Hamm an der Sieg. He became mayor of Weyerbusch in the Westerwald in 1845, of Flammersfeld in 1848 and of Heddesdorf (today part of Neuwied) in 1852 (Deutsche Biographie). In the hunger winter of 1846/47 he founded the “Weyerbuscher Brodverein” together with well-off citizens. It sold food cheaply to the poor and later arranged seed on credit. In Flammersfeld in 1849 he founded a loan association in which wealthy members guaranteed loans for poor farmers.

These first associations still depended on the goodwill of richer people. The decisive step came in 1864 with the Heddesdorfer Darlehnskassen-Verein, in which the borrowers themselves were the members. In 1866 Raiffeisen published his book Die Darlehnskassen-Vereine als Mittel zur Abhilfe der Noth der ländlichen Bevölkerung, which spread the model, and in 1872 he founded the Rheinische Landwirtschaftliche Genossenschaftsbank in Neuwied, a central bank that balanced money between the local associations.

2.2 Principles and main features

Raiffeisen’s model is usually summarised in three principles:

1. Selbsthilfe (self-help): the members solve their problem together, without depending on charity or moneylenders.
2. Selbstverwaltung (self-administration): the members run the association themselves. In Raiffeisen’s associations the board worked on an honorary basis.
3. Selbstverantwortung (self-responsibility): the members are liable for the association. In the early associations this was unlimited joint liability.

Further features were a small district, so that all members knew each other, long-term loans, and no distribution of profits to members. Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, the founder of the urban cooperatives, criticised several of these points: the long-term loans, the missing member shares, the honorary administration and the exclusion of profit shares (Deutsche Biographie). The Cooperatives Act of 1889 later made regular audits compulsory for German cooperatives. Raiffeisen’s best-known motto is: “Was einer allein nicht schafft, das schaffen viele.”

2.3 “Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe” today

“Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe” is still a guiding principle of German development cooperation. It means that outside support should strengthen people’s own abilities and institutions, so that in the long run they no longer need it. The principle contains a tension which is important for the novel: help from outside is needed at the start, but it must not create a new dependency.

3.1 Starting capital: from charity to self-help

Raiffeisen’s path from the Brodverein to Heddesdorf leads away from charity. Part Two of the novel opens with a similar distinction. When Fatou calls the Proxima Fund “a polite word for charity”, Adam Sterling answers: “Charity hands out what can be photographed, then disappears” (p. 90). After the failure at Madina in Part One, Proxima’s board had decided that money would only go where the people “owned it, and could stop it” (p. 82). In the agreement with Nafawol the money comes “for as long as what was built in Nafawol belonged to Nafawol and was run by its own people” (p. 100).

Proxima plays the role of the wealthy guarantors of Flammersfeld, but with an exit built in: it keeps a second key for ten years and then hands it back. The novel also limits what the outside money may do: “Proxima’s money built things; it did not pay debts” (p. 163). At the charter meeting Dr Arramata explains that the money bought steel and “bought us room to make mistakes without starving” (p. 173), but that the most important rules were not bought: “Nobody sold us the rule that a loan is written down before it is given” (p. 173). This is “Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe” as German development policy means it: the help pays for the start, and the institutions have to be the villagers’ own.

3.2 Self-help: osusu and Coffer Fund

Self-help in credit did not have to be imported. The women’s kafo already has an osusu, a rotating savings group kept in an old aluminium cooking pot. Each woman pays in, and each month one woman receives the whole sum. The rules are strict. When Isatou’s own daughter-in-law asks to take another woman’s turn because the wind has torn a sheet off her roof, Isatou refuses: “Then she can wait for her own turn” (p. 132). This is self-help in a very old form, and it works without any bank.

The common fund grows out of the first cotton sale. After the wages are paid, Fatou explains what stays together: “For the poor’s share, which goes out first. For the dry months. For the clinic’s shelves” (p. 109). Like Raiffeisen’s associations, the fund pays no dividends and keeps its surplus for common purposes, and later the fields yield well “on seed and fertiliser the Fund lent at planting and took back out of the harvest” (p. 140), which is very close to Raiffeisen’s seed credit in Weyerbusch.

Self-help in the novel also means that unpaid work becomes visible. Isatou insists that the women’s cooking for the road crews be entered in the ledger, “so that the grandsons can read it for themselves” (p. 113), and Fatou agrees: “The common fund pays for the stone” and “It can pay for the millet” (p. 113). As far as I found, Raiffeisen’s model does not deal with this kind of unpaid work, so here the novel goes further.

3.3 Self-administration: signatures, ledger and audit

The clearest parallel to Raiffeisen’s self-administration is the charter of the Coffer Fund. It says “that no sum above the price of a young bull could leave the fund without three names on it, and that the three must come from three different households” (p. 129). The elder Mamadou wants the rule to apply to himself as well: “I want the rule to say no to him, so that I do not have to” (p. 129). Earlier he had demanded: “Then build it so that it does not need me to be honest” (p. 128). Raiffeisen relied on a small district where everyone knew everyone; the novel relies on rules that work even against the people who wrote them.

The second instrument is the public ledger. Isatou, arguing for it, says: “A pot everyone can see into does not empty in the night” (p. 132), and the Fund’s ledger is posted on a wall in the square every Friday. When Sulayman, the Minister of Rural Development, wants to take control and orders that “the Fund’s signatories will come to Port Walada” (p. 135), the village has the trust re-registered as a savings society under the banking law, “so that the Ministry could not simply seize it without the regulator” (p. 135).

The inspector from the regulator then plays the role of the cooperative audit that German law introduced in 1889. She finds two errors, among them a payment with only two of the three signatures, and says: “If you let it be two when it is convenient, it will be two when it is not” (p. 138). Fatou corrects her own double entry publicly, and “At the end of it she wrote her name in full” (p. 139). When Hassan later finds an overcharged invoice from a supplier Fatou has traded with for twenty years, she admits: “I didn’t think it would be me who needed it” (p. 143).

Finally, the Union is “registered under the Republic’s law as a union of village cooperatives” (p. 173), with the Coffer Fund as its central fund, like Raiffeisen’s bank in Neuwied. It also has something Raiffeisen’s associations did not have: “One village, two votes” (p. 173), one vote for the village’s usual speaker and one for its young people, and a Council of Elders that “could review any large decision and warn against it, but could not stop it” (p. 173).

3.4 Self-responsibility: revolving loans and the suspension clause

The Union’s loans revolve. “Each new village would receive a loan to set up its own coffer and buy its machines” (p. 172), and after repayment “a share of the profits would flow back into the central fund for the next village” (p. 172), while most “would stay at home” (p. 172).

There is one difference from Raiffeisen here. His loan associations charged interest, but “The Fund lent without interest” (p. 163) and took only “a small fixed fee each year for keeping the ledger” (p. 163). Mamadou’s remark about the trading consortium’s loan, “The imam has a word for that” (p. 141), points to the Islamic prohibition of interest as a background. The borrower’s responsibility stays strict all the same: the rules were written “so that no village could talk its way out of a debt by being pitied” (p. 163).

The suspension clause is the most interesting rule. When Sirawol’s mill has been sealed and the village cannot repay its loan in full, Nyma argues: “The loan was written for a village that failed” and “This village did not fail. It was stopped” (p. 163). The clause says: “Where a borrower’s work is halted by an act of the Republic, and not by its own management, repayment pauses and nothing is added” (p. 163). In Raiffeisen’s terms this separates self-responsibility from risks the members cannot control. It is fair, but the novel immediately names the price: “It still cost Nafawol the money” (p. 163). The academy’s second building waits, restoration work stops, and “Edrisa, who had laid the first stone of the Road of Hands, went to the coast” (p. 164).

The clause also has a limit. In the eighth year the cotton price falls because of a glut and a subsidy far away, and old Teranu asks for the clause. But “A price at a port on another continent was no act of the Republic, and it was no fault of the Teranu either” (p. 204). The family sells its bullocks and leaves for the coast. The eldest son asks Fatou: “Write on the wall that we paid what we could” (p. 204). Self-responsibility is applied consistently here, and it is hard.

4.1 Fraud from inside: Lamin

Raiffeisen’s small district assumes that people who know each other will control each other. The case of Lamin shows the limits of this. Lamin, Mamadou’s own grandson and the Fund’s quickest clerk, makes nine payments to a carter who owns no cart. “All nine stopped a little under it” (p. 168), meaning under the sum that requires three signatures. A schoolgirl, Mariam, discovers it while adding up a column from the public ledger in class: “Why does the carter always stop just under the line?” (p. 168). Lamin’s defence is typical: “Each one was small” and “Nobody went without because of any of them” (p. 169).

In the end the fraud was found because the ledger was public. Everybody knew Lamin, and that had not stopped him. Mamadou has his own name written under his grandson’s, “as the one who asked for the rule” (p. 169), and later asks for a new clause “that payments to the same name were to be added together across the year, and that no clerk was to keep the same book two years running” (p. 169). The institution learns from its failure, much as German cooperatives developed regular audits, and self-administration turns out to need rules against the members themselves.

4.2 New inequality: fitters and farmers

Raiffeisen’s cooperatives were meant for farmers. The Union produces a new division between farmers and technical workers. Alkalo Yaya of Kumbawol complains: “In Talawol a mill fitter already earns three times what a farmer earns in Kumbawol” (p. 176), and asks: “Who will grow what the fitters eat?” (p. 176). The compromise of “six to the fields and four to the workshops” (p. 178) and a farm school does not solve the problem, and Fatou says so openly: “That’s another price” (p. 179). In Year 15, when the visitor from Madina asks who is poor now, Hassan still has to answer: “A fitter in the mill towns earns three times what a farmer earns” and “We have not solved it” (p. 229). A cooperative can share profits fairly between villages, but it cannot easily hold down what a trained fitter could earn at the port.

A related question comes from Isatou when TransGlobal offers fifty thousand dollars per family: “Into whose hand?” (p. 190). The payment would go to “each registered household” (p. 190), and Isatou asks “Who signs for a household now?” (p. 190). The same question applies to the Union’s own rule of three signatures from three households. Self-administration is only as equal as the definition of the member.

4.3 Exit: Kerewol

Membership is voluntary, and so is leaving. Kerewol repaid its loan, “sold its mill to a company from the coast and left” (p. 225). “The charter allowed it, and nobody had been able to tell Kerewol it was wrong” (p. 225). But “The credits on its restored land stayed with the Union” (p. 225), which recalls Raiffeisen’s rule that what is built up stays in the association. Self-help can also lead a village out of the cooperative and into the market, and the Union accepts this as the price of voluntary membership.

4.4 The state

The biggest limit is the state, and here the novel is more pessimistic than my sources on Raiffeisen, who worked as a mayor and with the state. The Republic of Tekuru does not destroy the Union, but it takes its share in other ways. After Sulayman has failed to take the Fund, an industrial safety office seals Sirawol’s boiler under a rule that “had stood for nineteen years” and “had never been enforced north of the river” (p. 160). Fatou blames the Minister; the novel never confirms it, but Kadiatou names the cost: “He has taken the year” (p. 160). The cotton then leaves Sirawol “raw, on other people’s lorries, at the price other people set” (p. 160). Later, when the railway is reopened for the Union’s trade, the Republic demands “a levy on the Union’s own freight for thirty years, which Fatou paid each month and called the rent” (p. 226). And to the registration of the Union, Sulayman only replies that “the Republic knew of no place called Senebia” (p. 173).

The legal form of the cooperative and the banking regulator protect the Union against open seizure, but not against regulation, fees and delay. The novel suggests that “Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe” is never complete as long as the state can set the conditions.