justifies a claim on their hospitality and help. He is already a migrant. Rather than suffering the degradation of being in a place where he has no voice and no freedom of movement, he chooses degradation in the place of a stranger, in the hope that the natural home of which he was deprived through no fault of his own will be found elsewhere. Choice is the operative word. For even though he continues to be abused, he embraces the abuse, even boasting of his ability to withstand what others could not possibly endure. Sartre perceptively refers to this tactic as “provocative impotence,” since the disempowered individual “reacts with an aggressive show of the passivity to which he has been reduced, and arrogantly takes on himself what the other did to him.” Sartre goes on to say that this attitude “in its pure form” is found “among colonized peoples at a certain stage of their struggle . . . when they become conscious of their oppression yet still lack the means to drive out the oppressor; in this case, the challenge, an ineffectual ideal, demonstrates at once the impossibility and the necessity of revolt.”18
In every folktale there is also a supernatural helper, a powerful intercessory without whom the questing hero could not survive the vicissitudes he encounters or the obstacles thrown in his path. Throughout Emmanuel’s narrative, the figures that would customarily provide support fail to do so (his maternal uncles), while the figure of a stepparent, the embodiment of evil in so many folktales, becomes the means by which his dreams are realized.
Emmanuel did so well at school that he won a scholarship to one of Uganda’s top secondary schools, renowned for the political leaders who had gone there, including Milton Obote. It was a boarding school, and Emmanueldescribed it as “the Eton of Uganda.” But even though he drew increasing satisfaction from his studies, Emmanuel continued to find himself marginalized because of his impoverished, rural background and stigmatized by the wealthier kids. “I had the smallest mattress in thickness, the smallest blanket in width and length, and the smallest pair of sheets on my bed. I had no pillow. The bed was one of those you can fold up and go traveling with. A safari bed, we called it. I was the only student with such a bed. All this was another big problem for me. I had to work out how best to survive this new situation. So I developed a sense of making fun. I became the funny guy, making fun of everything and making friends that way.”
To his repertoire of “tricks,” Emmanuel now added an existential strategy common to the oppressed in every human society—the strategy of currying favor with one’s oppressors by acting the clown, subverting an oppressive situation through ridicule, mockery, and gallows humor.
“Did you ever make fun of yourself? Put yourself down?”
“No, no, no, I avoided that totally. The fun I used to make was related to experiences I met along the way. Telling stories but in a funny way. Whenever I could make people laugh, I was the happiest person around. I did the same with Nanna. In the beginning I had to really make sure Nanna was happy, but of course I sensed later that the mode of our storytelling is cultural, based on Ugandan experience. Nanna is Danish and could not understand it, so there are times when my jokes or the funny things I say get lost in translation, and Nanna no longer responds—”
“Can you give me an example of this style of storytelling?”
“Yeah, like an example could be . . . it’s a long time since I’ve done this, but I could tell a story, for example . . . there was an old man, and the old man had a daughter, and this daughter had a problem because she could not get pregnant. She was married but she could not conceive a child, so she had to seek the medicine man’s help. So the witch doctor advises the girl or the woman to wake up one morning when it is still dark and go to an anthill. On the anthill she will see a mushroom that has not yet widened and resembles a penis. She will go and sit on it. [Emmanuel laughed, and so did I, recalling an identical Kuranko tale.] She will sit on that and get pregnant. So whenever I would tell this story, I would tell it quickly up to that point, and then everyone would burst out laughing, knowing exactly what I was talking about.”
“Did you make the stories up?”
“In most cases, yes.”
“But these are so typically African, you must have learned to tell such stories—you must have known this style of storytelling.”
“Yes, the style of telling and the creation of suspense and mystery—that was what I learned as a child.”
“And the exaggeration!”
“I was very good at building smoke, as we used to call it. I would build smoke on the story, even if the story was sad. I didn’t want to tell sad stories. I used to turn even the folklore stories that were very sad into something funny, because I didn’t want people to be sad. I wanted people to be laughing, because I grew up not laughing. If you laughed, you’d be asked, ‘Why you are laughing?’ you see, so I wanted people to laugh. People would laugh, and sometimes they would come and push me and tap me, and that felt good to me. And that is how I could survive most of the bullying and the pressure on me. Whenever you make fun and people laugh, they’ll share bites to eat. So I could get my basic necessities that way. It was a survival thing I developed. I started it with my brothers and sisters. Creating stories from what I heard from the older people, making them into funny stories. If I met a person on the way, I might notice his clothes or his way of walking and turn that into something interesting and funny. Instead of abusing someone or describing something that was wrong, I would work out how to tell it in a funny way. But when I started telling stories like that to Nanna, it was lost in translation—she couldn’t get it. She would ask, ‘What do you mean?’ But when you are telling something funny and somebody asks you about a detail, you lose the story. Yeah, you lose the whole trail and it is no longer funny. And Nanna and I began to lose that ability to make fun of the hard things we were up against in our life.”
Comedy is a common antidote to tragedy. In Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions, his main character, David Zimmer, loses his wife and two sons in a plane crash just one week short of his tenth wedding anniversary. Many months later, Zimmer is surprised to find himself laughing at the antics of a Chaplinesque figure in a silent movie. He searches out more movies by this long-forgotten slapstick star and gradually begins writing a book about him. “Writing about comedy had been no more than a pretext, an odd form of medicine that I had swallowed every day for over a year on the off chance that it would dull the pain inside me.”19
It is often said that comedians come from unhappy childhoods. Speaking of the defensive power of humor, Art Buchwald commented, “When you make the bullies laugh, they don’t beat you up,” and John Dryden claimed that “the true end of satire is the amendment of vices.” But it is to Henri Bergson that we owe one of the most compelling analyses of the comedic power of exaggeration.20 An event or experience is tragic because it utterly overwhelms us. We cannot rest for thinking of what has befallen us, rehearsing it in our minds, unable to shake it off. We are, in effect, possessed. We are at the mercy of our situation. Our power to act or speak is nullified, and we are rendered immobile and mute. But by telling a story about the events that devastated us, we reclaim a sense of agency. Not only do we now call the shots, but we separate ourselves from the events as they were originally experienced. However, this dissociation or detachment requires that the events we ourselves suffered be recast as events that befell a depersonalized character. A woman who cannot conceive a child is a potentially tragic figure, but in the tall tale she becomes a figure of fun, a stereotype. We laugh at a situation that in reality is too close, too real, too tragic to entertain. To use Emmanuel’s own words, we “buy off” the situation by rendering it ridiculous. We separate ourselves from the hapless victim and recover our power to determine events as retrospective commentators on the human condition. The comic is not the opposite of the tragic so much as a strategy for countermanding the tragic with distance and indirection. Tragedy befalls us like a bolt from the blue, a natural disaster, a physical accident, a random act of violence.
