Anyone who has staged a show has an idea of the numberless odd things that can go wrong. We expect, of course, that they will go right. From experience and knowledge, we can conceive the contingencies in categories; they range from the personal to the institutional and the natural (as in a force of nature). Contingencies of performance are the many variables that could impact performance in any number of ways, mostly unforeseen, and even if foreseen, mostly unpredictable in effect. Of course, contingency factors are time and space dependent, as what is contingent in one context or time may be completely under control in another context or time. We need to conceive of performance as fundamentally “a changing function of multiple variables,” as Barbara H. Smith once said of value.Footnote ¹ This changing function is a concept we need to hold tightly as we navigate common challenges of performance: What is our purpose or goal? What should we perform? What are the mechanics of the performance? Where should we perform? When? And for whom? These challenges are theoretically of indeterminate and indeterminable chronological sequence, and beginning from and working diligently through any one of them is bound to lead us into the others.Footnote ²

The preceding is a short description of the path I ordinarily would have followed in approaching the topic of this essay. But I would like to venture in a more abstract and wider direction because that promises a new reward in examining the ordinariness of my subject. I should begin then with a challenge that I take to be prior to any of those challenges of performance I listed above: Why perform at all? The universal question What are we performing for? already assumes that we must or ought to or have agreed to perform, and all we need to do is decide and agree about the For what? question. Even if this assumption is justified—which it hardly is—why we need to perform in the first place still requires critical analysis.

I am using in this essay the broadest conception of performance that we can think of: as both presentation and re-presentation and as encompassing both art and life in all its aspects—social, political, economic, cultural, religious, bureaucratic, technological, and more. Indeed, that has been the direction of the common usage of the word performance for the past three decades or more. There is virtually no domain of our lives—from the most distant to the most intimate—in which it is not invoked. It is as if we have a manic fixation for performance wired into our brains and that fact is just being made manifest in our language. It is as if we are compelled to “perform or else,” to borrow the main title of Jon McKenzie's fine book. McKenzie's concern is not why we perform; he begins with the fact that “performance has become one of the key terms for the new century.”Footnote ³ He then suggestively analyzes how the pressure to perform structures and rules three huge overlapping areas of our lives—the cultural, the organizational, and the technological—and how the practices in the three realms could be seen to have constituted over time “paradigms of performance,” each with its own rules and language of assessment. The question I am asking remains: Why perform at all? The question is a broad and foundational one, so I will respond with an appropriate mix of specificity and speculative metaphoric generalization.

We perform because of our irresistible urge to motion. We want to move from A to B in space and time, A being what we know and where we are and B being where we think we could or ought to be. In other words, the irresistible urge to move is constituted by an evaluative conviction that A, which we know and where we are right now, is inadequate for our desires or capabilities and could be improved upon to approximate more closely those desires and capabilities. To the destination, B, is thus always attached a higher value, whether we are conscious of it or not. That is why you are not likely to have ever heard of a performance whose implicit or explicit goal is to make us worse than we currently are.

From religion, philosophy, psychology, and generally the metaphysics of cultures, we can compile a handy collection of accounts of why human beings perform. A particularly evocative one for me is Wole Soyinka's elicitation of the origin of performance, specifically of Yorùbá tragic art, from the ritual action of the Yorùbá deity Ògun in his famous essay “The Fourth Stage.”Footnote ⁴ It was Ògun, the deity of iron and metallurgy, who braved the void and carved a path from divinity to humanity, healing a foundational rupture that had left both sides incomplete. Ògun is thus the first actor, the one through whose example the Yorùbá can negotiate the physical and metaphysical landscape comprising the three realms of the living, the dead, and the unborn. The “fourth stage” in Soyinka's title is actually not a stage located after the three realms but the connecting, transitional points between and among them, the gulf between and around each of them that needs to be periodically bridged or sutured through rituals for communal unity and health. The need for that periodic bridging is the reason for performance.

Particularly influential with many Euro-American theorists of performance are Sigmund Freud's observations about the psychological origins of symbolism and symbolization through an analysis of the fort/da game of disappearance and reappearance his little grandson played. The repeated game of throwing his toy away with a wail and then searching for and recovering it with a cry of pleasure allowed the boy to make believe and re-present a once pleasurable presence (the mother) that is now painfully absent.Footnote ⁵ The human compulsion to perform is the pleasure-inducing fictional recapturing of an imagination of undesirable absence.

There is no need for more examples, for they are all structurally similar. To borrow from a phrase from Herbert Blau in his book The Audience, human beings are “incited” into performance by “‘odd, anonymous needs’ still to be reconciled.”Footnote ⁶ Between needs and their reconciliation is a space, a gulf, or, in more popular parlance, a gap. Without the gap, there is no performance, and without performance, the gap cannot be reconciled. It is the gap, so commonly invoked and yet rarely considered in academic discourse generally, much less in academic discourse on performance—it is the gap that I am regarding as the primal contingent time–space of performance.

I am stimulated by some of the work in cognitive linguistics on the gap and the human brain. Literary theorist Ellen Spolsky suggests that the human brain is modular and absorbs information from several channels; the senses, for example. Because cross-translation of information from modules or senses is always structurally lacking in parity, our language cannot always adequately describe what we smell or see. Gaps, she argues, arise from this fragmentation of our knowledge of the world, this “systemic inexperienceability.”Footnote ⁷ But this gap in human cognitive structure is hardly a cause for lament; it is “the logical outcome of evolutionary development” that not only permits but “actually encourage[s] transformation and innovation” because the brain continually works hard to find a way to suture the gap. Such suturing, such “satisfaction is only fitfully achievable, and bridges that serve a purpose for a time must sooner or later be rebuilt.”Footnote ⁸ Thus, we will never be free of (the consciousness of) gaps and the apprehension they inflict on us. And that is a good thing. This line of inquiry is suggestive, but my interest in the gap is not primarily related to its biological and evolutionary origins.

The gap is the specter that haunts performance. The gap is the generative force that determines the genres and languages of performance. In theory and in practice, all our exertions in performance, all our performances, are ways of bridging the gap, whether we are conscious of this general fact or of particular gaps or not. The varieties of our genres and subgenres of performance, from tragedy to comedy and every permutation in between and from political rallies to academic conferences all are but means of negotiating the gap. But the reverse is also true. The specter that haunts the gap, its interstitial form and content and our affective investments in it, is performance. All those gaps that we invoke—the wealth gap, the achievement gap, the gender gap, the race gap, the belief gap, and more—are the things our plays and performances are about, aren't they? What do their invocations of all the gaps call up if not the imperative that we perform, that we “do” something to fill them? Performance is the guardian deity of the gap, and it is perhaps a sign of how a little too unselfconsciously we worship it that we have almost denoted performance from what ought to be its real character as descriptive and noncommittal into evaluative and positive. The opposite of performance is hardly nonperformance but, simply, what kind of performance.

No one with even a minimal knowledge of African drama and literature or postcolonial literary production generally can miss its enduring dominant theme of failed expectations after independence. This is the source of the common perception that the literature is “highly political” as well as of its discourses of self-constitution, explanation, and analysis.Footnote ⁹ It is to be expected, therefore, that wide-ranging explorations of the gap and performance are central concerns of the literary and theoretical tradition. I briefly explore three particularly suggestive examples: Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, and Femi Osofisan. I have chosen these three not because I want to claim any paradigmatic status for them but because they fit into my larger revisionist project.

• • •

If we go by the examples I gave earlier of why we perform and what I argued is their structural similarity, the gap is a universal genre of experience, whether it is wired into us by metaphysics or by biology. We are “blessed” with the ability to recognize inadequacy and with an ability to imagine (of varying degrees of haziness or clarity) a situation that would be more adequate, even if we will never achieve that adequacy. If we have any notion of “progress” at all, this is its origin. While the normative expectation is a more or less perceptibly incremental progress in “bridging” the gap, we are compelled by African literature and performance to ask what the impact is on people's psychology and imagination when what happens over time is actually the opposite: a glaringly obvious widening of the gap between expectations and fulfillment.

Take, for instance, Ayi Kwei Armah's early canonical novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The unnamed protagonist, cowered into near psychological paralysis by the pervasive corruption of the ruling elite of the newly independent country, Ghana, could only make do with poignant melancholic reflections on the gap between the hope of the anticolonial struggles of the past and the actuality of independent Ghana in the present. One of those reflections became the most quoted passage in the book:

A good half a century after the epochal wave of independence that ranged from Africa to the Caribbean, we must now conclude that a paradigmatic feature of postcolonial modernity for the majority of the people is not just unmet expectations but actually reverse expectations. In reverse expectations, the hope is not how much better things will be down the road but how much worse they will be. What you can realistically expect is a worsened version of where you had already been; in the future you can expect a much impoverished version of what you had once seen and lived. This gives postcolonial temporality a seemingly atavistic character.

A recent report by the World Bank, as usual choked full of statistics, tried unsuccessfully to temper its grim discoveries of worsening conditions in the developing world. In some regions, the number of people categorized as being in extreme poverty had increased over the past twenty-five years. The Bank discovered that even using its stripped-down standard to measure who is or is not living in poverty, it had been too optimistic in its earlier estimations of how quickly poverty would decrease. It nonetheless stuck to that same standard as it measured the success of governments in fighting poverty. The report can only be seen as an attempt to put a positive spin on the fact that the Bank has met none of its goals with its embrace of trickle-down economics, and a cloud of poverty still hangs over half the world. Its policies have hit Africa particularly hard. The Bank could only conclude that “the persistently high incidence and depth of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa are particularly notable.”Footnote ¹¹ The title of the report is revealing enough: “The Developing World Is Poorer Than We Thought, but No Less Successful in the Fight against Poverty.” Some economists and newspaper editorials have refused to perfume the ugly realities the report revealed; the New York Times published an editorial entitled “An Even Poorer World.”Footnote ¹²

But let us leave statistics alone and turn to popular music. The wildly popular Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, for nearly thirty years Africa's most controversial and militant musician and performer, released a hit song in 1982 titled “Original Sufferhead.” In it, he provided graphic examples of the suffering of the masses of Africa. In one of the verses of the song, Fela, always in the polemical mode, marshaled the greatest exaggeration he could imagine for how long it would take the Nigerian government to provide all Nigerians with safe, pipe-borne water: eight years, 1990. Fela's hyperbole sounded utterly ludicrous to everyone then: eight years before all Nigerians get drinking water? Impossible! That is an eternity; it just can't be that long. At several listening occasions in the year of its release and a few years after, I saw fans thrilled to tears at a derision that masterfully hits the bull's-eye whenever the song gets to Fela's graphic lines, “I wan die o!/Give me water drink,” conjuring the image of a person crumpled on the floor dying of thirst right this moment in 1982 and being told to hold on till 1990 to get water to drink! His audience recognized the delicious hyperbole, guffawed with musical pleasure, and said with pompous, dismissive finality: oh no, that's just an exaggeration. Well, 1990 came and went: no water for all. Today, 2008, twenty-six years later, the big issue is not just that most Nigerians still do not have potable pipe-borne water; the issue is that far fewer people have it than in 1982 due to the systemic decay of the nation's infrastructure.

It seems to me then that one thing that is different about an African or postcolonial experience of the gap is the seeming normalization of reverse expectations, a kind of pathologization of the gap. The question is what happens to that thing called hope in these contexts in which, for the majority, gaps actually get wider rather than narrower over time. What becomes of (our investments in) performance in such contexts? What happens to imaginative horizons both of the collective and the individual?

Because of this enduring epidemic of reverse expectations, there is no better figure to begin my three examples with than Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and theorist of the anticolonial revolution. It was Fanon who, right in the heat of the anticolonial struggle in the 1950s, warned that such a yawning gap of reverse expectations would occur, given the dubious practical and ideological character of the emerging nationalist leaders. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon mercilessly excoriated the African bourgeoisie—which he says is actually a fake bourgeoisie—for their “intellectual laziness,” “spiritual penury,” “absence of all ambition,” and gross “incapacity” to “fulfill its historic role of the bourgeoisie.” In this class, Fanon argued, “the dynamic, pioneer aspect, the characteristics of the inventor and of the discoverer of new worlds” that are found in any bourgeoisie worthy of that name are “lamentably absent.” It is an unoriginal class that is “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor; it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type.” It is a “bankrupt” class afflicted with a signal lack of initiative, and its “mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation” but instead is “content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie's business agent.”Footnote ¹³

Note in the quotes Fanon's repeated theme of unproductivity, which, of course, we can measure and talk about only in the language of “performance.” In my reading, the African bourgeoisie's unproductivity is not nonperformance as such but is rather a certain kind of performance. In any case, a pathological widening of the gap is the result of this performance. The larger historical background of Fanon's critique is, of course, Karl Marx's lyrical articulation in The Communist Manifesto of the distinctive characteristic of the European bourgeoisie: its productivity. To reread Marx alongside Fanon on this matter is to have a special appreciation of the fury and venom in Fanon's language. Just compare his plaintive lament with Marx's loquacious panegyric to the manifold accomplishments of the historical European bourgeoisie in imagining a different world and boldly bridging the gap to its realization.

The European bourgeoisie, Marx wrote,

In a justified grandiose rhetorical flourish, Marx asked, “[W]hat earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”Footnote ¹⁵ And I think we can only answer, None, Mr. Marx, none.

For Marx, the problem in the end is really not so much that these gigantic productive forces were roused from the lap of social labor but that the wealth produced by that social labor was being privately appropriated. Thus, as epically productive in its performance as the European bourgeoisie was, it did not bridge but actually reproduced more systemically gaps—a gap in material wealth, yes, but also metaphysical and psychic gaps. Marx wrote eloquently about how the bourgeoisie had “pitilessly torn asunder” all “idyllic relations” and “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour … in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”Footnote ¹⁶ If this is so, why did Fanon make so much of the woeful unproductivity of the African bourgeoisie and locate it as the source of the immiseration of the people? In a part of his text that is rarely referenced, partly because it reveals a more pragmatic Fanon, he conceded that while the bourgeoisie as a class should be made impossible, a productive bourgeoisie is more likely to have a “minimum humanist content” and produce a “multiplicity of nuances which allow it to preserve intact its proclamation of mankind's outstanding dignity” even while remaining fundamentally exploitative.Footnote ¹⁷ I think his point here is this: to be ruled by the bourgeoisie is bad enough; to be ruled by a pretentious and intrinsically unproductive bourgeoisie is a tragic double whammy. This would be the difference between the context of normative expectations and the context of reverse expectations. The difference is the degree to which the gap is filled, traversed, and engaged and through what kind of performance this takes place.

Fanon fixated on the unproductivity of the African bourgeoisie, but he overlooked the other side of that equation: the gaudy consumption of that class. The accomplished Senegalese filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembène later dramatized this squarely in Xala, released in the mid-1970s as both a novel and a film.Footnote ¹⁸ The African bourgeoisie is not just unproductive (that is, is stricken with xala, or impotence), it is also an unproductive consumer. Sembène adroitly uses heterosexual impotence to figure the political, economic, social, and moral vapidity of the class, in the process opening up a powerful feminist critique. After all, that African bourgeois class, though it is not unique in this, is male dominated and masculinist, and the group who suffers the most from its unproductive consumerism are women. One height of this line of cogent extension of Fanon in African literature is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's classic novel Devil on the Cross. Footnote ¹⁹

The negativity of the figuration of the gap in Fanon is strongly tempered, however, by his argument that the impoverishment of the people, from the time of its genealogical roots in colonialism, has transformed the people and produced in them an interstitially situated ontology and mind-set that is antinostalgic toward the past, critical of the present, and therefore open to the future. In a language shot through with performance, he described that sociopyschic in-between gap or space as a “zone of occult instability,” a “fluctuating movement which [the people] are just giving a shape to and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question.”Footnote ²⁰

For Fanon, the gap and its possibility are suffused with inevitable violent antagonism and violence. But for Homi K. Bhabha, the influential theorist of postcolonial studies and my second example, performance in the gap is more usefully conceived as agonistic, a contest with an indeterminate end, a nonabsolute singularity of goal, and an acceptance of the untamable messiness of the social. In his perhaps most well-known essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” first published in 1985, Bhabha uses an event in colonial Delhi to discuss the status of the English book, specifically the Bible, among the natives. He is interested in the extent to which the book, which the natives accept with a mixture of dogma and relativity, is “repeated, translated, misread, displaced.”Footnote ²¹ His argument is that between colonial directives and the target of those directives is a space of ambiguity that is subversive of compliance because that ambiguity can enable the colonized to refashion such directives. This is why the gap or the middle space is so important. Bhabha represents the gap in many ways in this essay and in others in his collection The Location of Culture. It is the space between desire and fulfillment, between dispose and disposition, to cite just two.Footnote ²²

The gap is the location of Bhabha's famous concept of hybridity. Uncertainty and ambivalence are characteristic of the gap, making it the venue where the lie of the unquestionable authoritativeness of authority is exposed and foiled, not in an absolute and absolutist reversal but in a complex of identification, discrimination, mimicry, sly civility, and so on. In Bhabha's words,

Bhabha's underscoring of the radical possibilities of the gap is persuasive, even if the ambivalence that is characteristic of the gap is hardly an automatic threat to authority. Power or ideology has never depended solely on transparency of directives to be effective. In fact, the opposite could be argued—that the more ambiguous, equivocal, and contradictory an ideology is, the more effective its power becomes. There is also the critical issue of whether the conflict in the colonial context could be construed in agonistic terms. Agonism assumes a more or less level playing field. Was the colonial context that? It is historically true that because of the longer history of British colonialism in India, it was able to acquire a thin layer of hegemony among certain groups of natives, but we know how rapidly that colonialism's pretense to a genial “civilizing mission” collapsed after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Fanon was careful not to claim subversion for the gap; he argued only that it is a “zone of occult instability,” which I take to mean a multiedged sword without a hilt that must nonetheless be handled by the colonized. The compulsion to handle it creates a risk—which must be consciously accepted—of self-dissolution.

Nigerian Femi Osofisan, leading playwright and scholar and my third example, has worked hard in the past three decades to create a dramaturgy that is a running metacommentary on the gap and the many performative means of its mediation. Very appropriately, one of his earlier and significant essays, “Beyond Translation: A Comparative Look at Tragic Paradigms and the Dramaturgy of Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi,” is a critical exploration of the origin and evolution of tragic art from pre-Hellenic times to the present as the oldest and most privileged dramatic form of responding to the challenge of the gap. “In the beginning was not the Word but space,” Osofisan began, and the prime task of the artist was a confrontation with this fearful “emptiness of space in which form realizes itself” in order to make a “translation,” “the sublimation of space.”Footnote ²⁴ Performance is the sublimation that replaces the fearful emptiness of the gap with our invested means of its mastery. His “beyond translation” in the title is a reckoning of the difficulties of that translation in times and contexts in which the connective tissues between the metaphysical and social lives, though still very much there, are thinner and more submerged than ever.

Osofisan, more than any contemporary African dramatist, is obsessively concerned with frames and frameworks. For him, it is not just the sublimation of space that is a challenge but also the very conception of it. Osofisan's adopted deity, Òrúnmìlà, is the deity of divination, a process that acknowledges multiple paths, privileges collective participation, and demands not just careful collection and interpretation of information but also consciousness of the frameworks of interpretation. For Osofisan, Òrúnmìlà metaphorically “incarnates [the] tension between the existing and the visionary, between the past, the present and the future. … For it is obvious that we shall never have the truth completely within our grasp, only as an inspiration.”Footnote ²⁵ Where we cannot have the truth completely within our grasp, consciousness about how we know the truth and search for it becomes as important as getting the truth.

I have written at some length elsewhere of the practical manifestations of this vision on the performance stage, and they are as varied as the plays.Footnote ²⁶ There is the famed democratization of playmaking in which the narrator gives directorial instructions and performers take up roles, cue colleagues, exchange characters, or displace themselves halfway through roles or even speeches and construct make-believe settings, all in full view of the audience. And then some of the plays will not and structurally cannot end until the real, live audience, right there in the theatre, debates and decides how it should end, helped on by the narrator while the other performers watch. The audience, accustomed to sitting through plays and applauding politely at the end and leaving, is usually surprised at the sudden turn of events that requests that they be both audience and performer. Art is expanded to encompass life, and vice versa. Performance that is simultaneously art and real life is what results. It is not surprising that this is usually uncomfortable for most of the audience, not because of any structural weakness in the plays but because they are bolder and far ahead of the audience, asking “why not” to this unconventional means of bridging the gaps between and among performer, performance, and audience.

But perhaps much more disarmingly disorienting in Osofisan's plays is the disjunction between the usual alluring spectacle—the whole shebang of flamboyant language, costumes, music, song, dance, masking, and magic, sumptuously borrowed from popular cultural tradition—and the insistent critical logic the plays pursue. The disorientation results from the fact that the familiar spectacle comes culturally bundled with a subtending worldview—frequently one that is gerontocratic and aristocratic and mystical—whereas the ideas the spectacle is made to carry in the plays are relentlessly critical and subversive of that worldview. Osofisan has created a sensuous aesthetic in which critical antitraditionalism—whatever the “tradition” might be—is pleasurably affirmed and given a persuasive cultural anchor, as if that is the most traditional thing to do. What is thereby crucially affirmed is less this or that particular position but more the very principles or frameworks of the formation and deformation of positions. The plays that bear the Osofisan imprint at his most perspicacious (such as The Chattering and the Song, Once upon Four Robbers, Farewell to a Cannibal Rage, and Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels, to name but a few) are characterized by deft appropriation and reinterpretation of indigenous performance forms, a fine-tuned materialist vision of history, and a consummate dramaturgic sophistication and openness that takes us beyond Wolé Sóyínká and Bertolt Brecht, two of Osofisan's many inspirations.Footnote ²⁷

• • •

I have argued that we need not consider the foregoing three ways of thinking about the performance of postcolonial modernity as paradigmatic. I chose them idiosyncratically, as strands of thought to which I am attracted. I am persuaded by Fanon's conviction, evident especially in his passionate polemical style, that we can have the contingencies of performance mostly tamed. There is just no other way to interpret his unequivocal critique of the historical African (non)bourgeoisie. That is the general tenor of his writing, even when his honesty forced him now and then to make qualifying asides to the effect that given some of the circumstances under which the African bourgeoisie had to perform, its success was already circumscribed. When he coined the phrase “zone of occult instability,” he applied it to the people only. There is very little justification for this. The African elite, living in the same historical time as the people, was also caught in a maelstrom of a broken-apart African past, a colonial present, and an uncertain postcolonial future, so it too was in a “zone of occult instability.” The difference is the different responses of the two groups, the people and the elite, to the challenges of that space. This is why Homi Bhabha's foregrounding of the subjective agency that is possible in that maelstrom—that gap of performance between event and eventuality—is important. But as I have argued, that is a generic ability, for it does not necessarily disable domination. Bhabha's dramatic scaling down of antagonism in the gap makes it seem as if we can choose which contingencies of performance to have and when to have them. In Femi Osofisan's case, I am drawn by his putting on the line what we can call the reperformance of performance. This allows me to raise one major aspect of performance we don't often address: its inherently conserving and therefore conservative nature. We hear a lot about its subversive effects, but there is the other side too. This is not a critique at all, merely observation and description. We perform repeatedly, and conscientiously too. We ought to question the unacknowledged pleasure in that repetition. But if the gap is even more yawning today, creating reverse expectation, then obviously we have had too much faith in our performance. Perhaps that is because we are always too sure of what we are performing for, whether it is consciously articulated or not. This means we treat the gap as if it is just a mere leap-over. Maybe we need to be a little circumspect about our faith in performance.

I want to end with a riddle. Years ago, in discussing postcolonial reverse expectations in India, distinguished Indian writer Arundhati Roy poignantly wrote, “It's a sad thing to have to say, but as long as we have faith, we have no hope. To hope, we have to break the faith.”Footnote ²⁸ I affirm this, and it is not a contradiction at all to say that I also affirm the fact that the very condition of the possibility of performance in the first place is the faith that the gap can be breached, can be bridged.