ATO QUAYSON ON TRAGEDY, LIFE, AND SPEAKING HIS TRUTH

Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Chair of the Department of English, and a 2022-23 CCSRE Faculty Affiliate, declared at his CCSRE Chautauqua last November that if there is one take away from his new book Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, it is that tragedy should be understood as ongoing pain and communally experienced suffering, rather than as an individual’s finite episode. When I sat down with Quayson to discuss this insight, he talked about how postcolonial literary criticism, his childhood in Brazil, and becoming Black upon leaving Ghana has profoundly affected his vision for Stanford during this historic moment of racial reckoning. 

Understanding Tragedy 

Depictions of tragedy in canonical literary works often focus on a finite catastrophic moment–the pile of dead bodies at the end of a battle, the suicide that ends a promising young life, or the self-destructive act of blind rage. The problem with understanding tragedy this way, Quayson explains, is that the reader or viewer is not enjoined to change anything about one's life or one’s social context when one reads or watches one of these more traditional tragic arcs. 

In contrast, the postcolonial writings Quayson explores reveal tragedy to be lived as a slow death rather than a single catastrophic moment. We learn from Quayson’s analysis of literary works by authors like Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy,  J.M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett that postcolonial stories of sorrow and anguish are often situated along both individual and communal paths that demand a response from the audience or reader. 

“The traditional view of tragedy is defective in at least two respects,” Quayson asserted. “One is that it assumes that the parameters of tragedy can only be properly detailed inside of literature. But the second thing is that tragedy in literature is something that you experience to give you a philosophical view on pain, suffering, disappointment. But the slow violence of real-life existence requires pressing solutions.” The term slow violence generally refers to the often unremarked devastation that is suffered by poor people affected by the destruction of their natural environments. But Quayson asserts that the term has much wider meanings and applications.

He argued, “Somehow the difference between tragedy in literature and tragedy as an experienced fact of race, class, identity, and sexuality – of real life existence – has to be tied also to a quest for solutions.” These solutions, Quayson explained, must be structural as well as personal. 

“In traditional views of tragedy we may pin our understandings on the individual [in the traditional framing of tragedy], but we are not obliged to extrapolate to a communal sensibility. On the other hand, you cannot read Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and not extrapolate to the larger context of slavery and African life under colonialism. It is just impossible.” 

A Courageous Woman

Quayson’s own story is telling of the ways social structures are reflected in individuals’ struggles and decisions. Quayson’s father was a Ghanaian international diplomat stationed in Brazil. This meant that Quayson and his siblings lead a privileged and protected life. They attended private schools and had house maids. “It was a life that was removed from the messiness of Brazilian everyday life,” Quayson reflected. 

When he was seven years old, however, his mother left his father. It was a rupture that took many years for Quayson to process. “[My mother] walked out of the marriage. [My father] was violent toward her. But in that time  – this is forty or fifty years ago – it was unthinkable for a Ghanaian woman to walk out on her quite privileged marriage the way she did. She left with the youngest, who was a baby, and she went to the consulate and said ‘I've had enough of this. You have to arrange my passage back to Ghana.’ Now that was a very courageous act.”

After several years, the children reunited with their mother in Ghana. Quayson’s attachment to his mother – he recalls picking flowers to bring home to her – made him a close observer of her suffering and solitude. He reflected, “My mother was a devout Christian and had the gift of healing. And she prayed loooong prayers. Her prayers were a conversation with the person with whom she felt the most trust.” He shared that he plans one day to expand on a chapter, entitled ‘Four Women Searching for God,’ that did not make it into this book and that will feature his mother, among other female postcolonial literary figures. He explained, “[The chapter] is about how the search for God sometimes will take them to the dark corners of their spirits. Sometimes the discovery of God is expressed in sorrow.” 

On Speaking his Truth

Quayson’s family experienced significant financial hardship later in Ghana when his father became jobless for some time, having been part of a purge of the civil service undertaken by the government in the early 1970s. After a long and protracted court battle, lasting approximately five years, the dismissed servants were reinstated into different branches of the civil service. “Basically, during that period we faced real poverty and lost all the comforts of our previous existence. It was a very bad situation,” Quayson said. “However, my racial consciousness kicked in only when I left to do my graduate studies at Cambridge University in the UK. It is then that I got a consciousness of race and race relations. I became Black when I left my country. Because back home being told that someone else was better than you because of the color of their eyes or of their skin was not a thing that you ever worried about. It was upon leaving Ghana that I came to understand the nature of racial microaggressions, for example.” Later, Quayson would come to understand racism as a structural problem and not just one of individual dispositions.

Ato’s experience of racism as an African in the UK and the US has informed his scholarship and teaching on and beyond campus. In May 2020, Quayson and his wife Grace Toléqué, Program Officer at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, started a YouTube channel called Critic.Reading.Writing with Ato Quayson. They were impelled to do so by their grief and rage about Anti-black racism as expressed in the murder of George Floyd. 

Quayson recalls that he was afflicted with depression during the early months of the pandemic. “The outrage that I felt after the killing of George Floyd is what pulled me out of my personal lethargy and depression. Race became a living nightmare, and not just for myself. I thought, we have to stop worrying about ourselves as individuals and do something about this racial problem. It is no longer enough to be swiping packages or washing our hands several times a day. COVID is bad but racism is worse. I thought to myself, what can a Black person do to speak their truth?” Quayson and Toléqué have produced forty-two episodes of the YouTube channel to date. 

“You don’t need to experience [racism] directly before you gain a consciousness of it and want to do something about the world that produces it. Everywhere in American culture you are reminded that you have to wrestle with forms of negation all of the time,” Quayson explained. “The racial question is also a question of slow death. You don’t need to see bodies piled up on stage before you recognize that tragedy is happening all around us.”

A Vision for Stanford

In his capacity as chair of the Framework Task Force subcommittee focused on the departmentalization of African and African American Studies (AAAS), Quayson addressed Stanford’s strengths and limits as the university assesses its campus environment for teaching and research on race and overall racial climate. Stating first that “Stanford is way behind its competitors” when it comes to racial equity and race studies, Quayson noted the importance of the university’s recent DEI survey. 

“The DEI Survey needs to percolate down to the departments. There needs to be a serious race and ethnicity audit. I know what I’m going to say is forbidden but I’m going to say it anyway – each department should be invited to say how they are going to continue to diversify their faculty and student bodies as well as their staff in the next three to five years and provide a roadmap for doing so. And the university has to support the departments in meeting those targets. There have to be benchmarks and we all need to know what they are,” Quayson stated. 

“The other thing I want to see is that Black Studies not be separated from Ethnic Studies in general at Stanford. This is very important. Because the thing is that as an African, when I see the dehumanization of Mexicans or the violence against Asian-Americans, for example, I interpret it also as a direct attack on myself as an African. Anything that is happening to any non-white groups or the indigenous peoples, I see it as an image of matters arising for me as an African. It is a notification of a ‘coming soon to a cinema near you.’ So I have to take serious note. Absolutely.

“I want this to be noted explicitly and as repeatedly as possible: We cannot separate Black life or Black affairs from the interests and flourishing of other ethnic minority groups in America or elsewhere. It is not a zero-sum game. That would be to divide and rule people who must devise a destiny in common in a world that has historically denigrated all of us, maybe at different times, but also consistently. Separating Black Studies from Ethnic Studies would be a big mistake.”  

Watch Ato Quayson’s lecture and discussion for the CCSRE Faculty Research Fellows Chautauqua, Tragedy in Postcolonial Literature, held in November 2021, here.

Watch episodes of Ato Quayson’s YouTube channel Critic.Reading.Writing here.