Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to examine Bridget Pitt’s response, in Eye Brother Horn (2022), to the problems of the postcolony – and of the ‘Plantationocene’ (Haraway’s 2015/2019 adjunct to the ‘anthropocene’) – by reanimating the past, seeing the present afresh, and reimagining the future.

Paper long abstract:

Eye Brother Horn (2022), Bridget Pitt’s novel set in 19th century colonial Natal (Zululand), is the story of “kin-making” (Haraway 2016) across the boundaries of species, race, and culture. Through the brothers, Daniel and Moses – sons of an English Reverend at a Christian mission station – Pitt shows the convergence of seemingly opposing ontologies: Daniel, the biological son, has a mystical connection with the natural world, rejecting patriarchal, colonial culture. He is emotionally sensitive and spiritually curious, while Moses, the adopted Zulu son, is more pragmatic; fascinated with science. The divide between the worlds they straddle becomes increasingly more apparent: a traditional African existence, sympathetic with the environment, and the modern emphasis of change and ‘progress’ that is being imposed by the colonising force. Eye Brother Horn provides “activated storytelling” (Haraway 2016:132); a timeous examination of the effects of colonisation on people and the environment: Pitt foregrounds a correspondence between western Wordsworthian ontology and African animism. “Literature does not explain or second scientific and philosophical notions; it poses a fundamental challenge to any form of knowledge” (Bartosch 2013:12). This paper seeks to examine Pitt’s response to the problems of the postcolony – and of the ‘Plantationocene’ (Haraway’s 2015/2019 adjunct to the ‘anthropocene’) – by reanimating the past, seeing the present afresh, and reimagining the future. The novel transcends present polarisations by reintroducing (for contemporary readers) the mythologies of once-colonised spaces; enabling a reimagination of multi-species possibilities for the future.