NO ENEMY BUT TIME - MICHAEL BISHOP

Although time travel is the ostensible conceit underwriting ‘‘No enemy but time’’ it is anthropology that is the central theme of the novel, with time seen in its complex workings through dreams, the collective unconscious through the mediation of time travel. Alternating between shards of the present and the pleistocene past in zarakal, an african country (invented ) where australopithecus hominid species are re experienced in their preadamite temporal context by Joshua kampa (a black man in 20th century america) through time travel and prior to the time travel machine by the agency of dreams ‘‘No enemy but time’ is arranged interestingly. Joshua kampa’s past is filtered in a kaleidoscopic pattern, non linear, dealing with his spanish mother Encarnacion consuela ocampo, a small time black marketeer and prostitute in seville spain and her abandonment of him to strangers who would care for him better and his adoption by Hugo and Jeannette monegal and traverses wyoming, kansas , florida and zarakal. A transcordion meant to facilitate communication between Joshua and Alistair patrick blair, a paleontologist and the brainchild behind the apocryphal existence of the homo zarakalensis and woody kaprow who being an avid dreamer of the past conceptualizes the time travelling contraption , fails and Joshua has to fend for himself. Complementing Joshua’s reconciliation of past and present is also his attempt to find some rapproachment with his adoptive mother Jeanette from whom he became estranged as a teenager and then decamped home for after the unresolved trauma of Hugo’s death. .

While the sections dealing with the present attest to both the burgeoning of joshua’s dream life and its concrete realization through time travel they also deal with the shenanigans of americans and the zarakal elite - the americans wanting to establish military bases and bribing the leaders of zarakal while the zarakal see the whole pleistocene space as a pretext for a mythopoeia of exceptionalism,acquire funding from americans and spearhead their own ambitions into a technological future and forays into space . In the sections of the pleistocene past with the minids ( as joshua calls them ) are traced the evolutionary beginnings of humankind. The minids have clans, with hierarchies, a rudimentary family structure , hunt and scavenge and kill, have rituals in dealing with death and a musicality that is formless and primordial but attuned to nature. Joshua gives the minid faction he cohabits with names like Alfie, guinevere, genly , helen etc. And slowly falls in love with Helen , even bearing a child from her he transports to the present by salvaging her from a volcano . Joshua the anthropologist contends with Joshua the denizen of pleistocene africa as his seamless absorption with the minids both ameliorates his existential alienation in the 20th century and provides him feelers into the sophistication of the homo habilis , their tenacity and adaptability, the remnants, unformed as they are yet discernible , of what would become human social behaviour and consciousness . It is dreaming that engenders these ideas, dreaming embodied through a time machine that blurs the lines between past and present and future. Joshua’s sojourn into time past is an eventful homecoming and he carries from this sojourn a nascent potentiality of time future, emblematized by his daughter Monicah. Love for helen, reciprocated wordlessly , yet endowed with self consciousness ( the relationship of the minids to a pocket mirror betokening embryonic self awareness ) . The salutary part of ‘‘No enemy but time’’ is its even handed judicious examination of the past pre human origins . Despite the minids killing of beasts and eating raw flesh, and rank odor and sexual promiscuity there is also a countervailing fellow feeling, kinship, solidarity with other groups . By contrast the racism encountered by Joshua kampa in the america of the sixties and seventies, overt and covert, provides a meta subtle commentary on the present.

As with Twain’s ‘‘ A connecticut yankee in king arthur’s court’’ there is plentiful ribald humour and scabrous wit in ‘‘no enemy but time, including declamations from poe and shakespeare and yeats . But the impetus is not an invidious reflection on the present through the double lens of a satirically revisited past onto the present but to trace a continuum imaginatively. In ‘‘transfigurations’’ the asadi’s reversion in evolutionary terms had a more convoluted evolutionary logic that a simplified survival of the fittest. The anthropologists in that novel had biases and preconceptions too. ‘‘No enemy but time’’ is about a different kind of evolutionary reckoning, implicating Joshua kampa in a loop of time past, present and future in which the nature of his experientiality of a collective unconscious in its specific preoccupation tangles up his interrelation with these coordinates. My critique of the novel would be a predisposition towards stylistic flourishes that undermine the anthropological quest. Joshua’s run ins with the minids have elements of the burlesque , partly understandable as irony evinced by the 20 th century sensibility located in the pre human past but it also makes the encounter with the prehuman other/ self partake of vestiges of the ludicrous or the slapstick. And while these are delineated intelligently they dilute the seriousness of the themes. At times the pleistocene sections seemed to strive for the sardonic at the cost of the anthropological. The time travel technique is also crude and the metaphysics of the dream landscape improbable though it doesn’t obtrude on the skillful storytelling much. The sections of Joshua’s propinquity with Helen and the acclimatization to the minids, which has familiarity too, an ancestral familiarity overlaid by the accoutrements of civilization do mitigate the farcical undercurrents and make the story moving . ‘‘No enemy but time’’ accrues a complexity despite its intermittent tonal incongruities and self reflexive literary storytelling . It offers a fictionalized extrapolation into our pre human past that isn’t censorious or self congratulatory or prioritizing the present over the past. Instead it attempts to engage with the pleistocene past on its own self contained , curious and respectful terms and makes the whole business of homo sapiens a far more layered and multifaceted phenomenon which is indubitably is.