Afroeurope@n Configurations : Readings and Projects [1 ed.] 9781443833998, 9781443833370

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Afroeurope@n Configurations

Afroeurope@n Configurations: Readings and Projects

Edited by

Sabrina Brancato

Afroeurope@n Configurations: Readings and Projects, Edited by Sabrina Brancato This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Sabrina Brancato and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3337-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3337-0

To my children, my twinkling little stars on their way from Bamako to Frankfurt

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Sabrina Brancato Part I: Theoretical Frameworks What Is This Afroeuropean?...................................................................... 18 Raimi Gbadamosi Europe, Race and Diaspora ....................................................................... 30 Susan Arndt Part II: Expanding Boundaries Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic beyond the Iron Curtain: African Students Encounter the Soviet Union ............................. 58 Maxim Matusevich Learning About Africa: The Imagination of African People in Icelandic Schoolbooks .............................................................................................. 81 Kristín Loftsdóttir Writing Our Future History Together: Applying Participatory Methods in Research on African Diaspora in Finland.............................................. 98 Anna Rastas African Migrants in Spain: Policies and Research Resources ................. 121 Juan Miguel Zarandona Part III: Literature in Context Liminality as Critical Empowerment: Second Generation Immigrants, ‘Guerrilheiro’ Memories and Nomad Women Poets ............................... 140 Joana Passos

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Autobiography as Political Essay: Narrative Strategies in Black Postmodern Literature ............................................................................. 157 Annalisa Mirizio Transcontinental Shifts: Afroeurope and the Fiction of Bernardine Evaristo.................................................................................................... 168 John McLeod Black British and Black Italian, Two Case Studies: Andrea Levy and Gabriella Ghermandi......................................................................... 183 Francesca Giommi Being Different without Fear: On Igiaba Scego’s Oltre Babilonia (and More) ............................................................................................... 198 Daniela Brogi Part IV: Writers Talk Agnès Agboton: Self-Translation and Intercultural Mediation ............... 210 Maya García de Vinuesa Afroeurope in the Canary Islands: An Interview with Antonio Lozano .. 223 Isabel Alonso-Breto An Afroeuropean Writer: Vamba Sherif on Himself............................... 232 Vamba Sherif Contributors............................................................................................. 237

INTRODUCTION SABRINA BRANCATO

“Afroeurope@ns”: an ongoing project This book comes as a result of a longstanding collaboration with a group of scholars, writers and artists brought together by common interests and affinities. Some of them are former or current members of the group “Afroeurope@ans”, while others are part of an extended network. “Afroeurope@ns: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe” is a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and coordinated by the University of León. It started in 2004, when a group of international researchers decided to join efforts in order to create an operative network and set up easily available resources to spread knowledge about the African Diaspora in Europe. The group has achieved several objectives. It is especially worth mentioning the following: the creation of a website (www.afroeuropa.eu) providing basic resources on Afroeuropean literatures and other arts; a peer-reviewed online journal (http://journal.afroeuropa.eu) with three yearly issues; several workshops and conferences; a multimedia encyclopedia of Afroeuropean Studies (forthcoming), and several volumes of collected essays. The present book follows the volume Afroeurope@ns: Cultures and Identities edited by Marta Sofía López (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), which offers overviews of African diasporas and their literatures in several previously unexplored national contexts as well as a number of gender-focused close readings. The second volume I now present continues on this path by exploring other national contexts and opening up to other disciplinary areas beyond literature. Far from pretending to be exhaustive, the diversity of the voices represented in this book constitutes a testimony to the variety of equally valuable configurations that Afroeurope can take. “Readings and Projects” follow “Cultures and Identities” in recognition of the multiplicity of perspectives from which this field of study can be approached. For this reason and in consideration of the field as an expanding horizon rather than a niche, any kind of prescriptive

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Introduction

definition of what is supposed to constitute Afroeurope is carefully avoided. Other individual scholars and research groups have been active in recent years, who have chosen different terminologies (for example Black Europe or Euro-Africa), but with whom we share the primal purpose of shedding light on a part of Europe’s past and present which is too often overlooked in mainstream discourse. For an effective politics of inclusion to be implemented in Europe, the continent must first acknowledge its diversity in cultural heritage. Before summarising the single contributions of the present volume, I will start by putting in context my personal motivations and my views on the crucial importance of Afroeuropean writing for the reshaping of Europe for future generations.

Where do I stand? An exercise in ego-criticism I started working on the African diaspora in Europe little less than a decade ago, when I moved from Spain to Germany with a virtual suitcase filled with sparse ideas for a postdoctoral research project on narratives of migration. My interest in displacement and the gradual canalisation of this interest towards the specificities of African migration in Europe emerged from a clash I sensed between my condition of intra-European expatriate and other expatriate stories I became familiar with. My plural locations (Germany was my third country of residence) and that peculiar coupling of uneasiness and potential enrichment at finding myself in a new environment (with scarce knowledge of the local language and the not unusual set of cultural complexes accompanying the southerner travelling North) naturally led me to bump into narratives of uprootedness every time I selected a cultural product either for personal enjoyment or professional development, be it a book, a film, a scholarly reflection or a piece of art. Among my readings of that time were some autobiographical texts by Africans from various regions, who had recently settled in Europe and with whom I could easily empathise for a number of circumstances we seemed to share. Some of them were young scholars, teachers or simply people with an acute sense of the literary value of experience. Like me, they were struggling to make sense of their present situation and trying to figure out what to do with their future. Nevertheless, unlike me, these travelling companions did not appear to be granted the freedom to make choices according to their inclinations. Some of them had to work far below their capacities and skills, had to deal with exhausting bureaucratic issues (from not having their qualification recognised to having to live in clandestinity), and had to face various forms of prejudice, rejection and

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racism. In short, what distinguished my experience from theirs was that sort of privilege which does not depend on personal qualities but rather on exogenous factors determined by history and ideology (in the broader sense of power discourses and politics). I had no stable position, no funding for my project (it came much later) and no clear plans for the future. However, my rather pale complexion and a European passport made life so much easier for me than it seemed to be for my black or Maghrebi African counterparts. In fact, apart from a few mostly harmless stereotypes about Italians (and southern Italians in particular), I did not have to experience any prejudice, let alone institutional racism, neither in Spain, in Germany nor in other countries I visited for long stays. If my passport was undoubtedly a crucial element of security, it was especially the fact of being identified as white and Christian (even if atheist) that granted me a degree of liberty not enjoyed by the less fortunate expatriates whose stories I more or less accidentally came across. It did not take long for me to realise that in a western environment Whiteness produces some sort of acknowledgement of a (however artificial) shared identity. Europe, in fact, is assumed to be White (not simply racially but also culturally and religiously). Hence, even if talks of diversity have long entered the political and cultural discourse, dynamics of exclusion will continue to be based mainly on racial criteria unless Europe finally recognises the entanglement of its history and selfdefinition with racism. A thorough exercise in self-scrutiny and criticism is therefore required before Europe can call itself properly diverse. As denial of structural racism does not only concern political discourse and the public arena but also the private sphere, self-scrutiny should be carried out also at the personal level by any white European, not excluded those who, like me, are involved in a field of study to which they come as outsiders, those, that is, who pretend to speak about (and in some cases for) the Other. I believe it is therefore necessary for white scholars of Afroeuropean Studies to ‘locate’ themselves, in order to make clear from which position they are speaking. This should not be understood as a form of hypocritical indulgence in ‘white guilt’, but as an essential step to approach the field with honesty and acknowledge one’s limitations. If I look back on my own life, I find it permeated by both racialism (an understanding of identity based on constructed racial difference) and racism (in the form of overt discrimination). And if my adult self has gradually learned how to recognise and respond to racial prejudice (preconceptions coming from the outside as well as my own assimilated prejudice), I certainly cannot claim the same for my childhood counterpart.

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Introduction

As a little girl from a middle class context in the south of Italy during the early seventies, for a long time the only black people I was familiar with were the ones I saw on television. Images of African children suffering the effects of famine populated my daily meals. Pushing mouthfuls of food in my mouth, my relatives took turns at reminding me how fortunate I was compared to those “poor black children” and at persuading me that eating all my food would be a due act of respect for them. This was my family’s way to teach me compassion. However, this was unfortunately not coupled with a positive (or simply realistic) image of black children and black people in general. I remember my grandmother constantly telling me to keep my fingers out of my nose by threatening that otherwise I would get “negro nostrils”. In the model of beauty my grandmother would insistently try to pass on to me (golden hair and ice-blue eyes, which by the way none of us in the family could boast), blackness simply had no place. I also remember that it was assimilated racism that made me drop out of ballet school. After a year or so of training, a public show was organised in which different groups danced dressed in the guise of different peoples of the world. I looked with envy at the older girls’ colourful veils and jingling beads as they staged a belly dance in the best tradition of western orientalist taste, while my group was made to wear tight dark brown garments, straw skirts, ‘kinky’ black wigs, and – our faces, hands and bare feet painted in brown – made to jump around with a fruit basket on our heads. I would like to think that my sharp feeling of humiliation was due to my sensing how demeaning that tribal disguise was for the people we were supposed to represent, but I am afraid it was simply due to the fact that in my little head (I was no older than six) being African and black was nothing to be proud of. And yet people, especially children, are far from being passive receptors of ready-made ideas, and even if stereotypes sometimes unfortunately prove stronger than direct experience, it must not always be the case. In fact, I can recall the exact moment when my childhood prejudice was overturned. I was seven years old when the televised version of Alex Haley’s novel Roots was screened in Italy for the first time. On those evenings I was allowed to stay up late, as my mother was eager to teach me the horrors of slavery (what she did also through books and other materials). I think, however, that this further training in becoming aware of unjust circumstances would not have taken me much beyond the idea of black people as human beings deserving compassion, had it not been for the presence of a black young man at our table. Zeweldi B. was an Eritrean with whom my father had shared a room during a long hospitalisation and

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who later occasionally visited us. We ate pizza and watched Roots, and the adults chatted eagerly while my little self dreamed of growing up fast enough to catch up with the charming gentleman I had grown so fond of (he was a seaman, and his tales of the big world brought home to me, even if unconsciously, the parochialism of my own world). I might have absorbed the adults’ responses to the TV series and possibly taken in some critical views but I think it was Zeweldi’s sheer presence in the first place that allowed me to see how much dignity and pride could be associated with being black and African. More than thirty years later I have gone a long way in the process of dismantling prejudice, and yet I constantly have to remind myself that my angle of vision is unavoidably limited. Last year in Rome, on the occasion of a conference where I was invited to speak about the African presence in Europe, I saw in the street the poster of an exhibition on the painting of the Roman Empire. I decided to visit the exhibition for the only reason that the poster featured a black female face in the foreground. By then I was of course already well aware of the multiethnic dimension of the Roman Empire, but it positively struck me to see this feature finally given the proper emphasis. Was this a new development, the sign that the cultural establishment was finally acknowledging blackness as part of European identity, or had this always been there and I was to blame for my blindness? Most of the exhibition’s paintings representing black people actually came from Pompei, which happens to be very close to my hometown. I had certainly already seen some of the paintings in the past, and yet I don’t remember ever having noticed the blissful conviviality of blacks and whites in that ancestral society. I was now looking with new eyes, and for the first time, arguing at the conference about the importance of dismantling the myth of a white Europe, it seemed to me that I was stating the obvious. As my angle of vision expands, I grow more aware of how personal experience shapes my intellectual development. In the same way as Zeweldi’s appearance constituted a turning point in received ideas about black people and the reading of African migration narratives made me aware of my privileged position, what I experience every day allows me to see a little further. From where I stand now, Afroeurope is a reality, and yet there is still a long way to go for this reality to become visible to everybody.

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Introduction

From migrancy to citizenship: writing Europe anew Afroeuropean literatures are proliferating all over the continent. Beyond the important contribution they make in terms of aesthetic innovation, it is crucial to acknowledge the potential that these writings offer to the dialogue between Europe and Africa and to the formation and consolidation of a new notion of Europe, seen not only as plural but also as effectively transcultural, a Europe finally recognising in its historical, ethnic, political and cultural identity the presence of strong influences from Africa as well as from global African diasporas. A comparative analysis of Afroeuropean literatures immediately lets emerge a number of extra-literary questions. Exploring the texts of authors of African descent from various linguistic and national contexts in Europe and pointing out shared characteristics and common trends allows us to determine if it makes sense at all to speak of an Afroeuropean identity and to envisage the limits of such a configuration. In the first place, a comparative analytical model should take into account the diachronic asymmetries across linguistic contexts. On the one hand are Afroeuropean literatures which can already boast a long tradition, such as Black British literature, which can be traced back to slave autobiographies of the eighteenth century, or Francophone African literature, strongly influenced by the Négritude movement. On the other hand are literatures of more recent development, such as the Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Italian and AfroGerman, which do not yet enjoy full recognition from the literary establishment. However, what emerges immediately from a comparative analysis is the strong dependence of these literatures from political discourse and dominant ideologies. The texts in all their dimensions (the modalities of production, distribution and reception, but also the themes treated and the stylistic choices made by authors) appear to be very much influenced by the political ideology of the national context in question. In Italy, for example, from the early nineties on, starting with a number of works published by authors of foreign background, there has been a strong insistence on the migratory dimension. These literary voices have been received as representative of a ‘literature of migration’ and, if this has undoubtedly contributed to open a public space for new voices, it has also set them limits, pushing many authors to remain thematically circumscribed to the issues of migration and integration and stylistically to a preference for testimonial writing. In Spain, on the other hand, authors of African origins, even those belonging to the second generation, are usually marketed as African rather than Afro-Hispanic, with an emphasis on the exotic elements

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of their writing, so that, as a result, in their writing many of them concentrate on their countries of origin rather than on their experience in Spain. This phenomenon also concerns countries with a longer tradition of multiculturalism in their literature. France, for example, has a way of including authors in the national canon (i.e. considering them as French) when they prove particularly successful, while labelling the others either as African or migrants. This illustrates how questions not directly concerning literature, such as the notion of national identity or the way of conceiving citizenship and belonging, weigh on the kind of literature being produced. All this seems quite disheartening, as it would appear to reduce the autonomy and power of literary creation. However, from here one can start to move towards something more constructive. Once the link between literature and politics has been acknowledged, and once one understands how the dominant ideology influences literature (especially concerning minorities), the question arises about what happens in the other direction, that is, what literature has to offer to political discourse, how these voices can in fact produce a change in the political discourse, subvert it or suggest alternative patterns. Therefore, the crucial question is about the role that Afroeuropean literatures can play in the definition of the identity of the continent. Of course this is related to issues of distribution and dissemination which are quite obvious: in order to have an effective influence on political discourse, these literatures must be visible and accessible to a wide audience. Some time ago I attended the launch of an Italian schoolbook, a critical anthology for secondary school, which aims to introduce students to the Italian literature of the last thirty years. I expressed to the author, an established scholar, my puzzlement about the fact that no authors of nonItalian origin (first, second or third generation) appeared in the index, and I asked whether he was aware of the implications of this exclusion, especially considering the age of the target readership. He replied unapologetically, explaining that, although the book did not feature any text by authors of non-Italian origin, it did indeed devote a short descriptive chapter to the ‘literature of migration’ (and that, I gather, was supposed to be sufficient). I believe that this anecdotic episode brings to light something very significant, which concerns not only Italy and not only literature. I refer to this something as the ‘ghetto of migrancy’. At this time, across Europe, a person perceived or identified as nonEuropean, even if indeed a citizen of Europe, is excluded (according especially to ethnic criteria) from the cultural identity of the continent and relegated to the condition of eternal migrant, and thus always kept on the

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margins of what is supposed to be the ‘authentic’ Europe (in the case of literature, on the margins of the national literary canon). Therefore, since citizenship (understood as membership, as belonging) in the end seems to have little to do with the possession of a passport or the experience of a person (it does not matter how long I have been here, if I speak or write in the local language, if I feel really at home), we should ask ourselves when it is that the migrant actually becomes a citizen: what should happen for migrancy to make the transition to citizenship and therefore to a condition of belonging? I believe that Afroeuropean literatures offer an answer to this question. Here we find a way out of an artificial and false idea of Europe, and we find the vision of a Europe which is plural not only in words and which has always been transcultural. In fact, these writings dismantle the notion of culture as a delimited space and emphasise instead the continuous fluctuation of cultural influences and therefore the continuous transformation of everyday cultural practices. I reject the concept of ‘literature of migration’ (even having used it myself in the past and still using it occasionally for specific purposes) because of its ghettoising implications. There exist migratory narratives (i.e. stories that tell of a migration experience) and there exist transnational authors (authors clearly linked to various national and cultural contexts, whatever their nationality), but the literature of migration itself is a not a very sensible and useful invention. In Afroeuropean literatures the migrant does not exist, or appears very briefly as migrant. In the first place, only few of the narratives produced are de facto migratory narratives. Those that are (those that explicitly describe a migratory experience) show that the sense of belonging is immediate (in some cases it starts even prior to physical displacement) and always manifold. These narratives often place Europe and Africa face to face through a process of continuous comparison between the country of origin and the host country. In this context, even those narratives that place the emphasis on differences and on hardly compatible aspects of identity reveal through the experience and the transformation of the characters an ongoing transculturation, an uninterrupted mutation of identity enacted by the negotiation between pre-existent and newly acquired cultural elements, and thus eventually dismantle the idea of a culturally homogeneous national identity. Therefore, they unveil the artificial nature of national myths (it makes no sense to speak of italianità, francité or Englishness) and outline the figure of a new European citizen, by locating identity in personal experience, in the multiple affiliations and attachments, in the present rather than in ancestral cultural roots. In this way, then, national or continental identity comes to be conceived as open and constantly

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fluctuating. Newcomers are not guests to be tolerated or forced to adapt and assimilate to a pre-existing culture, but rather agents of transformation and renewal. This is one of the crucial contributions of Afroeuropean literatures to the rewriting of Europe. Another important element is the fact that the transnational citizen, the migrant or whoever is perceived as such and therefore experiences alienation (not only in the form of rejection and discrimination but also for being seen as an exotic object) is not at all an outsider to the country, but often more of an insider than indigenous citizens. One must not forget that those who migrate or who are automatically identified as foreigners (as Other) often find themselves in difficult and even painful situations. They might find themselves in a world at the margins which is however all but marginal. It is rather central for the identity of the country, and yet the average white native is often not familiar with this world. My point is that Afroeuropean literatures narrate a Europe which is not to be found in dominant narratives, and reveal aspects of European countries which are not immediately accessible to the average citizen. For example, I, as a Neapolitan of several generations, discover, by reading some Afro-Italian authors, a very different Naples than what I have experienced, and gain through their writings a deeper knowledge of my origins. Earlier in this text I stated that Afroeuropean narratives reveal a Europe which has always been transcultural. This is another key point. These literatures do not only write the present and the future of Europe, but also the Europe of the past, that is, they rewrite European history bringing to light what does not emerge in dominant narratives. They shed light on the historical interaction of the two continents, not only at the level of domination of a continent over the other (slave trade, colonisation, evangelisation, neo-colonialism, development aid, etc.). In the first place, they show how Africa has always been a crucial element for the definition of Europe itself, how it has served as a mirror image, and how it has actually influenced European aesthetics and philosophy, how European culture has always been permeated by African elements. Moreover, they bring to light the constant African presence in the European continent throughout the centuries, for example by transposing in literary form the lives of historical figures whose African origins are not always remembered (as does, for example, Black British writer Bernardine Evaristo in her novel Soul Tourists). In this way, they dismantle the implicitly racial and racist definition of the continent, the myth of a white Europe. A further contribution of Afroeuropean literatures is the commitment of many authors to undermine stereotypes and prejudices, which weigh not

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only on relations between Europe and Africa but also on interpersonal relationships between individuals and on the daily lives of European citizens perceived as foreigners according to racial criteria presented in the form of cultural essentialism. This is an antiracist commitment voted not only to counter the blatant and violent racism of right-wing extremism, but also to implement a process of deconstruction of the structural racism of European and Western imaginary, as it emerges in language, thought, representations and in the dynamics of interaction, a hidden racism as it is revealed also in the so-called positive stereotypes on Africanness. This commitment operates at two levels: on the one hand through an analysis and an explicit reflection on this phenomena, and on the other hand, implicitly, by means of alternative representations that ‘disturb’ the expectations of readers (especially those who perceive themselves as non racist) and thus come to undermine certain prejudices. Finally, writing the New Europe also means reviewing, rewriting and reformulating the relationship between Europe and Africa. Afroeuropean literatures crucially contribute to Europe’s mental decolonisation. They outline a path to go beyond the still dominant patterns of charity, paternalism and exoticism, and to formulate instead an effective idea of equality and dignity, and implement a conception of citizenship and belonging no longer based on ancestral cultures but on the inevitably transnational and transcultural experience of the people who inhabit Europe today.

The essays in this collection The contributions contained in this volume offer general reflections as well as analyses of particular national contexts, descriptions of ongoing projects, and close readings of literary works. The first two essays approach theoretical questions and discuss the discursive and ideological frameworks around the idea of Afroeurope. In “What is this Afroeuropean?” British artist Raimi Gbadamosi provocatively addresses the problem of naming and the necessity of uncovering and questioning the “unspoken qualifiers” attached to Afroeuropean identity, as the experience of being black in Europe, he argues, is tightly interrelated to the conundrum of the terminology in use. Therefore, the focus is not on whom but rather on ‘what’ qualifies for Afroeuropeanness. This perspective, of course, raises the question of the objectification of the Other and the racist assumptions implied, a phenomenon Gbadamosi explores through reference to nursery rhymes, songs, films and other expressions of popular culture. By contextualising the African in Europe

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and the European in Africa and highlighting the differences in legitimacy and treatment, the author comes to the bitter conclusion that the “promise of independence within Europe” implicit in Afroeuropeanness might in fact be yet another form of exclusion. On the other hand, in “Europe, Race and Diaspora” Susan Arndt discusses the dynamics by which bodily differences are fabricated to pillar social hierarchies. She examines notions of race at different points in time in European history and offers a critical analysis of the myth of whiteness, from the ethnocentrism of ancient Greece to the “habit of ignoring race” in contemporary Germany. Arguing that racism “continues to exist structurally and discursively” and that ignoring the privileges of whiteness actually reinforces its hegemony, Arndt stresses the necessity for Europe to reassess its history of slavery, colonialism and genocide. She then elaborates on the concept of the ‘racial turn’, which deconstructs the category of whiteness as an ideological construction and allows us to resituate it relationally. Finally, Arndt discusses the ‘diasporic transspaces’ which transcend the borders of European nations and suggests ways by which literary studies can do justice to the “performances of entangled histories”. The second part of this volume contains essays focusing on largely unexplored contexts in Eastern, Northern and Southern Europe, thus contributing to the task of mapping the field and expanding the boundaries of Afroeurope. Taking as point of departure the general indifference to rising racism in post-Soviet Russia, in “Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic beyond the Iron Curtain” Maxim Matusevich explores the African students’ encounter with the Soviet Union in order to contextualise the current configuration of Russia as a “danger zone” for people of colour. The essay provides a fascinating historical account of how African students (mostly young men travelling to the USSR from 1957 onwards) introduced new ideas, lifestyles and artistic forms to Soviet citizens and how they openly voiced their dissent with the contradictions and hypocrisy of the communist regime. Matusevich reads the experience of Africans in the Soviet Union as an extension of the trans-Atlantic experience, and argues that the notions of racial difference widespread in contemporary Russia find their roots in the official and popular representations of Africans in Soviet times, from the Khrushchev era to Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Learning about Africa” Kristín Loftsdóttir takes a look at the peculiar position of Nordic countries, traditionally seen as being exempt from the historical guilt of colonialism, and specifically focuses on Iceland by analysing the representations of Africa and Africans in schoolbooks in a diachronic perspective. Even if Iceland was not directly involved in

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colonial enterprises, Icelanders were part of a global system of power based on colonial relationships and shared the dominant ideology by producing and perpetuating racist views of Africa and black people in general. In her analysis Loftsdóttir points out the changes in the modalities and patterns of representation along the twentieth century and observes that schoolbooks published in the past decade destabilise old views of racial purity and homogeneity, emphasising the connections across cultures and engaging with the changing ethnic configuration of Icelandic society. Crucial questions of ethics and politics of knowledge production are addressed in “Writing Our Future History Together”, where, starting from her recent and current work on the African diaspora in Finland, Anna Rastas argues for the importance of applying participatory methods in anthropological research. Providing an overview of projects encompassing both academic and divulgatory work and offering examples from her fieldwork, she shows how active participation of members of the minorities involved can work both as a way of redressing the under- and misrepresentation of African minorities in Finland and as a means of empowerment for the communities. Finally, in “African Migrants in Spain” Juan Miguel Zarandona discusses immigration policies and research resources in the Spanish context in recent years. The essay presents an overview of texts dealing with African migration from various disciplines, analyses various phases in Spanish public discourse on immigration and tries to determine whether Spain has a civic or an ethnic concept of national identity. Following a rational approach which sees a direct equation between economic growth and hospitality, Zarandona observes that attitudes towards immigrants largely depend on the economic situation and argues that therefore the recent crisis has produced a sudden change in this respect. Placing literature in the social and political contexts of the countries in which it is produced as well as in the framework of reception, the essays in the third part of this volume provide close readings of works and point out trends and new directions as well as proposing alternative interpretational strategies. In “Liminality as Critical Empowerment” Joana Passos focuses on the “international impact of writers from the southern hemisphere” and in particular on second generation immigrants, guerrilheiro memories and nomad women poets in the lusophone context, choosing a selection of works which are central to the literature of present-day Portugal. Understanding liminality as a positive and empowering position providing writers with a subversive perspective as well as skills as cultural polyglots, Passos affirms that their works offer readers “a surplus of awareness and a

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seductive journey into deeper insights” and for this reason literatures previously considered marginal are becoming increasingly visible and appealing, as an alternative canon which better represents the interconnections of the globalised world. Annalisa Mirizio’s “Autobiography as Political Essay” tackles important theoretical questions relevant to methodological perspectives in the reading of Black diasporic literature. She observes that current trends in the approach to literature by black authors are mainly based on the agonal use (in a Freudian sense) of literature, and contends that this dominant discourse might prevent us from recognising the real contribution of black authors to the reshaping of the literary field, especially in aesthetic terms. Mirizio revisits the Gramscian idea of the political value of autobiography, conceived as an alternative to the political or philosophical essay. This genre, she suggests, has enormous potential for the subaltern subject and it facilitates access to the literary field. Far from being a mere evocation of personal experience, autobiography mirrors life in a social context (as a counterpoint to official history) and provides a drive towards social change. Through a close analysis of a number of recent texts produced in Italian, Mirizio shows, however, how they problematize the notion of integration and move away from identity politics and towards a postmodern view of identity as slippery and illusory. Finally, she argues in favour of a primarily aesthetic reading of black literature, which would allow us to recognise the process of experimentation carried out by a number of authors as well as the interactions with other authors and literary tradition. In “Transcontinental Shifts” John McLeod takes the literary career of Bernardine Evaristo as indicative of recent developments in black British writing. Shifting the focus from a redefinition of national identity to a continental sense of cultural plurality, Evaristo’s work brings forward a “distinctly European, at times self-consciously global” consciousness. This emergent focus on the European space and on the pan-continental histories it contains opens up diasporic postcolonialism to new ways of conceiving identity which apply not only to specific marginalised minorities but to all citizens. In his insightful reading of Evaristo’s works, McLeod identifies a “transpositional sensibility” which dilutes dichotomic conceptions and conjures “chronotopic” worlds where a myriad of cultural locations intermingle. However, while acknowledging the enriching potential of the polycultural encounter, Evaristo is also alert to the relationships of oppression and enslavement produced in the course of history. Her vision, as conveyed in McLeod’s thrilling interpretation, enables us to gain an understanding of Afroeurope beyond constraining paradigms.

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Introduction

Francesca Giommi’s “Black British and Black Italian, two case studies: Andrea Levy and Gabriella Ghermandi” proposes a comparative analysis of two recent novels. Small Island (2004) and Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) are among the most relevant literary works in two national contexts, the British and the Italian, where the notion of blackness is understood in very different ways and where black communities present very different trajectories in terms of history as well as cultural and literary traditions. All the more interesting is, therefore, observing in literary works common narrative strategies and similar dynamics of revisiting and rewriting the canonical history of the hegemonic centre. Identifying a strong bond between history, society and literature, Giommi ascribes to literature the fundamental task of reinterpreting the past and initiating societal transformations. In particular, she argues that Levy and Ghermandi take on the task of transmitting collective memory and heritage, thus transferring some of the prerogatives of orality to the written page. Also centred on the Italian context, Daniela Brogi’s “Being different without fear” offers a close reading of Oltre Babilonia (2008), a remarkable novel by Italian author of Somali origins Igiaba Scego. Scego is one of the most outstanding figures of what is still commonly known in Italy as “migration literature”. Looking critically at the ideological and institutional frame in which the reception of this literature is inserted, and making the issue of language use pivotal in her analysis, Brogi focuses on one of the literary works which best represent the transformative power of voices with multiple backgrounds and affiliations. In the fourth and last part of the volume three writers from different corners of Afroeurope reflect on their experiences and their work. “Agnès Agboton: Self-translation and intercultural mediation” is an interpretative essay containing an interview with the author. Maya García de Vinuesa presents the work of a writer whose plurilingualism and multiple belongings are reflected into her literary work. Agboton alternatively writes in Gun, Spanish and Catalan, and translates her own works into those languages, boldly rejecting the idea of a “prevalent language” and, as a direct extension, the notion of the supremacy of origins over experience as well as that of a single home and identity. This piece provides an interesting reflection on the connection between self-translation and intercultural mediation, especially when García de Vinuesa openly discusses her own personal puzzlement in the reception of narratives conveying problematic views about gender roles and admits to have missed an ironical side to the stories, which only becomes clearer in a more attentive reading or a live performance. This, however, would seem to suggest that a reader

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untrained to recognise the oral quality of Agboton’s narratives might miss the kind of cultural transfer celebrated and wished for in this essay, but it also suggests that orality is so central in Agboton’s work that solitary reading can never get us to a complete appreciation of her literary skills. Having myself assisted to some of Agboton’s live storytelling sessions, I can only confirm that this is the case. Isabel Alonso-Breto’s interview with Antonio Lozano, founder in 1987 of the Festival del Sur in Agüimes and now coordinator of the literary program of Casa África in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, takes us to that very peculiar location represented by the Canary Islands. As crossroads of cultures and as centre of the continental triangle Europe-Africa-America, the Canary Islands, which experienced shifting influences in different phases of history, are now a unique site from where to look at the entanglements between Europe and Africa. Lozano’ engaging novels deal precisely with the complicated relationship between the two continents, and his longstanding commitment in bringing to light the cultural expressions of those entanglements makes him a central figure in our field. As a closure to the book, the autobiographical piece by Vamba Sherif discloses the interrelationship of personal and political circumstances in the making of a writer and provides, in the context of the current backlash in Europe, an assertion of belonging which powerfully resists any form of essentialism and celebrates instead a personal journey through multiple cultural influences and passions.

PART I: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS

WHAT IS THIS AFROEUROPEAN? RAIMI GBADAMOSI

After The Wailers Don’t care where you come from As long as you’re a black man You’re an African No mind your nationality You have got the identity of an African [. . .] No mind your complexion There is no rejection You’re an African ‘Cause if your ‘plexion high, high, high If your complexion low, low, low And if your ‘plexion in between You’re an African1

I remember listening to this as a child, when Peter Tosh was simply that amazing musician making statements that seemed to resonate loudly with everyone I knew. As a boy with access to a reasonable library of books on Pan-Africanism, the song did not serve as a mantra for belief, it was simply a great song. Yet I return to it at this moment to address some of the problems that I face at this moment of new naming, the need to address the unspoken qualifiers of what makes for the position, place, politics, and properties of the Afroeuropean. Thankfully, for me, Peter Tosh had faced up to the possible contradiction in his own call. Being ‘black and African’ has never been, will never be, simple (it is after all a way of speaking to racial/political/national difficulties), and being black in Europe is part of the conundrum of naming. If all who meet his criterion are Africans (taking his provisos on nationality and hue into consideration), then who is the African in this quandary? It is possible to argue that Europe, in this 1

Tosh, “African”, in Equal Rights.

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instance, is easier to define. It is a quasi-geographical entity, all the African has to do is appear in Europe (thereby making the European distinct), and the African qualifies for Afroeuropean-ness.

Posing Questions The question I seek to unravel is not ‘who is the Afroeuropean?’ It is something much more obtuse than that. I am interested in the ‘what’ being raised wherever the term ‘Afroeuropean’ is invoked. ‘What’ being the thing or things used to specify something made available to an inquiring cohort, it is instinctively sought when something new is confronted. It is the thing that requires definition before one can investigate the distanced ‘who’. Even if the multiple ‘who’ strives and manages to remain singular, the ‘what’ will be used to reduce the many new bodies into a manageable form. That the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ are inescapably linked in this case does not make the question any less pertinent, being that without the need to define the ‘who’ there will be little need to clarify the ‘what’ of the Afroeuropean. Like Stuart Hall, I find that questions require firm placement, and that: These moments are always conjunctural. They have their historical specificity; and although they always exhibit similarities and continuities with the other moments in which we pose a question like this, they are never the same moment. And the combination of what is similar and what is different defines not only the specificity of the moment, but the specificity of the question, and therefore the strategies of cultural politics with which we attempt to intervene in popular culture, and the form and style of cultural theory and criticizing that has to go along with such an intermatch.2

Nursery Rhymes Nothing like controversy to liven debate. And Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, an Eighteenth Century rhyme still remains under cultural scrutiny. Known by most European children, it is as follows: Baa, Baa Black Sheep, Have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, Three bags full, 2

Hall, “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” 104.

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What Is This Afroeuropean? One for my master, One for my dame, One for the little boy That lives down the lane.

There is contemporary disquiet and probing that the questioner finds it necessary to point out that the sheep is black. There is acceptance that sheep are normally white, and a black sheep is an abnormality. Wool, as a valuable commodity, relied on bleaching and dyeing to meet market demands, so white wool was sought, and black wool was spurned as not being commercially desired. Add to this the belief held across Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Europe that black sheep were signs of the devil, that the ‘black sheep’ of the family (still in common usage) was wayward, and we have a complex mess of social, political, economic, and racial messages. So there is no surprise that apocryphal narratives remain around this rhyme. This may have nothing to with the Afroeuropean, but it does raise questions laying dormant regarding the subtleties of language and the possibilities of defining what the Afroeuropean is. I looked up the rhyme online and came across the question whether it is racist. The preferred answer on Yahoo Answers, by Brooke B, was: First of all it’s “who lives down the lane” Get it right, it’s a classic. No it’s not a racist poem. Now if it went something like this: Baa Baa Black man, have you any crack yes boy yes boy up there on the rack. One for the Gangsta, one for the Thug and one for the baby daddy that don’t pay child support, and don’t give a fug. Now that would be racist.3

One cannot but be bothered by this aggressive response. The simple collapsing of race and stereotyping tells of deep social encoding. There is also that niggling feeling that points to unspoken opinions, but remains heard and understood. The need to defy and define the other’s presence remains paramount.

3

Baa Baa Black Sheep is a Racist Poem? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/ index?qid=20080520151412AAoFiv2 08 Dec 2009. (Went back to check a detail, and this question and answer had been deleted. 20 April 2010)

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What is this Afroeuropean? It cannot be ‘who’, no one is an Afroeuropean. Perhaps this is a way of restating that the African in Europe, in the final analysis, cannot simply become a European.4 There is congruency between this naming and Peter Tosh’s song after all. To define what the Afroeuropean is, we will be consigned to articulating what the essence of the African and European is. And this is outside the scope of this paper. The limits of land are also under question: are we to deal with the concept of Europe as a collective of nations, quasi-continent, or is it Europe as a political entity (The European Union) that is set as a parallel to continental Africa, or is it the nations of the Africa Union which includes all those in the Diaspora?

Who is? Defining who the contextualised African is, requires pause: Is the ‘African’ a person who was born in Africa and made their way to Europe? Is the ‘African’ a person born of an ‘African’ in Europe? Is the ‘African’ a person with firsthand experience of Africa? Is the ‘African’ a person with historical links to Africa, and how distant? Is the ‘African’ a person who identifies with Africa? Is the ‘African’ a person that is ‘black’?5 Is the ‘African’ a person identifiable as an African? Is the ‘African’ a person?

New Land Now it becomes necessary to explain where Afroeuropa is. It is a place somewhat tied to the imaginative process. Is Afroeuropa a mythical home for an uncertain set of people claiming temporary equality with, or dominance over others? What is the make-up of the gallant individuals equally welcome and at ease in this delightful syncretic land? A land able to adopt the de-homed, or should it be the displaced? I am asking for 4

In spite of history, birth, and longevity in Europe, there appears a coding that the African is marked in a way that Europeans are not. So Europeans in the Americas or further afield can lay claim to land and place in a way clearly denied to the African. 5 All Africans are not ‘black’. Furthermore, in the United Kingdom, ‘black’ is a political category.

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What Is This Afroeuropean?

information specifying some-thing, not some-one. The conceptualisation of Afroeuropa has to come before it is possible to imagine those who will accept its boundaries. What is a ‘thing’ in this context? A thing is repeatable or reproducible. Alternately, who is a person? A person is unique, irreplaceable, defined, by their own being. A person is named and identifiable, if one person is an Afroeuropean, is it incumbent on everyone else to be like them (the first), identifiable by a marker rather than selfhood? So what is this Afroeuropean? What is the fantasy of the African ‘other’ made apparent to the European? The Afroeuropean does not, cannot, exist in Africa, there are Africans, and Europeans, in Africa. However, the historical and present difficulty Europeans have in acknowledging the humanity of Africans when they share their land in Africa is well documented, be it isolationist techniques, or a clear retention of cultural and political identification with Europe rather than with Africa; it leaves no illusion as to what Europeans see themselves as. This distinction says a great deal about what the African is supposed to be, especially when considering the ever-present calls for Africans to integrate and assimilate themselves in Europe. Thank you said the master, Thank you said the dame, Thank you said the little boy who lives down the lane.

Cinematic Diversion There is a paradox at hand: how does one separate the reality of Europeans in Africa from the existence of Africans in Europe? I watched Blood Diamond with some despair, it was yet another case of Black Africans at each other’s throats, or in this case, limbs as well. The European in Africa was always treated with deference, was the one best able to kill effectively and at the end of it all could redeem themselves of all their atrocities. The categorisations of people according to skin colour and origin in the film was simplistic at best, but very telling of a collective imagination. If both the mercenary, in the form of White (European) ‘Rhodesian” Danny Archer, and the Warlord, in the form of Black (African) Sierra Leonean Captain Poison, want a large pink diamond so that they can both get out of the mess they are in, how is it that when the Warlord is hacked to death with a shovel in the mud of a riverbank by the Black (African) Sierra Leonean fisherman, Solomon Vandy, the viewer is supposed to feel justice has been done because the Warlord had used Solomon’s son Dia to his own ends? However, it was the same for Danny Archer who intended to

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kill Father and Son once the diamond was found, and when it came to the crunch, Danny Archer was willing to use Dia as leverage to get the diamond’s location. Knowing all this, knowing that Danny Archer is a racist who compares Solomon Vandy to a monkey, and calls him kaffir to boot, how is it that when Archer dies it is a moving and redeeming moment? Danny Archer has the time to call the ‘love of his life’ in the form of White European ‘American’ Maddy Bowen, pour sand through his hands mixed with his blood, which places him firmly with the land (the ‘land’ having previously been succinctly theorised by Colonel Coetzee), and look over a beautiful view as he expires. The symbolism of Danny Archer’s blood fixed in the soil and Captain Poison’s blood being washed away is clear, the true inheritor of the land is the one whose blood colours the land, makes the soil red. And in this case it is Danny Archer who is presented as the real African, the one who truly loves the land. That Danny Archer kills, and arranges to kill without thought, is acceptable, and it is only when he kills White European ‘South African’ Colonel Coetzee that he too is shot, after surviving what appears to be ridiculous odds before this. It is almost impossible to imagine Archer or Coetzee being Euroafricans. It is the norm to see them as ‘Rhodesians’ or ‘South Africans’, controllers of the land, identified with control, but not displaced in any way. It is not envisioned that the European will be subject to Africans, while the reverse is taken for granted.

Naming Dubbing part of Europe’s population Afroeuropean is an act of simultaneous acceptance and rejection. In this case the rejection looms large, as the acceptance is linked to the commodifiable productivity of the African who finds themselves within the enforceable borders of Europe. This constant material and cultural enrichment of Europe comes at a price to the African producer. There is no denying that Africans seek critical and financial rewards from the Western machinery (and the same in reverse, even if with different motives and power relations), which is capable of extending their practices to a larger audience, and provide fulfilling financial rewards over a short period of time. And yet it becomes questionable whether everything should be given up in return. The brutality that represents European states and their relation to those it sees as aliens (those that form a large majority of those that make up the main body of those dubbed Afroeuropeans), forces the creation of a refuge, a place to escape to when tired of the defining character Europeans denote. There is the attempt to establish a definite African identity in

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What Is This Afroeuropean?

relationship to the ‘Euroeuropean’, to counterbalance possible erosions of the ‘dominant’ population. Unlike in the United States of America, where the habit of prefixing nationality is an act of recognising that all apart from the ‘Native’ Americans are immigrants, prefixing ‘European’ acts to render the prefixed the eternal immigrant. Africans and their histories are constantly being placed under stress in the definition of the Afroeuropean, it is the fact of lineage, to be traceable as Africans within Europe that makes them what they are. An African that is not distinguishable from any other European cannot perform this role. There are a lot of Africans that have made their way to Europe and have culturally and racially become part of the ‘main’ population and are not seen as Africans at all. So is the Afroeuropean reality determined by visual difference? It would appear Africans are coded by how much of their African-ness is on show, how much of it is available for sale, for representation, how much of this African-ness is available for commodification by Europe. It is not to be imagined that the African is particularly welcome in Europe. This essay not being the platform to address the vagaries of immigration and the attendant policies and news reports that vilify the African as a questionable addition to Europe’s population. This text does not address the many strategies of rejection instituted to separate African people from any sense of being and belonging in Europe. Africans in Europe are not about to go away, nor does it make them any less African. This is not because there are great needs that those of African origin want to be met in Europe, it is just that this is their home, where they have chosen to make home, where they live and feel they can make the best contributions to Humanity. These are the realities of the world. In the main, Africans in Europe are not economic, cultural, or political refugees, they are simply exercising their right to avail themselves of global opportunity (the same way Europeans did and do). They make their contributions to their chosen society in the face of systemic social, economic, and political barriers. In spite of these limiters, or perhaps because of them, Africans have a profound impact on the life of Europe. But one is only supposed to speak of the African influence if the African is distinct from their European counterparts, lose this apparent difference, and lose value. And while there is still difficulty in accepting Africans as Europeans, even in the face of a long and awkward joint history, this awkwardness ought to bring about closeness, but a lasting imbalance in the relationship, where Europeans maintain a sense of superiority in relation to Africans (wherever this contact may be), has made for increased alienation.

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The Present Media On the thirtieth of April 2010, a BBC journalist, Tom Fielding, introducing a cultural item, the South African Garden at the British Museum in London, on the influential BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, presented it as ‘something from the heart of darkness to the heart of Bloomsbury’. It was the first time I wrote to the BBC, and it is not that this was the first time I had heard such statements, worthy of ridicule, from the programme. It is just that after a while the constant expressions of practiced ignorance or insensitivity to historical realities become rather tiring, and this is a programme I enjoy listening to most days. In isolation this may not amount to much, but considering another current BBC programme, Welcome to Lagos, a three-part series on slum dwellers in Lagos that seeks to reveal the ‘belly of the hungry beast that is the modern megacity’, it becomes difficult to ignore a continuing bias. I accept that Welcome to Lagos shows real parts of Africa, and I acknowledge the difficult conditions people face to make life work. Nevertheless, the constant denigration of the African existence by Charities and the many arms of the mass media make it difficult to imagine the meeting of equals assumed and desired by all in general (but by Africans in particular).

Dinner? In a parody of the now classic film starring a young Sidney Poitier, Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner,6 or the reversal in Guess Who7 starring Bernie Grant, Roddy Doyle presents a contemporary interpretation of the now familiar narrative. Larry Limmane is confronted by the reality of an African in Europe, and the African was coming to his home: - He’s not gorgeous or anything else! Not in this house! He realised he was standing up, but he didn’t want to sit down again. He couldn’t. Mona spoke. - What’s wrong? He looked at faces looking at him, waiting for the punchline, praying for it. Frightened faces, confused and angry. There was nothing he could say. Nothing safe, nothing reassuring or even clear. He didn’t know why he was standing there. - Is it because he’s black? Said Mona. 6 7

Kramer, Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner, 1967. Sullivan, Guess Who, 2005.

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What Is This Afroeuropean? Larry didn’t let himself nod. He never thought he’d be a man who’d nod: yes, I object to another man’s colour. Shame was rubbing now against his anger. - Phil Lynott was black, love. Mona reminded him. Phil Lynott had been singing ‘Whisky in the Jar’ when Larry and Mona had stopped dancing and kissed for the first time. And now he could talk. - Phil Lynott was Irish! He said. – He was from Crumlin. He was fuckin’ 8 civilised.

The complexity of the relationship is illustrated in James Baldwin’s assessment of humanity: There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal after all, to what, and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth is of grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet in the 9 shifting sands of status.

Ben, the man coming to dinner, is a Nigerian accountant, from the north of the country, who in Larry Limmane’s imagination came from a place where: Well, there was AIDS for a start. Africa was riddled with it. And then there was - it wasn’t poverty, exactly – it was the hugeness of it, the Live Aid pictures, the thousands and thousands of people, the flies on their faces, the dead kids. Heartbreaking, but – what sort of society was that? What sort of people came out of a place like that? And all the civil wars – machetes and machine-guns, and burning tyres draped around people’s necks, the savagery.10

What is unfortunate is that nothing much changes. Even in the realm of ironic fiction, the reader is still confronted with the mess Africa is supposed to be in. Even Doyle’s Ben is a man on the run, whose sister, Jumi, had been ‘disappeared’ by the machinery of the state, and his brother’s medical education has been stopped by imprisonment. In the rewriting of a ‘classic’ text, the ‘African’ is still the maligned, if noble and innocent one, with a fixed narrative to support his position, and it is the European who has to go through the transformation in order to accept the 8

Doyle, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner”, 5-6. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 96. 10 Doyle, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner”, 9. 9

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African/black man’s humanity. We are not invited to interrogate a reversal; Guess Who, while humorous, simply does not achieve conviction in the face of an overarching hegemony. The power relationship, one to the other, still remains fixed. The African in Europe is still the one seeking equality, it can only be so when the geographical/economic/racial chips are down. And it is within this imbalance that the Afroeuropean emerges. It reinforces Baldwin’s observation made over half a century ago, when looking at the condition of relationships between those that saw themselves as American (and this meant European-American in its many guises) and those from Africa. Baldwin points out: [T]he unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal – an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no colour, but overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value. Also this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this.11

This is partly the reality of the Afroeuropean in the European imagination. It is a way of making the African into something else, something manageable, something that will make its way safely into the space allocated for it by the arbiters of all that is acceptable. Suddenly the competences of the African allow them entry into the arms of Europe. The Afroeuropean is not the raw material found in Africa, but not quite the refined object from Europe either. It is somewhere in between, it is the product of an uncomfortable union, the poster child of an uncomfortable alliance, the inheritance of an unwilling integration. The promise of independence within Europe implicit in Afroeuropean is a false promise. There is the feeling that there is a meeting of intentions, not the eating of one by the other. As demanded already, where is the Euroafrican? Where is the European that requires a prefix to settle into place? Its absence is telling, and its lack of necessity would be frustrating if one were to demand parity of Europe and internalise the jingoistic premise of Africa for Africans. One form of European colonialism ends in Africa, and from these liberations nations rise, determining their own existence as nations and people. Fixed boundaries appear to rival extant models of community, and

11

Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 102.

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What Is This Afroeuropean?

this is supposed to bring about a new age of equality, but as Baldwin highlights: The word ‘independence’ in Africa, and the word ‘integration’ here are almost equally meaningless; that is Europe has not yet left Africa, and black men [and women] here are not yet free. And both of these last statements are undeniable facts, related facts, containing the gravest implications for us all.12

The Afroeuropean produces representation for all Africans resident in Europe. The faces we are to recognise will be chosen from the ‘successful’ ones, those who have made contributions deemed worthy by the mainstream and who (as a matter of necessity) do not see themselves as being related to Africa in any fashion, other than in desire to exhibit what they see as valuable from the continent. Let it not be assumed that all Africans will be dubbed Afroeuropean, soon it will become a device for separation. Where is the Africa, and equally, where is the Europe for the Afroeuropean? Is a Tanzanian in Greece the same as a Malawian in France? Is the linguistic and cultural comfort of a Nigerian in London similar to the experience of a Madagascan in Paris? What is it like to have to maintain a myth of beneficial living in Europe, when the reality is very different indeed? What is the reality of imposed or chosen ghettoised existences of African communities away from ‘home’? Do these scenarios simply not end up in privations not understood or appreciated by Europeans who find, in the main, that when living abroad, their conditions are better than in the Europe they left behind? Maybe this is the future, Afroeuropeans will return to Africa in search of the goof life.

New Versions There is a practice of rewriting Baa Baa Black Sheep to meet new needs, so in the spirit of my disquiet, here is yet another: Hey, hey Afroeuropean, Have you any culture? Yes sir, yes sir, As much as you can conjecture.

12

Ibid., 95-96.

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Some for your past, Some for your present. And even more for your future, Where I am not meant. I take what I can said your past, I take what I can said your present. I take what I can said your future, Where I am not meant.

Works Cited Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. London: Michael Jospeh, 1963. Doyle, Roddy. “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner”. In The Deportees. London: Vintage, 2007. Hall, Stuart. “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” In Social Justice, Vol. 20 No. 1-2, Spring-Summer 1993: 101-114. Kramer, Stanley. Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner, 1967. Sullivan, Kevin Rodney. Guess Who, 2005. Tosh, Peter. “African”. In Equal Rights, 1977.

EUROPE, RACE AND DIASPORA SUSAN ARNDT

Identity is a fiction created by inventing difference and difference is a fiction invented because identities are needed – needed not for survival, but for surviving as the fittest. It is these very needs to claim privileges and perform power which determine the criteria on which patterns of identity and difference are based. A most prominent stage offering such needed criteria is, of course, the human body. “[T]here can be no natural way of considering the body,” as Mary Douglas stresses, “that does not involve at the same time a social dimension… If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries.”1 This dynamics of inventing bodily differences to pillar social ones, that is, to embody mental, cultural and religious differences and hierarchies, can be traced as far back as to antiquity. One of the most powerful drawings of borderlines on the human body has been the classification of complexions, resulting in the distinction and categorisation of ‘skin colours’. Thus framed, over centuries a “regime of looking” was fabricated that has led people to “believe in the factuality of difference [of ‘skin colours’, S.A.] in order to see it.”2 Skin colour, in turn, became the grounding pillar for the colonialist invention of ‘human races’ and the thus related symbolic order of racialised positions and identities. In my article, I discuss notions of ‘race’ in a diachronic perspective. In doing so, I touch upon various points of time in European (or, to be more precise, Greek, German and English) history. Thus framed, I read race in general and whiteness in particular as a colonial myth, social position and critical category of analysis. To conclude, I elaborate on the concept of the ‘racial turn’.

1 2

Douglas, Natural Symbols, 170. Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness, 5.

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The Social Meaning of Physical Difference in Classical Greek Philosophy In the face of Greek slavery and wars of conquest, Ancient Greece and particularly Alexander the Great needed strategies to legitimate their acts of violence and injustice, which paradoxically undermined those very achievements upon which Greek society proudly founded its very notions of superiority. As a result, forms of demarcation were fabricated which established a worldview pillared on a division between ‘Greeks’ and the ‘rest’, who were generalised as ‘Barbarians’. This division was grounded in a theory of ‘pure descent’, dependent on blood and/or geographical ties. Applying this paradigm, Aristotle elaborated the first and last formal and systematic theory of slavery. He argued that slavery was both natural and just, for in the same way that he saw the union of male and female as a natural drive resulting from the need to reproduce, he saw the pursuit of survival necessitating slavery. Additionally, he argued that nature defined who was born to be a slave and who a master: “[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing that is not only necessary, but also expedient; from the hour of their birth some”, and he meant the ‘Barbarians’, “are marked out for subjection” and “others”, that is the Greeks, “for rule”.3 This allegedly naturally given order of master and slave would, as Aristotle continued to argue, manifest itself in physical attributes, which, in turn, would determine competences. Nature would like to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves, making the one strong for servile labour, the other upright, and although useless for such services, useful for political life in the arts both of war and peace.4

Besides bodily attributes such as ‘physical stature’, the colour and texture of hair as well as ‘skin colour’ played an important role in Greek attempts to invent bodily differences as markers of differing competences and mental dispositions as well as cultural hierarchies. In that vein, it was postulated that climate and other environmental factors influenced physical attributes. Just as much as Greek mappings positioned Greece in terms of geopolitics and climate as the centre of the world, the ‘skin colour’ of the Greeks was defined as being the centre and norm of all ‘skin colours’. This is mirrored in the fact that the Greek term for ‘skin colour’, andreíkelon, refers to what is considered to be the Greek complexion only. 3 4

Aristotele, Politics, I.5. Ibid.

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In as far as it translated as ‘human-like’, it seemed to even imply that all complexions different from andreíkelon performed beyond humanity. Andreíkelon was contrasted with both the ‘skin colour’ of the Ethiopians, that is, all non-Egyptian African peoples, who had – as was etymologically implied – “burnt faces” as well as with ‘white skin’. Thus andreíkelon was situated as less dark or affected by the sun than black, yet darker than ‘white skin’. The demarcation line between andreíkelon and ‘white skin’ was, however, drawn in a manner that was by no means clear or consistent – a fact which corresponded with the considerable polyvalence of ‘white skin’ in Greek society. There were two main connotations of ‘white skin-colour’: Firstly, Greeks considered it a marker of Persians and people of Europe’s ‘extreme north’ such as Scythians, who were later replaced in discourse by the Galls and Germanic peoples. In this context, ‘white skin’ (as opposed to the ‘black skin’ of the Ethiopians in the ‘extreme South’) implied cowardliness, harmlessness and effeminateness.5 While in this respect whiteness was positioned as non-Greek, ‘white skin’ was secondly also the locus of an internal differentiation within Greek society along the lines of the structural categories of gender and class. In due correspondence with the climate theory’s postulate that ‘white skin’ was untainted (by the sun), bourgeois women, whose life was centred in the shadows of the house, were situated as white. In this case, whiteness carried implications not only of femininity (a connotation that resembles the interpretation of the whiteness of Persians), but also of beauty and grace. Moreover, in contemporary texts and pictures Greek philosophers are presented as pale or ‘white-skinned’ – a depiction often visually further heightened by their wearing of white clothing, which befits their prestigious social standing.6 This characterisation of philosophers as ‘white’ can undoubtedly be interpreted as suggesting that they were distinguished not by physical, but rather mental work inside the house. Moreover, it implies that whiteness was accorded potentials of wisdom, spirituality and a prestigious social standing and thus evaluated in a far more ambiguous and positive way than blackness.

Christian Colour Symbolism as Negotiated in Wolfram van Eschenbach’s Parzival The knowledge accumulated in classical antiquity that cultural differences manifested themselves physically and that physical differences conversely 5 6

Poiss, “Die Farbe des Philosophen”, 152. Cf.: Jackson, “Aristotle’s Lecture Room and Lectures.”

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corresponded to mental and physical capabilities was further fostered in the ensuing centuries and enriched in discursive accordance with aspects of the Christian faith and the thus informed knowledge. In fact, emerging Christianity appropriated and abrogated the colour symbolism of antiquity. A metaphor for death and grief as early as antiquity, black became a symbol of filth and dirt in medieval colour symbolism.7 This idea is manifested in the proverb, “To wash an Ethiop/blackamoor is to labour in vain”, which refers to the impossibility of an undertaking or futile effort. It presumably dates back to Aesop, who utilised the image as evidence of nature’s power and permanence. A reference to this very proverb appears in the Bible, in the Book of Jeremiah, 13:23, where the question is asked: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?”8 With respect to the Christian belief system, black became a symbol of hell and the devil, and, correspondingly of sin, guilt, shame, malice and the obligation of penance – to make it short: of evil.9 White, however, was established as the antithesis of black, that is, the colour of purity, innocence (also meaning virginity), virtue and the divine.10 This was often visualised in the transcendence of the heavenly and the white of angels. Just as much as white became a general metaphor for Christianity and its home, Europe, Black was a metaphor for Africans as well as those who adhered to ‘Othered’ religions, most prominently, Moslems and Jews. Thus framed, Christian colour symbolism also informed a politics of ‘skin colour’ that squeezed – in a truly conceptualising process of abstraction – the billions of ‘skin colours’ of the world into a simplifying matrix in which ‘white skin-colour’ was made to be the marker of normality, superiority and perfect physical beauty. That Andreikolon had lost not only its power, but even its visibility, of course, due to the decline of the Greek empire.11 In doing so, the Greek notion of whiteness of being a symbol of femininity and – as far as the Greek female body was referred to – even a marker of beauty was strengthened. Blackness, in turn, was defined to mark inadequate morality, ugliness, promiscuity, shame, sin, disobedience and acts that were regarded as sexually abnormal and physically deformation. “Always we find the link between blackness and 7

Cf.: Jordan, White over Black, 7. The Bible (King James Version). Online-Edition: http://www.biblegateway.com/ (10.11. 2006). 9 Cf.: Jordan, White over Black, 7; Hall, Kim. “Fair Texts/Dark Ladies”, 69. 10 Cf.: Fryer, Staying Power, 10, 135; Jordan, White over Black, 7. 11 Cf.: Fryer, Staying Power, 10, 135; Jordan, W. White over Black, 7; Briggs, This Stage-Play World, 96. 8

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the monstrous, and particularly a monstrous sexuality.”12 In this context, a causal link between ‘black skin colour’ and a duty and obligation to serve white people was invented. This was manifested, for example, in the curse that Noah puts on his grandson Canaan after Ham saw his (drunken) father’s nakedness, urging him and his descendants to become the servants of Japeth and his lineage. Although no reference is made to ‘skin colour’ in this whole passage, it is discursively present. First, the name Ham is derived etymologically from ‘dark’ and ‘hot’ and hence refers to particular African and Middle Eastern climate zones. Second, Ham and his son Canaan are, according to Biblical genealogy, considered the progenitors of many African and Middle Eastern cultures, and hence people who were (and still largely are) conceived to be Black, while Japeth is regarded as the progenitor of most European and thus, according to the Biblical understanding, white peoples, from the Greeks and Iberians to the Scythians and Irish. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is a relevant cultural-historical document that demonstrates how ‘skin colour’ was conceptualised in the 12th and 13th centuries as a category of difference that was interwoven with religious difference and heavily influenced by Christian colour symbolism, thus demonstrating an awareness of the believed superiority of whiteness. Parzival’s most central trait is his Christian faith. Although he is not described explicitly as having ‘white skin’, the importance of (his) whiteness comes to light in a reflexive fashion when other characters are introduced as being non-white: Belacane, who is positioned as a “dusky moorish Queen”13, and Feirefiz, her son. Before Gahmuret meets Parzival’s mother Herzeloyde, he falls in love with Belacane and sires Feirefiz with her. When leaving Belacane, he claims that he does not do so because of her “swerze”14 [blackness], but rather because of her faith.15 The mere fact, however, that he evokes blackness as a marker of difference (even though to declare it being nonrelevant), suggests that in the binary opposite of Islam/Christian a difference of ‘skin colour’ resonates, too. The fact that van Eschenbach is well aware of the meaning of ‘skin colour’ is, indeed, manifested throughout the text, for example in the words with which the narrator depicts the love encounter between Gahmuret and Belacane: “The Queen disarmed him with her own dark 12

Newman, “And Wash the Ethiop White”, 148. Cf.: Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human, 41-42. 13 Eschenbach, Parzival (Penguin), 30. 14 Eschenbach, Parzival (Reclam), I.2 91 5, p. 158. 15 Cf.: Ibid., I.1 55 25: 96-97; I.2 94 11-15, p. 162/163.

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hands … The Queen yielded to sweet and noble love with Gahmuret, her heart’s own darling, little though their skins matched in colour.”16 In as far as Gahmuret and Belacane’s love is described as “sweet” and “noble”, it seems to be unaffected by racialising notions; however, the very qualification evoked by the fact that their skin is described as “ungelîch”; that is, different, marks that there is knowledge about ‘skin colour’ being a relevant category of difference. Moreover, theorems of later ‘race theories’ are already anticipated in Parzival in as far as the child (Feirefiz) sired by their love is portrayed as divergent from the norm of human nature in that he is born with a skin that “was pied”.17 He was “both black and white… His hair and all his skin were particoloured like a magpie.”18 By comparing Feirefiz to a magpie, the rhetorical figure of ‘colonial Othering’ by employing animal metaphors is applied. Moreover, by inventing him as a freckled human being (as is implied by his name Feirefiz translating as pied son), the racist thesis is employed that a crossbreeding of different ‘races’ will lead to abnormalities. Even if these are called “marvels”, they position him as differing from the white norm. What is more, by making Belacane kiss the “white patches” of her son’s skin, van Eschenbach has her even position whiteness above Blackness,19 thus devaluing (her own) Blackness. In doing so, she is made to echo and affirm the epic’s opening lines, where the magpie allegory is introduced.20 Here, in the logic of Christian colour symbolism, the white (of the magpie) represents the colour of honour, loyal temper, courage, and Heaven and is contrasted with black (of the magpie) as the symbol of cowardice, shame, infidelity and Hell. His white patches seem to enable Feirefiz, in contrast to his mother, who is Black only, to live in Europe and among Christians. Yet the fact that he has black patches makes Feirefiz Parzival’s antithetical ‘Other’. Analogously, in terms of religion, Feirefiz is in-between. While Belacane merely claims that she intends to get baptised, Feirefiz wholeheartedly takes this step. It is true that this allows him to see the Grail, marry its carrier and thus enter Parzival’s world. Because he was born a Moslem, however, he is not allowed to belong to it. While in other medieval works, 16

Cf.: Ibid., 34; Cf.: “Dôpflac diu küneginne/ Einer werden süezer minne,/ und Gamuret ir herzen trût./ ungelîch war doch ir zweier hût” (I.1 44 27-30: 78/79). 17 Ibid., I.1 57, 16: 100-101. 18 Ibid., 25.10-16: 40; Cf.: „wîz und swarzer varwe er schein .../Als ein agelster wart gevar/sîn hâr und ouch sîn vel vil gar.” (I.1 57 17, 27-28, 100-101). 19 Cf.: “diu küngîn juste in sunder twâl/ vildicke an sînbu blanken mâl” (I.1 57 1920, p. 100-101). 20 Ibid., I.1 1 1-14: 6-7.

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such as the romance King of Tars, a person’s converting to Christianity is accompanied by his becoming white (or his casting off of dreadful physical features), there is no indication here that Feirefiz’s ‘skin colour’ or position in the symbolic order of ‘skin colours’ changes. On the contrary, ultimately, Parzival summons him to go back to where he belongs – namely to India, as the Orient is now geographically confined. This reveals that Feirefiz is to remain a ‘foreigner’ in Europe – and that the religion he was born into plays just as much a fundamental role therein as ‘skin colour’. In actual fact, it is not Feirefiz who goes down in history as the first white Christian leader in the Orient, but rather his son, Priest Johannes, born a Christian and by a white mother, who goes down in history as the first white Christian leader in the Orient. Ultimately, the characters of Belacane and Feirefiz do “not tell us that differences in skin colour were not important at that time, but rather that religious and cultural differences were already colour-coded… The black/white dichotomy fuses with the one between Islam and Christianity.”21 This fusion was performed particularly in the religiously informed war for supremacy between the Spaniards and Northern African peoples in the Iberian Peninsula, which started in the early 8th century and was won in 1492 by the Spaniards. On the side of the Spanish, the war was accompanied by a rhetoric of anti-Islam racism that relied heavily on the aforementioned religious colour symbolism. A manifestation of this is the very fact that the apostle James, who became the Spaniards’ patron called “matamoros” [moor-killer], was enveloped in whiteness – as is documented not least in 16th century paintings which surround him in light, dress him in white clothes and portray a desire for white skin.

‘Skin Colour’ as a Category of Slavery and 16th Century Early Colonialism Following Columbus’s infamous error that made Europe get to know the Americas, Europeans began in the 16th century to conquer and populate territories outside of Europe. In doing so, they appropriated their riches, oppressed, enslaved and murdered their peoples. Such actions contradicted everything which Europe claimed to have stood for ever since antiquity and, more specifically, in the Renaissance: freedom, democracy, ethics, ‘civilisation’ and the primacy of human dignity.22 Hence they longed for a 21

Loomba, “Religion, Colour, and Racial Difference”, 47-48. Cf. Arndt, “Myths and Masks of ‘Travelling’: Colonial Migration and Slavery in Shakespeare’s Othello, The Sonnets and The Tempest.”

22

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reason which could explain and legitimate that which was neither to be justified nor legitimated– violence, war, genocide and terror. As a consequence, Europeans started to create a myth of European superiority to those peoples whom they were about to murder, enslave and disown. This claim of superiority was pillared by both Christianity and the implementation of ‘skin colour’ as a naturally given category of difference, which were now fed into a newly created category: ‘race’. Being applied by various theologians, scholars and writers as early as the late 16th century, the idea of an existence of ‘human races’ centred on a message which was as simple as it was silly: the ‘white race’ is superior to all other ‘races’.23 Integral to this invention was a racialising religious discrimination against adherers of non-Christian religions. Part and parcel of this invention of ‘race’ was that – in an obvious rebirth of Aristotle’s theory of slavery and an exploitation of Christian colour symbolism - the ‘white race’ was defined to be entitled to enslave and colonise those the whites claimed to be their racial ‘Other’. This process of ‘Othering’ comprised both demonisation and exotification as two sides of the same coin. Central to both layers of alterisation is the century-old rhetoric of equating the ‘Other’ with ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’ and constructing it as the link between man and animal. In thus dehumanising the colonised, the colonial space could be depeopled in a virtual way – which was, in turn, a precondition to claim that the colonial space were a terra nullius waiting to be ‘discovered’ and become Europe’s ‘New World’. Reality was, however, that this terra nullius needed first of all to be produced by eradicating local and deep-rooted cultural, political, religious and social structures, which led to genocide and the deportation of enslaved people. This emergence of ‘race’ with whiteness as its superior centre was, in turn, catalytic as it evoked an excessive celebration of white ‘skin colour’, as particularly performed in Early Modern England under Elizabeth I and as is documented in many contemporary paintings.24 The self-glorification of Elisabeth I as the white-painted queen is based on the aspiration of the ageing queen to present her unmarried and childless status in terms of Christian imagery of virginity and virtue. Yet, the excess of whiteness embodied and promoted by her in politics, cosmetics and arts also framed

23

Cf.: Jordan, White over Black, 10. Cf. Hall, “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’. Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, 65.

24

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England’s ambitions to enter the European project of trading African people as slaves and of conquering what had been declared the ‘New World’.25 This excess of whiteness found its aesthetic counterpart in a hyperbole of fairness that characterises English Renaissance literature. In Shakespeare’s works, for example, where the word ‘race’ is used 18 times with reference to humans, fairness is one of the 10 most commonly used words. Interestingly, besides the conventional appraisal of fairness as a most cherished attribute of the female body, in his sonnets he also ascribes fairness to a white aristocratic man. This seems to correspond to the economic and political need of early colonialism to constitute whiteness as a new marker of power, which then, of course, could not remain a realm of women, but needed to become a domain of English/European masculinity. Yet by thus praising homoerotic love, he simultaneously challenges contemporary notions of fairness. This becomes even more striking in as far as – in the so-called “dark lady”-corpus of his sonnets –, Shakespeare opposes the beauty ideal as propagated and embodied by Queen Elisabeth I in particular and the Elizabethans in general. His lyrical I ascribes fairness not to a brunette white “dark lady” – as is commonly claimed irrespective of the fact that the woman is dressed in blackness and associated with slavery yet never called a lady and associated with “darkness” only once – but to a Black female slave who has been forced into prostitution, who is never in the corpus called dark or a lady, but who is more likely an African female slave forced into prostitution. This, for example, is manifested when in sonnet 130 he declares: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun … If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;/If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head; I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks.26

In his challenge of Elizabethan notions of fairness and beauty the lyrical I even goes as far as resituating blackness as embodiment of beauty:

25

After all, Elisabeth I supported John Hawkin’s efforts to enslave and trade Africans just as much as Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonial ambitions of conquest. Further, she decreed in 1596 und 1601 that Blacks were to be expelled from England, being concerned with keeping it white. Cf. Arndt, Mythen von Weißsein und die englischsprachige Literatur, forthcoming. 26 Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 369.

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In the old age black was not counted fair,/Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name; But now is black beauty’s successive heir; And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.27

Here, just as much as in The Tempest and Othello, Shakespeare portrays and challenges the colonialist inventions of his time, even establishing himself as an early critic of racism, colonial endeavours and notions of white superiority.

‘Race’ as a Transforming Structural Category of Enlightenment In as far as the missionary project to Christianise the world was part and parcel of colonial liturgy and practice, Black slaves and other colonised people were baptized. As a consequence, in the 18th century, the persuasiveness of the European ideologem that Christians could not be slaves faded – even though still adduced as late as 1719 by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe. Simultaneously, when in the process of colonial settlements and deportations it became obvious that comparable latitudes and climatic conditions could support highly varied complexions and, conversely, that differing climatic conditions could produce similar shades of ‘skin colour’, doubts about the suitability of established patterns of explanation, such as climate theories, became stronger and more widely uttered and doubts increasingly began to emerge as to whether ‘skin colour’ (alone) was strong enough to pillar the category of ‘race’.28 Since the myth of ‘race’ was needed, however, to pillar slavery and colonialism just as much as its anti-Judaist and anti-Islamic rhetorics and action, Europe did not disavow it, but rather was eager to reorient it in order to reinforce it. Thus, from the mid-17th century onwards, natural scientists and philosophers set out – in a pan-European project – to establish a scientific underpinning for the existence of ‘races’ that did not discard Christianity and ‘skin colour’ as categories of difference (and related theological explanations and climate theories) completely, but rather complemented them by new theoretical approaches and criteria. In doing so, century-old criteria, such as the texture of hair, the form of the nose and lips and the shape of the face, cheekbones and skull, were revitalised and new criteria such as the skeleton, the skull and the 27 28

Ibid., 375. Cf.: Lim, Walter S. H. The Arts of Empire, 130; Jordan, White over Black, 14-17.

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constituency of blood, were probed and dismissed – and revitalised, only to be dismissed and probed again. It can be observed that the manifold attempts of proving the existence of human ‘races’ penetrated deeper and deeper into the human body – starting off from complexion and hair and ending up with the attempt to verify racialising genes – only to, most recently, revitalise skin colour and Christianity as identitary determinants of the white European Self. This tendency to search for intrinsic features of the body as markers of mental, cultural and religious differences continued to rely on theology and philosophy, but also brought about many newly aligned scientific disciplines, such as phrenology, physiognomy, comparative anatomy and anthropology, which were to produce racist theories of bodily measurement. This tendency found its peak during the Enlightenment. Connoting the constructed bodily differences culturally, mentally and religiously, binarisms already probed in antiquity, such as civilisation as opposed to barbarism and reason and progress as opposed to the absence of these, were amalgamated with the somewhat younger binarism of Christianity as opposed to Islam, Judaism and paganism. Immanuel Kant, who was strongly influenced by David Hume, introduced the term ‘race’ to the German intellectual discourse on the Enlightenment; initially he used (following the example of David Hume) the English term ‘race’ (rather than the German equivalent ‘Rasse’), also employing it in the beginning at times as a synonym for ‘class’. Putting himself in the tradition of antiquity and Renaissance, Kant believed in the existence of hereditarily determined skin colours – whereby he describes other sub-criteria, such as perspiration odours, blood characteristics (of Blacks) and a less sensitive skin (of the Indians) as relevant, too. He also claimed that these physical differences were to be interpreted mentally and positioned in a hierarchy. Thus, for example, he insisted that the difference between whites and Blacks was not fundamental with regard just to colour, but also to the ability to experience deeper feelings. Thus framed, he identifies four races.29 To what extent Kant’s theories on ‘race’ were linked to the aspiration to legitimise slavery, is exhibited, for instance, in his hypotheses that, among the “hundreds of thousands of blacks” (and cynically enough he refers here only to slaves), “not a single one [was] ever found who was able to imagine anything great with regard to art or science, or any other honourable characteristic”. By contrast there were ample examples of how “the whites continually rose above [...] the lowest masses and, through 29

Cf.: Kant, “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen”, 11-32.

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excellent ability, acquired respect in the world. The difference between these two human races is so fundamental, and it seems to be just as fundamental with regard to the ability to experience finer feelings as with regard to colour.”30 Eager to integrate ‘race’ into his philosophical system, Kant constructed a hierarchy of ‘races’ that was based on ‘rationality’, ‘ethics’, ‘maturity’ and ‘educability’ as differentiating features. According to Kant, the assumption needed to be made that humanity was in a state of constant development and that a natural law existed according to which advanced ‘development’ resulted in ‘progressed civilisation’.31 Simultaneously, he translated, to apply Dipesh Chakrabarty’s stratagem of analysis, cultural differences into historical time gaps, meaning that if the Europeans encountered cultures which were different from their own, they simply reduced them to the formula of allegedly lagging far behind and longing to become like Europeans. Further, like other philosophers of the Enlightenment, he placed People of Colour and their cultures in the “waiting room of history”, where, as “not-yet cultures”, they were made to remain white Europe’s ‘Other’.32 Part and parcel of this construct was the myth of the “white man’s burden”. It positioned the white man as being capable, legitimised and even obliged to help those ‘Others,’ who, in his view, should be granted developmental latitude to progress and ‘civilisation’ – whereby, due to the Others’ allegedly naturally given inferiority, the condition of the white male subject could never be achieved by the ‘Others’. Being white presented itself hereby as normative and normalising, as the sole agent and, thereby, the sole existing subject in history. Thus framed, he declared slavery and the respective positions within its hierarchical order as defined by nature and hence legitimate. In his lectures on the Philosophy of History (1830/1831), Hegel also explicitly advocates this line of thought. On ten of the work’s approximate 600 pages, he postulates that Africa is devoid of moral standards, ethics, humanity, love, religion and respect for life. Based on this, he denies Africa all historic change and social dynamic. The way we [whites, S.A.] see [the Africans, S.A.] today is how they have always been [...] Africa [...] is not a historic part of the world, it exhibits no movement or development, and what has happened to it, meaning in its north, belongs to the Asian and European world ... What we actually 30

Kant, “Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen”, 253. Cf.: Piesche, “Der ‘Fortschritt’ der Aufklärung – Kants ‘Race’ und die Zentrierung des weißen Subjekts”. 32 Cf.: Chakrabarty, “Introduction”, Provincializing Europe, 3-21. 31

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What is more, he holds that Africans were lacking any sense of justice and freedom. This in turn would explain why Africans were to be enslaved by Europeans. He even goes as far as to claim that the “only substantial connection that the negro has had and will have with the European is slavery.”34 According to him, by enslaving Africans, Europe was teaching them an understanding of freedom. When, in the long run, Europe would be successful at this, it would put an end to slavery.35 Given the fact that Hegel gave his lectures on the Philosophy of History decades after the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) and the first successes of abolitionism, these considerations amounted to a cynicism that stayed far below Hegel’s intellectual capabilities. This lack of concern for accuracy in intellectual reflection, which could not be missed by alert contemporaries and hence cannot be explained but by racism being en vogue during his time, also characterised scientists, such as the Dutch phrenologist Petrus Camper (1722-1789). He aimed to measure and plot the dimensions of the human skull in order to establish a direct link between ‘racial’ difference on the one hand and dichotomic structures in terms of intellect and reason on the other. However, he based his scale of ‘races’ on merely seven skulls, and one of the heads was presented misleadingly. “When geometrically calculating the skull volume of the Greek bust of Apollo,” which served as the model for the white norm, Camper added on “a few centimetres, certainly attributable to Apollo’s fine head of hair, rather than to his skull size.”36

‘Race’ as a Transforming Structural Category of Scientific Racism The obvious lack of persuasiveness of patterns of explanation as provided by Hegel and Camper, however, once again did not result in abandoning these theories, but rather in reformulating them. After all, the end of slavery was tantamount to a reorientation of colonialism, which rushed towards its imperialist era. Simultaneously, European definitions of its 33

Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 162-163, emphasis mine. 34 Ibid., 162. 35 Ibid., 163. 36 Becker, Mann und Weib, 41.

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Christian ‘Self’ continued to rely on an anti-Judaist and anti-Islamic rhetoric. Hence, ‘race’ theories were needed as desperately as before to disguise Europe’s violence and patterns of discrimination that were to serve its economic and political interests. Facing the mentioned difficulties of proving the existence of ‘races’ by measuring the visible body, scientificallyoriented ‘race’ theories started to concentrate on invisible determining factors, resulting from inherited dispositions. Among these, blood was increasingly considered of crucial importance37 when attempting to identify ‘races’ genetically.38 Even though the scientific ‘race’ theories thus reached a stage where they could no longer be reassessed by laymen, they did not manage to overcome their inconsistencies. This comes to light in an exemplary fashion with the mere fact that the number of identified ‘races’ increased exponentially. At the start of the nineteenth century it was commonly assumed that around five to seven races existed. At the turn of the century, however, a figure of more than one hundred ‘races’ was circulating.39 This renewed paradigm shift that had penetrated even deeper into the human body was accompanied by a further radicalisation of the theoretical interpretation of alleged racial differences. In 1855 Arthur de Compte Gobineau published his book An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, in which he introduced the idea of the Aryan race and made the ‘race’ theories speak even more tartly by propagating that ‘superior’ ‘races’ (like the Aryan one) should ward off the ‘inferior’ ones. This line of thinking, which was met with considerable interest in Germany, laid the path for the ‘race wars’ and ‘racial cleansing’ of the 20th century. As for Germany, as early as 1904-1908 the German colonial power reacted on the revolts of Herero and Nama in what was then Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika with a genocidal terror. Four decades later Germany turned to the horrors of National Socialism and the Shoah. Europe did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, how it had declined into a ‘racial fanaticism’ that initially led to a bloody colonialism frenzy and later to the National Socialists’ obsession with ‘race’ – and its climax, the Shoah.

37

Ibid., 10-11. By taking this approach, ‘race’ theorists from various scientific disciplines were following a fundamental trend of nineteenth century science, which – as was demonstrated by Foucault – saw an academic turn away from sciences that were largely concerned with surface areas to sciences that sought to identify structures and fundamental relationships linking the surface and the underlying depths. Cf.: Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 32-33. 39 Cf. Becker: Mann und Weib – schwarz und weiß, 11. 38

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‘Race’ as a Shared Discriminatory Category of Colonialism and National Socialism Of course, the ideological framework of National Socialism did not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, it built upon an existing tradition to employ theorems of ‘race’ in order to maintain that bodily differences mark religious, cultural and mental hierarchies and that these hierarchies entitle those who declare themselves superior to violate human rights and wreak terror. While whiteness was still needed to support colonial endeavours (which Germany actually never ceased to pursue), National Socialism built upon a new hierarchy within whiteness, which positioned the category of Aryan as “Indo-German Herrenrasse” and, as profiled by Gobineau, the most ‘superior race’. Moreover, the colonial practices of expulsion, deportment, racialising legislation, concentration camps as well as committing mass murder and genocide represent an obvious basis for the terror and atrocities of National Socialism. What is more, the intent of National Socialism to rule Europe comprised, as was claimed by Adolf Hitler and discussed by Robert Young,40 the eager concern to reconquer the colonialised world. These and other obvious discursive and structural continuities between colonialism and National Socialism ask for theoretical paradigms that know how to compare National Socialism and colonialism – yet with an awareness for the power and meaning of given divergences.

Beyond Remembrance: Europe’s “Habit of Ignoring Race” Even when National Socialism in Germany was crushed and – not least in this way catalytically influenced – Europe’s colonial world had been destroyed by revolutionary processes of liberation, the white Western world did not unlearn racism. What it did learn, however, was to taboo it. As Toni Morrison puts it, the “habit of ignoring race” is widely considered “a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture.”41 This is particularly true for Germany. The ‘race’ frenzy committed by National Socialism in the name of ‘race’ has given birth to a historical sense of shame in Germany, which, paradoxically enough, in turn, has resulted in a longing to silence 40

The historian Robert Young described National Socialism most appropriately as a “European colonialism brought home to Europe by a country that had been deprived of its overseas empire after World War I” (Young, White Mythologies). 41 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 9-10.

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‘race’/race and racism. Just as much as Germany’s endeavours of remembrance with respect to National Socialism thus by necessity had to remain insufficient, white European and US-American societies cherish forgetting with respect to the atrocities of slavery and colonialism. Where the past is, however, not reassessed, it manages to rule the present. This is to say that Europe’s failure to face its history of slavery, colonialism and National Socialism appropriately makes its ideology of racism and the related myths survive largely unchallenged. Racism continues to exist structurally and discursively. It has invaded the white Western archives of knowledge as performed in media, language and education. As a consequence, there is a symbolic order of race which, up until today, assigns people social positions in a politically powerful way. Here we have reached another gist of the matter of race: The “silence about ‘race’”42 did not come along with an overcoming of the racist rhetoric of ‘Othering’; in fact, it simply performs as a silence about (discussing) whiteness.43 Racialising hegemonies and differences that are anchored structurally and mentally and racialised positions cannot, however, be overcome by simply claiming that ‘races’ do not exist or that whiteness does not matter. It is possible neither to simply abandon the term and concept of ‘race’, nor to apply it claiming that one would simply no longer use it in a biologistic and evaluating way. On the contrary, to negate the social position, privileges, and rhetoric of whiteness amounts to naturalising and redoubling the hegemony of whiteness.

The ‘Racial Turn’: Race and Whiteness as Critical Categories of Analysis A theoretical concept which I, relying on Shankar Raman, have labelled the ‘racial turn’,44 offers a methodological framework to negate the existence of human ‘races’ and yet to speak about what this myth has done with and to the world and how racism has infected Europe discursively and structurally. To say it in the words of Colette Guillaumin’s famous quotation: “Race does not exist. But it does kill people.”45 In a double movement of thought the racial turn leads away from ‘race’ (written in 42

Lentin, “Europe and the Silence about Race”, 487-503. Cf.: Aanerud, “Fiction of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature”, 35; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, 12. 44 Raman, The Racial Turn, 255; cf.: Arndt, “Weißsein – zur Genese eines Konzepts”. 45 Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, 107. 43

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inverted commas) as a biological construct and simultaneously towards race (written in italics) as a social position and analytical category of knowledge and criticism. Furthermore, in my definition the racial turn is concerned with surpassing conventional notions of ‘race’ as a matter of Blackness and overcoming contemporary visions that conceive white as ‘unraced’, ‘neutral’ and ‘universal’. The ‘racial turn’ identifies that whiteness has become the ‘unmarked marker’ and ‘invisible normality’ of processes of racialisation, thus resituating ‘race’ in its given relationality.46 Thus framed, the ‘racial turn’ deconstructs whiteness as the subject, norm and engine of the history of ‘race’.47 In this vein, whiteness is not to be misunderstood as a naturally given entity based on pigmentation or other bodily attributes. Rather, whiteness is to be read as having been fabricated by history. Not natural visibility, but practised, constructed and interpreted visibility is significant. The focus is not skin colour, but rather its ideological construction. Moreover, the racial turn identifies that whiteness is a “currency of power”,48 guarantees privileges and evokes collective patterns of perception, knowledge and action that have a discursive and structural impact on societal processes. What is important in this respect is that whiteness is at work even if masked by white people’s unawareness. Whiteness is not, as George Yancy convincingly argues, an individual choice, but a systemic position which is a form of inheritance whose longevity needs to be acknowledged and faced.49 Yet, in as far as whiteness interweaves with other structural categories – for instance sex, gender, nationality, education, religion, mobility or health – ruptures, qualifications and amplifications of power and privileges connected to whiteness occur. Caused by this networking of hegemonies and symbolic 46

Attitudes and behaviours of white people and cultures have already been analysed by earlier theorists of racism such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Edward Said (Cf.: Fanon, Les damnés de la terre; Memmi, Portrait du colonisé précédé du Portrait colonisateur; Memmi, Le racisme: description, définition, traitement; Said, Orientalism). Yet it was only in the early 1990s that the field of research known as ‘Critical Whiteness Studies’ emerged which takes whiteness into account in addition to Blackness and in its complex relationship to Blackness, thus resituating ‘race’/race as a relational category of knowledge and criticism. For an introduction to this field see Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness; Eggers, Kilomba, Piesche & Arndt, Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. 47 Cf.: Arndt, “‘The Racial Turn.’ Kolonialismus, Weiße Mythen und Critical Whiteness Studies”. 48 Cf.: Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness, 15. 49 Cf.: Yancy, What White Looks Like, 8-9, 14.

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orders, whiteness manifests itself (though within the systemic boundaries of whiteness) in a dynamic and complex way. This does not allow, however, negotiations that would stipulate individual whites as off-white. When wishing to revisit the history of whiteness, whiteness needs to be employed as a critical category of analysis. It is this approach that has informed my article in an attempt to show firstly, that antiquity, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are to be identified in their ambivalences and that their merits need to be identified along with their responsibilities for the atrocities of colonialism and National Socialism. Secondly, as I wish to argue in conclusion, colonialism has to be acknowledged as complementary master category of renarrating Europe and its endeavours to lend itself substance and identity by means of outward demarcations to a fabricated racial and religious ‘Other’. If Europe revisits its routes of historical becoming, the knowledge will reveal that ever since antiquity it has harboured multifaceted national, cultural, religious and racial identities. Acknowledging these identities will strengthen Europe in its contemporary endeavours to unite its member states and become one, thus making identity patterns of being European permeate into the bare brickwork that has been erected by the European Union. What is more, if Europe revisits the historical routes that renarrate its mythical roots, it will reposition itself in the entangled history, present and future of the world and shoulder the responsibility for its man-made deficits whose longevity needs to be acknowledged and faced - and first and foremost when addressing the question of ‘What is Europe?’

Beyond white Europe ‘Europe’ was and is an indistinct term changing with the times, a metaphor like ‘the West’, ‘Occident’, ‘Orient’ and many others. Of course, Europe is not religiously or culturally a ‘naturally’ homogeneous, given entity. Rather, Europe is an historical and political construct that has throughout more than two millenniums struggled hard to lend itself substance and identity by means of outward demarcations to a fabricated racial and religious ‘Other’. Even today, while the European Union longs for a transnational European house, it overemphasises Christianity and whiteness as its foundation – blanking out that what might be a pillar for white Christian Europeans, and is a bed of thorns for Europeans of Colour and European Moslems. Europe has grown to be a trans-space that harbours multifaceted national, cultural, religious and racial identities. For coalescing, however, it needs to revisit its politics of belonging just as much as its history of becoming. Thus, antiquity, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

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are to be revisited in order to relate their merits just as much as their responsibility for European atrocities committed in the eras of slavery, colonialism and National Socialism. It is this approach of renarrating Europe that will offer new ways of understanding Europe in a global perspective. It may be true that Europe exported to its colonies in many areas around the world cultural, religious, political and economic models that had developed over the course of centuries on European territory. Yet Europe did not conquer a vacuum, but rather culturally, politically and religiously structured societies. Consequently, Europe never managed to form the world into the mirror image of itself. Modernity did not simply emerge and expand, but rather processes of globalisation caused the generation of polyphonous and “entangled modernities”.50 The respective processes of abrogation and appropration include, as Paul Gilroy claims, the impact of the intellectual heritage of the West on Black “writing and speaking in pursuit of freedom, citizenship, and social and political autonomy”.51 These processes, in turn, also had a retroactive effect on Europe itself – on intellectual debates as well as on cultural, religious, political and social structures.

Diasporic Transspaces An evident central manifestation of the emergence of Europe as provincialised trans-space is the migratory movement that brought people, together with their cultural and religious identities and knowledge systems, from former European colonies to Europe. As a result, new diasporas emerged. When defining and classifying these diasporas, Robert Cohen has identified two significant factors: the notion of their rootedness in their countries of origin and their struggle to be accepted as belonging to the mainstream society of their adopted countries.52 By thus interweaving the countries of origin and residence and, moreover, creating diasporic identities that transcend Europe’s national borders, the diasporas act, as Etienne Balibar has proposed, as precursors of a transnational European house. Moreover, conventional white notions are challenged, which assume both European and white to be synonymous and, as a consequence, European and Black identities “to be mutually 50

Cf.: Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities. Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in India”. 51 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 2. 52 Cf.: Cohen, Global Diasporas.

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exclusive”.53 Additionally, Paul Gilroy questions the belief that any act of “occupying the space between” Europe and Blackness is “a provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination”. In his opinion, any notion of a “double consciousness” that claims that People of Colour in Europe and the US are both – for example, British and Nigerian –, would not exhaust “the subjective resources of any particular individual.”54 After all, processes of colonialism and globalisation have had a catalytic effect on the formation of the world and its subjects as a “socio-cultural continuum”55, to adopt Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s formula for creolisation. As for Édouard Glissant, this “unceasing process of” cultural interweaving56 and errant cultures is most pertinently expressed in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s57 metaphor of the rhizome.58 The root extends linearly, genealogically, lonesomely and predictably into the depths of the earth. Correspondingly, Glissant reads it as a metaphor for long-established cultures and territories. The rhizome, however, “maintains ... the idea of rootedness, but challenges that of a totalitarian root.”59 It expands, encountering others and cross-linking with them. In this manner, the rhizome presents itself in an unpredictable and dynamic way and hence is best suited to serve as a metaphor for complex and polyphonous cultures – and for overcoming conventional binarisms.60 Moreover, the rhizome proves to be the most appropriate way “of naming the processes of cultural mutuation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse”.61 It is this “rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation”, which Gilroy “call[s] the black Atlantic”.62 Referring to a transcultural and transracial dialogicity (in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin)63 between Western and non-Western cultures as well as Black diasporic cultures and their countries of residence, Gilroy’s stratagem of the Black Atlantic lays emphasis on historical processes that entangle Europe, “the Africans they enslaved,” the First Nations “they

53

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1. Ibid. 55 Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 310. 56 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 142. 57 Cf.: Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 58 Cf.: Deleuze & Guattari, Rhizom. 59 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11. 60 Cf.: Glissant, Kultur und Identität, 51. 61 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 2. 62 Ibid., 4. 63 Cf.: Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 54

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slaughtered and the Asians they indentured”.64 In doing so, Gilroy insists on complementing the notion of diasporas as being “rooted” in their countries of origin and longing to become “rooted” in their adopted countries with the idea of “routes” as a strategic means to focus on the historical becoming of global positions and encounters.

Framing Postcolonial Literary Studies: Literatures in Motion and the Poetics of Relation In 1946 Erich Auerbach predicted that the “Europeanization of the world” – as his quest for origins might be summarised using Wolfgang Reinhard’s65 more recent terminology – would lead to a unification and simplification, indeed a standardisation of cultures, which would also affect narrative structure and bring an end to cultural diversity. Glissant also assumes that the literatures of the world are undergoing an interactive dynamic exchange. However, in contrast to Auerbach, he speaks of a global network of literature that is transculturally and rhizomically formed66 and influenced by historically grown and discursively based hegemonies. In an implicit allusion to the stratagem of “provincialising Europe” he asserts that any attempt to simplify and tame this complexity through the imposition of Western categories – as a mode of standardisation – amounts to a kind of ‘barbarism’. To accept that one is incapable of completely understanding the ‘Other’ is, however, a manifestation of ‘civilisation’ that helps one to recognise the “unity of liberating diversity”. It is this notion of transcultural literary performance that informs Glissant’s theory of a “poétique de la relation”.67 If literary studies wishes to do justice to the performances of entangled histories and the “literature in motion”68 created by these performances, it would do well to resituate its analytical tools and, correspondingly, its subjects, margins and terminology in conceptual accordance with this notion of a “poetics of relation”. As far as terminology is concerned, this means, for example, coming to terms with Ottmar Ette’s observation that national literatures are no longer (if they ever were) composed of one’s being culturally, nationally or racially ‘rooted’ (i.e., born or patriated) in one’s respective country, but 64

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1. Reinhard, “Die Europäisierung der Erde und deren Folgen”, 76-93. 66 Cf.: Glissant, Kultur und Identität, 54. 67 Glissant, Poétique de la relation. 68 Ette, ÜberLebenswissen. 65

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work according to a mobile and rhizomic logic.69 Consequently, it is unadvisable to place migration literature in binary opposition to national literature – or Black British literature to British literature (thus implicitly suggesting British to be synonymous with white). After all, this would mean to stick to the asymmetrical contrasting of an ‘unmarked hegemonial norm’ and its ‘marked Other’. It is true, a symmetrical pairing of, for example, Black British and white British writing would be a much more convincing alternative to this than simply adding literatures by People of Colour invisibly to national literatures.70 Yet, if one wishes to escape the trap of this aporia in a consequent manner, a sustainable solution seems to lie in a fundamental and yet epistemologically manageable reconceptualisation of terms such as ‘national literature’, ‘British literature’, and ‘African literature’.71 With respect to the subjects and margins of literary studies, in order to pursue another level, complementary and comparatively informed philological structures and categories are needed that – in a creative process of academic dialogicity, – cut through and criss-cross conventional structures of literary studies.72 Thus framed, epistemological necessities (merely tamed by linguistic competences), rather than narrow and outmoded nation- or language-bound philological pigeonholes, should set the agenda. This idea of literary studies in motion that is structured in a transcultural and translinguistic fashion forms in accordance with cultural studies, is hosted most appropriately by the concept of postcolonialism as performed in postcolonial literary studies. By selecting colonialism and its aftermath as the master narrative of postcolonial literary studies, a transcultural perspective well aware of structures of difference and power and of the meaning of migration and globalisation is pursued. This framework enables literature to be rearranged in a rhizomic (dis)order. This again enables literatures from the margins to emerge as new centres/ and to approach national literatures in their given polyphonic and transnational guise in terms of language, culture and racialised positions. Postcolonial literary studies thus offer the most appropriate analytical tools to identify the dialogicity of the literatures of the world and both their narrations about global entanglements and the corresponding “poetics of relation”. 69

Ibid., 234. Ibid., 242. 71 Cf. Arndt, “Europe and the Occidental Turn. Migration, Transcultural Narration and Literary Studies without a Permanent Residence”. 72 Ette, ÜberLebenswissen, 88-92. 70

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Works Cited Aanerud, Rebecca. “Fiction of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature.” In: Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. by Ruth Frankenberg. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1997. Aristotele. Politics, I.5, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html Arndt, Susan. “Europe and the Occidental Turn. Migration, Transcultural Narration and Literary Studies without a Permanent Residence.” In: Elizabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff, Daniela Merolla (eds.): Transcultural Modernities. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2009, 103-120. —. “Myths and Masks of ‘Travelling’: Colonial Migration and Slavery in Shakespeare’s Othello, The Sonnets and The Tempest.” In: Lars Eckstein, Christoph Reinfandt, (eds.): Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings. Trier: WVT 2009, 213-226. —. “The Racial Turn. Kolonialismus, Weiße Mythen und Critical Whiteness Studies.” In: Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, Sunna Gieseke & Reinhard Klein-Arendt. Koloniale und postkoloniale Konstruktionen von Afrika und Menschen afrikanischer Herkunft in der deutschen Alltagskultur. Frankfurt a.M., Peter Lang 2007, 11-26. —. “Weißsein – zur Genese eines Konzepts. Von der griechischen Antike zum postkolonialen ‘racial turn’.” In: Jan Standke, Thomas Düllo (ed.): Theorie und Praxis der Kulturwissenschaften. Culture Discourse History. Band 1. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2008, 95-129. —. Mythen von Weißsein und die englischsprachige Literatur. Der ‘Racial Turn’ in der Literaturwissenschaft. Forthcoming. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist (ed.). Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press 1981 [written during the 1930s]. Becker, Thomas: Mann und Weib – schwarz und weiß. Die wissenschaftliche Konstruktion von Geschlecht und Rasse 1600-1950. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 2005. Brathwaite, Edward K. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Briggs, Julia. This Stage-Play World. Texts and Contexts. 1580-1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

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Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, Rhizom. Berlin: Merve, 1977. —. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Viking 1987. Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols. London, New York: Routledge 1996 (1970). Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Thompson Learning: The Arden Shakespeare 1997. Eggers, Maureen Maisha, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche & Susan Arndt (eds.), Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißforschung in Deutschland, Münster: Unrast, 2005. Eschenbach, Wolfram van. Parzival. Translated by A.T. Hatto. London: Penguin, 2004 (1980). —. Parzival. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004. Ette, Ottmar. ÜberLebenswissen. Die Aufgabe der Philologie. Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag 2004. Fanon, Frantz. Les damnés de la terre. Paris, F. Maspero 1961. Frankenberg, Ruth (ed.). Displacing Whiteness. Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain. London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London, New York: Verso 1995 [1993]. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. —. Kultur und Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt (Introduction à une poétique du divers 1996, tr. 2005, Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2005). —. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1997. —. Poétique de la relation. Essay. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 1995. Hall, Kim F. “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’. Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare's Sonnets.” In: Ania Loomba & Martin Orkin (eds.), PostColonial Shakespeares. London and New York, 1998, 64-84. —. “Fair Texts/Dark Ladies.” In: Dies. Things of Darkness. Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press: 1995, 62-122. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Stuttgart: Reclam 1961. Jackson, Henry. “Aristotle’s Lecture Room and Lectures.” In: Journal of Philology 35 (1920): 191-200.

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Jordan, W. White over Black. American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Kant, Immanuel. “Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen” [1764]. 4. Abschnitt. In: Kants Werke. Bd. II. Berlin 1905, 205-256. —. “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen.” In: Werke in 12 Bänden. Bd. 11. Ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1960, 11-32. Lentin, Alana. “Europe and the Silence about Race.” In: European Journal of Social Theory 10 (4) 2008: 487-503. Lim, Walter S. H. The Arts of Empire. The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Press, 1998. Loomba, Ania. “Religion, Colour, and Racial Difference.” In: Ania Loomba. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 45-74. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé précédé du Portrait colonisateur. Paris: Gallimard, 1966 —. Le racisme: description, définition, traitement. Paris: Gallimard, 1984 [1982]. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Newman, Karen. “And Wash the Ethiop White. Femininity and the Monstrous Othello.” In: Shakespeare Reproduced. The Text in History and Ideology. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. Nussbaum, Felicity. The Limits of the Human. Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Piesche, Peggy. „Der 'Fortschritt' der Aufklärung – Kants 'Race' und die Zentrierung des weißen Subjekts.” In: Eggers et Al, eds. Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Münster: Unrast 2005, 30-39. Poiss, Thomas. “Die Farbe des Philosophen. Zum Motiv des ‘weißen Menschen’ bei Aristoteles.” In: Wolfgang Ulrich and Juliana Vogel, eds., Weiß. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag 2003, 144-154. Raman, Shankar. “The Racial Turn: ‘Race’, Postkolonialität, Literaturwissenschaft”. In: Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft. Miltos Pechlivanos, Stefan Rieger, Wolfgang Struck und Michael Weitz (eds.), Stuttgart 1995, 241-255. Randeria, Shalini. “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities. Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in India.” In: Elkana,

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Yehuda & Randeria, Shalini. Unraveling Ties. Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2002, 284-311. Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Die Europäisierung der Erde und deren Folgen.” In: Schlumberger, Jörg A.; Segl, Peter, (eds). Europa – aber was ist es? Aspekte seiner Identität in interdisziplinärer Sicht. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau 1994, 76-93. Roediger, David R. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. London, New York: Verso, 1994. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books 1978. Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. Desiring Whiteness. A Lacanian Analysis of Race. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. The Bible (King James Version). http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/? search=Jeremiah%2013:23%20;&version=9 (10.11. 2006). Wheeler, Roxanne. The Complexion of Race. Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Yancy, George (ed.). What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge, 2004. Young, Robert. White Mythologies. Writing History and the West. London 1990.

PART II: EXPANDING BOUNDARIES

EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC BEYOND THE IRON CURTAIN: AFRICAN STUDENTS ENCOUNTER THE SOVIET UNION MAXIM MATUSEVICH

A recent BBC investigation focused on the lives of Africans in Moscow. A staggering sixty percent of the respondents reported having been physically assaulted in racially motivated attacks at some point during their residence in Russia.1 The report, widely discussed in the blogosphere and international press, made little news in Russia. In fact, it hardly registered with the Russian public, largely dismissed as yet another example of the West’s insistent attempts to malign their proud and resourceful nation. In post-Soviet Russia, it seems, the plight of Africans and other ethnic minorities, routinely abused, beaten up, and even murdered, concerns very few. Russia’s ruling elites are too deeply involved in exploiting resurgent Russian nationalism for political benefit to be bothered with such politically inexpedient niceties as human rights and diversity; and the Russian public, in poet Alexander Pushkin’s famous words, bezmolvstvuet (remains silent) or… worse. Less than three hundred people, many of them foreign students, showed up for the “March Against Hatred,” organized in St. Petersburg in October 2009 under the auspices of Russia’s African Union and a small number of domestic human rights groups. The march, intended to draw national attention to the scourge of racism and racially motivated violence afflicting post-Soviet Russia, highlighted instead the general apathy of the public.2 In an all too familiar fashion, the gruesome murder of a young Ghanaian man in St. Petersburg on Christmas day 2009 allegedly filmed by its neo-Nazi perpetrators, hardly made so much as a

1

“Africans ‘Under Siege’ in Moscow,” BBC broadcast, 31 August 2009, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8230158.stm (accessed on 5 October 2009). 2 “Protiv Nenavisti” [Against Hatred], www.protivnenavisti.ru/ (accessed on 18 January 2010).

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ripple in the complacent national media.3 How tragically ironic that the country that had previously staked its reputation on waging global struggles against racism and colonialism would emerge in its post-Soviet reincarnation as a danger zone for people of color. The purpose of this article4 is to contextualize the rise of racial intolerance in post-Soviet Russia by examining some of its historical and cultural roots, especially in relation to African presence in the Soviet Union. In addition, I suggest that life and study in the Soviet Union as experienced by thousands of African students represented an extension of trans-Atlantic experience. In other words, and to use Paul Gilroy’s terminology, African students in the USSR expanded the eastern shores of the “Black Atlantic” all the way to and even beyond the Ural Mountains.5 The ideas of race and racial difference entertained by many modern-day Russians were formed to a large extent through their encounters with and official and popular representations of Africans residing in the Soviet Union, most of them young men who, from 1957 onwards, traveled to the USSR to pursue affordable higher education. Their presence amidst the Soviet society and their interaction with both the Soviet system and Soviet citizens would make a profound impact on the common perceptions of racial difference still shared and articulated across the former Soviet spaces.

The Khrushchevian “thaw” and the 1957 Youth Festival In the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s ascent to power in post-Stalin Soviet Union, at first just a few and eventually hundreds and even thousands of young Africans began to take advantage of generous educational scholarships extended to them by the Soviet government. The arrangement, much trumpeted in the Soviet press, was essentially a pragmatic one. The Soviet Union sought to attract African students as a way of enhancing its 3

“Natsisty Zasnyalis’ v Ubijstve” [Nazis Filmed the Murder], Fontanka.ru, 15 January 2010, www.fontanka.ru /2010/01/15/072/ (accessed 18 January 2010). 4 Parts of this article have appeared in Maxim Matusevich, “An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans, and the Soviet Everyday,” Race & Class, vol. 49, no. 2 (April 2008), pp. 59-81 as well as in Maxim Matusevich, “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society,” African Diaspora, vol 1, nos. 102 (December 2008), pp. 53-85. I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to Rossen Djagalov of Yale University for generously sharing with me some of his findings in Moscow archival collections. 5 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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standing and popularity in the Third World at a time when many third world nations were undergoing the rapid process of decolonization. Africans hungered for access to free education and, as one former African student in the USSR put it, were prepared to receive it “even under the ocean.”6 African students traveling and residing in the Soviet Union of the 1960s-1980s found themselves in a country that little resembled the Soviet Russia of its heady post-revolutionary days. Much of the early revolutionary fervor had been spent and, under Stalin’s reign of terror, the Soviet Union acquired some unmistakable characteristics of conservative statism; i.e., the pragmatic interests of the Soviet state, and not necessarily communist ideology, defined its international behavior. Soviet antiracist and anticolonial propaganda went on unabated, but it had grown ossified and streamlined to represent the official Soviet line in an ongoing cold war bickering with the West; and in this capacity it hardly expressed genuine feelings shared by the general population. In a similar vein, the Soviets continued to pay lip service to the ideals of multiethnic coexistence and ethnic and racial equality that had so impressed the pre-war black “pilgrims”; yet the war experience had deepened Russian nationalism and made Soviet officialdom ever more apprehensive of ethnic particularisms (Estonian, Ukrainian, Chechen, Jewish, etc.), the trend that would extend into post-Stalin period.7 It is no coincidence that during the last ten years of his life Stalin launched a series of ethnic purges (some of them genocidal in nature) against such Soviet minority groups as the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tartars, and eventually the Jews. The internationalist ideals of the 1920s increasingly lost their luster as Stalin turned his ire against “rootless cosmopolites,” many of them bearing distinctly Jewish surnames.8 Stalin’s last years were marked by intense official chauvinism and xenophobia and, as a result, the country’s deepening isolation from the outside world. The tyrant’s death in 1953, followed by the rise of Nikita Khrushchev and his subsequent 6 John Akaan, “Nigerian Students and the Communist Countries”, unpublished paper-memoir, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) Collection, n. d., 6. 7 On the evolution of Russian nationalism after Stalin, see Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 8 On Stalin’s anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish campaigns during the post-war period, see Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995. Also see Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953, New York: Harpers Perennial, 2004.

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denunciation of Stalinism at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 softened the rigidity of Soviet society. In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s revelations the country entered a relatively short period of the so-called “thaw,” which, in contrast with the years of Stalinism, was a time of cultural and political awakening and comparative openness.9 It was under these transformed circumstances that Soviet citizens were treated to a remarkable spectacle – the appearance amidst Moscow’s drabness of a colorful cast of exotic characters, the international delegates of the 1957 Youth Festival. The festival plunged Muscovites, especially the young and better educated ones, into an exalted state. Almost fifty years after the fact, Apollon Davidson, the doyen of Soviet African Studies, still remembered the cultural and emotional shock of the festival. Davidson, like other Soviet students of Africa, had never been to the continent and had limited contact with foreigners. And now, over 30,000 foreign youngsters had poured into Moscow and for the first time in decades Soviet citizens found themselves face-to-face with the representatives of the world ordinarily closed to them.10 For Davidson and his fellow Muscovites the experience of this new openness bordered on “surreal, fantastic.”11 By many accounts, African delegates enjoyed wide (and wild) popularity during the festival. The hotel reserved for African delegations quickly turned into a vibrant social spot, “the liveliest place” in town, with Soviet youngsters (especially girls) crowding its entrance in hope of getting acquainted with the exotic newcomers.12 Urban folklore circulated the wild tales of Russian girls throwing themselves at the exotic looking delegates. The rumors, undoubtedly greatly exaggerated, cast the festival as a veritable extravaganza of interracial love. Yet the gathering did excite Soviet citizens, unaccustomed to such close, not to mention intimate, contacts with foreigners, pushing the most adventurous towards behaviors both risky and risqué. One of festival’s unintended consequences was the appearance of a generation of bi-racial “festival kids,” whose presence amidst the Soviet populace would serve as a continuous reminder of that

9

For an exhaustive study of Khrushchev’s role in this transition, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 10 “Youngsters Fill Moscow For Fete,” The New York Times (28 July 1957). 11 For more on the festival and its impact on Muscovites, see this recent memoir: A.B. Davidson and L.V. Ivanova, Moskovskaya Afrika [Africa in Moscow], Moscow: Teatral’niy Institut, 2003, 7-25. 12 Ibid., 9-10. Also see “2-Week Revelry In Moscow Ends,” The New York Times (12 August 1957).

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1957 summer of love in Moscow.13 Indeed, love was very much in the air. “Africa is shaped like a heart,” serenaded poet Evgenii Dolmatovsky, another contemporary and observer of the festival.14 Soviet authorities had planned the festival to showcase Soviet values but the event overwhelmed them and produced some long-lasting and quite surprising ramifications. In August of 1957 millions of Soviet citizens received their first exposure to the lifestyles, mannerisms, aesthetics, cultural expressions, and political debates that contrasted most sharply with the Soviet everyday.15 The effects of the festival would linger on for decades; it provided an opening through which Western ideas and art forms began to seep into the Soviet society.16 Africans, so visible during the festival, would soon begin to arrive in the country in large numbers. They came to study but, in an ironic role reversal, they ended up educating the Soviets; they introduced the population steeped in parochialism to modern aesthetics, new art forms, and the liberation political discourse.

Institutional initiatives and the arrival of African students The 1957 Youth Festival also rejuvenated the study of Africa in the USSR. After the grim decades of Stalinist isolationism the Soviet Union now looked for friends in the developing world where the nations emerging from colonial dependency seemed perfect candidates for just such a friendship. This was the point emphasized by W.E.B. Du Bois during his 1958 conversation with Nikita Khrushchev, when Du Bois argued for the creation within the Soviet Academy of Sciences of “an institute for the study of Pan-African history, sociology, ethnography, anthropology and

13

See Roth-Ey, “‘Loose Girls’ on the Loose?: Sex, Propaganda and the 1957 Youth Festival,” in Melanie Iliþ, Susan E. Reid and Lynne Attwood, eds., Women in the Khrushchev Era, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 75-95. 14 Russian State Archive of New History (RGANI), Department of Culture at CC CPSU, f. 5, op. 55, ex. 103 (January 1964 – July 1965). 15 For a comprehensive overview of the festival’s impact on Soviet society see the recently published Pia Koivunen, “The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: Propagating a New, Peaceful Image of the Soviet Union,” in Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith, eds., Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev, London: Routledge, 2009, 46-65. 16 This argument has been recently made in Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War, University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

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all cognate studies.”17 Du Bois’ argument must have convinced the ebullient Khrushchev; in July 1959, the Communist Party’s Central Committee adopted a special resolution provisioning for the creation of a research institute of African studies (later to be known as the Africa Institute).18 And less than a year later another party resolution of 5 February 1960 stipulated the founding of a new university to train “the national cadres for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” Friendship University, also known as Lumumba University, would emerge as the flagship institution of higher learning, catering to the needs of third world students and thus to the needs of Soviet foreign policy.19 As these institutional foundations were being laid down African students began to trickle into the USSR. As of January 1, 1959, there were only seven students from sub-Saharan Africa officially enrolled in Soviet institutions of higher learning.20 However, between 1960 and 1961 the number of African students in the USSR increased almost ten-fold, from 72 to over 500, eventually reaching some 5,000 by the end of the decade.21 By 1990, on the eve of Soviet collapse, the number of Africans in the country would rise to 30,000 or about 24% of the total body of foreign students.22 Their entrance into the Soviet society proceeded under circumstances vastly different from those that had accompanied the arrival of the black pilgrims of the 1920s-1930s.23 They saw in the Soviet Union 17

See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, London: Oxford University Press, 2007, 18-19. 18 Mazov, Sozdanie Instituta Afriki [The Creation of Africa Institute], Vostok, no. 1 (1998), 80-88. 19 Tsentr Khranenia Sovremennoj Dokumentatsii (TsKhSD), f. 4, op. 16, d. 783, l. 13 and d. 806, l. 19, 21. For more archival references, see Mazov, Sozdanie Instituta Afriki. 20 RGASPI, “ɋɩɪɚɜɤɚ ɨ ɤɨɥɢɱɟɫɬɜɟ ɫɬɭɞɟɧɬɨɜ-ɢɧɨɫɬɪɚɧɰɟɜ ɢɡ ɤɚɩ ɢ ɤɨɥɫɬɪɚɧ, ɨɛɭɱɚɸɳɢɯɫɹ ɜ ɜɭɡɚɯ ɋɋɋɊ ɧɚ 1 ɹɧɜɚɪɸ 1959,” f. 1M, op. 46, d. 248, list 12. 21 These numbers come from O.M. Gorbatov and L. Ia. Cherkasski, Sotrudnichestvo SSSR so stranami Arabskogo Vostoka i Afriki [Cooperation between the USSR and the Countries of Arab East and Africa], Moscow: Nauka, 1973 – also quoted in Hessler, “Death of an African Student in Moscow.” 22 Gribanova and Zherlitsyna, “Podgotovka studentov iz Afrikanskikh stran v vuzah Rossii”. 23 See, for example, the following memoir accounts of such sojourns: McKay, A Long Way from Home, New York: Lee Furman, Inc., 1937; Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, New York: Hill & Wang, 1994; Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia: A Memoir, Chicago, Ill.: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964; Robert Robinson, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside

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less of a “promised land” of racial equality and more of an educational opportunity of choice. Few of these students harbored deep Marxist convictions. In fact, there is some evidence that even those of them who arrived with the backing of foreign Communist parties or their front organizations often lacked the right ideological credentials or at least failed to put them to good use once in the USSR.24 As a result and in stark contrast to the black travelers of the pre-war decades, African students of the 1960s and 1970s were less inclined to give the Soviets “the benefit of the doubt.” Where the African-Americans of the 1920s-1930s, on a tour away from Jim Crow America, put much faith in Soviet rhetoric and rationalized the many Soviet deficiencies as a necessary corollary to the “newness” of the socialist experiment, the new arrivals proved to be far less sanguine about the Soviets. Many of them also arrived from the places steeped in political activism, charged with the energy released by the process of decolonization. They brought into the midst of Soviet society the very revolutionary fervor and liberation ethos that had marked the Soviet Russia’s entry into the world some forty years earlier.

African students challenge and subvert Soviet ritual Accounts by African students in the late-Soviet Union are replete with complaints about drab lifestyles, everyday regimentation, substandard dorm accommodation, spying (real or imagined) by Soviet fellow students, etc.25 Upon his arrival in Moscow in 1959, an East African student Everest Mulekezi was quick to discover that he had to share his 14’ by 16’ dorm the Soviet Union, Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1988; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, Chicago, Ill.: Liberator Press, 1978; and William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography, New York: International Publishers, 1971. 24 A typical example was that of a young Somali student Abdulhamid Mohammed Hussein, who having arrived in Moscow with references from Italian communists proceeded to wreak havoc with Soviet and university authorities by engaging in a series of domestic disturbances and public scandals. His story was only one of many… See Mazov, Afrikanskie Studenty v Moskve, 91-93. 25 See, for example, Olabisi Ajala, An African Abroad (London: Jarolds, 1963); Andrew Richard Amar, An African in Moscow; Jan Carew, Moscow Is Not My Mecca (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964); Andrea Lee, Russian Journal; Nicholas Nyangira, “Africans Don’t Go to Russia to Be Brainwashed, The New York Times Magazine (16 May 1965), p. 64; S. Omor Okullo, “A Negro’s Life in Russia—Beatings, Insults, Segregation,” U.S. News and World Report, vol. XLIX, no. 5 (1 August 1963), pp. 59-60; William Anti-Taylor, Moscow Diary, London: Robert Hale, 1967; etc.

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room with 3 other students, two of whom were “hand-picked” Russians. His hopes for a hot bath after a long and arduous journey were also dashed – hot water was only available once a week, on Wednesdays from five to eleven o’clock in the evening.26 In stark contrast to the prevailing climate of complacency, Africans protested vociferously against: poor living conditions, racist incidents, restrictions on travel within the USSR, restrictions on dating Russian girls, restrictions on forming national and ethnic student associations. As early as March 1960, African students in Moscow petitioned the Soviet government to clamp down on what they saw as the flagrant expressions of crude racism by Soviet citizens.27 On another occasion, two African students refused to be part of a long established Soviet practice – an annual dispatch of thousands of Soviet students to work in the countryside during the harvest. The objectors from Chad and Morocco argued (unconvincingly) that in their cultures men under twenty-five were not allowed to work in the fields but rather had a special obligation “to engage in leisure activities.”28 At about the same time four African students (Theophilus Okonkwo of Nigeria, Andrew Richard Amar and Stanley Omar Okullo of Uganda, and Michel Ayieh of Togo) were expelled from Moscow State University for defying an administrative ban on the Black African Students’ Union. Their expulsion and subsequent departure from the country became something of a cause célèbre in the West. The students publicly accused university officials of suppressing the union as well as of imposing severe restrictions on the circulation of “books and jazz records.” Okonkwo, Amar, and Ayieh challenged the Soviet authorities in a biting “open letter”: For the Soviet leaders to pose before the world as champions of oppressed Africa while they oppress millions in their own country and their satellitesis hypocrisy at its worst. 29 Death of a Ghanaian student in Moscow, in December 1963, which other African students suspected to have been a homicide, occasioned an

26

Everest Mulekezi, “I Was a Student at Moscow State,” The Readers Digest, vol. 79, no. 471 (1961), 99-104. 27 TsKhSD, f. 5, op. 35, d. 149, l. 42, 44. For more on this and similar incidents, see Mazov, Afriknaskie Studenty v Moskve. Also see “The Plight Of Our Students In The USSR”, West African Pilot (3 February 1964) 28 RGASPI, “Ⱦɨɤɥɚɞ ɨ ɩɪɨɜɟɞɟɧɢɢ ɥɟɬɧɟɝɨ ɨɬɞɵɯɚ ɫɬɭɞɟɧɬɨɜ ɍȾɇ ɜɨ ɜɪɟɦɹ ɥɟɬɢɧɢɯ ɤɚɧɢɤɭɥ 1961 ɝɨɞɚ,” f. 1M, op. 46, d. 295 (1961). 29 “Africans Did Russians In By Rioting,” The Chicago Defender (28 December 1963); also see “Africans Embarrass Reds,” The Christian Science Monitor (18 February 1964).

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exceptionally angry reaction among African students in the USSR.30 They staged a protest march on the Kremlin demanding a “Bill of Rights” for African students in the country (the first unauthorized demonstration in the Soviet Union since the fall of Trotsky in 1927 (!)).31 The press was also raging back home: “…Why did our students… protest in Moscow recently?” exclaimed a particularly incensed African observer. “Was it not because… our boys had been insulted and attacked on trams, on the streets, in restaurants, in most public places? Could it be that our students have grown tired of the hypocrisy of Communism and the Soviet system?”32 More trouble brewed in 1964 and 1965, with African students in the USSR frequently reporting racist attacks, fights with Soviet youngsters, and even feeling compelled to “carry knives for protection.”33 Komsomol officials at Moscow State University (MGU) grudgingly acknowledged several instances of scandalous behavior exhibited by Soviet students but also argued that Africans and other foreigners at MGU had a limited understanding of the selfless and romantic nature of those Soviet young men, who often preferred the hardship of toil in remote Siberia to the pleasures of Moscow high life. One wonders if it was the “romantic nature of Soviet young men” that fueled the passions of one youthful geography major who threatened to “lynch” an African student married to his Russian fellow student. Or was it a disagreement over their respective work ethics that led another MGU freshman to call upon his African roommate to “pack up his stuff and go back to Mali”?34 In May 1965, the Soviet authorities tacitly linked the African student community in the country with the idea of political subversion when they expelled a black American diplomat, Norris D. Garnett, for “conducting anti-Soviet work among students from African countries.”35 Garnett’s departure from 30

An exhaustive study of this episode is found in Julie Hessler, “Death of an African Student in Moscow,” Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 47, nos. 1-2 (2006) 31 “Students Demand ‘Bill Of Rights’,” West African Pilot (30 December 1963). 32 Sunny Odulana, “Our Students In Moscow,” West African Pilot (2 January 1964). 33 See “Red Race Relations,” The Washington Post (5 January 1964); “Africans Carry Knives For Protection In USSR,” Chicago Daily Defender (11 May 1964); “Soviet-African Student Fighting Reaches Kremlin,” The Washington Post (28 January 1965); “African Students Trying Anew To Leave Russia,” The Washington Post (4 April 1965); “Kenya Students Tell Why They Left USSR,” Chicago Daily Defender (8 April 1965). 34 RGASPI, “ɋɩɪɚɜɤɢ ɨɛ ɢɧɬɟɪɧɚɰɢɨɧɚɥɶɧɨɦ ɜɨɫɩɢɬɚɧɢɢ ɜ ɆȽɍ,” f. 1, op. 39. d. 127, lists 9-10, 87 (1964). 35 See “U.S. Diplomat Ordered To Leave Soviet Union,” Chicago Daily Defender (12 May 1965); “Soviet Ousts U.S. Cultural Aide As Inciter of African Students,”

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the scene hardly had the desired long-term effect. Just a few years later, 800 African students went on a week-long strike, this time - in Kiev, in protest against the expulsion of a twenty-three year old Czechoslovakian girl for marrying a Nigerian fellow-student. That same year a Nigerian student sleeping in his dorm room in the city of Lvov was attacked by “a drunken Russian with a chisel.” The attacker was reportedly incensed by the Nigerian’s successes with Russian and Ukrainian girls. The incident quickly turned into a major fight involving other Nigerian students who had come to the rescue of their compatriot, and as a result three of them were expelled “for attacking and beating up a Soviet citizen.”36 Discrimination or alleged discrimination aside, the students’ resentment, it was noted, stemmed from “the sole fact of their living in a communist country”.37 Once in the Soviet Union, Africans, “even selfproclaimed leftists,” had to reconcile “the obvious discrepancies between what is said and what actually exists.” And what “actually existed” in the Moscow of 1960s and 1970s were “the crowded living conditions, lack of privacy, monotonous diet, inadequate sanitary facilities, and the overall drabness of life.”38 A former African student at the Moscow State University, writing about his experiences there, maintained that of all foreign students in the Soviet Union, Africans were most upset by Russia’s depressed style of living: No cars, no cafés, no good clothes or good food, nothing to buy or inspect in the stores, no splash of color to relieve Moscow’s damp gray. Nothing but shortages and restrictions. No opportunity to let go normally, breathe easily, and enjoy some harmless student fun. Not a trace of the civilized pleasures of Paris – or even Dakar.39

By expressing their displeasure with the Soviet status quo (something that few of their Soviet peers dared to do) and by challenging it through their “foreign” lifestyles and cosmopolitan aesthetics some African students became the de facto conduits of dissent. They had more freedom of The New York Times (12 May 1965); also “Expelled Negro Diplomat Calls Soviet Charges Ridiculous,” The Washington Post (17 June 1965). 36 “Africans Studying in Russia Allege Discrimination,” The Christian Science Monitor (11 November 1975); also see “Kiev Strike Settled,” Africa Diary, vol. 15, no. 49 (3-9 December 1975), 7703-7704. 37 “The Plight Of Our Students In The USSR,” West African Pilot (3 February 1964). 38 Ibid. 39 Feifer, “The Red and the Black: Racism in Moscow,” Reporter (2 January 1964), 27.

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expression and travel (and quite often more money) than their hosts and many of them arrived from postcolonial settings reverberating with spirited political debates.40 Everest Mulekezi remembered intense political discussions he used to hold in his dorm room with some of his Russian friends who were absolutely flabbergasted by the openness and nonchalance with which Everest and his fellow Africans discussed politically sensitive matters. From a Soviet perspective, Everest, by encouraging his Russian friends to question the authority and read Western press, clearly acted as an agent of political subversion. By introducing them to jazz he effectively subverted Soviet cultural values… It was in the course of one such “sedition session” that a Russian friend of Mulekezi’s “buried his face in his hands” and conceded the truth of the African’s argument: “It is true we’re not free… I am not free to read what Westerners read. I am not free to visit the West or even travel in my own country without a permit.”41 African students in Moscow articulate ideas manifestly out-of-sync with Soviet sensibilities in the pages of Andrea Lee’s marvelously perceptive Russian Journal. Lee records, for example, an intense conversation she had in a smoke-filled Moscow kitchen with a stern-looking Eritrean student: “In my five years in Russia, I’ve come to hate everything about the Soviet system. Life here is a misery of repression – you yourselves know it… The Soviet Union has educated me, though not in a way it intended.”42

Performing foreignness, performing blackness, performing freedom Not all Africans set out on a collision course with the Soviet system. Yet being an African in the Soviet Union condemned one to performing “foreignness” on a day-to-day basis. Being black also implied an almost automatic association with a number of political and cultural modern phenomena that taxed Soviet sensibilities. I’m specifically referring here to a/ anti-racist and anti-colonial movements with their strong liberation (and often implicitly religious) message and b/ cultural production associated with black roots and containing an unmistakable antiauthoritarian message. The liberal wing of Soviet intelligentsia sometimes embraced the official liberation “causes” for reasons other than them 40

Amar, 19. Mulekezi, “I Was a Student at Moscow State,” The Reader’s Digest, vol. 79, no. 471 (1961), 99-104. 42 Lee, 152. 41

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(those causes) being official. Africa’s struggle for emancipation and freedom evoked some all-too-understandable sympathies among those whose own freedoms were significantly restricted. Having visited West Africa in the late 1950s the bard of the Soviet “thaw” Yevgenii Yevtushenko penned a series of emotionally-charged and ideologically ambiguous poems. His signature penchant for all things exotic notwithstanding Yevtushenko also mused on the supposed commonality of fate between the savannah (Africa) and the taiga (Russia): Savannah, I’m the taiga I’m endless like you I’m a mystery for you And you’re a mystery for me… Your sons desire for you Freedom eternal And towards them I’m filled with love 43 Enormous like the pine trees of my land...

On its surface the poem reads as yet another evocation of empathy with African aspirations. Indeed, over the years the Soviet regime labored to domesticate and appropriate African anti-colonial movements or to claim a kind of ideological kinship to the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., the movement epitomized by a charismatic Baptist minister – by no means a “natural ally” of the USSR.44 Yet the very discussion of civil and human rights in the context of the Soviet everyday, characterized by its typical 43 “Savannah and Taiga,” in Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Vzmah Ruki [An Outstretched Hand] (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardia, 1962), pp. 58-59. /translation mine/. 44 Martin Luther King, Jr., with his Christian gospel and Gandhi-inspired tactics of civil disobedience, had to be inconvenient for the Soviets. They far more preferred such firebrand radicals as Dr. Angela Davis, whose famous 1971-72 trial occasioned a massive propaganda campaign of support by the Soviet Union. [See, for example, numerous commentaries and cartoons about the trial in issues of Krokodil for 1971-72. A typical one depicts a plucky Davis holding her head high in front of a racist judge. The sleeve of the judge’s robe is in fact an executioner’s ax ready to drop on the courageous black Communist. [Krokodil, no. 5 (February 1972), p. 10] But even Angela Davis inspired more than a sense of solidarity in the hearts of Soviet intelligentsia. In 1978, a leading Soviet nuclear physicist Sergei Polikanov was expelled from the Communist Party after having made a statement to Western reporters protesting restrictions on travel abroad. “It was easier to fight for the freedom of Angela Davis than for our own freedom,” announced Polikanov and… predictably got into trouble. [“Soviet Physicist Who Complained of Travel Curb Is Ousted by Party,” The New York Times (28 March 1978)].

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rigidity and the routine of heavy-handed state and party intervention in the lives of Soviet citizens, planted the seeds of dissent. That is why Yevtushenko’s ode to African freedom composed at the time when hopes were running high for a long-lasting post-Stalin liberalization of Soviet society can also be read as a hymn to freedom – African and Russian. And it should probably come as no surprise that one of the first public expressions of dissent in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was occasioned by African events. In 1968, Andrei Amal’rik, the dissident author of the visionary Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, breached a major taboo when he and his wife picketed the British embassy in Moscow carrying signs reading “Gowon Kills Children” and “Wilson, Don’t Help Gowon.”45 This unsanctioned protest was an ingenious act of political defiance. It was the Soviet Union, not Britain, that since 1967 had been providing the crucial military aid to the federalist regime of General Gowon fighting a bloody civil war against secessionist Biafra. Probably the most visible aspect of Africa’s subversive challenge to Soviet values could be observed in the countercultural prominence of the types of artistic expression usually associated with African/black cultural tradition. Living in Moscow in the early 1960s Andrew Amar noted the Russian students’ fascination with jazz music as well as their awareness of its historical roots: One of the things which often brought us together with the Russian students was listening to modern jazz music. Large numbers of them appreciated the better kind of jazz and also realized and acknowledged that it had developed from the folk music of the African people.46

With its strong emphasis on improvisation and free spontaneous expression jazz (just as rock music later) provided for a special kind of camaraderie between its listeners that knew no borders and/or ideological divides. Jazz as an art form then was bound to run afoul of Soviet authorities, the fact duly noted by the observant Amar: It was really the popularity that this type of music gained among Russian students, thus bringing them into close contact and friendship with American and African students, that really decided the Soviet authorities to condemn this kind of music.47

45

Kamm, “Portrait of a Dissenter,” preface to Andrei Amal’rik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, XIII. 46 Amar, 63. 47 Ibid.

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Early Soviet commentators saw in jazz the worst manifestations of Western decadence. They also fumed over the “jungle” and “uncivilized” roots of the music. When it came to criticizing jazz gloves came off and the Soviet critics of the “music of grossness” reinforced their arguments with the most nauseous racist stereotypes. Maxim Gorky wrote a devastating essay “On the Music of the Gross,” which in effect evoked the worst racial stereotypes common in the West. Gorky explicitly links jazz to unbridled sexuality of its performers. For Gorky, jazz is a symptom of decay and sexual degeneracy, a logical final step in the man’s descent into spiritual abyss (obesity and homosexuality being the intermediary stages). In subjecting jazz to his searing critique, the great proletarian author faced an obvious dilemma: How does one reconcile one’s rejection of this “degenerate” music with the feelings of solidarity with and sympathy for its purveyors – the oppressed American blacks? Gorky’s answer bears all the trademarks of Lenin’s creative dialectic. “American Negroes,” he intones, “undoubtedly laugh in their sleeves to see how their white masters are evolving toward a savagery which they themselves are leaving behind.” In one sentence Gorky recognizes the “savagery” of black people and also provides an ideologically sound, if rather ridiculous, rationalization for the spread of jazz music.48 Africa and Africans thus occupied a highly ambiguous place in the Soviet everyday. While over the years the Soviet state and its ideologues exerted considerable effort in “bringing Africa into the fold” the reality of African presence in the USSR was far more multi-layered and complex. As a propaganda weapon Africa often jammed and even backfired, and as the Soviet collapse loomed closer the idea of Africa was playing at least partially a subversive role to the Soviet status quo. It is noteworthy then that African themes came to feature prominently in the Soviet countercultural production, especially towards the late-Soviet period. In 1988, millions of Soviet citizens flocked to the movie theaters to see what would become a classic “perestroika” film ASSA.49 By employing a grotesque but poignant pop-cultural symbolism the film exposed to national scrutiny the debility of late-Soviet society. The movie’s main character, an artsy and nonconformist “boy Bananan” (played by a countercultural icon Sergey Bugaev, also commonly known to his peers under a nickname Afrika)

48

All quotes in this paragraph come from S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1991, New York: Limelight Editions, 1994, 91. 49 Film ASSA, dir. Sergey Soloviev.

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turns himself into a protagonist of change.50 Bananan’s youth and lightness of being, his alternative lifestyle, his penchant for hippiesque outfits, and his eventual tragic end in the hands of mature and businesslike men (men of establishment no doubt) combined to put forward a quixotic vision of life in starch contrast to the moribund Soviet status quo. Set to the throbbing soundtrack “We Wait for Changes” by an underground rock star Viktor Tsoi, ASSA offered both an exposé of and a challenge to the Soviet everyday. The very name “boy Bananan” evokes the image of an exotic and forbidden (or at least not readily available in the empty-shelved Soviet stores) tropical fruit, while the stage name of the actor himself, “Africa,” makes the alien quality of the main character even more pronounced, as does the appearance of Bananan’s best friend – a black-skinned Russian. For the makers of this popular movie Africa obviously presented a point of reference so out of tune with daily Soviet experience, so remote and strange as to endow the bearer of such moniker with a distinctive dissident aura. The idea of Africa and Africa’s foreignness finds use in another celebrated and paradigm-changing perestroika film – Vassily Pichul’s Little Vera (1989). There is a scene in the movie that never failed to elicit puzzled chuckles from the Soviet audience. We see a typical shabby Soviet flat and a little black boy glued to a television screen watching a popular Russian cartoon. At some point the cartoon characters, three vicious looking but highly likable pirates, break into a light-hearted song about Africa: Little kids, No matter what you do, Don’t even think of Going to Africa for walks. Africa is dangerous, 51 Africa is horrible….

The irony of the scene that shows a black Russian child consuming a cultural production that treats Africa as an exotic, dangerous, and slightly ridiculous unknown could not fail to register with the viewers. The black boy’s outward appearance made his absorption in the cartoon highly humorous. Yet the significance of this brief cinematic encounter with 50

See Louis Grachos, Afrika (Los Angeles, Cal.: University of Southern California Fisher Gallery, 1991). 51 The lyrics of the song come from a popular children’s poem. See Kornei Chukovskii, Doktor Aibolit.

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Africa went beyond a passing movie moment. Little Vera gives us a glimpse of popular Soviet imagery of Africa and alerts the viewer to Africa’s presence in late-Soviet public and cultural domains. Yes, Africa is a somewhat unknown quality but not entirely so. The little boy in the movie didn’t just materialize out of thin air amidst the clutter of Soviet domestic life (even if some of the viewers conclude that to have been the case) – his mother is white, hence the father had to be of African descent. His precise identity is left to our imagination – a foreign sailor, an African student, a romantic guerilla type on training in the USSR, or maybe even a visiting black American musician (partisans of Soviet counterculture worshipped Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and others). It is probably not a coincidence that a cult classic like ASSA utilized an idea of Africa and Africanness in its treatment of the contemporary Soviet condition. Such contrasting imagery flashed out the essentials of Soviet experience – its profound isolationism, the drabness of the mundane, the lack of color, and even the notoriously forbidding Russian climate. African students in the USSR routinely collided with the state and challenged by word and deed its values. They had demarcated for themselves a separate cultural and ideological space within the Soviet domain, an impressive achievement of free will, beyond the wildest dreams of most Soviet citizens. For many a Soviet citizen then Africa encapsulated the world outside Soviet ritual, differing from it in almost every respect. And for this very reason Africa and Africans became early targets for the xenophobic propaganda campaigns of the late-Soviet period.

Popular images of Africanness and racist backlash during Perestroika At the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, the Soviets had long since solidified their bone fide credentials as the supporters of African decolonization and liberation struggles. The Soviet Union participated (with varying degrees of success) in a number of African development and industrial projects. African students became a common sight on most large Soviet campuses where many of them enjoyed a degree of popularity among the student body. Besides, a new generation of Soviet children of partial African ancestry began to enter Soviet public life. For most Soviet citizens Africa remained distant and strange but it had found its permanent if marginal space in the Soviet popular imagination and within the official cultural and political discourse. The post-1985 reforms ushered in a period of thorough reevaluation of Soviet

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values and commitments, which also affected both the officially-sanctioned and popular attitudes towards Africa and Africans. By exposing the structural deficiencies of the Soviet system perestroika also invited an increasingly open and progressively critical discussion of the special place the USSR had come to occupy within the international community.52 With the Cold war on the wane, many of the country’s economic shortcomings were now blamed on its external commitments. For too long, argued the avatars of perestroika, the USSR had undermined its own economic base by channeling aid to third world nations. The implication of such argument was all too obvious: the Third World had been “sponging” on the USSR and thus degrading the quality of life for its citizens.53 Even before the onset of reforms folks in the streets had been grumbling about “too much aid to Africans” or lamenting the privileges (foreigners received much higher stipends – 90 rubles per month vs. an average of 30 rubles allotted to Soviet students) bestowed upon African and other visitors at, presumably, their expense.54 As early as 1963, professors from Moscow and Leningrad reported some of their Soviet students complaining bitterly about the preferential treatment allotted to Africans at their colleges: “they are studying at our expense and eating our bread, of course it’s unfair.”55 Some of the most popular images of Africa and African lifestyles long present in the Soviet cultural tradition fed the growing paranoia. It was exactly the frequent representation of Africa as a place of carefree existence, where people (and cute cartoonish animals) care little to none about “tomorrow” that turned Africa into a ready scapegoat for popular discontent. Several generations of Soviet kids, for example, grew up to the lovely tune “Chunga Changa” from a famous cartoon. In the cartoon, a racially diverse group of adorable and playful youngsters enjoy a problemfree life on a tropical (read: African) island, far away from the drudgery and cold of the north. In a lighthearted song they celebrate the obvious benefits of this easy way of life: 52

See Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika New York: Harper & Row, 1988. L.Z. Zevin and E.L Simonov, “Pomosh’ i Ekonomicheskoe Sotrudnichestvo SSSR s Razvivayushimisia Stranami: Uroki, Problemy i Perspektivy,” [Assistance and Economic Cooperation Between the USSR and Developing Countries: Lessons, Problems, and Perspectives] Narody Azii i Afriki, no. 2 (1990), 5-17. 54 See Mulekezi, “I Was a Student at Moscow State”; also see William AntiTaylor, “Red Bias: African Lament,” The Christian Science Monitor (5 November 1963). 55 RGASPI, “ɋɬɟɧɨɝɪɚɦɦɚ ɫɨɜɟɳɚɧɢɹ ɩɪɟɩɨɞɚɜɚɬɟɥɟɣ ɜɭɡɨɜ ɝ. Ɇɨɫɤɜɵ, Ʌɟɧɢɧɝɪɚɞɚ ɢ ɬ.ɞ.,” f. 1, op. 46, d. 339 (23 ɚɩɪɟɥɹ 1963). 53

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Chunga-Changa, the sky is blue Chunga-Changa, the summer’s all year round Chunga-Changa, we live so merry Chunga-Changa, we sing little songs Oh, what a miracle island, miracle island It’s so easy to live here It’s so easy to live here, Chunga-Changa We are happy munching on cocoanuts and bananas 56 Munching on cocoanuts and bananas, Chunga-Changa

A very similar theme can be found in another popular cartoon The Lion Cub and the Turtle, where several charming characters of unmistakably African animals celebrate life in the sun without work. Sings the lion cub: All I do is lie in the sun And move my ears I just lie and lie And move my ears

Such “orientalist” representations of Africa and life in the tropics in general did not have to be intentionally demeaning. More likely they reflected the generally benign views of “southern countries,” widely held by Soviet citizens and just slightly touched by certain condescension and paternalism. Yet under adverse economic circumstances paternalism can easily morph into distaste and even outright hostility. A surge in anti-Third world sentiments accompanied the new revelations about the alleged “sources” of Soviet underdevelopment. The Soviet Union, the public believed, couldn’t afford supporting dependents in the faraway exotic locations. And Africans, the most visible representatives of the developing world in Soviet public spaces, often bore the brunt of what became a spontaneous campaign of denunciation of Soviet assistance abroad. African residents in the Soviet Union at the time reported a rise in the number of racist incidents as well as mounting difficulties in maintaining government scholarships to continue their education in the country.57 In a series of letters to West Africa, Charles Adade, a Ghanaian residing in Leningrad, depicted a rather gloomy fate of the African in Gorbachev’s Russia. According to Adade, a sense of 56

Composer V. Shainskii [translation mine]. See Charles Quist-Adade, In the Shadows of the Kremlin and the White House: Africa’s Media Image from Communism to Post-Communism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001). 57

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desperation and insecurity permeated the lives of Africans (mostly students) in the country of dying socialism. Prior to perestroika, he suggested, African students had been in a privileged class of their own. Their stipends were high, their lodgings were free, and what is more important, they were allowed to travel twice a year to Western Europe, a privilege effectively denied to their Soviet peers. An African bringing three pairs of jeans, a stereo, and a few t-shirts to Moscow from his European vacation could easily fetch himself sufficient rubles for a comfortable living for a semester.58 The neat arrangement was ended by a combination of skyrocketing inflation and new regulations that imposed heavy financial burdens on foreign students in the Soviet Union, but not before it had produced a widely spread envy, resentment and racial hatred amongst the general population. Adade argues that racism, while latent in the Soviet Union, had been energetically suppressed by the communist system. Glasnost lifted the flood gates to prejudice and crude racism and let loose the virtual anti-black hysteria. And many Africans blamed Gorbachev’s “revolution” for not feeling safe in the streets and public places of the Soviet cities. A Nigerian journalism student at Kazan University wrote to a Moscow newspaper: “One day I decided to have my lunch in nearby café. As soon as I opened the door, I was met with jeers and cat-calls by young girls sitting around a table, laughing and cracking unfriendly jokes about me…”59 The enterprising Nigerians soon learned to play curious mind games to save their skin during the growing number of unfriendly encounters. One of them, for example, when approached by a group of hoodlums, pretended to be an American black. The trick worked as the toughs abandoned their original belligerent intentions and “immediately simulated keen interest and began to ask questions about Steve Wonder, Michael Jackson, etc.”60 The ploy, however, was not 100% fail proof and between May and August of 1990 at least four Nigerian students were severely beaten up and one allegedly killed in Moscow on grounds raging from “being a monkey” to dating Russian girls.61 Considering the growing public paranoia about HIV-AIDS, for any African to approach a Russian girl was increasingly becoming a risky proposition. By the late 1980s the Soviet public had grown panicky about the alleged AIDS pandemic in the country. Virgin in their understanding of the dreadful disease Soviet citizens found themselves exposed to a 58

Adade, “Sense of Insecurity”, 482-483. Quoted in Adade, “Russian Roughshod”, 2056. 60 Ibid. 61 Adade, “Black Bashing”, 2606. 59

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media barrage of materials on AIDS, many of them of scientifically dubious content. Publications dealing with AIDS routinely portrayed Africans as primary transmitters of the virus (the first victim to have died was reported by Leningradskaya Pravda as having had her “first sexual contact with Africans ten years ago”). Another newspaper ran a featured story about an infected Ukrainian baby whose mother had “had an affair with an African”).62 Adade’s letters are distinct in their bitterness about the “unethical manner in which Soviet media, in collaboration with Soviet doctors and politicians are handling the anti-AIDS campaign.” A fellow African student complained: “As a result of a deliberate racist campaign, we are now being called SPID (SPID is a Russian abbreviation for AIDS) on the streets by Soviet youngsters.” Soviet street folklore, with its characteristic sexual undertone, tied together the much professed (and mocked) “love” of the Soviet officialdom for the developing world and the appearance of the disease in Russia. A popular joke provided “alternative” transliterations for the original Russian SPID (AIDS) whereas the term was variously interpreted either as Sotsialnoe Posledstvie Internatsionalnoj Druzby (Social Consequence of International Friendship) or Spetsialny Podarok Inostrannyh Druzej (Special Gift from Foreign Friends). Africans residing in the Soviet Union were far from amused though; the joke encapsulated the growing popular dissatisfaction with the regime, which “wasted precious resources” on people who (in the words of one populist politician) “have just descended from the palm tree”… Africans were rapidly becoming visible scapegoats for the Soviet medical, economic and political disasters.63 While the Soviet-style paternalism, that permeated the pre-perestroika publications on Africa, was being gradually toned down, so was the concern for the continent. Africans residing in Russia on the eve of the Soviet collapse noted on many occasions that coverage of Africa was reduced to simplistic and highly stereotypical catalogues of its bane and woes. In the media, the very word “Africa” was often supplanted by cherny kontinent (black continent), the place of danger and wasted opportunities, and a proverbial black hole devouring scant Soviet resources.64 The stage was being set for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal

62

Ibid., “Targets of AIDS-phobia”, 8-9. Quoted in ibid. Also see the discussion in The NIIA-RIAS Dialogue: A Report, Lagos: Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, 1997, 105. 64 See examples of such publications in Charles Quist-Adade, “After the Cold War: the Ex-Soviet Media and Africa”, Race and Class, vol. 32, no. 2 (October/November 1993), 86-95. 63

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from Africa as it was for the debilitating wave of racism and xenophobia soon to sweep across the post-Soviet spaces.

Works Cited Ajala, Olabisi. An African Abroad. London: Jarolds, 1963. Amar, Andrew Richard. An African in Moscow. London: Ampersand, 1963. Anti-Taylor, William. Moscow Diary. London: Robert Hale, 1967. Brent, Jonathan and Vladimir Naumov. Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953. New York: Harpers Perennial, 2004. Brudny, Yitzhak M. Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Carew, Jan. Moscow Is Not My Mecca. London: Secker & Warburg, 1964. Chukovskii, Kornei. Doktor Aibolit [Doctor Dolittle] Moscow: Detskaiia Literatura, 1961. Davidson, A.B. and L.V. Ivanova. Moskovskaya Afrika [Africa in Moscow]. Moscow: Teatral’niy Institut, 2003. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. London: Oxford University Press, 2007. Feifer, George. “The Red and the Black: Racism in Moscow”. Reporter, 2 January 1964. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Gorbatov, O.M. and L. Ia. Cherkasski. Sotrudnichestvo SSSR so stranami Arabskogo Vostoka i Afriki [Cooperation between the USSR and the Countries of Arab East and Africa]. Moscow: Nauka, 1973. Grachos, Louis. Afrika. Los Angeles, Cal.: University of Southern California Fisher Gallery, 1991. Gribanova, V.V. and N.A. Zherlitsyna. “Podgotovka studentov iz Afrikanskikh stran v vuzah Rossii” [Training of African students at Russian universities]. Publications of Africa Institute, http://www.inafran.ru/ru/content/view/77/51/ (accessed June 17, 2008). Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago, Ill.: Liberator Press, 1978. Hessler, Julie. “Death of an African Student in Moscow”. Cahiers du Monde Russe 47 (1-2), 2006.

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Hughes, Langston. I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. New York: Hill & Wang, 1994. Kamm, Henry. “Portrait of a Dissenter”. Preface to Andrei Amal’rik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Koivunen, Pia. “The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: Propagating a New, Peaceful Image of the Soviet Union”. In M. Ilic and J. Smith, eds., Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev. London: Routledge, 2009: 46-65. Kostyrchenko, Gennadi. Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Prometheus Books, 1995. Lee, Andrea. Russian Journal. New York: Random House, 1981. Matusevich, Maxim. “An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans, and the Soviet Everyday”. Race & Class 49 (2), 2008: 59-81. —. “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society”. African Diaspora 1 (102), 2008: 53-85. Mazov, S.V. “Afrikanskie Studenty v Moskve v God Afriki” [African Students in Moscow in the Year of Africa]. Vostok 3, 1999: 89-103. —. “Sozdanie Instituta Afriki” [The Creation of Africa Institute]. Vostok 1, 1998: 80-88. McKay, Claude. A Long Way from Home. New York: Lee Furman, Inc., 1937. Mulekezi, Everest. “I Was a Student at Moscow State”. The Reader’s Digest 79, 1961: 99-104. Nyangira, Nicholas. “Africans Don’t Go to Russia to Be Brainwashed”. The New York Times Magazine, 16 May 1965: 64. Okullo, S. Omor. “A Negro’s Life in Russia – Beatings, Insults, Segregation”. U.S. News and World Report, vol. XLIX, no. 5, 1963: 59-60. Patterson, William L. The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Quist-Adade, Charles. “After the Cold War: the Ex-Soviet Media and Africa”. Race and Class 32 (2), 1993: 86-95. —. In the Shadows of the Kremlin and the White House: Africa’s Media Image from Communism to Post-Communism. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001. Richmond, Yale. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Robinson, Robert. Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union. Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1988.

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Roth-Ey, Kristin. “Loose Girls on the Loose? Sex, Propaganda and the 1957 Youth Festival”. In M. Iliþ, S.E. Reid and L. Attwood, (eds.), Women in the Khrushchev Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 75-95. Smith, Homer. Black Man in Red Russia: A Memoir. Chicago, Ill.: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964. Starr, S. Frederick. Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 New York: Limelight Editions, 1994. Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Yevtushenko, Yevgenii. “Savannah and Taiga”. In Vzmah Ruki [An Outstretched Hand]. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardia, 1962, 58-59. Zevin, L.Z. and E.L Simonov. “Pomosh’ i Ekonomicheskoe Sotrudnichestvo SSSR s Razvivayushimisia Stranami: Uroki, Problemy i Perspektivy” [Assistance and Economic Cooperation Between the USSR and Developing Countries: Lessons, Problems, and Perspectives]. Narody Azii i Afriki 2, 1990: 5-17.

LEARNING ABOUT AFRICA: THE IMAGINATION OF AFRICAN PEOPLE IN ICELANDIC SCHOOLBOOKS KRISTÍN LOFTSDÓTTIR

Introduction Iceland’s isolation from the rest of the world can be seen as an enduring nationalistic theme in Iceland, stressed in various contexts and entangled with notions of purity of people and language. It is in some sense true: Iceland is an island in the North Atlantic Sea populated by three hundred thousand people, but in other respects this conception is a simplification that distorts the multiple engagements that Iceland had with the outside world, including Africa and colonialism. The Nordic countries are often conceptualized as exempted somehow from the history of colonialism and racism that has characterized so much of Europe’s involvement with Africa through history; something which is evident, for example, in how little colonialism has until recently been analysed in relation to the Nordic countries.1 As scholars are increasingly stressing, the Nordic countries had various engagements with colonialism, and people of African descent lived and were visible in the Nordic countries. In Sweden it was, for example, fashionable from the late 17th century to keep ‘black’ boys as jesters at the Royal Family, the most famous being Badin who was brought as child from the Caribbean island Saint Croix and raised to serve as jester to the Swedish Royal family in the mid-19th century.2 In my discussion here, I explore these multiple engagements by focusing on a particular aspect of Icelandic society and culture, that is how Africa has been imagined in Icelandic schoolbooks in the 20th century, stressing that even though there have not been many Africans historically living in Iceland, the country has still had an engagement with Africa, such as in its educational material that has been informed by other encounters 1 2

Cf. Keskinen, 2009; Maurer, Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2010. Habel, 2005: 125.

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and representations. I show that older images often emphasize the humanistic and paternalistic relationship with Africa, formulating the continent as separated and remote from Europe. Furthermore, I discuss how in some recent educational material important changes can be detected especially in regard to how they challenge the simplistic boundaries between ‘us’ - white– Icelanders - and the ‘others’ - Black Africans. Scholars have long since analysed European images of Africa based on racist and ethnocentric views of the continent, which use Africa as a mirror to reflect on the presumable superior qualities of Europeans,3 as well as images proving justification and rationalization for various enterprises within the continent.4 Ruth Mayer even speaks of ‘Africa as an artificial entity, invented and conceived by colonialism’,5 presumably attempting to point out how the images of the continent distorted the lives of real people living there and affected their agency. Her comment echoes V. Y. Mudimbe’s statement that Africa ‘is represented in Western scholarship by “fantasies” and “constructs” made up by scholars and writers since Greek times’,6 stressing that representations of the continent are in a sense more about those representing than those represented. They provide an ‘archive of information’, to use Edward Said’s term, which points at the trans-generational aspects involved – supplying mentality and genealogy, as well as references, and understanding the aspects of these representations.7 In Paul Gilroy’s influential work in the 1990s, he drew attention to the transatlantic links between Europe, USA and Africa, and how racial minority have been excluded from the imagined community of the nation and official histories of the national communities.8 What is important for my discussion here is how Gilroy brings out how modernity and nationality have been theorized in an European context by excluding the history of slavery and colonization, meaning that colonized people outside Europe as well as people of the African diaspora are excluded from European history and culture. Following Benedict Anderson’s now classic discussion of the nation as an imagined community, schoolbooks can be seen as especially interesting in regards to how ‘the’ nation – being a social construction rather than natural entity – is imagined and experienced by those defined as the 3

Cf. Amselle, 1998; Mudimbe, 1994. Lindfors, 2001. 5 Mayer, 2002: 1. 6 Mudimbe, 1994: xv. 7 Said, 1978: 41-42. 8 Gilroy, 1993. 4

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national community. As I have stressed elsewhere, schoolbook texts and educational material are important for nationalistic ideologies, portraying the nation in visual and textual terms, along with explaining and normalizing relationships between different groups of people.9 Björn Lindgren has characterized textbooks as types of memory texts, based upon V. Y. Mudimbe’s definition of the term, embodying political ideology entangled with power and domination.10 A similar sentiment is expressed by Simona Szakács, who argues that that education can be seen as transmitting ‘knowledge and reinforcing social values and norms’.11 As such, school material can be powerful in maintaining stereotypes and transmitting an intergenerational world view from one generation to the other. I see schoolbooks as social documents that are contested and manipulated, their texts derived from a certain socio-cultural context. Importantly, schoolbook texts are about relations and identity that tie local societies and cultures into a larger political and historical context, creating and enforcing boundaries.12 In my discussion here, I am primarily concerned with schoolbook texts as one part of what informs images of Africa in Iceland, but will not focus on these images as a part of school practices or their connection to the educational system in Iceland. It should still be pointed out that schoolbook studies and research focusing on school practices often emphasize a reproduction of dominant State ideology,13 but as Szakács stresses, curriculum and textbooks simultaneously have be seen as powerful tools of social transformation,14 and school practices can be multiple and even at odds with official policies.15 As emphasized in research on media images in general, it is crucial to recognize the agency of those involved, people interpreting and resisting images in multiple ways.16 In the first part of my discussion, I contextualize images of Africa in Iceland by briefly outlining Iceland’s connection to the continent historically, and then I discuss more closely the images of Africa in schoolbook texts. Schoolbooks in Iceland, especially in the past, have often been translations or adaptations from books from other countries, indicating the transnational intertextuality of schoolbooks’ images. It is 9

Loftsdóttir, 2007. Lindgren, 2001: 121. 11 Szakács, 2007: 24. 12 Loftsdóttir, 2010a. 13 Olsen, 1997: 18; Rockwell, 1994: 173. 14 Szakács, 2007: 24. 15 Rockwell, 1994: 173. 16 Askew, 2002: 6. 10

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also difficult to know when a particular book has been in use; many were reprinted many times over the decades and thus used for a very long time. I then move to more recent presentations in Icelandic schoolbooks, showing that some seek to destabilize older conceptions of Africa and the rigid boundaries between us and other, even though we still see a somewhat un-reflexive discussion of skin colour in some of the material.

Africa and Blackness in Iceland and the Nordic Countries As stated earlier, the Nordic countries are often in popular discourse both internally and externally seen as somehow exempted from racism and colonialism, in spite of having historically been engaged in various colonial exercises.17 Denmark, for example, had colonies in the African Gold Coast and the Caribbean, in addition to possessions closer to home, and participated actively in the slave trade.18 Sweden had a colonial role in the African Gold Coast for a very brief period of time, and also in the Caribbean,19 in addition to Swedish scholars being at the forefront in designing racial categorization in late 18th century.20 Norway had strong economic interests in African colonies, in addition to being firmly embedded in European mentality regarding colonization.21 As argued by Randi Marselis, the terms ‘race’ and ‘racism’ are thus often not seen as relevant in the Nordic context, in addition to the national conception of many of the inhabitants of the Nordic countries that they do really not have the ‘burden of guilt’ like other European countries.22 This is supported by Wren’s comment that today racism is seen as external to Denmark; something that happens somewhere else.23 A similar point is raised by Marianne Gullestad writing in relation to perceptions of immigrants in Norway.24 Iceland was not directly involved in colonial enterprises, being a small and poor Danish dependency in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th, with a population below 100,000 people.25 As I have observed elsewhere, Icelanders were, nevertheless, part of a global system of power 17

Blaagaard, 2010: 101-102. Ibid. 19 Sawyer, 2002: 19. 20 Pratt, 1992. 21 Kjerland and Rio, 2009: 6. 22 Marselis, 2008: 463. 23 Wren, 2001: 159. 24 Gullestad, 2002. 25 Statistics Iceland, 2010. 18

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with colonialism at the centre, accepting the general ideology behind the colonial system and reproducing racist views in various printed media.26 Racist attitudes occasionally emerged explicitly, for example when, after the Second World War, the Icelandic government demanded that the USA government station no ‘black’ soldiers at the American navy base, identifying the soldiers especially as a threat to Icelandic women.27 The presence of the soldiers had created a great controversy in Iceland partly due to their presumed “effect” on Icelandic women, and this request reflects that ‘black’ soldiers were seen as especially problematic in this regard. The Icelandic texts about Africa and African people from the late 19th and early 20th century were usually not based on actual encounters or experiences but generally written by people who had never been to Africa nor participated directly in the colonial project. However, there were certainly many cases of Icelanders encountering people from Africa or from the African diaspora, usually outside Iceland. To mention a few examples, the poet Matthías Jochumsson, author of the national anthem who wrote about his experience in the London Chrystal Palace where he saw a dance exhibition performed by West African women from Dahomey,28 and nine Icelanders who, in 1911, went to South-Africa to work in the whaling industry in Cape Town, including Jón Magnússon who wrote a book about his experiences which was published in 1937.29 Iceland was also visited by African-American artists such as Josephine Baker in 1954 and Louis Armstrong in 1965, both of whom were well received and celebrated in the Icelandic media.

Africa in Icelandic Schoolbooks Schoolbooks published at the turn of the 20th century include Africa generally more in geography books than history books, thus locating the continent as a geographical entity more than a historical one. Discussion of African people can often be found in sections describing and distinguishing racial categories, then describing African people in a dehumanizing way when explaining the physical and cultural aspects that were seen as characterizing the different races. The presumed racial differences are, furthermore, often elaborated more closely in illustrations accompanying 26

Cf. Loftsdóttir, 2009b and 2008. Ingimundarson, 2004. 28 Cf. discussion in Loftsdóttir, 2009b. 29 Sigvaldsson, 1937. 27

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the text.30 A geography book by Karl Finnbogason, probably originally published in 1907 but republished many times at least until 1937, states: “The Negroes live in Sudan. They have black skin, mouth sloping forward, thick lips and curly hair.”31 The text continues with elaborating how “the Negroes” are superstitious and unable to govern themselves.32 Such subjective characterization was still not limited to African people or other groups perceived as non-white, but also used when characterizing people of European nationalities, even though generally not as negative, and seen in books on Iceland’s history and society. Africa does occasionally feature in history books focusing on the world’s exploration, placing a central concern on how exploration and, later, colonization benefited Europe. The countries explored are spoken about as reservoirs of raw material rather than seen as active participants in the shaping of the ‘modern’ world’.33 Egypt is the exception from this, but Egypt was in fact not seen as a part of the African continent but rather a part of the history of civilization that eventually lead to the birth of Europe. Conceptualizing Egypt as nonAfrican has a long tradition in Europe.34 Occasionally Africa is mentioned in relation to the slave trade, the tone in the textbook then generally objective and passive. In one history book published in 1952 it is stated, for example, that the Spanish “bought blacks (svertingja) or kidnapped them from Africa and took them to America. They were stronger than the Indians and tolerated work better. This was the origin of slavery in America that lasted for several centuries”.35 In a geography book a more critical perspective is given, the text still characterizing South and Central Africans as the inhabitant of “tribes” on “low cultural stage” (lágu menningarstigi). The text criticizes the slave trade and especially the participation of ‘white men’ but optimistically saying that now the ‘culture nations” send missionaries, doctors and teachers to “help the people” and to “teach them to work”.36 In the 1980s until the late 1990s, Africa features in a few textbooks that have in common a strong emphasis on the livelihood of hunters, gatherers and pastoralists, in addition to increasingly appearing as an ‘underdeveloped’ continent. These books are different from older books in that they do generally not emphasize racial categorization so much, but 30

Loftsdóttir, 2010a. Finnbogason, 1931: 109. 32 Ibid., 109-110. 33 Loftsdóttir, 2010a: 90. 34 Sanders, 1969. 35 Bjarnarson, 1913: 75-76. 36 Arason, 1924: 123. 31

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still reproduce a notion of Africa as a continent belonging to the past. Even though cities are mentioned in some books, relatively many seem to emphasize the livelihood strategies of pastoral people or herders (focusing, for example, on the San people, the Masaai or the Pygmies in Zaire). This discussion is generally somewhat positive in its celebration of difference but it is still positioned in the framework of a ‘disappearing’ world, not locating these societies within a larger political and historical context. It fits quite well with an evolutionary view of the world where these groups are seen as exotic survivals of past ways that was the predominant way of framing discussion of hunter-gatherers and pastoral people until the 1980s.37 This can generate a stereotypical image of the continent as populated typically by pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. One book entitled “Life in a Warm Country: Tanzania” (Líf í heitu landi: Tansanía), probably published in the late 1970s or early 1980s, can be seen as an exception to this pattern. It gives an overview of Tanzanian society under headings such as ‘The children’ or ‘What is eaten’, and seems to try to focus to some extent on city life (although only very briefly) and to locate Tanzania in the present. A geography book translated to Icelandic from Swedish and published in two volumes in 1996 and 1997 gives extensive discussion of Africa and continues with this focus of locating the continent in the past. In volume one, we see similar pictures of hunter gatherers groups presented as interesting people of the past. The text compares the religion of particular groups to the old Nordic religion, trying of course to create a link of commonality for students, but in so doing simultaneously enforcing the association of Africa with a distant past.38 In volume two of the same book, Africa’s association with underdevelopment is underlined repeatedly in the beginning of the text through discussion of aspects often seen in association with Africa as a ‘problem’ such as population explosion, lack of water, and conflicts between ethnic groups. In one chapter heading bluntly labelled “Underdeveloped Continent,” it is noted once again how little is cultivated in Africa, how primitive agriculture is, and the lack of machines for cultivation, as well as lack of industry, underdevelopment of infrastructure, and the difficult position of women in African societies. The text emphasizes technological innovations as a motivation for change in Africa, thus echoing theories of modernization where technological innovations are equalized with progress. Difficulties facing the different African States appear in the text as somehow natural and not placed in any 37 38

Leacock and Lee, 1982. Anderson, 1997: 60-61.

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historical perspective. The text ends with a section entitled “Is there a hope for positive development?” In a chapter section that focuses more closely on Kenya, the focus continues to be on negative aspects and the lack of various aspects.39 In all these books, ‘masculine protection’ can be seen as the underlying theme, based on the subordinate position of those in the protected position,40 in addition to ‘whiteness’ being also at play in the background with development discourses frequently revolving around ‘white’ people saving darker and less fortunate ones.41 The issue of race is brought up in these more recent books even though not featuring as explicit racial categorization as in the older books. A history book translated from Swedish and published in Icelandic in 1995 uses different kinds of colour terms to refer to people that seems to serve no particular purpose for the text except to remind the reader of the skin colour of the people in question. Phrases such as ‘Black Africa’ and ‘Darkest Africa’ are used rather uncritically.42 Another book in geography first published in 1972 and republished several times until 1986 distinguishes people into racial groups but has no elaboration of those groups as characterized by the older books.43 The insistence on dark skin pigmentation coupled with absence of reference to light complexion makes dark skin appear as the exception, a deviation from the norm, further normalizing whiteness as unmarked.44 In some of the more recent books a critical perspective is taken in relation to skin colour, usually by emphasizing the injustice of racism and discrimination. A sociology book from 1986 gives, for example, a brief outline of the system of apartheid, criticizing the discrimination involved,45 while another one from 1989 discusses prejudice in relation to skin colour, emphasizing that such discrimination is racism.46 These texts, however, do not take a serious stand in deconstructing the racial categorization itself, nor explain the historical origins of such categorization, thus assuming it as natural in some sense. When the text refers to people as ‘black’ or ‘white’ without critically engaging with the problems of such categorization, racial categorization is naturalized as being common knowledge.47 39

Ibid., 86. Young, 2003: 4. 41 Loftsdóttir, 2009c. 42 Häger, 1995. 43 Guðbergsson, 1972. 44 Cf. discussion in Hartigen, 1997. 45 Förde, 1986: 12. 46 Hompland, 1989: 109. 47 Cf. discussion in Loftsdóttir, 2007: 15. 40

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Recent Discussions of Africa in Iceland From the 1990s Iceland became much more internationally integrated. The gradual deregulation of banks and the adoption of the EES treaty in 199448 contributed to Iceland’s increased involvement in the globalised world economy. With added demands of labour, increased immigration followed; immigrants constituted 8% of the population in 2008, compared to below 2% in 1996.49 Iceland’s new landscape of people is characterized by higher numbers of foreign nationals, second generation immigrants, adopted children and refugees. Therefore, many of the new Icelanders with foreign backgrounds are born and raised in Iceland. Immigration and questions concerning what can be labelled multiculturalism are issues debated within Icelandic society and, as stressed by Marianne Gullestad, one can currently observe across Europe a reinforcement of the “ethnic dimensions of majority nationalism, with a focus on common culture, ancestry and origin”.50 Such majority nationalism has always been present in Iceland with a strong emphasis on Iceland’s cultural purity and uniqueness. Around the turn of the century, several schoolbooks for children can be found that give a more dynamic view of Africa, as well as books that destabilize the image of the homogenous ‘white’ Icelander. In 2003 the book “Does Glue Exist in Africa?” was published and, as the title indicates, it specifically addresses the continent. The book is a translation and adaptation of a Swedish book from 1992. In the foreword the Swedish author explains that one of the reasons for him to write the book was that he wanted to show that Africa was so much more “than only misery”, as often represented in the media.51 This book marks a very different type of perspective from the older ones earlier discussed, emphasizing the diversity of the African continent and locating current problems of the continent within a political and historical context. It gives an overview of Africa’s history prior to the colonial period, as well as addressing the violence and dehumanization of colonialism. Each chapter is placed forward in the form of a reply to specific and rather naive questions such as “Does Africa have schools?” and “Are there tall buildings in Africa?” The text gives specific replies that generally move the attention from the generic conception of ‘Africa’ as the homogeneous unity implied in the questions to the specificity of different countries and individuals. 48

Ólafsson, 2008. Statistics Iceland, 2009. 50 Gullestad, 2002: 45. 51 Berg, 2003: 5. 49

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Individuals speak often for themselves in the text, instead of being spoken for. One book chapter is entitled “Why are black people black?” and here the author provides scientific information about skin-pigmentation. However, by including a chapter about skin colour within a book about Africa, the book still participates in naturalizing skin colour as having to do with dark skinned people, normalizing whiteness as an invisible and fixed norm.52 As scholars have by now sufficiently demonstrated, racial classifications have historically normalized white skin colour,53 and, as I pointed out earlier, slavery and racism have for a long time been seen as belonging to the sphere of ‘black’ history, as having nothing to do with Western intellectual history.54 This different perspective can also be found in the history book “Pile of Rocks in the Oceans” (Ein grjóthrúga í hafinu), published in 2004, which is about Iceland’s history but mentions Africa in a few places. The name of the book refers to Iceland and instantly brings an image of isolation but simultaneously the insignificance of Iceland in the larger world. The text strongly identifies Iceland as part of a wider ideological and political context, focusing especially on the countries closest to Iceland which have most affected its history. It also includes a chapter about different states in history, as if to remind the reader that the world is wider than this, including a short section on the Songhay Empire in West Africa, as well as discussing the links between Spain and North Africa. The brief section on the Songhay kingdom gives a view of a dynamic, powerful state connected to the outside world. The text directly states that Songhay and other past African states were in many respects similar to states in Europe,55 thus drawing an image of familiarity and agency, rather than otherness and passivity. Two book series, The Art of Writing and Reading and Come and See, are both designed for young children; the first one consisting of short texts to practice reading skills and the latter used for education in biology, social sciences and history. These books originally caught my attention due to the accompanying pictures, which show a sharp visual contrast with older books in that many show dark skinned children in the context of Iceland. The book At Sæbóli (Á Sæbóli), which is a part of the series The Art of Writing and Reading, can be taken as an example. The siblings Þóra and Þórir get to stay with their grandparents at the farm Sæból while their parents travel to Rome. The story focuses on their stay with their 52

Cf. Frankenberg, 1993; Jacobson 1998; Loftsdóttir 2003. Hartigan, 1997: 496. 54 Gilroy, 1993: 49. 55 Helgason, 2004: 47. 53

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grandparents (which for most Icelandic children are common happenings) and shows the children involved in activities familiar to most Icelandic children; the story line thus firmly locating them within Icelandic reality. In the beginning of the story we are shown pictures of the parents and see that their mother has light skin colour and blond hair, and their father is dark with dark curly hair. The siblings have the same colour as their father and the son has curly hair as well. The book Come and see the Body (Komdu og sjáðu líkamann) from the series Come and See similarly includes drawings of people with different skin pigmentation without making any special comment in relation to it. The book has no geographical purpose but it is rather addresses the normative body and its main function in very simple way. By including pictures of children of both genders, a child in a wheelchair and children with different skin pigmentation, the book tries to construct the normative body as a diverse body, not prioritizing specific gender or skin colour as the norm.56 Nowhere in these two series as a whole is there an explicit mention or observation made in regard to the different skin complexion of individuals present or diversity within certain families. My point is not that skin colour should not be discussed or that this in itself is enough to address the experiences of children of the African diaspora, but that through this interaction of pictures and texts, these children appear as a normal and mundane part of Icelandic society, thus importantly destabilizing the view of Iceland as populated by ‘white’ descendants of Vikings. The film “Our Africa” (Afríkan okkar) released in 2008 directly involves children of the African diaspora. It has been shown in the national television and can be downloaded for free at the home page of The National Centre for Educational Materials (Námsgagnastofnun), which is a state-run company and the main producer of educational material in Iceland. The film is a documentary about an Icelandic eight year old, Erna, and her little sister Auður who have a Zambian father and an Icelandic mother. The film focuses on when Erna’s Icelandic families visit her Zambian family, and as such the film makes the connections between different parts of the world clearly visible, making Zambia a part of the identity of these two Icelandic girls. The film shows the viewer the meeting of the two families, a trip to a safari and popular tourist places in Zambia. Erna narrates the film and provides information about various aspects of the African continent, Zambia and its wildlife. Interestingly, the generic word ‘Africa’ is very often used in the film, much more than Zambia, such as to describe a destination or origin, often juxtaposing the 56

Cf. discussion in Loftsdóttir 2009a.

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generic term ‘Africa’ with the specified ‘Iceland.’ This could be due to the fact that Icelandic people very often refer to “Africa” to describe specific areas or destinations, giving somewhat broad generalizations about the continent. The film is refreshing in its emphasis on the two families, seeing Zambia through the eyes of Erna’s Icelandic family. It thus shows the Icelandic students seeing the film, real individuals in actual circumstances, as well as overall destabilizing the boundaries between being Icelandic and African. In the opening and the ending scenes of the film we hear Erna tell about herself and in both scenes her skin colour is the main topic of discussion. In the opening scene, she says: “My father he is from Africa, and he is rather dark. My mother is from Iceland, she is [she hesitates] just white and then I become brown […] I am kind of different from others”. The last sentence is said rather hesitantly, and it establishes her skin colour as setting her apart from other Icelandic children. She further elaborates that sometimes it is fun but often it is tiring to have people always asking where she is from when she is “of course just from Iceland”. The normalization of whiteness in relation to Iceland is further elaborated in the final words when she explains that those who don’t know her see her as ‘very black’ but her friends see her as ‘just white’, probably to emphasize that to them she is just like everybody else. She adds that with her family she feels black like them, then possibly referring to her Zambian family. We never hear the interviewers or filmmakers so it is difficult to know if this subject is so close to Erna’s heart that she wanted to begin and end the film with it, if it was selected from many of the clips from the film maker or whether she was especially asked to talk about or explain it. The point here is not to trivialize Erna’s perspective or her mature way of discussing it but rather to critically ask what this framing means for other Icelandic children, perhaps especially those who are conceived as being ‘white’. In the teaching aid material following the film, which can be downloaded from the same page, the issue of skin colour is not addressed but teachers are encouraged to locate Zambia in a geographical context, as well as compare Zambian and Icelandic kids.57 Within the classroom this aspect of the film should at least be positioned within the heritage of racism and with a critical evaluation of why skin colour continues to be significant in Iceland.

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Yngvadóttir og Eyjólfsdóttir, 2008.

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Final Comments Africa has been imagined in diverse ways in Iceland for a long time. The schoolbooks published after 2000, taken here as examples, all destabilize in some sense older views of purity and homogeneity, generally not seeing Africa as separated and foreign. Their authors seemingly attempt to engage with changing compositions of the Icelandic nation, along with acknowledging diversity and connections that have always been there. It should be stressed that these are only single schoolbooks that do not necessarily reflect on what happens in the classroom or school policies and practices in a wider sense. Some school material also continues to highlight race as a category of difference. Inequality can be seen as existing in the school system, Christianity, for example, being dominant in religious education Also, while the current national curriculum stresses the importance of equality in all school practices, it simultaneously draws a somewhat strong opposition between immigrant children and other Icelandic children.58 In Iceland, there seems also to be some acceptance of stereotypical images of Africans as is reflected in that many people saw it as legitimate to republish the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Negros” for Icelandic Children59 or to publish a cartoon of Obama, then candidate for president, dressed in a straw skirt.60 The publication of these visual images certainly provoked mixed responses, indicating a more critical view of images of the past simultaneously as their acceptance. This recent material aimed at educating young children hopefully also contributed towards challenging and destabilizing older views of Iceland’s purity and homogeneity.

Works Cited Amselle, J.-L. Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. (Trans. C. Royal). California: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1990]. Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1983. Askew, K. “Introduction”. In K. A. a. R. R. Wilk (Ed.), The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002, 1-13.

58

Cf. Loftsdóttir, 2010b. Loftsdóttir, forthcoming. 60 Loftsdóttir, 2010c. 59

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Blaagaard, Bolette B. “Remembering Nordic Colonialism: Danish Cultural Memory in Journalistic Practice”. Kult, special issue, 7, 2010: 101121. Borg, Arnheiður og Rannveig Löve. Á Sæbóli. Drawings by Höllu Sólveigu Þorgeirsdóttur. Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 1998. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London, New York: Verso, 1993. Gullestad, M. “Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, Nationalism and Racism”. Journal of the Royal anthropological Institute, 8 (1), 2002: 45-63. Hable, Ylva. “To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927-35”. Film History, 17, 2005: 125-138. Hartigan, J.J. “Establishing the Fact of Whiteness”. American Anthropologist, 99 (3), 1997: 495-505. Ingimundarson, V. “Immunizing against the American Other: Racism, Nationalism, and Gender in U.S.-Icelandic Military Relations during the Cold War”. Journal of Cold War Studies, 6 (4), 2004: 65-88. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Keskinen, Suvi, Salla Tuori, Sari Irni and Diana Mulinari. Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Kjerland, K.A. & Rio, K.M. (eds.). Kolonitid: Nordmenn paa eventyr og big business in Africa og Stillehavet (pp. 5-9). Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press/Spartacus Forlag AS, 2009. Leacock, E. & Lee, R. (eds.). Politics and History in Band Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982: 1-20. Lindfors, B. “Hottentot, Bushman, Kaffir: The Making of Racist Stereotypes in the 19th-century Britain”. In M. Palmberg (ed.), Encounter Images in the Meetings of Africa and Europe. Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute, 2001, 54-75. Lindgren, B. “Representing the Past in the Present: Memory-texts and Ndebele Identity”. In M. Palmberg (ed.), Encounter Images in the Meetings between Africa and Europe. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2001, 121-134. Loftsdóttir, Kristín. “Encountering Others in the Icelandic Schoolbooks: Images of Imperialism and Racial Diversity in the 19th Century”. In Þorsteinn Helgason and Simone Lässig (eds.), Opening the Mind or

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Drawing Boundaries? History Texts in Nordic Schools. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht UniPress, 2010(a). —. “Margbreytileiki og fjölmenningarlegt samfélag í námsbókum: Sýn aðalnámskrár grunnskóla og gátlista Námsgagnastofnunar”. Uppeldi og menntun 18(2), 2010(b): 35-51. —. “Leyfar nýlendutímans og kynþáttahyggju: Ljóð Davíðs Stefánssonar, Tómasar Guðmundssonar og deilur um skopmynd Sigmunds” (The Remains of Colonial and Racist Ideologies). Skírnir, 184 (spring), 2010(c): 121-144. —. “The Diversified Iceland: Identity and Multicultural Societies in Icelandic Schoolbooks”. In Staffan Selander (Ed.), Nordic Identities under Change. Oslo: Novus Press, 2009(a), 239-260. —. “Pure manliness’: The Colonial Project and Africa’s Image in 19th Century Iceland”. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 16, 2009(b): 271-293. —. “Invisible Colour: Landscapes of Whiteness and Racial Identity in International Development”. 2009. Anthropology Today, 25(5), 2009(c): 4-7. —. “Shades of Otherness: Representations of Africa in 19th-century Iceland”. Social Anthropology 16(2), 2008: 172-186. —. “Learning Differences: Nationalism, Identity and Africa in Icelandic Schoolbooks”. International Textbook Research, The Journal of the George-Eckert Institute, 29 (1), 2007: 5-22. —. (2003) “Never Forgetting? Gender and Racial – Ethnic Identity during Fieldwork”. Social Anthropology, 10(3), 2003: 303-317. Marselis, R. “Descendants of slaves: The articulation of mixed racial ancestry in Danish television documentary series”. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11, 2008: 447-469. Maurer, Serena, Kristín Loftsdóttir and Lars Jensen. “Introduction”. KULT 7, 1-7, 2010. http://postkolonial.dk/artikler/IntroductionNCM.pdf Mayer, R. Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization. Hanover and London: Darthmouth College, 2002. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Idea of Africa (African Systems of Thought): Indiana University Press, 1994. Ólafsson, S. “Íslenska efnahagsundrið: Frá hagsæld til frjálshyggju og fjármálahruns”. Stjórnmál og stjórnsýsla, 2008: 233-256. Olsen, L. Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools. New York: The New Press, 1997. Pratt, M. L. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

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Rockwell, E. “Schools of the Revolution: Enacting and Contesting State Forms in Tlaxcala, 1910-1930”. In J. Scott & G. M. Joseph (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994, 170-208. Sanders, E.R. “The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Function in Time Perspective”. Journal of African History, 10(4), 1969: 521-532. Sawyer, L. “Routings: ‘Race’, African Diasporas, and Swedish Belongings”. Transforming Anthropology, 11 (1), 2002: 13-35. Sigvalsson, Benjamín. Æfintýri Afríkufarans: Þættir úr æfisögu Jóns Magnússonar, Fljótsdælings. Reykjavíki: Benjamín Sigvaldsson, 1937. Statistic Iceland 2009. Immigrants and Persons with Foreign Background, Hagtíðindi Social Statistic. 94(4):1-24. Downloaded 20 February 2010 from https://hagstofa.is/lisalib/getfile.aspx?ItemID=9077 Statistic Iceland 2010. Data accessed 10 September 2010 from http://hagstofa.is/?PageID=622&src=/temp/Dialog/varval.asp?ma=MA N00000%26ti=Lykilt%F6lur+mannfj%F6ldans+1703%2D2010++%26 path=../Database/mannfjoldi/Yfirlit/%26lang=3%26units=Fj%F6ldi Szakács, S. “Now and Then: National Identity Construction in Romanian History. A Comparative Study of Communist and Post-Communist School Textbooks”. International Textbook Research. The Journal of the George-Eckert Institute, 29(1), 2007: 23-47. Wren, Karen. “Cultural Racism: something rotten in the state of Denmark?” Social & Cultural Geography, 2 (2), 2001: 142-162. Young, I. M. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29 (11), 2003: 2-25.

Schoolbooks and education material discussed Afríkan okkar. Author: Anna Þóra Steinþórsdóttir. Produced by Klipp ehf, 2008. Downloaded 31 June 2010 from http://drm.nams.is/ngs/ngsfiles Anderson, Göran. Landafræði handa unglingum: 1. Hefti. Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 1997 [1991/92]. Arason, Steingrímur. Landafræði. Reykjavík: Prentsmiðjan Gutenberg, 1924. Berg, Lars-Eric. “Formáli höfundar” (Author’s introduction) Er lím í Afríku? (þýðandi: Dagmar Vala Hjörleifsdóttir). Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 2003. Bjarnason, Þorleifur. Mannkynssaga handa unglingum. Reykjavík: Bókaverzlun Guðm. Gamalíelssonar, 1913.

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Finnbogason. Landafræði Handa börnum og unglingum (6. Útgáfa). Reykjavík: Bókaverslun Guðm. Gamalíelsonar, 1931 [1913]. Förde, B. Kemur mér það við? Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 1986. Guðbergsson, Gylfi. Landafræði II. hefti: Almenn landafræði, útálfur. (4th edition). Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 1986 [1972]. Häger, Bengt ǖke. Samferða um söguna: Mannkynssaga fyrir efri bekki grunnskóla. (Sigurður Hjartarson translated). Reykjavík: Mál og menning, Námsgagnastofnun, 1995. Helgason, Þorsteinn. Ein grjóthrúga í hafinu: Kennslubók í sögu. Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 2004. Hompland, A. Samfélagið: Námsefni fyrir grunnskóla (Gunnar Frímannson, Páll Bergsson og Valgerður Hrólfsdóttir transl.). Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 1989. Tryggvadóttir, Kristín H. [n.d.] Líf í heitu landi: Tanzanía. Reykjavík: Ríkisútgáfa Námsbóka. Yngvadóttir, Aldís and Ellen Klrar Eyjólfsdóttir. Afríkan Okkar: Kennsluhugmyndir með samnefndri mynd. Reykjavík: Námsgagnastofnun, 2008. Downloaded 27 August 2010 from http://www.nams.is/pdf/afrikan_okkar.pdf

WRITING OUR FUTURE HISTORY TOGETHER: APPLYING PARTICIPATORY METHODS IN RESEARCH ON AFRICAN DIASPORA IN FINLAND ANNA RASTAS

“So, have a kind of a positive image, because it creates, or it has allowed the black consciousness to be created in people’s minds, in the minds of Africans and people of African descent. […] When we talk about Africans in whatever society they live in, it’s not just about poverty, about illness, diseases, hunger, drought…” .

The quote above is from a speech given by Perpetual Crentsil in the seminar “Celebrating the accomplishments of African people”, held in Helsinki in October 2009. The seminar was part of the “African Voices” happening, organized by the African Civil Society in Finland. The aim of the organizers was to bring together Finnish Africans and their various organizations and to send a message to other Finns: We are here, we also belong here, we do good things here, and we work hard to make this society a better place.1 1 I use the notion of “Finnish Africans” here, instead of for example Black or “Afroeuropeans in Finland”, since at the moment it seems to be the best possible way to describe my research subjects. By Finnish Africans I refer to all those people who identify themselves as Africans or descendants of Africans living in Finland. The many questions and dilemmas related to the words that Finnish Africans use to express their ties to Africa and African diaspora, as well as words with which they refer to their individual and collective racialized identities, are examined in my ongoing research project “Africa(ns) in Finnish non-fiction”. For a discussion of the meanings and arbitrariness of namings and categorisations referring to individuals’ Africanness or African roots in Finland see Anna Rastas, “Racialising categorization among young people in Finland,” YOUNG – Nordic Journal of Youth Research 13 (2005); Anna Simola and Anna Rastas, “Jos

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Unfortunately, there were not many White Finns in the audience, and the Finnish media seemed to have no interest in this happening.2 Perpetual Crentsil is a Ghanaian-born anthropologist who lives and works in Finland. In her speech she emphasized the need to change the predominantly negative representations of Africa and Africans. She argued that the many positive achievements of Africans and people of African descent in Finnish society should be highlighted too. As a social scientist, she is familiar with the dynamics allowing negative ideas and stereotypes of Africans to be produced and perpetuated. As a Black African woman who has lived in Finland for many years, she is also aware of the consequences of these representations in the everyday lives of people of African descent in Finland. The negative images of Africa and Africans and the disregard of the existence of African communities in Finland have been the most recurrent features in the data gathered in the multidisciplinary ethnographic research project “Africa(ns) in Finnish non-fiction”.3 The study aims at examining the ethics and politics of knowledge production related to the African diaspora and minorities in general. Representations of Africa, encounters between Africans and Finns, and the presence of Africans and their descendants in Finnish scholarly texts and other non-fiction have been examined by doing searches from various databases, by creating bibliographies and by analysing different genres of literature, mainly nonfiction. Since I also explore the impacts of these representations, especially on Finnish Africans, text analyses have been combined with ethnographic and participatory methods in order to create dialogue with Finnish Africans and their communities. The fieldwork consists of interviews, workshops, participation in activities arranged by Africans living in Finland and various side projects inspired by participative and action research tradition. Analyses of existing literature, together with the rohkenen sanoa... Voiko ihonväristä puhua edistämättä rasismia?” in Journalismikritiikin vuosikirja 2008, ed. Maarit Jaakkola (Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, Journalismin tutkimusyksikkö 2008); in other European countries see e.g. Marta Sofia López, “Introduction,” in Afroeurope@ns: Cultures and Identities, ed. Marta Sofia López (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); Sabrina Brancato, AfroEurope. Texts and Contexts (Berlin: Trafo, 2009), 22-23; Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small, Black Europe and the African Diaspora (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 2 Anna Rastas, summary of the field notes made by Jarkko Päivärinta and Nadja Laine, October 16, 2009. 3 In addition to myself as the principal investigator, several researchers and students have been working for the project that was funded by Kone Foundation for the biennium 2008-2010.

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knowledge produced during the fieldwork, have revealed that existing research and other texts about Africans, and Africa and the African diaspora in Finland are largely partial or biased. Africans and their communities do not really have a voice in Finnish society. Exploring the current implementations of Africanness in Finland and the emergence and different manifestations of diasporic Africanness among the heterogeneous groups of Finnish Africans is necessary, not only for the recording of their local histories but also for political activities. Examining together with Finnish Africans what is known about the African diaspora in Finland also aims at exploring possibilities for their empowerment. In Finland, as in most European countries, “the biography of the nation has become negotiable” due to migration.4 Promoting the participation of Finnish African communities in research projects aims not only at making their voices better heard, but also at including their voices in the “national we”. This essay discusses the possibilities of applying participatory methods to carry out projects in which the expert knowledge of research subjects is taken seriously and incorporated into the knowledge creation processes.5 Descriptions and histories of the local African diaspora communities can be done in co-operation with those people whose lives and cultures we are studying. Firstly, I will present a short description of Africans in Finland and an overview of how they are represented in scholarly texts published in Finnish.6 Then, I will provide some examples of the side projects and coprojects developed during the project “Africa(ns) in Finnish non-fiction” in order to show how we may encourage individuals and communities to contribute to the projects in which their histories are documented and in which their histories become part of “our history”.

4

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, “The nation as a human being”, 111. See e.g. Coyan Tromp, “Criteria for a reflexive approach to knowledge production”, 14-15. 6 In addition to scholarly texts, other genres of non-fiction have been recorded and analyzed during the project, e.g. media texts, travelogues, autobiographies written by Finnish Africans, school books and literature for children. For an overview of these analyses, Olli Löytty and Anna Rastas, “Afrikka Suomesta katsottuna,” in Afrikan aika, ed. Annika Teppo (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, forthcoming 2011). 5

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Africans in Finland According to demographic statistics based on countries of origin there are over 20000 African born-people in Finland.7 Estimating the number of descendants of Africans is more difficult, since official statistics do not specify ethnicity or “race”. Until 1990, Finland was considered a country of emigration rather than immigration. Immigration to Finland increased rapidly after 1990, but the number of people with an immigrant background is still small compared to many other European countries. People of African heritage constitute only a small, though rapidly growing minority within Finland’s immigrant population. Unlike migrants from the largest immigrant groups, migrants from Africa have mostly grown up in non-western cultures, and many of them have a refugee background. Moreover, cultural differences may make their integration into Finnish society a slow and laborious process. Africans and their descendants are a visible minority, and as such, their presence has generated a lot of discussion concerning multiculturalism, cultural differences and racism. Even people of African descent who were born in Finland and are Finnish citizens are not automatically considered as Finns by everybody.8 When the racial map of Europe was established in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, in Finland, too, “race” was strongly linked with notions of nationhood.9 Ideas of Finnishness have also been influenced by ethnological and folkloristic studies, and their presupposition of close relationship between languages, populations, and cultures.10 Twenty years ago, one could take a walk in most cities in Finland without seeing a single African/Black person in the streets. Most Africans who lived in Finland those days were either students who had decided to stay in Finland, or people who had married a Finn. Africans were seen as exotic strangers. The first studies about Finnish Africans were made in the 1990’s, but the few autobiographies written by Africans who have lived in

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Statistics Finland, accessed 9 March 2011: http://www.tilastokeskus.fi/til/vrm_en.html 8 Anna Rastas, “Racism in the everyday life of Finnish children with transnational roots,” Barn 27 (April 2009). 9 E.g. Anssi Halmesvirta, “The British conception of the Finnish ´race´, nation and culture,” in Studia Historica 34 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1990); Aira Kemiläinen, Finns in the Shadow of the “Aryans”. Race Theories and Racism. Studia Historica 59 (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1998). 10 Jukka Siikala, “The Ethnography of Finland”.

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Finland before that shed light on their experiences of racism and loneliness in those days.11 When the first groups of Somali refugees arrived, the image of Africans in Finland changed rapidly. Somalis, who have come as asylum seekers and refugees during the past 20 years, are today the biggest group of Africans in Finland.12 “Exotic strangers” have become “refugees who need to be integrated into Finnish society”. Many of them are now Finnish citizens, and a large number of children have been born in Finland. As Africans, Muslims and refugees, they have become targets of xenophobia and open racism. According to a European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey, Finnish Somalis are victims of racist crimes more often than other surveyed African minority groups in the EU member countries.13 However, even though Somalis do identify themselves as Africans, there is more ambivalence in their identifications with “blackness”, both due to their strong identifications with the Islamic and Arab world and because of the history of slavery in Somalia.14 Among refugees, many are from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (former Zaire), whereas other African nationals (e.g. Moroccans, Egyptians, Gambians) have moved to Finland because they have married a Finn. In addition to these groups, there are hundreds of university students (from Nigeria, Cameroun, Ethiopia) who are likely to stay in Finland. However, even these larger groups are in fact rather small and in the statistics most African communities are not numerous. From many African countries, there are less than a thousand individuals in Finland, and there are some African countries with less than 20 representatives.

11

E.g. Joseph Owindi, Kato, kato nekru, Finnish trans. Risto Karlsson (Porvoo, WSOY); M’hammed Sabour, Suomalainen unelma: Tapahtumia ja tulkintoja Suomesta ja suomalaisista (Joensuu: Joensuu University Press, 1999); Ellen Namhila, “Living abroad,” in Coming on Strong. Writing by Namibian Women, ed. Margie Orford and Nepeti Nicanor (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1996); Ellen Namhila Ndeshi, Vapauden hinta, Finnish trans. Maria Forsman and Eija Poteri (Helsinki: Rauhankasvatusinstituutti ry., 2001). 12 The estimates concerning the number of Somalis in Finland vary between 10000 and 15000. 13 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, “EU MIDIS: European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey”. 14 Besteman, “The Invention of Gosha: Slavery, Colonialism, and Stigma in Somali History”, 47-50; c.f. Catherine Besteman, Unraveling Somalia. Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

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Even though the number of Africans in Finland is small compared to many other European countries, today one can no longer walk the streets without seeing a person who either is or “looks like” an African. In every school in the biggest cities in Finland, there are also black children. Some of them are from immigrant families, but many of them were born in Finland of so-called mixed marriages. There are also children and young people who have never had any contact with their biological African parent (usually the father), but who are anyway forced to think and negotiate their Africanness in everyday encounters with other people. Transnational adoptees constitute a relevant group of Finnish Africans. Hundreds of children have been adopted from Ethiopia or South Africa. Many adoptees from Ethiopia are now adults, parents themselves. People of African descent can also be seen in the media as newsreaders and hosts on TV programmes and as participants in reality shows. At the local level in politics, there are Finnish Africans in many city councils. In addition to bands playing African music, many Black people do hip-hop, rap, reggae or “world music”, and some artists mix African music with Finnish folk music.15 However, Finnish African authors are still to come. Most texts written by Finnish Africans themselves are published in anthologies edited by Finns of majority background. These books aim at making “their immigrant voices” better heard in Finnish society. They offer an important forum for “their voices” to be heard, but, ironically, many of these publications, while introducing the authors of these texts as immigrants, position them in the category of “eternal immigrant” that many of the authors themselves desperately try to dispute. Even though there are more and more individuals of African heritage who have been accepted as Finns, and some of them even celebrated as active citizens, the everyday life of Black people is still overshadowed by experiences of racism and feelings of not belonging. This is also true in the case of Black children who were born in Finland, or who were raised in (White) Finnish families.16

Partial truths: researchers’ questions versus “their knowledge” Since the presence of African communities is a rather new phenomenon in Finland, only a few texts have been produced about this diaspora, mainly 15

Cf. e.g. Arnold Chiwalala, “Chizentele/ Arnold Chiwalala” (doctoral dissertation, Sibelius-Academy, 2009). 16 Rastas, “Racism in the everyday life”.

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media texts or scholarly texts written by researchers in migration studies. The representations produced by such texts affect the everyday lives of Finnish Africans. Therefore, it is important to examine the ethical and political dimensions of knowledge production related to these texts. Since the history of Africans in Finland is still to be written, these texts, as the major source of written documents concerning their presence in Finland, also construct the basis for the (future) historiography of Finnish Africans and their communities. They also become part of the written history of Finland as a multiethnic, multicultural society. The analysis of scholarly texts and other non-fiction about the African diaspora in Finland shows how partial the pictures of migrant and minority communities can be if they are constructed only by researchers working in the field of migration studies. In Finland and elsewhere, the choice of the topics and the issues addressed have often served the practical needs of governance, especially authorities working in the field of integration of immigrants. This also easily leads to a situation whereby the groups perceived as problematic become the object of study, whereas other groups – their contributions to the society they live in as well as their possible problems, and sometimes even their existence – are ignored. Research on immigration, ethnic relations and ethnic minorities has increased rapidly in Finland since the 1990s. However, scholarly texts about Finnish Africans are almost exclusively about Somalis. There is no research in the Finnish language about other African communities, and only a few studies are published in other languages. Finnish Africans are mentioned as a group in studies about racism, which, however, usually refer to Somalis. In scholarly texts about Somalis in Finland, their voice is heard in some ethnographies and in some studies as interviewees.17 However, the research questions are usually decided and formulated by Finnish-born researchers. In most studies, the focus is on problems of their integration into Finnish society. There is barely any research, for example, on Finnish Africans’ contributions to Finnish society and culture or any other positive aspects of “their being here”. Interviews and discussions with many Finnish Somalis, as well as a workshop that I organized together with the Somali League in Finland produced long lists of important questions which have not yet been studied in Finland. In our discussions, Finnish Somalis emphasized especially the situation of children and young people in Finnish society. Another aspect they often highlighted is that many people who have come from Somalia 17

E.g. Marja Tiilikainen, Arjen Islam. Somalinaisten elämää Suomessa (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2003); Petri Hautaniemi, Pojat! Somalipoikien kiistanalainen nuoruus Suomessa (Helsinki: Nuorisotutkimusverkosto, 2004).

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to Finland are now active and well-integrated citizens. This fact is usually ignored in the debates on immigration and the discussions on the Somali diaspora in Finland.18 Scholars with a majority background easily focus on minorities’ problems in their process of integration or on problems that are often articulated in terms of ethnic relations, cultural differences or, in the case of young people, their (ethnic, hybrid, multicultural) identities. An ethnographic approach allows richer descriptions and may reveal questions that are hidden from the majority. Researchers’ interventions and involvement in their informants’ everyday lives as well as dialogue between researchers and their informants usually change researchers’ original lists of questions favouring also those questions that their informants consider important. However, for those of us who belong to the (white, non-immigrant) majority, it can be difficult to see and understand how majority representations of minorities, including scholarly texts, are experienced and negotiated within minority communities. The discussions with Finnish Africans regarding their children’s well being often dealt with the negative images of Africa, not only in literature and the media but also in other cultural productions. How feasible is it for a child from Africa, or of African descent, to construct a positive identity as a Finnish African or as a Finn of African descent? Even finding books (in Finnish) about the countries from which the largest groups of Africans have come to Finland is difficult. Mapping and analyzing different genres of non-fiction confirmed what discussions with Finnish Africans and other fieldwork revealed. Representations of Africa and Africans in general, and especially in relation to particular African countries and nationalities, are predominantly negative. In public libraries, most books about Africa are travel and nature books, or they tell about the history of Egypt. This concerns both non-fiction for adults and literature for children. Publications (non-fiction) in the Finnish language about the African countries from which the biggest immigrant groups have come are rare, and most of them are reports and histories of wars and the unstable political situations of those countries. These representations are repeated and rarely challenged in schoolbooks. Children who want to learn about their (parents’) birth countries have mostly negative images to negotiate with as elements of their roots. Among the travelogues and memoirs published in Finnish, there are also books written by Finns who know the countries and people and 18 Anna Rastas, field notes and transcriptions of taped interviews and discussions in the workshop organized with the Somali League in Finland, May 19, 2009.

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cultures they write about, but the bestsellers among these genres do not really help us to understand the situations of those Africans who have moved to Finland. Old travelogues, and even some new ones, can also be characterized as stereotypical and even racist. In missionary texts, which constitute a substantial amount of Finnish literature about Africa and especially about present-day Namibia, the description of “heathens” “still influences the way the Finns perceive and relate to people who bear resemblance to the Ovamboland ‘heathen’”.19 These are not the only representations that people of African descent have to negotiate, but still they make a heavy burden especially for young Finns of African descent. My statement about the recurrent focus on negative aspects and problems is not meant to suggest that researchers and writers should avoid those questions. Research on immigrants’ problems in their integration into new societies is indeed needed, for example, in order to provide better services for immigrants. However, there is a severe distortion of information concerning some people if they and their cultures and countries of origin are seen only or mainly through negative representations. I was not surprised that those few researchers and authors who have also focused on more positive questions are either of African background themselves or ethnographers who had spent time with their informants. Anthropologist Marja Tiilikainen, while working on her exhaustive ethnographic study of the meanings of religion in the everyday lives of Somali women in Finland,20 edited a collection of prose and poems written by her informants.21 Moroccan-born M’hammed Sabour, who is specialized in Arab intellectuals and is currently working as a professor of Sociology at the University of Eastern Finland, has written about immigrants’ problems and Finnish Africans’ experiences of racism, but as a scholar he has also focused on questions – like well-educated immigrants’ contributions to their new home countries – that cannot be articulated as problems.22 19

Löytty, “Shades of White: Finnish Missionaries and Their “heathens” in Namibia,” Balayi: Culture, Law and Colonialism 6 (2004): 122-123; cf. also Pellervo Kokkonen, “Early Missionary Literature and the Construction of the Popular Image of Africa in Finland,” in Text and Image. Social Construction of Regional Knowledges, ed. Anne Buttimer, Stanley D. Brunn, and Ute Wardenga (Leipzig: Institut für Länderkunde, 1999). 20 Tiilikainen, Arjen islam. 21 Cf. Marja Tiilikainen, Amran Axmed, and Muddle Suzanne Lilius, eds. Yhdeksän syyssadetta: Suomessa asuvien somalinaisten runoja ja proosaa (Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 2001). 22 M’hammed Sabour, interview by Anna Rastas, November 25, 2009.

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From theories to practice: inviting people for co-operation We should avoid approaching migrants and racialized groups as merely vulnerable groups and victims of unfair social relations. However, as socially and culturally distinct groups, migrant communities have problems that need to be studied and solved, and in many societies their voicelessness is a matter of fact. Ideas of solving problems, promoting change and giving a voice are included in most theorizations of participatory and action research.23 In action research the focus is also on providing the means to improve people’s self-determination and to “empower them in their roles as professional practitioners or citizens in the diverse social domains in which they live and work”.24 The idea that minorities’ situated knowledges create an epistemic advantage25 also favours this approach, since the main principle of this tradition is a dialogue and co-operation between researchers and their research subjects. Collaboration in all phases of the research process – from diagnosing problems and selecting issues that can and need to be examined to planning strategies for action and evaluating outcomes – helps increase the quality of produced knowledge. Since the validity and reliability assessment of the generated knowledge is an ongoing process of assessment through dialogue, participatory approach also contributes to general social theory and knowledge.26 It usually leads researchers into

23 This multidisciplinary and multiform tradition has no single disciplinary or political orientation, and it involves variety of methodologies. For a discussion of the history and of the theoretical and methodological premises in participatory and action research tradition see e.g. William Foote Whyte, Participatory Action Research (Newbury Park, London and New Delhi: SAGE, 1991); Andrea Cornwall and Rachel Jewkes, “What is participatory research?” Social Science & Medicine 41 (December 1995); Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, The Sage Handbook of Action Research. Participative Inquiry and Practice (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage publications, 2008); Boog et al., Towards Quality Improvement of Action Research; Nina Wallerstein and Bonnie Duran, “The Theoretical, Historical, and Practice Roots of CBPR,” in Community-Based participatory research for health. From Process to outcomes, ed. Meredith Minkler and Nina Wallerstein (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). 24 Zeelen, Slagter, Boog and Preece, “Introduction: Ethics and Standards in Action Research,” 2. 25 Cf. Sandra Harding, “Standpoint Epistemology (a Feminist Version): How Social Disadvantage Creates Epistemic Advantage,” in Social Theory and Sociology. The Classics and Beyond, ed. S.P. Turner (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). 26 Zeelen et al., “Introduction”.

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previously unfamiliar pathways, and therefore it is also likely to stimulate us to think in new ways about old and new theoretical problems.27 Research inspired by the participatory ethos of action research aims at incorporating community members as active participants in the research. Interactions between researchers and research subjects are seen as dialogical and cooperative, and the knowledge creation process and the assessments and validations of the knowledge that is produced are not governed and controlled only by the researchers.28 I consider this an important starting point especially in projects in which researchers and their research subjects are positioned differently in racialized and other social relations and hierarchies. An ethnographic approach always includes improvisation, since the specificity of ethnographic approach lies in the idea that what is learnt during the fieldwork, in dialogue with informants, should direct the research questions.29 The idea of the emancipatory power of critical perspective is included in many traditions in social sciences, but the practical orientation included in action research, together with the claim for a dialogue between researchers and their research subjects, insist on critical examination of issues of power and agency, also within research projects. The first phase of the fieldwork was approaching Finnish Africans and their various communities, and introducing the main ideas of the project as well as its results concerning the texts that had been recorded and analysed. Participants’ ideas related to the project were documented, and many plans for further co-operation were made jointly. The starting point for co-operation was the question of how current representations of Africa, Africans and encounters between Finns and Africans affect their lives in Finland. The question of what Finnish Africans would like to communicate of their present lives in Finland to future generations was also discussed with all informants. One question that could not have been avoided was how to meet the needs of both researchers and of participants. What I learned during the fieldwork started new discussions in the field. Questions posed to Finnish Africans, like “what should be written about the African diaspora in Finland?”, “how and by whom should the history of Africans in Finland be written?”, and “how to see and take into consideration differences and hierarchies within their communities?” soon 27

Whyte, Participatory Action Research. Cf. e.g. Tromp, “Criteria for a reflexive approach,” 14-15. 29 Cf. Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki, Improvising Theory. Process and Temporality in Ethnographic fieldwork Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 28

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turned to questions of language skills, discrimination in the labour market, and images of African migrants and their children as people who are eternally doomed to the roles of incompetent and incapable people, “lesser citizens”, whose contributions to Finnish society and culture are always ignored. Finnish Africans’ frustration with public discussions on migration and immigrants was a recurrent topic. The lack of good literature for children of immigrant background was also widely discussed. The participatory dimension included in the study directed the shift from analyzing existing texts to starting and carrying out various side projects in which new texts were produced in cooperation with Finnish Africans. In the following, I will give two examples of these side projects and their contributions to my understanding of the many ethical and political questions related to knowledge production in research of diasporic and other minorities.30

Contesting the negative discourses and images As explained above, images of Africans, and especially some groups of Africans living in Finland, mainly Somali refugees, are very negative. As in many other countries in Europe, overtly anti-immigrant groups in Finland, many of which are openly racist, have recently gained more political power. As a consequence of their success in national elections, their views and discourses have also been adopted by many other politicians and authorities, who had earlier avoided harsh and xenophobic language. In order to raise discussion on the anti-immigrant and racist discourses and their consequences in Finnish society scholars in the researchers’ subgroup of the national network against racism decided to arrange a seminar. As a member of the group I suggested that we invite Said Aden, chairman of the Somali League in Finland, to the researchers’ seminar. I had interviewed him earlier and he had told me how these debates, together with other negative representations of Africans, make the everyday lives of Finnish Somalis very difficult. As chairman of the Somali League in Finland Said Aden is a kind of media person, often interviewed by Finnish journalists. However, his possibilities to say what he wants to say in the media have been limited, since journalists can always choose what to include in their stories that often must be short. During the hottest debate in autumn and winter 20082009 he had been invited to participate in panels on TV, together with 30 Other side projects in which participatory methods are favoured focus on for example literature for children and on Finnish Africans’ artistic contributions.

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people representing overtly anti-immigrant groups. This is a typical way to “give a voice” to people of immigrant background in the Finnish media, but speaking in those kinds of encounters with populist politicians and overtly anti-immigrant people is difficult and frustrating for those who represent minorities. In our seminar Said Aden gave a lecture on how, from their point of view, Finnish Somalis are treated and represented in the media. His analysis of media texts was very similar to the analyses presented by media scholars in the same seminar.31 However, Said Aden could also talk about the consequences of those texts. Participants in the seminar decided to publish a book that I promised to edit together with two colleagues.32 The project of editing Said Aden’s text was interesting and contributed to my study in many ways. He wrote his text not only as a person of Somali background and as a representative of one of the central Somali Associations in Finland, but also as a social worker, as a father who is worried about his and other children’s future in Finland, and as a Finnish taxpayer. His text not only offered alternatives to stereotypical conceptions of Somali refugees in Finland, but also claimed recognition for all Finnish Somalis as “ordinary citizens”.33 As one of the editors of the book, I had to make some suggestions not only concerning the structure of the text but also regarding words and expressions. Editing the text would have been an easy task if I had avoided dwelling on questions like if or how my comments were influenced by the fact that I am a scholar (a specialist in questions he wrote about, like racism and ethnic relations) and he was not. Or, were mine simply comments from a more experienced author? I realized how easy it can be for a researcher to take away the power to speak from those to whom we want to give that opportunity. I had so many good ideas, topics that he, in my opinion, could add in his text. But would it be his text then? We talked about this openly, and with his good sense of humour he understood my worries. We decided that I could remind him of some good points and important things that he had said to me during the interview we had done before (the interview had been taped and transcribed) or during a workshop we had organized together (also taped and transcribed). We decided to carefully discuss every change I suggested. These discussions 31

Cf. e.g. Camilla Haavisto, “A Diverse and Inclusive Communicative Space in the Making? The Case of Finland,” in Manufacturing Europe. Spaces of democracy, diversity and communication, ed. I. Salovaara-Moring (Göteborg: Nordicom). 32 Suvi Keskinen, Anna Rastas and Salla Tuori, En ole rasisti, mutta… Maahanmuutosta, monikulttuurisuudesta ja kritiikistä Tampere: Vastapaino, 2009. 33 Said Aden, “Ikuisesti pakolaisina? Maahanmuuttokeskustelu Suomen somalialaisten näkökulmasta,” in Keskinen et al., En ole rasisti, mutta…

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took place on the phone, and unfortunately, were not always carefully documented just because of lack of time. In our dialogue we dealt with many important questions, such as how representatives of subordinated minorities can and should speak, how and what they say is or can be read and interpreted, and what kind of textual strategies can be used to change a minority position into another, for example expert or just “an ordinary citizen” position. One question that we had to discuss was how to use one’s expertise without patronizing others and without falling into the same disrespectful tones that are sometimes used against us.34 Talking about his text was talking about many of the main theoretical questions of my ongoing research, questions related to the ethical and political dimensions of knowledge production. This convinced me that working and making sense together and discussions and negotiations of how things should be done can offer much more fruitful data for a researcher to explore these questions than just bare texts or interviews. When these discussions are documented and analyzed, it is much more difficult to ignore the complexities and problems that may arise in collaborative projects.35 As Gayatri Spivak has said, sometimes the question of ‘Who will listen?’ is the most crucial question.36 For individuals of refugee background in Europe it is difficult to have a voice, and even if there are opportunities to speak, being heard is another thing. Said Aden’s participation in the book project turned out to be very useful for all of us who wanted to “do something” to respond to xenophobic and racist discourses. As a member of the Advisory Board of Ethnic Relations in Finland, Said Aden organized the launching of the book so that also we, researchers representing different disciplines, had an opportunity to present our results and our ideas both to many influential civil servants and to representatives of various other ethnic minority communities. Someone to whom we (researchers) wanted to give a voice gave us an opportunity to be heard. Working together may also make visible the power included in the agency of those who are usually approached as subordinated and powerless people.

34

Both Said Aden and I (as a researcher and as an anti-racism activist) have been repeatedly harassed by anti-immigrant and racist individuals and groups, also in public on the Internet. 35 On how editors may control authors’ texts, see Sidonie Smith, “Who’s talking/Who’s talking Back? The Subject of personal narrative,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993): 398-404. 36 Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic. Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, 59.

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Maintaining the power not to be defined by others Another essay by a Finnish person of African descent included in the above-mentioned book was written by Kaisla Löyttyjärvi.37 She is a professional actor and anti-racism activist, currently working with immigrants. Her essay starts with a description of her frustration caused by the fact that in order to write, or rather in order to be understood, once again she has to position herself in racialized relations. She compares herself with her (White) neighbours living in the same rich neighbourhood, who never have to explain their roots or their identities. Unlike her, they can “just enjoy the beautiful summer day”. As a well-known and one of the few Black actors In Finland, Kaisla Löyttyjärvi, like Said Aden, has many opportunities to speak: in the media, on the stage of the National Theatre, and on other public occasions. We have known each other for many years. What started as a kind of a researcher-informant relationship years ago has changed into a friendship. She has helped me in many ways in my research projects, including the current study. I have sometimes asked her if we could make a formal taped interview. To my disappointment she has politely but resolutely refused. I first thought that it may have something to do with our friendship. I also feel uncomfortable when I have to ask favours of that kind from people whom I consider as my friends.38 But when I started to reflect on the ways she has taken an interest and participated in my research projects during the years we have know each other, and the ways and the strategies that she has chosen in her participation, including her spontaneous initiatives, I realized that it has to be about something else. She wants to maintain her right to choose how she participates, and she tries to control the ways that others (researchers, journalists, and her friends) describe and interpret her ideas, and the lives and experiences of people she feels related to. For me, these are questions of ethics and politics of knowledge production. In her essay she writes: “There is not a single word for a definition of who I am, there has never been: And there is not enough paper to make the list ready, fortunately, since that makes space for a culture that allows

37

Kaisla Löyttyjärvi, “Erilainen nuori,” in: Keskinen et al., En ole rasisti, mutta…. These kinds of situations, negotiations of the nature of the relations between researchers and their informants, are very common in ethnographic research, see e.g. Amanda Coffey, The Ethnographic Self. Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity (London: Sage, 1999); Irma McClaurin, Black Feminist Anthropology. Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

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laughing, alone and together”39. With these words she asks us to think carefully about how we categorize people like her. But while making it clear that she wants to keep the power to define and not to be defined, she also leaves room for dialogue, since in a culture that allows laughing together, difficult questions can also be posed and discussed. As long as we can laugh together, it is easier to admit that there are questions that we may understand differently, and that, therefore, must be discussed. Lena Sawyer writes about “white laughter” referring to White individuals’ reactions (e.g. giggling, head shaking) when racist representations are made visible and discussed, for example, in academic spaces.40 According to her these responses, uneasy laughter, can be interpreted as “attempts to try to deflect (white) individuals in the audiences’ association with such racist meanings and characterizations.”41 According to Sawyer, this “inclusive laughter” not only makes whiteness visible but also reestablishes it. Encounters that allow the dialogue are possible if our situated knowledges based on our positionalities in racialized relations and hierarchies are acknowledged and openly discussed. During all these years of cooperation and friendship with Kaisla, I must have learned something that makes our “laughing together” possible. I would probably have learned even more if I had written down and carefully reflected all our discussions of how things can and should and should not be done. As long as “laughing together” is possible, I do not have to be afraid of the possible limits of my understanding caused by the fact that my position in racialized relations is different from how my informants are positioned. If we can laugh together, we can learn from and with each other. If we cannot, we have to ask “Why?”.

Whose voices become documented? One of the topics discussed with all Finnish African participants of the study is the fact that the written history of the African diaspora in Finland is still to be written. Within the scope of this text, I am not able to deal with everything my informants said with regard to this, but some things can be summed up from discussions in the field. With no exceptions, every Finnish African that I have met during the project has said that the project of writing the history of Africans in Finland is important. They have also 39

My translation. Löyttyjärvi, “Erilainen nuori,” 131. Cf. Lena Sawyer, “White Laughter,” Slut 1 (2006). 41 Ibid., 67. 40

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underlined the necessity to emphasize their knowledge and their viewpoints in projects that aim at documenting their local histories. The predominantly negative images should be questioned and also African immigrants’ and their descendents’ contributions to Finnish society and culture should be included in the picture. Knowing that many of my interviewees represent the first Finnish African scholars, artists, journalists, activists and so on, I made a decision that with their permission the transcriptions of their interviews would be stored at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.42 No one refused, though some people said that it can be done only if their anonymity is guaranteed. When reading the transcriptions of the interviews that I had done with Finnish Africans, I realized that my voice occupies as much space as the interviewees’. That did not result from inadequate interviewing skills, but rather from the methodological framework chosen for the study. When the validity assessment of the generated knowledge is done through dialogue, questions posed to participants are also meant to test researchers’ ideas. During the interviews, I wanted to know if what I have learned about something, or what I am going to do next, is right in my interviewees’ opinion. I am sceptical towards claims for authenticity when it comes to knowledge produced in interviews, since we always lead our interviewees to particular directions with our questions. However, I was disappointed to realize that what I had promised to these participants - that their voices and ideas would be stored for future use - may not actually be their voices and their ideas about their lives as Finnish Africans but rather discussions about my research project. Feeling sad about loosing the opportunity to produce what I thought would have been valuable documents of not only “their history” but also of the history of Finland, I asked a Finnish journalist, Leena Peltokangas, who had already had some cooperation with Finnish Africans, to apply for funding for a radio documentary about the first Africans in Finland. She got the funding, and all the information and data I had gathered helped her to start the project. We also decided that all her interviews, with permission of the interviewees, would be transcribed by people working in my project and would be stored in the archives. “The first Africans in Finland” could now tell more freely their life stories (instead of commenting a research project), and talk about things they themselves considered important to record for future generations. Every person interviewed for the radio program gave permission to the filing of the 42 For more information about the The Finnish Social Science Data Archive, see http://www.fsd.uta.fi/english/.

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interview for research purposes. I also had some co-operation with and was kindly given a lot of the data produced for another documentary, a three-piece TV-documentary about the history of Africans and Black people in Finland.43 Cooperation with these journalistic projects allowed new people to participate both in my study and in their projects. It made possible for me to interview, for example, Joseph Owindi, one of the first African students in Finland. Comparing the interviews made by the two journalists and myself was informative, since we all had different motives for our interviews. Owindi´s memoirs of his years in Finland, the book entitled Kato, kato nekru [Engl. Look, look a Nigger!”] had already been published in 1972, after he had moved back to Kenya.44 The interview I conducted with him is, again, very much about me explaining the project and the reasons behind my questions. In my interview, the focus is on questions like “If your book was published now, would you keep the title of it?”, and “Were Franz Fanon’s texts familiar to you when you chose the title for your book?”. In the interview for the radio documentary, Owindi speaks more freely about his time in Finland. Even though only very small amount of that interview ended up in the radio documentary, everything that was taped during the interview, all those valuable stories about times when he was the only Black person in the nowadays much more multicultural city of Tampere, and questions related to how he himself values the book that he wrote over thirty years ago can now be stored in the archives. The documentary could have become, for example, a “history of racism faced by Finnish Africans”, since racism was a topic all interviewees talked about, or a story focusing mainly on Finns’ reactions to the first Africans. Informed by the knowledge I had gained during the fieldwork among Finnish Africans about their ideas of what kind of questions should be emphasized in stories about them, my journalist collaborator also wanted to focus on Finnish Africans’ contributions to social and cultural life in Finland and on their expert knowledge as transnational subjects, whose personal lives are testimonies of crossing not only national borders but also many other boundaries. It is sometimes difficult to ensure individuals that their participation in academic research may improve their lives (especially if even researchers 43

Both of these documentaries, Leena Peltokangas’ radio documentary “Roosa Suomesta. Ensimmäisiä afrikkalaisia etsimässä” [Rosa from Finland. Tracing the first Africans in Finland] and Mia Jonkka’s TV-documentary “Afro-Suomen historia” [The history of Afro-Finland] were broadcast by the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE in January and February 2010. 44 Owindi, Kato, kato nekru.

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themselves have doubts about it), but there are also other alternatives. Researchers can participate in and even launch projects that also those people whose lives and experiences we are interested in find important and supportable. Bringing the questions of ethics and politics of knowledge production, in addition to other expertise we may have to offer as academics, can also add something to the quality of work of those with whom we co-operate.

Conclusions Applying participatory methods is time consuming. This approach usually means long-lasting research projects, during which researchers easily become “network managers” who just do not have time to follow all the ideals and principles presented in research literature of this multidisciplinary tradition. To be honest, only some of all those discussions and reflections that I should have documented carefully have found their way from yellow sticky post-it notes to the field diaries I originally planned to write throughout the project. Still, discussions with various participants of the project, negotiations of strategies chosen for particular projects, as well as doubts and frustrations and feelings of success and enthusiasm, have all become data that cannot be ignored if the idea of partnerships is taken seriously. In research in which an action research approach and participatory methods are favoured, the scientific and societal impacts of research are intertwined. My informants’ willingness to actively participate and their initiatives for new co-projects and for future co-operation has, in my opinion, proved that planning and doing things together can also benefit those communities we are studying. We may, for example, promote and carry out projects that our informants find important, and pass information and create networks that can be useful for their communities. Inviting Finnish Africans to participate in a project in which texts about them and texts that affect their everyday lives are examined, has contributed to my research in many ways. I have been able to test the validity of my original research questions, and it has been important that people in the field have encouraged me to follow some ideas, things that I now know are really worth examining. They have also helped me to process my questions further. Their expert knowledge has directed me towards new questions, both related to the meanings of literature for Finnish Africans and their communities, and related to the more general and theoretical questions of the ethics and politics of knowledge production. I have been able to address only some of those questions here.

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Discussions in the field have made it possible to see and address some questions and aspects of their lives that easily stay invisible in texts that serve the interests of others, rather than their interests. Inviting other professionals, like journalists, librarians and teachers, for co-operation has also enabled dialogue across expertise. As Marilyn Strathern has stated, if knowledge produced in particular disciplinary or professional nexus can be more productive in combination with others, sharing information can become knowledge-creation.45 A dialogue with people who are or become objects of our writings helps us to become more aware and sensitive to the many meanings and consequences of the texts we produce. The claim for critical reflexivity, enabled only by documentation of what is done, directs researcher’s attention to questions that could otherwise easily be bypassed, like power relations within the researched communities and between researchers and those whose lives and experiences we study. Especially in research on minorities and subordinated groups, questions of ethics and politics of knowledge production are also questions of reliability and validity of the generated knowledge.

Works Cited Aden, Said. “Ikuisesti pakolaisina? Maahanmuuttokeskustelu Suomen somalialaisten näkökulmasta.” In En ole rasisti, mutta… Maahanmuutosta, monikulttuurisuudesta ja kritiikistä, edited by Suvi Keskinen, and Anna Rastas and Salla Tuori. Tampere: Vastapaino, 2009, 25-32. Besteman, Catherine. “The Invention of Gosha: Slavery, Colonialism, and Stigma in Somali History.” In The Invention of Somalia, edited by Ali Jimale Ahmed. Lawrenceville and New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 1995, 43-62. —. Unraveling Somalia. Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Boog, Ben, Julia Preece, Meindert Slagter, and Jacques Zeelen, eds. Towards Quality Improvement of Action Research. Developing Ethics and Standards. Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2008. Brancato, Sabrina. Afro-Europe. Texts and Contexts. Berlin: Trafo Verlag, 2009.

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Marilyn Strathern, “Experiments in interdiciplinarity,” Social Anthropology 13 (February 2005).

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Cerwonka, Allaine, and Liisa Malkki. Improvising Theory. Process and Temporality in Ethnographic fieldwork. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Chiwalala, Arnold. Chizentele / Arnold Chiwalala. DMus diss., Sibelius Academy, 2009. Coffey, Amanda. The Ethnographic Self. Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage, 1999. Cornwall, Andrea, and Rachel Jewkes. “What is participatory research?” Social Science & Medicine 41(December 1995): 1667-1676. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. “The nation as a human being – a methaphor in a mid-life crisis? Notes on the imminent collapse of Norwegian national identity.” In Siting Culture. The Shifting Anthropological Object, edited by Karen Fog Olwig, and Kristen Hastrup. London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 103-122. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. “EU MIDIS: European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey.” European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/ attachments/eumidis_mainreport_conference-edition_en_.pdf (accessed January 21, 2010). Haavisto, Camilla. “A Diverse and Inclusive Communicative Space in the Making? The Case of Finland.” In Manufacturing Europe. Spaces of democracy, diversity and communication, ed. I. Salovaara-Moring. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2009, 229-252. Halmesvirta, Anssi. The British conception of the Finnish ´race´, nation and culture, 1760-1918. Studia Historica 34. Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1990. Harding, Sandra. “Standpoint Epistemology (a Feminist Version): How Social Disadvantage Creates Epistemic Advantage.” In Social Theory and Sociology. The Classics and Beyond, edited by S.P. Turner. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996, 146-160. Hautaniemi, Petri. Pojat! Somalipoikien kiistanalainen nuoruus Suomessa. Helsinki: Nuorisotutkimusverkosto, 2004. Hine, Darlene Clark, and Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small. Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Kemiläinen, Aira. Finns in the Shadow of the “Aryans”. Race Theories and Racism. Studia Historica 59. Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1998. Keskinen, Suvi, and Anna Rastas, and Salla Tuori, eds. En ole rasisti, mutta…Maahanmuutosta, monikulttuurisuudesta ja kritiikistä. Tampere: Vastapaino, 2009.

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Kokkonen, Pellervo. “Early Missionary Literature and the Construction of the Popular Image of Africa in Finland.” In Text and Image. Social Construction of Regional Knowledges, edited by Anne Buttimer, Stanley D. Brunn, and Ute Wardenga. Leipzig: Institut für Länderkunde, 1999, 205-213. López, Marta Sofia. “Introduction.” In Afroeurope@ns: Cultures and Identities, edited by Marta Sofia López. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 1-10. Löytty, Olli. “Shades of White: Finnish Missionaries and Their “heathens” in Namibia.” Balayi: Culture, Law and Colonialism 6 (2004): 107-123. Löytty, Olli, and Anna Rastas. “Afrikka Suomesta katsottuna”, in Afrikan aika. Näkökulmia Saharan eteläpuoliseen Afrikkaan, edited by Annika Teppo. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, forthcoming 2011. Löyttyjärvi, Kaisla. “Erilainen nuori.” In En ole rasisti, mutta… Maahanmuutosta, monikulttuurisuudesta ja kritiikistä, edited by Suvi Keskinen, and Anna Rastas, and Salla Tuori. Tampere: Vastapaino, 2009, 123-131. McClaurin, Irma, ed. Black Feminist Anthropology. Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Namhila, Ellen. “Living abroad.” In Coming on Strong. Writing by Namibian Women, edited by Margie Orford, and Nepeti Nicanor. Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1996, 73-82. —. Vapauden hinta. Translated into Finnish by Maria Forsman and Eija Poteri. Helsinki: Rauhankasvatusinstituutti ry., 2001. Owindi, Joseph. Kato, kato nekru. Translated into Finnish by Risto Karlsson. Porvoo: WSOY, 1972. Rastas, Anna. “Racialising categorization among young people in Finland.” YOUNG – Nordic Journal of Youth Research 13 (2005): 147-166. —. “Racism in the everyday life of Finnish children with transnational roots”. Barn 27 (2009): 29-43. Reason, Peter and Hilary Bradbury. The Sage Handbook of Action Research. Participative Inquiry and Practice. 2nd ed. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage publications, 2008. Sabour, M'hammed. Suomalainen unelma: Tapahtumia ja tulkintoja Suomesta ja suomalaisista. Joensuu: Joensuu University Press, 1999. Sawyer, Lena. “White laughter”, Slut 1 (2006): 66-67. Siikala, Jukka. “The Ethnography of Finland.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 153-170.

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Simola, Anna and Anna Rastas. “Jos rohkenen sanoa... Voiko ihonväristä puhua edistämättä rasismia?” in Journalismikritiikin vuosikirja 2008, ed. by Maarit Jaakkola. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, Journalismin tutkimusyksikkö, 2008, 170-178. Also available online at http://tampub.uta.fi/tiedotusoppi/1797-6014.pdf. Smith, Sidonie. “Who’s talking/Who’s talking Back? The Subject of personal narrative.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993): 392-407. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic. Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym. New York, London: Routledge, 1990. Strathern, Marilyn. “Experiments in interdiciplinarity.” Social Anthropology 13 (2005): 75-90. Statistics Finland, accessed 9 March 2011. http://www.tilastokeskus.fi/til/ vrm_en.html Tiilikainen, Marja. Arjen Islam. Somalinaisten elämää Suomessa. Tampere: Vastapaino, 2003. Tiilikainen, Marja, and Amran Axmed, and Muddle Suzanne Lilius, eds. Yhdeksän syyssadetta: Suomessa asuvien somalinaisten runoja ja proosaa/Nio höstregn: Prosa och poesi av finlandssomaliska kvinnos/Sagaal Dayrood: Suugaanta Haweenka Somaaliyeed ee Fiinlaan. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 2001. Tromp, Coyan. “Criteria for a reflexive approach to knowledge production.” In Towards Quality Improvement of Action Research. Developing Ethics and Standards, edited by Ben Boog, Julia Preece, Meindert Slagter, and Jacques Zeelen, 7-28. Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2008. Wallerstein, Nina, and Bonnie Duran. “The Theoretical, Historical, and Practice Roots of CBPR.” In Community-Based participatory research for health. From Process to outcomes, edited by Meredith Minkler and Nina Wallerstein. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008, 25-46. Whyte, William Foote, ed. Participatory Action Research. Newbury Park, London, New Delhi: SAGE, 1991. Zeelen, Jacques, Meindert Slagter, Ben Boog and Julia Preece. “Introduction: Ethics and Standards in Action Research.” In Towards Quality Improvement of Action Research. Developing Ethics and Standards, edited by Ben Boog, Julia Preece, Meindert Slagter, and Jacques Zeelen, 1-6. Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2008.

AFRICAN MIGRANTS IN SPAIN: POLICIES AND RESEARCH RESOURCES JUAN MIGUEL ZARANDONA

Introduction It is a very well-known fact that Spain as a nation has traditionally kept itself much aloof of everything related to Africa, sub-Saharan Africa especially, and its complex cultural and social realities. The Americas have always been, from 1492, the first target of its national overseas enterprises and best common endeavours beyond its national boundaries. History accounts for this long separation and continuous disengagement, from the ‘Treaty of Tordesillas’ (1494)1 to the infamous ‘Disaster of 1898’,2 but, when some time is reserved to ponder calmly about it, nobody can avoid noticing the paradoxical fact that Africa is right there, so close geographically to Iberia, no matter how far it may be or seem to be from the ‘collective imaginary’ of the Spanish people. However, nowadays, it may still be true that Spain does not care much, or not as much as it should, about Africa, but Africa has begun caring about Spain quite a lot from the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1

In 1494, the two Iberian nations of Spain and Portugal met in the Castilian village of Tordesillas and managed to reach and sign an agreement to divide the new worlds recently discovered and soon to be colonized among them two. America was reserved for Spain and Africa for Portugal. This was the historical origin of the almost exclusive Spanish interest in the Americas and of its almost absolute neglect of Africa. 2 The Treaty of Berlin or Berlin Africa Conference (1884-85) had granted Spain large territories in the Gulf of Guinea, but Spain had lingered to take hold of them and participate very actively in the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Then, in 1898, Spain was beaten by the United States of America and lost its last colonies very dishonourably: Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Philippines mainly. It provoked a deep national crisis, self-inflicted isolation, and lack of interest in any other colonial ventures. Two years later, The Treaty of Paris was signed, by which Spain ceded most of its African territories to France, with the exception of a tiny portion of land, the former Spanish Guinea, present-day Equatorial Guinea.

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number of Africans who have emigrated and settled down in the regions of Spain has grown exponentially in the last twenty years. Consequently, their cultural and social footprints can now be contemplated almost everywhere all around the country, from cinema festivals3 to the workplace, from everyday politics to the surge in literary translation of African postcolonial writers. This essay will try to present a general overview of the ways in which contemporary Spain is changing and enriching itself thanks to the contribution of its African Diaspora and of the sub-Saharan communities now inhabiting its cities and villages, sharing the same spaces and life experiences as the Spaniards. And it will do it by means of a representative collection of texts dealing with Africa and its migrant population in Spain. In this regard, it will devote some brief references to the literary work of the exiled Equatorial Guinean writer in Spanish Donato Ndongo (1950- ) who, among many other academic and literary texts, published a short story entitled ‘El sueño’ [The Dream] for the first time in 1973, and also a full novel, El metro [The Tube], published recently in 2007. In spite of the a long time span of 44 years between them, both texts deal with the same subject matter: the fateful travel of an African young man of not much importance toward the forbidden pseudo-paradise which Europe represents in his mind and in the minds and aspirations of so many contemporary black men and women like him who take any risk whatsoever, physical and/or spiritual, in order to make their pseudo-dreams come true. The ancient classics claimed that the world of fiction was usually truer than the real world. In other words, the analysis of a novel such as El metro is justified and can provide unsuspected insights into the African Diaspora in Spain which many other text types, from statistics to research journalism, cannot possibly achieve. However, these pages will apply a more conservative approach and mainly focus their attention not on literary texts but on a rich and varied number of less artistic text typologies dealing with the facts of the booming phenomenon of African migration into Spain, ranging from legal texts to sociology research papers and

3

The prestigious Festival de Cine Africano de Tarifa, Andalusia, can be credited with the protagonist role in the popularization of African cinema in Spain. For further information, see: http://www.fcat.es/FCAT. For information about everything African in Spain, it is impossible to avoid the web site of Casa de África, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Spanish official institution in charge of promoting all kinds of relationships with the Black continent: http://www.casaafrica.es. A special section of this page is named: ‘Africanos en España’: http://www.casaafrica.es/africanos-en-espana.jsp.

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manuals and the different genres of newspapers’ opinion or information articles.

A world of texts Contemporary Linguistics has taught us that one of the main gifts that characterize and differentiate human beings is that of Language, regarded as the species’ most basic instinct. Consequently, all men and women of the past, present and future, whatever the specific language or languages that they may happen to make use of, do understand, categorize, transform or beautify their worlds –the real world or the worlds of their imagination, desire or spiritual belief– with the intermediation of those languages. In addition, when the use of language is involved, cutting-edge subdisciplines such as Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Text Linguistics, or Discourse Analysis (Bernárdez 1982: 79-88; Bernárdez 1995: 60-69, 129191; Van Dijk 1995; Van Dijk 1996: 9-116; Yule 1997: 83-89; Fawcett 2003: 9-136) have made popular the fact that there is no use of language without texts, that both speakers and writers produce linguistics texts when they benefit from Language in general, and from their particular mother tongue, second language or pidgin; that mankind’s experience of reality is almost never independent from texts; that humans live in a world of texts. And also that those texts are linked to some kind of aim, i.e., serve a function.4 Another key idea, for the purposes of this essay, is that the number of different texts that can be produced is endless.5 But this linguistic creativity is limited by the need to compose texts that can be been regarded as fit for specific needs and situations. In other words, new texts adjust to wide existing text typologies, concept mentioned before, or available groups of texts within a language or culture, that share many of its formal features and content organization. New texts will take after previous texts used in similar or equal contexts or for similar purposes. Although, from a theoretical point of view, nobody has been able to produce a final, comprehensive text typology that can classify all texts 4

According to Roman Jakobson, these are the six traditional functions of language and its texts: expressive (sender), metalinguistic (code), poetic (message), referential (subject), phatic (channel) and directive (receiver) (Fawcett 2003: 101-102). 5 A text, however, is never a collection of words or sentences put together. A text, to be really a text, must meet a number of strict requirements, the so-called ‘seven standards of textuality’: ‘cohesion’, ‘coherence’, ‘intentionality’, ‘acceptability’, ‘informativity’, ‘situationality’ and ‘intertextuality’ (Beaugrande and Dressler 1994: 1-47).

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without doubt, imprecision or change, it is also true that any text producer, more or else intuitively, is able to master the conventions of a great variety of prototypical text types and to construct text instances of any given text type, provided they have acquired the skills to do so. And the realities of African immigration into Spain, as any other complex historical and sociological phenomenon, have been recorded and can be studied by taking advantage of the many families of texts that it has produced. Because of this, the study of a representative selection of them all can be regarded as the ideal means of approaching the features of a phenomenon still taking place. In other words, the most convenient method of doing it will be to compile a corpus of different, very representative examples of the Spanish texts dealing with sub-Saharan African newcomers; to read, describe, study, and comment them as far as possible, and arrive at some kind of tentative conclusions, always provisional for such a novel phenomenon. With these premises in mind, the following sections of this chapter will devote some attention to and benefit from four great textual areas, namely: ‘Spanish Immigration Laws’, ‘socio-cultural and socio-political research papers and specialist manuals’, ‘newspaper articles’, and ‘fiction literature’ (novel). They will clearly contribute to a better understanding of this polemical issue.

Spanish immigration laws As a human product, no law is perfect. Not even complete. They do not regulate the whole reality or any aspect of it. Reality is always wider and more unpredictable than the effort to organize it. And when, additionally, this reality is new and much unexpected, as the massive recent immigration into Spain has been, and there is no experience on how to regulate it, the goal of legislative perfection is more distant. However, at least from a theoretical or philosophical point of view, laws and statutes are designed to last, to endure the test of time, to hold all the possible instances of a problem or conduct. Their applicability seeks to be general and exhaustive. When they clearly prove that they do not fulfil any or most of these requirements, there is no other way to solve the dilemma that amend previous legislation or start it all over from scratch. This is what has happened in Spain as far as migration and the law are involved in recent years. As it has been studied by Désirée Kleiner-Liebau in great detail (2009: 85-95), until very recently Spain had no real immigration policy and, consequently, immigration laws worthy of the name. Being a typical

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emigration country, with very little numbers of immigrants seeking to settle down, migration-related issues were not a priority for the country’s political agenda. However, the accession to European Union forced Spain to regulate the immigration of non-EU citizens. The result was the 1985 Primera Ley de Extranjería [First Law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners in Spain], which established very restrictive legislation for the admission of permanent immigrant, family reunification, and stable residence of foreign-born population (Kleiner 2009: 85-86). This policy must be understood in the context of very high levels of unemployment in the country. This First Law lasted from 1985 to all the 1990s, but heavily affected by many new and varied regulations and other legal and policy implementation texts that can be regarded as a long period of familiarization, concretization, differentiation and consolidation of the phenomenon. Both the administration and the people of Spain had to learn more about what was happening and what was going to happen, and what measures to take. In 1990, the Spanish Government presented a report on the situation of foreigners in Spain and guidelines for future Spanish immigration policies for the first time. As the conclusion was that Spain was going to be an important destination for immigrants, it was necessary to promote integration and prevent marginalization, racism, xenophobia (Kleiner 2009: 86). In 1991, the EU Schengen agreements forced Spain to tighten up its regulations on entry to its territory. Visas became compulsory for North Africans and many Latin Americans. In 1993, the first quota ever for labour immigrants was established. But the major change in this period took place in 1996 when a full legal amendment to the 1985 law was applied acknowledging certain immigrants’ rights: access to education, legal advice and an interpreter, permanent residence, family reunification, etc. (Kleiner 2009: 86). Soon after, the need for a new law regulating immigration became clear. The 1985 legislation could not be amended any more. So, starting with the new millennium, a second Immigration Law was enacted in 2000 [Law on Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners in Spain and their Integration]. But this time things were very different: negotiations between a weak government without an overall majority and the opposition parties were very difficult and for the first time the whole process led to a broad public debate and awareness of migration issues, seen as potentially very problematic. This second Law no longer focused solely on controlling immigration flows, but highlighted integration and extended political and social rights to all non-EU foreigners (Kleiner 2009: 87).

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But the party in office, the Partido Popular (PP), the party that had criticized the new Law as too permissive and against the restrictive standards set by the European Union, won the election that very same year 2000 with an overall majority, after making immigration for the first time a controversial campaign issue. The new Government immediately amended the 2000 Immigration Law the same year 2000, and restricted certain rights (health care, education for children, etc.) to immigrants with a legal status, not to all foreigners on Spanish territory. It was followed by further restrictive regulations on repatriation, internment, family reunion, etc. (Kleiner 2009: 87). The situation changed again in 2004, when the main opposition party, the Socialist Party (PSOE), won the new elections. Soon, the new Government, did not further reform the reformed 2000 Law, but liberalized immigration by a clear change of many of its regulations through a Royal Decree enacted in December 2004. And, based in this Royal Decree, this new socialist Government started the extremely polemical ‘regularization campaign’ of irregular immigrants in Spain (Kleiner 2009: 87-88). The high number of the so-called sin papeles [undocumented, irregular immigrants], between 800,000 and 1 million, has become a major immigration problem that Spain had to face. Spain had had previous regularization campaigns in 1985/86, 1991/92, 1996, 2000 and 2001, but this 2005 one, exceeded all the others. Indeed, it was the largest regularization campaign ever in Europe with almost 700,000 applications, 577,159 of them approved. The basic requirements for regulation were not so difficult to meet: a work contract of at least six months, registration at the local register of their municipality before August 8, 2004 and living in Spain ever since (Kleiner 2009: 91-92). And they were not demanded very strictly. The process was so polemical and the scandal within Spain and outside Spain, mainly in the EU, was so great that the Spanish Government had to announce very emphatically that this regularization was going to be the last, which has been true so far. It has also to apply a number of measures in order to pacify Spanish public opinion and calm down other European Governments (Kleiner 2009: 88-92): • Severe sanctions to employers who kept on contracting irregular immigrants. • Enforcement of much tighter border controls: visa requirements for Latin Americans, offshore controls in the Straits of Gibraltar and the Canary Islands, the main illegal migration routes towards Europe.

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• Acquisition of better equipment for the Spanish security forces with the support and other EU member states and coordinated by the new EU Agency for Bonder Control (Frontex). Specially the Sístema Integral de Vigilancia Exterior (SIVE), an advanced surveillance system for the Straits of Gibraltar. • Heightening and strengthening of the fences of the Northern Africa Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla. • Hire of more security staff to patrol borders. • Agreements with Morocco and Mauritania, as the main countries of depart of illegal immigrants, to set joint naval patrols. • Repatriation of irregular immigrants by means of bilateral readmission agreements with various African countries of origin: Morocco, Nigeria, Mauritania, Guinea Bissau, etc. As it can be easily realized, these measures were heavily influenced by the media’s focus on the irregular border-crossing of African boat migrants, the dramatic pictures of small fisher boats packed with immigrants reaching Spanish coasts and the evoked fears of an African mass immigration to Europe. However, the most effective measure was that of adapting Spain’s visa-policy to EU norms, i.e., demanding visas to Latin American countries, the main geographical source of irregular immigrants in Spain, as it will be discussed in the following section of this chapter. This complicated update of different laws, decrees, regulations, norms and agreements that have marked the short but intense history of Spanish legislation on the matter, can only be followed by those experts specializing in emigration issues in general, and Spanish emigration phenomena in particular.6 However, there are a number of facts that everybody can understand and that should be emphasized. The 2005 regularization campaign did not stop the arrival of irregular immigrants to Spain, as the critical year of 2006 was going to prove, but rather worked as an “efecto llamada” [call effect] for new immigrants. Everybody knows that today there are still many immigrants in an irregular situation in the country. The reason that makes immigrants make the decision to come or 6

In this regard, it is very advisable to consult the recent volume compiled and edited by Mª Teresa Soler Cantalapiedra (Soler 2009), and published by CivitasThomson Reuters in its Biblioteca de Legislación series. This volume, entitled Legislación sobre extranjeros, not only offers together all the Spanish legislation related to immigration issues, but complementary sections dealing with the chronology of the phenomenon or the key words to understand it.

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not to come to Spain are, indeed, very independent of legislation, laws or regulations, as many scholars and researchers have also proved and as the next section will show.

Sociocultural and sociopolitical research The novelty of the phenomenon, and the inherent difficulties to explain it, has given rise, within the Spanish academic world, to an abundant wealth of research texts dealing with the problem and the necessary clues to be able to understand, explain, and regulate it. This is the purpose of empirical science, social sciences included, and the use of their objective methods. As examples, and for the purposes of this chapter, the texts by Ferrán Iniesta (2007), Albert Roca (2007), Itziar Ruiz-Giménez (2007), Héctor Cebolla (2007), Ricard Zapata-Barrero (2009), and Desirée KleinerLiebau (2009) have been used. They all share, among other characteristics, having published very recently in Spain; representing the trends of up-todate Spanish research on the matter; and dealing, partially or exclusively, with the phenomenon of African immigration into Spain. However, to begin with, there is another key text that cannot be avoided: the Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes 2007: una monografía (Villar 2009) [The 2007 National Survey of Immigrants], made by the Spanish Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), the public body in charge of compiling official surveys. The Spanish administration had never taken on such a huge effort to analyze such intense and new social phenomenon. Those were the years when Spain led the increase in the number of European new migrants very clearly. The field work consisted of 20.000 interviews, by means of a long and complex questionnaire, to people born outside Spain but resident in the country for at least one year before the date of the survey, i.e., between December 2006 and February 2007. Beyond stereotypes and popular beliefs, the survey provided many surprising results, in general and with the main groups considered: Latin Americans, North Africans, Eastern Europeans, Asians or sub-Saharan Africans, etc. Spain, for the first time in many centuries, turned from a typical emigrant country into an immigrant one. Taking into account all the difficulties, the arrival, settlement, and labour market integration of 4.5 million foreigners have been much more successful than it could be expected. Their geographical distribution has coincided with the areas more densely populated by Spaniards themselves. They come from all over the world. Black Africans are just a tiny minority: in January 1st 2007, the official date of the survey, 116,550 men (72.2%) and 44.925 women (27.8%). And above all, even for Black African men, and contrary

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to what most people believe in Spain and in other countries, the use of the highly advertised and scandalous small fishing boats, cayucos or pateras to enter Spain illegally is the least popular means of transport. 11.8% of them crossed the sea in a patera, whereas 50.5% arrived by plane. Even more surprising is the fact that 76.9% of all Black men and 85.0% of Black women have some kind of educational background, a much higher level than that of their compatriots in their countries of origin.7 Their competence in the Spanish language is lower than that of other emigrant communities, but they learn the language very quickly, especially minors who attend school from the moment they arrive. In addition, although 47.6% of Black African men do not have a permanent contract, 72.6% of them send significant money remittances to their countries and families, and only 6.7% of them are determined to return to their places of origin. Consequently, the survey disclosures that, in spite of all difficulties, the profile of the Spanish immigrant population, the sub-Saharan one included, is very far from being one typical of a marginalized population group.8 If they move from hard data and exact figures to the studies mentioned before, that is, further into the realm of opinion and speculation, readers are confronted with a set of recurrent explanatory ideas, arguments and proposals that could be structured as the following paragraphs do. Behind African emigration to Spain and Europe in general, there are not only economic causes and development imbalances, but social, political and psychological ones as well (Roca 2007: 29-30) (RuizGiménez 2007: 19-21). Among others, Ruiz-Giménez lists the following: the crisis of the African state, colonial legacies, lack of infrastructures, rural exodus, privatization of the public means, failed democratic transitions, cronyism, political infighting, open wars and war lords, tribalism, refugee crisis, AIDS and malaria, the aforementioned brain drain, and so on. For many African families to have a member of the family in Spain is a survival strategy. But Spain also needs them for its own survival. Without this comprehensive approach there is not clear understanding of the complexity of the phenomenon (2007: 21-51). 7

This phenomenon is known as the ‘brain drain’ and if frequently denounced by African governments. African professionals are the first to emigrate, and an increasing percentage of them are now women, against all stereotypes (RuizGiménez 2007: 18-19). 8 It must be taken into account that these data and conclusions are previous to the breakout of a deep economic crisis that Spain is enduring at the moment and since a couple of years, circumstance that may alter this vision very radically in the future.

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The migration flows within Africa itself are much larger that those bound to Spain/Europe, a peripheral, secondary phenomenon in comparison. Africa is also experiencing an immense rural exodus toward urban dwellings (Roca 2007: 29-30). Another undeniable truth would be that intercontinental emigration, African one included, is a stoppable phenomenon associated to present-day cultural and economic globalization (Roca 2007: 31; Ruiz-Giménez 2007: 51).9 Black African immigrants in Spain are very few and they can never be regarded as a threat to the Spanish economy or society. The biased mass media coverage of their dramatic arrival in pateras and the hysterical and prejudiced declarations by politicians and other social agents are not really justified (Roca 2007: 31-33).10 What really should worry the most is the fact that the Spanish greying population and work force demands continuous immigration for Spain to remain a viable society and a competitive economy. No matter what it is declared by many social actors and opinion leaders, Spain cannot discard migration (Roca 2007: 33). The intriguing question should rather be whether it will be always available or not. Consequently, and due to the novelty of the phenomenon, the Spanish public discourse on immigration is still very ambiguous and lacks definition. Almost everybody accepts that a zero-immigration policy is impossible, but there is also fear of the consequences of such a massive phenomenon, of its lack of control that may lead to social unrest and xenophobic attitudes, and of the cultural and religious differences involved in the process. In general, the population demands more repressive measures, regulations, and border controls, especially against illegal immigrants, but rejects any hint of racism or inequality. The contrast of opinions can be very polemical, with the help of too dramatic coverage by 9

Africa has always been an extraordinarily mobile continent. Most of its population has frequently been on the move, from the Bantu migrations to slavery and the population drives derived from European colonization. The movements of today follow the path of former historical displacements very clearly with the help of postcolonial imbalances, wars, famines or rural exodus (Ruiz-Giménez 2007: 1215). 10 The worst moment of this hysterical phenomenon was experienced during the so-called ‘Crisis de los cayucos’ [The Cayuco Crisis] in the summer of 2006, when even a Spanish Government Crisis Cabinet had to be summoned to calm Spanish alarmed public opinion down, due to the high increment of illegal arrivals by boat to the Canary Islands, and absolutely repelled by what they were watching in their televisions every day. The tragic figures were not those of newcomers, who were still meaningless, but the number of tragic victims under the ruthless hands of traffickers of human beings (Ruiz-Giménez 2007: 10).

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the media, but no radical anti-immigration party has appeared yet (ZapataBarrero 2009: 115-173).11 Finally, there are scholars who have combined this phenomenon of Spanish immigration and the characteristics of Spanish national identities. Both phenomena tend to merge sooner or later, and there is usually a crucial link between the concept of a nation’s own national identity and the treatment of immigrants who may threaten or question that identity (Kleiner 2009: 34-36). In general, there are nations that emphasize ethnic and cultural features, Germany for example, and tend to require assimilation. Other nations do not feel threatened by ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity, but they emphasize civic and political values, as Republican France. Today, probably, the boundaries between models are very blurring, and neither is Germany so close to the German model, nor is France to the typical French one. Recent riots in Paris and other French cities seem to prove this, but the intriguing question is what model in Spain closer to. National identity in contemporary Spain is characterized by a weak central state nationalism and a strong peripheral nationalism, especially in some regions. When the recent radical change from an emigration into an immigration country is added, the result is a very peculiar and complex balance and/or construction of identities. But is Spain more of an ethnic or a civic nation? According to Désirée KleinerLiebau, its demonstrative positive attitude towards immigration, which is primarily linked to economic aspects, and the reference to the already existing inner-Spanish diversity and heterogeneity, which is merely enriched by immigration and not a consequence of it, alludes to a civic rather than an ethnic concept of the Spanish nation (2009: 226).

Newspaper archives Today, all Spanish national newspapers offer to their readers, on their websites, electronic access to their archives, i.e., to all or most of their back issues or, in other words, millions of texts. There, all those interested in the past of any given news or subject matter, can enjoy the easy 11

Another consequence of the ‘2006 Cayuco Crisis’ was the establishment and implementation of the Spanish Government ‘Plan de Acción para África Subsahariana’, better known as ‘Plan África 2006-2008’. For the people and the ruling elites of Spain, faced overnight with the dramatic realities of a very close but neglected continent so far, this action plan meant a well-intentioned, but not very rigorous, cooperation and solidarity project, mainly urged by the harsh, unavoidable impact of African immigration and its puzzling challenges that nobody knew how to tackle very well (Ruiz-Giménez 2007: 10-11).

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privilege, and frequently free of charge, to be able to consult all the published information and opinion concerning their focus of interest. ABC, for example, the oldest Spanish newspaper with a national circulation, can be read online (www.abc.es) from its first issue dated January 1st 1903. Consequently, for the purposes of this section, the decision has been to benefit from this powerful search engine, and enter the following three search key words: “emigración”, “África” and “España” [emigration, Africa, Spain] in ABC’s electronic archive search facility. The rewarding result was 1,467 hits or texts (news reports, editorials, opinion articles, etc.) dealing with the phenomenon of African emigration into Spain, an unbeatable textual treasure. It is a highly recommendable one, but also one that this chapter cannot study in full detail within the limits of its few pages. However, it is worthwhile to record its existence beyond all doubts. This is the most detailed account of the phenomenon, on a daily basis, of African emigration into Spain. The Spanish newspaper archives all together must be approached as a huge macro-corpus of which ABC is just a part. This is the magic, and the power, of journalism. As leading examples, the following selection of texts has been chosen, organized in chronological order. The brief comments added to the headlines will insist on and emphasize how some of the ideas previously discussed in these pages are actually dealt with in these newspaper texts:12 • “Locos for Africa” [Crazy for Africa] (ABC January 6, 2003). African music, played and sung by African emigrants, has also started to have an impact in Spain and become very popular. • “La CE calcula que 30.000 ilegales esperan en Argelia y Marruecos para «saltar» a Ceuta y Melilla” [The EC estimates that 30,000 illegal immigrants in Algeria and Morocco hope to “jump” to Ceuta and Melilla] (ABC October 13, 2005). All European governments are worried about the loose way Spain controls its hot southern borders. The emigration pressure is seen very dramatically as a real threat. • “Los africanos advierten contra la «inmigración selectiva»” [Africans warn against ‘selective immigration’] (ABC October 13, 2005). African governments and the African Union are also interested in struggling against all types of immigration, the “brain drain” too, and not only those that scare Europe. 12 ABC has been chosen for practical reasons and for the high quality of its free electronic archive, not for any ideological preferences or political biases.

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• “La presión migratoria motiva la primera gira africana de un ministro de exteriores” [The migration pressure motivates the first trip to Africa of a foreign minister] (ABC December 6, 2005). The novelty of the phenomenon has finally urged the need for Spain to devise an African foreign policy for the first time. • “Moratinos «vende» a Europa su viaje africano” [Moratinos ‘sells’ his African trip to Europe] (ABC December 13, 2005). You may believe or not, but the Spanish Foreign Minister Moratinos, even tried to teach a lesson or two about Africa to his European colleagues, even to those fully experienced in dealing with African affairs. • “España devolvió ayer a Ghana a un primer grupo de inmigrantes” [Spain returned a first group of immigrants to Ghana yesterday] (ABC December 13, 2005). Although Black African illegal immigrants are just a minority in Spain, they are almost the only ones to be returned, in spite of all difficulties, to their countries of origin. • “Negritos vía satélite” [Satellite little blacks] (ABC May 18, 2006). Many political commentators do not believe in this new African policy of the Spanish Government. They can be extremely satirical as it is here the case. • “Senegal interceptó el fin de semana 19 cayucos y detuvo a 1.501 clandestinos” [The weekend Senegal intercepted 19 boats and arrested 1,501 clandestine immigrants] (ABC May 23, 2006). The emphasis in the numbers gives away the alarmism raised by the socalled immigration crisis of the year 2006. • “El Parlamento canario pide que la Armada blinde las costas” [The Canary Islands Parliament calls for the navy to shield its coasts] (ABC May 23, 2006). Again, a regional parliament asks for the impossible – year 2006 alarmism at its best. • “África: palo, zanahoria… ¿Y las políticas de inmigración?” [Africa: stick, carrot ... And what about immigration policies?] (ABC June 24, 2006). The confusion dominates the immigration measures, so the intriguing question is whether Spain has a real immigration policy. It clearly did not. • “Europa y África buscan en Rabat soluciones a la emigración clandestina” [Europe and Africa seek solutions to illegal immigration in Rabat] (ABC July 10, 2006). Spanish immigration issues are not only internal affairs but also something that must be solved at European level.

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• “El nigeriano deportado pudo asfixiarse con la mordaza que le colocó la Policía” [The Nigerian deportee could choke on the gag placed by the Police] (ABC June 13, 2007). Sometimes the prevention of illegal immigration leads to tragedies including the loss of lives. • “El Rey inaugura la Casa de África, «un gran instrumento de cooperación»” [The king inaugurates the Africa House, “a great instrument for cooperation”] (ABC June 13, 2006). For years Spain has had a magnificent Casa de América in Madrid, but it did not see the need of a Casa de África until very recently. The king Juan Carlos himself presided over its official inauguration in the Canary Islands. • “La UE ofrece a África negociar para evitar la lucha comercial” [The EU offered Africa to negotiate to avoid a trade fight] (ABC December 10, 2007). Is more trade the solution to African emigration to Europe, or is it rather a delusion? • “Zapatero promote escuela-taller e infraestructuras” [Zapatero promises vocational training and infrastructures] (December 10, 2007). Another example of the Spanish naive approach to African immigration. • “Moratinos, el cooperante” [Moratinos, the cooperator] (ABC January 1, 2008). Again, the Spanish press can be ruthless with their Government’s good intentions towards Africa.

El metro In the times of Ancient Greece Aristotle wrote that the imaginary constructions of literature can be truer that the facts of history because literature appeals to what can be applied to all humankind, whereas history deals with the specifics of some particular deeds and human beings. In other words, poets and fiction writers can see more profoundly into the nature of phenomena than legislators, researchers and journalists. Consequently, this vision of immigration in current Spain with the help of texts, of different kinds of texts, could not be complete without the contribution of at least one example of that special kind of texts known as literary texts symbolizing that most profound nature of the phenomenon in question. Contemporary Spanish letters enjoy the privilege of a very recently published novel by the Equatorial Guinean writer Donato Ndongo, El metro [The tube] (2007). This tailor-made novel depicts in words the why, when, where, how, who, etc. of a young Black emigrant who leaves his

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native land and people and who is able to endure all necessary hardships in order to make his dream of reaching Spain and Europe come true. The dream will end in tragedy, which, as previously mentioned, is not the most frequent destiny of emigrants in Spain, but it is the long, painful process, or pilgrimage, what really matters. The protagonist’s long way of suffering and disillusion symbolizes, as no other text could have done, the feelings and experience of all other Africans confronted with the same urge to emigrate. Madrid, the alien and threatening terminus of the long travel, the big city of the lands of the White man, finds in this novel no better and more powerful symbol than its underground metropolitan network of trains, el metro, the tube. Thanks to different flashbacks, the novel opens there, in the tube, and there its story closes. No other text, I believe, can display such a subjugating epiphany as the following one: A pesar de haber perdido la intrepidez y la arrogancia de sus antepasados, Lambert Obama Ondo, miembro del clan de los yendjok, se esforzaba por mantener incólume y reafirmar su africanidad militante en todo lugar y circunstancia. Pero no podía dejar de sorprenderse cada vez que bajaba hacia el Metro... Pensaba que no era propio de personas vivas ese descenso irremediable hacia las profundidades, y a veces le asaltaba como un comienzo de desazón cada vez que bajaba las escaleras mecánicas hacia las entrañas de la tierra. (Ndongo 2007: 13) [Despite having lost the courage and the arrogance of his ancestors, Lambert Obama Ondo, a member of the clan of yendjok, struggled to keep intact and reassert its militant Africanism in all places and circumstances. But he could not help wonder every time he went down to the Metro ... He thought it did not suit living people this irremediable fall into the depths, and sometimes a beginning of unease assailed him every time he went down the escalator into the bowels of the earth].

Conclusions The rosy days of international and African immigration into Spain are almost over. Nowadays, and for the few last years, Spain is enduring a deep economic crisis that has changed things very dramatically. Nobody can either predict easily when and how the country will get out of this present predicament. Many immigrants are facing high unemployment levels and are even beginning to leave the country. “Return” has become the new fashion word. So, many Spaniards have started to wonder if these few years of high immigration and economic prosperity, for both nationals and foreigners alike, will ever be seen in Spain again. Has it only been a

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brief parenthesis in the history of Spain? Will usual migration trends return? Will Spain resume its traditional status of an emigration country? Will these changes have an impact in the way immigrants are accepted and assimilated? Kleiner-Liebau fears that this may be the case: As long as the economic benefits of immigration prevailed and as long as there was a strong demand for foreign labour, public discourse about migration was dominated by positive aspects. But in view of the present economic recession and the rising unemployment figures among natives and immigrants, this might change. (2009: 233)

However, it cannot be denied that Spain, no matter how prosperous it might be in future, will need more immigrants. In addition, most parts of the world are very likely to improve their economic conditions, from Latin America and Asia, to Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, so their peoples will be less prone to emigrate. Spain and Western Europe will require the assistance of the only sub-continent whose prospects are not so encouraging: sub-Saharan Africa. One day it may become the only source of new immigrants left, or of human beings who may still be willing to leave their nations and long for settling down in Europe in search of a better life. The threatening view of an invasion of Europe from Africa has not proved true so far due to the aforementioned small number of Black Africans moving North. But this prospect might in the future be the reality that it is not nowadays. But then it will possibly not be termed a threat or an invasion any more, or seen as alarming as it is today. Africans may even be welcomed out of necessity and encouraged to come in greater numbers. Only the future will tell.

Works Cited Bernárdez, Enrique. Introducción a la Lingüística del Texto. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982. — Teoría y epistemología del texto. Madrid: Editorial Cátedra, 1995. Beaugrande, Robert-Alain de, and Wolfgang Dressler. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London and New York: Longman, 1994. Cebolla Boado, Héctor. “La inmigración subsahariana hacia España: control de flujos, estrategias de supervivencia y cooperación.” In Origen y causas de la emigración de África a España, edited by Itziar Ruiz-Giménez and Héctor Cebolla Boado. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2007, 53-60.

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Fawcett, Peter. Translation and Language. Linguistic Theories Explained. Manchester: St Jerome, 2003. García Villar, Jaume, ed. Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes 2007: una monografía. Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), 2009. Iniesta, Ferrán, ed. África en diáspora. Movimientos de población y políticas estatales. Barcelona: Fundació CIDOB, 2007. Kleiner-Liebau, Désirée. Migration and the Construction of National Identity in Spain. Madrid-Frankfurt am Main: IberoamericanaVervuert, 2009. Ndongo, Donato. El metro. Barcelona: El Cobre Ediciones, 2007. Roca, Miguel. “Causas de los movimientos poblacionales africanos.” In África en diáspora. Movimientos de población y políticas estatales, ed. Ferrán Iniesta. Barcelona: Fundació CIDOB, 2007, 29-41. Ruiz-Giménez Arrieta, Itziar, and Héctor Cebolla Boado. Origen y causas de la emigración de África a España. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2007. Ruiz-Giménez Arrieta, Itziar. “Aproximación al origen y las causas de la emigración de África a España.” In Origen y causas de la emigración de África a España, edited by Itziar Ruiz-Giménez and Héctor Cebolla Boado. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2007, 9-51. Soler Cantalapiedra, Mª Teresa, ed. Legislación sobre extranjeros. Cizur Menor, Navarra: Aranzadi, 2009. Van Dijk, Teun A. Texto y contexto. Semántica y pragmática del discurso. Translated by Juan Domingo Mogano. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995. —. La ciencia del texto. Un enfoque interdisciplinario. Translated by Sibila Hunzinger. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós, 1996. Yule, George. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Zapata-Barrero, Ricard. Fundamentos de los discursos políticos en torno a la inmigración. Madrid: Trotta, 2009.

PART III: LITERATURE IN CONTEXT

LIMINALITY AS CRITICAL EMPOWERMENT: SECOND GENERATION IMMIGRANTS, ‘GUERRILHEIRO’ MEMORIES AND NOMAD WOMEN POETS JOANA PASSOS

The reception of postcolonial literatures in Europe usually falls into two patterns. The critical debate either focuses on the scars of the colonial period to understand current day international dynamics or it addresses the particular intervention of a specific writer as representative of a particular (non-Western) national literature. In my view the focus has to change in order to consider a third dimension, namely the international impact of writers from the southern hemisphere, who are increasingly popular with mainstream public and canonized by critical circles. In other words, what are these writers saying that Europe is so eager to listen? Why is this alternative canon, on the margins of European national literatures becoming so visible and appealing?

Liminality “Liminality” is one of those concepts that have become part of current critical jargon, a fact that may have contributed to grant it a fluid, differently nuanced meaning on account of diverse uses for the term. Accordingly, for the present discussion, I think it is useful to make explicit the meaning of “liminality” I will be working with, as a key concept to approach four case studies which I will use to argue for the consolidation of a particular literary trend in contemporary literature, a trend that, in my view, links intercontinental literary systems in a dialectic without precedent before our current globalized epoch. I will use the concept of liminality to represent the positive, empowering position of African writers that are, somehow, circulating at the margins of European literary systems. Their marginal yet visible position instigates in these writers a subversive, critical perspective that frames their writing,

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offering readers a surplus of awareness and a seductive journey into deeper insights. My strategic use of the notion of “liminality” was inspired by the work of Victor Turner and Homi Bhabha. The anthropologist Victor Turner (2004)1 used the term “liminality” to describe ritual transitions, either in initiation rites or during enthronement ceremonies, which invest individuals with new functions or powers. In other words, “liminality” would be the transitional limbo between two borderlines, when you are about to become something else, and you no longer are what you used to be. In this sense, a liminal state suggests you are in a provisional, unfixed position, undergoing an active process of transformation, which I interpret as active translation between two cultures or civilizations in a changing world order. Another use of “liminality” is to be found in Homi Bhabha2 who has applied the concept to contemporary Western society, in the context of a postcolonial, globalised age. According to Homi Bhabha, “liminality” is a condition of the self within modernity, identifiable since “the emergence of the later phase of the modern nation, from the mid-nineteenth century, [which] is also one of the most sustained periods of mass migration within the West, and colonial expansion in the East” (1994: 139). This massive immigration into Western Europe, for it is mostly Europe that Bhabha addresses in The Location of Culture (1994, 2000), inscribed, in a significant manner, for at least a hundred and fifty years, the existence of African and Asian cultural elements within the borders of the modern European nation, even if these recognizable cultural differences were/are relegated to the margins of collective senses of national identity. Currently, as Homi Bhabha so adequately understood, the astounding number of people in transit in a globalised, postcolonial world enlarges the scale of this phenomenon to another dimension, eroding and deterritorializing homogeneous, fixed notions of collective national identity. One no longer projects a unique, stable identity over the whole of a European nation, such as it was conceived according to a traditional XIX century nationalist sensitivity, invoking an organic functional whole coinciding with a territory, a history and a shared culture. In fact, when “feeling the pulse” of contemporary Western society, Bhabha is stating quite the contrary. In his opinion, the current condition of the modern 1

Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” in The Performance Studies Reader, Henry Bial (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 79-87. 2 See the overall discussion on the book The Location of Culture (1st edition 1994; 3rd edition 2000). The term keeps reappearing within the frame of Homi Bhabha’s theories, but it is central to chapter 8, “Dissemination, time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation”, 139-170.

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nation is fragmented, plural, contradictory, permeated by difference, and made of networks of provisional identities. In his view, the boundaries of the modern nation no longer are mere political and geographical borders: (Freud’s narcissism of minor differences) provides a way of understanding how easily the boundary that secures the cohesive limits of the Western nation may imperceptibly turn into a contentious internal liminality providing a place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and the emergent. (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994: 149) How do we conceive of the ‘splitting’ of the national subject? How do we articulate cultural differences within this vacillation of ideology in which the national discourse also participates, sliding ambivalently from one enunciatory position to another? What are the forms of life struggling to be represented in that unruly ‘time’ of national culture (…) that both constitutes the exorbitant image of power and deprives it of the certainty and stability of centre or closure? What might be called the cultural and political effects of the liminality of the nation, the margins of modernity, which come to be signified in the narrative temporalities of splitting, ambivalence and vacillation? (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994: 147)

Although I fundamentally agree that liminality is a feature of nowadays’ globalised world (and even if you call it postmodern or postcolonial, you are still going through a transitional stage on the wake of modernity as Bhabha implies), I differ from Homi Bhabha in so far as I do not think the whole of European culture is equally liminal. Mainstream, Western, modern Europe is aligned with a grim expansion of xenophobic feelings (“fortress Europe”), welcomes neo-colonial moves concerning the moving of European based factories to Asia and China, and supports European based rural explorations in Africa. In the capitalist world, certainty, targets and aims do not leave much room for liminal sensitivities, and this not so liminal West is willing to turn a blind eye on human misery and environment irresponsibility in the name of profit. And yet, some of us in Europe do understand that in a globalised world the local and the global are inextricably bound together, for better or for worst. The consequences of irresponsible exploitation of peoples and environment will always bounce back. It is because of this principle of interrelatedness linking local and global in what comes to human and environment protection that the most urgent critical voices to sober up Western capitalist frenzy are the counter-discourses ensuing from either cultures from the southern hemisphere or from European “liminalities” – that is to say, from within

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the margins of the mainstream modern nation itself. Very often, these “liminal voices” correspond to postcolonial, immigrant or diasporic writers, who live intercontinental biographies, becoming nomad observers between local and global geographies. These sensitive and educated nomads are the masters of insightful critical perspectives, the beholders of the aware gaze, the estranged travellers. They mind the detail, comprehending in its everyday banality the concrete cost of huge historical processes. If “liminalities” suspended between past and present, historical and the current, the Western and the South, the local and the global are indeed the living conditions of the modern self, the West needs the contribution of these nomads to understand itself, not only because of the critical sharpness of less integrated/accommodated voices, but because the exile (I will return to this image) is part of mainstream European life style and sense of identity. Within the sphere of Western literary systems, the marginality attributed to postcolonial, immigrant or minority voices is not proportional to the centrality and the urgency of the literature they are writing as these voices address some of the most pressing ethical and human issues at stake in a globalised world. To illustrate this point, I will discuss below a set of literary texts that I can only place in a literary canon that refers back to an intercontinental crossroads, revealing of African, Asian and Western (dis)encounters. The place of enunciation of the selected writers is in part European, as they have long lived here, incorporate Western perspectives in their worldview and are perfectly aware of dominant ideas and values in Europe. However, they also live by other cultural geographies, decoding both ‘here’ and ‘there’ or ‘local’ and ‘global’, in a synchronicity beyond the mediating role of cultural translation. They became cultural polyglots, suffering from existential schizophrenia and estrangement in relation to their everyday social environment, experiences that sharpened their insight and awareness. You do have to speak from a “liminal” sense of self, from the position of the resident-foreign-yet-within-and-aware in order to confront Eurocentric narcissism in such culturally translated terms the West cannot dismiss nor minimize. Speaking after Victor Turner, who underlined the empowerment ensuing from liminal status, and with Homi Bhabha, who used “liminality” as a metaphor for the fragmented and provisional basis of identity in our postcolonial, globalised age, my working notion of liminality refers to a strategic estrangement caused by diverse biographical circumstances that turn you into a cultural polyglot, someone always at home and always a foreigner to the multiple worlds you live in. Liminal spaces are in-between spaces, borderlines. Think, for example, of the no

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man’s land you walk between two guarded borders as a metaphor for a liminal identity. Thus, liminality as a condition of the modern self implies an estranged, non-stable citizenship, which I interpret as an enhanced critical view, looking back at history – that which we have left behind – so as to understand what we have not yet become, but are moving towards. I will then argue that liminality seems an adequate concept to describe precisely the enunciation position of a set of expatriate or immigrant writers, intercontinental citizens, whose works can be seen as composing a particular literary trend, received in the west as postcolonial, diaspora or minority literatures. In fact, these three concepts refer to related but different literary systems3 but for the matters that concern us here they share the margin as common instance of enunciation vis-à-vis canonical, mainstream European national literatures.

The exile It was with a sense of empathy, of complicitous alignment, that I read Homi Bhabha’s comments on Edward Said, being Said the other inspirational voice that led me to understand the complex position of these writers, simultaneously insiders and outsiders to plural literary systems. Here is Bhabha on Said: When Edward Said suggests that the question of the nation should be put on the contemporary critical Agenda as a hermeneutic of ‘worldliness’, he is fully aware that such a demand can only now be made from the liminal and ambivalent boundaries that articulate the signs of national culture as ‘zones of control or of abandonment, or recollection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness or of sharing. (Homi Bhabha quoting E. Said 1994: 148-149)

A hermeneutic of worldliness accepts the complex set of fragments and networks that weave the fabric of XXI century western society, beyond the myth of the nation as a coherent whole destined to progress on the wake of modernity. Worldliness establishes a claim to exchange, information and 3 To be more precise, I think postcolonial writers are primarily writing their contribution to diverse national literatures from the southern hemisphere, while diaspora or immigrant literatures exist in relation to distance from ‘home’ and to the claims of citizenship within a determined host nation. In any case, I believe these writers are creating either the most wordly, cosmopolitan trend in local literary systems, or, at least, the very alternative canons in the cultural life of the modern West.

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quotation across cultural difference, eradicating silences and tension. Besides, in the globalised era, the sheer numbers of people ‘in transit’, of de-territorialised citizens, turns the exiled scholar, the expatriate thinker or the immigrant writer into the perfect epitomes of the world we live in. Note that the exile is by definition a figure never absorbed or assimilated into sameness. The exile lives in liminality, in between worlds, holding to his/her own non-accommodation, living physically in one place while his heart and mind are somewhere else. And yet, in Said’s famous theory, the exile is neither indifferent to the society he lives in, nor passive in relation to the destinies of the world. A couple of quotes on the intellectual exile, such as Said imagined this metaphoric figure, will clarify the sort of attitude behind the literary trend I am identifying in contemporary literatures written from the margins of Western Europe: Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country. Intellectually this means that an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, therefore making them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light: from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think, say, about a human rights issue in one situation by comparison with another. (Edward Said, 2000: 378)

Although Edward Said is perfectly clear about the extra insight in the hands of the intellectual exile – whom I materialize in this paper as the immigrant, or postcolonial writer living in Europe – there is a certain weakness in the worldliness Said envisages that I find unsatisfactory. In an interview (The Edward Said Reader, 2000: 419-470) I can read a certain hesitation concerning the role of the university. Said declares he sees the university as a sheltered environment, similar to the intellectual forum of a leisure class or the life of reflection you may expect to find in a seminar (2000: 436). And yet his interview is full of political insights and clear stands concerning international issues. Maybe after a life enduring stern criticism from diverse reactionary sectors he was simply being cautious, but I would prefer to think of the university, and especially the humanities, not as a corporate, sheltered institution but as the working place (and a formative place) of responsible, caring and aware citizens. Technological training alone does not help the world getting anywhere worth, and contemporary mainstream mentality should mind the necessity of discourses that work as counterpoints for a profit drive. Everywhere in Europe social rights are shrinking, and the laws regulating work are going

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back to XIX century industrial exploitation across the borders, out of sight, leaving Europe with a massive unemployment problem. It seems the guys managing the economy are not doing a good job by any responsible, sustainable standard. We need an alternative plan, sensitive to humanistic concerns. And as inspiration to design it, I suggest you start by listening to a few insightful writers, the exiled observers from liminal worlds.

Liquid frontiers Recently, I read a poem by Ana Mafalda Leite that stroke me as a wonderful illustration of the revealing insights one encounters in those liminal literatures of multiple belonging. There was, in this poem, a fine example of that in-between sensitivity I have been talking about, with its unsettling effects, the discrete erosion of distinctive borders, the slippage from certainty to open possibilities, the ubiquity of double lives. Ana Mafalda Leite was born in Portugal but she moved to Mozambique as a baby, where she grew up, and where she remained even as a college student. She moved to Portugal as an adult, and she currently is a professor of African literatures at the University of Lisbon. She frequently is visiting professor in other universities of Europe, or in Mozambique and Brazil. As a poet she has published six anthologies of poetry. In her last poetic anthology, Livro das encantações (2005), I found the poem “Liquid Frontier”: Fronteira Líquida Cose-se a dobra do tempo sem costura frente e verso Coincidem E o que acontece é apenas uma margem de esquecida vontade Assim o meu rosto está na sombra desde sempre Até que o preciso número de luas encontre A geometria exacta para o iluminar Acredito nesses números secretos Nesse entrecruzar de linhas Pela palma da mão Paralelas duas vidas me dão (Ana Mafalda Leite, Livro das Encantações, 2005: 15)

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Liquid Frontier You sew up the folds of time, seamless, right and reverse Coincide And what happens is but a margin of Forgotten will Thus my face has remained in the shadow since ever Until the exact number of moons finds The precise geometry to illuminate it I believe in those secret numbers In these crossed lines Along the palms of my hand Two parallel lives 4 They grant me.

Indeed, a new geometry has to be found to trace the lines of destiny for those who live parallel lives. And what will those lines describe but the moving routes of contemporary lives in a globalised world? Across intermittent geographies, you have to catch up with interruptions in time. You adjust your life to make “here” and “there” reversible counterparts. If “right and reverse coincide”, there are distinctions that cease to matter. Consequently, where does this worldview leave room for xenophobia and racism? You lack the stable, contained referents of projected national identities. The individual is not one in the crowd. The individual is the confluence of plural lives and relative certainties. Can you see the political potential of such a fluid view of the world? Old (colonial) binaries are left behind, centres of power can move with the people, and the idea of what “a foreigner” is becomes a blurred spot to the surveillance gaze. But why is the face of the nomad across liquid frontiers hiding in shadows? Certainly, the schizophrenic condition of parallel lives across continents leaves its scars. For the migrant, identity is a problematic assemblage you have to structure yourself without the safety net of installed, universal traditions. In between cultures everything becomes more relative. The absence of comfortable, precise and continuous cultural references may cause schizophrenic non-coincidence between different “selves”, a confused, shadowy identity to be settled with maturity… indeed, after one has lived through many moons. 4

I want to thank Ana Chaves for her willingness to help me with the translations of the two poems quoted in this paper. I have always trusted her experienced eye as literary translator, and I have welcomed her suggestions for these translations.

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The second-generation immigrant In the universe of communities of immigrants living and growing up in Portugal there is not yet a real literary milieu, even though you already find a couple of interesting cases. Editors I have been talking to tell me they have read a couple of promising manuscripts, but the authors were not keen on taking a co-author, someone that would edit and rewrite the text until it was up to publishing standard – the solution that, according to Sabrina Brancato,5 some writers have found in Italy. Apart from this possible arrangement, all over Europe, a new literature produced by diverse minorities is emerging as a serious aesthetic and philosophical contribution to European literary landscapes. In this scenario, the novel by Joaquim Arena, A verdade de Chindo Luz (2006)6 seems encouraging evidence of the development of such a milieu within Portuguese borders. It is true that the novel still has some flaws (after all, it is his first book), for example the detective story plot that relies too much on forced coincidences to be credible, and that I can only see as a staged appeal to popular mainstream readership. Nevertheless, A Verdade de Chindo Luz does represent a breakthrough in the assertion of literary immigrant voices inside Portugal, and the writing reveals Joaquim Arena’s eye for relevant issues as well as his sensitivity to the internal logic presiding over some of the margins in Portuguese society. Among the set of writers addressed in this paper, Joaquim Arena is the only voice that deals with the experience of immigration such as it was lived by millions of people searching for better living conditions. In this sense, he could be considered a writer affiliated to minority communities within Europe, while the other three would be more adequately understood through a cosmopolitan, postcolonial episteme. But my argument is, precisely, that there are many voices to fit the many margins and silences of Europe. While the poem you read above (by Ana Mafalda Leite) offers the ubiquity discourse we necessarily have to invent to express moving citizenship in a globalised world (a condition that amounts to eternal sense of de-territorialisation, of disconnection, and hence of liminality), while another formulation of exile is to be found in Joaquim Arena’s narrative about the marginal status of the immigrant. Arena explores the indifference (if not the violence) Europe has reserved for the immigrants it hosts as the very cause for social tension and marginality that nationalist sectors then blame on immigrant communities 5

Sabrina Brancato, “From Routes to Roots: the emergence of Afro-Italian literature” in Afroeurop@ns, cultures and Identities, (ed.) Lopez, Marta Sofia, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 6 Joaquim Arena, A Verdade de Chindo Luz, Lisboa: Oficina do Livro, 2006.

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themselves. It is a vicious circle, producing ever widening gaps within European society. The plot of A Verdade de Chindo Luz starts with the mysterious disappearance, and presumed suicide, of Chindo Luz, a second generation Cape Verdean immigrant. He had just won a popular contest on Portuguese television and had become the media star of the moment. The disappearance of Chindo together with the money he won, the subsequent discovery of blackmail letters in his apartment, the kept pieces of news about a corpse found in an old monastery – all of these narrative elements weave a detective story plot, in search for the truth regarding Chindo’s mysterious disappearance. After this non-promising replica of Hollywood film noir, the narrative delicately takes you back in time, after a memory flow that contextualizes several photographs in the family album. Baldo (Chindo’s younger brother) finds it open on the floor, in front of a silent, mournful mother. It is this family biography and Baldo’s journey to mature self-awareness that will be discussed below as the two most significant narrative lines. D. Nitinha arrived in Lisbon in the 1950s, long before decolonization and the Carnation Revolution in April 1974. Her marriage unites two typical emigration routes for Cape Verdeans: she is another young woman in transit to Italy (a great majority of the feminine emigration from Cape Verde goes to Italy) when she meets John Luzona, a Cape Verdean sailor trying to reach The Netherlands’ busy harbours to find a job. They decide to settle in Lisbon and as John is usually away (until he disappears in a shipwreck), D. Nitinha raises their four children in the suburbs of Lisbon, running a bed and breakfast hostel. What kind of city does Baldo recollect from his childhood? Esta zona oriental da cidade fora, em meados do século, escolhida para acolher a maior parte das indústrias químicas da capital. Depois caiu sobre ela um manto de esquecimento. Entre o bairro e o rio Tejo só havia baldios lamacentos atravessados por canaviais lúgubres e pelo caminho de ferro. Com o tempo, aquilo tornou-se um depósito de lixo industrial, com um ferro-velho à mistura. Nos últimos anos tinha-se tornado uma espécie de terra de ninguém, mal-cheirosa e sem qualquer interesse. (…) O único autocrro que se atrevia a cruzar aquelas bandas perdidas era o 28. Por isso, tínhamos por ele uma feição de amigo (…). Por aqui só havia fábricas e operários. E migrantes do Alentejo e das Beiras. Não havia liceus.7 Around the 1950s, this eastern part of the city had been selected to host most of the chemical industries. Afterwards, it was forgotten. Between the 7

Arena, 2006: 27.

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Liminality as Critical Empowerment neighbourhood and the Tagus river there were muddy wastelands, gloomy cane fields and the railway. As time went by, it became a junkyard and a deposit for industrial waste. Lately, it was no man’s land, stinky and irrelevant. (…) the only bus that dared to cross that forgotten area was number 28. That is why you were attached to it as to a sort of friend (…). Around here, there were only factories and factory workers, as well as Portuguese migrants from Alentejo and Beiras. There were no highschools. (My translation)

In Lisbon, to live in a suburb means you are too poor to afford living in a neighbourhood closer to the city centre. Thus, poor, rural Portuguese people moved to the suburb when they arrived in the city looking for a better life. Other immigrants started to arrive, mostly from Africa and all of them remained circumscribed to the suburb life where “there were no high-schools”. Actually, it is remarkable how many lines of marginalisation are condensed in this single paragraph: the poor public transports, the lack of access to education, the waste and garbage piling up in the landscape, the absence of professional alternatives. This is an area of oblivion in what concerns administrative care and public investment. Given this background, for the kids growing up in this neighbourhood, television stardom or the hope for a successful break in music are some of the most coveted dreams. High-school studies and college can also open wider roads to these boys, and yet Baldo, a graduate in history, finds himself partially living off an affair with an older woman (something that seems a current alternative for some of the other men) or under the protection of his uncle Naiss, who encourages him to try a living with his guitar. Some of Chindo and Baldo’s childhood companions become lawyers and politicians, just as there are others who live miserable destinies. The narrative neither rules out the advent of a good opportunity nor the force of circumstances to make you walk sad roads. However, the truth is that even Chindo, the television star, is caught within a negative, destructive logic. In part, this negativity is the consequence of Chindo’s inability to speak out the truth about an accidental murder in his childhood, but Chindo’s inability to tell the truth is not simply an individual issue as Chindo is trying to keep a silence vow he had made to his childhood friends. Besides, there is no alternative affective bond outside the universe of the suburb. There is no one he can talk to, no friend, no institution, nor trustworthy contact. Consequently, the truth that led Chindo to suicide is thus a revelation of a landscape of urban indifference. This hostile urban environment is a motif that runs through the whole of the text, even in minute side comments or isolated scenes. There is for example a scene where Mohammed is sitting in the waiting room of a hospital urgency service and notices a wounded

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worker who has been brought in. A little later, a doctor walks to Mohammed and tells him that the wounded worker, who has just entered, has died. Beyond the shock over such a tragic working accident, Mohammed cannot bear the pathetic indifference in the context of being informed of this death simply because he is the only (equally black) person who happens to be in the waiting room. No one cares to verify if he is the right person to address, and nothing is done to correct the mistake. Bearing this kind of scene in mind it is worth noticing that the novel manages to avoid a bitter note or a melodramatic impression. Joaquim Arena seems to have found a detached (even if too deliberate) tone to balance the themes he addresses. All along the novel begs the question: can a suburb youth break the feeling of alienation and loneliness in relation to the big city? When Baldo joins college, he makes a discovery: A periferia da cidade tinha sido uma fronteira implacável. Na verdade, (Baldo) só a cruzou quando foi estudar para a faculdade. Os novos amigos interessavam-se por coisas diferentes, frequentavam livrarias, galerias de arte e bibliotecas. ‘Julgávamos que vivíamos em Lisboa, mas na verdade não vivíamos em Lisboa’.8 The city’s suburb had been an implacable frontier. Actually, (Baldo) only crossed it when he started attending college. The new friends were interested in different things; they went to bookshops, art galleries, libraries. ‘You thought you lived in Lisbon, but in fact you did not.” (My translation)

The moment Baldo becomes aware that growing up in the suburb means living in exile in relation to Lisbon is the moment he realises he needs to use his liminality to sit back and watch. His own story is still open ended, and he has in his hands the responsibility to make his own itineraries and choices. All along, Baldo’s slow pace of living and his introspective mood prove advantageous. It is this careful, doubtful attitude that keeps Baldo from accommodating to the suburb or selling out too quickly to any easy alternative. It is this same attitude that prevents Baldo from falling under Mohammed’s spell, a character that embodies a reference to opportunistic sects with less than impeccable moral credentials. In the end, only in Cape Verde will Baldo find himself, but while he struggles for self-discovery, the reader is offered a view of Lisbon through the eyes of one of its margins, revealing the city’s inability (or 8

Arena, 2006: 114.

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unwillingness) to accommodate not so few of its own children. It is worth mentioning that the novel’s secondary narratives invoke other marginal communities, left to linger in their own liminal world. Such is the case of ‘the Club’ of Cape Verdean retired civil servants who worked for the Portuguese colonial administration. They will not adjust to a postcolonial world and they cannot fit the meanness of the rushed, impersonal, pragmatic city. They are too old to start again, and they no longer have access to the privileged life they lived in Africa. They live enclosed in a shell of colonial nostalgia, reviving cherished memories. In fact, the importance of these memories explains the compulsory necessity of speaking of their lives in Africa, as if the act of speaking confirmed each other’s past and legitimated their longing. Actually, these are double exiles, removed to the suburban periphery and disconnected from the present time. Lisbon could never make up for what they lost.

‘Guerrilheiro’ memories The Angolan writer Luandino Vieira is one of the key voices in the plural context of African literatures written in Portuguese. Among his many books, I am going to discuss the most recent one, O Livro dos Guerrilheiros (2009),9 a very particular novel in terms of form, language and content, which was written as homage to a moment in the history of Angola and to the individuals who made this history by joining the armed fight. Angola has endured a long war period10 and this tragic history has inspired many texts over the years. Some of these, lacking in aesthetic and philosophical quality, are usually referred to as ‘propaganda literature’, and they amount to relevant documents to the history of Angola, even if they are irrelevant as literary heritage. On the other hand, Luandino Vieira’s trilogy11 is a real literary contribution to this period of Angolan history, creating an “epic narrative” that makes artistic justice to such matter. With these introductory lines I am separating postcolonial literatures from other written documents and, secondly, I am asserting the fact that postcolonial writers have a life outside European publication industries and that their concerns stand primarily in relation to their mother culture. 9

Luandino Vieira, O Livro dos Guerrilheiros, Lisboa: Caminho, Outras Margens (grupo Leya), 2009. 10 The independence war in Angola lasted from 1961 to 1974. Civil war among different factions started the next year and lasted until 1994 with further war periods, until 2002. 11 The first volume in this triology was O Livro dos Rios, 2006, Lisboa: Caminho.

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Having said that, where does Luandino Vieira fit in the marginalia of European literary systems? What is he doing here? I have brought the reader through the ubiquity of double lives and their cosmopolitan expression as the key discourses to grasp mobile, globalised identities. Then I have analysed a case that stood for the literary expression of the immigrant experience inside contemporary western society. Now, I am turning towards the invocation of a memory of the independence struggle. I believe such memory has to be present in Europe, as part of European self-awareness, and as a key pedagogic discourse to define European citizenship within the frame of a globalised world. This is not about guilt. The study of postcolonial literature in Europe is about awareness, selfknowledge, and the learning of what went wrong in history, and at what price. In other words, I am saying that the knowledge of literary heritages in the West has to include the study of pieces of colonial and postcolonial literatures, so much so as the study of the classics or the key authors in any national literary system.12 I believe a journey through the memory of colonial wars is a confrontation with a repressed margin of historical awareness, and that is how a study of the ‘guerrilheiro’ fits in this paper. O Livro dos Guerrilheiros starts with a grave, formal introduction, reminding one the tone of medieval chronicles. This tone subtly sets in the reader an attitude of respect, even awe, towards the exemplary narratives expected to follow. And yet, while bringing a medieval Western note to the fore of the first pages of this novel, the language and the subject matter are so uniquely Angolan that the final impact leaves the reader with the discovery of an African epic. I need to explain further. The ‘chronicle’ proposes to narrate the lives and (heroic) deaths of fallen warriors “for the joy of the young, and the wise sadness of the older”.13 Coherently, the text is full of references to ancient histories of resistance, episodes erased from European official historical record. These ancient episodes inserted in the main narrative, combined with the aesthetic references of the medieval chronicle and the epic, undo centuries of silence and reveal the bias in the historical archive. At least in the case of the independence war, the record will not go so unaccounted for. Luandino Vieira saw to that. The book of Guerrilheiros (O Livro dos Geurrilheiros) takes the unaware reader to the jungle of Angola and to the routines of guerrilla. Actually, Luandino Vieira’s writing has such a strong (affective) appeal that you feel a ghostly presence among the group. You come to know them 12

Most technical universities are blind to this necessity, at the cost of their own students’ notion of citizenship. 13 “(…) para alegria dos menores e tristura dos mais velhos”, Luandino Vieira, 2009: 1.

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by their nick names, you can tell their position in the group as they move silently through the jungle, you learn to understand why you have to stop after that bird has cried, and you learn to be careful where you lay your foot. While reading, you hold your ear to their hearts. And then the novel narrates a few of their biographies, so that you know how they came to be there, fighting this war. And everything is more complex and pungent than you expected, and yet, a dignified silence falls short of narrating the unbearable. In the pages of this novel, if you are not an Angolan learning to love your country and history, then, you are still grabbed by your emotions and intelligence to see from the other side of European arrogance, and you learn to love the colours, the ground and the despair of Angola, together with the ‘guerrilleiro’ who was never too busy or too scared to stop and take in the natural beauty around him. Reading this novel was an experience of suspended (Portuguese) identity. Even the bilingual language of the text, full of words of Quimbundo (glossary available at the end of the novel) forces you to master a bit of this Angolan language. You start to recognize some of the words, building your own provisional idiolect as you read, and you are pushed, even linguistically, to ‘feel’ Angola. Then, you have to consider the set of ‘guerrilheiro’ biographies. A less gifted writer might have hidden the insecurity, the rage, the corruption, the fear and the ideological manipulation among these units. Nothing is smoothed over. There is enough dignity in their motives, in the road that led them to this war. And there is the irony, the laughter that carries you through the tension and avoids the grand scale narrative, the Hollywood take that would release empathy. Everything in this text is deeply humane, close, intimate. No spectator’s distance. This novel also hints at different ways of making the independence war, convoking the effort of generations, from grandfather (proud tribal warrior), to father (cerebral state engineer contributing to Angola’s modernity) to son (‘guerrilheiro’ pushed to the jungle). Silenced history has many dimensions, and all of them have to be written. Then, after the record is straight, you have to let time wash away heavy memories, learning the wisdom of this attitude with the flowing water of the river Kwanza (a pervasive metaphor in Luandino Vieira’s writing) the silent witness to many histories, deaths and destinies. And yet, none of these ever prevented the river from flowing to its destiny. As Luandino Vieira says, “we were the ones that were rowing too fast”,14 while the river, just as history, live on another scale of continuity and deliverance. Probably, it is this faith in the future and in the ability to heal and love that explains the 14

“Nós é quem éramos os apressados canoeiros”, Luandino Vieira, 2009: 98.

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surprising amount of light and generosity in a book of ‘guerrilheiros’. It never ceases to amaze me.

Why margins are the centre Ana Paula Tavares, Angolan writer who lives between Portugal and Angola, wrote a small poem I offer as an adequate conclusion to the urgency of listening to these authors. I place them in exile because they live multiple lives and belong exclusively to none. From the liminal, ubiquitous spaces they inhabit, they have found, each in her/his own ways, the ability to articulate routes for self-knowledge and awareness, so urgent in a globalised, moving world. It seems it is up to the margins of the literary heritage claimed by the West to find the words to shatter indifference. It is a beginning. Aquela mulher que rasga a noite com o seu canto de espera não canta Abre a boca E solta os pássaros Que lhe povoam a garganta. (Paula Tavares, O Lago da Lua, 1999: 17) That woman who pierces the night With her chant of longing Sings no song She opens her mouth And lets free the flustered birds in her throat.

Works Cited Arena, Joaquim. A Verdade de Chindo Luz. Lisboa: Oficina do Livro, 2006. Leite, Ana Mafalda. Livro das Encantações. Lisboa: Caminho, Outras Margens, 2005. Tavares, Ana Paula. O Lago da Lua. Lisboa: Caminho, 1999. Vieira, Luandino. O Livro dos Guerrilheiros. Lisboa: Caminho, Outras Margens, 2009.

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Background Theory Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Brancato, Sabrina. “From Routes to Roots: the emergence of Afro-Italian literature”. In López, Marta Sofía (ed.), Afroeurop@ns, cultures and Identities. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Said, Edward. The Edward Said Reader. London: Granta Books, 2000. Turner, Victor. “Liminality and Communitas”. In Henry Bial (ed.), The Performance Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 79-87.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS POLITICAL ESSAY: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN BLACK POSTMODERN LITERATURE ANNALISA MIRIZIO

In a brief paragraph of the Prison Notebooks (1929-1935) titled “Justification of Autobiography” (59), Antonio Gramsci considers that the political function of this literary genre could be to help others to develop towards certain ways of being or towards certain breakthroughs (1718). The narration of one’s experiences might be certainly read as “an act of pride”, dictated by the somehow overconfident feeling that one’s life deserves a special memory, being original and unique. But – he adds – the driving force of autobiographical writing should be other than mere pride. If politically conceived, autobiography can, in fact, function as an alternative to a political or philosophical essay because – he concludes – it describes “in act” what, in an essay, appears as deduced logically (ibid.). Gramsci does not mention it explicitly, but it is quite obvious that he is evaluating, on the one hand, the exemplum potential of this genre for the subaltern subject, and, on the other hand, the major possibility that autobiography offers to access the literary field, in contrast to essay, which, as T. Eagleton illustrated (1984), has often been, after J. Addison, a site of osmosis of ideology and aesthetics. This defence of the political value of autobiographical narratives, as Lidia Curti (2006) points out, could be easily applied to that ensemble of public and private, life and theory that are the Prison Notebooks (18). And, we can add, it can also function as a sort of political rescue of the privileged narrative form of that individualism which emerged with the consolidation of capitalism and the bourgeois society (Lejeune, 1975). Nevertheless, it is also a defence of a method. Gramsci’s comparison is, in fact, based on the assumption that autobiography shares with essay the method that Montaigne intended to express in the title of his texts. The conjunction between the two is thus to be found not in the literary form and neither in the interweaving of experiences and thoughts, but in the intellectual approach that underlies writing, an approach that refuses any

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pretension to convey absolute truths and aims to register, in fieri, the arising of ideas in the meditation of the author, together with doubts and hesitations. Gramsci’s gaze, concentrated mainly on the revolutionary potential of narrative, reads autobiography as a discourse able not only to convey the possibilities of transformation of subalterns’ life, but also to trace the history of the effective triumphs of their fight against the symbolic and material misery of reality. So considered, the narration of personal experience, far from being the presumptuous or nostalgic evocation of one’s existence, would act, according to Gramsci, as a drive towards social change showing the path to follow and, eventually, the way out of subjection. Moreover, the careful recollection of details that autobiography contains allows Gramsci to read it as an historical document about society in a particular time, not a mere testimony of a life, but a mirror of a life in a social context (1723). Once again Gramsci is attracted by the upsetting potential of the genre that, through the everyday details that construct the framework of personal experience, gives evidence of the gap between appearance and reality, words and facts, law-system and subjective praxis (ibid.). Autobiography would, then, also function as a counterpoint to official history, which is based only on laws and official events and excludes all the social minor movements, labelling them as banal or, even worse, simply “picturesque” (ibid.). On the contrary, these details reveal, according to Gramsci, the slow process of transformation of a society, the “molecular” variations that bring to radical changes. For this reason, he suggests, strictly “personal and individualist” autobiographies, more than a heritage of the romantic hypertrophy of the ego, should be read as the effect of a powerful censorship system (1724). The purpose of this contribution is to outline how Gramsci’s reflections about autobiography, elaborated in the middle of the thirties of the last century, have influenced and still remain of great actuality in the Cultural Studies approach to this literary genre. On the other hand, I shall consider how the insistence on what we might call with Freud an agonal use (“agonale Verwendung”) of literature might prevent critics from recognizing the real contribution of black Italian literature to the reshaping of the literary field. My point is that the subjective experience, initially vehiculated by autobiography as the most suitable frame for the vindication of a different identity, today can be traced in great diversity in others genres, where it is only one of the many elements that intervene in the articulated dialogue between present and tradition. I shall also point out how these texts problematize the notion of integration and, moving

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away from identity politics, seem to participate in the postmodern awareness of the illusory nature of the very notion of identity.

Tracing Gramsci’s heritage Cultural Studies in the Birmingham School phase or in the immediate following years often turned to Gramsci. His notions of hegemony and subaltern subject have had a determinant role in the theoretical debates around culture, power, popular literature and the function of intellectuals, just to mention a few. Less evident, but not less impressive has been his influence on the political re-reading of autobiographical narratives by silenced or displaced subjects in order to reconstruct genealogies and outline identities. I shall recall only a few examples. Mary Helen Washington (1984) concludes her essay about Gwendolyn Brooks’s autobiographical novel Maud Martha (1953) underlying how this novel anticipates many of the themes that would be articulated in the future by black novelists such as Alice Walker or Toni Morrison: silence, repressed creativity and alienation from language. And, with the aim to reinforce the symbolic contribution of Brook’s text, Washington adds: Paule Marshall has said that Maud Martha is the first novel she read which permitted a black woman a rich interior life, and it provided inspiration for her own writing about black women. (1984: 261)

In a similar way, Sudipta Kaviraj (2004), in her reading of an early autobiographical text of Bengalese literature, Sibnath Sastri’s Autobiography (1918) specifies that, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the Bengali context, autobiography “holds a peculiarly significant place” in the inauguration of new, modern forms of social life: It describes and reflexively comments on real – not fictive – lives. Novels assert the possibility of modern lives in the abstract; autobiographies have the ineradicable advantage of describing the real. Every autobiography is thus a vindication that such a new kind of life for the individual is not merely desirable, but actually possible. (1918: 84)

Also F. Abiola Irele (2001), in his exhaustive mapping of the emergence of African letters, points out how, in the eighteenth century, autobiographical writing was first used by a small group of “enfranchised and cultivated Africans” who took part in the then mostly controversial question of African slavery. They were determined, Irele explains, “to bring their personal experience to bear upon the discussion of this question” (46) and

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the autobiographical genre “serves to identify the point of departure of both the written self-representation they offer and the process of selfreflection they delineate” (ibid.). As in the case of the most appreciated work that emerged in this period, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789, as in other examples of early narratives, autobiography “affords scope for precisely the kind of introspection inspired by the actualities of experience that the circumstances of these early Africans in Europe required” (ibid.). And even when the narrative focuses on the process of assimilation to European culture, functioning as an “account of the progressive integration of the black/African self into the white/European world”, as a “credential” of their legitimate participation in Western civilization (47), as is the case of Equiano’s, the whole text, Irele argues, “attests an abiding sense of origins and marks a gesture of self-affirmation as African subject” (48). A similar combination of “the pathos of black experience” (Irele 2001: 49) and pride has been emphasized also in the critical analysis of the autobiographical narrative by some black African-Italian writers, as, for example, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, author of an autobiographical novel that has never been published. As the study of S. Ponzanesi (2004) reveals, this Italian-Somali writer refused, in fact, to issue her text, considering unacceptable the changes and cuts proposed by her publisher. Ponzanesi explains that Viarengo creates a discourse about hybrid and multicultural identity that combined “autobiographical narrative and political debate about difference” (33). Her text reconstructs her duplicity intersecting Italian and Oromo as to make visible through the body of the language the experience of living “in between”. It seems that this singular combination of cultures, races and languages made her text too difficult to adjust to market criteria. We miss a more detailed description of the elements that brought to this incompatibility. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that the decision not to publish, as S. Ponzanesi suggests, certainly condemns the author to silence but it is also a gesture of self-respect (ibid.).

Autobiographical narratives and aesthetic value Discussing the literature of Blacks from the Diaspora, F. Abiola Irele explains that the awareness of a particular historical, social, and cultural experience produces a deep sentiment of distinctiveness, a feeling of a different identity “that demands to be reflected in a distinct expression” (20). The literary discourse needs, thus, to be bent to the materiality of experience, dismantled, manipulated and hybridized up to the point of giving voice to this singularity.

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Maybe because, as Rita Felski (2005: 28-43) insists, cultural studies should not be conflated with literary studies, the literary merits or demerits as literature of these narratives and their aesthetic value were often underestimated or at least subordinated to the appreciation of the political force they conveyed. After all, as Michael Bérubé provocatively asks: “Can politically motivated criticism have anything interesting to say about the form of cultural forms?” (2005: 9). All aesthetic judgment is, as Nora Catelli points out, strictly related to the acceptance of a canon (forthcoming 2011). And against the aesthetic theory and its canon many voices arose, among them that of Abdul R. JanMohamed (1987) who claimed, as S. Ponzanesi recalls, that “The ‘inadequacy’ or ‘underdevelopment’ that is ascribed to minority texts and/or authors by a dominant humanism in the end only reveals the limiting (and limited) ideological horizons of that dominant ethnocentric perspective” (8). After more than twenty years since this vehement defence of minority literature, can we still avoid to engage with the notion of aesthetic value? Which are the consequences of this refusal for the literary appreciation of contemporary black artistic and literary productions? I shall try to reflect on this point using black Italian literature as an example. There is no doubt that black writers have made a significant entrance into Italian contemporary literature in the last decade. The data bank about immigrant writers in Italian language, Basili,1 registered in 2009 a 28.8% of Africans writers, authors of 357 texts. And the total number of literary and academic works by “immigrant” writers amounts to 1712. Why should we still approach their texts as if they were their “first step” in the “hostile” field of writing? As Raymond Williams brilliantly predicted in 1977, “If we are asked to believe that all literature is ‘ideology’ in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the communication or imposition of ‘social’ or ‘political’ meanings and values, we can only, in the end, turn away. If we are asked to believe that all literature is ‘aesthetic’, in the crude sense that its dominant intentions (and then our only response) is the beauty of language or form, we may stay a little longer but will still in the end turn away” (1977: 155). Moreover, the very Gramscian defense of the political function of autobiography, as I have already mentioned, should be read with particular reference to the subaltern subject’s struggle. But maybe this is the crucial 1 Cf. Basili, Banca Dati Scrittori Immigrati in Lingua Italiana, Bollettino di sintesi 2009, at http://www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/basili2001/.

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point. Can we still consider a writer as a subaltern subject? Shouldn’t we take into account that the notion refers to proletariat and rural peasantry? In his sharp and polemic conference “History and Value”, talking about Orwell, F. Kermode (1988) mentions “the kidnapping of workingclass writers by the bourgeoisie the minute they put pen to paper” (121). Beyond the difficult relations between F. Kermode and theorists of cultural studies, can we consider, as he suggests, that this inclusion of writers in the number of subalterns misleads the critical approach to their pieces of work? Shouldn’t we start to pay more attention to the dialogue between the different literary traditions that shape the authors’ identity? A demand for a new discussion about aesthetics seems to arise also from the same African-Italian writers that, as Franca Sinopoli (2001) explains, often refuse to continue to be tied to the theme of immigration, to be considered “only as immigrant writer”, that “only narrate stories related to and that explicitly reflect the world of immigration”. F. Sinopoli argues that their texts include a visible invitation to be read as “poetics in the form of literary fiction”, poetics that give voice and form to a new model of experience and a new ideology, beyond the topic of displacement (ibid.). In the last years, there has been a change in the vindication of being minor that can also be foreseen in the choice of genres of the critic and literary production of these African-Italian writers. If among their first issues there was a preponderant presence of autobiographies mainly based on the experience of migration (but we may conjecture that this abundance has something to do with the determinant market criteria), the last report on their work (Basili 2009) registers not only an increase in number (from the 5 works of 1993 to 136 works in 2009) but also a shift in the election of the genre: in 2009 only 14 are the autobiographical novel, while 36 are novels on diverse topics, 87 poems collections, 5 plays, and 35 essays. It seems that there has been a decrease of interest in the narration of the personal experience in favour of other textual formats. In particular, the combination of literary creation and political vindication concentrated in autobiography seems to have split in two separate artistic quests: on the one hand, through the classical narrative genre, the novel, and on the other, in the privileged genre for meditation, the essay. But other genres are also being explored, and theatre is one of them. In this search for new literary configurations, the subjective experience is still present, but it has acquired new forms and new intersections in which it functions as a poetic strategy more than as a proof the authenticity and reliability of the text (Catelli, 2007).

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Engaging with identity The political utility of autobiography, the possibility it offers, as Gramsci pointed out, to combine self-assertion and social vindication, seems to have lost its fascination for writers that do not feel immigrants but migrants, rescuing the open horizon of the ancient human restlessness. African-Italian writers, conscious of their unique and complex combination of cultures and languages, have recently started to dialogue with other literary voices of Italian and European literature giving rise to genres innovations in both fields. Salah Methnani’s Immigrato (1990), for example, as F. Sinopoli (2001) contends, echoes the structure of the European bildungsroman to subvert it from within. As the Italian comparatist explains, the novel offers an overthrow of the classical end of bildungsroman so that the protagonist does not come to a mature and definite self as in European literary tradition, but to a condition of being both familiar and stranger to himself, as homeland, at his return, seems so foreign as any other place that he has crossed during his journey. On the other hand, Sabrina Brancato’s Ancor ci si imbarazza. Storie di ordinaria xenofollia (2008) adopts the anecdotic writing of Kossi Kolma-Ebri’s “Embaracisms” (2002). Exploiting the possibilities that the new genre offers, the author shows how the intersection of African and Italian literatures is a fertile literary space to unhinge social constructed stereotypes, and not only for “immigrant” writers. An example of reflection about the illusory nature of identity, together with the disenchantment of integration can be found in the essay Traiettorie di sguardi. E se gli altri foste voi? (2001), by the ItalianCameroonian anthropologist Geneviève Makaping. This work wants to be a study of the mechanisms of formation and circulation of those stereotypes that trap the author in the social figure of the immigrant. It is not the material, social and psychological condition of a Cameroonian woman in the South of Italy that interests the author, but rather the theoretical position and configuration of a whole society, as well as the confrontation between cultures in which her blackness works as a skylight through which cultural intersections can be read in their aporetic dimension. Neither a woman deprived of any means of protest or selfaffirmation, nor a subaltern subject crashed under political impotence or cultural castration, but rather an active woman conscious of the advantages of her ex-centric position. Makaping’s text is, most of all, a dialog with that anthropological tradition that situated Africans in the place of object of study and a subversion of its Eurocentric narratives. Nevertheless, what is announced as an indeed ambitious project, only after a few pages needs

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an abrupt readjusting: “To feel comfortable -writes Makaping- I must think I’m writing ‘a not very personal’ diary” (29). The intersection of essay and diary will not serve better to the purpose of her research, but will guarantee her the calm recollection of unpleasant memories that will be later analyzed under the lens of anthropology. As the study develops, the sources of the gazes evoked in the title becomes clearer: the gaze of Italians on her, her gaze on them, but also the more painful gaze of her mother, who accuses her to have become “white” and magnifies the severe disappointment of their original community. Rage and pride still contend the domain of the text, but this time they are not simply a response to the social discrimination she has to suffer, but also a more dramatic defense against the phantasmatic self-reproach of assimilating to whiteness, of betraying her own origins and of abandoning her community, what the gaze of her mother renews. Makaping doubtlessly depicts a genuine portrait of the falseness of the Italian “easy antiracism” through a strategic reappropriation of the master’s tools to “dismantle the master's house”, as A. Lorde would put it, but she also highlights that even the most successful process of integration (and she proudly mentions her job as assistant professor at the Faculty of Anthropology of the Università della Calabria) implies a loss and wound, a sense of laceration. Her text materializes this wound at the juncture of its two discourses; in fact, the autobiographical discourse cuts, like a sharp weapon, her anthropological analysis, mirroring the inescapable fragmentation of the subject whose identity is always an illusion and the tragic dimension of integration. The same double gaze on the migrant subject, together with a meditation about the disappointing taste of integration can be found in the play Kantheros: un’africana a Roma, written and performed by Felicité Mbezele (2006). Clarisse, a young woman that lives in the very center of Rome, in the first scenes, sings in French, talks in Ewondo on the phone, and challenges an old man to a sort of poetic tenzone in the dialect spoken by Romans, showing her perfect management of local linguistic forms. She sharply criticizes her uncle that “Africanizes everything, languages, thoughts, actions” (17), while she wants to feel free to “Europeanize herself as much as she wants” (ibid.). But this euphoric defence of her western attraction does not prevent her from the melancholic interrogation about her own identity. “Who am I?/ Who am I? I ask myself very often/ But I can never give myself an answer” (24). What in Makaping’s text was implicitly insinuated becomes here explicit: “No culture and no place deserve disdain” (51), whether it is homeland or Europe that, after all, “is

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like marriage: at the beginning it has the flavour of honey but at the end it tastes vinegar” (49). Mbezele exploits all the possibilities of drama, which is, as Irele (2001) points out, a mode of representation that permits not only “the concrete enactment of real-life situations”, but also the expression of African speech in European language, the gestural features and the primacy of cultural oral mode (17). The author merges expressions and gestures of African spiritual tradition with elements of everyday life in Rome creating a play that cannot be considered simply as the subjective testimony of an immigrant woman oppressed by a racist and patriarchal culture. Mbezele in no way seeks to bestow upon her character the glamour of the victim. She consciously chooses to transform the stage in the setting of the struggle of every migrant to find a balance between the old and the new, the known and the still to know. She gives voice to this struggle through an intersection of languages, cultural references, rituals and poems. It is the intersection itself that occupies the stage. At the end of the play, the young woman, half African, half European, identifies herself with the typical Greek vase kantheros. This does not mean denying one’s history of migration and struggle, but rather looking at integration as a process in continuous evolution that also implies becoming other to oneself and to one’s original community. The struggle has stopped, but not concluded.

Conclusion To say that these pieces of work inaugurate a new season of Italian literature would be probably inappropriate. Nevertheless, it has to be acknowledged that they offer a good sample of how, in Italy, black contemporary practices are dynamizing the Italian literary scene. Their exploration of diverse textual genres, their continuous process of experimentation is actually involving other members of the literary community, giving rise to a healthy reshaping of poetic discourse. Certainly, they can also be seen (in particular way Makaping’s essay) as a valuable document about contemporary Italian society. They show its hypocrisy, its false antiracism, the gap between antiracist official discourses and everyday social practices and call for urgent reconsideration of Italians’ relation with otherness. But this political and agonal reading does not take into account the aesthetic element of their work, its dialogue with the literary tradition of the language they employ, the contribution of their poetics to Italian literary studies, as F. Sinopoli (2001) argues. And

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this is a loss that we, migrants with no other home than literature, should try to avoid.

Works Cited Bérubé, Michael. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005. Brancato, Sabrina. Ancor ci si imbarazza. Storie di ordinaria xenofollia. Nardò: Besa Editrice, 2008. Catelli, Nora. En la era de la intimidad. El espacio autobiográfico, Beatriz Viterbo, 2007. —. “Tres cruces entre feminismo y cultura popular: Woolf, Barthes, Sarlo” (forthcoming 2011). Curti, Lidia. “Percorsi di subalternità: Gramsci, Said, Spivak”, in Esercizi di potere, Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale, edited by Ian Chambers. Roma: Meltemi, 2006, 17-26. Eagleton, Terry. The function of criticism. London: Verso, 1996 (1984). Felski, Rita. “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies”, in The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by Michael Bérubé. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005, 28-43. Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni del carcere (1929-1935), edited by Valentino Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi, 2007 [1975]. JanMohamed, Abdul R. (1987). “Introduction. Towards a Theory of Minority Discourse”, in Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, Cultural Critique, Spring 1987: 6, 5-12. Kermode, Frank J. History and Value. The Clarendon Lectures and Northcliffe Lectures 1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Kolma-Ebri, Kossi Amékowoyoa. Imbarazzismi - quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero. Bologna: Edizioni Dell’Arco Marna, 2002. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Makaping, Geneviève. Traiettorie di sguardi. E se gli altri foste voi? Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2001. Mbezele, Felicité. Kantheros: un’africana a Roma. Roma: Armando Editore, 2006. Methnani, Salah and Mario Fortunato. Immigrato, Roma: Teoria, 1997 (1990). Montaigne, Michel de. Essais (1533-1590). Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Irele, Abiola F. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kaviraj, Sudipta. “The Invention of Private Life. A Reading of Sibnath Sastri’s Autobiography”, in Telling lives in India: biography,

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autobiography, and story life, edited by David Arnold and Stuart H. Blackburn. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2004, 83-115. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Il Postcolonialismo italiano. Figlie dell’Impero e Letteratura Meticcia”, Quaderni del ‘900, “La letteratura postcoloniale italiana. Dalla letteratura ‘immigrazione all’incontro con l’altro”. Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali. Pisa-Roma, Anno IV, 2004, 25-34. Sinopoli, Franca. “Poetiche della migrazione nella letteratura italiana contemporanea: il discorso autobiografico”, in Studi (e testi) italiani, Dipartimento di Italianistica e Spettacolo, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, 7, 2001, 189-206, available at http://www.disp.let. uniroma1.it/kuma/critica/sinopoli-critica-kuma3.html [15/09/2010]. Washington, Mary Helen. “Taming All That Anger Down”: Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha”, in Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (first ed. New York: Methuen, 1984). New York and London: Routledge, 1990, 249-262. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

TRANSCONTINENTAL SHIFTS: AFROEUROPE AND THE FICTION OF BERNARDINE EVARISTO JOHN MCLEOD

If we wish to discern how black British writing has moved forward in the first years of the twenty-first century, we need look no further than the literary career of London’s Bernardine Evaristo. Born in Woolwich to a Nigerian father and English mother of Irish and German descent, Evaristo’s delightful, innovative yet sobering work both indexes and takes forward some important developments in Britain’s healthy tradition of postcolonial diasporic writing. Most notable is her attention to a distinctly continental sense of cultural plurality which shifts the ground away from the more strictly national, exclusively British focus of late-twentieth century black British writers – a sense which, for the purposes of this book of essays, we might want to identify as “Afroeuropean”. In addition to her status as a writer of significant and innovative literary works, Evaristo has also played an important cultural role more broadly in the promotion and evolution of black writing in Britain in recent years. To take but two examples, in 2009 she co-edited with Daljit Nagra an anthology of recent black and Asian poetry, entitled Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word, while in 2010 she co-edited with Karen McCarthy Wolf a ground-breaking issue of the international journal Wasafiri on recent black writing in Britain, called “Black Britain: Beyond Definition”. In calling attention to emergent black writing in Britain, Evaristo has been keen to discern the new directions and shifts of focus offered by the latest generation which escape more familiar conceptualisations of the field. It is an approach which one might take towards her own writing, of course, which breaks beyond received definitions of black British writing in a number of exciting and exemplary ways. As Mark Stein has persuasively argued in his fine study, black British writing of the last years of the twentieth century tended to favour the form of the bildungsroman and was often preoccupied with the construction of a

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new form of subjectivity which challenged racially exclusive and prejudicial notions of national identity and belonging, not least because so many writers – Hanif Kureishi, Diran Adebayo, Andrea Levy – were Britishborn. To speak of a black Britishness at this time involved “redefining where one is staying, about claiming one’s space, and about reshaping that space”.1 These important domestic political concerns have also been highlighted in the work of James Procter, whose study of black British writing importantly insists on the significance of dwelling in a diasporic context and points out how black British writing exposes Britain as “more than simply a nodal location within a global matrix of travel; it is also a dwelling place that has been home to a ‘sedentary’ black British experience”.2 In the later years of the twentieth century, then, the insistence on dwelling in the UK and forging a robust black British identity, for both self and society, was of fundamental importance to the literary endeavours of black British writers who were often operating in a deeply prejudicial social milieu. In Evaristo’s work, however, we can detect a shifting sense of consciousness that supplements this ongoing and vitally important challenge to Britain’s imagined community with something culturally and geographically wider: distinctly European, at times self-consciously global. In this essay I want to give a brief account of this shifting consciousness in Evaristo’s writing as part of an ongoing wider argument (which I have opened elsewhere) concerning the evolution of a distinctly European rather than British consciousness in black writing of Britain.3 I shall comment briefly on the two editions of her novel-in-verse Lara (1997, 2009) as a way of embarking and concluding this essay, and consider her three key novels of the last ten years: The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Soul Tourists (2005) and Blonde Roots (2008). A central concern of my argument takes its cue from a small but important point made by the crime writer and critic Mike Phillips, who reminds us that today “a substantial part of the English population now has fairly recent origins in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean”.4 This inclusion of “Central and Eastern Europe” into the more familiar geography of Anglophone diasporic postcolonialism betrays a significant emergent attention to the space of Europe – not just the four British nations and the former colonies – within the wider circuits of 1

Stein, Black British Literature, 17. Procter, Dwelling Places, 15. 3 Cf. John McLeod, “Extra Dimensions, New Routines: Contemporary Black Writing of Britain”, Wasafiri 25: 4 (2010), 45-52. 4 Mike Phillips, “Migration, Modernity and English Writing”, 29. 2

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transnational pursuits. For Phillips, the cognisance of such plural origins has placed notions of Englishness (and, in parallel, Britishness) significantly under erasure. Although prompted by her position as a British writer whose relationship to Britain has been spoiled by the illusions of race, Evaristo’s exploration of interlaced European and pan-continental histories is pursued not primarily to accommodate her standpoint within a grand narrative of national identity or on behalf of a minority community, but instead beckons a remoulded way of thinking about notions of standpoint and identity which applies to all citizens. Evaristo does not excavate an exclusively black British history but rather pursues the pathways of Afroeuropean history as a way of involving all her readers in a rethinking of Britain’s polycultural relationship with Africa, the Americas and Europe. Evaristo’s early writing evidences her attention to the polycultural condition of self and society, although her instincts in this direction remain at first firmly expressing the marginalised identity of black Britons. The 1997 edition of Lara is a case in point. As Pilar Cuder-Domínguez describes it, the novel involves a “painstaking process of self-search” and a “journey of self-discovery” and it is chiefly wrapped up in the solipsistic pursuits of its unsettled mixed-race heroine, for all of the text’s unearthing of previous generations and cultural shifts.5 “I searched but could not find myself”, laments the youthful Lara: “not on the screen, billboard, books, magazines, / and first and last not in the mirror”.6 Lara’s subsequent transnational attempt to reflect her identity in “a story, to speak me, describe me, birth me whole”7 is ultimately tentatively successful, and as in other black British bildungsroman she succeeds in “carving out space”8 for herself within the context of her tiny “island – the ‘Great’ Tippexed out of it”.9 But although the novel ends by reflecting upon new selfhood in a firmly national frame, something of Lara’s transnational tour from Britain to Nigeria to Brazil, and back again, will be pursued to different ends in her subsequent writing. There is a sense that in Lara Evaristo begins her novelistic career by finishing with, perhaps even finishing off, the familiar form of the black British bildungsroman, almost as if she is clearing the decks or carving out the possibility of a new kind of fictional space upon which she can proceed with this first novel of selfhood out of the way. On 5

Cuder-Domínguez, “(Re)Turning to Africa: Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara and Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses”, 309, 310. 6 Evaristo, Lara, 69. 7 Ibid. 8 Stein, Black British Literature, 30. 9 Evaristo, Lara, 140.

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this point, two issues require some comment: Evaristo’s polycultural consciousness and her little-remarked-upon choice of literary form. As Patricia Murray has argued, the cultural and geographical terrain of the 1997 edition of Lara seems more concerned with the transatlantic travails of Lara and her Nigerian and Brazilian paternal heritage – the familiar routes of the Black Atlantic, in other words – and less curious about Lara’s “maternal inheritance” of Irish and German ancestry.10 But while Evaristo’s first novel-in-verse may seem to sit quite comfortably inside the familiar dynamics of the black British or Black Atlantic comingof-age quest-for-identity narrative, the text incubates the emergence of what I want to call a transpositional sensibility which features more strongly in the later works. At times in Lara the grooved diachronic routes of historical and geographical passage give way to key instances of synchronic spatial richness where a number of diverse places seem gathered together and transposed upon the geographical location of London. At such moments, Evaristo forges a vision of polycultural interrelation which breaks beyond dichotomous distinctions between the local and the global, or between black history and white oppression, and so forth. Lara’s childhood home is called, wittily, Atlantico, and in its basement is glimpsed a brave new world born from the bathetic bric-abrac of her family’s inheritances: Hidden in the moist entrails of Atlantico, the basement passage was body-wide, mildewed, one medieval wooden door, arched onto the coal hole, now populated with a miscellany of saws, shovels, sinks, enamel potties, antique telephones and lamps which hung like exhibits in a museum. [...] Above on a concrete shelf sat a blue and white striped mug holding penny-a-time black Bic biros, a plastic replica of the Eiffel Tower, framed wedding photos and two sullen Yoruba carvings, 11 his’n’hers, side by side and grey with dust foundation.

The companionable juxtaposition of medieval doors, the Eiffel Tower replica and the Yoruba carvings existing side by side offer a provocative image of the polycultural “foundations” not just of Lara’s selfhood but something much wider: the city, perhaps, or the nation, or the history of nations which conjoins Britain, France, Yorubaland, and beyond. It is an 10 11

Murray, “Stories Told and Untold”, 45. Evaristo, Lara, 79.

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image of spatial synchronicity, where the different times of transcultural passage are transpositioned at the same site, in this instance in the fluid entrails of the family home in London. Mikhail Bakhtin has famously attended to the ways in which literary form creates particular dynamics of space and time in his concept of the chronotope.12 The fictional worlds of Evaristo’s works, I would hazard, might be described as “chronotopias”, in that their exciting transpositional fusion of diachronic histories within synchronic spaces attend, on the one hand, to the difficult passages of transcultural passage and, on the other, look forward to the often unrealised polycultural possibilities of dwelling companionably side by side – as epitomised by the framed wedding picture of Lara’s parents Ellen and Taiwo which resides in Atlantico’s basement (and of which an approximation appears on the cover of the revised 2009 edition of Lara). Lara displays this transpositional sensibility when, one morning in 1972, she boards the Woolwich Ferry across the Thames and watches the landscape “drift into the South Pacific void / as trade winds guided my balsa raft from the Americas / to the remote Marquesas when I caught the ferry home”.13 Evaristo’s decision to write much of her fiction as novels-in-verse – a notoriously difficult mode – is an attempt to quest for an appropriate form in which she might collate and transpose the myriad cultural locations conjured by her work into an enriched literary space of fictional transposition. Her engagement with poetic modes of expression at this stage of her career invites a lyrical sensibility into her writing which seems especially well-suited to exploring the richness of significant images, transpositional visions or key moments. Just as poetry often works at the metaphoric rather than metonymic pole, to rent Jakobson’s influential terms,14 Evaristo’s pursuit of the novel-inverse form is an attempt to establish the fresh associations and connections brokered by metaphor and illuminated in the poetic image, but without sacrificing the narrative traction which the novel usually engenders. Indeed, Koye Oyedeji has (perhaps unwittingly) described Lara as “a

12

Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 13 Evaristo, Lara, 71. 14 Cf. Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1988), 57-61.

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novel-inverse”15 – a suggestive remoulding of the term that captures something of Evaristo’s serious play with the dynamics and possibilities of the novel which are cross-hatched with a creative poetic susceptibility. To my mind, then, the form of Evaristo’s novels needs to be understood as something less bland as “hybrid” or “in-between”, but part of a wider literary project to break beyond the conventional parameters of black British writing and its predominant critical modes. In order to concretise these ideas a little more securely, let us turn to Evaristo’s next novel, The Emperor’s Babe, in which her transpositional sensibility is more ambitiously and in many ways more artfully realised. This is also a novel where the more familiar routes of black British writing – to and from Africa and the Americas – give way to a focus on the transnational passages of Europe and the Middle East. Inspired by Evaristo’s sojourn as Writer in Residence at the Museum of London in 1999, The Emperor’s Babe is a sassy, vibrant and fantastical tale of thirdcentury Roman-occupied London (or Londinium, as it appears in the novel), and features the fortunes of its heroine Zuleika, “Illa Bella Negreeta!”,16 the black daughter of migrant parents who have fled westwards from the city of Meroë in Nubia (situated in present-day Sudan and Egypt) to settle as shopkeepers in this latest outpost of the Roman Empire. Zuleika enjoys the cosmopolitan energies of the fledgling city until she is spotted by a visiting Roman senator, Felix, who takes her as his bride (much to her father’s delight) despite her tender age of barely eleven years. Quickly abandoned by her philandering husband who leaves her ensconced in a plush villa while he pursues his business trips, Zuleika becomes the lover of Emperor Septimius Severus who spots her on a visit to the city – although their passion, like Zuleika’s life, is short-lived. The novel envisions Londinium as the transpositional site of polycultural possibility and pain, and indicative of the long history of Afroeuropean conjunction. On a visit to the city’s docks, Zuleika sees a realisation of the transpositional vision which Lara could only imagine in the previous novel, in the comings and goings of the city’s seamen who beckon the languages and behaviours of the known world into Zulieka’s purview. She buys fish from Thorsten’s Fish Emporium, run by a Saxon with a “strange, deep, sing song accent” and watches the fishing boats and trading ships arriving at the harbour.17 She drinks in the Fisherman’s Tavern with rowdy 15 Oyedeji, “Prelude to a Brand New Purchase on Black Political Identity”, 348. It may be that Oyedeji’s phrase “novel-inverse” is a typographical error, but it is a deliciously fortuitously one if so. 16 Bernardine Evaristo, The Emperor’s Babe, 3. 17 Ibid., 103.

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seamen and notes the soldiers and slaves awaiting transport. The city at large is similarly polyculturally populated: Romans, Arabians, Gauls, Saxons and many others exist side by side, while Zuleika is given two Scottish slaves, Valeria and Aemilia, to attend to her needs. But this is no utopian vista of transnational license. If the seamen’s drunken revelry and ardent sea-shanty singing bear witness to Londinium’s convivial excitements, then Zuleika’s Scottish slaves, as well the slaves who sit awaiting their fate at the docks, quickly remind us that the metropolis is a site of both fun and fear, fertility and fatality – as Dave Gunning has pointed out, Evaristo’s Roman London is by no means an idealisation of cosmopolitan conviviality.18 It is with a binocular sense of transpositional conjuncture alert to both polycultural encounter and enslavement that Evaristo’s Afroeuropean sensibility proceeds. The presentation of London as a transpositional site of fertility and creativity is furthered through the passions of Zuleika, whose two key preoccupations in the novel are her ambitions as a poet and her sexual intimacies with Septimius. As Evaristo told Alistair Niven in an interview, Zuleika’s sexual exploits index her transgressive energies and her desire not to be subjected to the whims of more powerful others: “for Zuleika sex becomes a symbol of her oppressive relationship with her husband. And it also becomes a symbol of her empowerment when she has her relationship with Severus.”19 But it is not only gendered empowerment to which sex in the city is linked. Intriguingly, in one key scene in the novel Evaristo brings together the realms of sex and writing when Zuleika hosts a poetry recital at a local bar owned by her cross-dressing male friend Venus, whose transvestism involves its own gendered transpositions quite in keeping with the spirit of Evaristo’s Londinium. The recital features Zulieka’s first public airing of her work (she has designs to be a writer), but also performances by the Pictish poet Hrrathaghervood, the awardwinning Roman poet Pomponius Tarquin and Manumittio X “whose every poem began / Take these chains from my heart, / and finished with I just wanna be free”.20 The recital underlines the creative and fecund possibilities of polycultural admixture and is a way of cherishing, with ardent levity, the enriching consequences of cohabitation and cultural fusion. The choric assembly of voices at Venus’s bar figuratively express Evaristo’s sense of treasuring the realities of metropolitan, national and 18 Cf. Dave Gunning, “Cosmopolitanism and Marginalisation in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe” in Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature, ed. Kadija Sesay (Hertford: Hansib, 2005), 165-178. 19 “Bernardine Evaristo with Alistair Niven” 282. 20 Evaristo, The Emperor’s Babe, 198.

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indeed imperial life: chiefly, and as epitomised in the moist entrails of Atlantico’s basement, the sense that disparate things transpositioned “side by side” form the “foundation” of all cultures. This is a mode of understanding which, for Evaristo, is fundamentally resourceful and often signified via sexual as well as textual creativity – it is more than a coincidence that Zuleika’s “verbosa orgia” soon morphs into “an almighty // piss-up, feel up and throw up, the floor / was a pit of writhing flesh, the grunts and gaps, // even Valeria and Aemilia were entangled / in a foursome at the back”.21 The orgiastic entanglements enabled by Zuleika’s tilt at literary posterity pithily index the nascent condition of Afroeuropean cultural and social endeavours that must be set against the arid and deathly attitudes of those who would disentangle such human affairs into the fenced-off roles of race, nation, citizen, slave. It is highly significant, of course, that Evaristo humorously reinvents a pre-modern European empire, the Roman, keen to conquest other (present-day) European spaces and peoples (Gaul, the Picts) as much as African and Asian ones, as a way of binding together the shared histories of Europe, Africa and Asia which far pre-date modernity’s imperialist pursuits. As she reminds us, our understanding of Europe as an entangled, transpositional, transcontinental space is as old as Europe itself (perhaps even older). It is refreshing that Evaristo focuses on Britain in terms of Europe, rather than in and of itself or in relation to its colonial history. To be sure, The Emperor’s Babe acknowledges Peter Fryer’s ground-breaking text Staying Power: A History of Black Peoples in Britain (1984) for helping Evaristo grasp Britain’s multiracial past – Fryer’s book famously begins with the line “There were Africans in Britain before the English came here”.22 But The Emperor’s Babe shifts the focus beyond the strictly national and opens up a vista which is different from Fryer’s magnificent work and that of those it has inspired. This developing of focus from the national to the continental, from Britain to Europe, is driven home in her next novel, Soul Tourists, which takes as its subject the hidden fortunes of black people in Europe, and chiefly on the mainland rather than in the British Isles. In a section of his book London Crossings (2000) titled “European Tribesmen”, Mike Phillips has pointed to the general ignorance of the history of black peoples across Europe. “It would be next to impossible to find a reference to anyone of African descent in any history of Europe”, he writes, “and, ironically, even where a ‘black’ person is unmissable, the 21 22

Ibid., 194, 199. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, 1.

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commentaries avoid or skate over any discussion of the fact”.23 Citing the African origins of Pushkin and Dumas as evidencing the “distinguished tip of an iceberg” of the African presence in Europe historically, Phillips concludes that the “invisibility of black people in this context isn’t surprising because the traditional defence of racist and xenophobic attitudes towards us has been the argument that our presence in European society is so recent as to be shocking”.24 While Phillips has proceeded to redress this balance in terms of twentieth-century history in his novel A Shadow of Myself (2000), Evaristo has dug deeply into the submerged history of Afroeuropeans most notably in Soul Tourists which depicts the lives of two black Britons, Stanley Williams and Jessie O’Donnell, who in 1987 decide upon the mad idea of driving eastwards from London to Australia (Stanley gets as far as Kuwait via much of mainland Europe). The couple’s odyssey across 1980s’ Europe is really a journey into its polycultural past, due to the visions suffered by Stanley who is visited by the ghostly figures of black and mixed-race Europeans from history, including Lucy Negro from Shakespearean London, the French Queen Marie Thérèse’s black dwarf Nabo, Alessandro de’ Medici, Mary Seacole and Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. It is also a generically more ambitious novel than Evaristo’s previous works, as here significant passages of prose are intercalated with poetic sections with a playfulness and confidence which mark Evaristo’s development and growing maturity as a writer. Stanley embarks upon his road-tripping history lesson significantly just after his migrant Caribbean father, Clasford, has passed away, and the opening pages of the novel deal movingly with Clasford’s final days as a widower living near the Isle of Dogs in London. His house is a vile location which has been barely cleaned for a considerable time and where things fester and rot. On one of his last visits, Stanley dreams of throwing the entire contents into a rubbish bag, including “that old globe of his, for a start, sitting on the mantelpiece, all smoke stained and sun-bleached from the days when he let daylight into the room. The countries and borders are about thirty years out of date.”25 Clasford is associated with a sense of time arrested and stalled, a world locked in stasis and darkness, ignorant of change and history. His house stands figuratively for Stanley’s own British-based ignorance of the world at large as well as a sense of historical paralysis more widely, and it is against this notion of living a 23

Phillips, London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain, 198. Ibid., 198, 199. 25 Evaristo, Soul Tourists, 7-8. 24

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petrified existence remote from historical change which Stanley’s subsequent European odyssey is pitted. In uncovering the spectral history of Afroeuropeans, Stanley comes to learn valuable lessons in how the world has turned in the past which bring a new dynamism and vitality to his life. In Cordoba he learns about the Moors’ eight-centuries-long rule in Spain, which makes him “want to storm up to my history teacher, grab him by the lapels and demand, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the Moors, Mr Cartwright?’”26 And as Stanley acknowledges, his new-found knowledge of the past impacts upon his sense of selfhood and his relationship to the world in the present: “As he explored the past, he became aware that the past was exploring him too”.27 It is important, then, that the novel begins with the laying to rest of Clasford and all he stands for. His passing effectively frees Stanley from rooting his sense of identity in filial terms, as the son of Caribbean migrants with a particular indebtedness to his parents’ colonial place of origin, or as a second-generation black Britain tied to colonial history and its consequences. Stanley’s re-routing through Europe connects those familiar narratives of Caribbean migration and black Britishness – the Middle Passage, the Final Passage – with a new affiliative transcontinental constituency and its manifold rhizomic historicities which are unearthed in France, Spain, Italy, Turkey and elsewhere. Soul Tourists, therefore, is not a narrative of arrival, settlement or return, familiar to us from an earlier historical moment in the vital work of writers like Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey and Buchi Emecheta, but instead one that opens up a fresh trajectory which goes beyond previous colonial or national paradigms – from the centripetal space of black Britain towards the centrifugal terrain of Afroeurope. In his final moments in the novel, as he stands on the crystallised shore of the Kuwaiti desert, Stanley returns to the image of the plastic globe which had sat faded and immobile in his father’s rancid house: This is the plastic globe I once spun on my forefinger like a football, its geography reduced to miniscule printed nations, the countries I had to memorise, squiggles of borders I once carefully traced with a classroom compass: blue for water, green for forestry, gold for deserts. The meridians, zones, poles. What did it all mean to me then? That the world was 70 per cent water and floating continents, right? Another fact to ingest among the thousands of others called learning, from the breeze-block city

26 27

Ibid., 153. Ibid.

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The consequences of Stanley’s journey across Europe – one which shapes a different route to that drawn by the “classroom compass” – are vividly conjured in this passage, in the contrast between the inert knowledge of the breeze-block city of the past and Stanley’s final shoreline threshold where his new Afroeuropean disposition is clinched. Standing by the sea with the sun-scorched desert behind him, Stanley’s awakened sense of Afroeuropean history and his indebtedness to it has indeed involved ‘several lifetimes’ that transpositionally fuse continentally as well as transculturally. For these reasons, Soul Tourists is perhaps Evaristo’s most visionary novel in its attempt to open up new ground – historical and geographical – for black writing in Britain. Evaristo’s determined engagement with the past firmly in the context of present concerns continues in Blonde Roots, in which she reimagines the history of slavery with the racial roles reversed: in this fantastical novel of exploitation and escape, “whyte” Europeans are enslaved by black Africans. While her characteristically witty approach to a profoundly sobering history is once again present in the book, the novel is Evaristo’s most conventional at the level of form: there is none of the poetry of Lara and The Emperor’s Babe, nor of the formal adventurousness of Soul Tourists. Consequently, the gravitas of the historical matters raised in the novel holds the frivolity of the book’s central conceit in a firm grip, and signals that for all of her inventiveness Evaristo is keen not to seem to trifle with the extremely painful and horrific phenomenon of slavery. The fantastical imagining of a world turned upside down racially enables Evaristo to fuse together a number of significant historical contexts that conjoin the continents of Africa, America and Europe. This fusing is signalled by the map which prefaces the novel, which depicts the terrain of Amarika to the West, Aphrika to the North East and Europa to the South West, all situated on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The novel’s chief location, the U. K. of Great Ambrossa, is an island resembling the United Kingdom which sits off the coast of Aphrika and where the novel’s heroine, Doris Scagglethorpe, works as a whyte slave in the city of Londolo. Doris’s story enables Evaristo to transpose a number of historical contexts which are both firmly local and inevitably global, and in so doing she breaks down separatist notions of black history, European history, the history of slavery, working-class history, and so forth, in a manner which 28

Ibid., 279.

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takes forward the attempt in Soul Tourists to evade singular racial or national historical frames. Doris’s early life as part of a proud family of cabbage farmers recalls the rural serfdom of feudal England, while her attempt to escape her enslavement via the Londolo Underground Railroad indexes the Underground Railroad network in nineteenth-century USA which facilitated the escape of slaves to free states. She points out that Londolo’s impoverished black community contains several supporters of white manumission in the Resistance movement, hence indexing the crossracial political solidarities brokered in the days of slavery and since in the fight against racism; while her eventual sojourn in a Maroon camp in the West Japanese Islands near Amarika’s coast beckons the history of slave rebellion and marronage in the Caribbean into the novel’s transcontinental frame. At one point in the novel, as Doris attempts to flee Londolo by water, she is transported downriver and past a location which recalls London’s Thames-side enclave of Woolwich (where Evaristo was raised), famous for its Royal Armoury: We soon skirted the wide riverside factories of the arsenal town of Wool Wi Che, famous for manufacturing the finest spears, shields, crossbows, poison darts, muskets and cannons in the world. Grotesque hippos lay entwined on top of each other in the mudflats, their rubbery slimy skins like those of giant slugs, their eyes and ears a putrid pink. [...] A herd of ugly water buffalo traipsed like disgruntled hunchbacked farmhands through the mangroves.29

This vividly transpositional moment (which recalls the river-side visions of Lara) clinches the novel’s racially inverted chronotopia in its vivid blending of the histories of colonial London and colonised Africa in the invented space of Londolo. The transpositional sensibility deployed here opens a fictional location in which Europe and Africa are envisioned as entirely inseparable. It makes visible to the reader the historical connections which bind the armouries of Europe to the ecologies of Africa in an imagined location which is both African and European simultaneously, at one spatial conjunction where linked temporalities are transcontinentally shifted together. Just as Lara could transpose other times and places when looking across the Thames from the vantage of the Woolwich Ferry, in Blonde Roots Evaristo paradoxically literalises this way of seeing in a fantastical fictional space, wittily actualising the transposition of Africa 29

Evaristo, Blonde Roots, 160.

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and Europe in the representation of Wool Wi Che’s manufacturing might situated amidst the animal life of Great Ambossa. The image reminds us, of course, that Europe has inevitably guided the fortunes of Africa and impacted on its fate. As does Soul Tourists, Blonde Roots situates Africa, the Caribbean and other colonised locations resolutely within the concrete terrain and historical weave of Europe. By way of conclusion, we might note how Evaristo’s shift from a national to a continental transpositional sensibility can be ultimately discerned by placing side-by-side the first edition of Lara (1997) and its revised and expanded edition which was published in 2009. If Lara emerges from the first edition as a polycultural citizen of a postcolonial Britain, then the second edition situates her as part of a wider ongoing transcontinental conversation which makes stories of German migration to London in the 1860s historically have something to do with Brazilian slavery and post-war Nigerian migration to Britain. Alongside the stories of Lara’s paternal ancestors from Nigeria and Brazil there now appears the narrative of the arrival of Emma O’Donaghue in London’s Seven Dials in 1880 as the new Irish wife of an English soldier, and the 1860 journey of Louis Wilkening from Hamburg to Whitechapel in London’s East End. Indeed, on his arrival in London, Louis enters an Asylum for the Houseless Poor where he shares the same space as “Africans, Chinamen, Lascars, Irish, Scots, English” before receiving the assistance of the German Society of Benevolence.30 As in all of her twenty-first-century novels, Evaristo resists separating out these related if distinct migration histories into colonial, European, black, white, and so forth, and instead opens up important ancestral connections which go beyond the discrete terrain of nation-states or the heteroglot cultural exclusivities of the Black Atlantic. As we have seen, throughout her work Evaristo unearths a transpositional vision of London as a significant nodal point within a transcontinental shifting network of histories. Her writing quests beyond specific racial, national or colonial paradigms, but without ever forgetting the pain of the enslaved, oppressed or “pauperised”.31 It is a literary vision which facilitates a fresh, enabling Afroeuropean articulation of time and space, the transpositional sensibility of which is both transformative and energising.

30 31

Evaristo, Lara, 84. Ibid.

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Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “(Re)Turning to Africa: Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara and Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses.” In Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005, 300-313. Evaristo, Bernardine. Lara. Tunbridge Wells: Angela Royal Publishing, 1997. —. The Emperor’s Babe. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001. —. “Bernardine Evaristo with Alistair Niven.” In Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. Ed. Susheila Nasta. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 279-291. —. Soul Tourists. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. —. Blonde Roots. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008. —. Lara. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2009. Evaristo, Bernardine and Nagra, Daljit (eds). Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2010. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto, 1984. Gunning, Dave. “Cosmopolitanism and Marginalisation in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe.” In Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005, 165-178. Jakobson, Roman. “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles.” In Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London and New York: Longman, 1988, 57-61. McLeod, John. “Extra Dimensions, New Routines: Contemporary Black Writing of Britain.” Wasafiri 25: 4 (2010): 45-52. Murray, Patricia “Stories Told and Untold: Post-Colonial London in Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara.” Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing XXI: 2 (1999): 38-46. Oyedeji, Koye, “Prelude to a Brand New Purchase on Black Political Identity: A Reading of Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara and Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black.” In Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005, 346-374. Phillips, Mike. A Shadow of Myself. London: HarperCollins, 2000.

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—. London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain. London and New York: Continuum, 2001. —. “Migration, Modernity and English Writing: Reflections on Migrant Identity and Canon Formation.” In A Black British Canon? Ed. Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, 13-31. Procter, James. Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.

BLACK BRITISH AND BLACK ITALIAN, TWO CASE STUDIES: ANDREA LEVY AND GABRIELLA GHERMANDI FRANCESCA GIOMMI

This paper offers a parallel between Black British literature and the younger Italian literature of migration, which I’ll call “black Italian” to strengthen the affinities between the two. Starting from the field of British cultural studies, which first focused on processes of biological, linguistic and cultural hybridization and creolization in the West, at the origin of the new identities of the third millennium, I’ll base my argumentation on the compared analysis of two novels: Small Island (2004) by the AngloCaribbean writer Andrea Levy and Regina di fiori e di perle (2007), by the Italian-Ethiopian Gabriella Ghermandi. The parallel will show how narrations from the margins recover oral stories from apparently marginal countries and oppose them to the stories of imperial metropolitan hegemonic countries, becoming themselves increasingly “central”. The migratory waves which increasingly characterized the second half of the XX century, displacing great numbers of immigrants from the former colonies of Western empires towards the “mother country”, from the peripheries towards the centre, engendered a process of biological, linguistic and cultural hybridization and creolization which has produced in recent years a theoretical, linguistic, political and socio-cultural reflection on the new hybrid identities of contemporary postmodern and postcolonial societies. Great Britain, one of the greatest colonial powers ever, has also been one of the modern nations most involved in this phenomenon of shifting of borders, of “centralization of marginality”. It is in Birmingham, in fact, that Cultural Studies was first institutionalized in the 1960s thanks to the foundation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), where world-renown cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy first investigated ideas of migration and dislocation, race and racism in Western postcolonial societies. Together with Salman Rushdie and Homi Bhabha, Hall and Gilroy contributed to the enunciation of a new hybrid

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and diasporic identity, commonly defined as Black British, which finds similarities at an international level with other contingent hybrid identities and local contaminations born from colonial experiences, mass migrations and redefinition of borders. These transnational realities and identities are located mainly in urban metropolitan centres, where migratory flows are more consistent and where the possibilities of putting alternative practices of territorialization into effect and of carving public and private spaces of belonging are manifold, thus stressing an ambiguous but fruitful contraposition between social marginalization and cultural artistic centrality over the past couple of years. The same practice of “counter-colonization” of the metropolitan centre, and of subsequent hybridization and métissage, has started to establish itself in Italy (with obvious differences and historical, sociological and cultural specificities which, due to limited space, will not be analyzed in this paper). The Italian colonial enterprise, anachronistically engaged in the first half of the XX century, when the other colonial empires already started their decline, was much shorter and much more geographically limited, but it was equally animated by a similar imperial desire of expansion and empowerment. It concentrated the same negative consequences, abuses and oppression,1 and initiated similar processes of postcolonial contamination and interdependence. This paper, therefore, will suggest a parallel between the two colonial and postcolonial experiences (through the compared analysis of two literary pieces in particular) and will identify the emergence of a hybrid creative and multifarious space in Italy. This third space located in-between the centre and its peripheries has become, according to Bhabha and Hall, the postcolonial and postmodern space par excellance. This is the site where new cultures are born and developed, thus turning the idea of centre itself upside down, along with the identities and canons so far related with it. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha elaborates ideas which are fundamental to the understanding of the new cosmopolitan hybrid dynamics and identity formations of the third millennium. Those of the 1

This happens despite the tendency to consider the Italian colonial experience a “minor colonialism”, more superficial and less destructive. For several decades after the fall of Mussolini and the Fascist regime, the Italian official historiography tried to underplay, deny or hide any memory of the colonial experience. It is only in the past fifteen years that a historical consciousness concerning those years is emerging in our country, through, for instance, the work of historian Angelo Del Boca, urged partly by the increasing presence of immigrants from former colonies and by the delicate postcolonial – or maybe neo-colonial – relationships that characterize this new era.

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“third space” and of “in-betweenness” are key concepts which attempt at representing ambiguous, fluid and creative positions on the borders. In the essay “DissemiNation. Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation” in particular, Bhabha argues that the nation is nowadays inhabited and described by those who once occupied its margins, and who are gradually moving towards the centre. These marginal counter-narrations, according to Bhabha, destabilize the centre itself and its hegemonic canon/s. The postcolonial British experience has already revealed in the past decades the emergence at the end of the millennium of a new identity at the heart of the former empire which is simultaneously black and British. This presence has generated a deep identity crisis within the dominant culture, posing new questions about the most profound essence of Englishness and destabilizing the ideas of West and centre itself. The parallel suggested by this paper will reveal how a similar identity crisis is analogously developing some years later in Italy. Although according to diverse and complex migratory patterns, which are not limited or univocally related with the colonial experience, diverse human, linguistic, cultural and social experiences are meeting and confronting themselves in our country – which already maintains a century-old tradition of migration and cultural exchange across the Mediterranean – searching for a peaceful cohabitation and conciliation apparently difficult to reach at the moment of writing. In the colonial vocabulary, “black” and “British” were antithetic terms: the adjective “black” has long represented an element of “excentricity” in relation to a national belonging which perceived itself as “white” – commonly understood as synonymous of “English”, or “Italian” in our case – mirroring the contraposition between the centre of the empire and its colonies, the civilized and the savage and, more recently, between the citizen and the foreigner. Therefore, the binomial itself used to refer to these “new ethnicities” of the margins which nowadays are located at the very centre, encloses a creative tension between so far dichotomous terms. The two parts of the binomial – “black” and “British/Italian” – thus reflect metonimically the contraposition between black and white, canon and anticanon, mainstream and black arts. The latter were disdained at the beginning as an expression of the margins and the minorities, but they have become nowadays some of the most avantgarde and propulsive forces on the national and international artistic arena.2 2

That is why I chose to refer to this identity and culture as “black Italian” (with a small b since in Italy there is yet no “political” notion of blackness), to make the parallel clearer, although this binomial is not commonly used. On the contrary, due to the lack of useful and effective law on immigration in Italy, these identities are

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This contribution adopts a new historicist approach based primarily on the Foucauldian dialectic power/knowledge, and investigates how the “canonical” history of an hegemonic centre can be re-read, re-interpreted and re-told through the distorting lens of the margins, allowing a plurality of stories and perspectives to emerge, along with the creation and empowerment of new subject positions which were previously marginalized, unheard, or silenced. According to Stuart Hall – who notoriously stated: “Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel dispersed I become centered” (Hall 1996: 114) – the “new ethnicities” and cultures of the margin today embody the representative contemporary experience. Marginality has become a powerful and central space, and the discourses of the dominant regimes have certainly been threatened by this de-centred cultural empowerment of the marginal and the local. The texts here analysed operate at a national and international level: they imply diasporic connections and affiliations and exemplify universal processes of legitimation and affirmation, which can be applied to different texts and contexts and replicated on a larger scale. Positioned as they are within British, Italian and Western history and culture – in fact at the very core – Levy and Ghermandi offer re-writings and re-interpretations of the “Greater History” of the centre. They offer redressing accounts of an imperial past which has been built discursively and metahistorically for centuries as a narrative of white power and supremacy. The two pieces are set in strategic positions, taking place in important and specific moments of pre- and post-imperial Britain, Italy and their colonies, stressing landmarks within the linear narrative of colonial history, points of rupture and irreversible change. The paper also stresses a strong bond between history, society and literature; it thus suggests how Black British narratives – together with those that we will call here black Italian – carry on the task already undertaken by Cultural Studies to redefine British and Italian identity – still conceived widely as white – inserting the notions of blackness, otherness and difference. At the core of these narratives are those hyphenated identities of Afro-English or Italo-Somali for instance, which trace their roots back to faraway lands, but who reclaim their belonging on British and Italian soil as a “birthright”. Differently from their parents, they do not feel strangers or immigrants any more, and they don’t want to conceal their “otherness” aiming to assimilation, but they rather want to state their uniqueness and total belonging. not recognized or legitimized at all on our territory, if not in negative exclusive terms such as “extra-communitarian” or “foreigners”.

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Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth is considered the prototype of this new generation and literature commonly defined as “multi-cultural”. It was published in Great Britain in 2000 and was defined by international press as the “Bible of multiculturalism”. White Teeth was immediately translated also into Italian by one of our major national publishers. The work generated an animated debate on the new identities it describes, producing contrasting opinions and positions, but it was welcomed, mainly, as the long-awaited revenge of all those minorities that had long been marginalised, silenced or ignored by dominant discourses. Thanks to these sudden centrality and visibility, all these fringes have quickly gained centre stage, occupying the front position in bookshop windows and bestseller lists, although this does not necessarily imply an improvement of their social and political conditions. On a literary and cultural level, these minorities have come to occupy at the turn of the millennium a noteworthy stance, but matters concerning migration and interracial relationships have drastically worsened after 9/11 and 7/7, thus considerably slowing down the process of integration and hybridization which post-imperial countries such as Great Britain and partly even Italy seem necessarily destined to undertake. In the writing of Mike Phillips, Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy (of Caribbean origins), Jackie Kay, Biyi Bandele and Bernardine Evaristo (ancestrally connected to Nigeria) significant examples of multiple and hybrid narrations can be found, linking the history of the former colonies and of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora to the central imperial and hegemonic historiography of Great Britain. A novel such as A Distant Shore (2004) by Caryl Phillips traces the delicate relationships between former colonizer and former colonized in a fragile and tragic story set in England at our days but deeply rooted in its colonial past. The book – winner of the Commonwealth Prize in 2004 – tells of the accidental encounter and of the unusual friendship between a political refugee fleeing a bloody civil war in Africa and a middle-aged retired English teacher; they are both alienated and dislocated characters searching for a place of belonging which they can finally call “home”. Through the backward reconstruction of the individual and familial experiences of the two – constituted mostly by not totally bridgeable gaps and mysteries – Phillips suggests the inseparability of the two stories of the centre and its peripheries, apparently antithetic but in fact complementary. For the Western man, the novel suggests, rebuilding the Other’s story in far away times and lands is a necessary step in order to face and better understand his own present and future in the West.

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Likewise in Italy, the presence of marginal cultures reclaiming visibility and of writers of African origins writing in Italian as more or less voluntary spokespersons is becoming more and more relevant. The corpus of this literary production has become so rich and wide in the past twenty years that a precise census is impossible. Pioneer in the field is the Senegalese immigrant writer Pap Khouma who, in 1990, published the autobiographical account Io, venditore di elefanti written in collaboration with Italian journalist Oreste Pivetta, thus sanctioning the passage from the original language into Italian. To the younger generation belong, for instance, Italo-Somali writers Igiaba Scego and Ubax Cristina Ali Farah or Italo-Ethiopian Gabriella Ghermandi. Such a cultural and artistic vitality is testified by the blossoming in recent years of anthologies, journals, associations and literary prizes, such as the avantgarde journals entirely dedicated to the literature of migration Scritture Migranti and el-Ghibli, the BASILI database or the intercultural association Eks&Tra, with the related annual competition and literary prize. Similarly to Black British literature, this new writing “from the margins”, has its source in the experience of migration and diaspora, sometimes associated with abuse and oppression. It often recalls the colonial experience, and it underlines especially the negative effects and legacies of postcolonial practices already described in other major languages, such as, for instance, in the work by the Somali writer Nuruddinh Farah, written entirely in English. Many of these texts describe the difficult attempts of entrance and integration in the new country – characterized most of the time by suspicion, discrimination, and overt racism – and rebuild connections and descents with the countries and traditions of origin. The fear of “contamination” – social, linguistic and biological – is reflected at an artistic level by the unwillingness, on the part of the audience and critic alike, to consider this literature as a legitimate component of Italian literature tout court, and to confer to it a value which is not only sociological but also artistic.3 The revitalizing effect of these new narrations on Italian contemporary literary production is evident and undeniable, so that they cannot be ignored or relegated to the margins any longer. Instead of entering this rich and controversial debate on the literariness of these works (my position being clearly affirmative), I’ll try to exemplify how, through literature, the stories and the inhabitants “of the 3

A step in this direction has, however, been taken by Armando Gnisci and Raffaele Taddeo, to name only a few, in the already mentioned database BASILI and the online journal El-Ghibli respectively. Significant and encouraging is also the intercultural creative writing experiment conducted in Bologna by Fulvio Pezzarossa.

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margins” can make their voice heard, seek for attention and visibility and thus move slowly “towards the centre”. Taking the analogies so far revealed as a starting point, the second part of this essay proposes a compared reading of the work of the AngloJamaican writer Andrea Levy – of her fourth novel Small Island (2004) in particular – and of the Italo-Ethiopian Gabriella Ghermandi, at her first long-length fiction work with the novel Regina di fiori e di perle (literally Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 2007). The following analysis will trace the analogies, manifold and consistent, between the personal experience and the fiction of these two writers, born and bred in-between two worlds, with a strong feeling of belonging to the host country, but also at the same time with a great awareness of their origins and traditions, individual, familial and collective. Both writers fulfil in their work a moral and social task, recovering centuries-old oral stories and narrations. These are the rich and multiple stories of their people in Jamaica and Ethiopia, which they feel the duty to rework and pass on in a written form to preserve them from oblivion. Since both of them are women, and therefore subject to a double marginalization, they represent the extreme synthesis of what Gayatri Spivak defined “the subaltern”; that is why the centrality and visibility acquired by their work is doubly significant and praiseworthy. In Small Island, the double imperial history and perspective, the English one of the metropolitan centre together with the Caribbean one of its peripheries – so far silenced and ignored by official white hegemonic historiography – melt in a sole polyphonic, hybrid and multi-perspective narration. The results of careful research lead for four years and a half in archives, libraries and interviews to war-veterans are intertwined by Levy with the many stories and anecdotes told by her Jamaican mother and her white English mother-in-law, converging to create a greater “black” and “British”, “central” and “peripheral” history and narration. The four main characters of the novel are a couple of black Jamaican immigrants and a couple of white Londoner. They all meet in London in 1948 and their lives and destinies crisscross in such a way that they cannot be separated any more, thus becoming the emblem of the first Caribbean immigrants in the ‘50s and of the Londoner population of the second postwar period. Through the four distinct narrative voices and the respective points of view, the action moves back and forth in time and space, from Earls Court to Jamaica, from India to the United States and various regions of Great Britain, before, during and after the Second World War. In this complex narrative framework, the pieces of the lives of single characters recompose in a historical frame full of details, dates and careful and verifiable references, demonstrating how the Greater History of empire is essentially

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constituted by the individual microstories of the people who made it up. The experience of migration and marginalization of Gilbert and Hortense – young couple of naive Jamaican immigrants in London – is very similar to the true story of immigration and disillusion of Levy’s parents themselves and of most “subjects of empire”, who decided to leave their countries of origin and seek fortune in the “mother country”. (As I will show later, the same technique of telling the history of her own country through the events of her own family is adopted also by Gabriella Ghermandi in Regina di fiori e di perle). The year 1948, main setting of Levy’s novel, represents, at least symbolically, a moment of crucial and irreversible change for English history. It is in June 1948, in fact, that SS Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury docks with the first 492 Jamaican immigrants on board. Among them there were Andrea Levy’s father and uncle and, in the novel, Gilbert: they all dreamed of a better future in England, but they all suffered bitter disillusions. Since this first arrival, more migratory waves would follow, taking millions of immigrants to London from the four edges of the earth. They all left their home countries with the dream of landing in a rich, generous and welcoming mother country, but from the pages of the novel it is made clear how all these juvenile expectations have been progressively deceived and shattered, and how both Gilbert and Hortense have to modify and abandon their expectations of wealth and comfort in Great Britain and face a considerably more hostile and shabby reality. Since his first arrival in a cold, dirty and bombed London, Gilbert barely survives among crumbling accommodations and racist Englishmen, who deny him a house and a job for his own “original fault”, the colour of his skin. Gilbert learns at his own expense that coming from a colony of the empire and having fought a war in its army are not sufficient prerogatives to guarantee citizenship and belonging. The same bitter disillusion awaits his wife Hortense, who reaches him after six months, confident with her perfect English pronunciation and her teaching diploma, achieved at the missionary school in Jamaica. Once in London, however, she is almost suffocated by the shabby, dirty and cold attic where Gilbert lives, in the decadent house that the couple share with other black renters. At the apex of humiliation, the English people she meets on the road try to avoid her or disdainfully call her “darkie”. The relationship between the inhabitants of the centre of empire and those of its peripheries is exemplified in the novel by the relationship that links Gilbert and Hortense to the couple of white Londoners Queenie and Bernard. Surprisingly, however, far from any pretence of superiority, the latter are equally shattered by the difficult postwar reconstruction and by

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the disillusion of imperial dreams and ideals. They are simply depicted as wretched and unaware interpreters of a narrow-minded imperialist mentality, which is falling apart leaving a great emptiness and an all-pervasive identity crisis. Through the careful description of two white English characters and their petty existence – made up at the beginning of prejudices and sense of superiority but progressively transformed by a series of disillusions and loss of certainties – Levy, on the one hand, understates the white alleged superiority, and identifies, on the other, the necessity to find reciprocal support between the two couples, to overcome together the economic and identity destabilization they all equally come to face. The events told in the novel demonstrate not only that the contribution paid by immigrants in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s was fundamental for the English postwar economy and reconstruction, but also that, at the end of the century, their presence and their right to belonging on British soil were an undeniable and irreversible historical reality, an inalienable right sanctioned by imperial history itself and by the migrations and “contaminations” that followed. Bernard, in particular, suffers greatly the horrors of the conflict experiencing violent religious genocides in India, and more than the others he has to come to terms with his own identity and principles. He is the prototype of the English bourgeoisie: he leaves London during the war as a mean but wealthy bank clerk and comes back profoundly shaken and disturbed by the atrocities of the war. Foreigner and alienated in his own country, he finds a “shrunk” England invaded by strangers, who are, however, the only possibility for him and his own family to recover from the crisis they are deeply affected by and to pave the way to their own future. Levy profits by the double perspective and the sometimes super partes vision typical of the Black British generation and of all those people who built their identity on the border: she does not in fact criticise or resent Bernard’s racism, but on the contrary she describes him as a tragic anti-hero, the victim of the narrow-minded society that educated him and of a world which rapidly changed, shattering his petty certainties and sense of superiority. The same compassion towards the oppressors – seen as victims on their turn of an absurd system which overcomes any human logic or individual choice – can be found in Gabriella Ghermandi’s novel. Both writers also share the capacity to dissolve the atrocity of certain events through a great sense of human compassion and sometimes conciliatory irony, convinced as they are that no positive future can be built on recrimination or revenge, but rather on cooperation and mutual understanding.

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Differently from Andrea Levy – born and bred in London and who visited Jamaica for the first time as an adult – Gabriella Ghermandi spent the first fourteen years of her life in Ethiopia, home country of her mother, and she keeps vivid memories of her painful departure for Italy, from where her father came: The night before leaving from my country [...] my grand-mother, together with my cousin Alem and some women of the neighbourhood tried to console me: “You are going to the land of your father” they kept saying “you’ll find everything there”. But then I arrived here, and I didn’t find what I had been told. How can you say that a country has everything to offer if you cannot find consolation? Support? The sharing of happiness and sorrow? I felt deep nostalgia and loneliness, and in those cold days, when no warm embrace filled my emptiness, I found a sole home, the language of my father, Italian, and I understood that I could live there within and rebuild the warmness through the memory of my people and my country. That is why today I write...4

Since this disillusion and profound nostalgia, Gabriella Ghermandi started feeling the necessity to recover the art of orality, so dear to her continent: The impulse to recover orality was born by a necessity rooted in my cultural Ethiopian background, were we use to live and share everything with our community. Telling stories arises from the desire to share the emotion of a story which beats every time with a different rhythm because there comes to be a single heart, unique and unrepeatable, between the narrator and his audience. The song that accompanies the narration represents my love for the Ethiopian culture, for its intrinsic spirituality and I like thinking to bring it over, through the songs which are never empty of meaning, which confer a double significance to everything and which have always been the voice of my people.5

Her grand-mother Berechtì – commemorated in the short-story “All’ombra dei rami sfacciati, carichi di fiori rosso vermiglio” – taught Gabriella that history has always something to teach, even when it is a story of violence or abuse which you would prefer forgetting: Nothing of what I say, nothing of what happens, you keep or throw completely. In sorrowful events there’s always a piece of canvas ... we want to keep.6 4

Ghermandi in http://www.gabriella-ghermandi.it (my translation). Ibidem. 6 Ibidem. 5

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Even in Ghermandi’s work, women hold the fundamental function to preserve and pass on the communal memory of a whole people, as already seen in Small Island, where Levy collects and passes on the stories of her mother and mother-in-law, or in The Fruit of the Lemon (1999) – Levy’s third novel – with the stories of aunt Coral and many other Jamaican aunts and cousins. These polyphonic narrations are sagas not only of a family but of a whole people, exemplifications of empire and the colonial experience. They show how encounters and hybridizations among English or Italians and the inhabitants of the former colonies did not start in the very last decades caused by mass-migrations from the peripheries towards the centre, but on the contrary are part of a century-old process initiated by the colonizer’s invasion in the first place. By revealing the anachronisms, omissions and gaps of Western traditional historical narrations, mainly linear and told by a single voice, Levy and Ghermandi rebuild in their novels national epics which are simultaneously extra-territorial and transnational. Here, Jamaica and Ethiopia are indissolubly linked to the countries which once colonized them (Great Britain and Italy in this specific case), thus constituting hybrid and complex geographical and historical realities. In these cross-cultural and extended countries, past and present melt together and try to pave the way to a future finally freed from restricting boundaries, physical, racial, or cultural. If it is true that history cannot be erased, it is also important to learn from its mistakes and turn them into signals for a better future. The incipit of Gabriella Ghermandi’s first full-length novel, Regina di fiori e di perle, is a hymn to and celebration of the many stories that the Ethiopian people has to tell, and which she collects as rare flowers and precious pearls: Raccolgo fiori e perle. Fiori di tutti i tipi: grandi, piccoli, invisibili, anonimi, fiori con colori sgargianti come il sole imperioso e altri con colori tenui, come brezze di primavera. Fiori profumati e fiori la cui fragranza segreta racconta storie all’anima. Raccolgo perle e fiori. Perle di tutti i tipi: lucenti, perfettamente sferiche, imperfette, bianche, rosa, nere. Perle nascoste e perle evidenti. Raccolgo i racconti del giardino incantato della mia terra. (Ghermandi 2007: 1)

Thanks to both the circularity of its structure and the oral qualities of the language employed, the novel brings to light some of the most tragic moments of Ethiopian history in a span longer than one hundred years, from the times of Menelik up to the present days. By telling episodes of

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the Ethiopian struggle of resistance against the Italian occupation, which took place towards the end of the 1930s during the Fascist period, the book takes on the onerous task of bridging the gaps of our history, dusting off the Italians’ dormant memories of those years. Only recently, especially thanks to Angelo Del Boca’s exemplary work, our historiography has made up for lost time. As in Small Island, the story of the protagonist’s family intermingles with the history of her people during Mengistu Haile Mariam’s tyranny and the following decade of emigration. ...[E]ven the story of my family belongs to those times. One of the many, uncountable personal stories looking like each other, approaching or overlapping at the most unexpected moments, as it happens in real life, shaping the Great History! (Ghermandi 2007: 38. My translation)

The novel’s narrator is Mahlet - who is only in some respects the author’s alter ego, as Ghermandi insists that this is not an autobiographical novel. Mahlet was born into an Ethiopian patriarchal family in Debre Zeit, thirty miles from Addis Abeba and she is predestined to become her people’s “singer” and to bring to the Italians’ land the stories of a seemingly distant colonial past, which remains vivid in the memory of the Ethiopians who experienced it and struggled to break free. Mahlet’s curiosity – the child often pretends to be engrossed in her games while the women of the house gossip in front of the brazier – and her engagement with the grown-ups’ stories, serve as a framework to collect and pass on the history of the Ethiopian resistance. With the help of two wise men, Yacob and Abba Chereka, at the end of the novel Mahlet can finally recall the prophetic words of the old Yacob who had foretold, when she was still a child, both her journey and her important task: Preserve your curiosity and collect as many stories as you can. One day you’ll be our disclosing voice. You’ll cross the sea that Peter and Paul once crossed and you’ll bring our stories to the Italians. You will be the voice of our history refusing to be forgotten. (Ghermandi 2007: 6, my translation)

A new Sharazad, Mahlet collects the stories of the Ethiopian partisans in order to save and preserve the memory of her people, and inscribes her narrative in the long tradition of the frame novel, spanning from the Arabian Nights to the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. Once again, we face a non-linear narrative made up of stories told within history, long flashbacks and impressive moves in time and space. The novel delves, even more in depth than Small Island, into a jungle of collateral events, bringing them from the background to the surface of narration and

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employing the present tense as an adhesive strategy. With Mahlet’s physicality, the fragments of the Ethiopian past are sewn up together and intertwined with those bits of contemporary history that are strictly related to the interaction between Italy and Ethiopia. All skilfully underpinned by a storytelling practice typical of African “orature”. Among the many stories that Mahlet inherits and passes on, there are the stories of Abba Chereka, or the personal story of the old wise Yacob, fighter when he was young in the Menghesha forest, and the story of his sister, who fell in love with an Italian soldier and got pregnant. Despite the tragic epilogue of the love affair, which ended with the execution of the two lovers guilty of having broken interracial barriers, the episode gives way to dissent within the hegemonic history of regime. It predicts, moreover, the possibility that the two populations could one day stop being enemies and build a common peaceful future. In Italy Mahlet encounters the old-aged man from Bologna named Antonio, who fought in Ethiopia falling in love with the country and learning its language. So many years apart, Antonio still feels nostalgia for that beautiful African land and people, but he is also still ashamed by the atrocities and crimes committed by the Italians. Through him, Ghermandi also want to show how not all Italians were “cruel colonizers and fighters” and how it is possible to find humanity and compassion even on the part of the oppressor, as they are often equally victims of History’s mistakes. Despite the sorrowful and sometimes violent passages, it is not grudge or self-pity that emerges from the book. On the contrary, a great sense of fierceness permeates the narration, together with a deep admiration for the arbegnà, who fought in the counter-offensive led by Hailè Selassié, and for other historical and mythical characters who struggled to free their country from the oppressor. Along the entire narration, women cover fundamental roles: they do not function simply as auxiliary to the action of their men, but they are engaged on the forefront in organizing and carrying out the struggle of resistance. Among many other, the name of Kebedech Seyoum is worth remembering: she was Aberrà Kassa’s widow and led her husband’s army while eight-month pregnant, thus deserving a mythic place in the Ethiopian history. Likewise, it is significant that the old people of the community, last depositaries of an oral tradition and history under threat of being lost and forgotten, ask to a female child to preserve their memory, aware as they are that only women can bring fruits and transmit life. By reading these works, it emerges how Andrea Levy’s and Gabriella Ghermandi’s narrations abound in the fruits of their lands of origin and contribute to preserve their memory, while offering at the same time to

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their adoptive countries a richer, wider and more realistic view of Western and imperial history, filling its blanks and correcting its lies and prejudices. The two novels analysed here, in particular, imprint on the written page a collective memory and heritage, which had so far been entrusted mainly to oral transmission. By giving a voice to the subaltern of colonial history, Levy and Ghermandi offer contrapuntal readings. They contrast hegemonic imperial metropolitan narrations with alternative stories which were so far ignored or silenced, thus providing reelaborations of the colonial memory from a hybrid and postcolonial point of view, and positioning them in a more and more central location.

Works Cited Ali Farah, Ubax Cristina. Madre piccola. Roma: Frassinelli, 2007. Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation. Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation”. In The Location of Culture: 139-170. London & New York: Routledge, 1994. Del Boca, Angelo. Gli italiani in Africa Orientale. Milano: Mondadori, 1999. —. L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani. Miti, memorie, errori e sconfitte. Milano: Mondadori, 2002. Ghermandi, Gabriella. Regina di fiori e di perle. Roma: Donzelli, 2007. —. All’ombra dei rami sfacciati, carichi di fiori rosso vermiglio. In http://www.gabriella-ghermandi.it/ Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities”. In Baker, H. A. Jr, M. Diawara, R.H. Lindenborg (eds.), Black British Cultural Studies, A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996(a), 163-172. —. “Minimal Selves”. In Baker, H. A. Jr, M. Diawara, R.H. Lindenborg (eds.), Black British Cultural Studies, A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,, 1996(b), 114-119. Khouma, Pap and Oreste Pivetta. Io, venditore di elefanti. Una vita per forza fra Dakar, Parigi e Milano. Milano: Garzanti, 1990. Levy, Andrea. Fruit of the Lemon. London: Review, 1999. —. Every Light in the House Burning. London: Review, 1994. —. Never Far From Nowhere. London: Review, 1997. —. Small Island. London: Review, 2004. Phillips, Caryl. A Distant Shore. London: Secker & Warburg, 2003. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000.

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Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313.

Websites Gabriella Ghermandi. n.d. http://www.gabriella-ghermandi.it/ (accessed 31-05-2009) Andrea Levy. n.d. http://www.andrealevy.co.uk/ (accessed 31-05-2009) http://www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/basili2001/ (accessed 20-09-2009) http://www.el-ghibli.provincia.bologna.it/ (accessed 20-09-2009)

BEING DIFFERENT WITHOUT FEAR: ON IGIABA SCEGO’S OLTRE BABILONIA (AND MORE) DANIELA BROGI

But how do we begin to tell a story? (Igiaba Scego, Oltre Babilonia)

Our point of departure is a definition that may seem superfluous in a European context, but that in Italy is still quite unusual; so unusual that the tendency is to avoid it entirely as it is considered unfamiliar. The definition is as follows: Oltre Babilonia1 [Beyond Babylon] is a novel written by an African-Italian author, or rather by a citizen of the Italian language who no longer uses Italian as a mere tool for communication or to give testimony to her own story as was the case with the first books written by migrant authors in the 1990s.2 This type of language usage 1 Scego, Oltre Babilonia (2008). Scego premiered in 2003, winning the Eks&Tra prize for migrant writers for her story Salsicce; before Oltre Babilonia she also published La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock (2003) and Rhoda (2004). Her latest work, La mia casa è dove sono, was released in 2010. 2 Three revolutionary publications date back to 1990: Chiamatemi Alì by M. Bouchane (with De Girolamo); Immigrato by S. Methnani (with Fortunato); Io, venditore di elefanti by P. Khouma and O. Pivetta (all are examples of “writing with four hands”). In 1991 La promessa di Hamadi was published by S. Moussa Ba and A. Micheletti; N. Chohra published Volevo diventare bianca in 1993. The year 1994 saw the publication of Lontano da Mogadiscio by S. Ramzanali Fazel and Princesa by F. Farias De Albuquerque (the book inspired a song by F. De André and a film by H. Goldman). That same year, the Eks&Tra prize was established to help ‘emerging’ authors (the first winner, T. Lamri, published the successful I sessanta nomi dell’amore in 2006). In 1995 M. Melliti published I bambini delle rose. For further references, see Pallavicini, “Qualcosa che viene da lontano”; Brancato, “From Routes to Roots: Afrosporic Voices in Italy”; Brancato, “Afro-European Literature(s): a New Discursive Category”. In 1997 Armando Gnisci set up a database of works by immigrant writers in Italy (http://www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/basili2001/).

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should not be understood rhetorically – as a hallmark of the author’s ‘literariness’ – or employed as a sort of heterogeneous language (‘other language’ of ‘another culture’). Examples of the latter type of eclectic usage can be found in writers from the Middle Ages who used Italian when seeking to express love (perhaps while composing a Petrarchan sonnet) and others that have attempted to write in Italian as ‘outsiders’ (Montaigne, Byron and Pound3 to name just a few). Instead, the Italian used by Scego, like that of many other contemporary authors, is a language that allows her to inhabit her own story and thus inhabit her own identity. In other words, the Italian language is no longer used solely as a communicative device or a literary preference, but as a condition of being. With respect to other European countries (England, Germany, France), immigration in Italy is still considered a relatively ‘new’ reality. It was only in the 1980s that the country saw the first phases of the migrant influx that now populates and, in a certain sense, moves the country forward. Given the comparatively young age of the new ethnic groups in Italy, it stands to reason that Oltre Babilonia belongs to a literary sphere that maintains a certain ‘unripened’ quality, marking a difference between it and some of the more widely-recognized, successful books like The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) by Kureishi, Kanak Sprak (1995) by Zaimoglu or White Teeth (2000) by Smith. All the more reason to discuss this work in particular: the novel itself merits discussion and literary criticism, which is all too often distanced from the very reality it is in fact closest to. We must begin with two premises. First premise. For years, Italy has employed the term ‘secondgeneration Italian writers’ to classify and define authors of non-Italian origin. (Scego was born in Rome in 1974 to Somali parents who had fled their homeland following Siad Barre’s coup d’état.) This definition functions on at least four levels. On a sociological level (1), because it does in fact indicate the generation of children born to non-Italian parents, or rather, children of parents who had come to live in Italy. The specification is not unnecessary as it differentiates them from other ‘cosmopolitan’ writers.4 ‘Second-generation Italian writers’ is valid in a linguistic sense (2), and even in a psycholinguistic sense: these authors 3

Cf. Vedovelli, L’italiano degli stranieri. Storia, attualità e prospettive, 2002; Vedovelli, Prima persona plurale futuro indicativo: noi saremo, 2010; Brugnolo, La lingua di cui si vanta Amore. Scrittori stranieri in lingua italiana dal Medioevo al Novecento, 2009. Also see Brugnolo and Orioles, Eteroglossia e plurilinguismo letterario, 2002. 4 Agota Kristov, to cite one example from present-day literature; or in the case of Italian, authors like Helena Janeczek and Anilda Ibrahimi.

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belong to a plurilingual context, which differs from generic multilingualism or polyglotism. The distinction creates new realities, ones that are often not solely linguistic in a strictly technical sense. Bilingualism, or trilingualism, creates a situation where speaking different languages contemporaneously is not just part of a person’s public or private life, but a fundamental element of one’s inner being, including the complex states of imagination, memory, even—perhaps above all—pain. All of this cannot help but result in different ways of relating to the world.5 At the same time, the term ‘second-generation Italian writers’ is valid in a cultural-educational sense (3). For children of immigrants, Italian is no longer a language learned along the material and symbolic road to integration, but a language learned at school.6 This third line of reasoning, in addition to the first two, explains also the fourth possible value of the label: They are writers. Second-generation Italian writers do not use the Italian language for the basic purpose of survival and communication; they use it with literary ambitions (4). In this sense, the difference between the first and second generations also functions in regard to the narrative or communicative pact established by the texts. No longer destined for a model interlocutor called upon to hear dramatic testimony, these ‘secondgeneration’ texts rely instead on a recipient able to appreciate the works’ literary qualities. ‘Second-generation Italian writers’, then? The reality is that more than a decade after the publication of the first novel by a non-Italian writer who grew up in Italy (Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo’s Verso la notte bakonga, 1999), there is now something problematic about this definition. It risks becoming a defensive expression—or even an offensive or belittling expression—as it implies the condition of second class citizen, to use Buchi Emecheta’s notorious expression. In either case, it risks reducing the subject to object; turning these authors into repositories for an identity reconstructed by others thus stripping them of the ability to be selfdefined. Let us try African-Italian, then, as in Anglo-Pakistanis or German Turks. Second premise. In the face of a now considerable editorial production, cultural institutions and Italian academies continue to react with pacific indifference—to the point that Postcolonial Studies departments are all but 5

For the psychoanalytic implications of this difference, see Amati Mehler, Argentieri, Canestri, The Babel of the unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension, 1994. 6 Cf. Gnisci, Creolizzare l’Europa. Letteratura e migrazione, 2003; Nuovo planetario italiano. Geografia e antologia della letteratura della migrazione in Italia e in Europa, 2006.

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absent—or with a manner of uncritical openness that has led to the creation of databases and debates (primarily online), that define the situation in terms of the ‘phenomenon of immigrant writers’. It is a reality accepted a priori, without ever being actually discussed. Naturally, these two reactions (indifference and feigned openness) cannot be superimposed one over the other. In the second case, significant occasions for elaboration and dialogue have been presented, often under circumstances nothing short of heroic given the continued resistance from the surrounding environment created by a frequently racist ideology and a political-economic situation that proceeds to the rhythm of continuous cuts to the cultural budget. That notwithstanding, the doubt remains that both self-defensive closure and unconditional openness can at times become two parallel discriminatory logics, both capable of reproducing the prejudice of an overwhelming irrelevance as they both insist on a caging of sorts—the refusal to recognize these works on the basis of anything other than their ‘foreignness’.7 How, then, do we cease defending ourselves? The answer is almost certainly difficult and will unquestionably require a period of reflection and qualifications much greater than those found in this text. In the meantime, we might commence with the small, even slight, antidote of eliminating the word ‘phenomenon’ from the critical vocabulary. Another, perhaps more demanding remedy is ridding the discussion of a facile and hypocritical political correctness (often enabled by sociology) on the textual criticism level, and to instead begin discussing the literary value of these texts, thereby constructing a dialogue around textual questions. It is also useful to remember that traditional criticism has an easy alibi in ignoring these texts which do not always have literary questions at their heart and are sometimes based less on strictly ‘literary’ themes and more on conflict.8 That said, it is prudent to remember that conflict runs rampant in both the political and social discourse on immigration in Italy. A prime example of such conflict—as Amara Lakhous reminds us—is that many people born in Italy still do not hold an Italian passport as they are not considered Italian citizens9. 7

I was able to better reflect on these aspects thanks to the stimuli from the studies already mentioned in the text, as well as in Strappini, Voci di dentro e voci di fuori nella letteratura italiana, 2009. 8 It is no coincidence that many studies about Italian migrant writers can trace their origins back to the traumatic date of 25 August 1989 when Jerry Essan Masslo, a refugee from South Africa, was killed by a local band in Villa Literno. 9 Lakhous, Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio, 2006 (this book received the Premio Flaiano for narrative in 2006 and Algeria’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix des libraires Algeriens, in 2008).

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Beyond Babylon Scego’s title evokes an expression used by Bob Marley in his famous 1976 interview with Ed McCormack for Rolling Stone. Though it echoes Marley’s words, her title implies an overtaking of Marley’s position (returning to Ethiopia), as home becomes, even if difficult to swallow, the place where we are, where we live our own stories. (It is no coincidence that Italiani per vocazione [Italians by Vocation] is the title of an anthology of migrant writers edited by Scego in 2005).10 Five particularly striking aspects in Igiaba Scego’s Oltre Babilonia characterize the novel; interestingly, they are themes that recur often in migration-based narratives. First, —and in this case the discussion is obviously valid primarily for women writers—the prevalence of a ‘matricentric’ plot, or a story told by a feminine voice11 that weaves the thread of memory by recounting other women’s stories through the intersection of present experience and past events, all resurrected by remembrance. It is a process that in some respects recalls Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Alongside this aspect is the choral togetherness found in both plot and narrative points of view. Like books by Ghermandi, Farah, Smith and Ndiaye, Scego’s novel consists of multiple biographies narrated by moving points of view. They are lives separated by history but placed alongside one another by writing that speaks to us of a reality that existed, and is perceived, on various levels. Two other constants derive from this point: departure and separation as workings of the plot,12 and the use of an investigative structure as privileged device in the organization of the story.

10 Scego, Italiani per vocazione, 2005 (with works by J. Canifa Alves, S. Annecchiarico, K. Komla-Ebri, M. Alatas, I. M. Kakese, U.C. Ali Farah, J.C. Calderón, B. Hirst, Y. Wakkas, J.M. Gangbo. B. Serdakowski.) 11 I will offer only one example, from the American narrative: Kym Ragusa, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006), a memoir of growing up in Harlem to an Italian-American father and an African-American mother and the social and racial stresses and strains that caused members of these families to come together and fall apart and then make it work. 12 Another Italian example is Cristina Ali Farah’s Madre piccola, 2007: Barni and Domenica grow up together in Mogadishu, as happy children in a world consisting of familial affection and common roots until Domenica has to leave for Italy with her mother. The return to Mogadishu is a fated moment: the explosion of the civil war coincides with Barni’s move to Rome and the beginning of a decade of confusion and loss for Domenica.

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The reader’s attention, like that of the characters, is guided towards investigation and discovery.13 Finally, a fifth recurring motif is the profound significance of place within the organization of the narrative (Oltre Babilonia is set in Italy, Tunisia, Somalia and Argentina). It is precisely place that builds, at the same rhythm as the unfolding of the story, the universe of meanings and temporality constructed by the narrative. In Scego’s novel, place is sometimes understood as mother country of origin; other times as a new, acquired country or a temporary home; and sometimes as conflict area or an intersection between one story and another. The movement between various places coincides with the progressive work of characterization and consciousness-raising; at the same time, the spatial arch outlined in the stories defines it as the novel’s narrative span, and both form the most complete picture of the lives represented. The characters can finally succeed in seeing the world and, in doing so, see themselves, a bit like the epilogue of Borges’ El hacedor (1960), where ‘a man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.’ In seeking meaning in Oltre Babilonia, the centre of gravity lies in the reconstruction of identity through the relationship with the mother tongue, with the past, and with divisions. These same relationships form the centre of the novel’s organizational form, as well. The text is constructed on a precise frame, with a prologue and epilogue (guided by one of the characters, Zuhra Laamane, the ‘Negropolitana’, who lives in Rome and decides to write her story in a series of notebooks). The prologue and epilogue frame eight narrative blocks. In each of these, there are five alternating stories (following the same order each time) that take their titles from the nicknames of the respective characters: the Nus-Nus, Somali for “half and half”; the Negropolitana; the Reaparecida; the Pessottimista; and the father (the only character whose name is not capitalized). As the writing and reading gradually proceed, the characters encounter one another and their respective biographies begin to intersect. Matters complicate as a result. The Nus-Nus is Mar, a young woman with an Argentinian mother (Miranda, the Reaparecida) and a Somali father. She is black and lives in Rome, like the Negropolitana. The two women do 13

In Amara Lakhous’ books, all very different, the mystery novel structure transforms the theme of the search for identity into narrative code.

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not meet in the city where they both live, but at a language school in Tunis where the most diverse languages congregate. In this conglomeration of ethnicities, destinies, words and even colours (the colour motif is important in Oltre Babilonia, another parallel with Beloved), we also have the secret stories from the pasts and homelands of Mar and Zuhra – Buenos Aires and Mogadishu, respectively – thanks to their mothers, Miranda and Maryam, who reveal the secrets in their own tales. We might even say that they ‘give birth’ to their own pasts like memories to pass down to their daughters (intergenerational dialogue is another key theme in migrant writing). Along with these four voices, we have that of Elias, Mar and Zuhra’s father, who is doubly foreign as his two daughters do not know they are sisters. The plot, which unfolds in various places, formally translates the idea that the search for one’s roots cannot happen in one single place, and that one place alone is not sufficient in guaranteeing permanent identity. We must travel roads that arrive from faraway places, never following linear paths, but ones that are – like the languages of Babylon – inherently confused. Take the example of Zuhra, who communicates in Somali with her non-Italian speaking mother, uses Roman dialect when she writes and speaks, has a degree in Brazilian literature, and, in addition to speaking English and Spanish, decides to study Arabic. Zuhra’s condition is not the equivalent of a banal division between the language she speaks outside and the language she speaks at home, but a complex coexistence of codes that, besides words and voices, allow for the interaction of even more diverse elements of identity.14 In addition, this very real circumstance produces, in the passage to literary revision, a narrative world filled with doubles—yet another motif 14

As an example, let us take an excerpt from the epilogue (443-444): «Mamma mi parla nella nostra lingua madre. Un somalo nobile dove ogni vocale ha un senso. La nostra lingua madre. Spumosa, scostante, ardita. Nella bocca di mamma il somalo diventa miele. […] Ma poi, in ogni discorso, parola, sospiro, fa capolino l’altra madre. Quella che ha allattato Dante, Boccaccio, De Andrè e Alda Merini. L’italiano con cui sono cresciuta e che ho anche odiato, perché mi faceva sentire straniera. L’italiano aceto dei mercati rionali, l’italiano dolce della radio, l’italiano serio dell’università. L’italiano che scrivo […]» (Mum speaks to me in our mother tongue. A noble Somali where each vowel has meaning. Our mother tongue. Frothy, brusque, daring. In mum’s mouth Somali becomes honey. [...] But then, in every discussion, word, sigh, the other mother peeps out. She who nursed Dante, Boccaccio, De Andrè and Alda Merini. The Italian that I grew up with, and that I also hated because it made me feel foreign. The vinegary Italian of the neighbourhood markets, the sweet Italian of the radio, the serious Italian of university. The Italian that I write [...]).

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seen in various works by migrant writers. In Oltre Babilonia we have two young women (the reader slowly comes to discover they are sisters); two mothers who tell two stories of exile; two dictatorships, etcetera. What makes Scego’s novel so interesting is the fact that the identities in play are not just those hybrids ascribable to the individual lives of the characters, but those of Italy as well. Oltre Babilonia succeeds in recounting, without completely suffocating the narrative, the shaky ground that is Italian national unity. In spite of the numerous celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Italian unification, the country still struggles with the notion of a national identity, which – in terms of the rhetorical, ideological and memorial map of ideas and events that created the concept of ‘Made in Italy’ – was and is still today the product of a severe case of collective denial. Like Southern banditry, racism,15 or the conscious adherence to fascism, immigration and colonialism represent two chapters in Italian history that are as fundamental as they are forgotten. As confirmation of this idea, we need to look no further than the total lack of criticism that surrounds one of the most beautiful Italian novels of the post-war period, Tempo di uccidere [Time to Kill] (1947) by Ennio Flaiano.16 Miranda, Zuhra, Mar, Maryam, as with characters in many other African-Italian books, remind us through the stories of their own lives that the ties that bind Italy and Africa were put in place long ago, during the country’s imperialist period in Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya.17 They remind us that Italians – like people from many other nations, like Reaparecida’s family of origin – have always migrated, and must not be considered only ‘brava gente’18 (good guys) that are more human, more civilized and better than others. In the best examples, the language of African-Italian writers offers a textual plane enriched by a certain ‘modernization’ with respect to the idea of literature advocated by various institutions that champion tired forms of 15

I offer one very good example: Bonavita, Spettri dell’altro. Letteratura e razzismo nell’Italia contemporanea, 2009. 16 For treatment of this novel, see Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 2007. For more on Italian colonialism see F. Cavagnoli’s Una pioggia bruciante, 2000. 17 To reconstruct the threads of this ‘silenced’ story, see Labanca, Oltremare, 2002; and from a literary point of view Tomasello, La letteratura coloniale italiana dalle avanguardie al fascismo, 1984, and L’Africa tra mito e realtà. Storia della letteratura coloniale italiana, 2004; Farah, Rifugiati, 2003. Another worthwhile read is Maria Coletti’s article on Italian colonial cinematography during the fascist period: http://www.cinemafrica.org/spip.php?article774. 18 Del Boca, Italiani brava gente? [Italians: Good Guys?], 2005.

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antagonism which paradoxically risk producing formal orientations even more scholastic, and more claustrophobic, than before. This kind of writing gives rise to a more expressive and authentic Italian; a fact that is even more significant in a country where many Italians are returning to the use of dialect that is no longer perceived as ‘private’ or ‘familial’ but a communication tool to be used in various circumstances and with a variety of people. The ‘new’ language, so rooted in real life, has two potential consequences capable of bringing about unforeseen future qualitative results. The first consequence consists of the use of a simpler Italian, not that rich but nevertheless cleaner, governed less by the emphasis of tradition (in terms of the rearguard conviction of actually being avant-garde), or by Italian literature’s most established vice – a heavy, notarial syntax. The second consequence concerns the use of an Italian that emphasizes expressive functions rather than rhetorical ones. In cases of multilingual blending, language naturally manifests this mix of various cultures. Italian is revitalized when words from the spoken language of one’s family of origin are introduced in the text. As evidenced by the glossaries often found in appendices, this particular lexicon consists of terms concerning identity (food, religion, familial systems, and sexual codes). It is the same lexicon used to convey recurring polysensorial details when recounting episodes related to the magic/infantile world of the past. Other times, the untranslatable word indicates an experience related to a state of emotion or remembrance; or related to stories connected to oral speech patterns. For example, the expression ‘wallahi billahi’ becomes the refrain employed by Zuhra as she articulates her discussion in the prologue of Oltre Babilonia. Significant stylistic consequences result from each aspect covered in this article. Once again, this confirms how literature – both on the creative and critical side – is never a strictly rhetorical or self-reflexive experience. Instead, it brings with it a complex system of being inside reality, and, at the same time, inside the story itself. This is how Italian language and culture are reinvented by new experiences of migration and by conflicts over the recognition behind the words. No indignation or simulated indifference is necessary: this is not an emergency situation – no matter the perception in Italy – but a fact of life. Perhaps when less pure or less inferior feelings and viewpoints come into the open and find a place in the vast landscape of story-telling, we will come into more frequent contact with great narratives (the same discussion is valid for films). In the meantime, we can observe – we can try not to be afraid to observe – that even Italian authors of non-Italian origins face the same difficulties that every author who is trying to tell a good story encounters: the difficulty of

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style, a concept of expression as distant as possible from the simple act of undifferentiated transcribing and closer to a conscious originality capable of re-establishing new combinations between reality and language.

Works Cited Ali Farah, Cristina. Madre Piccola. Roma: Frassinelli, 2007. Amati-Mehler, Jacqueline, Jorge Canestri and Simona Argentieri. The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension. Madison: IUP, 1994. Bonavita, Riccardo. Spettri dell’altro. Letteratura e razzismo nell’Italia contemporanea. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009. Bouchane, Mohamed (with Carla De Girolamo). Chiamatemi Alì. Milano: Leonardo, 1990. Brancato, Sabrina. “From Routes to Roots: Afrosporic Voices in Italy”. Callaloo 30, 2, 2007: 653-661. —. “Afro-European Literature(s): A New Discursive Category”. Research in African Literatures 39, 3, 2008. Brugnolo, Furio. La lingua di cui si vanta Amore. Scrittori stranieri in lingua italiana dal Medioevo al Novecento. Roma: Carocci, 2009. Brugnolo, Furio and Vincenzo Orioles (eds.). Eteroglossia e plurilinguismo letterario (2 volumes). Roma: Il Calamo, 2002. Cavagnoli, Franca. Una pioggia bruciante. Roma: Frassinelli, 2000. Chohra, Nassera. Volevo diventare bianca. Roma: e/o, 1993. Del Boca, Angelo. Italiani brava gente? Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005. Farah, Nuruddin. Rifugiati. Voci della diaspora somala. Roma: Meltemi, 2003. Farias De Albuquerque, Fernanda (with Maurizio Jannelli). Princesa. Carrù (CN): Sensibili alle foglie, 1994. Gangbo, Jadelin Mabiala. Verso la notte bakonga. Milano: Lupetti, 1999. Ghermandi, Gabriella. Regina di fiori e di perle. Roma: Donzelli, 2007. Gnisci, Armando. Creolizzare l’Europa. Letteratura e migrazione. Roma: Maltemi, 2003. —. (ed.). Nuovo planetario italiano. Geografia e antologia della letteratura della migrazione in Italia e in Europa. Troina: Città Aperta, 2006. Khouma, Pap (with Oreste Pivetta). Io, venditore di elefanti. Milano: Garzanti, 1990. Labanca, Nicola. Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002.

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Lakhous, Amara. Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio. Roma: E/O, 2006. Lamri, Tahar. I sessanta nomi dell’amore. Rimini: Fara, 2006. Melliti, Mohsen. I bambini delle rose. Roma: Edizioni Lavoro, 1995. Methnani, Salah (with Mario Fortunato). Immigrato. Roma: Theoria, 1990. Moussa Ba, Saidou (with Alessandro Micheletti). La promessa di Hamadi. Novara: De Agostini, 1991. Pallavicini, Piersandro. “Qualcosa che viene da lontano”. http://www. nazioneindiana.com/2003/12/10/qualcosa-che-viene-da-lontano-1/ Ragusa, Kym. The Skin between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging. New York: Norton & Company, 2006. Ramzanali Fazel, Shirin. Lontano da Mogadiscio. Roma: Datanews, 1994. Scego, Igiaba. La mia casa è dove sono. Milano: Rizzoli, 2010. —. Oltre Babilonia. Roma: Donzelli, 2008. —. (ed.). Italiani per vocazione. Firenze: Cadmo, 2005. —. Rhoda. Roma: Sinnos, 2004. —. La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock. Roma: Sinnos, 2003. Strappini, L. “Voci di dentro e voci di fuori nella letteratura italiana”. In Silvana Ferreri (ed.), Plurilinguismo, multiculturalismo, apprendimento delle lingue. Confronto tra Giappone e Italia. Viterbo: Sette Città, 2009. Tomasello, Giovanna. La letteratura coloniale italiana dalle avanguardie al fascismo. Palermo: Sellerio, 1984. —. L’Africa tra mito e realtà. Storia della letteratura coloniale italiana. Palermo: Selleria, 2004. Vedovelli, Massimo. L’italiano degli stranieri. Storia, attualità e prospettive. Roma: Carocci, 2002. —. Prima persona plurale futuro indicativo: noi saremo. Il destino linguistico italiano dall’incomprensione di Babele alla pluralità della Pentecoste. Roma: EdUP, 2010.

PART IV: WRITERS TALK

AGNÈS AGBOTON: SELF-TRANSLATION AND INTERCULTURAL MEDIATION MAYA GARCÍA DE VINUESA

Agnès Agboton has lived and written in Barcelona since 1978. A poet, storyteller, narrator and author of African cookery books, she has had the extraordinary will to write in three languages – her mother tongue Gun (Benin), Catalan and Spanish. As Manuel Serrat Crespo points out in his preface to her recent Voz de las dos orillas (2009: 9), orality has an undeniable weight in Agnès Agboton’s writing, and he highlights her ‘stubborn struggle to sprinkle her work, self translated into Castilian and Catalan, with the music of her tonal mother tongue –that Dahomeian Gun’.1 Her position differs from most of African writers living in Spain, who are mainly from Equatorial Guinea – as such, she is among the writers coming from countries whose historical relation with Spain is not strictly “postcolonial”. As I pointed out recently (García de Vinuesa 2010: 254), this sets her writing in a different domain, one of hibridity and new connections between Africa and the Hispanic world, which she expresses in the following terms: ‘French cartesianism grafted onto African myths may yield strange fruits. Evocative and full of life. He [her father] was like that. And I wonder whether I too might be such a fruit’ (Agboton 2005: 32). As Inmaculada Díaz Narbona (2010: 240) points out, any attempt to categorize Agnès Agboton’s literary production rises an endless number of questions: ‘Should she be considered a writer from Benin? A Spanish writer? A Catalonian writer? An African Spanish writer? Or, rather an African Catalonian writer? What defines her “literary geography”? The languages in which she writes? The themes of her works? The colour of her skin?’ 1

Y es verdad que he sido un privilegiado testigo de su empecinada lucha por lograr que la musicalidad de su lengua tonal, ese gun dahomeano, salpicara de extrañas flores el castellano o el catalán a los que se traducía (Agboton 2009: 9). [My translation from Spanish into English].

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Perhaps the broader term “Afroeuropean”, as articulated by Marta Sofía López (2008: 3) is useful in order to link Agnès Agboton to a generation of black African, Caribbean and Latin American writers who have settled in Europe in the second half of the 20th century, living in diasporic communities scattered across Europe and not sharing a collective memory. In her optimistic assessment of the contribution of these Afroeuropean writers, Marta Sofía López states that: Considering their diversity and exploring their commonalities can be an extremely pedagogical exercise at the time of understanding the world we all live in. But the thousand histories and herstories contained in Afroeuropean narratives do also have another extremely salutary effect: they can seriously teach us to deflate the pompous oratory of Western nations on egalitarianism, human rights, democracy, freedom and so many other tall words that are so often employed with an unjustifiable degree of self-complacency to celebrate our purported unique social, economic and political achievements. Once again, the history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, which many nations and individuals in Europe would willingly forget and erase, resurface in the narratives produced by Afroeuropeans. (2008: 6)

Some of the differences between Agnès Agboton and the other two main African women writers in Spain may be explained from their different “Afrosporic” identities, to use Brancato’s (2007: 653) term which in the cases of Catalonia and Spain may or may not imply a connection with the former Spanish colonies of Equatorial Guinea, Morocco or the Sahara. Unlike María Nsue Angüe’s lament over the Spanish colonization of Equatorial Guinea (and over the destruction of the African continent by Europeans) in her novel Ekomo (1985), Agnès Agboton acknowledges Barcelona’s colonial history and its connections with the slave trade in order to advocate the possibility of a cosmopolitan, African and European city: ¿Sabéis? A veces me resulta gracioso pensar que vivo en Barcelona y que nací en la Costa de los Esclavos. Ahora sé que algunas de las grandes fortunas de Barcelona se consiguieron gracias al tráfico de esclavos y se puede decir que soy amiga de algunos descendientes de aquellas familias. La vida es un camino lleno de rodeos, lo que me lleva a pensar que quizá sí que avanzamos. Y que pese a las apariencias hay una luz más humana más allá del túnel. (2005: 23) You know? Sometimes it is funny to consider the fact that I live in Barcelona and yet I come from the Slave Coast. Now I know that some of Barcelona’s great fortunes were made through the slave trade and I can

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Agnès Agboton: Self-Translation and Intercultural Mediation even say that I have friends among the descendants of those families. Life is a path full of detours and that makes me think that perhaps we do move forward… that in spite of appearances there is a more human light beyond the tunnel. [My translation]

In this narrative of her story, her concern with being an African woman and living in Catalonia is not so much about validating her citizenship as a subject from a former Spanish colony, in contrast with Najat El Hachmi’s claim of those rights for herself and, by extension, for all those born in Morocco (as expressed in her essay Jo també sóc catalana, 2004). Yet there are parallels between both first-person narrators in Agboton’s autobiography Más allá del mar de arena [Beyond the sea of sand] (2005) and Najat El Hatchmi’s novel L’últim patriarca [The Last Patriarch] (2007). While the heroine in El Hachmi’s novel makes a wealth of acid comments about the constant racism she was subject to during her teenage years in Catalonia, Agboton is able to go beyond the momentary pain and see the ignorance of those who insult Africans. Here is an instance of El Hatchmi’s narrator bitterly recalling an incident at school: Era una maestra como la de Dientes blancos, aunque no era pelirroja ni demasiado guapa ni tenía en su aula a dos gemelos hijos de un musulmán de Bangladesh. Era yo quien tenía que verla cada día en clase y no decir nada, no gritarle cada vez que me humillaba delante de todo el mundo, eh, tú, que ya sé que te estás tirando a mi padre. ¿Por qué no lo dijiste? ¿Qué hubiera sido de nosotros? (2007:266) Although she was a teacher like the one in White Teeth, she was not red haired, not too pretty nor did she have twins born to a Bangladeshi Muslim in her class. I was the one who had to see her every day at school and keep silent –I could not shout at her every time she humiliated me in front of everybody, Hey, you, I know you are screwing my father. Why didn’t you say anything? What would have become of us? [My translation from the Spanish version]

Not only can this teacher be seen as a caricature of the sexy and innocent Poppy in White Teeth, but there is also a sense in this novel that there is nothing humorous or funny about growing up as a “morita” (lit. “little moor girl”) in Catalonia. The anger in the narrator’s voice seems to suggest that Catalonian (or Spanish) society at large is a far cry from the multicultural United Kingdom that Zadie Smith celebrates so unashamedly in her novel. Agnès Agboton is not unaware of the racism and general ignorance in the West towards Africa, and in her self-portrait she is terribly honest

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about her experiences as an African woman living in Spain (the publisher decided to complete the title of her autobiography in the Spanish version with this subheading, my italics). Experiencing a sense of belonging in Barcelona means acknowledging that it is not a fully multicultural society but also that there are certain changes going on: Lo que sí sé es que he aprendido a amar Barcelona. Ahora es mi ciudad, sí, la siento así. Y hoy ni siquiera me hacen daño, más bien me dan pena, quienes a veces (pocas, pocas…) me han dicho aquello de “vete a tu país”. A vosotros también os lo han dicho, muchas veces me habéis hablado de ello. Cuando el único argumento que una persona tiene para insultar a otra es el color de la piel, la cosa dice muy poco a favor de su inteligencia. Como decían en Benín durante la dictadura de Kérékou: Ehuzu Ehuzu, dan dan ló, las cosas están cambiando mucho. Ojalá cambien más aún. (Agboton 2005: 93) What I do know is that I have grown to love Barcelona. It is my city now, yes, that is how I feel about it. Today it hardly hurts me –it makes me sad, rather- when I am sometimes (very few times really…) told “go back to your own country”. You [my children] have also been told that, you have often talked to me about this. The fact that the colour of skin may be the only argument somebody has to insult someone else says very little regarding their intelligence. As people in Benin said during Kérékou’s dictatorship: Ehuzu Ehuzu, dan dan ló, things are changing. May they change even more... [My translation from Spanish]

But, as we will see, Agnès seems to be able to explore the roots of such racism and to change it, without any particular strategy of “educating Catalans” (and/or Spanish society in general), in what comes across as an ongoing conversation between her African heritage and her European experience. In this sense, Agboton’s poetry and narrative is a departure, not only from African women writers in Spain, but also from other African European woman writers. In comparison with Calixthe Beyala (who has said she considers herself “Afro-French”), Ken Bugul (Senegal) and Amma Darko (Ghana), Agnès Agboton’s texts are far more conciliatory and optimistic. In Más allá del mar de arena, Agnès explains her intention to tell her sons about her African upbringing and values along with the European values she has incorporated into her life, in a discourse which actually articulates her own hybrid identity as a woman and a writer. In her writing, whether telling stories of Benin for audiences of all ages in Catalonia, reading poetry in four languages or cooking African recipes in workshops, Agnès has been seen as an intercultural mediator and also an

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agent of transmission of the traditions she rescues: “Above all, cooking is a way of not forgetting. Of keeping traditions alive” (2005: 47). The connection between self-translation and intercultural mediation has been highlighted by recent researchers in Translation Studies, although few of them relate to the Hispanic world. Gema Soledad Castillo (2007: 155) investigates how the “in-between” space inhabited by Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico), who translates her works from Spanish into English, provokes different styles depending on the language in which she writes: “When I write in Spanish, my sentences are often as convoluted as a baroque retablo. When I write in English, Locke is locked in every sentence” (Ferré 1997: 103). Gema Castillo also quotes Carme Riera (2002: 12), a writer from Mallorca, who speaks about re-writing in a second language as an opportunity to become “more objective” and to gain distance from texts, and this process makes the author a “receiver”, rather than a “sender” of her self-translated texts. And I would add that both Rosario Ferré and Carme Riera’s position is similar to Agnès Agboton’s, as she expresses it in the interview below: “language constructs one” – in Ferré’s terms, “Writing in English is like looking at the world through a different pair of binoculars; it imposes a different mind-set” (Ferré 1997: 103). However, in spite of Agboton’s success as a tale teller and writer and her publishers’ marketing of her as a An African Woman in Spain – the subheading added by the Spanish publisher of Más allá del mar de arena [Beyond the Sea of Sand] –, one may wonder what exactly Agnès Agboton’s position is regarding her celebrated “intercultural mediation”, and what her intentions might be as a writer beyond the fact of being an African woman and living in Spain. In fact, after my first reading of Na Miton: La mujer en los cuentos y leyendas africanos (2004) [Na Miton: Women in African Tales and Legends], with high expectations of “cultural information” in order to learn about African women and their particular strategies of resistance, I found myself quite shocked at their very “politically incorrect” views of women’s duties and punishments in the traditional setting of the Dahomeian culture these stories relate to. The stories do not seem to represent women’s resistance to patriarchy nor do they seem offer any apparent bridge to Womanism, not to mention Western feminism –to the extent that I wondered what kind of cultural mediation was being carried out in their translation into alien cultures and languages (Catalan and Spanish), outside their original context, and what kind of cross-cultural “sisterhood” might be imaginable between African and European women.

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To quote some of these stories, in “Dadá Segbo y sus cuarenta y una mujeres” [Dadá Segbo and his forty one wives] (2004: 45-49), an old man organizes his marriage to his forty-first wife, despite the opposition of the other forty, who firstly object to it and who then get Yó the spider to dig a hole in the path to the river for the youngest one to fall into as she goes to fill her jar with water for her husband. Once the young woman hears the old man riding his horse and looking for her, she sings a song from her trap, and he suddenly recognizes her voice: Mè hé hô gnin enin Ko dja nin. Sè hé dô enin Ko dja nin. Yigmbe tché wè un wa hue (repeat) Adonon yogbó ka koundo (repeat) Zin flin goyo ma soun gbada Ema djahi hà Sè mè mon gbèmè nou wan gnan Wa sé létè nou ma dó gbèmè nou wan gnan Wa sé létè nou ma dó gbèmè hó yè dé noué. He aquí a quien se casó conmigo, Que está llegando. He aquí al principio vital a quien me debo, Que está llegando. Estaba yo haciendo mi camino Pero el glotón de Yó cavó un foso. La jarra que se tambalea debe asegurarse. Pero se ha quebrado, ¡ah! Pero el se, principio vital, ve todas las cosas. Ven, ponte aquí de pie para que yo te cuente algunas historias sobre la vida. (2004: 47) Here is the one who married me / arriving now./ Here is the vital principle I belong to/ he is arriving now./ I was walking my way/ but greedy Yó dug a ditch./ The trembling jar must be grabbed safely. But it is broken now, oh! / But se, the vital principle, sees everything. / Come! Stand beside me and let me tell you some stories about life. [My translation]

The man rescues her and the orders his people to decapitate the other forty wives. The moral of the story, we are told, is “si tu marido quiere tomar una co-esposa y eso no te gusta, debes llamarle, hacer que se siente y comunicárselo, hacérselo saber sinceramente. Pues sentir celos por ello, hasta desear su muerte, no es en absoluto algo bueno” (2004: 47-48)/ “if

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your husband wishes to take on a co-wife and you don’t like this, you must call him, ask him to sit down and be frank with him. Because feeling jealous about her, to the extent of wishing her death, is not good at all” [my translation]. Apart from a little inconsistency in the narrative –the forty wives do complain quite frankly at the beginning of the story–, the moral does not seem to mitigate the cruel fate of these women punished for their objection. Similarly, in “Historia de una mujer encinta” / “A Tale of a Pregnant Woman”, the heroine develops a craving for elephants’ tails and she dies a terrible death ripped apart by the angry tail-less elephants. Again, the story ends with a down-to-earth, commonsense moral, juxtaposed with the terrible punishment: “Cuando estás embarazada, debes comer lo que tienes y lo que te ofrecen” (2004: 53) / “When you are pregnant, you must eat what you have and what you are offered”. In “Las dos esposas” / “The Two Wives”, the Yale (first wife) tells the Yao (the new wife) to fetch water from a deep pool in the river, where the younger woman falls. A woodcutter hears the Yao’s song, telling her sad story, and finds her there some days later. When the chief is told, he orders the villagers to make a mat and “to behead the first wife so her blood allows the other woman to get out of the river and join her husband” (2004: 103). According to the moral of the story, “the envious ones must know that jealousy is not a good thing and, if you ignore this, you may be killed” (2004: 104). Upon a second reading of these stories, this pattern of the “disobedient” or “whimsical” woman who acts according to her desires, her spectacular death and the repressive sharp moral of the story made me suspect the possibility of an underlying mockery in the whole narrative. Attending one of Agnès Agboton’s live performances, I was able to confirm this: their unique oral quality and the echoes in the repetition of certain phrases, the visual and imaginative cruelty of the plots and the gestures added a particular sense of humor. If this were the case, as I now believe it is, the intercultural aspect of these stories is not about their literal content (with plenty of inconsistencies and cruelty, as most tales in different traditions) but, rather, in the relish with which the story is told and received by the audience. This is not to discard the anthropological value and wisdom they contain, but, instead, to highlight their affirmation of the universal joy of listening, the feast of narration and the magic of words and gestures in performance. Paradoxically, her inclusion of songs and poems in Gun in several fragments of the Spanish versions signifies the foreignness of the original, to use Venuti’s terms (1995: 200) as they deviate from the literary canon in Spanish, revealing a fierce will to resist ‘domesticating’

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her Gun narratives for Catalan and Spanish audiences. The transliteration of the stories from oral to the written form, and their translation from Gun into Catalan and Spanish, are unique acts of intercultural mediation between Benin and Spain or between Africa and Europe which Agnès Agboton has achieved. This process is beautifully illustrated in the photograph on the back cover of her collection of stories Eté Utú (2009), which portrays Agboton holding a microphone for an old woman and recording her words. I finally decided to ask Agnès Agboton about her own practice of selftranslation, and I found confirmation regarding these nuances within her role in intercultural mediation – a role that is so often seen and theorised regarding the works of many African authors living and writing in Europe. Here are the answers she gave me (in Spanish, with my translation into English). Question: How do you have this awesome will to write in three languages, i.e., Gun, Catalan and Spanish? Initially it was not a deliberate decision – I believe it has only been due to my own personal journey. I was born into a Gun family and, because of that very family circumstance, I found myself immersed in sounds of other languages and dialects such as Yoruba, Fon or Mina, which still accompany me in the shape of a placid purr. I was first educated in French, afterwards I married a Catalonian man and, living with him in his country, I discovered this language that seduces me, that I feel very comfortable with it. Then, I am constantly in contact with (Castilian) Spanish, a language I embraced when I arrived in Spain which was also the language of my degree in Language and Literature. It is astonishing how this may become a source of some problems, because Romance languages have an annoying way of overlapping with each other and I can never feel sure that what I have written is “correct” as an academic might do. Q: ‘Language constructs one’, you have often said. In what sense does each one of these languages construct you? Of course, language constructs us… Have you ever noticed the way Germans or Italians argue? I believe this has to do, partly, with the fact that verbs in German are placed at the end of the sentence, and this is an impediment for the opposite party to understand it until the first speaker has finished – and that implies an apparently much less heated argument and demands a particular way of receiving the other’s word… So it gradually constructs us, it certainly does.

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It is true, I have said this before and I still think so. Not just at the written level, but also at the oral one. This is an endless construction and also a fascinating one from my point of view and also in the geographical spot where I live. In Barcelona I continue to speak Gun with friends and relatives, even from a distance, and it is the same with French. Then, regarding Spanish and Catalan, the fact of being in permanent physical contact with them, the influence of these two languages (which I think I have mastered but I will, unfortunately, never ‘feel’ them) is always constructing me inwardly, though not at random. And fortunately this is a bottomless pit… The first time I listened to Catalan (not understanding a word of it, of course) was in Ivory Coast, on the veranda at Bingerville, listening to Manuel’s [her husband] conversation with his mother (his parents came to spend a few days with him when I was already there). Catalan felt then a very sweet and tender language… And it still feels so now, being my everyday language and knowing about its dry outbursts… However, we also learned Spanish at school (as a second foreign language) and my relation towards it from the beginning had a nice “cultural” nuance. We enjoyed studying it. I once listened to a psychologist saying that pure bilingualism is impossible, that there will always be a prevalent language… I don’t know… I feel ‘four-lingual’ and I switch – easily, even within the same conversation – from one language to another. This is a “requirement of the script”, as a particular expression in the middle of a dialogue may require code-switching. In Catalonia this is a constant phenomenon – Catalan and Spanish mix without the least effort in everyday conversation (and it goes almost unnoticed). At home this phenomenon is even more intense as French comes in and, when Manuel and I talk, we tend to look for the right word in whatever language to express what we think or what we feel, not bothered at all by switching from one language to another. In my case I believe it is the theme of whatever I wish to write that actually chooses its language… although sometimes this decision may be made by the publisher. I have published in Gun, in Catalan and in Castilian Spanish, but never in French. Regarding Beyond the Sea of Sand (2005), I translated it from Castilian Spanish into Catalan (as I speak Catalan with my children and this book, as you know, is addressed to them). But both versions are, for me, the ‘original’. Writing literature is quite different altogether, of course – I must choose and write just one language… but that is a ‘process of manufacture’. In fact, even speaking a single language, the very fact of doing that is already a ‘translation’. We translate into words various impulses, emotions

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and thoughts which originally are not ‘verbal’… Ultimately, it is all about translating! Q: Your poetry seems to flow in Gun, your writing on African cooking originates in Gun and is published in Catalan, your book on your personal journey moves from Catalan into Spanish… Tell us more about the language you write in and the genre of each text. Yes, my poetry flows in Gun… perhaps (I am not sure) because it comes from an intimate drive rooted in my childhood. Words in Gun have, for me, a smell and a taste (and this is not a metaphor, it is actually physical, real); the Gun tongue also, as all tonal languages, allows for a very poetic approach to the ‘music’ in words. I ‘feel’ my poetry in Gun, that is true… Regarding my cookery books Columna Publishers asked me for a first (and ancient) booklet on African recipes and, because Columna publish in Catalan, that was the only option. But I remember when this publishing house wanted to print that old book again, later on, I suggested a new one (in Catalan): Àfrica des del fogons [Africa from the Stove]. By the time this book was published, Columna had already launched Ediciones del Bronce in Spanish and the Catalan book just came out at the same time – I think there was a year’s difference between the publications in both languages (it had already ‘grown’ in both languages!) But I must say that, for me, you know, perhaps if it hadn’t been a demand by the publisher, I would also have written it in Gun. As I have always felt that cooking, be it from my continent or any other, is nearly another form of poetry – although there are many other issues attached to it apart from the simple fact of satisfying hunger. Q: Self-translation has been seen recently as mediation between cultures… have you ever felt pressed to play this role as a writer? I am thinking of the subheading of your autobiography in the Spanish version, Una mujer Africana en España [An African Woman in Spain]. Well, I would say that can be the case quite often… Regarding the subheading Una mujer Africana en España [An African Woman in Spain], it was certainly a commercial strategy on the part of Lumen Publishers. As an anecdote, the version in Catalan by Rosa dels vents Publishers says Una dona africana a la nostra terra [An African Woman in our land]. Q: The back cover of Eté Utú shows a fascinating photograph of you holding a microphone for an old woman (in Benin, I suppose), who might be telling one of the stories in your book. Tell us more about it.

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The photograph on the back cover of Eté Utú is, in fact, the origin of ‘everything’. This elderly woman is Tanyi Akare (one of the guardians of my family’s oral heritage) and she is telling the story of the Agboton family from its origins. We call this ‘the praises’ (les louanges) and they are transmitted by word of mouth. After I met Manuel (and our son Didac had been born) and it was him (with his interest in African cultures) who encouraged me to record those louanges so they might be kept before Tanyi Akare died. My father became the ‘translator’ when the language felt too esoteric – as a comparison for us to understand this, it would be like checking out classical Greek or Latin in order to understand the meaning of a word. This is often the case with the elderly – a whole culture is disappearing and its codes along with it. My father became interested in this task. He took a degree and did a PhD in History with a doctoral thesis on these ‘praises’ and a part of it was published in Barcelona by Studia Africana, the journal of the CEA (Centre de Estudis Africans). So yes, this photograph is a record of the beginning… Q: In the long way journey that moves from the recording of a story to its transcription and translation, what is gained and what is lost for the reader in Catalan and Spanish? The gain is about being able to fix in written language some aspects of that knowledge with all that is implied in a given culture and not losing it. What is lost, in my experience of translating some stories, is the freshness of the oral language, the long and rich innuendoes, that evoke the meanings of words which, once moved into more normative corsets, constrain one a lot more. Let me give you an example: n’ñi wuan nan wué means literally ‘I like your smell’, and I eventually have to translate it as ‘I love you’. This also means omitting other implied emotions, which are untranslatable. That is why I believe that my task collecting these stories in Spanish or in Catalan is a very evocative challenge that I happily impose on myself, to see if I can pour them into ‘another’ Spanish or Catalan of my own. But once I am done, I let my readers judge that. French is a wholly different thing. I have never published in French, although I have done it alongside my work process to see what it would yield, or how I feel it. However, this is not a kind of game that allows me to use the language of the metropolis, but the very special French we speak over there.

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Q: Your stories may not be too politically correct –in fact they may be quite cruel, even towards women. Is there anything you would wish to convey to your European women readers? Oh, no! There is nothing I wish to teach in that sense… I am just trying to take care of an oral heritage which is disappearing and to write down on paper these certain moments or shivering instances that keep me alive… mainly out of selfishness, because this makes me feel well. I do not care much about being politically correct (and I have stated this in Beyond the Sea of Sand) and I mistrust those messiahs who claim to possess the truth (catholics and muslims, marxists, feminists…). There is no way I want to place myself in the role of a wise lady teaching poor ignorant people… But of course, if they wish to learn something, then why not? It is about approaching another way of looking at things and then deciding whether they like it or not – I believe I am only trying to offer people something I have drunk from. In fact, there are other writers who would not agree with what I do and who have chosen other paths which are just as perfectly valid.

Works Cited Agboton, Agnès. África dels fogons. Barcelona: Columna, 2001 (Catalan version). África en los fogones. Barcelona: Ediciones del Bronce, 2002 (Spanish version). —. Na Mitón. La mujer en los cuentos y leyendas africanos. Barcelona: RBA, 2004. —. Más allá del mar de arena. Una africana en España. Barcelona: Lumen, 2005. —. Canciones del poblado y del exilio. Bilingual edition: Gun and Spanish. Barcelona: Viena Edicions, 2006. —. Eté utú. Cuentos de tradición oral. De por qué en África las cosas son lo que son. Palma de Mallorca: Olañeta, 2009. —. “Poems” (In Gun and Spanish, translated from the Spanish by Maya García de Vinuesa). Wasafiri Vol. 23, Nº 4 2008: 47-49. —. Voz de las dos orillas. Bilingual edition Gun-Spanish. Málaga: Diputación de Málaga, 2009. Brancato, Sabrina. “From Routes to Roots: Afrosporic Voices in Italy”. Callaloo Vol. 3, Number 2, Spring 2007: 653-661. Castillo, Gema Soledad. Rosario Ferré, mediadora entre culturas: Sus autotraducciones de Maldito Amor y The House on the Lagoon. Alcalá de Henares: Publicaciones de la UAH, 2005.

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Díaz Narbona, Inmaculada. “Agnès Agboton: A una y otra ribera del mar de arena”, in Miampika & Arroyo (eds.), De Guinea Ecuatorial a las literaturas hispanoafricanas. Madrid: Verbum, 2010, 239-252. Ferré, Rosario. “Writing in Between”. Hopscotch: A Cultural Review 1.1, 1997: 102-109. El-Hachmi, Najat. El último patriarca. Barcelona: Planeta, 2008. García de Vinuesa, Maya. “Desde el umbral: María Nsue Angüe y Agnès Agboton. Iniciación en las escritoras hispanoafricanas”, in Miampika & Arroyo (eds.), De Guinea Ecuatorial a las literaturas hispanoafricanas. Madrid: Verbum, 2010, 253-265). López, Marta Sofía (ed.). Afroeuropeans: Cultures and Identities. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Miampika, Landry-Wilfrid & Patricia Arroyo (eds.). De Guinea Ecuatorial a las literaturas hispanoafricanas. Madrid: Verbum, 2010. Nsüe Angüe, María. Ekomo. Madrid: UNED, 1985. Riera, Carme. “La autotraducción como ejercicio de recreación”. Quimera 210, 2002: 10-12. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995.

AFROEUROPE IN THE CANARY ISLANDS: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANTONIO LOZANO ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO

In 1987 Antonio Lozano (Tangier 1956) began the “Festival del Sur” – the Meeting of Three Continents, a theatre festival that sought to bring together the cultures of Europe, America and Africa, and which has been held every year since then in the charming Canary village of Agüimes. This interview came about as a result of my attendance at the Festival in 2010 which, having reached its 23rd year, is now recognised as one of the most prestigious events of its kind in the Canaries and in Spain. This year Antonio Lozano has decided to retire from running a festival which has long since come of age and is able to fend for itself, leaving its founder free to concentrate on other matters such as his writing (author of a number of prize-winning novels) and on his work with Africa House, created in 2007 by the Spanish government. With its headquarters in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, “Casa África”, like the Festival of the South, seeks to improve links and encourage greater collaboration between Africa and Europe. A man of many parts, Lozano is able to provide a number of clues to understanding this European enclave situated 95 kilometres from the continental African land mass and, paradoxically, 1,400 from the European. Question: Let’s have a brief look at history. Geographically the Canaries archipelago forms part of the continent of Africa. It has nevertheless belonged to Spain since the 15th century. Who inhabited the islands before the Spanish arrived? To what extent was the original population affected by the Spanish invasion? Did any other European imperial powers play a significant part in the Canary Islands? Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Canaries were inhabited by the Guanches (although this name is specific to the inhabitants of Tenerife, it has come to be applied, by extension, to everyone from the archipelago). They were a people of Berber origin, whose arrival on the islands remains

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to be pinpointed exactly, although there are some theories that suggest they were rebels against the might of Rome who were despatched to sea in small boats and ended up on the islands. What is clear is that the islands have been inhabited since some centuries before Christ and in peace and quiet until, in the 15th century, Spain decided to annex the territory. Despite the enormous resistance mounted by the Guanches, the Spanish ended up occupying the islands and incorporating them into the crown of Castille. The native population was in large part annihilated, and those who survived were sent as slaves to the peninsula or gradually mixed with the colonists who arrived to take over the islands. Although Spain was nominally the political power, much of the economy was for a long time in English hands, while the French and Portuguese presence was also significant, leaving an indelible trace in Canaries history. Q: As the spirit of the “Festival del Sur” demonstrates, The Canaries are to be found at the centre of the continental triangle Europe-America-Africa. What has been the particular importance of each of these three in the historical configuration of The Canary Islands? In other words, after the conquest, is it possible that, despite the distance, America has had a greater impact that Africa on the sociopolitical configuration of the Islands? I’m thinking, for example, of one of the main tourist attractions, the renovated old quarter of Vegueta, in Las Palmas: the Columbus House Museum, where the controversial mariner spent the final days before his first successful journey westwards. For historical reasons the American influence has undoubtedly been greater than the African. The Canaries people, firstly as colonists in the lands conquered by Spain, and later as emigrants, have always been travellers, and especially to America. Cities such as Montevideo, or San Antonio in Texas, among others, were founded by people from The Canaries and their presence has spread to other important regions such as Venezuela and Cuba. The Canaries has always lived with its back to Africa, and relations with the continent have always been few and far between. Q: With regard to the Spanish colonisation of Africa, how was this perceived from The Canaries? One might think that, given the geographical proximity, Canarians could have been more closely involved than peoples from more remote areas in the Spanish peninsula. Is that true?

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I didn’t live in The Canaries then. However, I do know that in the case of Western Sahara, the presence of people from The Canaries was significant and relations with the Saharans were particularly cordial in comparison to those with Spaniards from elsewhere. This would explain why, today, The Canaries is the autonomous region which defends most ardently the rights of the Saharan people for their independence and why people from The Canaries have been first in line ever since Spain took up the Saharan cause. Q: In that sense, is it just chance that, having been born in Tangier, you have chosen The Canaries as your home? It was chance that I chose The Canaries. I intended to spend a couple of years here and then follow the path to somewhere else. What was not chance was that this land entrapped me from the first moment because, actually, there is much in common with Morocco, and here I feel so much closer – and not just geographically – to the country I was born in than I would from the peninsula. Q: At this year’s Festival of the South the short film “Sahara” by María Jesús Alvarado was presented, a woman from the Canaries who was born in the Western Sahara when it was a Spanish colony. As well as condemning the flagrant injustice suffered by the Saharan people ever since Spain left them, and the annexation by Morocco in 1975, this beautiful documentary provides a rather nostalgic view of the Spanish colonial period, not just on the part of the director, but that of the Saharan people themselves. Do you agree with this perception of the Spanish colonisation of the region? I don’t think that the short The Door to the Sahara is an acritical film. Mª Jesús is someone who is utterly dedicated to the Saharan cause, and this dedication is carried into her artistic work – both her film and in her writing, she is an excellent poet – but also in her daily campaigning. It is, however, quite understandable that this first film should be impregnated with a certain amount of nostalgia, because this is the land where she was born, the land where she spent her childhood and her teenage years, and she made it very closely with the Saharan people. The comments of the Saharans who appear in the film and which, in some cases, also reflect this nostalgia, are also understandable for two reasons: because, as I said before, putting to one side the fact that colonisation is a form of political and economic domination of one people over another, there exist human relationships between men and women which circumstances have obliged to live together in the same place. And, on the other hand, because the

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situation of the Saharan people continues to be, in the present day, colonial, but much more brutally, with a large number exiled in the Tinduf camps and with others living on their own land but subject to utter repression. Q: At this Festival the presence of the group Origins, from Equatorial Guinea, sponsored by the Spanish Cultural Centre in Malabo and which has brought together the five main ethnic groups in the country in a single production, was also highly acclaimed. One of the actresses complained that in Spain many people do not even know of the existence of this former Spanish colony, a country which has Spanish (together with French) as its official language, and which continues to hold in esteem everything Spanish. What do you think is the reason for this ignorance? Is it lack of interest? Would you say that people from The Canaries are more conscious of Spain’s colonial past in equatorial Africa? Origins was actually quite an extraordinary show and, as always happens with culture, it provided an exceptional way of bringing us closer to a greater understanding of other countries, in this case of Equatorial Guinea. With regard to knowing Guinea better or worse, one has to place it within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about Africa that is prevalent in Spain. We have always lived with our backs to our neighbouring continent, and Guinea, however much of a Spanish colony it might have been, is no exception. In The Canaries the same has happened as in the rest of the country, except for the case of Western Sahara, due to its geographical and human proximity, given that many people from The Canaries live there. But there is no doubt that this situation has begun to change, and perhaps in The Canaries more than in other places, because the arrival of immigrants to our shores, and their incorporation into our society, has made such an attitude necessary in this sense. Q: Among the Festival’s parallel activities you coordinated the symposium “50 años de ¿Independencias? africanas”, where important issues were addressed, such as development and cooperation models in the face of aggressive capitalism, and the possible convenience of following African models in order to stimulate production paradigms different from existing ones, as well as sustainable consumption models -in line with the pressing needs of an environment in crisis. There were also suggestions of a need to return to ways of thinking and living together which have been reviled for so long and which Africa, with all its problems has shown itself to be a repository… How

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can we relate all these questions to the existence, increasingly documented and debated over, of an historical notion and identity that we know as “Afroeurope”? I’m not sure that the concept of Afroeurope, which is certainly gaining currency, corresponds to a political and cultural reality. I believe, it is true, that the way out of the African crisis must come from the continent itself, but it must do so with the help of Europe. Not in the manner whereby Europe, up until now, has steered Africa towards the abyss, but from a conception of a relationship between the two continents based on equality, on respect for the autonomy of African countries as they conceive their own future. This collaboration also entails the assumption by Europe that there is a historical and economic debt with Africa. It is shocking that considering how much Europe has taken from Africa in terms of human and economic resources, it should be Africa which appears to be in debt to Europe. It is African civil society which, through antiglobalisation and alternative associations, brings together the greatest potential – in terms of ideas and proposals – for the construction of a new Africa. There is, undoubtedly, an Afroeuropean dialogue, but at a personal level, of groups that are in tune with each other. But with regard to European governments, this idea remains unexpressed: that is to say, one must save Africa, but continue to fleece its resources. In other words, to break down the barriers between Africa and Europe to alleviate the misery which we ourselves are generating there. Q: In a wider sense, I would like to ask you about the Festival. Was it easy to get going such an ambitious idea? What support did you have at the beginning? What difficulties did you encounter on the way? What do you consider to be the major successes of this festival, now in its 23rd year? The “Festival del Sur” has been, and still is, a wonderful adventure. Its aim was to create a space for the theatre, and thus the cultures, of Europe, Africa and America, the three continents most closely associated with the Canaries archipelago. Already 23 years ago it seemed to us essential that we should open ourselves up to Africa, to establish relationships that would allow the people of The Canaries to get to know their neighbours. We began with few resources: the first year, for example, we had no seats for the theatres that we were using, and we had to take them from one theatre to another – simple fold up wooden chairs – in order to be ready for the next day. Public support was magnificent from the beginning, both as audience and as helpers. People gave us furniture from their houses in order to supply the scenery, and many young people came to help the

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organising team as volunteers. Grants were minimal, but as from the second year they were reduced even further, because the government was not happy with the success garnered by the first festival: the media made comparisons between the government’s cultural policies and those of a small town, and they were not to their liking, it seems. Today, 23 years later, the Festival is more than established and, despite the economic cutbacks, it has evolved in many ways, until it has become a point of reference and the only Spanish festival which welcomes African theatre. But, on the whole, its aims and its character remain the same. Q: I understand that the choice of Las Palmas, capital of the Gran Canaria province, as the headquarters for such an important institution as “Casa África”, unique to Spain, is a result of some of the issues we have already touched upon: the proximity of The Canaries to Africa; the great involvement of people from The Canaries in Spain’s African policies; the existence of the “Festival del Sur”; in short, the genuine interest for all things African which is palpable in The Canaries. Are you optimistic that you will achieve your aims? Do you think that Africa House has, or will develop, the capacity to prevent undesirable interference in Africa? Which cultural projects that you are engaged in would you particularly focus on? Africa House is an institution belonging to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an instrument at the service of Spanish foreign policy in Africa. From a political point of view, it follows the line of the government in power at any specific time. In that sense, I do not think it is among its tasks, nor can it be, to prevent undesirable influence in Africa. What it can do, on the other hand, and I think it is doing, is bring the African experience closer to Spanish society, above all culturally; it can bring about a greater understanding of Africa. And that is no small thing, and it is being done in a variety of ways, through cinema, literature, the performing arts, the fine arts… Not long ago, to attend an African cultural event in The Canaries or in the rest of Spain was something unusual. Today, thanks to what has been achieved, things have changed a lot. But work is not only being done in the area of culture, but also in politics, with meetings between social partners from both sides, in the area of cooperation, of society itself. I strongly believe that the work done by “Casa África” is important and necessary, although it is beyond its ability to go further than providing a meeting point between Spain and Africa in a number of fields, which again, is no small thing.

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Q: As a writer you take on the issue of the African exodus to Europe for the first time in your first novel Harraga (2002), which received various awards. You were undoubtedly motivated by the drama reflected in the small boats which wash up almost daily on the Spanish coast, and particularly The Canaries, and what is especially terrible is the tragedy of those that don’t arrive… I would also like to ask you about the genesis and development of Donde mueren los ríos (Where the Rivers Die, 2003), another thriller which was very well received by the critics and which has as its protagonists a number of Africans settled in Las Palmas. The fact that the narrative is related in the first person in the voices of various people from Burkina Faso, Mali, Morocco and Sierra Leone underlines your familiarity with these cultures. Yes, both novels are centred on the issue of illegal immigration, and that is because it seems to me that this is the great drama that humanity is labouring under today. In Harraga, I tried to represent the inner voice of the emigrant, their hopes and frustrations resulting from the situation in which they find themselves. I think we have talked for a long time about the emigrant from our point of view, and it is necessary to put ourselves in their skin, of the skin of those who have left everything in order to get here in search of support for their families, risking their lives, leaving behind friends, family and identity. At the same time I try to submerge into the world of people trafficking, which is not only to do with the mafias who run the boats, but also more powerful interests on both sides. In Where the Rivers Die, I try to give a voice to four emigrants in order that they be the ones to tell us how they got here, how they did it, and what has happened to them once they became settled here. The aim is the same, and at no time do I attempt to provide answers to the problem, rather I share with the reader the questions that I ask myself. Each one of the characters reflects a very different experience, as indeed is the African experience, very diverse: in both novels I ask the reader to extract the individual, the human being, from the mass of emigrants who seem all the same to us, so that we can open up a dialogue person to person. Q: In 2006 you published El caso Sankara (The Sankara Case), a novelistic exploration of the charismatic leader of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara, and of his murder. It seems to me very daring to fictionalise such a weighty subject, which, in my opinion, is evidence of your maturity as an author. The success of this ambitious project is obvious, as you received the City of Carmona award for thriller fiction. How did you go about writing the novel?

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After learning about Thomas Sankara and of the political process that he carried through, which amazed me, and on realising that in Spain nobody had heard of it, I felt an obligation to write about him. His murder was one of the most ignominious examples of European intervention in African history. Sankara’s political career showed that today Africa needs to emerge from its permanent crisis by itself: honesty, the fight against corruption, equality between men and women, environmental protection, endogenous economic development, political independence, development of education, culture, health… In all these areas, Sankarism was exemplary, and for it to be so Sankara had to oppose the dictates of the old metropolis, France, and the prescriptions of the World Bank and the IMF. His voice was continually raised against the grave injustices of the world, and he had to be silenced. And he was: both his voice and his legacy. The novel El caso Sankara aims to provide a small grain of sand in the restoration of Thomas Sankara, by making him known in Spain. Not only for what he did, but also because he is a perfect reference for what should be done, which explains why his name has not emerged beyond the frontiers of Africa. The writing process began with an intense period of documentation, about him and about French colonialism, because what happened in Burkina Faso – The Land of the Honest Men was the name that Sankara gave the country – cannot be decontextualised from the history of French intervention in the continent. Q: The dominant image of the Canaries in the European imagination, actually, is that of a tourist resort, offering tropical surroundings without the inconvenience that the west associates with Africa. That is to say, from the west, the African identity of the Canaries is not visible. In a general sense, to what extent is this identity visible in the archipelago itself? How do the people from the canaries see themselves? By considering ourselves European, people from the Canaries have forgotten that we are also African. Of course, not everybody: many of us assert this condition, but for the majority, the possibility does not even pass through their minds. Q: To finish, and in your opinion, what place does the Canaries occupy in the configuration of Afroeurope? The Canaries must play a fundamental role in the rapprochement of Europe and Africa. It is something that we have always believed, and which ought to be our main contribution to the world: to offer ourselves as

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a meeting point for establishing political, cultural and human relationships with Africa. Thank you very much.

AN AFROEUROPEAN WRITER: VAMBA SHERIF ON HIMSELF VAMBA SHERIF

One day, I must have been ten or eleven years old, I was browsing through the family library in Kolahun, Liberia, when I stumbled on a unique book. The library, which was inaccessible to anyone outside of the family, contained centuries-old handwritten manuscripts in Arabic, some composed by my ancestors. There was a corner reserved for English books, collected by my brothers and uncles who had attended a secondary school built by missionaries who had settled in Bolahun, a small village outside of Kolahun. This particular book contained legends and tales of Europe. The book would introduce me to Hercules and the Greek mythologies, to Thor and the Scandinavian mythologies, and a host of other mythologies, including the Irish ones. The stories, though placed in a distant world and time, sounded familiar to me: the odds the heroes had to surmount to attain their goals, the stories of princes and princesses, and of witches and gnomes, seemed to have come straight from tales my grandmother told me at night, out in the moonlight, while the family compound sizzled with life. The discovery that Europe and my world shared something in common besides the dark periods of slavery and then colonization would trigger my passion for European literature in particular, and for world literature in general. Europe and I would meet years later, but not before I left Liberia and settled in Kuwait to pursue secondary school education. Ensconced in a culture where stories abounded and where a poet was once treated as a king, I explored my passion for books, exhausting not only classical Arabic poets but works of great writers such as Thomas Mann, Primo Levi, Dickens, Goethe, Schiller, and of course Dante, in whom I found traces of Arabian influences. In Kuwait, due in part to its wealth, I was afforded the opportunity to purchase books of my choice, so that at school, while my chemistry teacher lectured about the periodic table, my head would be buried in a book by one Umberto Eco, by one Calvino, or by Camus. It was not my intention to become a writer those days, but

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whenever I wrote a letter home to aunts and uncles, and to friends I had left behind and whom I only missed when I was with them, I tried to capture the sensation of the desert heat on my face, and the experience of witnessing a storm of sand sweeping across the streets, turning everything in its path into ochre red. I would write in detail about my obsession with insects which I searched under stones and in furrows in the desert whenever I participated in a school excursion. I would describe my daily ritual of waking up every morning to breakfast on flat bread or brown Iranian bread, and always accompanied by hot tea saturated with sugar, for it was believed that it dampened the effect of the heat on the body. The yellow American looking bus would take me to school, where I would sit before teachers all of who were foreigners, come to seek opportunity in that land of opulence. While the teacher struggled to explain the periodic table or while he analyzed a chemical compound, I would be reading Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard , recognizing in the Prince of Salinas the person of my uncle, an august and wise man and the bearer of a tradition that went back centuries; the man whom I wanted to be when I grew up, and who would affect my outlook on life, making me an optimist despite my difficult experiences, and converting me to the idea that religion in essence was a means of trying to create harmony between people, and that if it fell short of that goal it was not to be called religion at all but a means of suppressing people. The Prince of Salinas was my uncle. His rage, his musings, his inability to halt the changes around him, I perceived as my uncle’s inability to bring across his message of tolerance to the world at large, dying years later during the Liberian civil war, a victim in a war in which anyone who advocated hope and peace was perceived as enemy. Saddam then invaded Kuwait, forcing me to flee the country in search of another place to pursue my dreams. I ended up in the Netherlands. For the first time I was confronted with a culture that made me keenly aware of my place in the world. It was a culture with a different language and a different outlook on life, individualistic in every sense, while the cultures I had cultivated up to that point often laid emphasis on the common good. Though our histories were intertwined, with the Dutch being one of the firsts who sailed the shores of Liberia, who named it the Green Coast and then the Pepper Coast, they were not histories of equals. They were histories in which people of my color had been dominated, colonized, and their sense of self lost in that interaction. Though one could argue that the same thing could be said of the Arabs, who had had once dominated my culture, resulting in my being a Muslim today, though not a practicing one anymore, this Western Dutch culture had also dominated the Arabs,

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making it possible for me to look at them as belonging to my history. These facts heightened my sense of self once I settled in the Netherlands. First of all I had to master the language, which I was certain ‘would make me immune from the conspiracies of its speakers,’ as the saying goes in my country. Language meant access to the people and perhaps a sense of belonging. This was all happening in a period in which the debate for integration was alive as nowhere else in the world. I learned the Dutch language in less than three years, and entered law school, during which I began to write a novel. The attempt at writing came about because of my confusion regarding myself, because of the questions the war threw at me on a daily basis, and my inability to accept the stark truth that the country I had left behind as a child was no more. The people who made up that country and who were dear to me were now scattered to all corners of the earth, seeking refuge and a new beginning elsewhere. I was sure that whenever I saw Liberia again, it would never be the same. That much was evident with the gruesome images of child soldiers, of warring factions, of lootings and rapes that the television spewed out every day. The novel was an attempt to keep myself whole, an attempt to protect myself from quaking under the pressure of those images and those new realities. The novel would be called The land of the fathers. It was about the founding of Liberia by the freed men who returned to Africa to found a country they could call home. I hoped that the novel would explain my land to myself, that it would explain the war to me, but most importantly exile and what it meant to me, for in essence it was a novel of exile. The freed blacks who had returned maintained the lives led in America, and some dreamed of returning to that America. The civil war in Liberia was also part of the novel, for some of the characters were forced to flee the war and seek safety in another country. The publication of the novel had a profound impact on my life. I toured the country, giving readings to a mostly white audience who had not heard of Liberia in any positive sense but knew it only as a war torn country where bloodthirsty war lords roamed. For the first time, I felt at home. I felt that with my writing I had fulfilled the dream that I had been harboring since childhood, to become a writer like my father had been, a poet like my uncles had been, like their fathers had always been. I was grateful to the Netherlands in particular and to Europe for helping me realize my dream. I became a columnist for the university magazine, then for other newspapers; I wrote articles about issues ranging from my experience during a brief visit to Liberia during the war, to the Taliban bombing of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan. I was living my dream.

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Meanwhile, all around me, the battle about integration and the multicultural society was raging. There was a current of nationalism which was fueling this debate, the feeling that the host nation was being deprived of jobs, while foreigners lived off welfare; and the fact that the country had more than two million foreigners and that the cities had more foreigners than citizens only worsened matters. Doomed scenarios were sketched. Soon, it was believed and propagated everywhere that Europe would be crushed under the weight of strangers who were intent on altering its future – outsiders who in fact hated its way of life. The solution was integration and the closing of borders to all who spoke languages that were not Western European. But integration was never really and has never been clearly defined. Did it mean assimilating in the European culture? Sometimes I felt that way, especially when emphasis was laid on the importance of the culture of the new country? So much so that I felt at a certain moment that I was being confronted with a people who felt superior to my way of life. At times I felt that Europe, Netherlands in particular, was asking me to abandon my African way of life, including the wealth of experience I had acquired with my presence amongst the Arabs of Kuwait. The sense of confusion which resulted in this pervasive, all-consuming debate, might have led me to search for a way to define myself. While others turned to religion, adhering fervently to it as they never did in their own countries, I turned to my talent as a writer and went on exploring my humanity, my sense of self in the world. I owe it to Europe, to its staunch position regarding migrations, that I came to accept and value my culture and everything I had become, value it within the context of being an AfroEuropean. Did it mean that I could confront and survive the onslaught and the raging debate that is still going on? I think so. Although Europe claims homogeneity, basing its past on the Greek civilization, I realize in my wide readings that these claims have no solid basis. The Greek civilization was not independent of the African and the Asiatic civilizations, which meant that the cries for mono-culture and emphasis on national identities were in fact an attempt to polarize society, to isolate the weak, the vulnerable, the minority groups. Europe, especially in the Netherlands, has always been an amalgam of cultures, including the Greek culture with its Afro-Asiatic influences. I want to live within that Europe, that Europe of diverse cultures. But the battle continues, the nationalists gaining the upper hand everyday, and every day I feel the sense of being squeezed into nonentity, into insignificance ever greater.

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I belong to Europe though, and as the cord of hatred, which is covered up with the cloak of fervent nationalism and a call for integration, tightens around my neck, I sharpen my knife of common human values determinedly, with the intention of shivering that cord once and for all.

CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Arndt is professor of English and African literatures at the University of Bayreuth. She has worked and published extensively on the African novel, theatre, performance oratures in Africa, African feminism, gender theories, intertextuality Renaissance English literature and the 18th21st century British novel and Postcolonial theory with a focus on racism and Critical Whiteness Studies. She is the author of African Women’s Literature, Orature and Intertextuality and The Dynamics of African Feminism. Moreover, she has (co)edited the following books: Afrikabilder (2001); Afrika und die deutsche Sprache (2004); Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland (2005); Africa, Europe and Postcolonialism (2006); Theatre, Performance and New Media in Africa (2007); Words and Worlds. African Writing, Literature and Society (2007); Exophonie. Anders-Sprachigkeit (in) der Literatur (2007) and Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht. (K)Erben des Rassismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache (2010). Isabel Alonso-Breto is a lecturer in postcolonial cultures and literatures in English at the University of Barcelona. She has published articles on writing by women of Canadian, Caribbean, Indian and Sri Lankan origin. She is a member of CEA (The Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Barcelona) and of LITPOST, a research group devoted to the study of postcolonial literatures and emerging arts. Daniela Brogi teaches Italian Literature at the University for Foreigners of Siena (Italy). Her main research fields are the narrative modes from the Middle Age to the present. She has published on Boccaccio, Manzoni, Verga, Bilenchi, Cassola, Pasolini, Visconti, Calvino. She is currently carrying out a research project on Italian cinema. Maya García de Vinuesa is a lecturer at the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Alcalá where she teaches Literary Translation and Postcolonial Literatures; she is a member of the international research group “Afroeurope@ns: Black Identities and Cultures in Europe”, and editor of the Journal of Afroeuropean Studies. She is the author of a number of translations of contemporary African

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fiction (from English into Spanish) by Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta and Amma Darko. Her publications include the volume Migraciones, y mutaciones interculturales en España [Migrations and intercultural mutations in Spain] (2007). Raimi Gbadamosi, artist, writer and curator, received his Doctorate in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art. Member of interdisciplinary research groups: Afroeuropeans, University of Leon; The Black Body Group, Goldsmiths College, London; and on the Editorial Board of Third Text. Recent exhibitions, events and essays include: Serious Play, London 2011; Exchange Mechanism, Belfast 2010; ARCO Madrid 2009; Tentativa De Agotar Un Lugar Africano, CASM, Barcelona 2008; Human Cargo, Plymouth Museum & Art Gallery, Plymouth 2007; Port City, Arnolfini, Bristol 2007, The Not-So New Europeans, Wasafiri UK, and The Delight of Giant-Slayers: Or Can Artists Commit Their Lives to Paper? ArtMonitor, Sweden. Become a citizen of The Republic at http://www.the-republic.net Francesca Giommi graduated from the University of Bologna in 2001 with a dissertation on Nigerian female writing. She earned her PhD in Literatures and Cultures of the English-Speaking Countries from the same university in 2007, her research focusing on Black British literature and the Black Atlantic diaspora. She studied at York University (1999), University College (2004) and Metropolitan University (2005) in London, Legon University (2005) in Accra, Brown University in Providence (2006), and University of California in Los Angeles (2008). She was Research Fellow at Padua University, Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Germaniche e Slave, from 2008 to 2010, specializing in Black British Fiction, Drama and Cinema. Among her publications: Narrare la Black Britain, Migrazioni, riscritture e ibridazioni nella letteratura inglese contemporanea. Le Lettere, Firenze, 2010. Kristín Loftsdóttir is Professor in Anthropology at the University of Iceland. She received her PhD in 2000 from the University of Arizona. She has recently conducted extensive analysis of the images of Africa in Iceland and focused on Icelandic nationalism, racism and gender in Iceland. She was the co-organizer for series of workshops in relation to the Nordic Colonial Mind, and an active participant in the ATHENA (Thematic Network for Women’s Studies) network. She has published her

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results in books and in journals such as Social Identity, Critique of Anthropology, and Identities. Maxim Matusevich is an Associate Professor of World History at Seton Hall University where he also directs the Program in Russian and East European Studies. He is the author of No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe: Ideology and Pragmatism in Nigerian-Soviet Relations, 1960-1991 (Africa World Press, 2003) and editor of Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Africa World Press, 2007). John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the School of English, University of Leeds, UK. His published books include Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004) and J. G. Farrell (Northcote House, 2007). A second edition of his best-selling book Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester University Press) appeared in 2010. Annalisa Mirizio teaches literary theory and comparative literature at the University of Barcelona and is a researcher in the Centre Dona i Literatura/ Women and Literature. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the review Lectora. Revista de Dones i Textualitat. Her main research areas are feminist theory, cultural studies and film studies. Joana Passos is auxiliary researcher at the Centre for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho where she is part of GruPocli and NiGEF, two research teams respectively focused on postcolonial studies and gender. She developed her PhD research at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, on postcolonial studies and women’s writing. She is finishing her postdoctoral research project on Goan Literature in Portuguese (XIX and XX centuries). She has been part of the team who translated selected theoretical essays, on feminism and visual culture, from English to Portuguese. Anna Rastas is a Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tampere, Finland. She has co-edited books on racism and multiculturalism and is the author of several articles and chapters on racialized relations and identities, transnational subjectivities, and Africans and African diaspora in Finland. Her other research interests include childhood and youth studies and ethnographic research methods.

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Vamba Sherif is a writer. He was born in Liberia, spent a substantial part of his youth in Kuwait, and now lives in the Netherlands. He has published three novels: The land of the Fathers (1999), The Kingdom of Sebah (2003) and Bound to Secrecy (2007). Learn more about his work at http://vambasherif.rlhub.com Juan Miguel Zarandona is a member of the Faculty of Translation Studies at the University of Valladolid, Spain. He is the director of the research group Afriqana (www.afriqana.org), specialized in African Studies combined with Translation, Linguistics and Literary and Cultural Studies. He has Publisher several articles, book chapters and translations focusing mainly on South Africa and Equatorial Guinea.