Diaspora & Returns in Fiction 1847011489, 9781847011480

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Editorial
Leaving Home/Returning Home: Migration & Contemporary African Literature • Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo & Helen Cousins
Articles
Alienation & Disorientation in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments • Julia Udofia
Wait No Longer?: The Temporality of Return in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments • Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji
‘Our Relationship to Spirits’: History & Return in Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar • David Borman
The ‘Rubble’ & the ‘Secret Sorrows’: Returning to Somalia in Nuruddin Farah’s Links & Crossbones • Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo
Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity in Benjamin Kwakye’s The Other Crucifix • Helen Yitah & Michael P.K. Okyerefo
No Place Like Home: Failures of Feeling & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears • James Arnett
‘The Backward Glance’: Repetition & Return in Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die • Sophia Akhuemokhan
Negotiating Race, Identity & Homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah & Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die • H. Oby Okolocha
The Problem of Return in 164the Local Gambian Bildungsroman • Stephen Ney
Returns ‘Home’: Constructing Belonging in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi • Helen Cousins
‘Zimbabweanness Today’: An Interview with Tendai Huchu • Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo
Featured Articles
Remembering Early Issues of African Literature Today • Bernth Lindfors
African Literature Today: Its History, Story, Impact & Continuing Journey • Eustace Palmer
On African Literature Today • Helen Chukwuma
Literary Supplement
4 Poems by Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Reviews
Eds Xavier Garnier & Pierre Halen, Littératures africaines et paysage • Francoise Ugochukwu
Mukoma wa Ngugi, Mrs. Shaw (A Novel) • Obi Nwakanma
Elleke Boehmer, The Shouting in the Dark • Obi Nwakanma
Ernest Emenyonu, Princess Mmaeyen and Other Stories • Jasper A. Onuekwusi
Dayo Olopade, The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa • Pelumi Folajimi

Citation preview

Diaspora & Returns in Fiction

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 34 Guest Editors: Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu Assistant Editor: Patricia T. Emenyonu Associate Editors: Jane Bryce • Maureen N. Eke • Stephanie Newell Charles E. Nnolim • Chimalum Nwankwo • Kwawisi Tekpetey Iniobong I. Uko • Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

FORTHCOMING ALT 35 Focus on Egypt Cover: © EcoPic/iStockphoto

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-148-0

9 781847 011480

Editor Ernest N Emenyonu

Articles on: Nuruddin Farah / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / Pede Hollist Ayi Kwei Armah / Dinaw Mengestu / Benjamin Kwakye Black British Literature/Gambian Bildungsroman/Migration Interview with Tendai Huchu Featured Articles: by Bernth Lindfors / Eustace Palmer / Helen Chukwuma Literary Supplement: 4 Poems by Tsitsi Ella Jaji Reviews

Diaspora & Returns in Fiction ALT 34

This special issue focuses on literary texts by African writers in which the protagonist returns to his/her ‘original’ or ancestral ‘home’ in Africa from other parts of the world. Ideas of return – intentional and actual – have been a consistent feature of the literature of Africa and the African diaspora: from Equiano’s autobiography to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah. African literature has represented returnees in a range of locations and dislocations from having a sense of belonging, being alienated in a country they can no longer recognize, or experiencing multiple identities. To what extent can the original place be reclaimed with or without renegotiations of ‘home’?

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 34

Diaspora & Returns in Fiction AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 34



Guest Editors:

Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Editor:  Ernest N. Emenyonu Assistant Editor:  Patricia T. Emenyonu

     

Associate Editors:

Jane Bryce Maureen N. Eke Stephanie Newell Charles E. Nnolim Chimalum Nwankwo Kwawisi Tekpetey Iniobong I. Uko



Reviews Editor:

Obi Nwakanma

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GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES The Editor invites submission of articles on the announced themes of forthcoming issues. Submissions will be acknowledged promptly and decisions communicated within six months of the receipt of the paper. Your name and institutional affiliation (with full mailing address and email) should appear on a separate sheet, plus a brief biographical profile of not more than six lines. The editor cannot undertake to return materials submitted, and contributors are advised to keep a copy of any material sent. Articles should be submitted in the English Language. Length: Articles should not exceed 5,000 words. Format: Articles should be double-spaced, and should use the same type face and size throughout. Italics are preferred to underlines for titles of books. Articles are reviewed blindly, so do not insert your name, institutional affiliation and contact information on the article itself. Instead, provide such information on a separate page. Style: UK or US spellings are acceptable, but must be used consistently. Direct quotations should retain the spellings used in the original source. Check the accuracy of citations and always give the author’s surname and page number in the text, and a full reference in the Works Cited list at the end of the article. Italicize titles of books, plays and journals. Use single inverted commas throughout except for quotes within quotes which are double. Avoid subtitles or subsection headings within the text. Citations: Limit your sources to the most recent, or the most important books and journals, in English. Cite works in foreign languages only when no English-language books are available. Cite websites only if they are relatively permanent and if they add important information unavailable elsewhere. For in-text citations, the sequence in parentheses should be (Surname: page number). No year of publication should be reflected within the text. All details should be presented in the Works Cited list at the end of the article. Consistency is advised. Examples: Cazenave, Odile. Rebellious Women: The New Generation of Female African Novelists. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000. Duerden, Dennis. ‘The “Discovery” of the African Mask.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 31, No. 4 (Winter 2000): 29-47. Ukala, Sam. ‘Tradition, Rotimi, and His Audience.’ Goatskin Bags and Wisdom: New Critical Perspectives on African Literature. Ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2000: 91-104. Ensure that your Works Cited list is alphabetized on a word-by-word basis, whether citations begin with the author’s name or with an anonymous work’s title. Please, avoid footnotes or endnotes. Do not quote directly from the Internet without properly citing the source as you would when quoting from a book. Use substantive sources for obtaining your information and depend less on general references. Copyright: It is the responsibility of contributors to clear permissions. All articles should be sent to the editor, Ernest N. Emenyonu, as an e-mail attachment (Word) Email: [email protected] African Literature Today Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint 303 East Kearsley Street Flint MI 48502 USA Fax: 001-810-766-6719 Books for review to be sent to the Reviews Editor. Reviewers should provide full bibliographic details, including the extent, ISBN and price: Obi Nwakanma, University of Central Florida, English Department, Colburn Hall, 12790 Aquarius Agora Drive, Orlando , FL 32816, USA [email protected]

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AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY ALT 1-14 BACK IN PRINT. See www.jamescurrey.com to order copies ALT 1, 2, 3, and 4 Omnibus Editionr ALT 5 The Novel in Africa ALT 6 Poetry in Africa ALT 7 Focus on Criticism ALT 8 Drama in Africa ALT 9 Africa, America & the Caribbean ALT 10 Retrospect & Prospect ALT 11 Myth & History ALT 12 New Writing, New Approaches ALT 13 Recent Trends in the Novel ALT 14 Insiders & Outsiders Backlist titles available in the US and Canada from Africa World Press and in the rest of the world from James Currey, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer ALT 15 Women in African Literature Today ALT 16 Oral & Written Poetry in African Literature Today ALT 17 The Question of Language in African Literature Today ALT 18 Orature in African Literature Today ALT 19 Critical Theory & African Literature Today ALT 20 New Trends & Generations in African Literature ALT 21 Childhood in African Literature ALT 22 Exile & African Literature ALT 23 South & Southern African Literature ALT 24 New Women’s Writing in African Literature ALT 25 New Directions in African Literature Recent and forthcoming* titles African Literature Today continues to be published as an annual volume by James Currey (an imprint Boydell & Brewer since 2008). North and South American distribution: Boydell & Brewer Inc., 68 Mount Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, US UK and International distribution: Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Wood­bridge IP12 3DF, GB. Nigeria edition (ALT 24–33): HEBN Publishers Plc ALT 26 War in African Literature Today ALT 27 New Novels in African Literature Today ALT 28 Film in African Literature Today ALT 29 Teaching African Literature Today ALT 30 Reflections & Retrospectives in African Literature Today ALT 31 Writing Africa in the Short Story ALT 32 Politics & Social Justice ALT 33 Children’s Literature & Story-telling ALT 34 Diaspora & Returns in Fiction ALT 35 Focus on Egypt*

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Diaspora & Returns in Fiction AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 34

EDITORIAL BOARD Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu Department of Africana Studies, University of Michigan-Flint 303 East Kearsley Street, Flint, MI 48502, USA Assistant Editor: Patricia T. Emenyonu Department of English, University of Michigan-Flint 303 East Kearsley Street, Flint, MI 48502, USA Associate Editors: Jane Bryce Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados Maureen N. Eke Department of English, Central Michigan University Mount Pleasant, MI 48859, USA Stephanie Newell English Department, PO Box 208302, Yale University New Haven, CT 06520-8302, USA Charles E. Nnolim Department of English, School of Humanities University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria Chimalum Nwankwo English & African American Literature North Carolina A&T State University 1601 E. Market Street, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA Kwawisi Tekpetey Department of Humanities, Central State University PO Box 1004, Wilberforce, OH 45384, USA Iniobong I. Uko Department of English, University of Uyo Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

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James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF (GB) and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

© Contributors 2016 First published 2016 All poems in Literary Supplement © Tsitsi Ella Jaji All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available on request ISBN 978-1-84701-148-0 (James Currey hardback) ISBN 978-1-84701-149-7 (Africa-only paperback) The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or ­appropriate. This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Designed and set in 12/13.5 pt Berkeley Book by Kate Kirkwood Publishing Services, Cumbria, UK

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

x

EDITORIAL ARTICLE Leaving Home/ Returning Home: Migration & Contemporary African Literature P auline D odgson -K atiyo & H elen C ousins

1

ARTICLES Alienation & Disorientation in Ayi Kwei Armah’s  Fragments J ulia U dofia

12

Wait No Longer?: The Temporality of Return  in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments A manda R uth W augh L agji

28

‘Our Relationship to Spirits’: History & Return  in Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar D avid B orman

48

The ‘Rubble’ & the ‘Secret Sorrows’:  Returning to Somalia in Nuruddin Farah’s Links & Crossbones P auline D odgson -K atiyo

67

Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity  in Benjamin Kwakye’s The Other Crucifix H elen Y itah & M ichael P.K. O kyerefo

82

No Place Like Home: Failures of Feeling  & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears J ames A rnett

103

vii

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viii  Contents

‘The Backward Glance’: Repetition & Return  in Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die S ophia A khuemokhan

123

Negotiating Race, Identity & Homecoming  in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah & Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die H. O by O kolocha

143

The Problem of Return in  the Local Gambian Bildungsroman S tephen N ey

164

Returns ‘Home’: Constructing Belonging  in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi H elen C ousins

185

‘Zimbabweanness Today’:  An Interview with Tendai Huchu H elen C ousins & P auline D odgson -K atiyo

200

FEATURED ARTICLES

Remembering Early Issues of African Literature Today

213

bernth lindfors

African Literature Today

219

Its History, Story, Impact & Continuing Journey* eustace palmer

On African Literature Today

224

helen chukwuma

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

4 Poems by Tsitsi Ella Jaji

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229

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Leaving Home/Returning Home  ix



REVIEWS

Eds Xavier Garnier & Pierre Halen, Littératures  africaines et paysage

231

F rancoise U gochukwu

Mukoma wa Ngugi, Mrs. Shaw (A Novel)

234

Elleke Boehmer, The Shouting in the Dark

239

O bi N wakanma O bi N wakanma

Ernest Emenyonu, Princess Mmaeyen and  Other Stories

244

J asper A. O nuekwusi

Dayo Olopade, The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules  and Making Change in Modern Africa

249

P elumi F olajimi

STOP PRESS TRIBUTE TO ISIDORE OKPEWHO 1941–2016

Erudite Scholar/Novelist ISIDORE OKPEWHO, acclaimed one of the greatest authorities on African Oral Literature, died while we were going to press with this issue. We will carry a Tribute to his legacy in the next issue, ALT 35.

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Notes on Contributors

Sophia Akhuemokhan is a Professor in the Department of English and Literature, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. She is author of the award-winning book The R­evolutionary Character in the African Novel  (Ibadan Uni­ versity Press, 2014). Her articles on African, American and British literature have appeared in journals worldwide. James Arnett is an Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chatta­ nooga. He received his doctorate in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2013. His ­research has appeared in Literature Interpretation T ­ heory, ARIEL, Victorian Literature and Culture and others; his current project is analysing representations of bodily, affective and immaterial economies in transnational ­ ­African novels. David Borman teaches English at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has previously appeared in Research in African Literatures, ARIEL and Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), among o­ thers. Helen Cousins is a Reader in Postcolonial Literature at Newman University, Birmingham, UK. She researches in African women’s writing and contemporary Black British literature. Recent publications include a chapter in Blackx

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Notes on Contributors  xi



ness in Britain (Routledge, 2016) and in Critical ­Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi (Sussex Academic Press, 2016). She is on the Advisory Board of Postcolonial Inter­ventions: An ­Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo was formerly Head of English at Newman University and Dean of the School of Arts at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. Her research ­interests are in African literature, particularly Zimbabwean and Somali, and contemporary women’s writing. She is co-editor (with Helen Cousins) of Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera (Africa World Press, 2012) and is a director of a small publishing company, Books of Africa. Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her disser­tation focuses on time and narrative, and theorizes a ‘temporality of waiting’ in postcolonial fiction. She ­received the special mention from the Postcolonial Studies Association for the postgraduate essay prize in 2011 and 2013. Stephen Ney lectures at the University of Sierra Leone and the University of the Gambia. His Ph.D work at ­British Columbia (Vancouver) examined Nigerian literary history against the literary and historical backdrop of the nineteenth-century missionary encounter. Currently his research considers intersections between literary histories, book histories and religious change in West Africa. Michael P.K. Okyerefo is Associate Professor and Head of Sociology, University of Ghana. He is a graduate of the universities of Ghana, Vienna and Cambridge; Visiting Fellow, University of Cambridge (2007/2008); External Research Fellow, University of Vienna (since 2014). His research area is sociology of culture and sociology of religion with

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xii  Notes on Contributors

interests ranging from the sociology of litera­ture to human-­ capital formation among Ghanaians abroad. H. Oby Okolocha, Ph.D, is a Senior Lecturer in the Depart­ ment of English and Literature, University of Benin, Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria. Her major areas of research are Gender Studies, feminist literature and literature dealing with politics, conflict and trauma, in which she has published journal articles. She has also published poetry and short stories. Julia Udofia is a lawyer and Senior Lecturer in the Depart­ ment of English, University of Uyo, Nigeria. She is the author of the seminal book, Caribbean Literature and its Background, and holds a Ph.D in English. She has published extensively in learned journals and books. Her research interests are in African literature, Caribbean litera­ture, African-American literature and Gender Studies. Helen Yitah is Associate Professor and Head of the Depart­ ment of English, University of Ghana. She is also the founding Director of the University of Ghana-Carnegie Writing Centre, which was established through her initia­tive. She has published work on oral and written African literature, American literature and children’s literature in Ghana.

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Editorial Leaving Home/Returning Home: Migration & Contemporary African Literature HELEN COUSINS & PAULINE DODGSON-KATIYO

Ideas of return – intentional and actual – have been a consis­tent feature of the literature of Africa and the African diaspora: from Equiano’s autobiography to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah. African literature has represented returnees in a range of different positions including feeling located in an ideal home and having a sense of belonging, being alienated in a country they can no longer recognize, or experiencing ‘multi-placedness’, through ‘feeling at home’ but not ‘declaring a place as home’ (Brah Cartographies of Diaspora: 197). From the early to mid-twentieth century, the typical protagonist of the return narrative was a man educated abroad (usually in the colonial country or the US) who was returning home. The position of the returnee in literature bears some resemblance to that of the ‘native intellectual’ described by the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon in his important essay ‘On National Culture’. Fanon’s paradigm of the three phases the native intellectual, such as the writer or artist, passes through is well known: the first is the assimilationist phase in which he adopts European culture as if it were his own; the second, the attempt to return to his ‘roots’; and the third, the fighting phase, in which he awakens people from their lethargy. ‘On National Culture’ was first delivered as a conference speech in 1959 in the period just before the decolonization and independence of most African countries when liberation struggles were 1

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2  Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

still being fought. Fanon’s model, therefore, cannot be said to fit exactly the situation of the intellectual returning to his/her country post-independence. Nevertheless, his descriptions of the transition from the first to the second phase do resonate with the ways in which the returnee has been represented in African literature. Fanon argues that after assimilation, the native intellec­ tual sometimes realizes that taking on European attributes has made him ‘a stranger in his own land’ (176). He, then, seeks to separate himself from the culture he has assimilated but if he fails to find another culture equal to that of the colonial power he often ‘fall[s] back upon emotional attitudes and will develop a psychology which is dominated by exceptional sensibility and susceptibility’. This results in what Fanon calls ‘muscular action’ (177) and consists of a desire to become as native as possible. This is the second phase that begins with the native intellectual being ‘disturbed’ and deciding, as he sees it, ‘to remember what he is’ (179). However, he encounters the problem that his separation from his people through assimilation has cut him off from their life and culture which he can recall but from which he is distanced in reality. If the native intellectual is a writer, the literature he writes in this phase can be described as ‘just-beforethe-battle’. It may be humorous or allegorical but, in Fanon’s view, it is also sterile and can be characterized by ‘distress … difficulty… disgust’: ‘We spew ourselves up; but already underneath laughter can be heard’ (179). Transposing Fanon’s ideas on the experience of the artist/ writer as native intellectual to returnee characters in postindependence fiction suggests that much of the language he uses is indicative of the position and psychology of the returnee. Ideas of strangeness, ‘exceptional sensibility and susceptibility’, distress and disgust permeate narratives in which return is a theme. There may be laughter but it is a nervous laughter, sometimes verging on the macabre.

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Leaving Home/Returning Home  3



A further aspect of the post-independence return is disillusionment – a disillusionment which is not just that of the protagonists who return and are disappointed by what they find, but is also that of their families, friends and colleagues who had expectations of them which are not met. What is, to some extent, different is that the returnee may not want to return to their roots in the way Fanon suggests; s/he may have ideas about progress which do not involve re-appropriating their original culture even if it were possible for them to do so. Nevertheless, issues around tradition and modernity and how these two concepts relate to each other are central in these texts. The ‘been-to’ is now a well-known figure in African media, ranging from the laughing stock of television comedies to the representation, in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s film Hyènes, of the revengeful Linguère Ramatou who demands that the villagers kill her former lover if they want to benefit from her wealth. Novels of the returnees’ re-entry into society written after independence include Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters. Fragments is a classic ‘been-to’ novel, deserving of the two articles, by Julia Udofia and Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji, which are included in this issue. Like the media representations of the ‘been-to’, it deals with materialism. Baako, returning to Ghana from the US, is expected to show his affluence by buying and distributing material goods; his inability to meet this expectation or to deal with the contradictions he now finds in Ghanaian society results in his breakdown. The Interpreters is centred on a group of young Nigerian men who have returned to Lagos following study overseas. They find the newly independent society hypocritical and corrupt with people of status drawing on and aping the behaviour of European colonialists. Their way of dealing with this is to criticize and satirize rather than actively work towards change. However, as Eldred Jones states this ‘new generation is straining back to something to hold on

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4  Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

to’ (The Writing of Wole Soyinka: 219). This can be seen in Egbo’s agonizing over whether he was right to turn down the inherited position of chief and in Kola’s painting of the pantheon of Yoruba gods. Returns in novels by women writers with female protagonists tend to focus on gender. In Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde, after a long stay in London, Kehinde follows her husband back to Nigeria and discovers that he now has a second wife. Feeling betrayed and humiliated and with no chance of fulfilling her dream of becoming a ‘celebrated “been-to” madam’ (Uwakweh ‘To Ground the Wandering Muse’: 400), Kehinde returns to the UK to make a life for herself there. The assumption behind the ‘been-to’ is that s/he always intended to return to Africa. However, in the case of the exile who leaves their country of origin, not for education or employment, but to escape political oppression, this is not necessarily the case; there may be no way back. Two of the essays here – Helen Yitah and Michael P.K. Okyerefo’s on Benjamin Kwakye’s The Other Crucifix and James Arnett’s on The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu – discuss the impossibility of return. Exile as lived experience and as theme has been prominent in African literature. Some of the most well-known African writers have spent long periods in exile, have written about their exile and, in their fiction, have imagined their homelands. As Annie Gagiano writes in an article on Dambudzo Marechera in African Literature Today 22, an issue dedicated to Exile & African Literature, exile is a subject which has fascinated writers (1). Edward Said’s essay ‘Reflections on Exile’, in which he writes of estrangement and loss, has been influential in thinking about the condition of exile. However, the exile’s return to Africa from elsewhere in the world has been of less interest. This may be due to the fact that many exiled writers have either not returned or returned (sometimes only on a temporary visit) late in their lives. Andrew Gurr, in Writers in Exile,

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Leaving Home/Returning Home  5



offers another explanation. Claiming that ‘homecoming as an ideal … does not respond readily to being deployed in literature’, he suggests that this is because modern society finds ‘it easier to celebrate dystopias … than to welcome utopias’ (142). Homecomings, though, can be dystopian or, at least, alienating. The origins of dépaysement lie in ‘being out of the country’ but the French term also means feeling disoriented or out of place, feelings which can arise in a country which has been ‘home’. Recent postcolonial theory has explored the idea of migration as a way of life for so many, so that being away from home is normalized, and even the need to be geographically connected to a home place is no longer necessary. Arjun Appadurai suggests in Modernity at Large that ‘more people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born’ (6). Appadurai suggests that there are strongly imagined connections operating between the places where people might live and where they might consider ‘home’ via electronic media. Similarly global in scope is Homi Bhabha’s claim (in The Location of Culture) for his ‘Third Space of enunciations’, which ‘may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the splitspace of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism nor the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity’ (56, original emphasis). Characters who occupy such a liminal space can be found in The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician which is discussed in the interview with its author Tendai Huchu in this volume. Farai – rich, young, well-connected to home via electronic media – and Chenai – also young and romantically connected to her adopted city – seem to possess the capacity to belong wherever they find themselves living, not troubling themselves about the genuineness or permanency of that place. Françoise Kral,

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6  Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

recognizes these traits in writing as typical of ‘the global novel … with its deterritorialized characters who not only roam the world at their ease but who sometimes seem to have jettisoned all cultural moorings’ (Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature: 2). Yet, in her discussion of diasporic identities she also has reservations regarding the ‘canonization of the migrant as an emblematic figure of the twenty-first century’ which ‘constitute[s] a romanticized vision of immigration, one that is far from being representative of all im/migrations’ (2). Specifically in relation to Appadurai, she criticizes his ‘diaspora of hope’ as failing to pay adequate attention to ‘hierarchies, inequalities and power struggles’ (90). Inequalities such as this are highlighted in Yitah and Okyerefo’s essay on The Other Crucifix which discusses how Jojo’s experiences mar his time abroad and contribute to his inability to return home to Ghana. In fact, the novels featured in the essays here seem to indicate that, in African literature, returning geo­ graphically is still significant and important. There are notable exceptions in African writing to the idea that homecoming is less interesting than exile. Frieda, the protagonist of Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, returns from the UK to South Africa before the end of apartheid. Whether her return is permanent or not is left unresolved, but being back leads her to think about her self-identity. As discussed by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo in her essay, Nuruddin Farah, having visited Somalia after an absence of over twenty years, wrote in the Past Imperfect trilogy of the attempt of exiles returning from North America to re-connect with the country. Other, recent, fiction however, indicates that returning home after a period of living abroad can be unequivocally positive and presumably permanent. Probably the best known of these examples is Adichie’s Americanah, one of two texts discussed by H. Oby Okolocha. In this novel both Ifemelu

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and Obinze make successful returns to Nigeria despite their very different experiences abroad. While Ifemelu applies successfully to study in the USA, Obinze has had to illegally migrate to the UK; eventually he is forcibly deported. When Ifemelu makes her voluntary return later – as a relatively wealthy and successful ‘been-to’ – she finds Obinze well-established in Nigeria. Other essays in this volume that discuss the successful returns of their protagonists include that of Sophia Akhuemokhan on Pede Hollist’s novel So the Path Does Not Die (also discussed by H. Oby Okolocha in comparison with Americanah), and Stephen Ney’s exploration of several examples of Gambian bildungsromans. Not only do the protagonists bring remit­ tances back to their home communities but also the capa­ bility to help their societies progress in various ways. In these novels, the protagonists’ successful reintegration into the societies they left is managed through an (eventual) acceptance that the homes to which they return are not the same as those they left. During panels at the African Literature Association conference (Bayreuth, Germany 2015) where papers on the topic of African return were presented, one discussion noted that Ifemelu returns to Lagos and not to her natal home village, which, for an Igbo, is really what home would mean. Her ability to reintegrate into Nigeria is predicated on living in a vibrant, globalized city with other ‘been-tos’. Similarly, Fina in So the Path Does Not Die returns to Sierra Leone after the war in order to find her grandmother but finds that the place she called home has been destroyed; a new belonging is created through her subsequent choices to work with refugees. Kral suggests that the treatment of diaspora by critics such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha, has moved the discussion away from the ‘emphasis on the return journey’ (12) which is fundamental to William Safran’s classic definition of diaspora. The fourth point in this definition was that members of any diaspora will

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8  Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

‘regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return’ (‘Diasporas in Modern Societies’: 83). In contradiction to Kral’s assertion, for much contemporary African literature a return home is still fundamentally important to the novel’s imaginative world, even if unrealized, or problematic, or recognizing change in the home place and the protagonist. The imaginative process of (re)creating a homeland is specifically explored in David Borman’s essay on Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. In some novels of migration and return, though, the failure of the protagonists to feel at home when they return to (or more accurately ‘visit’) Africa, is because home is the diaspora. This is not in the sense of Bhabha’s free floating ‘third space’ or a cosmopolitan sense of belonging everywhere but an attachment to a specific ‘other’ place, geographical or psychological, within what would usually be thought of as the African diaspora. Safran notes that ‘some diasporas persist – and their members do not go “home” – because … although a homeland may exist, it is not a welcoming place with which they can identify politically, ideologically, or socially; or because it would be too inconvenient and disruptive, if not traumatic, to leave the diaspora’ (91). This is certainly the case for the protagonists in the Black British novels discussed in the essay by Helen Cousins in this collection. In fact, the question of how far these novels (written by authors with at least one Nigerian parent, but who were born and/or raised in the UK) can be considered African literature might be queried. Safran goes on to say that, in the circumstances noted above, ‘the myth of return serves to solidify ethnic consciousness and solidarity’ (91). For these protagonists, return is going back to the UK after (often traumatic) experiences in Nigeria. It is pertinent to note that although one of these authors, Helen Oyeyemi (who

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was born in Nigeria and came to live in the UK with her two Nigerian parents when she was four years old), was claimed as a ‘third generation’ Nigerian novelist (by Jane Bryce in an article in Research in African Literatures) after the publication of her first novel The Icarus Girl, her later novels, which do not overtly discuss diaspora experience, have been paid less critical attention in African studies. Safran asks, ‘how long does it take for a diaspora con­ scious­ ness to develop, and what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for its survival?’ (95). These novels perhaps indicate that in the future the ‘double consciousness’, which Gilroy describes (following W.E.B. Du Bois) as connecting all Black diasporas via an African sensibility, will make way for more localized forms of ‘conviviality’. This more recent phenomenon described by Gilroy (in After Empire) describes how regular contact between different peoples, languages, religions and skin colours – particularly in big cities – erodes a recognition of difference. Might this herald the beginning of new diasporas? Not ‘Black’ and rooted in experiences of slavery, as Gilroy described it in The Black Atlantic, but more focused on state or ethnicity: the Somali diaspora; the Igbo diaspora. Hence, recognizing the reality of Black populations that are not diasporic at all but at ‘home’ in Europe or the USA, however uncomfortable those homes might be, is important. Given the current reality of migration as a way of life, as indicated by Appadurai, the theme of leaving and of return undoubtedly will continue to be a predominant theme in African literature. Yet, as migration becomes commonplace, the inequalities, prejudice and gaps in wealth associated with ‘globalization’ seem also to be on the rise. No wonder, then, that the novels express the discomfort of living away from home and the desire to return. Yet, as these essays indicate, there is work to be done in exploring precisely what ‘return’ and its associated term ‘home’ mean in

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contemporary times, and as expressed through fiction. Like Kwame Anthony Appiah, the novelists discussed in this volume can see the ‘foreignness of foreigners, the strangeness of strangers: these things are real enough’ (Cosmopolitanism: xix); they can also humanize the suffering brought about where migration is a necessity for many; and imagine the value of being at home.

WORKS CITED Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Global­ ization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin, 2007. Armah, Ayi Kwei. Fragments. London: Heinemann, 1974[1970]. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Rout­ ledge, 1994. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 1966. Bryce, Jane. ‘“Half and Half Children”: Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 39, No. 2 (2008): 49-67. Cheney-Coker, Syl. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. Oxford and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990. Emecheta, Buchi. Kehinde. London: Pearson, 1994. Fanon, Frantz. ‘On National Culture.’ The Wretched of the Earth. [Les damnés de la terre 1961]. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin, 1967: 166-99. Gagiano, Annie H. ‘Concepts of Exile in Dambudzo Marechera’s Early Works.’ African Literature Today. Vol. 22 (2000): 1-11. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. ——The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gurr, Andrew. Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981. Hollist, Pede. So the Path Does Not Die. Bamenda: Langaa, 2012.

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Leaving Home/Returning Home  11

 Huchu, Tendai. The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. Bula­wayo: amaBooks, 2014. Jones, Eldred Durosimi. The Writing of Wole Soyinka. 3rd edn. London and Portsmouth, NH: James Currey and Heinemann, 1988. Kral, Françoise. Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kwakye, Benjamin. The Other Crucifix. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2010. Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Safran, William. ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.’ Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. Vol. 1, No. 1 (1991): 83-99. Said, Edward W. ‘Reflections on Exile’ [1984]. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta, 2001: 173-86. Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. Oxford: Heinemann, 1970[1965]. Uwakweh, Pauline Ada. ‘To Ground the Wandering Muse: A Critique of Buchi Emecheta’s Feminism.’ Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Ed. Marie Umeh. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996: 395-406. Wicomb, Zoë. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. London: Virago, 1987.

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Alienation & Disorientation in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments JULIA UDOFIA

Return is viewed as going back to one’s home country or country of origin; a homecoming or returning to the roots where one started from (King and Christou ‘Cultural Geographies of Counter-Diasporic Migration’; Markowitz ‘The Home(s) of Homecomings’; Vasey ‘Place-Making, Pro­ visional Return, and Well-Being’), while home is believed to be a place of comfort, stability and security, ‘a hearth’ and ‘an anchoring point’ (Blunt and Dowling Home: 11). Hence return becomes not only desirable and normal but also to be taken for granted; the ‘final act of closing the migration cycle’ and reuniting with one’s family (Capo ‘The World is My Oyster’: 5). Because of the (presumably) strong ties people have with their homeland, with which they share ethnicity, culture and identity, return is also believed to be natural (Gage North of Ithaka; Kalfopoulou Broken Greek). These, together with the pull of the familiar, it is argued, give the returnee a sense of belonging and being home, thereby making return a ‘journey of therapeutic self-fulfilment’ whereby the returnee finds or becomes his complete self by ‘rejoining the pieces of his life together’ (Gage: 14), or uniting his fragmented or incomplete identity. So it is that Baako, the protagonist of Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments, after his five-year sojourn in the US where he had gone to receive his education (by which fact he is now seen as a ‘been-to’ or ‘Americanah’, to borrow Adichie’s term in her volume of the same name), returns naturally 12

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to his homeland. But his returning is connected with angst as he wonders how he can help build his country as well as satisfy the stated expectations of his family that his status as a been-to yields in Ghana. This does not simply mean honouring family obligations or laying his skills at the service of his nation, but implies jettisoning his ideals and moral integrity and participating in the corruption and crass materialism that have taken hold of the people. Consequently, Baako is unable to rise to the occasion. The result is that he is disoriented, alienated and rejected by his people (both family and larger society). He suffers a nervous breakdown and is placed in a mental asylum by his family who declare him mad. Baako, thus, refuses to re-negotiate home by compromising his moral principles and partaking in the rat race for material things, which he compares to the ‘Melanesia Cargo Cults Mentality’ (Armah Fragments: 228). As a result, he is unable to be home or belong, even after returning to his home country. This would seem to be in tandem with the views of some scholars that home and belonging do not always come naturally or automatically because of kinship or ancestry but may have to be negotiated or re-negotiated, as every return crafts a new home and creates a new mean­ing of home. As Evangelia Kindinger puts it in ‘I Can’t Wait to Go Back Home!’, ‘return is a homecoming to a home that is created through the act of return’ (5), which means that the expectations the returnee has of home are not always fulfilled but are shaped in the course of return. Home, Kindinger continues, will always adjust to the ‘decentering and destabilizing character of transcultural migration’ (5). The implication here is that the possible comforts of being back home are challenged by changes in both the country of return and the migrants themselves as relation­ ships change irreversibly by separation over time and space, thereby making return a complex process that

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challenges boundedness and fixity. In the words of Katie Vasey, ‘there is no such thing as genuine uncomplicated return to one’s home’ (32). She also states that ‘home’, ‘is something to be taken along as individuals move through space and time’ (26). This implies that returnees may have to negotiate home in the spaces in which they find themselves, as home is not one place in which people are rooted but each is a place of construction. It is precisely because Baako refuses to do this that he fails to reclaim home as we see in the novel. He refuses to reconstruct a home that has changed drastically after the heavy burdens of slavery and colonization, replacing morality with materiality. The result is alienation and disorientation; the inability to be home or belong even after returning to the fold of his family and to the familiar. Having completed his studies in the US, Baako, now seen as a been-to, is imminently expected by his family. In the opening pages of the novel, Naana, his frail, old grandmother and seer intuits his return thus: Each thing that goes away returns and nothing in the end is lost. The great friend throws all things apart and brings all things together again. That is the way everything goes and turns round. That is how all living things come back after long absences, and in the whole great world all things are living things. All that goes returns. He will return. (Armah Fragments: 1)

For Naana, therefore, Baako’s return is as normal and certain as death, for this is no single episode but part of ‘a huge cycle of death and rebirth sanctified by the gods’ (Fraser The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: 11). Baako, therefore, must come back in answer to the call of the umbilical cord to his roots. So, it is not long before Baako touches down at the airport in Accra. But nervous as to whether he will be able to live up to the role now expected of him as a been-to, he slips in unannounced and spends the first night in a hotel.

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In fact, because of this anxiety, he had neglected to send a cable. Moreover, from side references, we learn that he had suffered a nervous breakdown while in America. He also reduces the length of his planned stop-over in Paris, thereby bringing forward the date of his arrival in Accra by several days. His nervousness is caused not by ‘gleeful anticipation’ but by an ‘all-pervasive dread’ that appears to be following him everywhere’ (Armah Fragments: 71). The act of return has come to bear dreadful implications for him, as he later tells Juana, his girlfriend: ‘The worst thing was the fear of the return … I didn’t know if I’d be able to do anything worthwhile’ (145). This is because in his society ‘the member of the family who goes out and comes back home is a sort of charmed man, a miracle worker. He goes, he comes back, and with his return some astounding and sudden change is expected’ (146). Naana corroborates this point: The return of this one traveller held out so much great hope. But there were those left behind who had their dreams and put them on the shoulders of the traveller returned, heavy dreams and hopes filled with the mass of things here and of this time. So busy have they become in reaching after new things and newer ways to consume them. (282-3)

In other words, Baako is supposed to be the extraordinary man who brings about a complete turn-around in the situation of things, the hero who turns his family’s poverty into sudden wealth. Proof of his residence abroad should be provided by the material goods he brings back, goods like cars, deep freezers and other artefacts of the materialist US, in addition to his coming and living in a huge mansion. In fact, not long after his return, his mother, Efua, shows him the foundations of a dream house he is supposed to complete. Unfortunately however, Baako brings back nothing materialistic, save a guitar and a typewriter. The chapter in which Baako explains all this to Juana is entitled ‘Osagyefo’, meaning glorious redeemer. Osagyefo

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was Nkrumah’s praise name, now used in ironic circum­ stances. Just as Nkrumah is believed by some in the society to have betrayed the messianic figure of Osagyefo, Baako is seen as having failed his people by not living up to the expectations of a been-to. It is in this same context that the chapter headed ‘Akwaaba’ (meaning welcome) is seen: the irony is that the returning nationalist who does not carry material wealth is not welcome, which accounts for why Baako is despised by his family. This is in contradistinction to Brempong, the big politician, who is praised in vulgar ostentation for bringing back home a deep freezer to store meat for his mother, a new luxury car and several other material goodies for his people. In fact, earlier, a lady acquaintance had told Baako that he did not look like a been-to, obviously because of Baako’s simple appearance, in contrast to Brempong, who is described in the novel as ‘the man in the wool suit’ (60), and his wife as ‘a mass of wig’ (77). Brempong, therefore, like Koomson in Armah’s The Beauty­ful Ones Are Not Yet Born, embodies all the qualities of the successful been-to: ‘empty posturing of importance and wanton materialism’ (Akwani ‘Moaning Pessimists’: 2). The speech with which Brempong’s sister greets him when he touches down at the airport is worth quoting: ‘Move back, you villagers’ she said, pushing hard against those in her way. ‘Don’t come and kill him with your TB. He has just returned; and if you don’t know, let me tell you. The air where he has been is pure not like ours. Give him space. Let him breathe!’ (Armah Fragments: 84-5)

We are told that the sister at this point pushed back everybody, including an old woman who had ventured to ask a question, and then created a space around the hero. After this, she stripped off her large kente stole and laid it on the ground leading to the back of the limousine for her brother to walk on calling: ‘come, my been-to; come, my brother. Walk on the best. Wipe your feet on it. Yes it’s

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kente and it’s yours to tread on. Big man, come! … Stamp on it, yes great man, walk!’ (85). Brempong, we are told, let her lead him over the rich cloth nodding and smiling. It is also this same covetous mania that has led to the commercialization of many traditional practices in Ghana. The outdooring ceremony, for instance, is meant to welcome the child from the world of the ancestors. It is supposed to be conducted shortly after the eighth day of the child’s birth but in recent times, this ceremony has been turned into an inflated feast to which the most affluent acquaintances are invited. In the novel, Araba, Baako’s sister, and Efua move it back three days from its traditional date to pay day, in order to collect the fattest droppings. On the day, the baby is splendidly displayed – smothered in folds of kente cloth, the effect of which is mitigated by the direct blast of the fan. However, while its benefactors are falling over one another to demonstrate their affection, the baby, their object of benefaction, has expired. Similarly, the libation ceremony, originally intended as a compact between the ancestors and the living, has, like the outdooring ceremony, been transformed into a merely materialist feast in recent times. As noticed in the ritual before Baako’s embarkation for America, Foli, Baako’s uncle, stints on the invitation to the spirits so as to reserve more of the liquor for himself. Naana laments the situation thus: That night I saw more things to astonish me in this place and to make me feel I have become a stranger here, because these are things whose meaning I will never understand before the time of my going comes. In my mind also I walked across strange lands where I had never been before. (14)

This greed is also apparent when a new consignment of television sets arrives at Ghanavision where Baako has finally found employment. Instead of these being distri­ buted in the rural areas as intended, they become the object of frenetic rivalry among the employees of the

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Broadcasting Corporation itself. Similarly, at Yegi ferry, Skiddo, a lorry driver, anxious to get his goods to the market before they rot, dies in the rush. When challenged by Baako, the engineer in charge of the site is unable to sug­gest measures to prevent a recurrence so that Skiddo, like Baako, becomes symbolic of those brutalized and destroyed by inefficient bureaucracy, which is why Skiddo keeps appearing in Baako’s nightmares when the latter has a nervous breakdown. Robert Fraser argues that the outdooring episode, and the death of the child which results from it, can be regarded as an extended metaphor for the factors that project the main concerns of the novel. These are the public shell of social inanity and the inner spiritual bewilderment of Baako, the struggling individual who is trying desperately to relate with the society. The death of the child, Fraser continues, is a sacrifice which was made to the weird modernistic deity that is materialism, so that it and the consequent dearth of spirituality become the factors that strangle the nation’s creativity (38-42). Similarly, Emelia Oko suggests in The West African Novel and Social Evolution that the child, like Baako, symbolizes the ideal: he takes a look at his world and returns because the world is too heavy with the desire for material things, just as Baako feels nausea towards this world – a world where a man is evaluated not by what he is but for what he can bring. Naana, again, ruminates: I was powerless before the knowledge that I had come upon strangers worshipping something new and powerful beyond my understanding, which had made all the old wisdom small in people’s minds, and twisted all things natural to the service of some newly created god. They have lost all belief in the wisdom of those gone before, but what new power has made them forget that a child too soon exposed is bound to die? What is the fool’s name, and what the name of the animal that does not know that? The baby was a sacrifice they killed, to satisfy perhaps a new god they have found much like

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the one that began the same long destruction of our people when the elders first − may their souls never find forgiveness on this head − split their own seed and raised half against half, part selling part to hard-eyed buyers from beyond the horizon, breaking, buying, selling, gaining, spending, till the last of our men therefore sells the last woman to any passing intuitive buyer and himself waits to be destroyed by this great haste to consume things we have taken no care nor trouble to produce. (Armah Fragments: 28)

The killing of the child, then, seems to be in resentment of its quick instinctive life which contrasts with the creative lifelessness of the people. This point is driven home by the fact that Baako is misunderstood essentially because his commitment is to creation, whereas his people are seemingly incapable of anything, save a slavish consumption of things which in Naana’s words ‘we have taken no care nor trouble to produce’ (28). Again, we are reminded of the attitude of the producers at Ghanavision and of the host of the drama programme, ‘American Influence’ at Accra’s drama studio since their sycophantism might be a cover for their lack of creative ideas. Infanticide, as Naana observes, is the ultimate symbol of sterility or impotence so that, by killing the child, the perpetrators are not only deliberately destroying their own capacity to create but also exercising their communal impotence. This interpretation is also extended to the episode of the feverous dog. Because it occurs very early in the novel (after Naana’s opening preamble) and in fact, before we have met Baako in the flesh, Fraser considers it as a preface to the story that follows and ‘a cogent metaphor for the whole work held in perfect miniature’ (42). In other words, since the eventual killer of the dog, most likely suffering from some advanced infectious disease, is impotent and unable to have sex with a woman, he compensates for this by impressing his brutality on the dog, so that frustrated masculinity becomes expressed in violence.

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Additionally, towards the end of the novel just before his confinement, Baako escapes from the clutches of his family, only to be surrounded by a hectoring, bullying crowd who attempt to trap him with ropes. The implication here, and indeed in the general treatment meted out to Baako throughout the novel, is that Baako has been turned into a scapegoat for the weakness or impotence of a whole society whose resentment is founded on fear. As Oko explains, ‘the mangy dog haunted in a macabre sequence of boredom and frustration is a symbolic parallel of how Baako’s family hunt him to put him away in a mental asylum because he has failed to bring the “slave cargo” of public embezzlement’ (140). So, Baako takes us through a tour of the wasteland that is Ghana so as to appreciate the general poverty that is created by government mismanagement and to see how the economic race destroys the citizens. However, he does not just stand on his integrity alone: he tries to use his journalism to help rebuild his country; he represents the authentic and creative individual in a nation of false values. Baako’s vision is complemented by that of Naana. How­ ever, while he is young with his physical senses still open to the external world, Naana is blind and spiritual with her senses closing to the physical world as she prepares for death. She believes she has nothing to wait for in a place where ‘new things enter uncalled for and break into thirty separate bits the peace of my mind’ (Armah Fragments: 279). In her words, ‘things have passed which I have never seen whole, only broken and twisted against themselves’ (280). Thus, since her remaining days ‘bring fear’ and ‘will be filled with more broken things’ and the air carries ‘sounds that have no understood meaning, always with the loud and hasty wildness that is everywhere now’, then she had better join the ancestors immediately (279). Naana’s vision, therefore, unites with Baako’s to form a coherent whole in exploring Baako’s response to his world, so that

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‘working from two poles (ancestral and modern), Armah unites both ages in a singular quest for the noble and good beyond the heavy clay of acquisition’ (Oko: 140). The third complementary vision is that of Juana. As a foreigner, Juana is able to see Ghana critically. To her, ‘life is war in Ghana’ and the only means of ensuring survival and mental health in this ‘defeated and defeating place’ (Armah Fragments: 45) is not to see, like Naana. It is Naana’s blindness that spares her the vision of the destruction of all that was good in her traditional world, and maintains her survival: ‘A matter of adopting a narrower vision every time for full vision threatens danger to the visionary self’ (46). So, just as Baako helps to clarify people’s thoughts, Juana helps to mend people’s minds. Like Baako, who had prematurely fled America and Paris because of his ‘giddying isolation’ (71), Juana too is in a process of flight, having been driven to Ghana by the traumas of a shattered marriage. She tells Baako that ‘it was not just in the mind, this need for flight’ (17). Juana’s experience, therefore, is not much different from Baako’s. Initially she is too absorbed in her own troubles to notice the desolation that lies around her: ‘the small signs and the plaintive mottoes on the boards of mammy lorries, the sadness of the highlife music at the Star Hotel, the muted appeal of her patients’ (34). Juana soon realizes that she is confronted with the symptoms of a malaise that reaches to all levels of society, and she is forced to ponder what meaning hope could have ‘in an environment so completely seized with danger and so many different kinds of loss’ (34). According to her, ‘it was too widely spread, the damage’ (34). As she observes, even at the hospital where she works, ‘the doctors knew that things were a mess’ but ‘accepted it like some hopeless reality they couldn’t even think of changing’ (192). The trio – Juana, Baako and Naana – therefore, have the same perceptive abilities. The only other likely soulmate

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22  Julia Udofia

is Ocran, Baako’s former arts teacher. As ideal individuals, they are able to perceive ethical realities and truths denied to the rest of the society. Their three visions thus unite to make a central statement on the need for Ghana’s dreams, currently fragmented into a thousand useless pieces (which the novel catalogues), to be restored. It had been Baako’s dream to use his journalism to help rebuild his nation, rather than work on novels or poems. He had already taken this decision before returning to Ghana. As it is, Baako wants to fulfil the traditional role of the artist as a man who serves the spiritual needs of his community by translating the concept of the artist as a man alone, wrestling with a unique destiny, into contemporary terms by using the technologically produced screen image to communicate with the rural masses, instead of working on poems or novels that people, including the literate ones, do not read. However, Ocran warns him that if he wants to do real work, he had better work alone as ‘nobody is interested in being serious’ (155). Ocran further explains to Baako after the latter’s frustrating search for a job at Ghanavision that ‘nothing works in this country’ because the place is ‘run by the so-called elite of pompous asses trained to do nothing’ (116). The Principal Secretary at Ghanavision also tells Baako: ‘We don’t have modern systems here. This country doesn’t work that way. If you come back thinking you can make things work in any smooth, efficient way, you’ll get a complete waste of your time’ because ‘making a go of life means forgetting all the beautiful stuff they teach in the classroom’ (118). Earlier, Brempong had told Baako: ‘If you were an expatriate, a white man, it wouldn’t matter. You’d have these things easy even without real qualifications. But when you present your black face like their own, there’s no respect’ (68). Ironically, it is Ocran’s view that comes to pass because, after a very frustrating search, when Baako eventually

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lands a job at Ghanavision, he realizes he cannot work in the place because the directors of the station, rather than work on educational films, are more interested in pandering to the head of state and the big politicians. Burning his scripts in despair, Baako is forced back on to the ‘perverse, Western notion of the artist as a secluded visionary’ which Ocran had earlier advised was inevitable (Fraser: 36). But, contrary to his expectation, the peace he thought would follow his resignation turns out to be a mirage since the ‘sterility’ and ‘stagnancy’ he thought were peculiar to Ghanavision were everywhere. For instance, at Ghanavision: The producers seldom worked at night but the names and titles they had put on their doors were done in paint that glowed against the dark. The way they understood their work, it was more travel than production. All had been abroad, to different countries overseas for training and had brought back fond footage of themselves visiting foreign studios, seeing strange sights and eating extraordinary foods in famous places. To fill program space and time, they took routine trips to all the embassies in town to ask for films and tapes to be run on television screen after the opening music and credit titles. (Armah Fragments: 188)

The question that keeps troubling his mind is why the other workers at Ghanavision saw the things he saw, ‘the myriad motions anyone could see were empty’, but accepted them with an ‘amazing happy kind of intent to build up whole structures filled with thousands doing nothing’ (188). The more he tries to shift these thoughts away from his mind, the more they stay, deepening his isolation. Even his family members, who should have provided some sort of shelter, turn out to be a more intimate reflection of the society itself, a concave mirror that exposes materialist values, for they cannot understand why he is not rich. When they discover him committing thoughts to paper apparently meant for no eyes other than

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his own, they conclude that he is mad and put him in the psychiatric hospital. Baako thus ends up alienated because his dreams are not echoed by his people who have become acquisitive and desire only to be rich. The result of this inability to confront the disjuncture between dream and reality, in a society that is out of joint and has lost its footing, is that he fails to be home or to belong even after returning to his home country, to the familiar, and reuniting with his family. As discussed earlier, returning home is a complicated process. Vasey suggests that ‘crossing national boundaries involves a process of re-creation … the re-evaluation of one’s past, present, and future locations’ (32-3), thereby making connections between permanent returnees and home communities contentious and complex. The feeling of home, Vasey concludes, is ‘an affective and social con­ struction’ (33) that transcends local and national boun­ daries. Other writers too speak of multiple identities or identities and belongings that do not come naturally but are negotiated. Roger Bromley, writing on diaspora fictions in Narratives for a New Belonging, argues that home or belonging ‘is always problematic, a never-ending dialogue of same with other’ (5). The above seems to dispute the concept of home as an anchoring point or a vertically rooted place or place of comfort, stability and security where one finds one’s self or becomes one’s complete self by joining back the pieces of one’s life together or, as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling state, ‘a container [in] which human beings are centered and rooted’ (11). It seems also to rebut the presumption of the lasting link with the homeland or country of origin with which one shares ethnicity, culture and identity and rather sees home as places of negotiation or re-negotiation (as the case may be). It is something to be taken along as individuals move through space and time so that home becomes something that is transformed, newly invented

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and developed in relation to the circumstances in which people find themselves or choose to place themselves; an experience of being within and between sets of social relations. As Kindinger puts it, ‘homes are constructed, are variable, can shift and have multiple layers’ (5). This then implies that people do not, because of ances­ try or ethnicity, automatically or naturally belong or feel at home but that home or belonging may have to be acquired, negotiated. Although Baako’s case tends towards a naturalization of home and belonging in the way he can­not explain what brought him back to Ghana, or in the way his grandmother intuits his return at the beginning of the novel, his story deconstructs myths of natural belong­ing and shows that homes are constructed. It is precisely because Baako refuses to re-negotiate home that he fails to reclaim home even after returning to his home country. He refuses to compromise his ideals and partake in the rat race for material things that has taken hold of the people, either to satisfy the demands of his family or to feel a sense of belonging in the larger society. His is a case of divided loyalties between the requirements of his family who demand material wealth and the larger community in whose service Baako wishes to sacrifice his own and family’s interest. Therefore, we see a struggle between his attempt to assert his integrity and the forces that try to divert it otherwise; a case of the ideal frustrated by the real and actual. It had been Baako’s dream to help rebuild his country through creative journalism. Unfortunately, this dream is not echoed by his countrymen who desire only to be rich. Thus, while he sees his education as preparation for the life work of a socially committed artist, his family expects his education to translate into power and wealth in the real world here and now. Unable to handle his growing frustration or reconcile his moral scruples with the needs and demands of his family, and his and society’s diametrically opposed views, he breaks down.

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He thus refuses to re-negotiate home which had changed drastically, replacing morality and spirituality with mater­ ial­ ity. The result is alienation and disorientation and failure to be home or belong even after returning to the fold of his family and to the familiar, thus seeming to con­firm bell hooks’ view that at times home is ‘nowhere but locations or places of negotiation as one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation’ (Yearning: 15). As Vasey observes, people’s relationships to places are neither ‘fixed nor straightforward’ (26) but rather shift according to changing contexts through which home and where one is best located are challenged, re-defined and reinforced.

WORKS CITED Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Akwani, Obi. ‘Moaning Pessimists: A Review of the Novel Fragments by Ayi KweiArmah.’ (6 October 2012) http://imdiversity.com/ villages/global/book-review-moaning-pessimists. Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann, 1968. ——Fragments. London: Heinemann, 1974 [1970]. Blunt, Alison and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Capo, Jasna. ‘The World is My Oyster: Well-Educated AustralianCroatian Citizens in the Era of Global Mobilities.’ Croatian Studies Review. Vol. 8, No. 1 (2012): 91-112. Fraser, Robert. The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah. London: Heinemann, 1980. Gage, Eleni N. North of Ithaka: A Granddaughter Returns to Greece and Discovers Her Roots. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. London: Turnaround, 1991. Kalfopoulou, Adrianne. Broken Greek: A Language to Belong. Austin, TX: Plain View Press, 2006. Kindinger, Evangelia. ‘“I Can’t Wait to Go Back Home!” Negotiating

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Spaces of Belonging in Greek American Narratives.’ The 4th Hellenic Observatory Ph.D Symposium on Contemporary Greece and Cyprus. London School of Economics (25-26 June 2009) www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/research/hellenicobservatory/ pdf/4th_%20symposium/papers_pps/narratives/kindinger.pdf . King, Russell and Anastasia Christou. ‘Cultural Geographies of Counter-Diasporic Migration: Perspectives from the Study of Second-Generation “Returnees” to Greece.’ Population, Space and Place. Vol. 16, No. 2 (2010): 103-19. Markowitz, Fran. ‘The Home(s) of Homecomings.’ Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return. Eds Fran Markowitz and Anders Stefansson. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004: 19-28. Oko, Emelia. The West African Novel and Social Evolution. Calabar: Thumbprints, 2005. Vasey, Katie. ‘Place-Making, Provisional Return, and Well-Being: Iraqi Refugee Women in Australia.’ Refuge. Vol. 28, No. 1 (2011): 25-35.

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Wait No Longer? The Temporality of Return in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments AMANDA RUTH WAUGH LAGJI

‘The worst thing was the fear of the return’, he said … ‘The member of the family who goes out and comes back home is a sort of charmed man, a miracle worker. He goes, he comes back, and with his return some astounding and sudden change is expected.’ Armah, Fragments, 102-3

When we first encounter the protagonist, Baako Onipa, in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments, he is waiting. In the Paris airport and en route from studying abroad in the United States, Baako ‘avoided the initial stampede of passengers in a hurry’ (38). Titled ‘Awkwaaba’, the Akan word for welcome, the chapter pits the excitement and eagerness of other ‘been-tos’ returning from abroad against Baako’s increasing anxiety that his arrival will be disappointing for his family, who expect ostentatious displays and distributions of wealth. Armah’s novel has been called ‘the most fully developed, artful usage of the been-to convention in all West African fiction’ (Lawson The Western Scar: 70), a theme that is both a ‘recognized cultural reality, and a repeated literary convention’ (2). Been-tos leave their native countries to be educated abroad, and then return home to assume powerful or lucrative jobs. This theme, of course, is not limited to West Africa, but is taken up in African literature from across the continent.1 Like the native intellectual in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Baako dreams of returning to Accra and awakening 28

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the masses to their exploitation by the educated elite. Instead, he becomes discouraged by the general malaise and stagnancy he observes across the country. As Baako’s grandmother Naana adeptly observes in the novel’s final chapter, Baako crumbled under the pressure of others’ ‘heavy dreams and hopes filled with the mass of things here and of this time’ (Armah Fragments: 198, emphasis added). Fanon cautioned of a ‘time lag, or a difference of rhythm, between the leaders of a nationalist party and the mass of the people’ (107), and in fact Baako’s return evinces these arrhythmias, as he feels out of step with both the masses and the new nationalist elite.2 Indeed, the dissonance between the temporalities engendered by national development and ‘progress’, disillusionment and deferral, Akan time and tradition contribute to Baako’s eventual mental breakdown and his institutionalization in a mental asylum. Like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Armah’s first novel, Fragments is often categorized as a novel of dis­ illusion­ ment because of its indictment of the newly indepen­dent nation.3 The ‘not yet’ in the title of Armah’s most well-known novel is, in Fragments, echoed in the waiting that pervades the text; disappointed in the realities of post-independence society, Ghanaians are still waiting for the promises of independence to be realized. Given that Fragments is often identified as a ‘novel of disillusionment’, the disappointment and dismay registered through Baako’s return to Ghana suggest that the been-to narrative is an effective convention to illustrate postcolonial dis­ illusionment. In 1976, the Ghanaian writer Kofi Awoonor remarked that Armah, among other writers, seemed ‘to epitomize this era of intense despair’ (The Breast of the Earth: 303-4). In this essay, I am interested in the way that Baako’s return to Ghana is described in terms of waiting, and the ways that both ‘return’ and ‘waiting’ are configured to yield a sense of time at odds with the temporality of

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stasis, which I argue below is characteristic of postcolonial disillusionment. I aim to nuance the established reading of Fragments as a novel of disillusionment by elucidating the mutually constitutive temporalities of return and waiting elaborated in the text, and which have not yet been addressed in the scholarship. I argue that we can see symptoms of waiting as disillusionment, or waiting as stasis in Baako’s sense of time, but that Naana and other characters in the novel suggest other dimensions of waiting not reducible to pessimistic disillusionment. The novel takes up the rhetoric of refusing to wait, as espoused by Nkrumah at Ghana’s independence. Urgency and refusing to wait are available for the new African elite, but not for Baako, Skido or Boateng. Rather than adopting the strategies, values and temporalities associated with national progress, which encourages acceleration for some and stasis for most, characters like Naana turn waiting on its head. This perspective challenges Baako’s notion of disillusioned waiting, which is formed by his experiences as a been-to. Both perspectives are necessary to elucidate the possibilities and limitations of waiting; while Baako’s return brings to the fore the dissonances between the traditional rhythms and life he remembers and the tempos of national ‘progress’ he encounters, Naana’s perspective reminds us that return has additional valences and possibilities beyond the paralysing temporality of waiting that Baako experiences. Scholarship on Fragments is dominated by the assump­ tion that the text is a novel of disillusionment. In his Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, a study of Armah’s fiction, Neil Lazarus contends that Armah’s work is ‘exemplary of the passage from messianism to disillusion’ marking the disappointment that succeeded the euphoria of independence (x). The idea that optimistic inde­ pendence euphoria inevitably gave way to postcolonial disillusion­ ment has become almost a commonplace in

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postcolonial scholarship since Arthur Ravenscroft’s 1969 account, ‘Novels of Disillusion’. His assessment of the politics and tone of African literature was published less than a decade after large swaths of the continent achieved inde­pendence. Yet his assessment of these novels as ‘dis­ illusioned’ about the realities of post-independence society remains influential. More recent work, such as Derek Wright’s 2004 ‘African Literature and Post-Independence Disillusionment’, argues that ‘high-sounding rhetoric’ at independence predominated where ‘framing political principles or social visions’ ought to have guided, which made it ‘not surprising’ that independence was an uneven process, benefitting a handful of professional elites (797). Independence, so the narrative goes, signals a return to colonial dynamics, and the waiting that typifies these texts appears to be anticipation without hope. Disillusionment results in part from several frustrated hopes: independence’s promise of a full representative govern­ment, the expectation of a unified nation and state, a falling short or failing to make good on promises related to political and social welfare, and the belief that independence marked a radical break with the past. Nkrumah announced at an address one month ahead of Ghana’s independence in February 1957: ‘We are not waiting; we shall no more go back to sleep … We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, young as we are, that we are prepared to lay down our foundation’ (Blaustein, Sigler and Beede Independence Documents of the World: 247). Refusing to wait is linked to the country’s youth and newness, celebrating a radical break with colonial rule and the dawn of a new African subject who is fully endowed with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in the new nation. Novels of disillusionment, however, appear to locate the postcolonial subject in a continued state of waiting; in what is often characterized as literature of disillusionment, scholars note a marked pessimism about the future in a seemingly stalled

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present that is doomed to replicate the power dynamics of the colonial past, where citizens wait in vain for the hopes of independence to be realized. Baako’s return, however, draws our attention to the ways in which waiting functions both as a form of continuity between the colonial past and the postcolonial future, and a temporal modality that challenges the notion that waiting entails stalled time and stasis. Baako’s experience of waiting and mental turmoil is directly tied to his return. His dismay at the consumerism, corruption and nepotism that has proliferated in his absence reflects the general mood of disillusionment often ascribed to postcolonial nations in the decades immediately following independence. The narrative uses Naana’s memories to reconstruct the ceremonies of Baako’s departure, and the first two chapters build anticipation and expectation for Baako’s return from abroad before his actual, strained arrival in the third. Baako’s fear of ‘the return’, as he puts it to Juana, a psychiatrist and his eventual lover, is connected to his fear that he will not meet the expectations of his family and community, who expect to see big and sudden changes in their status and wealth. According to the beento narrative, Baako’s return from abroad ought to entail a return on the family’s investment. The man who achieves a successful return is not Baako, however, but Brempong, another been-to on the same return flight who functions as a foil for Baako, and also intensifies Baako’s fear of returning. Brempong initially tries to reassure Baako: ‘You just have to know what to look for when you get a chance to go abroad. Otherwise you come back empty-handed like a fool, and all the time you spent is a waste, useless … But if you come back prepared, there’s nothing to worry about’ (Armah Fragments: 45). Unlike Brempong, Baako returns without a car, a definite job offer or the appearance – according to Brempong – of even being a ‘been-to’ (47). Because Baako returns empty-handed, his time away from

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Ghana appears to have been a waste, and his return too soon. Several assumptions about time undergird the con­ clu­sion that Baako’s time away was wasted. The intrinsic value of travelling abroad overlaps with the ways that mobility is generally valued over immobility, a residual effect of the ‘generally competitive neo-liberal rationales of productivity and a concern that time needs to be utilized more productively in order to be more profitable’. This in turn produces ‘chronological time as a container waiting to be filled’ and ‘must be used wisely’ and not wasted (Bissell ‘Animating Suspension’: 280). This sense of productive time is additionally informed by the legacies of colonialism and the creation of African labour forces by colonial authorities on the continent. Using Kenya and Malawi as case studies, Alamin Mazrui and Lupenga Mphande trace the creation of African labour pools through the imposition of capitalist conceptions of time. They note that activities that ‘may be seen as idleness and time-wasting’ had value in the Kenyan and Malawian communities, and that the ‘idea of time as a linear object that could be gained, saved, or lost was alien’ to the African cosmologies colonists encountered (‘Time and Labor in Colonial Africa’: 100). In order to bind Africans to a standard work day, colonial governments passed vagrancy laws and introduced penalties for unemployment and failure to pay taxes (105). Upon his return, Baako is pressured to capitalize on his mobility – his time abroad and the cultural capital associated with Western ties – and turn time spent elsewhere into financial returns. Commodified time is, as John Mbiti points out, discordant with traditional African life, where ‘time has to be created or produced’ rather than ‘utilized, sold and bought’ (African Religions and Philosophy: 19). During his journey back, Baako is consistently perplexed by this valuation of time as he admits that he does not have a job waiting for him, or connections with ‘big men’ who can

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facilitate rapid socio-economic mobility. The association of ‘return’ with investment and produc­ tive time traffics in conceptions of time that are at odds with temporalities of communal life and tradition that Baako associates nostalgically with home. But through Naana, Baako’s grandmother, Armah suggests that those same traditions and rituals are already affected by impatience and greed. The first chapter, presented from Naana’s perspective, recounts the ceremony marking Baako’s departure, which was rushed by the ‘hot desire impatient at his departure for his return’ (Armah Fragments: 4). The ceremony itself, led by Uncle Foli, is marred by selfish greed; Foli refuses to give the ancestors a generous pouring of alcohol in favour of saving more for himself. Even before Baako’s departure, then, the narrative indicates that growing greed, selfishness and impatience threatens not only the respect and traditions underpinning Baako’s family structure, but also the sense of time that inheres in the rituals themselves. From the perspective of Akan ritual, it appears that Baako and his family would have done well to wait, or at least slow down. Yet, Fragments does not promote ‘waiting’ or patience as a uniform response to the impatience characteristic of greed and consumerism. As a been-to, Baako, on the one hand, has internalized the pressures of success and productive time. Waiting, in this view, is wholly negative and entails delays and deferral. On the other hand, he is aggravated by the tempo of Accra, which emphasizes acceleration, accumulation and development. Electing to wait, in contrast, might offer a critique of capitalistic, productive time. At Baako’s return, these conflicting senses of time collide, as both waiting and refusing to wait appear equally limiting. While Baako is initially in a hurry to return, his momentum is immediately stymied by the waiting imposed by the producers at Ghanavision and other bureaucratic offices and parties. Other characters

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experience his return to Accra differently, and his return is a catalyst for them to reconsider their own orientations in time. In the case of the author Boateng and the truck driver Skido, waiting is configured as the temporality employed by the powerful to maintain the status quo. Baako meets Boateng at a gathering for writers, where Boateng is encouraged to read from his ‘novel awaiting publication’ (115). Drunk and uninhibited, Boateng rails: ‘Nobody meets to discuss real writing anymore. This has become a market where we’re all sold. There’s money for this and that. Grants and so forth, but who swallows all this money?’ While Boateng is justified in his frustration, Ocran, the old teacher scolds, ‘You have a novel. O.K. You’ve had it done for six years, and you’re waiting. Just waiting. A serious writer would have three, four more novels done by now, instead of waiting. And you’d have a totally different picture’ (117). This exchange illustrates the debilitating effects of waiting, foreshadowing the lessons Baako will similarly learn as the newness of returning home fades. Ocran is similarly justified in his entreaty to use the time of waiting to write more, but Boateng’s predicament highlights the real, demoralizing effect of waiting which is to stifle the energy to act and to create. As Skido’s death later shows, refusing to wait is also fraught with danger. Skido has been waiting for the ferry to take his lorry across the river, and as the ferryboat approaches, drivers dash to cut in line. Skido pleads angrily, ‘I’ve waited three days by the river and it’s food I have in my lorry, not iron. I won’t let it happen again’ (135). Instead, policemen allow the government buses to load first, followed by ‘other trucks and lorries crashing after and into each other’ (136). Nerves frayed by the waiting, Skido makes a ‘crazy’ move and propels his truck forward, leaving the lorry in a ‘long suspended moment with its rear tires on land and its front on the moving

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boat’ (137). Juana and Baako look on in disbelief as the ferry undocks, the truck falls, and Skido is crushed in the attempt to leap from it. Clearly, exhibiting patience in waiting for the ferry only further exploits Skido. Yet, refusing to wait results in his death. The text elaborates the injustice implicit in repeated privileging of waiting through the Public Works Department’s engineer, who responds to the incident with the observation, ‘No one asks them to rush. If they don’t make the last ferry at four they can wait till morning … A bit more patience and he’d still be alive. Why are they in such a hurry anyway?’ (139). When Baako presses the engineer to change the operating rules of the ferry, the engineer replies, ‘Listen: I joined the PWD twenty-three whole years ago. I was patient, I waited, that’s why I have my present post’ (140). The futility of Skido’s earlier waiting, however, belies the sensibility of this advice. The imposition of waiting is one way that the powerful maintain their own positions, as refusing to wait or to settle in to the tempo of Accra makes one vulnerable. Faced with the impossibility of negotiating these senses of patience and impatience, Baako’s temporal experience upon his return to Ghana becomes increasingly reduced to waiting and immobility. Unlike Brempong, who embraces the been-to role and temporality of productive time, Baako’s consciousness is shaped by several temporal rhythms, yielding a sense of time that is consistently out of sync. His difficulty with reconciling these competing and disjointed senses of time intensifies in the scene depicting Araba’s outdooring ceremony for her newborn, Baako’s nephew. It is impor­tant to note that the ceremony event is recounted in a flashback, after Baako has a mental breakdown and is institutionalized in an asylum. The actual planning of the outdooring ceremony, however, is narrated much earlier in the text. We learn that traditionally the outdooring ceremony is held one week after the birth, but that Efua and Araba move it

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earlier to coincide with the first weekend after payday (88). Naana foreshadows the baby’s premature death, warning that the child ‘is not yet with us … His birth can be a good beginning … but for this he must be protected. Or he will run screaming back, fleeing the horrors prepared for him up here’ (97). The child’s premature outdooring ceremony mirrors its premature birth and death. Baako botches his responsibility of calling for gifts for the baby, and as the guests leave, Naana remarks: ‘It was too sudden, whatever you did … Everything is wrong now’ (187). After a paragraph break, the text continues, matter-offactly reporting, ‘three weeks after the child was buried Efua asked for help and [Baako] asked her what for’. Baako is disturbed to learn that ‘the time has come to put an announcement in the papers’ to report the baby’s death. This new ritual, which Baako believes to be motivated by show and appearance, is governed by a sense of time and propriety with which he is, again, unfamiliar. Because of Baako’s time away, the discrepancies in tem­ poral schemes and rhythms are especially jarring. In the outdooring ceremony, the time of the working week that controls when the men are paid conflicts with the ritualistic time that traditionally dictates when the ceremony occurs. Likewise, new traditions like farewell announcements in the newspapers require temporal adjustments; the announcement is expected three weeks after the death, a conventional mourning period, but its timing will be additionally dependent on the newspaper’s publication schedule. Baako is unable to reconcile or to negotiate these different temporal modes, resulting in action that is, from every perspective, ‘too sudden’. The subsequent temporality, for Baako, is a sense of stalled time through flashbacks to earlier moments during bouts of mental breakdown. The narrative itself reflects this temporal fragmentation, jumping between the rejection of Baako’s television scripts about slavery, the outdooring ceremony,

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and fevered meditations on contemporary Ghanaian society and the cargo cults of Melanesia. To further develop the temporality that Baako experiences, paralysing the present and resulting in a sense of stasis and futility, I turn to his meditations on the cargo cult and its resonance in contemporary Ghanaian society. These ruminations occur during his most acute exhibi­ tion of mental distress. The chapter ‘Dam’, the Akan word for madness, opens with Baako immobilized by fever (Zabus The African Palimpsest: 165). Agitated by thoughts and reflections that flit quickly through his mind, Baako attempts to ‘trap’ them with his typewriter (Armah Fragments: 156). In the fragmented text that follows, Baako meditates on the similarities between the Melanesian cargo cults – the ‘ritualistic religious expression of the fetishization of material goods introduced to Melanesia by Europeans’ (Murphy ‘The Curse of Constant Remembrance’: 63) – and the expectation that the been-to will similarly act as an intermediary and human export. Baako writes: ‘A return is expected from his presence there: he will intercede on behalf of those not yet dead, asking for them what they need most urgently … Meets established, well-known expecta­tions handsomely … In many ways the been-to cum ghost is and has to be a transmission belt for cargo’ (Armah Fragments: 157). He then elaborates the ‘return’ of cargo in terms of waiting. CARGO MENTALITY. The expectancy, the waiting for bounty dropping from the sky through benign intercession of dead ancestors, the beneficent ghosts … The waiting not a simple expectation, but something more active. An integral part of the waiting is an active expression of strong belief that the cargo will come, i.e., the phenomenon of hope is incomplete without an incorporated act of faith. (160)

The waiting Baako describes here is without end; in this active expression of strong belief, the absence of bounty – which might belie such steadfast certainty – can be

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reconciled through continued hope and faith. In the same way, Baako’s return, despite falling short of expectations, is not enough to dispel his family’s faith in the been-to narrative and the wealth that is expected. The expectations centred on returns, of the physical and material kind alike, reveals that waiting and return here are mutually constitutive and contribute equally to Baako’s growing mental instability. The continued power of hope and returns depends on expectations maintained through the temporality of waiting. One way to understand the relationship between this meditation on cargo mentality and the text’s larger com­ mentary on temporality is through the recurring images of the slave trade, a past that Baako attempts to link with Ghana’s present but that others continually suppress.4 Laura Murphy argues that the trauma of the slave trade causes ‘Baako’s stress and existential nausea’, and that the text, through the slave castle that figures as imagery in Baako’s scripts and appears in the background on the beach where Efua and Juana meet, makes ‘explicit links between the materialism of postcolonial Ghana and the earlier vicious and deadly consumption of human lives’ (‘The Curse of Constant Remembrance’: 56). Linking the slave trade with the cargo cult mentality of awaiting the been-to, Fragments creates a ‘layered temporality’ in which the present-day consumerism ‘is no modern, post-independence malady’ (63-4). My reading of Fragments extends this observation to argue that the waiting and return evoked and experienced by the characters provide a temporal continuity between colonial and postcolonial Ghana. In the rush to embrace a break with colonial government, the characters in Fragments avoid coming to terms with the history of the slave trade, and inadvertently perpetuate its vices through what Murphy calls ‘the slave trade’s commodification of human life and his [Baako’s] family’s vision of him as the deliverer of consumable “cargo”’ (63). Rather than

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confront slavery, and I would argue the existing geopolitical and economic realities that are the legacies of colonialism, producers at Ghanavision (where he eventually finds employ­ment) tell Baako: ‘Look, we’re a free, independent people. We’re engaged in a gigantic task of nation building. We have inherited a glorious culture, and that’s what we’re here to deal with … Look, don’t waste time’ (Armah Fragments:147). This forward-looking mentality, however, excises the past prematurely and allows similar dynamics of dispossession and privilege, acceleration for some and waiting for others, to continue. In contrast to the cargo mentality’s emphasis on the future, Baako’s sense of waiting focuses single-mindedly on the past. Over time, Baako develops a sense of stalled time, of waiting as stasis, through continued circling back to the past. Lazarus similarly argues that Baako is unable to bridge the past and future in the present moment. Baako’s problem, according to Lazarus, is that he is unable ‘to sustain his activism in the concrete here-and-now while appreciating that it is not in the present but only in the “not yet,” in the as-yet unforeseeable and uncertain future, that this activism will be seen to have been constructive’ (101). Hugh O’Connell’s comments about the ‘not yet’ in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born are applicable here as well; Fragments emphasizes the ‘not yet’, ‘which is other to the present and thus unknowable to the teleological, western developmental discourse of history wrapped in the promise of the bourgeois nationalists’ (O’Connell ‘A Weak Utopianism of Postcolonial Nationalist Bildung’: 379). Baako faces a disjunction between acting in the present and knowing that the results will only be realized in the future, a discouraged sense of waiting. Unlike Fanon’s ‘colonized man’ who ‘ought to use the past with the intention of opening up the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’ (The Wretched of the Earth: 232), Baako is unable to bridge the here and now and the not yet. Juana,

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on the other hand, ‘understand[s] that the present is in so many wearying respects barely more than an extension of the past’ (Lazarus: 105) and so she ‘live[s] not merely with future in mind, but as though it were already here’ (116). A focus on waiting clarifies this difference, as the women in the text, in particular Efua and Naana, inhabit the temporality of waiting in ways that continue to reach out towards the uncertain future. The way that the opening and closing chapters, narrated from Naana’s first-person perspective, frame ‘return’ yields a less paralysing temporality of waiting. The motif of return is introduced through Naana, who is certain that ‘[a]ll that goes returns and nothing in the end is lost’ (Armah Fragments: 1). This perspective starkly contrasts with Brempong and the producers at Ghanavision, who are quick to call ‘unproductive’ time ‘wasted time’. Naana’s voice, both structurally and thematically in the novel, is relegated to the periphery of the text. While Naana insists that Baako, despite his travels and the changes he no doubt will exhibit, will be ‘welcome[d] … just the same’, the narrative depicts Baako’s interactions with community and family, who are less welcoming to the failed been-to (3). The community’s sympathy rests with Efua, Baako’s mother, who waited a long time for her son to return and whose expectations of material change to their circumstances are unsatisfied. Despite her disappointment, Efua has one moment where she exhibits a spirit of reconciliation towards Baako and his return that configures waiting as a temporality open to the future, but not dictating its outcomes. Efua’s tentative reconciliation occurs in a short chapter that bears her name, and comes immediately after the chapter ‘Dam’. As Baako remembers this encounter, he lies in the acute ward after running across Accra, tortured by the image of Brempong’s business card that reminds him of his failure. In contrast to the immediately preceding

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chapters, Baako’s memory is clear here and he remembers the events of an earlier Sunday with Efua more or less linearly. Efua warns Baako ‘not to let the waiting make him angry’ as they take the bus to a deteriorating building that she hoped he would renovate to be a house for her (176). As part of her ‘soul-cleaning’, she tells him that she had previously cursed him for his failures, but now lets go of the dream of the extravagant house. She continues with her ‘happy laugh’ throughout their return home, ‘waiting in the sun for whatever would come’ (179). One could read in Efua’s words the same disappointment with independence characteristic of novels of disillusionment; she lets go of her dreams and desires not because she recognizes their superficiality, but because she knows that Baako will not fulfil them. But when Efua releases Baako, reiterating that ‘it’s all over now’, we might also read through her disappointment to a new orientation towards the future, heralded and more fully realized in Naana’s concluding voice that announces: ‘The time has come’ (195). Put another way, the ‘not yet’ is ‘now’. Letting go of the been-to narrative, where a return from abroad is equivalent to a return on investment, allows ‘return’ to function in the service of hopeful, futureoriented regeneration. Return forges a kind of beginning for Baako, and Naana’s concluding lines link beginnings and endings as she invokes the ancestors: ‘Take me. I am ready. You are the end. The beginning. You who have no end. I am coming’ (201). Fragments is significantly bracketed by Naana’s point of view, straining for the new and the whole, and discontent with pieces. A grandmother figure, Naana evokes the circular relationship between the living, the unborn and the ancestors, what Chukwunyere Kamalu calls ‘a cyclical process of becoming’ (Person, Divinity & Nature: 31). Naana’s point of view evokes both circularity and return at odds with the forward-only thrust of modern Accra’s environment, and also offers a promise of forging

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continuous connections despite breaks and interruptions in the construction of time and history. Wright’s work on the Akan background to Fragments helpfully addresses Naana’s role in the text. In his view, Naana’s final call to the ancestors, whom she will shortly join: holds in simultaneous apposition contrary ideas of cyclicality and terminality, process and endings, leaving uncertain the final value which is to be attached to Naana’s religious vision. Naana’s death, in her own view, is subsumed into a cycle of renewal and restoration, and the historical decline of which it is part is only another development in the unceasing process of the spirit. But from the quite different and more material viewpoint of her age, the deteriorative historical process has already subverted this circular progress. (188)

As she awaits her own return to the ancestors, she repre­ sents and enacts a dynamic relationship with the past. Naana’s vision of the present and future engenders a different temporality than that assumed by narratives of linear history or disillusionment, allowing her to wait rather than despair, not only for herself but for Baako: ‘The returned traveler also – in all that noise I thought he would surely die, but there must be strong spirits looking after him’ (Armah Fragments: 199). In this way, the novel shifts the definition of ‘success’ for Baako the been-to from the acquisition of material goods and status to ‘a powerful unifying understanding’ (Lawson: 71), one that resists the temporality of waiting as stasis, and instead makes the past present as the characters turn towards the future to come. The temporal modality that Naana inhabits, according to Wright’s reading, is neither inflexibly cyclical nor absolutely linear; in her negotiation of time and culture in contemporary Ghana, Naana evokes the time of waiting to wrestle with these competing temporalities. In her, we see ‘the traditional order is given a dynamic continuity with the present’ (Wright ‘The Akan Background’: 176). Naana’s own imminent return to the

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ancestors reminds us that return functions in numerous ways in Fragments, and through the movements of return, the temporality of waiting is employed in both passive and active, pessimistic and optimistic registers. A focus on waiting in Fragments captures the temporal modalities at play in the novel, undercutting readings of the text that would ascribe a straightforward temporality of ‘disillusionment’ in its orientation towards the future. As Naana in particular demonstrates, waiting need not be reduced to stasis or temporal stagnation, but might function in opposition to it. Waiting, in my view, is often voided of its political power because it is defined as a kind of stasis, where both movement and time stalls. The wholesale reduction of waiting to stasis tends to overlook the way that other configurations of time might draw on other cosmologies. Time stops in stasis, but waiting, in contrast, assumes both a past and a future. Rather than stasis’s cessation of time, waiting posits a different configura­ tion of time that functions to reveal the power, as well as the limitations, of the linear time of development and disillusionment, and to suggest other ways to experience and theorize time. Fragments clearly does not privilege waiting as a mode of being – both Skido’s fate and Boateng’s novel speak to those complications – but rather nuances our understanding of waiting given how characters describe their experience of time through its temporal dimensions. Naana’s voice in the novel’s concluding chapter returns us to her opening words in the novel, framing Baako’s physical return in terms of her spiritual one. She reminds us: ‘Everyone who goes returns … That is the circle’ (Armah Fragments: 3). And as the text comes full circle through Naana’s voice, the temporality of waiting that attends Baako’s return opens up. Waiting certainly captures a sense of impatience for rapid forward movement in the form of modernization and development, and is also used by those in positions

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of power to maintain their influence. But as Fragments demon­strates through the poetics of return, waiting is a multivalent temporality that can register the tensions of multiple temporal modalities confronting the African sub­ ject in making sense of her world.

NOTES 1 The theme is not limited to Africa. See, for example, Vera Mihailovich-Dickman’s edited collection, ‘Return’ in Post-Colonial Writing: A Cultural Labyrinth. 2 I follow Kevin Birth’s concept of ‘arrhythmias’ in Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, Birth theorizes: ‘Polyrhythmia is the existence of multiple rhythms; eurhythmia is the consonance of these rhythms; arrhythmia is the conflict of these rhythms’ (101). He utilizes ‘arrhythmias’ and ‘polyrhythmias’ to theorize time and temporality in postcolonial Trinidad (102). 3 Susan Andrade, in ‘Realism, Reception, 1968, and West Africa’, observes that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born severely criticizes the independence movement and Nkrumah in particular (303). As we see in Fragments, the language of refusing to wait is taken up by the African nationalist elite in a grotesque inversion of Nkrumah’s message at independence. 4 Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, Armah’s emphasis on the slave trade anticipates later developments in theorizing African culture, modernity and tradition, most notably Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic. Both Baako and Gilroy are critical of the way that ‘blacks are urged, if not to forget the slave experience which appears as an aberration from the story of greatness told in African history, then to replace it at the centre of our thinking with a mystical and ruthlessly positive notion of Africa that is indifferent to intraracial variation and is frozen at the point where blacks boarded the ships that would carry them into the woes and horrors of the middle passage’ (Gilroy: 189).

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WORKS CITED Andrade, Susan Z. ‘Realism, Reception, 1968, and West Africa.’ Modern Language Quarterly. Vol. 73, No. 3 (2012): 289-308. Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. ——Fragments. London: Heinemann, 1974[1970]. Awoonor, Kofi. The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976. Birth, Kevin. Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bissell, David. ‘Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.’ Mobilities. Vol. 2, No. 2 (2007): 277-98. Blaustein, Albert P., Jay A. Sigler and Benjamin R. Beede, eds. Indepen­ dence Documents of the World. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1977. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Kamalu, Chukwunyere. Person, Divinity & Nature: A Modern View of the Person & the Cosmos in African Thought. London: Karnak House, 1998. Lawson, William. The Western Scar: The Theme of the Been-to in West African Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982. Lazarus, Neil. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Mazrui, Alamin and Lupenga Mphande. ‘Time and Labor in Colonial Africa: The Case of Kenya and Malawi.’ Time in the Black Experience. Ed. Joseph K. Adjaye. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. 2nd rev. and enlarged edn. Oxford and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990. Mihailovich-Dickman, Vera. ‘Return’ in Post-Colonial Writing: A Cultural Labyrinth. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Murphy, Laura. ‘The Curse of Constant Remembrance: The Belated Trauma of the Slave Trade in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments.’ Studies in the Novel. Vol. 40, No. 1 (2008): 52-71. O’Connell, Hugh Charles. ‘A Weak Utopianism of Postcolonial National­ist Bildung: Re-Reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful

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Ones Are Not Yet Born.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Vol. 48, No. 4 (2012): 371-83. Ravenscraft, Arthur. ‘African Literature V. Novels of Disillusion’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Vol. 6, No. 1-3 (1969): 120-37. Wright, Derek. ‘Fragments: The Akan Background.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 18, No. 2 (1987): 176-91. ——‘African Literature and Post-Independence Disillusionment.’ Cam­bridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Ed. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004: 797-808. Zabus, Chantal. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. 2nd enlarged edn. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

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‘Our Relationship to Spirits’ History & Return in Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar DAVID BORMAN

From 1775 to 1783, the time of major conflict between Britain and its American colonies, the number of runaway slaves from southern plantations in the United States spiked dramatically. From this group, two waves of emigrants were brought to the west coast of Africa, the first from London in 1787 and then again from Nova Scotia in 1792. In a Nietzschean and Foucauldian sense, the historical narrative about the Black Loyalists might be called a history of constants, with all its ‘consoling play of recognitions’ between historical event and the contemporary moment (Foucault ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’: 88). In this case, the Black Loyalists are recognizably modern, rights-bearing individuals who make up the heart of liberal politics. They are situated, to an unusual degree, as powerful actors in the emergence of revolutionary – and still culturally animating – ideals.1 The fictional account of this moment I examine here, the epic novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, narrates the Black Loyalists in a manner more akin to a Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogical history, as the author, Sierra Leone exile Syl Cheney-Coker, uses this historical moment to destabilize the very situatedness that history depends upon to understand the Black Loyalists. Rather than present the Loyalists as recognizable representatives of a particular culture who demand acknowledgement, The Last Harmattan depicts an international story of multiple affiliations and multiple historical influences. In short, 48

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rather than see the Black Loyalists as an early example of liberal democratic values, this novel proposes the need to think multihistorically about contemporary affiliations. The Last Harmattan recog­nizes disparate historical experiences and uneven inter­national connections as integral to con­ temporary col­lective identification. By extension, con­tem­ por­­ary self-identi­fication with Africa becomes a process of noting these multiple, dynamic histories rather than claiming a cultural affinity for Africa, a place that is typically seen as unchanging, epistemologically separated from modernity as a peripheral site of ‘tradition’ and atavism (Piot Nostalgia for the Future: 8). Cheney-Coker’s novel foregrounds the importance of time and history as negotiable factors in the Black Loyalists’ affiliations with Africa, with a mystical vision of history linking Africa and the Americas through the returnees’ sentiments of belonging. The returnees who are able to gain a sense of themselves in the novel do so by means of the magical – the settlers’ felt sense of belonging comes during moments when magic intervenes in reality.2 The novel uses this technique as a method for celebrating the deeply felt connection to ‘Malagueta’ – a fictionalized version of Freetown – as well as to critique the returnees’ shameful ignorance of the people who actually inhabit this part of West Africa. Because the novel so frequently shuffles between magic and reality as well as various time periods on multiple conti­nents, The Last Harmattan is nearly impossible to summarize. It begins with the original 1787 settlers, sailing from London to Malagueta and follows their families in subsequent generations, culminating with a failed postcolonial military coup by General Tamba Masi­ miara. The title character, Alusine Dunbar – known for most of the novel as Sulaiman the Nubian – is a seer from Mali and, before the settlers arrive, he projects a vision of their coming. He vanishes for a century, only to return as

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inspiration for a poet named Garbage and with the help of his glowing, giant, magical testicles, Alusine Dunbar helps Garbage navigate Malagueta’s history and understand the rise and eventual fall of the Krio ruling class.3 The Last Harmattan is populated by many stories and characters, all of which serve to simultaneously mystify and bring clarity to this project of nation building in West Africa. CheneyCoker’s novel is distinguished by its specific subject matter. It is primarily a story of mass return to Africa, and the subsequent building of community and nation stem from this re-crossing of the Atlantic and the multiple histories that overlap as part of this collectivity. In the novel, Cheney-Coker largely defines through magical means the cultural connections enabled by return, an appropriate vehicle for suggesting such multiple and extra-national histories as a basis for collective identifica­ tion. While the magical is the novel’s vehicle for describing – and initially celebrating – the ways that these original settlers imagine their belonging in Africa, it also implies a critique of that imagined connection. In these moments of otherworldliness, the novel’s characters inevitably feel a sense of collective affiliation, but they largely do so at the cost of everyday connections among the Africans already residing in Malagueta. Magic has the unique ability to simultaneously convey these ends at any given moment, a condition that reflects the complexities of Black Loyalist identification. Although many were originally captured and transported from Africa, their cultural status as returnees complicates individual affiliation. Each returnee’s sense of self is filtered through multiple cultures and experiences, and magic offers an aesthetic complement to these difficulties inherent in the act of return, conveying conflicting sentiments in the same moment. In narrating the Black Loyalists’ story, Cheney-Coker accounts for the seemingly natural connection the returnees feel for Africa while also suggesting that this connection does not

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necessarily translate to the process of nation building. In the end, the poet Garbage comes to represent a more meaningful and useful model of affiliation for Malagueta. As the child of a settler and a native African, he maintains the connection to the magical so integral to the returnees, but he also lives with an awareness of alternative voices in Malagueta’s history. In positing Garbage as both the heir to Alusine Dunbar and as the chronicler of the budding nation-state, Cheney-Coker presents the kind of returnee affiliation that can capitalize on a special connection to Africa while remaining attached to the practicalities of postcolonial citizenship. The magical vision that characterizes the entire novel begins on board the Belmont, a ship carrying the original emigrants in 1787. The narrative follows Jeanette and Sebastian Cromantine from London – where they have resided since their evacuation from the American Revolution – to the Kasila coast, Cheney-Coker’s invented name for the region of Africa most commonly referred to as the Grain Coast in Sierra Leone’s early history. They eventually settle there in the town of Malagueta. Sebastian returns his father’s remains to Africa while Jeanette is tasked with completing the circuit of another woman on board, Fatmatta the BirdWoman. These two journeys characterize the original connections the novel’s settler characters feel between Africa and the US and Canada, and they both are heavily influenced by the presence of the dead and the magical. The connections these characters experience are largely felt through the otherworldly realm, and the novel suggests that magical elements actually enable these imagined links between the returnees and Africa. In many ways, these original associations are celebrated as moments of genuine connection that help lead the settlers to fuller senses of themselves as individuals and as part of the returning collective, and the presence of magic inserts multiple and overlapping histories into this crossing of the Atlantic.

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Although the novel begins on the deck of the Belmont, it almost immediately reaches back to the slave past of the Cromantines.4 Both are born in the American colonies to slaves. Jeanette is described as the beautiful octoroon daughter of a house servant and the slave master’s son, who sends her away from the plantation to live as a free black with an elderly preacher. Sebastian’s slavery is largely in the service of an elderly white woman whom he deserts for the British lines in the Revolution. Although the Cromantines lived behind British lines during the war, it is their experience in London – seeing poverty among whites and blacks – as well as a spiritual connection to Sebastian’s father in America that calls them ‘back’ to Africa in 1787. Sebastian completes the first circum-Atlantic journey of the novel when his dead father, a former slave taken from the Kasila coast, calls from beyond the grave, telling Sebastian to journey to Africa (Cheney-Coker: 9). His father connects Sebastian to a pre-slave past, one that is ultimately more meaningful and generative than any ties to the Americas. This supernatural encounter shows Sebastian that his father ‘was obeying the call from another world to which he had returned’ (10). As they sail to Africa, Sebastian shows Jeanette the skull of his father, unearthed during the Revolution, which he is carrying across the ocean. He calls the skull ‘de Magic Lantern’ and uses its spiritual and symbolic significance to give perspective to this return to ‘de place where our faders come from’ (1415). More than serving as a symbol of physical return to Africa, Sebastian’s father’s skull is a reminder of the kinds of connections to Africa that give meaning to Sebastian’s daily life. The skull allows him to gain awareness of a culture from which he has been severed, and Africa becomes more than simply a place in his family’s past. By opening himself to the possibilities inherent in another worldview, Sebastian can see his own lineage as more than a family tree or line of descent, and he feels a strong sense of attachment to his

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pre-slave ancestors: ‘Now, he could evoke a lineage that was not defined by time, but by the spirit, by the force of all eternities and the running music of ancestral water that coursed through his blood’ (14). Sebastian’s con­ nection to Africa, rooted in the spiritual rather than the temporal, is helpful for understanding the ways in which a felt connection to Africa generates an ‘African’ sense of self for Cheney-Coker’s returnees. As Sebastian completes his father’s journey from Africa to America and back, the novel celebrates this moment of spirituality as a genuine connection that results in Sebastian’s fuller sense of self and belonging. Sebastian seems to be constantly engaging questions of how to belong in Africa in a meaningful way, beginning with using his father’s skull as a ‘Magic Lantern’ to guide his journey to Africa. When a second wave of emigrants arrives, he embraces a worldview akin to that of Sulaiman when he sees that the present is dependent upon those who are in ‘another realm of existence’ and ‘that through the present dead, man was alive’ (143). Sebastian’s revelation leads to the rebuilt town’s first act of community building: Sebastian hosts a feast to remember those who had been before, a feast attended by ‘the whole community’ (144). In hosting this feast, the Cromantines successfully ‘reconcile people who had gone apart’ (144) while also building a shared sense of identity as Malaguetans, all of which is built upon a renewal of the magical connections that first attached Sebastian to West Africa. In a sense, he passes this spirituality on to the second wave of emigrants, teaching them to understand their own collective affiliations as anchored to a spiritual worldview and an ambiguous sense of historical time. Sebastian’s feast revels in such historical multiplicity, honouring the dead while celebrating the present. On the Belmont’s route from London to Malagueta, another circum-Atlantic journey is also completed. This

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journey is, in some ways, more straightforward than Sebastian’s, as Fatmatta the Bird-Woman was herself taken from the continent and is physically present for her return. She never sets foot on land alive, however, for she dies as the ship comes within sight of the Kasila coast. Fatmatta’s death inaugurates the returnees’ settlement in Malagueta; their first official act is to bury her on African soil. Perhaps paradoxically, it is through death that Fatmatta connects to her African past and to her fellow settlers, as she passes on much of her life’s story to Jeanette Cromantine, arguably the most important settler for the founding and initial prosperity of Malagueta. In transmitting her story to Jeanette, Fatmatta initiates a non-biological female line of cultural continuity, a connection that reappears throughout the novel in various magical moments. Like Sebastian’s devotion to his father, this association between Jeanette and Fatmatta is enabled by magical elements and is celebrated as a connection that fosters genuine links for the returnees; it also establishes the magical as a realm of existence in Malagueta that pre-exists the returnees. Fatmatta’s magical connection to Africa, and her ability to extend that connection to the other settlers, shows the kinds of belonging adopted by the returnees in the novel. Her story is one that virtually erases the Middle Passage, focusing on moments of union instead. Rather than develop new ties in the American colonies, Fatmatta remains tied to her homeland as well as her ancestry, imagining ‘a long ancestral bridge with a lot of people crossing from one end to the other’ (67). She understands intuitively that she is destined to return to Africa, a destiny that is intricately tied to ‘an old animated life rhythm that went round the universe like a great flame’ (67). Fatmatta’s vision of a ‘long ancestral bridge’ connecting past and present is akin to Sebastian’s embrace of a spiritual lineage. Both visions foreground ‘return’ as an important part of Sierra Leonean identity; and ‘return’ in both visions is equal parts a spiritual

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return to an African worldview and the physical return of those removed by slavery (67). Both visions are indicative of the novel’s treatment of settler belonging, for magic is the vehicle by which such return to Africa generates selfunderstanding among the returnees. The development of this perceived sense of association in Malagueta, in fact, is itself a product of the community’s adoption of Fatmatta the Bird-Woman’s magical nature and the returnees’ use of that magic as a basis for collective identification. Although she dies before the founding of the town, her burial initiates the settlers’ stay in Africa. Furthermore, Fatmatta reappears at key moments in the settlers’ history, especially at births, deaths and moments of political upheaval. Her reappearance at these moments measures the continuation of the 1787 settler connection to Africa, but it also underscores the magical presentation of settler belonging in the novel. That Fatmatta appears throughout the novel at moments like these is also evidence that this kind of connection is what makes the Black Loyalist story a powerful example of African belonging on a global scale. The moments of disconnect – whether the Middle Passage or settler-native hostilities – are elided in favour of these spiritual and magical moments of synchrony. Indeed, the novel asserts that a shared sense of community and belonging are largely imagined through visions of magic and alternative notions of time and history. Fatmatta’s appearance at these moments, and Sebastian’s invocation of his father’s voice, are individual histories that explain felt connections to Africa upon return. However, they are problematically used as the basis for an essential cultural trait of the returnees, as ‘a kind of blood knowledge, unmediated by experience or time’ (Cooper ‘Cultural Identity, Cultural Studies in Africa and the Representation of the Middle Passage’: 174). Cheney-Coker’s novel shows this spirituality as part of the returnees’ prioritization of a constructed returnee community ethos. His narrative must

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account for the strong sense of affiliation these former slaves feel for Africa, and the spiritual realm – however saturated with essentialist language – provides the kind of powerful association that the settlers feel for the continent itself. Taken as the collective inheritance of the returnees, the magical realm further forges collective consciousness among the settlers while ignoring the fact that these magical stories are pieces of settler history, not a natural, unmediated essence of return. At its most generative, the founding of Sierra Leone is a powerful story of worldly belonging, as in these early imaginings of Sebastian and Fatmatta. But the novel itself critiques the settlers’ priorities in the development of its plot. If the returnees see themselves essentially as spiritually connected to Africa, the effects of detaching themselves from everyday Malaguetan life are apparent when Malagueta becomes a colony and then an independent nation. While Fatmatta’s ancestral bridge serves as an important moment for the collective attachment to Malagueta, Cheney-Coker’s novel also reveals the distancing effect such visions have on the settlers. Non-returnees are routinely presented as less involved with the spiritual realm, as they do not organize their community around this in the way the returnees do. Thus, their interpretations of Malaguetan history and culture are largely practical affairs. The imperial and postcolonial dynamics of the novel make a strong claim that the magical can provide a felt sense of settler belonging, but it cannot be an unproblematically celebrated cultural trait of returnees. Malagueta’s imperial moment begins with David Hammer­stone, the novel’s primary embodiment of colon­ iza­tion, who is driven to Africa by the desire to begin a mission of stability and progress brought about by the Bible and commerce. Significantly, Hammerstone’s ideology of progress and development interrupts Sebastian Cromantine’s feast honouring the dead. This feast marks

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Sebastian’s acceptance of a non-linear version of time. Yet, whereas Sebastian Cromantine looked to honour the dead as part of life, Hammerstone imposes a new way of seeing life in Malagueta. For Hammerstone, life is pointed towards the future, not related to those who have come before. He also ushers in an ethic of enlightenment ‘rationality’, as he focuses on the development and maintenance of colonial authority and law. His chief aim is to run an efficient colony, speaking to a very different way of living from the returnees. By imposing his will, Hammerstone brings about two violent colonial wars as well as a final war of independence. He also capitalizes on growing class divisions within Malagueta, personally encouraging the development of a settler aristocracy. By asserting the absolute difference of returnees and others in Malagueta, he encourages the settlers to think of the magical as essential to their specific culture. Such encouragement, however, has the effect of removing settlers from seeing Malagueta as a colony – and later, nation – made up of many cultures and histories. But Hammerstone’s logic, especially in his focus on the present rather than the past, is taken to the extreme by the Malaguetan postcolonial rulers who populate the novel’s concluding pages. What the Captain, Sanka Maru and Ali Baba share is the notion that magic is the collective property that sets settlers apart from the rest of Malagueta, and they react to this returnee difference by asserting their own cultural traits in the national sphere. Yet again, the novel separates the settlers’ historical perspective defined by magical connection from the variety of cultures represented in the present-day postcolonial nation of Malagueta. Sanka Maru, Ali Baba and the other ministers and military personnel that populate postcolonial Malagueta only see the legacy of returnee exceptionalism and the class divisions that arise from it, and they demand that their own cultural traits be recognized. By this point in the

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novel, all involved parties ignore the multiple histories that constitute Malaguetan settler society in favour of the myth that returnees have an exclusive connection to the magical realm. In this sense, it is significant that Sanka Maru is eventually removed from his office and killed by Alusine Dunbar, with the help of his magical, glowing testicles: ‘The light of the testicles glowed with a fierce brilliance, and [Sanka Maru] felt himself lifted out of the grandiloquent illusion of power, borne into space as if he were a dwarf, by a force too terrible to contemplate’ (397). Dunbar, flying on a magic carpet, sends Sanka Maru ‘crashing down in the middle of a street’ to be put on public display in death (397). Such an ending to the postcolonial corruption – and the novel itself – asserts the value of the spiritual, nonlinear worldview in ways that are not connected to settler collective identification. Brenda Cooper notes that ‘Sanka Maru … stands as a symbolic shorthand for the novel’s tensions between historical and mythical time’ and is part of the larger ‘ambiguity surrounding time and space’ in the novel (Magical Realism in West African Fiction: 142-3). Yet Dunbar’s ousting of Sanka Maru also suggests that magic is as important to the affairs of the postcolonial Malaguetan state as it was to returnee identification. While the novel’s magical ending undoubtedly critiques the postcolonial corruption of Malagueta, it equally comments upon the removed nature of the returnees, who have used magic as the foundation for their cultural identity rather than as one piece of Malagueta’s history. For the most part, there is little interaction between the settlers and native Africans, and the nature of the settlers’ connections to Africa have little to do with an actually lived experience in Africa. Rather, their often powerful associations with the continent are largely imagined through the magical, and the novel clearly shows that such removal from the everyday – the refusal to negotiate this connection with the practicalities of West African life – is

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a looming factor in the postcolonial failure of Malagueta. One of the architects of a postcolonial coup in Malagueta, Colonel Lookdown Akongo, deeply resents the class division between Krios and native Africans, and cites this as one reason for his rebellion: ‘He laughed when he recalled that incongruously with their three-piece woollen suits and the Sunday charade of going to church, they were the biggest practitioners of sorcery, lost in the chimerical illusion of history that blinded them to the fact that their chickens were coming home to roost’ (Cheney-Coker: xv). However, Dunbar’s magical triumph over the postcolonial corruption suggests that contemporary problems in Malagueta are not necessarily the results of returnee dis­ connect, but that sentiments the settlers attached to their spiritual feelings were used to establish a distinct cultural identity. Whereas such magical elements are originally presented as moments for returnees to work through the past and feel a connection to Malagueta through that history, this otherworldly activity becomes entrenched as a cultural trait as the settlers remain in Malagueta. Although the novel uses such imagined associations to show a lived difference between the former slaves and the native West Africans, the resulting disconnect and class disparity does not negate the returnees’ felt sense of belonging or their potential for a collective affiliation with Africa. Alusine Dunbar’s magical victory over Sanka Maru reasserts the spiritual into the realm of everyday national affairs, creating a space in contemporary Malagueta where the governing of a contemporary multicultural nation-state can coexist with the felt connections that have long defined the returnee consciousness. The novel’s conclusion is not the only moment in which the spiritual settler point of view is resituated as one historical experience among many, rather than the exclusive property of returnee culture. In fact, it is Garbage – the revolutionary poet – who both inherits

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Sulaiman’s philosophies and immerses himself in the politics of contemporary Malagueta in ways that unsettle the perception that settler culture is magically inclined by nature. This lifelong process begins with the curious circumstances of his birth, which are dependent upon a liminal position. When their efforts at conceiving a child in Malagueta are unsuccessful, Isatu Martins, a native African, and her husband Gustavius, a 1787 settler, travel back to Isatu’s hometown after a premonition about her father’s death. It is here that they begin the process of cleansing themselves and returning to a simpler way of life, and in doing so, they prepare themselves for conception. It is also from this process that Garbage receives his strange name. However, what also lies within this story, a story positioned at the centre of the novel itself, is the most generative moment of communication between the settlers and the African world to which they immigrate. Garbage’s birth, the novel suggests, is the model for collectivity that relies upon multiple histories rather than a variety of cultural traits. Garbage’s birth is the product of a long process that both Gustavius and Isatu have to endure. Isatu is driven home by the fear that something has happened to her father, Santigue Dambolla; her fears are correct, as he has recently died and his spirit still supposedly roams around the family home. Isatu learns she can bear a child only if she and Gustavius agree to ‘be washed with the sap of the leaves of the grove’ in which her foetuses are supposedly trapped (206). The magical elements of these conditions are significant, for they link Gustavius – a returnee struggling to understand his place in Malagueta – with a more mystical worldview and the very elemental perspective that comes from Santigue’s death in the banana grove. This particular scene makes both preconditions for living a fulfilling, community-based life in the future, and both perspectives are ultimately passed down to Garbage.

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This washing is also the first and only way Gustavius is able to enter into Isatu’s family as an equal partner, for the ritual cleansing in dirt is part of a different understanding of the world. As her mother urges: ‘This is as it was before your time, because we are all segments of the dirt of the world, and an inescapable part of living is recognising our relationship to spirits, to nature and these creatures of the underworld’ (206). Garbage’s birth, then, serves as a moment when the magical and earthly worlds come together. Yet, as Cooper notes, the birth is also tainted with essen­tial­ism. She claims the ‘supernatural world is roman­ ticised as spiritually superior’ and that Gustavius must be ‘cleansed of the contamination by the debris of an inferior foreign culture’ associating the ‘dirt of the world’ with the slave cultures Gustavius encountered in the United States (‘Cultural’: 175). But the novel itself proposes ‘dirt’ as an elemental part of life to be seen as an addition to the spiritual rather than a blemish to be washed away. Throughout the novel, connection across borders and cultures is dependent upon the kind of cognitive realignment that simultaneously embraces the unexplainable and the ordinary. Being cleansed of the ‘dirt of the world’ is a mental preparation for identifying collectively, for Gustavius must open himself to both the spiritual and earthly realms before he and Isatu can have a child. Putting such ‘dirt’ alongside the magical reaffirms the novel’s sense that Malagueta is a collection of multiple histories that have largely been ignored. The openness embodied by Garbage Martins stands as the model for what Malaguetan collectivity can and should be. Naming the newborn Garbage is less surprising than it might at first seem, given the circumstances that surround his birth. In the final moments of Book Two, Isatu has a vision in which Garbage takes his place as the heir to Alusine Dunbar. He is thrown onto the garbage pile where Santigue Dambolla died only to be picked up and cleaned

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of his impurities magically by Santigue. After waking from her dream, Isatu immediately names the child Garbage, ‘so that he will not forget his roots’ (Cheney-Coker: 208). While the name certainly puzzles most of Malagueta, it is an apt reminder of the very powerful connections made between Gustavius, Isatu and the earthly past they had tried to ignore. Indeed, the novel suggests that the most generative form of belonging will have to be intimately connected to the filth of the world, not in spite of it. Naming their child Garbage is somewhat akin to the prophecies of Sulaiman the Nubian, the calming presence of Fatmatta the BirdWoman, or Sebastian Cromantine’s feast of remembrance: all engender a sense of community rooted in the magical history that defines Cheney-Coker’s Malagueta. However, it also speaks to the need for a fundamental connection to African life and experience, embodied by Santigue Dambolla and his banana grove. As he comes of age, Garbage presents the poetic possibility of being able to ‘continue the narrative line’ begun by Sulaiman (Cooper Magical: 143). As a young adult, just before he begins experimenting with poetry, Garbage encounters Sulaiman, now known as Alusine Dunbar, and his herniated, glowing testicles. For Garbage, Dunbar is primarily a medium for understanding Malagueta’s history, as Garbage ‘had been waiting for [Dunbar] to come to lead him through the labyrinth of the past, now that many of the old people in Malagueta had been overcome by the persistence of death or had succumbed to the senile voracity of old age’ (Cooper ‘Cultural’: 291). But, more than this, their initial meeting also shows Garbage that Alusine Dunbar’s particular point of view is one that can speak to the magical as part of pre-settler Malaguetan history, not returnee culture exclusively. Garbage then uses this insight to compose poetry that comments on the lived experiences of Mala­ gue­tans both descended from returnees and not.

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This poetry reflects a strong commitment to social and political critique that cannot simply emanate from a spiritual sense of belonging typically associated with settler culture. By giving Garbage this capacity, Cheney-Coker suggests that the most generative model for collective identification involves reframing magic as part of Malagueta’s history, not as a special returnee attribute. The magical connections that characterize the settlers throughout the novel are not dismissed or made exceptional, but understood as one very powerful way of historically affiliating oneself with Africa; likewise, the non-returnee points of view affect Garbage as valuable, critical tools for understanding Malagueta’s ills and potential. In a sense, Garbage is Cheney-Coker’s most magical character, for he can understand why the return engenders such passionate feelings of belonging while critiquing the effects of return on the native Malaguetans who do not live by such spiritual feelings. Proposing Garbage as the model of a returnee conscious­ ness is far from the stable history of the Black Loyalists that tells of the demand for individual rights at the beginning of the Age of Revolution. Rather, Cheney-Coker uses Garbage and Malaguetan history genealogically to disturb notions of what ‘return’ to Africa might mean as a method of selfidentification. Rather than highlight the parallels between the present and the late-eighteenth century, The Last Harmattan proposes a more complex vision of return. This vision encompasses both the affective, spiritual ties that are essential to a returning collective and the complexities of a multicultural postcolonial nation-state.

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NOTES 1 Sylvia Frey (Water from the Rock), Gary Nash (The Unknown American Revolu­tion), Benjamin Quarles (The Negro in the American Revolution) and Simon Schama (Rough Crossings) all treat the historical narrative of the Black Loyalists as a counter-narrative to the widely accepted version of the American Revolution that has become a cultural mainstay in the United States: that the war was a fight for colonial freedom from oppression. On the other hand, Cassandra Pybus (Epic Journeys of Freedom), James Walker (The Black Loyalists) and Ellen Wilson (The Loyal Blacks) narrate this story as one about the individual quests of former slaves for liberty in an Atlantic world developing ideals of individual liberties. Both readings are situated in the idea that these early Atlantic citizens are recognizably modern and rights-bearing. 2 Although I’ve used the term ‘magical’ here, the novel itself has a tenuous relationship to the genre of ‘magical realism’. It is more akin to what Kwame Anthony Appiah has termed ‘spiritual realism’, to mark the specific African form of this genre. CheneyCoker insists that his novel is influenced by, but not an imitation of, writers like Gabriel García Márquez: ‘I am really at a loss to understand how people can mistake all this as just a mere example of magical realism. It is a book to celebrate and to understand so much complexity in a world that, on one hand, is a very simple one to deal with, but yet at the same time contains possibilities for creative imaginative writing’ (quoted in Cooper Magical: 142). 3 Historically, ‘Krio’, also called ‘creole’, refers to those who are descended from and have inherited a ‘synthesis of African and Western civilizations’, begun with the Black Loyalists and ‘continued by other African groups displaced to Sierra Leone’, according to Walker (xxi). In the novel, a Krio class of Malaguetans descend from the original settlers and maintain authority over Malagueta for most of its history as a colony and nation. 4 The choice of surname also hints at multiple histories in this epic novel, as variations on the name were standard in colonial accounts of African slavery. British colonial accounts generally referred to the Akan people from what is now Ghana as Coromantee, Coroman­ tins, Coromanti, or Kormantine. The Coromantees were ‘often stereo­typed as hard and loyal workers among English-speaking slaveholders’ but were also ‘implicated in dozens of slave rebellions

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and plots’ in the Caribbean (Thornton ‘War, the State, and Religious Norms in “Coromantee” Thought’: 182). I see Cheney-Coker’s variation of this name as an indicator of the multiple histories at play in any given moment of the novel.

WORKS CITED Appiah, Kwame Anthony. ‘Spiritual Realism.’ The Nation (3 August 1992): 146-8. Cheney-Coker, Syl. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. Oxford and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990. Cooper, Brenda. ‘Cultural Identity, Cultural Studies in Africa and the Representation of the Middle Passage.’ Transgressing Boundaries: New Directions in the Study of Culture in Africa. Eds. Brenda Cooper and Andrew Steyn. Rondebosch and Athens: University of Cape Town Press and Ohio University Press, 1996: 164-83. ——Magical Realism in West African Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2004. Foucault, Michel. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.’ The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984: 76-100. Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Piot, Charles. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pybus, Cassandra. Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. Boston, MA: Beacon, 2006. Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. New York: Norton, 1973[1961]. Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution. New York: Ecco, 2006. Thornton, John K. ‘War, the State, and Religious Norms in “Coromantee” Thought: The Ideology of an African American Nation.’ Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America. Ed. Robert Blair St.

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George. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000: 181-200. Walker, James W. St. G. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Wilson, Ellen Gibson. The Loyal Blacks. New York: Putnam, 1976.

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The ‘Rubble’ & the ‘Secret Sorrows’ Returning to Somalia in Nuruddin Farah’s Links & Crossbones PAULINE DODGSON-KATIYO

Nuruddin Farah’s Past Imperfect trilogy is centred on the returns of Somalis from North America to Somalia. These returns are not just personal; they also provide a forum for political disquisition on the state of Somalia and on Somalia’s geopolitical relations with the West, the East African region and the worldwide Somali diaspora. This article focuses on Jeebleh, the protagonist of the first novel in the trilogy, Links, and a character in the third novel, Crossbones. In an interview, Farah has refuted the idea that his returnee characters are alienated or disconnected, stating that they are ‘connected, but in a different way’ from those who stayed in the country, and adding that ‘they want to compare the past, when Somalia was peaceful and beautiful, with the present-day situation, when Somalia is in chaos. But because of their distance, they feel they are objective. They become part of the story when they have been there long enough’ (Farah in Niemi ‘Witnessing Contemporary Somalia from Abroad’: 336). A professor of Italian at an American university, Jeebleh, as a Dante specialist, has a detailed literary understanding of another ‘hell’. Many years previously, as a student in Italy, he had written a dissertation on Dante’s Inferno ‘casting the epic into a poetic idiom comprehensible to a Somali’ and, even that long ago, he had discussed with two friends, Bile and Seamus, ‘what Somalia would be like if the country plunged into anarchy’ (Farah Links: 57). In Links, 67

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he makes his first visit to Somalia after a long absence, having gone into exile after a period of imprisonment. Links is set in the 1990s after the fall of the dictator Siyad Barre, when Somalia is in a state of civil war. Jeebleh can only traverse the war zone of Mogadiscio through reliance on (although not necessarily trust in) those who know how the city now functions. Early in Links, Jeebleh asserts that he has come ‘to learn and to listen’ and ‘to assess the extent of my culpability as a Somali’ (32). However, his actions lead, as another character points out, to his reentry into the Somalia story, and to the renewal of old friendships and childhood enmities. Although intent on restitution through finding his mother’s grave and rescuing two kidnapped young women, Jeebleh is also intent on settling an old score with his childhood enemy, Caloosha, his clansman and Bile’s half-brother. Caloosha, a minor warlord who had previously worked for the dictator, is represented as someone who has always been evil and manipulative. A violent child, he had killed his stepfather, Bile’s father. During the dictatorship he had, in a way not fully explained in the novel, been responsible for the imprisonment of Jeebleh and Bile for alleged anti-regime activities and, then, had unexpectedly arranged Jeebleh’s release while Bile remained in prison. Jeebleh suspects that Caloosha had also tried to turn his mother against him before she died by telling her that her son was a traitor. After arriving in Somalia, Jeebleh realizes that his hatred for Caloosha has not gone away and, indeed, that he is ‘infested with more venom toward Caloosha and anyone associated with him than he had thought possible, despite his years of exile’ (67). Jeebleh intends to kill Caloosha and has indicated to Dajaal, an ex-Army man who works for Bile, that he needs his help to do this. Before this, though, he has a dream which he interprets as meaning that he should practise deception, humbling himself before Caloosha and seeking his help. However, when Caloosha accepts his

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own evil, telling Jeebleh he has sold his ‘conscience to the devil’ for self-advancement and does not want to buy it back, Jeebleh fails to dissemble, revealing his hostility by telling Caloosha, ‘hell was invented for your kind’ (144). Jeebleh’s other mission is to rescue Bile’s niece, Raasta, and the friend from whom she is inseparable, Makka. It is not clear who has kidnapped them although Raasta’s father Faahiye, Caloosha and other warlords all come under suspicion. Raasta’s original name, Rajo, means ‘hope’ in Somali, and she and Makka together represent peace, friendship in difference and hope for the future, not only to Raasta’s family and their friends but also to the wider community through their association with The Refuge, a home Bile has set up for children and displaced people. Nevertheless, the circumstances of Raasta’s birth complicate the representation of her as ‘The Protected One’ (198) who, symbolically, safeguards the city. Shanta, Bile’s sister, conceives Raasta, her only child, at an advanced age and, with no doctor available during the fighting, Bile decides to deliver the ‘miracle baby’ (120) himself. Although Bile may have saved her life and her child’s, Shanta believes that in touching her ‘in ways that he shouldn’t have’ (211), Bile has committed an act which is haraam and brought a curse on their family, particularly in relation to her marriage and in the potential destructiveness of Bile’s and Faahiye’s obsessive love for Raasta. Raasta had been taught ‘who she was, that is to say, what her clan family was’ (163) from birth. In contrast, Makka is an orphan, who was found and taken into The Refuge by Bile; she has Down’s Syndrome and is possibly of mixed Somali-European heritage. According to Bile, she ‘belonged to no clan and to no one but herself’ (163). In an interview in 2011, Farah stated that since state collapse and the civil war, Somalia had become an ‘orphan country’ (‘Looking Back to Somalia’). As has often been remarked, orphans have played a significant role in Farah’s fiction, most notably

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in his second trilogy Blood in the Sun. Farah suggests that, ironically, the orphan state of the country came about during the civil war when people split along clan family lines. The political scientist Lidwien Kapteijns in Clan Cleansing in Somalia has shown how much of the violence was aimed at killing members of other clan families. Referring to clanbased violence under the dictatorship as a ‘technology of power’ (76), Kapteijns shows that, despite his nationalism and his implementation of scientific socialism, Barre had at times resorted to using clan as a basis either for promotion or collective punishment. However, at the start of the civil war, there was a ‘key shift’. This shift can be understood in three ways: firstly, clan-based violence took place outside state institutions and forced people to confront one another directly; secondly, people became perpetrators of violence as well as victims; and thirdly, what had started as opposition to Barre became communal violence rather than violence between state and opposition (1-5). As Bile explains to Jeebleh, it was allegiance to clan or political group, often the two being synonymous, which mattered after the fall of the dictator. Bile recalls that when released from prison, he did not know that language had changed. He ‘hadn’t realized that the old way of answering the question “Who are you?” was no longer valid’ and that during the war ‘the question “Who are you?” referred to the identity of your clan family, your blood identity’ (Farah Links: 119). Jeebleh’s distrust of clan goes back even further to his childhood when his divorced mother, bringing him up on her own, had warned him to beware of his clanspeople, telling him, ‘They’ll prove to be your worst enemies, and they are more likely than not to stab you in broad daylight if you choose to have nothing to do with them’ (96). After his return, clan elders come to see him, demanding that he give them money so they can fight other clans. Suspecting that they are following Caloosha’s orders, he turns them away.

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If clan is destructive for the individual and for society, then what is the alternative? Farah has long been an advocate of cosmopolitanism, of opening oneself to literary and cultural influences from different parts of the world. Links is an allegorical1 rewriting of, and, in a Foucauldian sense, a commentary on Dante’s Inferno. Each of the four parts of the book and the Epilogue are introduced with translated quotations from the Inferno, and Dante can be seen as a guide, not only to Jeebleh but also to the writer and reader. One of the epigraphs to Part I includes the question ‘Who were your ancestors?’(Farah Links: 1), which has also been translated from the Italian as ‘and who would your ancestors be?’ (Dante Alighieri Inferno: 83). It is the heretic Farinata who haughtily addresses this question to Dante in Canto X. Since Farinata and his kinsmen twice expelled Dante’s ancestors from Florence, the quotation relates to clan and enmity. The other epigraphs can similarly be linked to themes in the novel. Writing in ‘Childhood of My Schizophrenia’ of the influences educated Somali children of his generation experienced, Farah explains that ‘belonging essentially in the oral tradition, Somali society bestows undue deference on books, whether profane or sacred and regardless of the language’ (1264). In addition to the reworking of Dante’s Inferno, there are many other intertextual references in Links and Crossbones, some brief and others more developed. They emerge either in Jeebleh’s or the narrator’s thoughts or in conversations between Jeebleh and Bile. Often these references are to classical literature and philosophy, illustrating not only the past in the present but also Somalia’s right to draw on a worldwide antiquity. I discuss below two examples from Links. The first is Bile’s belief that he is a ‘kindred spirit’ to the Greek Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus. Porphyry’s The Life of Plotinus had been smuggled into his prison cell and, later, when he had unexpectedly found a large sum of

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money in an abandoned house, he had taken it and used it to found The Refuge, following Plotinus’s example of caring for abandoned children. Jeebleh asks Bile whether he remembers a quotation from Plotinus: ‘Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike’. Bile interprets this as: an artist needs to be the figure he represents. Extending this, he suggests that it could be understood as ‘a man with a radical image who’s spent years in detention for political reasons must act forthrightly and without fear of the consequences’ (Farah Links: 86), an idea which applies both to Bile himself and to Jeebleh. My second example is a brief quotation from the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil who is Dante’s first guide in the Inferno. As Jeebleh travels through Mogadiscio with Dajaal, they see few other cars on the road. The city is ‘marked … as a place of sorrow’ with roofless houses, bullet-scarred walls, and streets which were ‘eerily, ominously quiet’. Jeebleh imagines that ‘the residents had been slaughtered “in one another’s blood”, as Virgil had it’ (70). The quotation is taken from Book II of the Aeneid. As Troy is burning, Aeneas, fearing that his family – father, son and wife – may be dead, addresses his mother, the goddess Venus: Was it for this, dear mother, you fetched me through fire and steel, – That I should witness the enemy right in our house, witness Ascanius and my father and my Creusa beside them Lying slaughtered here in one another’s blood? (57)

The powerful phrases, the ‘enemy right in our house’ and ‘slaughtered in one another’s blood’ have connotations and resonances when transposed, from the enmity between the city inhabitants and invaders in the Trojan war, to the civil war of Somalia in which internal division and distrust result in death. Bile explains to Jeebleh that ‘civil wars bring out the

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worst in us … There’s terrible bitterness that comes at you from every direction, everyone busy badmouthing every­one else, everyone reciting a litany of grievances’ (Farah Links: 85-6). Farah had already illustrated this consequence of civil war in his non-fiction work, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora. The book was the result of many interviews he had conducted with Somalis in different countries and across continents. He admitted that when hearing the way some Somalis had treated others during the war he had felt ill and several times thought of giving up the project. Jeebleh too is sickened when he learns that two young men who had entered his room, possibly intending to kill him, had been shot and one, the son of a clan elder, had died. Jeebleh’s distress leaves him ‘unable to remember things in any detail’ and thinking that temporal ‘concepts like “an hour ago”, “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, “last week”, “next week” were meaningless with all that had taken place’ (Farah Links: 149). Simon Gikandi states that having dual nationality and living ‘between cultures or languages is one important way of coping with the disorientation of moral geographies at the end of modernity’ (‘On Afropolitanism’: 9). However, this does not seem to help Jeebleh. Despite the cosmopolitanism he has espoused since his youth in Somalia Italiana and as a student in Italy, Jeebleh seems to some extent to be unanchored in a negative way. Speaking of characters returning to Somalia from the West as going from ‘the comfort zone’ into ‘a chaotic situation’, Farah points out that they also ‘have problems in the comfort zone’ (Farah in Niemi: 336). Jeebleh is irritated when Americans give him an identity based on the way they see Somalia, asking him about his clan and assuming he is a recently arrived refugee. Even his American wife, as he later recalls in Crossbones, utters a constant refrain about Somalia, referring to it as ‘that unfortunate country, cursed with those dreadful clanspeople, forever killing one

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another and everyone around them’ (12). His relationship to his adopted country, the US, therefore, is linked to an identity he does not wish to recognize. His return to Somalia, as he tells a taxi driver in Links, is ‘to reemphasize my Somaliness – give a needed boost to my identity’ (36). However, the Somalia he returns to is not the one he once knew and he asks himself: ‘Can one continue to love a land one does not recognize anymore?’ (42). People in that country do not recognize him either. Rather than seeing him as stereotypically Somali as the Americans do, they see him as an individual whose behaviour borders on madness, particularly in relation to the offence against the clan elders. He also draws attention to himself by preventing a boy from beating a pregnant dog and berating a crowd who fail to help an epileptic. Shanta explains to him that, in taking the moral high ground, he was ‘rubbing pepper and salt on the communal wound’ and ‘because of this … [he] had to be humbled’ (201). There are moments too when he feels himself that he has ‘lost his way in the labyrinthine politics of the place’ (149). This sense of having lost his way continues in Crossbones. Jeebleh revisits Somalia ten years later with his journalist son-in-law Malik and encounters a different situation. Parts of Southern Somalia including Mogadiscio are under the control of the Islamic Courts Union and their military wing, an embryonic al-Shabaab.2 Dajaal points out that whereas previously ‘the functioning principle was the primacy of the clan … nowadays, the primacy is religion’ (116). Among the enforcement officers of the Courts is a bullying and violent man, BigBeard, who confiscates Malik’s computer and who reminds Jeebleh of Caloosha. Comparing his present encounter with BigBeard to his confrontation with Caloosha on his previous visit, Jeebleh realizes that he still lives with that memory; it ‘has left him traumatized, like an amputee suffering anew the agony of dismemberment’ (108).

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Since it is Malik’s first visit to Somalia, Jeebleh intends to act as his guide. In an echo of the title of the first novel, the narrator tells us the two men are ‘linked in intention’ (13) but Jeebleh proves to be an inadequate guide. ‘A rank rememberer’ (108), he is haunted by the past; Malik, who has reported from many war zones, is interested in reporting accurately on the present situation and helping his brother Ahl find his stepson who has been recruited by al-Shabaab. When they are taken on a tour of the city, Malik is excited but Jeebleh ‘suffers in shocked silence’ (81). Returning again to the city he once knew, he now finds it is beyond his attempt at cognitive mapping since ‘one loses one’s bearings in a city with few landmarks, no road markings and no street names’. He ‘finds a generic featurelessness to the city’s destruction, as if the impact of a single bomb, detonating, had brought down the adjacent buildings, or they had collapsed in sympathy’; Mogadiscio, he thinks, is ‘oddly ostentatious in its vulgarity’ (80). Jeebleh is not Farah’s alter ego but Jeebleh’s experience and understanding of the world appear to be close to Farah’s. Farah’s views, expressed in interviews and in his journalism, are spread out and shared across a number of characters in Links and Crossbones but it is Jeebleh who is the returnee and is most like Farah in his long enforced absence from Somalia and his probing attempts to find out more about life in the country. Participating in a meeting of exiled writers in Vienna in 1987 when Siyad Barre was still in power, Farah suggested that what ‘writers do is to play around with the myth of creation or with the myth of return’. In between, ‘there is that promise, the promise of return’. While waiting, exiled writers tell the story of that return as ‘a variation on the creation myth … a return to innocence, to childhood, to our sources’ (Farah in Glad Literature in Exile: 4). During the meeting, he announced that the day the dictator was overthrown would be ‘the very day’ that he would book his flight back to Somalia (119).

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This perhaps suggests a kind of innocence, a sense that just the one momentous event – the dictator’s overthrow – would allow him to go back to the Mogadiscio he had once known. Farah’s identification with Mogadiscio is selfwilled and chosen. He was born and brought up in the Ogaden and only moved to Mogadiscio with his family at the age of seventeen. In the essay ‘The Family House’, he explains what he loved about the city when he first arrived there: I loved the labyrinthine network of the city’s alleyways; I loved the mélange of its cultures – an eleventh-century minaret cheek to jowl with a glass house … I loved the contrasts on display at every turn, from the monument raised in memory of Mussolini to the palace in which the city’s Zanzibari sovereign defined the city’s cosmopolite. I adored the sea that served as the city’s face. (8)

When he returned on a temporary visit, the promise was not matched by the reality. In a long interview with a French broadcaster, Farah admitted that during his twenty-two years of absence ‘the city and I had grown apart – grown apart in the sense that I hadn’t seen it’. Like Jeebleh, he ‘couldn’t even know the areas in the city … [he] lived in. The structures, the buildings, the streets were reformulated’ (Institut national de l’audiovisuel Grands Entretiens: Chapter 12; emphasis added). The use of the conditional tense is informative. He wanted to recognize the city he had known but could not do so because it was no longer there. It is instructive to look at this loss of orientation through the lens of Farah’s second novel, the modernist-inspired A Naked Needle. The novel is organized in ‘movements’ and in ‘Movement Five’, the protagonist Koschin takes his English girlfriend, Nancy, on a tour of ‘the wonderful city of Mogadiscio’ to show her ‘the treasures as well as the hidden infirmities of this ancient African settlement’ (89). They will, he suggests, ‘together discover the calamity,

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the er … eternity of a city that has a divinity of its own kind’ (90). In Koschin’s satirical and sometimes cynical commentary, Farah provides a vivid portrayal of the cosmopolitan history of the city and the changes brought about by Barre’s revolution. Most importantly, he also maps the city. As Koschin and Nancy move through the streets, Koschin points out and describes buildings and landmarks as they then were – among them, the Catholic Cathedral, the University, the People’s Hall, the Monument of the Unknown Soldier and named cafés and hotels. It was the Barre regime’s hostile reaction to A Naked Needle that resulted in Farah’s long period of exile. Now dismissed by Farah as ‘very stupid’ (‘Looking Back’), this novel, which shows Mogadiscio as Farah and, presumably, the fictional Jeebleh would have known it in their youth, is, ironically, the only one of his twelve novels which is out of print. In A Naked Needle, Koschin shows Nancy the shopping complex known as the Tamarind Market where artisans and tailors make and sell gold and silver jewellery and clothing. In Crossbones, Malik goes to a current Mogadiscio landmark, Bakhaaraha Market, a place of commerce, corruption and political intrigue which he thinks ‘looks nothing like anyone’s idea of an African market’ (155). Jeebleh chooses not to accompany him. In his essay, ‘Of Tamarind & Cosmopolitanism’, Farah mourns the destruc­ tion in 1991 of the old cosmopolitan Tamarind Market and writes disparagingly of the newer Bakhaaraha Market: At this newly established ‘Market of Silos’, for that is how its name translates, market forces prevail, and ‘the clan’ reigns supreme. It is the height of a nation’s tragedy when those who pillaged and therefore destroyed a city’s way of life are allowed to turn murder into profit. Militarised capitalism is on the ascendancy, and the idea of cosmopolitanism is dead and buried … To me, a silo suggests an entity that takes pride in its separateness, intolerant, parasitic and unproductive. (12)3

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Farah’s concept of cosmopolitanism bears some resem­ blance to Achille Mbembe’s description of Afro­politanism as a historical phenomenon with movement, migrancy and trade within Africa and to-and-from Africa taking place across centuries (‘Afropolitanism’: 26-28). In a recent talk in London, Farah reiterated his view that the loss of cosmopolitanism was the most important consequence of the civil war (Royal African Society and KAYD ‘An Evening with Nuruddin Farah’). In his work, he attempts to recover that cosmopolitanism, representing it, in part, through the erudition of Jeebleh, Bile and other older Somalis. According to Jeebleh, ‘the great tragedy’ about civil wars and disasters in poor countries without access to forensics is that the bodies of the dead may never be recovered nor their identities known since ‘the rubble seldom divulges the secret sorrows it contains’ (Farah Crossbones: 27). If she had not been rescued, this might have been Makka’s fate. Bile says of her that she is ‘held together within the framework of a narrative not yet known to us, that she’s an untold story. Her every word points to so many unasked questions needing answers’ (Farah Links: 162). I would suggest that this also describes the lack of resolution, the refusal to provide a sense of an ending, in Farah’s narratives. There are stories that are never fully explained or resolved. In Links, we do not discover why Caloosha had Jeebleh released from prison and not Bile; why it was Dajaal and Bile and not Jeebleh who killed Caloosha; or why Raasta and Maaka were kidnapped and then released. In Crossbones, we do not know whether the seriously injured Malik will recover or whether Ahl’s stepson, held for questioning in Djibouti as a ‘terror’ suspect, will be released or detained. Not to tell the whole story and not to provide all the answers is not new in Farah’s fiction. In the first novel of the Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk, the reader never learns how and by whom the dissident Soyaan is killed or

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what happens to his twin brother, Loyaan, who investigates his death. In civil wars, as in dictatorships, some answers will never be found; not all the ‘secret sorrows’ will emerge from the rubble. A key, but implicit, question not fully resolved in either novel is the connection (or the links) between acting and reflecting. Are they ‘linked in intention’? I refer to ‘reflecting’ rather than ‘thinking’ to convey the sense of deep thought and analysis that Farah seems to demand. In Links, Bile, questioned by Jeebleh, admits that he ‘might have achieved something more substantial if … [he] had intervened politically, and tried to make peace between the warring sides’ (167) but now sees no point in doing this. In contrast to Bile, Jeebleh sees himself as someone who has ‘taken the plunge into the chaotic energy of the place’ (168) through his defiance of the clan elders. During their childhood, he had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Bile to fight back against Caloosha when Caloosha beat him but Bile would ‘balk at the suggestion’. However, when Bile, and not Jeebleh, kills Caloosha, he could be said to be acting ‘forthrightly and without fear of the consequences’ (82) in alignment with his own reflection on and interpretation of Plotinus. Divanize Carbonieri suggests that the killing of Caloosha is a symbolic killing of Barre who had sentenced Farah to death in absentia (‘Please Do Not Judge Us Too Harshly!’: 91). This is a plausible reading within the world of Links where the civil war and rule of the warlords followed on from the fall of the dictator. In Crossbones, in a world where Farah’s idea of an historically rooted cosmopolitanism has been challenged both by fundamentalism and globalization, the intellectual discussion and reflection of Jeebleh and Bile eventually give way not only to the quests of the younger generation of Malik and Ahl but also to the immediate and violent actions of others. Jeebleh leaves Somalia halfway through the novel, not wanting to wait

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for Ethiopia to invade.4 In the more complex geopolitics of the twenty-first century, the innocence Farah saw in the promise of return is a lost innocence. The Somalia he knew has changed since the fall of the dictatorship with part of the north declaring itself the independent country of Somaliland, and Puntland (where Ahl seeks his stepson) becoming an autonomous state. The loved city of Mogadiscio, rather than being the paradise of the creation myth or the city of his youth remembered as ‘innocent of the meanness of crime’ (Farah ‘Family’: 9), is now a chaotic city allegorically linked to hell. For Jeebleh, and, one suspects, for Farah too, the desire for Mogadiscio is always deferred.

NOTES 1 I am grateful to Eve Eisenberg for her comments on the Inferno and allegory in Links. Farah has said that he was ‘brought up on allegories’ (Commonwealth Club of California). 2 Crossbones is ostensibly set in late 2006 shortly before the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. However, some of the events described and issues raised relate to later in the decade. 3 In ‘Of Tamarind & Cosmopolitanism’, Farah gives the impression that the Bakhaaraha Market was a new market, replacing the Tamarind Market. However, in Crossbones, Malik researches the Bakhaaraha and finds that it was ‘established in 1972 during the last tyrant’s reign’ (Farah Crossbones: 155). It is the difference between the two markets that is important. 4 Raasta, the symbol of hope, and Makka have already left the city and are studying in Dublin (Farah: Crossbones 30-31).

WORKS CITED Carbonieri, Divanize. ‘“Please Do Not Judge Us Too Harshly!” – The Exile’s Return to Contemporary Somalia in Links by Nuruddin Farah.’ Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture. Vol. 36, No. 1 (2014): 83-91.

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Commonwealth Club of California. Nuruddin Farah interviewed by Jewel Gomez. Programme 4 (2007). Dante Alighieri. Dante’s Inferno. Trans. and ed. Mark Musa. Bloom­ ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Farah, Nuruddin. A Naked Needle. London: Heinemann, 1976. ——Sweet and Sour Milk. London: Allison & Busby, 1979. ——‘Childhood of My Schizophrenia.’ Times Literary Supplement (2329 November 1990): 1264. ——Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora. London and New York: Cassell, 2000. ——Links. London: Duckworth, 2005[2004]. ——‘The Family House.’ Transition. No. 99 (2008): 6-16. ——‘Of Tamarind & Cosmopolitanism.’ African Cities Reader. Cape Town: Chimurenga and African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, 2010: 9-12 [2002]. ——‘Looking Back to Somalia.’ [Interview with Alex Chadwick]. The Story. American Public Media (4 August 2011). ——Crossbones. London: Granta, 2012[2011]. Gikandi, Simon. ‘Foreword: On Afropolitanism.’ Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. Eds. Jennifer Wawrzinek and J.K.S. Makokha. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011: 9-11. Glad, John, ed. Literature in Exile. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1990. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA). Grands Entretiens: Nuruddin Farah. www.ina.fr/grands-entretiens/video/Afriques/Farah Kapteijns, Lidwien. Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Mbembe, Achille. ‘Afropolitanism.’ African Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Ed. Simon Njami. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007: 26-9. Niemi, Minna. ‘Witnessing Contemporary Somalia from Abroad: An Interview with Nuruddin Farah.’ Callaloo. Vol. 35, No. 2 (2012): 330-40. Plotinus. Ennead, Vol. 1: Porphyry on the Life of Plotinus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Royal African Society (RAS) and KAYD. ‘An Evening with Nuruddin Farah.’ SOAS, London (29 May 2015). Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. C. Day Lewis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity in Benjamin Kwakye’s The Other Crucifix HELEN YITAH & MICHAEL P.K. OKYEREFO

In The Other Crucifix, Benjamin Kwakye explores the relationship between cultural memory and belongingness by focusing on the tensions that shape African identity in America. At the centre of the novel is a young Ghanaian man from a poor family who migrates to America for education and economic amelioration. His migration, although voluntary, places the protagonist-narrator, Jojo Badu, in a ‘middle passage’, a life-negating environment in which his cultural rootedness is ruptured, and which he must survive by holding on to memories that will eventually replace his original home. In this sense, ‘home’ and identity are defined by cultural memory, which, in the narrative, takes the form of remnant consciousness: ‘the ontological, physical, and spiritual manifestations of reclaiming an African cultural heritage’ (McKoy ‘This Unity of Spilt Blood’: 195). Remnant consciousness embodies the migratory subject’s hunger for a remembered home that is located in a desire for cultural wholeness. Home as it was in Ghana may not exist for Jojo in America; instead, home is replaced by cultural memory which helps to re-situate the migratory subject, but is also necessarily affected by the tensions between competing identities in the origin and the destination. For the migratory subject, remnant consciousness can provide the means to reconcile these competing and seemingly irreconcilable identities. In the case of Jojo, remnant consciousness is what he resorts to 82

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in his attempt to resolve the tension between the anxiety of losing his original identity and his desire to create a new one. Nevertheless, as Jojo begins to put down new roots and to define himself according to the truth of his marginality, America also becomes a space for his identityin-transition, an identity that becomes a matter of choice rather than tradition. The Other Crucifix does not tell the story of the successful New World man but focuses on the loneliness and the sense of cultural and linguistic displacement that cripple an immigrant’s attempts to fulfil the American dream. Disease, breakage and chasm characterize Jojo’s immigrant experience. His anguish of regret for leaving his home country is as excruciating on his first arrival in the US as it is in the last pages of the novel when he resolves to begin a new life and assume a new identity in the host country: an anguish that is obvious from his wavering faith that America will accept him, which suggests that the Ghanaian window in his being can never be obliterated. Thus while he keeps an eye on his goal to seek his fortune in America, he also holds on to the values that give his life purpose and meaning and keep him connected to his Ghanaian roots. These values prop him up as the host society constantly deals him ‘the emasculating blow of selfdoubt’ (Kwakye: 217). In this sense, the narrative seems to chart the protagonist’s struggle to unite his dual selves, the African and the immigrant American, into a new being in a new home. The creation of a new home is dominated by matters of continuity and the need to maintain links to the lost home by means of the recreation of familiar features from the lost environment. Memory becomes a manifestation of the desire for coherence and control over dissonant emotions and feelings. Jojo’s experience as an immigrant in the US is characterized by several polarized worlds: the African, to which he feels the greatest affinity; the college

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milieu, a boiling pot/hotbed of adolescent agitation fired by intractable racial prejudices and cultural differences; the wider American society, in which Jojo feels like ‘the outsider looking in’ (43); and the African-American world, his relationship to which is marked by contradictions of ‘love and non-love, closeness and distance, alikeness and deep difference, oneness and separation’ (128). As he moves in and out of these contradicting worlds, their irreconcilable elements exacerbate his angst and compel him to look inward for resolution and independence. The educated immigrant, such as Jojo, who does not return to his home country, is not a common occurrence in African migration narratives. For example, fictional portrayals of migration from Francophone Africa to Europe and America have tended to focus on illegal migrants with little or no education eking out a clandestine living in the metropolitan centre. Fiction from this region also seems less concerned with individual characters than it is with the history and identity of groups of immigrants (Dobie ‘Invisible Exodus’; Abderrezak ‘Burning the Sea’; Njoya ‘Lark Mirror’; Bel ‘Migration, Literature and Cultural Memory’; Russell ‘Home, Music and Memory for the Congolese in Kampala’). In recent studies on this category of works, Hakim Abderrezak and Wandia Njoya consider the legal and economic hurdles that African immigrants in Francophone literature confront in their attempts to seek their fortunes in the metropolitan centre. Abderrezak’s study emphasizes that Moroccan literature on illegal migration, a sub-genre he terms ‘illiterature’, ‘systematically rewrites and reverses [the] dehumanizing effects’ of statesuppressed Moroccan and Western media accounts that objectify illegal immigrants (462). It bears mentioning that the ‘migrations of despair’ into ‘an illusionary Eldorado’ (468) that Abderrezak identifies in Francophone migration narratives do not pertain in Kwakye’s novel, nor does The Other Crucifix portray Africans who migrate illegally or out

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of despair. Indeed, Kwakye’s immigrants are counselled and encouraged by US Embassy staff to apply for colleges in America (Kwakye: 16). Njoya’s essay stands out from these studies because it identifies a gendered and individualized agency in male African immigrants to France in Congolese author Alain Mabanckou’s novel, Bleu blanc rouge (translated into English as ‘Blue White Red’). Njoya argues that such voyagers are drawn to the European metropolis by the ‘human need to assert one’s identity as an individual and as a man in his society’, the fulfilment of which is founded, not on African values and traditions, but on ‘the acquisition of a Western lifestyle and access to consumer goods’ (340). Simply put, in Njoya’s view international mobility for these immigrants is a rite of passage into manhood on Europe’s terms. In all these studies, individual agency is important mainly as it pertains to group culture, image or identity. While this article recognizes the implications of Jojo’s plight, both for African immigrants in the US and for his native Ghanaian community, it notes that in Kwakye’s novel, group identity is not the main focus, but the means of individual self-affirmation for the non-returning voyager. In The Other Crucifix, Kwakye uses a protagonist-narrator whose first-person point of view, interior monologue and specific history seem intended to attract sympathy for him as the foreigner against whom all the odds are stacked, and therefore to set him apart from other African immigrants such as Mburu and Yannis with whom he attends The University and The Law School. Thus, while, like other African students at The University, Jojo believes that an African immigrant represents ‘all of Africa, all of the black race’ (Kwakye: 20), Kwakye’s protagonist is equally committed to revealing the damaging dynamics of African migration to America: ‘Going to work and classes and then work, earning meagre wages and clenching [his] teeth when [he] used some on beer’, Jojo wonders ‘what a man

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from Ghana was doing in these parts’ (78). This state of being is neither what Jojo experienced in Ghana nor what he planned for himself in America. In this sense Jojo follows the lead of earlier African migrants to the West, like Ama Ata Aidoo’s Sissie in Our Sister Killjoy, who ‘see the land of exile as it is’, refusing to be ‘fooled by the neo-colonial lie’ (Wilentz ‘The Politics of Exile’: 161) in which the migrant sees himself as one who has escaped the limitations of his original home and is free to experience a superior culture. Like other novels of the African migrant literary tradition, the West African migration narrative portrays the destructive historical, psychological and social undercurrents of African migration. Yet unlike other African immigrant fictions, particularly Francophone novels like Bleu blanc rouge and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Partir which, according to Abderrezak, portray ‘migrations of despair’ into ‘an illusionary [European] Eldorado’ (468), West African novels, at least until the mid-1990s, tend to depict the ‘been-to’ who voluntarily journeys in search of the blandishments of the West. The been-to typically returns home after some time abroad wielding the trophies of education, status and wealth, and full of high expectations of making an impact on society. These ‘Western accoutrements’ are often evident in the dress and other observable characteristics of the been-to, typically presumed to be male. Thus, in a 1962 interview, Kofi Awoonor (then George Awoonor-Williams) describes the been-to as ‘a social snobbery … the young man who feels he must go about in a three-piece suit in spite of the scorching Ghanaian sun’ (‘A Top Scholar Who Has Delved Deep into Africa’s Literature’: 5). To Awoonor, the been-to is also an example of how Western education influences the life of the average Ghanaian male and cuts him away from the roots from which he sprang. Thus, for the been-to in West African literature, migration is expected to serve as a platform for the establishment of

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individual identity and social participation. The decision to migrate is shaped by both individual and collective values that make migration not only a cultural event but also a part of the individual’s identity. In Scribe, Griot and Novelist, Thomas Hale illustrates this point when he notes that young men generally aspire to perform individual feats that would guarantee them a place in the larger social history. Hale draws parallels between epics and modern migration to the West when he observes that: whereas an ancestor made his name in war, a descendant today may acquire a similar level of renown by travelling from the Sahel or Savanna regions to the coast to find a job and eventually returning to distribute some of the wealth he has accumulated, or by going off to Europe to earn an advanced degree and then returning to assume a position as civil servant, doctor or lawyer who is able to help support the extended family. (20)

For the been-to, however, international mobility typically fails to function as a rite of passage into manhood and as an ‘affirmation of masculinity’ (Pessar and Mahler ‘Transnational Migration’: 829). One reason for this failure, as Njoya explains it in her reading of Bleu blanc rouge, is that the host country ‘replaces African values, history and traditions which provide a framework for the human impulse to migrate and for African men to affirm their individual identity and serve as functioning adults in their societies’ (350). Njoya observes that since colonialism the fulfilment of ‘the human need to assert one’s identity as an individual and as a man in his society … has been pegged to the acquisition of a Western lifestyle and access to consumer goods, as opposed to being founded on the values and history that affirm African societies and that are embodied in African traditions’ (340). The colonial narrative of the African’s inferiority and his need to be assimilated into a superior Western culture has however been challenged by writers and scholars of African

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literature. In Gay Wilentz’s reading of Our Sister Killjoy, she argues that Aidoo’s novel questions ‘the supposed superiority of European culture for the colonial subject’ (160) through the reports that her protagonist, Sissie sends to her home community about what she sees in the land of the colonizers, as well as through her confrontation with her compatriots who refuse to return home to help build their nation. One point that needs to be made is that the been-to typically returns home only to find that he and his society are ‘no longer at ease’. The returning migrant, weary of existing on the margins of the Western metropolis, arrives at his native community to discover ‘a loss of personal and communal bearings’ (Migraine-George ‘Ama Ata Aidoo’s Orphan Ghosts’: 84) in an increasingly troubled society. In this situation he feels out of place and alienated from the native community, which is gripped by materialism, corruption, greed, abuse of power and other maladies. This situation is depicted in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest? and Two Thousand Seasons, Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother, and Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost and Our Sister Killjoy. Although for the migrants in these narratives the return to their native land is the high point of their life stories, there is no sentimental arrival to a ‘heritage of celebratory dance and song’ (Wright ‘Returning Voyagers’: 181); instead, as Jane Bryce observes of Our Sister Killjoy, it is ‘a homecoming fraught with contradictions’ (‘Going Home is Another Story’: 2). These conflicting feelings of returning African migrants regarding their experiences in the West and the condi­tions they have to face on their arrival back home are explored in some early African migration novels like Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo. Abrahams’ protagonist, Michael Udomo, is a British-educated man and a radical politician who returns to Africa to lead a revolution among his

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people for the economic recovery of their nation. Initially hailed a hero, Udomo later falls out of favour due to his Machiavellian manoeuvres, is branded a traitor and killed by his own people. Despite Udomo’s plight, two decades after A Wreath for Udomo, Aidoo’s first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, examines the plight of African immigrants in Europe through the perspective of Sissie, its female protagonistnarrator. Sissie goes to Germany on a scholarship and later visits England. In narrating her experiences in Europe, she tells of her fellow Africans, including Ghanaians, who went to London to pursue education but found excuses to stay on after completing their studies. Although they live in poverty, these self-exiles feel they are better off cutting themselves off from their emerging nations. As she heads back to Ghana, Sissie criticizes these African exiles in London, among them her lover, for abandoning their home countries where they are needed to help carry out the important work of decolonization after political independence. Our Sister Killjoy is a rare find in that it depicts a group of non-returning African migrants in Europe. Yet although these are self-exiles like Jojo, they are marginal characters and do not tell their own story; instead, they are cast in a role that helps the narrator-protagonist, a returning migrant, to tell her story. In fact, Sissie ‘overturns the assumptions of cultural superiority that the self-exiles bring with them in expatriation; she also exposes the sham behind the self-exile’s reason for leaving from a polemically female perspective’ (Wilentz: 161). Thus, in Our Sister Killjoy the focus is on the incisively critical Sissie to whom is given the task of revealing the delusions of these marginal self-exiles regarding the cultural superiority of the former colonial centre – delusions that cause them to make strenuous efforts to erase their original identity in a misguided attempt to adapt seamlessly into Western society. Frantz Fanon explains this situation in Black Skin,

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White Masks: ‘The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle’ (18). Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost anticipates Kwakye’s The Other Crucifix in its depiction of the damaging effects of migration to America by exploring the impossibility of a ‘real’ return to the migrant’s roots. In Aidoo’s play, Ato Yawson returns home to Fanteland with his AfricanAmerican wife, Eulalie Rush, after a period of study in America. But as Thérèse Migraine-George rightly observes, for the now-Westernized Ato (and his wife) there can be no ‘return’ to ‘a place and time that should allow [him] to “belong” and to start [his life] anew’; there is only a ‘constantly evasive subjectivity’ (‘Ama Ata Aidoo’s Orphan Ghosts’: 84). Ato seems ‘bewildered and lost’ (Aidoo Dilemma: 52) among his people, who had put all their resources into his expensive education, and he is unable to bridge the chasm between his wife and his family who live in two different worlds. He is a ‘ghost’ whose limitations and obliviousness to his own, his clan’s and Eulalie’s history and lived reality stultify any possibility of creating what is needed for survival. As with Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North portrays the African migrant who returns home after a considerable period of studying abroad. But unlike Ato who lives true to himself (albeit a ‘ghostly’ self), Salih’s Mustafa Sa’eed lives a lie. Like Aidoo’s self-exiles in Our Sister Killjoy, Mustafa loses himself in the European world; but unlike the former, who see full adaptation to the host culture as a way to escape the feeling of exile, Mustafa recreates imperial fantasies about the exotic ‘Other’ which he uses to exact his revenge for the colonial conquest of his country. His home in London is a veritable imperial museum to which he lures and then seduces English women, and the stories he spins

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about Africa are fabricated to indulge the fantasies of his various audiences – fantasies informed by a colonial mind set which sees Africa as an indiscriminate mass of sand and bush. ‘I would do everything possible to entice a woman to my bed. Then I would go after some new prey’, he declares (Salih 30). In short, like the marginal(ized) migrants in Our Sister Killjoy, who live in poverty in London but keep the truth from their folks back home, Mustafa’s life is based on a lie – one that he replicates for personal interest in his several other migrations in Africa. In this sense, Kwakye’s protagonist is closer to Aidoo’s in The Dilemma of a Ghost than the others already cited, for despite choosing to stay in exile Jojo grapples with a similar ‘ghostly’ identity as does Ato. Kwakye’s novel is one of a few that portray, as central characters, immigrants to the West who do not return to Africa. The non-returning migrant as narrator-protagonist began to occur in the West African novel from the mid1990s. In the latter narratives, the protagonists remain abroad and endure hardships and setbacks, either because their downward social mobility renders them unable to fulfil roles and expectations back home, or because they hope to attain victory over adversity and create a new identity for themselves. Unlike the self-exiles in the other African novels discussed earlier, these more recent migrants do not attempt to lose themselves in their host society; indeed, it is their tenacious grip on their native culture that informs their response to people and issues in the host community. Thus, rather than blatantly dismiss his country and his people, Jojo ‘was weaving and dodging, intending and retreating’ (Kwakye: 139) as necessary to survive in America. With Jojo’s first winter in America passing slowly ‘like a lingering distasteful odour’, and with the warmth of loved ones in Ghana ‘now stifled by cold distance’, it is his thoughts about what it means to be ‘a man from Ghana’ that help him ‘maintain [his] sanity’ (78). Throughout his

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sojourn in the West, even when ‘thoughts about an alluring future would roam wild and sometimes unchecked’ (78), his experiences in Ghana remain his stabilizing force. These conflicting thoughts and feelings – about the desire to maintain his Ghanaian identity and yet make a home in exile – distinguish Jojo from other African self-exiles in the West. Apart from The Other Crucifix, one notable work that features a non-returning migrant as narrator-protagonist is Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, in which Mara, the central character, is an illiterate female prostitute stranded in Germany. Married off to Akobi, an abusive husband and a pervert who doubles as her pimp, Mara ends up a drug addict whose only redeeming grace lies in the remittances she sends to her family back in Ghana. While questions of belonging, home and identity pertain in both Beyond the Horizon and The Other Crucifix, for Mara, the psychological adjustment to cultural transposition quickly pales in comparison with the betrayal she suffers from Akobi, who uses the money from her sexual transactions to maintain his girlfriend. However, for Jojo, who breaks all his promises to his family, his friends and his nation, the main concern is not betrayal. By the end of his first spring in the US, Jojo, who had ‘boldly, brashly and daringly’ expressed his love for his Ghanaian girlfriend, Marjorie, and sealed their union through a blood pact (Kwakye: 3), has written her off in order to avoid the risk of losing his white American girlfriend, Norah Turner, with whom he has ‘tasted of the forbidden fruit’ (89). The ultimate betrayal, however, is when Jojo abandons his promise, made in 1963 before he departs for America, to ‘return and become a leading member in [Ghanaian] society’ (14). Jojo had begun honing his ‘great leadership skills’ (15) by playing an active role in student government in high school. Before he leaves Ghana his grandfather reminds him that he cannot fulfil

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his leadership goal in ‘Amrika’, citing the Akan proverb, ‘the foreigner never carries the head of the casket’ (16). Yet by the end of his story Jojo declares that he has developed ‘an unshakable resolve’ to start his life anew in America (218). Kwakye’s novel thus fills several thematic gaps in the African migration story. While North African migration narratives (and, interestingly, his Ghanaian compatriot and his contemporary, Darko) typically present illiterate or lowly educated characters who travel to Europe often via illegal means, and whereas his West African precursors are preoccupied with the return of the sojourner and his reunion with his native society, Kwakye depicts a highly educated protagonist who struggles to adapt to life in America but resists acculturation on the host country’s terms. Home country and host country are conceived in spatial terms along a polarity in which America is displacement and psychic chaos whereas Africa represents continuity and psychic calm. This polarity reflects the changing psychology of the protagonist as he oscillates between the deep anxiety about forgetting his original culture and identity and his desire to adjust to the host society and to create a new identity. Uprooted from African soil, Kwakye’s protagonist is transplanted into a society where policies and attitudes regarding ethnicity, race and cultural diversity prevent him from achieving seamless assimilation into metropolitan society. Thus suspended between two worlds, Jojo adopts a strategy of mind over matter: he remembers and reremembers his experiences of Ghana as a means to achieve a sense of rootedness and to get a grip on himself as he battles adversity. Through memory he transports himself on psychic journeys into time, across the social chasm within which perceptions of the self and of others are typically trapped. On this journey, memory collapses space into time, so that a ‘spiritual bridge’ is formed ‘over

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the physical rivers of space, time and distorted histories’ (144). This ‘bridge’ allows Jojo to develop new roots with­ out discarding the original ones. Kwakye’s protagonist experiences the kind of situation that Salman Rushdie, in an essay on Günter Grass, terms ‘a triple disruption’ from place, language and social environ­ ment (Imaginary Homelands: 277-8). In Rushdie’s view Grass is only ‘a half migrant … a maybe-only-one-third migrant’ (277); his estrangement is not from place or language but ‘from his past’ (279). Like Grass, the African migrant who returns to his home country enjoys a right to belong, although he may suffer ‘estrangement’ from his past and dis-ease with his society. By contrast, Kwakye’s protagonist, who makes the host country his permanent home, experiences the ‘triple disruption’ that Rushdie associates with ‘full migrants’. Suspended between two worlds, unable to sink roots into his host culture, Kwakye’s migrant resorts to memories of his former home in order to create spaces of comfort that can help him cope with his current situation. In her reading of Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager At Last, Sheila Smith McKoy argues that cultural rootedness is systematically ruptured in the liminal space defined by the middle passages that are the lives of immigrants (195). McKoy however contends that in Awoonor’s view the cultural and emotional rupture that ensues from migration is reversible through cultural reintegration upon the voyager’s return to the African continent, and remnant consciousness is a means for this rebirth (206). By contrast, Kwakye does not seem to posit such a rebirth, as his protagonist does not return to his native land despite the important role that remnant consciousness plays in constructing his personhood. Instead, equipped with accoutrements he acquired from the Western lyceum, Jojo is determined to triumph over adversity and to further his life in America. It is thus plausible to con­

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clude that in Kwakye’s view, the rupture wrought on the African immigrant’s personhood by cultural transposition is irreversible. Yet Jojo constantly recalls all that is precious and authen­ tic about his native land, particularly his African culture, deriving a temporary sense of home from such memories as he seeks a more lasting home away from home. The ‘home’ that emerges from Jojo’s memories is fundamentally limited, yet powerful and invaluable in the temporary mitigation of his angst – he is, so to speak, only ‘memories from home’. In this sense home is a psychic bridge that allows Kwakye’s ‘full migrant’ to cope with his past and the present, with his sense of belonging to his home country and of alienation in the host country. Haunted by reminders from his family in Ghana that he ‘will never belong in the land of the white people’ (Kwakye: 16), Jojo feels ‘a distance … like air, not definable in its infinite qualities’ (32). His struggle with the question of belonging recalls discussions in other contexts regarding what Lee Cuba and David M. Hummon term ‘place identity’. Cuba and Hummon define place identity as ‘an interpretation of the self that uses environmental meaning to symbolize or situate identity’. They argue that place identity counters the question ‘Who am I?’ with ‘Where am I?’ or ‘Where do I belong?’ (‘Constructing a Sense of Home’: 548). Environmental meaning seems to be an integral part of Jojo’s identity as a triply displaced person. Constantly ‘living in memory’ (Kwakye: 18), Jojo feels an irresistible urge to situate himself within his native Ghanaian environment, close to its familiar sights and sounds. In his ‘vivid mental travelling’ (18) he remembers the cold Harmattan season in December; the intense heat and the sea breeze in Accra; his family and ‘the spiritual rebirth that comes with seeing familiar faces’ (17); and the beach on the Atlantic. ‘To really get a feel for Accra’ (17) he places himself in markets bustling with human activity, takes stock of foodstuffs and

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samples meals, music and dancing. Women with ties to Ghana play a significant part in Jojo’s sense of belonging: Marjorie, his Ghanaian girlfriend who stroked his male adolescent ego, is ‘a strong presence’ (29) until he marries Fiona Harris, motivated by ‘the commonalities in [their] background’, which include a Ghanaian accent, a long sojourn in Ghana and growing up in a family that upholds race consciousness and racial pride (155). Marrying a woman with whom he shares a common background allows Jojo to interpret the past in the context of the present, but also to signal group identity. Martin Sökefeld draws attention to the complexity of the concept of identity, noting that there is ‘a plurality of identities’ as well as ‘a basic singularity of the concept’, and that a particular identity, as with ‘ethnic identity’, may be more basic than others (‘Reconsidering Identity’: 532). In The Other Crucifix, a ‘plurality of identities’ exists in the form of personal identity, which pertains to the psychological interpretation of self, and social identity, which can be viewed with reference to one’s social situation. Personal identity in turn is closely tied up with masculine selfaffirmation in a racially charged community that Jojo finds bewildering and emasculating. In this sense, the concepts ‘identity’ and ‘self’ are closely connected (532). Social identity is implicated in this equation, as Jojo attempts to fulfil the expectations of identity and behaviour in his native Ghanaian community while also meeting the West’s challenge to his African cosmos. Social identity informs personal identity and can be manifested in attitudes and behaviour ranging from accent, to handshakes (Kwakye: 8-9), perceptions about race (7), names and marriage proposals. As Jojo puts it in his rumination on the question, ‘Who are you?’, ‘like a book, the answer couldn’t be offered in one sentence or paragraph or chapter. This would have to be a painstaking study of the full text, a text without quick denouement, if

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ever it had one’ (12; original emphasis). Even after a study of Jojo’s ‘full text’, however, no denouement comes into sight; instead, his story ends with his struggle to emerge from the social gulf that truncates his evolving self. It is a chasm in which America ‘seems so far removed’ (122) from his consciousness, causing him to feel a ‘sense of abandonment rattling as chains on my heels’ (1). Complicating the challenge to his African cosmos is the third ‘disruption’ in Rushdie’s construct: Jojo’s struggle to communicate with Americans in his Ghanaian English accent is shattering for his self-confidence and his struggle to find acceptance in his new home: ‘As for my English, I had to repeat myself several times. Sometimes, my listeners would rephrase my words as questions to clarify my meaning and correct my pronunciations’ (8; original emphasis). Such treatment is a constant reminder to Jojo of his ‘otherness’ which, he says, ‘seemed to weigh on me: my manner of speech, the penchant of so many either to ignore me completely or show overt curiosity, the use of slang and phrases I didn’t know, the request to repeat my words’ (31; original emphasis); all combine to create in him an acute sense that he is an outsider. His Ghanaian accent provides a reason for Americans to humiliate him, as he is forced to grapple with making himself understood in a language he thought he had already mastered. He realizes that it is not only his ‘right’ to speak, but also his humanity that is under threat: he is an ‘invisible man’, easily ignored or viewed with curiosity. Confronting the challenge to his African cosmos requires dealing with the hiatus between equality of rights and inequality in ‘real life’. Jojo occupies an inferior place in America even after he has lived in the country for some years and acquired higher education; for example, the only work he can find after obtaining a university degree is stacking hay. In addition, there is no community group to which he can belong, except for the International

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Students Association, which gives him a palpable sense of not belonging. Therefore one could surmise that there is a lack of the kind of community building that could provide a support base for meeting such a challenge. In the US, where membership of a community within the nation typically involves ideas of race and religion, Jojo’s status as a foreigner adds a third factor that exacerbates his vulnerability and prevents him from entering the main­ stream of society. Therefore, in The Other Crucifix African immigrants do not find their feet on the ground. America is at best indifferent to them, and at worst designed to frustrate their efforts to make progress in their lives. Even for those as well educated as Jojo, the metropolis reserves a place at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy. Thus, after obtaining his first degree, while his friends and colleagues such as Edward and John work in top level jobs, Jojo can only get a menial job that requires him to be literally a ‘beast of burden’. It is a descent lower than any experience Jojo has had before, and it is suggestive of the socio-economic, cultural and psychic oppression and exploitation of black people through slavery and colonialism. His plight is, as it were, determined by ‘a modern face of the ideologies that once supported mercantilism and the slave trade’ (Tardieu cited in Dobie ‘Invisible Exodus’: 152). But above all, his downward social mobility is a clear indication that immigrants like Jojo will never truly belong in American society despite the human and cultural capital they are able to accumulate as a result of their movement. In such a situation, the home country is the only place that fulfils the immigrant’s definition of ‘home’. While the migrant’s travels may be removed from the site of his original home, its spirit is present in his search for a new identity. As Jojo ruminates: ‘I never wanted to forget what makes home home: family, the spiritual rebirth that comes with seeing familiar faces … home is where you go

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knowing that no matter what happens to you, no matter what others think of you, you will be loved’ (Kwakye: 17). Yet Jojo knows that ‘home is not always where the heart desires to be’ (143), for while his heart remains set on Ghana, America is never far from his mind; his hope of returning to Ghana fades daily, whereas his resolve to make America his home grows firmer (159). In effect, as he puts it, he settles for the life of ‘a ghost living in a land of flesh and blood, confined to the fringes’ (122). As the distance between him and Ghana increases, a distance he refers to as an ‘intangible beast’ (32), Jojo begins to establish new connections with the natural environment – the only non-discriminatory entity he can find, and one that reminds him of his home country. For example, what begins as an attempt to familiarize himself with his surroundings soon turns into an intimate relationship with the silence, peace and tranquillity of the enclave of The University Pond. He muses as he takes in the scenery: I was falling in love. I stood there a long while, watching and admiring. The memory of home unfurled again. I could be holding Marjorie’s hand, kissing her. I could be speaking with Papa, sharing a meal with Mama, playing soccer with my siblings. Here, time didn’t move, it evolved into something that seemed pristine without regard to time, whose passage went almost unnoticed. Here, I was capable of being home, hearing the voices that were familiar, knowing the sounds that were not bound to particular locations, where geographic boundaries were as meaningless as the shape of tears. (22)

Through this ‘vivid mental travelling’ (18) Jojo is able to traverse the boundary between cultural rootedness and alienation in a promised land which turns out to be a promise not kept. When combined with the image of Jojo as a ‘ghost’ on the fringes of American society, mental travelling captures Jojo’s ‘ghostly’ traversing of geographical, social and cultural boundaries that leave him a ‘ghost’ of his former self. Yet his resolve at the end of his

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story to begin his life anew suggests that this ghost will take on a new form, a new substance and a new meaning. Jojo’s decision to stay in America, determined to face the realities of his situation, marks a departure from the return migration pattern in African immigrant narratives. But he makes this choice in the knowledge that ‘home is not always where the heart desires to be’ (143); it is in Ghana that he desires to be, and it is to his native country that he turns whenever he needs to connect with ‘home’ at the deepest level (107); yet it is in America that he has chosen to make his new home. In this misalignment of desire and choice, it would seem that he must die to himself in order to be able to live with himself. His belief that he belongs to his original home makes him reluctant to apply for American citizenship, as he believes he will ultimately return to Ghana. Ruminating on his status as a Ghanaian citizen, he surmises that ‘even if I didn’t return, it seemed like the only – believe it or not – tangible connection I had to Ghana’, and to surrender his Ghanaian passport is to feel as if he has ‘killed a part of [his] identity and acquired a new one’ (159). Thus, he still considers his identity to be linked to his sense of belonging to his native country. As he settles down in a new phase of life, with a wife in law school and two young children, there are indications that after his descent in social status, ascent is possible; that in a material sense his life trajectory could change for the better. Yet it is in the intangible realm that he must continue his ‘elusive search for acceptance’ in his host country (147), and in this realm one thing that will not change is the ‘spiritual bridge [which] towered over the physical rivers of space, time and distorted histories’ (144). This ‘spiritual bridge’ is cultural memory which takes the form of remnant consciousness, whether it pertains to early lessons Jojo learned about how his ancestors defended their land against colonial domination (190); to traditional wisdom about knowing one’s place when one

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is in a foreign land; or to the spiritual rebirth associated with one’s natal home. Keenly aware that he will not be able to embrace America properly as long as he gives reign to cultural memory, Jojo, nevertheless, yields to remnant consciousness, knowing that through it he can ‘summon time to a standstill’ (144) and ‘bridge oceans and histories as diverse as skin colour, or as irrelevant’ (178).

WORKS CITED Abderrezak, Hakim. ‘Burning the Sea: Clandestine Migration Across the Strait of Gibraltar in Francophone Moroccan “Illiterature”.’ Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Vol. 13, No. 4 (2009): 461-9. Abrahams, Peter. A Wreath for Udomo. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. Achebe, Chinua. No Longer at Ease. New York: Anchor, 1960. Aidoo, Ama Ata. The Dilemma of a Ghost. London: Longman, 1965. ——Our Sister Killjoy: or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. London: Longman, 1977. Armah, Ayi Kwei. Why Are We So Blest? New York: Doubleday, 1972. ——Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi: East African Publishing, 1973. Awoonor, Kofi. Interview. ‘A Top Scholar Who Has Delved Deep into Africa’s Literature.’ With Francis Gassporsoo. Sunday Mirror 5 (August 26, 1962). ——This Earth, My Brother. New York: Doubleday, 1971. ——Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992. Bel, Jacqueline. ‘Migration, Literature and Cultural Memory.’ Journal of Romance Studies. Vol. 11, No.1 (2011): 89-97. Bryce, Jane. ‘Going Home is Another Story: Constructions of Nation and Gender in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes.’ West Africa Review. Vol. 1, No. 1 (1999). Cuba, Lee and David M. Hummon. ‘Constructing a Sense of Home: Place Affiliation and Migration Across the Life Cycle.’ Sociological Forum. Vol. 8, No.4 (1993): 547-72. Darko, Amma. Beyond the Horizon. London: Heinemann, 1995. Dobie, Madeleine. ‘Invisible Exodus: The Cultural Effacement of Antillean Migration.’ Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. Vol. 13, No. 2-3 (2004): 149-83.

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Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Hale, Thomas. Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1990. Jelloun, Tahar Ben. Partir. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Kwakye, Benjamin. The Other Crucifix. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2010. Mabanckou, Alain. Bleu blanc rouge. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1998. McKoy, Sheila Smith. ‘“This Unity of Spilt Blood”: Tracing Remnant Consciousness in Kofi Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager at Last.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 33, No. 2 (2002): 194-209. Migraine-George, Thérèse. ‘Ama Ata Aidoo’s Orphan Ghosts: African Literature and Aesthetic Postmodernity.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 34, No. 4 (2003): 83-95. Njoya, Wandia. ‘Lark Mirror: African Culture, Masculinity, and Migra­ tion to France in Alain Mabanckou’s Bleu blanc rouge.’ Com­parative Literature Studies. Vol. 46, No. 2 (2009): 338-59. Pessar, Patricia and Sarah Mahler. ‘Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In.’ International Migration Review. Vol. 37, No. 3 (2003): 812-46. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991. London: Granta, 1991. Russell, Aidan. ‘Home, Music and Memory for the Congolese in Kampala.’ Journal of Eastern African Studies. Vol. 5, No. 2 (2011): 294-312. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Trans. Denys JohnsonDavies. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970. Sökefeld, Martin. ‘Reconsidering Identity.’ Anthropos. Vol. 96, No. 2 (2001): 527-44. Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. London: André Deutsch, 1965. Wilentz, Gay. ‘The Politics of Exile: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy.’ Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature. Vol. 15, No. 1 (1991): 158-73. Wright, Derek. ‘Returning Voyagers: The Ghanaian Novel in the Nineties.’ The Journal of Modern African Studies. Vol. 34, No. 1 (1996): 179-92.

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No Place Like Home Failures of Feeling & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears JAMES ARNETT

The reasons for leaving home are myriad: war, famine, economic hardship, better opportunity, survival. Suffice to say, displacement would not need to occur – would not happen nearly so often – if the places from which migrants and refugees flee were sustaining and supportive. As such, many immigrant and refugee fictions are deeply imbued with the trauma of origin. There is nothing that the subject can do about this original trauma, as in the guilt of original sin, and Sepha Stephanos, the Ethiopian refugee at the centre of Dinaw Mengestu’s novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears1 is one such displaced person. He fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror, and finds himself plunged into immigrant America. In his most recent incarnation, he is the manager of a dilapidated corner store in Logan Circle, Washington, DC, where he becomes close to a new resident, Judith, and her precocious daughter, Naomi. This child, early in the novel, has ‘run away’ from her home to seek refuge in Stephanos’ corner store. By way of reaching out to her, Stephanos explains, ‘“I used to run away all the time when I was a child.” She smiled back gratefully at me…“And how did your mom get you to stop?” “She didn’t. That’s how I ended up here”’ (Mengestu: 26). Stephanos makes it clear that there are many routes to emigration, to refuge, but not all concerned with the same ends: ‘As it was, I did not come to America to find a better life. I came here running and screaming with the ghosts of an old one firmly 103

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attached to my back. My goal since then has always been a simple one: to persist unnoticed through the days, to do no more harm’ (41). This declaration makes clear the central problematic of the novel: the shame, guilt, and affective numbing that accompanies his long-term experience of depression in displacement. Shame, Timothy Bewes convincingly argues, is inherent in the form of postcolonial writing, proceeding from the premise that ‘shame appears overtly, as the [postcolonial] text’s experience of its own inadequacy’ (The Event of Postcolonial Shame: 3), an inadequacy inscribed in the circuitry between the writer and the text, and the text and its audience. He explains that: ‘Shame, in other words, results from an experience of incommensurability, between the I as experienced by the self and the self as it appears to and is reflected in the eyes of the other’ (24). As seen in Stephanos’ experience of world-historical trauma, its resultant shame has rendered him unable to make invested, intimate relationships with others, or, when made, to sustain them. His resulting paralysis and unavailability manifests most clearly in his neurotic repetition of failure – his repeated failure to process the work of mourning that might alleviate his depression. I will argue that the neurotic compulsion to repeat failure inheres in the traumatic experience of displacement for the emigrant or refugee, and that Stephanos’ reiteration of this cycle reaches its climax and crisis at the end of the novel – providing a conceptual map whereby other refugees might be able to find their way out of the restrictive experience of shame. Affect theory has a long history, but it has emerged as an especially prominent academic mode in the twenty-first century, building on disparate discourses and disciplines, coalescing around multiple centres in an effort to examine the ‘other side’ of experience opposite cognition and reason. This is a theory whose roots ground themselves in psychology, sociality, structures of feeling and affect.

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Yet its current interdisciplinary conjunctions belie the longer philosophical traditions of which affect theory partakes; one of the most important origin points is in the work of seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza, who puts affect at the centre of his ethical schema. Spinoza’s challenging thought suffered repression and embargo during his time, under charges of atheism and pantheism; accordingly, his influence on longer Western philosophical traditions remained largely suppressed until the nineteenth century saw the beginning of a resurgence of interest, which achieved its apotheosis in post-1968 ‘Left’ political philosophy. Affects, for him, are what enable or disenable, empower or disempower us to act (ideally, ethically) in the world – in the pursuit of our conatus, or our desire to persevere and persist (Ethics: 75). Our impingement on others determines our subjectivity and efficacy: we are all of us modes of the same immanent substance, creating a framework of in­ escapable, substantial and material coequality. One of the more confusing aspects of Spinoza’s affect is that it is both emotion – feelings, as we understand them psychosocially – and impact. For Spinoza, affects are bipolar: they are either good, in that they increase our joy and therefore empower us, or bad, in that they inhibit or block us, and beget sorrow (76-7). Even so, these good and bad affects are nothing but ‘passages’ towards or away from ‘perfection’ (70), which for Spinoza is ‘blessedness’ or peace with, and material knowledge of, the material world as it really is (163). In the column of ‘bad’ affects, shame occupies a particularly potent space; as Spinoza describes it: ‘Shame is a sadness, accompanied by the idea of some action [of ours] which we imagine that others blame’ (109-10). As the last affect that Spinoza defines in his glossary of the emotions, it would seem that ‘shame’ occupies a particularly important place in the framework of individuated emotions.

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Contemporary affect theory is sometimes traced to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, whose resurrection of the American neuropsychologist Silvan Tomkins’ work foregrounded a new interdisciplinary interest in the emotions. Affect theory – insofar as it takes as its focus the feeling subject, feelings, or the felt – seeks to explore how our complex emotional lives alter, augment, or compromise our being-in-the-world. Tomkins, like Spinoza, argues that there are two poles to feeling, the good and the bad: good affects that generate pleasure and joy, and bad affects that beget inhibition, frustration and sadness. These two schemas – Spinoza’s and Tomkins’ – are not mutually exclusive. Both understand that the self is culti­ vated in complex negotiation with sociality. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue that, in Spinoza, ‘individual selfhood is not possible in isolation: it depends on con­ tinuing engagement with and disengagement from other selves in changing structures of affect and imagination. Selfhood arises within a complex affective framework in which emotions circulate through systems of social rela­ tions’ (Collective Imaginings: 65). In Spinoza’s estimation, affects can be activated by any number of things, such as other sub­jects, objects, memories, imagination, ideas, all of which are magnificently co-present, real and, as such, part of the broad ‘social’ field. Sedgwick and Frank use the notion of the ‘fold’ (borrowed from Deleuze) to explain the way in which Tomkins likewise sketches a feedback cycle where stimulus begets response, affect begets affect, and interpersonal impingement is the clearest space in which affect’s work can be traced (‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold’: 12-13). Both, then, understand that affects are complex stimuli, and that shame is the emblematic ‘bad’ affect that com­ promises the very sociability that grounds affect’s working. Shame in particular occupies a central place within Tomkins’ polar schema: shame ‘operates only after interest

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or enjoyment has been activated, and inhibits one or the other or both’ (Shame and Its Sisters: 135). Accordingly, Sedgwick and Frank claim that shame lives ‘at one end of the affect polarity shame-interest, suggesting that the pulsations of cathexis around shame … are what either enable or disenable so basic a function as the ability to be interested in the world’ (5). Tomkins’ poetic claim for shame’s primacy grounds my reading of Stephanos’ experience of his transnational self, alienated from any stable sense of ‘home’: If distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the ego; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul … he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth. (Tomkins: 133)

Shame monopolizes one’s ease and comfort in the world, overpowering the self with feelings of not belonging, and causing existential angst. Shame erects barriers to intimacy that foreclose the possibility of good effects of affect: it keeps the self isolated, stuck in a web of relentlessly selfreinforcing isolation and torment. In Mengestu’s novel, it becomes clear only gradually that shame is the organizing affect in Stephanos’ life: it is halfway through the novel that we learn of the precipitating cause of his departure from Ethiopia. When the revelation comes, the tone of the novel shifts, making space for the darkness that is otherwise only alluded to, but likewise paving the way for a possible resolution to his mourning: I saw my father’s face just before the three soldiers in tattered uniforms escorted him out of our house. I never saw what death did to his face, whether or not it aged it, or perhaps even restored it to some long-vanished peaceful state. I did

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imagine it involuntarily while lying awake and staring across the living room to the glass doors that lead out to the balcony I sometimes imagined leaping off. In my mind, his face was untouched, free from any bruises or scars the soldiers might have left, his eyes, nose, and mouth impossibly perfect. I gave him a wonderful funeral, complete with all of the rites the dead deserve: a body, a casket, and flowers, along with a priest and a cast of mourners who followed him all the way to his family’s burial ground just outside of Addis. All of that happened on that couch. (19-20)

The feeling of paralysis that Stephanos experiences is a clear result of the trauma he has endured – at his own insti­ ga­ tion, he fears, but also imaginatively. Ann Cvet­­ kovich, collating a wide range of commentaries from cultural studies, history, sociology and literary theory, argues, in Depression: A Public Feeling, that the uncom­fort­ able admixture of self-blame, displacement, dis­possession and depression is a particularly American and racialized formation. From the space of post-traumatic depression, Stephanos cannot but see that he is the cause of the worldhistorical event in which he, and his father, got swept up, the Red Terror in Ethiopia in the late 1970s: The last walk we took around that park was on January 23, 1977, less than six months before he was killed. We had just entered the park grounds when we saw the first of seven bodies neatly lined up in the centre of the grass. They were lined up in a row, their feet bare, just inside the entrance. They were impossible to miss or avoid. Hung around each of their necks was a crudely made cardboard sign that simply read ‘Traitor’. (Mengestu: 217)

In this reflection, which comes at the very end of the novel, the operative line reflects what, in hindsight only, was the inevitability of the terror and its effect on his family: ‘impossible to miss or avoid’. But all of these reflections, this reiteration, ‘happened on that couch’. The resurgence of the trauma is an indwelling

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spectre, something that lurks and menaces. Spinoza under­stands acutely the confluence of the mind and body: ‘The idea of any thing … increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, our body’s power of acting, [likewise] increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, our mind’s power of thinking’ (76). We can – and do – respond to the memory, the imagination or the thought of past emotional stimuli, and such remembrances can beget in us the same – or differ­ent – affects as did the originary event. It does not appear accidental that the entirety of Stephanos’ phantasy, reparative work takes place ‘on the couch’ – so clearly invoking Sigmund Freud’s inter­ sub­ jective and ambivalent talking cure. Freud’s notion of mourning and melancholia here clarifies Stephanos’ particular depressive state. Stephanos’ feeling of misery is reflective of the experience of mourning, described by Freud, which encompasses ‘profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity’, and consists of a totalizing ‘devotion to mourning which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests’ (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: 244). Mourning is an activity that monopolizes, that marshals all available resources under its heading, and employs all of the subject’s unconscious labour. What augments Stephanos’ deep feeling of mourning is the interposition of the shame of the precipitating event, as well as the traumatic historical cause. No resolution to his father’s death is possible: the desired, the longed-for, funeral will never happen, at least not at Stephanos’ hands. This is, Cathy Caruth points out evocatively, an effect of the ‘double wound’ of trauma that, because it is always-already experienced before one is ready for it, inflicts its pain not just once, but also in its inevitable recurrence (Unclaimed Experience: 4). This double wound creates a paralysing oscillation between a ‘crisis of life’ and ‘crisis of death’ (7) and so resolution of the trauma can

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only happen projectively. Insofar as that resolution is thus immaterial, Stephanos therefore does not receive the actual relief here that he needs to process the work of mourning and accordingly achieve amelioration. Instead, he is blocked. The store that he manages becomes a representative echo chamber for his shame and depression. It is located in a ‘fallen’ neighbourhood which he ‘secretly loves’ because its shabbiness and economic depression mirror his psychoaffective depression (Meng­ estu: 16). The store is not particularly well-kept or -stocked, and his inattention to it parallels his lack of selfcare. Unlike his memory of the past, which is alive and insistent, Stephanos marvels that in the store, ‘it seems as if time stands completely still at the close of each day, and is resumed only by my return. Sometimes I like to think that if I waited ten or twenty years before opening my store, I could return to find it completely unchanged’ (37). The store is just barely an occupation: ‘the days of a shopkeeper are empty … The silence becomes a cocoon in which you can hear only your voice echoing; the real world in which you live begins to fade into a past that you have tried to put to rest’ (40). This clearly matches Caruth’s notion of trauma as an isolated and isolating experience. The store is the inner space turned out: its dusty shelves of subpar goods mirror the sparse, dark mindscape of Stephanos; the arrested memories sitting inviolate on the shelves, however, covered in the dust that marks their staleness. Sedgwick and Frank explain that shame ‘can turn one inside out – or outside in’ (22). Accordingly, the store is full of ‘timeless’ things: ‘detergent, paper products, toys, Hostess cupcakes, scissors, rolls of tape, Wite-Out, hair gel, soap, nightcaps, anything made of plastic – the things that endure and survive’ (Mengestu: 71). Like these things, Stephanos’ memories are not un-useful, but, in their plasticine, undecaying persis­ tence, their use value is no longer clear. These timeless things persist stubbornly, in contradistinction to

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the ‘calendars from 1993, 1994, and 1996 [that] are still hanging on the wall behind the counter’ (71). Time has unfolded and marched forward: the calendars are therefore layers in a geologic record of depression, while the things that he values most – the ‘timeless’ ones – live unaltered by the durée. Stephanos feels guilty for having harboured ‘revolutionary’ material through his own naïveté; his father, ultimately, is killed for claiming the material as his own. The memory that Stephanos clings to – of his father, tinged with the shame of the responsibility for his death – is reflected in these unchanging items, these things that will never be sold, moved or expelled, but rather persist, stubbornly, within. So, too, does his home reflect the paucity of hope in Stephanos’ life, a pure echo of his re-encounter with the store every morning: ‘The entire place was shabbier, smaller, and more desolate than I remembered, as if while I was eating dinner someone had entered my apart­ ment and stolen a few years off the furniture’, which is itself, all scavenged, ‘[bearing] the stamp of too many lives and too many people’ (60). So a notion of ‘home’ is something that is doubly alien and alienated; instead of creating a home in Washington, DC that is hospitable or healthy, Stephanos sabotages even that measure of comfort, creating for himself the limbo that he occupies between the present and the past, America and Ethiopia. Unlike the densely Ethiopian apartment building where his uncle lives and where Amharic is the lingua franca, Stephanos lives on his own in an African-American neigh­ bourhood. He intentionally creates a home that refuses the particularly, actually familiar for the cryptofamiliar – used furniture that has no specific associations for Stephanos, bits and pieces cobbled together from others’ refuse. As will become clearer at the end of this essay (and the novel), this sense of limbo invokes Dante’s first level of hell, the place to which the unbaptized and virtuous pagans are consigned.

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Tomkins, grounded eminently in the psycho-physio­ logical bind of affect, puts forward a model of the feedback loop that stresses the importance of the transit of emotions through external objects and back into the feeling body. The feeling of suspension captured by and in the store creates an endlessly iterative repetition of the paralysis of shame and depression by projecting outward (from the fund within) the unhomeliness of the traumatized psycho­ logy. The objects do not change, cannot change, without Stephanos’ intervention, but even when changes do occur, they are done without belief in their efficacy. At the beginning of the novel, in ostensible response to the slow changes in the neighbourhood and the increased presence of workers needing food, Stephanos installs a deli counter. But this augmentation to his store is never invested with a belief in its success: it is a perfunctory gesture, a shabby and second-rate performance of optimism. This same performance of optimism is always hollow, and a cyclical process he indulges in over and over again. In one such iteration, Stephanos reflects: To go on living halfheartedly is ridiculous, I think. Here I am; this is it. Starting today, I am going to press on valiantly. I am going to march through the hours and weeks and let no disappointment, regardless of how large, steer me from my course or bring me down. (65)

But the resolve is impossible to maintain, and once more, he collapses back into the paralysis that characterizes his depressed affect. Each of these manoeuvres is a sort of fort-da game or repetition compulsion that is deeply inflected by his abiding shame (Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle). He steels himself; he resolves to do better, to improve, to recommit to life. He subsequently fails. In doing this, Stephanos brings himself over and over again through the steps that would-have-saved his father: he should have been forthcoming and told his father, should have claimed

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responsibility, should have been aware of the possible consequences. His original failure, then, gets encoded into the fort-da game that structures his melancholic response to trauma in the repetition of the conditions of his persisting failure. He, at one point, decides to go to school, a decision that makes his mother inordinately proud. In this way, he was [thus] the penultimate accomplishment of a long-awaited dream. The first aim of the refugee is to survive, and having done that, that initial goal is quickly replaced by the general ambitions of life. I didn’t leave Ethiopia to attend classes in the northern suburbs of Virginia, but to hear the story told then, that was what I had done. (Mengestu: 98)

The performance of the pursuit of success – here embodied by the gold standard of refugee accomplishment, a college education – precisely plays into the aspirations and dreams of those left behind at home. But in this crucial trial, he fails. He stops attending classes; he drops out. He drifts once more away from the resolve that should, ostensibly, have carried him through to peace. He is in Freudian terms, resolutely neurotic; in the words of Tomkins, ‘shame is an experience of the self by the self’ (136) even as its precipitating cause may be external. The repetition compulsion of resolution-and-failure does little for Stephanos but mark the progress of time and act as a perversely willed confirmation of his shame. Stephanos’ most crucial failures, however, are inter­ personal. Standing in his shabby living room, he reflects: ‘A man, I told myself, is defined not by his possessions but by the company he keeps’, a phrase he acknowledges he stole from his father (Mengestu: 60). So begins a prime example of this cyclical, performative failure. In the spirit of resolution, he spends time carefully choosing Christmas gifts for Judith and Naomi, and for his mother and his brother: ‘This year, for the first time in many years’, he

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decides, ‘I was going to make [Christmas] something special’ (152). Normally, he admits, he would intentionally collapse the space between optimism and cynical, depressed pessimism: for the many previous years, ‘[he] sent Christmas cards full of empty promises to come home one day soon’ (153). He only ever mechanically makes the gesture of the promise of return, performed every year at Christmas in a perversion of the parable of the prodigal son. This Christmas, in light of his new resolve to make it ‘something special’, he experiences, fleetingly, a ‘general mood[ ] of joy and happiness … [and] could have danced through those aisles for hours’ (160). But it does not take long for Stephanos’ depressive repeti­ tion compulsion to compromise what little joy he had mustered in his effort to reach out to those new loved ones that have entered his life (Judith and Naomi) and re-establish ties to his loved ones back in Ethiopia. While wrapping the presents, he experiences increasing frustration: ‘I wanted smooth, flawlessly wrapped presents, just like the ones Naomi’s father had sent from Germany’, he thinks (161). Here he invokes his rival, Naomi’s successful, college professor father, in order to put paid to his feelings of failure. The things he has bought are ‘too small’, ‘too thin’, ‘too squat … None of them fit in the wrapping paper the way I needed them to’ (161). The grammar of this communicates much: that Stephanos, performing once more the ritualistic indulgence of his neurotically engendered failure, displaces the blame onto the wrapping paper, foregoing self-awareness and circumventing the possibility of success in establishing a punishingly high and irrelevant expectation of himself: ‘There was always something a little off: a corner would be showing, or another corner would have too much paper’ (161-2). The circumstances for the successful completion of mourning work – which would alleviate his depression, and permit the gradual remediation of his shame – are

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once more not met. In language recalling the relationship Stephanos has to those timeless and expired goods in his store, he thinks: ‘There was a unique fear that came with feeling that it was the inanimate objects around you that frightened you most’ (162-3). In his first description of his shabbily maintained home, casting his glance around him at that moment, he indulges in a reminiscence of his father’s dictum: ‘A man … is defined not by his possessions but by the company he keeps’. The phrase had occurred to him then because he ‘knew from experience that moments of sorrow and self-pity were the best times to think of these old phrases and axioms. Not because they provided any comfort, but because, like any other deliberate act of memory, they could supplant the present with their own incorrigible truth’ (60). These two moments – the surveying of his home, and his feeling of failure – are inextricably linked. And the recollection of his father’s words permits several things to intercalate: for one, he is able, through the use of the axiom as a sort of totem, to ward off the repetition of the memory of the precipitating trauma, replacing it instead with a warm memory of paternal communication. But it also works to undo that very impulse, by indulging a sense of sorrow and loss when he is already ‘down’, a sort of self-exacerbating impulse that mirrors his repetition compulsion to failure. It is ‘self-pity’, he acknowledges, but one that is shameful. Tomkins explains that ‘if negative affect is too punishing … it may be worse than the alarming situation itself, and it may hinder rather than expedite dealing with it’ (111). The invocation of his father in his confrontation with his failures to establish a ‘home’ have, therefore, the effect of creating the barrier to the alleviation of his shame. That said, these possessions – in the first scene, the furnishings of his home; in the second, the ‘failed’ Christmas presents – are the cause of the ‘unique fear’ of the ‘inanimate objects around you’ (Mengestu: 162-3),

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but which Spinoza would argue are nevertheless very real, eminently and immanently co-material. Accordingly, all Stephanos sees is ‘how sad and empty’ everything looked (163). Self-defeated, and shamefacedly circumventing the intimacy he seeks to develop with Judith and Naomi visà-vis the impulse of Christmas giving, Stephanos seals the deal by sorrowfully trumping even the content of his father’s cliché. He picks up a prostitute, tragicomically euphemized as a ‘special Christmas date’, with whom he rather listlessly has sex. At the end, neither satisfied nor becalmed, he offers her a choice of the presents he has laid out; she chooses the perfume he has bought for his mother, but awkwardly, since she ‘doesn’t wear perfume … [because it] gives [her] a headache’. Stephanos responds, closing the shame script he has ruthlessly enacted, ‘That’s okay … Just give it to someone you know’ (164). Rightfully, Stephanos is ashamed of the entirety of the scene as it has unfolded, with the certain inevitable logic of compulsion: he has resolved to change for the better; he has enacted recklessly the risky and ambivalent measure that might have begotten change; he is confronted by the perceived impossibility of success as if by something outside of himself; he indulges his feelings of shame; he fails at his resolve; and then, once more, feels ashamed of having failed again. Readers of the novel must undoubtedly be frustrated by Stephanos’ inability to form lasting and meaningful bonds with other human beings, the signal failure of which is his frustrated attempts to interject himself into the lives of Judith and Naomi. He creates conditions that cannot be fulfilled by the very nature of his depressive position. The only relationships that he can maintain are, tellingly, with the other immigrants among whom he initially finds himself upon arrival in Washington. Kenneth ‘Ken the Kenyan’, and Joseph ‘Joe from the Congo’ (1), together with Stephanos, form a relatively stable peer group, a tight cluster of relations that is grounded in their likeness: they

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are the ‘children of the revolution’, as croons T-Rex from a jukebox in their favourite bar: We did believe we were the children of a revolution, and not only because we were willing to be grand. We all had stories of families we missed and would never see again. We spoke in our broken English of Africa’s tyrannies, which had yet to grow tedious. And we had our own stories of death and violence to match. (48)

Whatever the particulars of their departures from Africa – and each does have a suitably violent origin story that bespeaks refugeeism and displacement, as opposed to volun­ tary emigration – these three are united in their shared orphanhood. Given that the UK title of the novel is Children of the Revolution, it becomes clear that the phrase is meant to invoke specifically the coincidence of parentage and history, father and nation-state. Although commenting specifically on the paternal language that coalesced around, and at the behest of, Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, Maina Mutonya remarks on how the use of paternal language underscores the gerontocracy, grounded in corruption, which haunts African postcolonial politics. This language, moreover, ‘relegates the role of the youth in political leadership to the future, a future that never materializes’ (‘Fimbo ya Nyayo’: 142). Stephanos has no elective, meaningful relationship with the Students for Democracy movement – he had received and hoarded these ‘subversive’ flyers not because of political principles but because of social naïveté. As he explains it, ‘I had volunteered to pass out flyers to people I could trust. I was only sixteen at the time. I didn’t believe in consequences yet’ (Mengestu: 126). His naïveté weaves him, nevertheless, into the fabric of governmental opposition, and makes of him a sworn enemy of the unfolding Red Terror, and precipitates his father’s abduction and murder.

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Lacking a father now, and deeply ashamed of his role in the event, Stephanos’ identification of himself as a ‘child of the revolution’ is painfully ironic, considering he never willingly established a political identity that could have warranted the violence he experienced. But like Joseph and Kenneth, he has nevertheless been displaced by violent social change. So it is that their game – naming current and former African dictators and their (sometimes brief, usually terrifying) reigns – carries a lot of symbolic resonance in the novel. Each iteration of the game is an opportunity to do the work of mourning, to point to the superposition of the African dictator-father – always deposed, or dead, but displaced – as the ghostly remnant that has engendered their own irreversible displacement as refugees. In the first instance of this game, Stephanos explains: So far we’ve named more than thirty different coups in Africa. It’s become a game with us. We’ve been playing the game for over a year now. We’ve expanded our playing field to include failed coups, rebellions, minor insurrections, guerrilla leaders, and the acronyms of as many rebel groups as we can find … anyone who has picked up a gun in the name of revolution. (8)

From the position of displacement, depression and shame, Stephanos invests his dream-life with the logic of this game: identifying others who could have performed the work of resistance he was only ever accused of performing. He can project himself into the space of these other failed revolutionaries as a means of generating self-reassurance, confirmation that there was nothing he could have done. The game, too, is, endlessly iterable: ‘No matter how many we name, there are always more, the names, dates and years multiplying as fast as we can memorize them so that at times we wonder, half-jokingly, if perhaps we ourselves are not responsible’ (8). There is a conflation of fantasy and phantasy in this statement. The fantasy is that the revolution, although stalled or failed, still hovers on

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the horizon, waiting to bring about prosperity, stability and happiness: a transnational projective fantasy of the restoration of the family. The phantasy, though, comes closest to the ‘truth’ that Stephanos already finds so paralytically shameful: that he is actually responsible for the failure of the revolution, on the one hand, and eminently and immanently responsible for the death of his father, on the other. Kenneth, drunk, sums up that feeling of failure: ‘I can’t remember where the scar on my father’s face is … Here. Or there. Here. Or there’ (9-10). The feeling of failure inhabits, implicitly, the liminal space of the refugee: forced to flee there (home) for here (‘home’) and unable to establish either as homely. In the final scenes of the novel, Stephanos has lost much: the possibility of a romantic relationship with Judith, his store and his livelihood. Once more he is displaced: this time by gentrification, by the neoliberal economic revolution reclaiming urban space from the structurally disenfranchised, at the cost of their further disenfranchisement. Resolution comes, though, through the perfunctory final performance of the script of failure, here, finally displaced from Stephanos onto Judith: he suggests she rebuild her house, which had been destroyed by an anti-gentrification arsonist. She gives back to Stephanos the language he has needed to hear himself utter in the past: ‘It’d be too much … to go through all of that work again. It would feel like I was stuck in the past and I don’t want to live my life that way. It’s better just to start over’ (227). Her invocation of ‘my life’ is an effective provocation to Stephanos, who is forced to recognize his own failed attempts to move on in spite of doomed and repetitive attempts. Shaken, he quotes de Tocqueville to her: ‘Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition’ (227-8). The revolution, far from being over, or impossibly distant, is

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one that happens on a microsocial level in democracies; although his attempt to forge a new kinship with Judith and Naomi has failed, the promise of the salvific nature of a self-forged family out of the ashes of the old invests him with a new sense of purpose. So, when he quotes his father to himself one last time, it is without the self-reproach of shame or guilt: ‘What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough’ (228). Bewes argues that ‘shame is ontologically inseparable from the forms in which it appears’ (39), and the shame that inheres in this transnational novel, is libidinally unbound when Stephanos steps out onto the avenue. With Stephanos’ declaration ‘I have suspended long enough’, the binds of shame and the compulsion to repeat his failure dissipate: as in the second-to-last line of Dante’s Inferno, Stephanos has emerged from the limbo of his shame into the clearer light of day, from the endlessly reiterative inferno of self-defeat into the purgatorial light of work that can save: Through a round aperture I saw appear, Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears, Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars. (Dante quoted in Mengestu: 99)

It is no mistake that the epic that haunts this novel is Dante’s. In The Theory of the Novel, in making the distinc­ tion between the epic and the novel – the former ‘gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within’ and the latter ‘seeks … to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life’ (60) – Georg Lukács argues that Dante represents the ‘historico-philosophical transition from the pure epic to the novel’ (68). This is significant

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because the ‘architectural clearly conquer[s] the organic’ in Dante, just as in Mengestu, the looming gentrification and reconstruction of Logan Square muscles out the people – like Stephanos – who lived therein. Adapting Lukács, then, ‘the break between life and meaning’ enshrined in the epic, and embodied ontologically by shame’s coincidence with form, is ‘surpassed and canceled by the coincidence of life and meaning in a present, actually experienced transcendence’ (Lukács 68). In other words, Stephanos, like Dante in the Commedia, emerges into the transcendence of his compulsory shame, having completed the work of mourning trauma, ready to claim his life ‘entirely as his own’ (Mengestu: 228).

NOTE 1 The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is the US title of the novel. It was published in the UK as Children of the Revolution.

WORKS CITED Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Dante. The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick. New York: Penguin, 2014[2004]. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2001[1988]. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914-1916). Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. ——Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: WW Norton, 1990[1955].

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Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. New York: Routledge, 1999. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cam­ bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994[1971]. Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Published in UK as Children of the Revolution. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Mutonya, Maina. ‘Fimbo ya Nyayo: When the Kenyan Dictator Called the Tunes!’ Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature. Ed. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014: 141-66. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and Adam Frank. ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.’ Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995: 1-28. Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. Trans. Edwin Curley. New York: Penguin, 1996. Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

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‘The Backward Glance’ Repetition & Return in Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die SOPHIA AKHUEMOKHAN

The experience of the African immigrant, in the Diaspora or returning to the continent, has been integral to the fiction of Pede Hollist from the inception of his career as a writer. The preoccupation is evident in his first four short stories, as implied in the titles: ‘Going to America’, ‘Foreign Aid’, ‘BackHomeAbroad’ and ‘Resettlement’. His novel, So the Path Does Not Die, is probably the most profound in its handling of the issues surrounding immigration and return, not merely because as a novel it is more expansive but because the popular theme of biculturalism is interwoven with highly controversial ideas, including ideas on female circumcision – dangerous ground for any man to tread. Fortunately controversy can be accommodated since African literature is not static. As the literary critic, Ernest Emenyonu, states in ‘The African Novel in the 21st Century’, ‘new voices are emerging from all parts of the African continent not only to reinforce the voices of the generations before them, but also to reveal the new realities, visions and concerns of Africa and its people’ (xii). Emenyonu’s statement foregrounds a primary intention of many new African writers, which is to keep the past in the present. The objective is to ‘reinforce the voices of the generations before them’ at the same time as they ‘reveal the new realities, visions and concerns’ (xii, emphasis added). In effect, they need to look backward and forward simultaneously. This phenomenon is pronounced in So 123

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the Path Does Not Die, where the backward glance1, in particular, is incisive. So the Path Does Not Die has an unusual reliance on repetition and return, demonstrating in several ways the author’s bid to both reinforce and reveal. The Palestinian-American critic, Edward Said, elaborates on the achievability of this in a discussion on the eighteenthcentury philosopher and historian, Giovanni Battista Vico, in The World, the Text and the Critic. Expounding on Vico’s theory of the cycles of human history, Said employs an example from music that demonstrates how repetition and originality, reinforcement and revelation, can successfully happen together: Formally speaking, Vico’s understanding and use of repetition bears a resemblance to musical techniques of repetition, in particular those of the cantus firmus or of the chaconne or, to cite the most developed classical instance, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. By these devices a ground motif anchors the ornamental variations taking place above it. Despite the proliferation of changing rhythms, patterns, and harmonies, the ground motif recurs throughout, as if to demonstrate its staying power and its capacity for endless elaboration. As Vico saw the phenomenon in human history, there is in these musical forms a tension between the contrariety or eccentricity of the variation and the constancy and asserted rationality of the cantus firmus. Nothing Vico could have said about mind’s triumph over irrationality can equal the quiet triumph that occurs at the end of the Goldberg Variations, as the theme returns in its exact first form to close off the aberrant variations it has generated. (114; emphasis added)

Said illustrates that repetition can provide a foundation for originality to exhaust itself. This article investigates repetition in So the Path Does Not Die in the light of Said’s analogy. The cantus firmus is the ‘fixed song’ underlying independent melodies. In Hollist’s novel, a cantus firmus is composed in the tale of Musudugu and extended in the tale of the fafei. Musudugu

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is a mythical setting, a village in a folktale, while the fafei is an initiation house in Koinadugu in Northern Sierra Leone. Rhythms and patterns in the development of the protagonist, Fina (a shortened form of Finaba), proliferate on the ground motifs established in Musudugu and the fafei, motifs which remain constant and thereby demonstrate their importance and their capacity for endless artistic elaboration. In other words, new occurrences in the protagonist’s life are symmetrical with the repetition of fixed themes. Repetition accordingly communicates the twin paradoxes to be scrutinized here: that of repetition/originality and of backward/forward movement. Technically speaking, repetition is singularly suited to the author’s thematic purpose because each instance of it – in action, event, language or scenario – is a return in disguise, and return is what he is pressing for. Hollist is persuaded that there are areas in which Africans need to return, to look backward and re-trace their steps. Repetition and return are in this sense synonymous. As Said notes when citing Soren Kierkegaard, ‘Repetition is “return, conceived in a purely formal sense”’ (quoted in Said: 120-1; original emphasis). Return can be physical, mental, metaphorical, cultural or even biological, as when children are carbon copies of their parents. The concept is integral to African literature set in the Diaspora, although it is not always recognized. For instance, Rosetta Codling compares the Diasporic experiences of the female protagonists in novels by Sefi Atta and Isabel Allende. In both Swallow and Island Beneath the Sea, being in the Diaspora is no tangible improvement in the women’s lives because at home as well as away from home they fill the same slot in a male-dominated universe. In ‘Colonial Chattel, Postcolonial Whores’, Codling declares, ‘for the African Diasporic woman there is no state or place of grace that can promise her sanctuary from the world of colonial minds. Whether White or Black, the

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males always endeavour to marginalize the African female’ (216). Codling views the marginalization of African females abroad from the perspective of their failure to really reach the land of freedom. Hence her statement that ‘the African Diasporic women of Swallow suffer a similar fate [to those of Island Beneath the Sea]. Rose and Tolani never advance beyond their incarceration within Postcolonial Nigeria’ (214). That which Codling interprets as not advancing can be interpreted from another angle, as a return. The women leave the motherland literally, but a return takes place in that they find themselves back in the situation they fled. The return is veiled in the repetition of the old situation. Commenting on So the Path Does Not Die, Kathryn Van­ Spanckeren asserts that ‘the overall structure [of Hollist’s novel] is that of a bildungsroman’ (57). VanSpanckeren argues: from the young girl’s perspective, we discover a world filled with wonder and also unpredictable violence – female circumcision, tribal tension, and war. They test her and affect her deeply, but as in Huck Finn, they lie outside the main story, which is the struggle to survive, find love and strength, and learn to stand on one’s truth. (57)

She gives a short exposition of the word ‘truth’: ‘In Finaba’s case, the idea of truth involves keeping faith’ (57). Although female circumcision is debatably ‘outside the main story’, VanSpanckeren’s posture aligns with that of the present study. ‘Keeping faith’ is synonymous with constancy, which has repetition ingrained. The backward glance in So the Path Does Not Die is in the category of Said’s aforementioned analogue from music, repetition anchoring proliferation. The repetitions largely cluster around two tales-within-the-tale – that of Musudugu and that of the fafei – which provide a basis for evaluating the repetition/originality design and the text’s message on the return to Africa.

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A key theme of the text is articulated by a female elder in Musudugu. She alleges, ‘When you do not follow the path, you will end up lost in the bush’ (Hollist Path: iv). This is the first of numerous overt and covert references to the novel’s title and to the overarching symbol of the path. The proverb not only pre-empts the chief investigation in the text (What is the path? Where does it lead?), but it also lays the foundation for the text’s prevailing movement. In throwing the reader’s mind back to the title, the reference to the path is an instance of a return. From this point and onwards, each mention of the path necessitates a process of return, a backward glance; in this instance a mental flashback from the text to the title. The principle of return permeates the narrative in theme and plot, and most strikingly in style, in the use of symbolism and verbal recapitulation. It begins with the story of Musudugu. The novel, paradoxically and calculatedly, starts with return: recourse to African folklore in the shape of a folktale. The tale of Musudugu, which constitutes the prologue, is the primary narrative in the sense that it obliquely structures the main text and, in addition, generates cardinal repetitions within it. In the context of Said’s metaphor from music, the folktale is the cantus firmus, the ground motif upon which the variations will exhaust themselves. Musudugu is a village inhabited only by women. There is a single rule guiding them: ‘Darkness must never cover a man in Musudugu’ (iii). This does not mean that the women are celibate, but that either the men visit during the day or the women leave the village to meet them. Consequently, the rule is obeyed with comparative ease until a young and precocious girl named Kumba Kargbo arises to challenge it. She is set apart from the other girls at birth. The narrator says: ‘She was no ordinary child, for she forced her way out of her mother’s belly, feet first!’(iii; original emphasis). Breech birth is the antecedent to the traits that stamp her as an oddity, then as a freak. Kumba wants to know what

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will happen if a man sleeps overnight in Musudugu. The council leader, the female elder quoted above, attempts to curtail Kumba’s non-conformism with the proverb of the path, appending a rebuke: ‘Life is about seeing yourself as a part of others and being ready to share their pain’ (v). Kumba is not satisfied with the elder’s answer and so goes out into the world in search of her own. She grows into a giant glutted with diverse kinds of knowledge and her head touches the sky. On re-entering Musudugu, she tramples it under her huge feet and the tale ends with her bewailing the destruction she has caused. The folktale gives way to the main narrative set in Talaba, a village in Koinadugu district of Sierra Leone, during the period when female circumcision is carried out. As the prologue flows into Chapter 1 there is a clear repetition of details. The tone and rhetorical simplicity of the oral performance are sustained and core events are re-enacted. For example, within the same rural African setting there is again an authoritative female elder and a precocious young girl. The elderly woman is Baramusu, grandmother to the girl, Fina. Baramusu admonishes Fina through a proverb, as the Musudugu female elder admonished Kumba Kargbo. Baramusu tells Fina: ‘Life is like the bird-scaring rope. The big and little ropes work together to protect the farm from the birds’ (5). She explains, ‘life is when people work together’ (5) as they must when pulling the ropes to scare the birds from the rice crop. Some difference is visible in the two situations – Baramusu’s proverb utilizes different imagery, and the relationship between Fina and her grandmother is considerably more cordial than that between the council leader and Kumba – but the correlation is obvious. The second story builds upon the first as a repetition as well as an innovation. The two versions touch at the points of setting and diction, and at the very vital level of ideology because the proverb of the rope and the proverb of the path are saying the same

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thing. Jointly, they speak of continuity, community, and responsibility. The repeated moral tenet is juxtaposed with verbal repetition: ‘do not cut the rope … DO NOT CUT THE ROPE’ (5). Thus, from the outset, emphasis is placed on repetition. It is a literary device and also a value connoted in the repeated (and seemingly irksome) commitment of walking the known path or pulling the communal rope. At this juncture in the story it might not dawn on the reader that repetition is return, and that the emphasis on one is tacitly an emphasis on the other. But as repetition acquires a vague significance in the reader’s thoughts, the author’s argument successfully takes root and he nurtures it gradually. Chapter 1 progresses, and the essential details of the prologue remain constant while modifications continue to build upon them. Fina, like Kumba, is poised to leave the clan. The modification is in the propelling factor. Kumba craves knowledge and explicitly departs to find it, whereas Fina is content with the life of continuity and has to be forced out of the village by unfavourable circumstances. She is twelve years old and anxious to undergo initiation into womanhood within Talaba. Her departure is therefore precipitated by her parents, who are staunchly opposed to female circumcision. Their opposition paves the way for the anomaly and spectacle of the circumcision night, creating an erratic deviation in the ‘fixed material’ of the pro­logue. The circumcision night is a major deviation in the Musu­ dugu blueprint. As such, it is an object lesson in the way repetition supports originality in the text because the blue­print remains basically intact even while it allows the ­disruption to play itself out. The disruption is set in motion when Amadu, Fina’s father, and Nabou, Fina’s mother, resist Baramusu’s demand to have Fina circumcised on the grounds that their first daughter died of tetanus after her circumcision. They will not allow history to repeat itself; hence they defy it with a gesture of rash non-compliance

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which ultimately, perversely, serves as a foil to the patient tenacity of the ground motif. When Baramusu abducts Fina and takes her to the fafei, the initiation ground, Fina’s father commits sacrilege by going there to remove her. Amadu actively truncates the ceremony, pulling Fina out from underneath the circumcision knife. She is rushed to a hospital where her bleeding and partially cut genitalia are stitched together by a nurse. The result of this dramatic turn of events is a return to the structure of the primary narrative; that is, Fina, like Kumba, leaves the village and commences her search for knowledge. Fina’s family flees from the repercussions of Amadu’s intervention, triggering Fina’s quest. She goes to secondary school in Freetown, to University at the prestigious Crowther College, and to America. Ironically, her wanderings betoken return over and over – reincarnating the displaced Kumba, haunted by the path, and drawn in by the rope. Towards the end of the novel she returns bodily and, like Kumba, must confront fragments where there had once been a society. Kumba laments that Musudugu is ‘no more [,] overcome by … destruction’ (vi). Fina discovers that Talaba, ravaged by war, is ‘scorched earth … the remnants of a place where homes once stood’ (227-8). But this is not the end of Fina’s story, just as it is not the end of Kumba’s. Fina ultimately grasps the importance of return, a concept her situation has been displaying in multiple shapes and which the text has been systematically strengthening through repetition of setting, plot, symbolism and vocabulary. Fina deciphers the concept in its grammatical sense. She thinks it is a return to the rope at the precise spot where she lived, but this becomes impracticable because the rope and the society have disintegrated. Neither is it the superficial sym­bolism of return down an established path because she invariably finds the answers to her life on unmarked territory, working in uncommon circumstances. Her wan­

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der­ings cease only after she abandons ‘the muddy track’ in order to ‘step over and around mounds of decomposing food, rotting vegetables and animal entrails, stumble into muddy potholes and rivulets, and weave in and between tents’ (229). It is in the no-man’s-land of a refugee camp that she finds the resolution to her quest for belonging and her final port of call. When Fina resumes work in the refugee camp, she comprehends what ‘return’ means. The idea underpinning the narrative’s theme, content, and strategy of repetition is simply the benefit of the code of conduct stated in the novel’s introduction: sharing pain, working together, constancy and commitment. This, substantially, is what Fina returns to when she returns home. As VanSpanckeren says, it boils down to keeping faith (57). For Fina, this entails doing something concrete about a continent whose poverty and decimation are so enduring that they constitute a cliché. Her resolve to leave America is perplexing to many of the characters. Aman, Fina’s African-American friend, avers with all sincerity, ‘I can’t figure out you Africans. I don’t know any one of you who has ever returned home … What’s so bad if I wonder why you’d want to go back, especially now? You’re always complaining about how bad things are’ (Hollist Path: 160). Aman’s remark is enlightening. It brings to mind an unforgettable claim by an African parent figure in the award-winning short story of Nigeria’s Tope Folarin. Folarin’s entry for the Caine Prize, entitled ‘Miracle’, is a rare achievement of Aristotelian unity of time, place and action. Within this tight module, it relays with candour and skill the ‘healing’ of the eyes of a young Nigerian boy in a Nigerian church in Alabama. As the healing service winds up, the protagonist assesses the true miracles in his life: I begin to believe in miracles. I realize that many miracles have already happened; the old prophet can see me even though he’s blind, and my eyes feel different somehow,

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huddled beneath their thin lids. I think about the miracle of my family, the fact that we’ve remained together despite the terror of my mother’s abrupt departure, and I even think of the miracle of my presence in America. My father reminds my brother and me almost every day how lucky we are to be living in poverty in America, he claims that all of our cousins in Nigeria would die for the chance. (82)

The father’s claim will surely puzzle a number of Nigeria’s residents, who have no aspiration to live in poverty in America or anywhere, but that is secondary – the father and the cousins are imaginary persons. His claim, however, lends interesting credibility to Aman’s speculation that Africans (Nigerians) in America do not want to go home, and that they talk a lot about the deplorable situation there. By talking and not acting appropriately, they end up con­ firming the negative stereotype instead of transforming it. This brings us back to Fina and certain features that make her a peculiar protagonist, irrespective of the shortfalls in her temperament. Fina is optimistic that Africans and non-Africans can survive the debilitating African terrain, and she does more than just talk about the problems. She acknowledges that sacrifice is mandatory, then she plunges in to make it. Hollist is not hereby insisting that Africans in the New World pack up shop and migrate to Africa. His premium is on sacrifice, the unpalatable kernel at the middle of the concept of return. His message might seem moralistic and dated to some readers, but African literature has generally been unremorsefully didactic in its oral rendition and equally in its written form since Chinua Achebe blazed the trail with Things Fall Apart, and with his announcement that his aim was to help his society ‘regain belief in itself and put away years of denigration and selfabasement’ (quoted in Ngara ‘The Place and Significance of Anthills of the Savannah’: 249). An objective of African creative writing is to keep the vision of past generations in the present, and in accordance, sacrifice in So the Path Does

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Not Die is neither an old-fashioned nor a soft option. The repetitions in the second tale-within-the-tale solidify the argument. Every repeated item is a unique sign to return to a dying spirit of generosity. The episode in the fafei, the circumcision site, echoes throughout the narrative. It is in line with the pre­ dominating power of repetition in the text that this second tale, which is a disruption in the blueprint laid by the tale of Musudugu, is absorbed into that blue­print and goes further to become seminal in its own right, genera­ting a fresh set of repetitions. Thus the ‘aberrant variation’ (Said: 114) metamorphoses in­ to another ground motif. Two particularities suggest that the tales are not disparate units but can be read together. First, the initiation arena is, like Musudugu, the domain of women only. Moreover, male intrusion at night is an abomination in both worlds. These repetitions are threads that knit present, past and future and aid coherence in the theme and eventually in the protagonist’s deductions. In due season, Fina is able to trace the thread between her past, her present, anarchy, and the impulse to return. As a young girl in Talaba, she gladly permits Baramusu to abduct her, paint her white with kaolin, and wrap her in a white cotton lappa along with the other girls in her age-grade. Circumcision is an index of the attain­ ment of puberty and she has confidence in her grand­ mother’s promise: ‘Soon you will die and a woman will be born’ (Hollist Path: 6). But Amadu infringes the sacred circle, provoking a supplementary and grim sequence of repetitions. When recounting the initiation night, the point of view changes from the omniscient third person narrator to the highly subjective streamof-consciousness technique, which better conveys the immediacy, pain and confusion of Fina’s ordeal: Firelight darkness. Sorrowful chanting. Violent thrashing. Palm branches, strands of beads, earrings, anklets, head­bands on the

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ground. Ghostly white bodies. A python devours the pale, writhing white bodies. Destruction! Girls descend into the cold, stinging water – DEATH OF AN AGE! Women rise into the warm air – BIRTH OF A NEW AGE. Weighted chest. Weighted thighs. Trembling, writhing thighs. Deafening, bitter, blue-red, all-consuming pain expressed into a spit-smeared cloth. Noises…shouts…screams… scrambling feet … toppling bodies. A voice…a man’s voice. A smell…a father’s smell. Wails throttle the air. (7; emphasis in the original)

The trauma is repeated verbatim, complete with italics and capitalizations, in Fina’s dream twenty years later on the eve of her wedding. It crystallizes into another cantus firmus upon which the contrariety and eccentricity of her life once more elaborate. Said identifies a salient trait of this second motif in his dialogue on Vico: ‘It is most nearly true to say, I think, that whatever else it is, repetition for Vico is something that takes place inside actuality, as much inside human action in the realm of facts as inside the mind while surveying the realm of action. Indeed repetition connects reason with raw experience’ (113; emphasis added). The importance of the tale of Musudugu, and more so in the fafei, is that the repetitions impress on Fina’s mind and prompt her to connect reason with raw experience. Granted that the fine distinctions probably elude her, she is competent to survey and judge the reiterating tragedy in the realm of facts. Her judgments are sometimes equivocal in that she tends to perceive the outcome of her own intractability as a curse from Baramusu. Notwithstanding, repetition is the instrument that finally enables her to enforce cosmos upon her chaos. The fafei sequence pro­ vides a breakdown of these events. The sequence is put in place at puberty and rehearsed at pivotal stages in her maturation, conspicuously at adolescence, graduation and marriage. Because the circumcision story is extracted from the sub­ conscious there is no concrete plot, but the motif regularly

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incorporates darkness, blood, agony and confusion, in an unspecified chronology. Kemi Koker’s party is illustrative. Being ‘the first she would be attending alone’ (Hollist Path: 24), the party is a landmark in Fina’s adolescence and a welcome entitlement at the age of fifteen. Unfortunately she does not go because Pa Heddle, her guardian, is delayed at the office and does not turn up to drive her to the Kokers. As Fina awaits Pa Heddle, readying herself to take a decisive step into adulthood, new events burgeon on the fixed platform of darkness, confusion, blood and pain. The sequence unfolds as follows: Pa Heddle returns that night at around 9.30 p.m. (darkness); the Heddle family rushes up and down in consternation searching for Fina, who they fear has absconded (confusion); Fina turns up and Pa Heddle lacerates her back viciously with a whip (blood); Fina weathers the torment curled up on the tiled bathroom floor (pain) – ‘float[ing] back and forth, existing both then and now’ (28). The ‘back and forth’, ‘then and now’, continue to coalesce in repetitions bracketing and further bonding the circumcision (the ‘then’) and the party (the ‘now’), the two events that never took place. Before the circumcision Fina ‘ripple[s] with excitement’ (6) and after it, she lies on a bare metal table: before the party she is ‘delirious with anticipation’ (24) and after she curls up on the cold bathroom tiles. The motif recurs at Fina’s graduation. A night before her final exams, she climbs a hill to rendezvous with a lab technician called Kizzy, whom she has foolishly begged to show her the exam questions in advance. A pile of ill-starred events contribute to her impending failure in organic chemistry, but her foolishness culminates in an open door for the darkness-confusion-blood-pain sequence to be reshuffled and re-run – thick darkness as she climbs the hill at night, confusion resulting from the blinding glare of car headlights in torrential rainfall, the anguish of a broken ankle as she slips down part of the hill, and flesh torn and

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bloodied by sharp thorns when she lands in a bramble bush. The abominable male intrusion in the fafei is brutally simulated when Kizzy rapes her. The rape is, perhaps, a consummation of the abuse by Pa Heddle and his whip when she was fifteen. Fina’s graduation is aborted, as was the party, as was the circumcision. Hollist’s description of Fina’s wedding is indisputably one of the most vivid and humorous in the narrative. As VanSpanckeren observes, ‘Hollist excels at social inter­ action, dialogue, clothing, economic detail, and depictions of social gatherings, whether at elite Crowder [sic] College or a lavish wedding in Washington’ (57). Indeed, the antici­ pa­tion characterizing landmarks in Fina’s matura­­tion is at its peak here because the occasion is a sensa­tional immigrant marriage in America. The ceremony between Fina and Cammy, a wealthy Trinidadian-American surgeon, is a ‘declaration of love [that is] easily 400 guests and $40,000 loud’ (Hollist Path: 127). The colour, opulence, vitality and multiformity of the occasion are arresting and yet the heterogeneity is methodically exploited on the sombre floor of fixity. The sacrilegious male intruder in this circumstance is Fina’s ex-husband and Aman’s relative, Jemal, a drug addict who arrives unexpectedly at the church with a false claim of Fina’s bigamy. As a type of Amadu, his presence in the sanctuary likewise elicits wails, scattering and disorder, and like Amadu he actively disrupts the ceremony at its heart: Fina, robed in white, is standing before the altar on the verge of taking her vows. The blood and physical pain tie in with darkness later that night when Fina suffers a threatened miscarriage. The sequence terminates with her lying on a bed in the hospital, thereby reconciling the extravagant variation to the preceding reproductions. Said notices ‘the quiet triumph at the end of the Goldberg Variations, as the theme returns in its exact first form to close off the aberrant variations it has generated’ (114). The fafei theme returns again and again until it similarly returns

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in its first form to definitively close off the aberrations. The sequel is brought to a climax with Fina lying on a bed in a ward, the medical personnel around her battling to stop the loss of blood from her genitalia. The last re-enactment finishes with an exact repetition of the first form, the night of the circumcision. Fina’s experience leads her to reason correctly that pursuing the American dream is not enough, in spite of the fact that she renders heavy monetary support to her family in Sierra Leone. Keeping the path alive means sharing pain that exceeds one’s family; a core lesson in the initiation ground, in Talaba, in Musudugu, and in America if one so wills. As the paths available ramify, characters can vote for different routes: trekking on the road, making footprints in the sand, or picking their way through garbage. The bottom line is that the African race should not lose sight of its ancient commitment to make meaningful sacrifice for others, and if that sacrifice concerns Africa squarely, all the better. One cannot resist the temptation to follow the repetitions in the narrative to their logical conclusion. So the Path Does Not Die ends with an epilogue that returns, characteristically, to the prologue and, also characteristically, superimposes originality. Dimusu-Celeste – Fina and Cammy’s threeyear-old daughter – alters the denouement of the folktale of Musudugu because she feels it is inordinately tragic. The novel’s closing scene shows Dimusu-Celeste with her mother, a traditional female authority figure. DimusuCeleste, a precocious young girl, is not satisfied with the customary finale of the tale and wants to know why it must be so. She is unsatisfied with her mother’s answers so she provides her own, which is to re-write the story. The revised version goes like this: ‘Kumba Kargbo stopped crying and the women and the men worked together to build a new Musudugu and lived together happily ever after. The End’ (Hollist Path: 282). In this manner, the

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loose ends of Kumba’s story are cheerfully knotted. Fina’s story adjusts to the recent invention. With Cammy’s arm around her, she picks up the phone to make peace after years of bitterness against Edna, her estranged foster sister. So the woman, Fina, and the man, Cammy, are working together to build a new Sierra Leone and, at last, everyone is happy. This article has explored repetition and return in Hollist’s novel in the light of Said’s analogy on music. Fina’s physical, empirical and financial progress is effectually paralleled by reversals to the fixed format of a narrative cantus firmus, a ground motif constructed in the tale of Musudugu and complemented by the tale of the fafei. Repetition proves to be a matrix for variety in the text, and the artistic buttress of the message of return. Hollist is not pretending that repetition, or return, or Africa, are inherently beneficial phenomena. While Bach’s Goldberg Variations rounds off with the unadulterated reassertion of the first form, consolidating it, such may not always be the case. Repetition may work to the detriment of originality, in which instance the result is not consolidation but parody and ‘debasement’ (Said: 122). The same applies to return. Not everything is worth going back to. The values of the past that will gainfully carry Africa forward are the values that Hollist propagates. He urges the African people to look back, to consider where they are coming from, and to resurrect positive elementary African behaviours. This does not rule out acculturation and personal gain in the Occident. It stabilizes them. So the Path Does Not Die is, to borrow the words of Ode Ogede, an ‘effort to ask and answer the crucial question: What should be the ideal relation between Africa and all her former children? Put differently, what role can, and should, New World Africans play in the recovery of Africa from her current depressed state?’ (130).2 Obviously, where the relations are convoluted

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there will be hiccups in the ability of Africa’s ‘children’ to participate in recovery. For instance, Rose and Tolani, the African Diasporic women analysed by Codling, are hampered from rescuing Africa from her depressed state on account of their ‘incarceration’ (Codling: 214), their margin­ alization at home and abroad. Again, because Uncle Happiness, a fifty-year-old Nigerian bachelor in Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale, is unable to adjust to immi­ grant life in the States, he is also unable to plough back as much as he should into Nigeria. Oguine writes: ‘For all the time he had spent in [the] country … [Uncle Happi­ ness] had, in a sense, never arrived in America’ (quoted in Okonkwo ‘Coming to America’: 131). In a manner of speaking, for all New World Africans, Africa is a chaconne, a cantus firmus, and their roles are the ornamental variations. No two roles are duplicates, and they are not compelled to be. Therefore Ast, the AfricanAmerican heroine in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Osiris Rising, has a role in recovery akin to Fina’s but it is not a replica of it. When trying to explain to her lover, an indigenous West African, her motives for staying on to assist him in the sub-Sahara, Ast says: ‘Would you accept that fulfilment involves a willingness to accept pain, even intense, lasting pain, as part of work that gives life a better meaning? … My being here is the best statement of intentions I could ever make’ (Armah: 111-12). Aman, the African-American woman in So the Path Does Not Die, who wonders why Fina should want to return to Africa, finally marries a Nigerian and teaches in a primary school in Lagos for a pittance. Logan, the protagonist of Hollist’s short story, ‘Foreign Aid’, returns to Sierra Leone after twenty years abroad with the noble intention of ‘help[ing] his parents financially and provid[ing] a sustainable future for his sister [in America]’ (271). He has more impact on the situation than Uncle Happiness but less than that of Ast and Aman because his style is a blundering crescendo and he lacks the tact to

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know how the ‘aid’ should be administered. A maxim in Hollist’s writing appears to be that Africa’s recovery, whether a humble or a lavish business, should be approached with a measure of respect. This article skims the surface of certain affairs that call for attention. Female circumcision is a prime example. The present study has addressed the topic from the angle of repetition only. Feminist critics may want to look at the novel’s representation of circumcision more broadly. A second example is the war in Sierra Leone, treated with horrifying realism in a penultimate section of the novel and worthy of more discussion than is feasible here. Hollist is plainly concerned about Africa’s sustenance – its people, its qualities and its economy – and this is heartening. His appeal for self-denial is universal, spanning Africans on the continent as well as in the Diaspora. Some readers may calmly ponder the policy of altruism. Others may dismiss him as a daydreamer. For both groups, a concluding writeup by Hollist is perhaps helpful. The write-up is on the activities of his students (60 per cent European) from the University of Tampa in Florida during their yearly visits with him to Nangodi. Nangodi [is] a small materially poor village twenty miles northeast of Bolgatanga, Ghana’s northernmost city. Since 2009, UT students have worked side by side with Nangodians to start a community library, set up a microfinance scheme for market women, build a basketball court, construct an art mural and install solar power lights for classrooms in a secondary (junior high) school, make reusable sanitary pads for pubescent girls, hold a law clinic, and study the bonding styles of kids at an orphanage. (Hollist ‘Chasing’: 5)

And that is no folktale.

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NOTES 1 The phrase ‘the backward glance’ is taken from Ode Ogede, Ayi Kwei Armah: Radical Iconoclast. (128). 2 Ogede is discussing Armah.

WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Allende, Isabel. Island Beneath the Sea: A Novel. New York: Harper­ Collins, 2010. Armah, Ayi Kwei. Osiris Rising. Popenguine: Per Ankh, 1995. Atta, Sefi. Swallow. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2010. Codling, Rosetta. ‘Colonial Chattel, Postcolonial Whores: The African Daughters of Sefi Atta and Isabel Allende.’ Journal of African Literature and Culture. Vol. 8 (2011): 205-18. Emenyonu, Ernest N. Editorial Article: ‘The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustaining the Gains of the 20th Century.’ African Literature Today, Vol. 27 (2010): x-xi. Folarin, Tope. ‘Miracle.’ Transition. No. 109 (2012): 73-83. Hollist, Pede. ‘BackHomeAbroad.’ The Price and Other Short Stories from Sierra Leone. Ed. M.C. Kamanda. Freetown: SLWS, 2013: 59-76. ——‘Chasing Elephants in Mole.’ World View: Inside China. No.6 (2012): 4-8. ——‘Foreign Aid.’ Journal of Progressive Human Services. Vol. 23, No. 3 (2012): 258-81. ——‘Going to America.’ Irinkerindo: A Journal of African Migration Stories. Issue 1 (2002). ——‘Resettlement.’ Matatu: African Cultures and Literatures. Issue 41 (2013): 199-215. ——So the Path Does Not Die. Bamenda: Langaa, 2012. Kierkegaard, Soren. Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Ngara, Emmanuel. ‘The Place and Significance of Anthills of the Savannah.’ Eagle on the Iroko: Selected Papers from the Chinua Achebe National Conference. Ed. Edith Ihekweazu. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1996: 243-63. Ogede, Ode. Ayi Kwei Armah: Radical Iconoclast. Ohio: Ohio Univer­sity Press, 2000.

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Oguine, Ike. A Squatter’s Tale. London: Heinemann, 2000. Okonkwo, Christopher. ‘“Coming to America”: Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant’s Narrative.’ African Literature Today. Vol. 27 (2010): 130-44. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. Review of So the Path Does Not Die, by Pede Hollist. World Literature Today. Vol. 87, No. 5 (Sept­ember-October 2013): 56-7.

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Negotiating Race, Identity & Homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah & Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die H. OBY OKOLOCHA

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die, published within a year of each other, have striking similarities in the issues they address, the manner in which the issues are treated, and in the subject position of the authors. Adichie and Hollist write from diasporic situations, and the two novels combine genres: bildungsroman, romance, comedy and social commentary, and events in both texts cut across nations. More import­ antly, both novels discuss diverse subject matter: race, identity, home and exile, culture, self-definition, sexism, romance, hair and food politics, homecoming and more. In these texts, these issues are not treated as singular or separate but are braided tightly together, like the intricate manner of braiding hair introduced to the reader in the opening scene of Americanah (11-13). These issues consti­ tute the complex, intertwined combination of experiences that afflict and characterize transnational migration. Adichie and Hollist illustrate how racism affects the identity of Africans in the diaspora and combines with other factors to encourage return ‘home’. This essay examines transnational migration and the complex dynamics of race in diasporan existence as these issues are presented in Americanah and So the Path Does Not Die (Path), through the lives, respectively, of Ifemelu and Fina: the reasons for their departure from their homelands, their experiences of racism in America, how 143

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these experiences affect their self-definition, and how the resulting evolution and acceptance of their identities propel them to return to their respective homelands. The essay also examines the nature and the implications of their return and demonstrates that diasporic return often impacts positively on the development of the homeland. The essay proposes that Adichie and Hollist’s presentation of the complexities of transnational migration, ending in the return, takes the shape of a quadrangle, a twist on the triangular slave trade description. Unlike in the triangular trade, in which migration is forced and there is no return, the migration quadrangle closes with a return. Transnational migration is a perennial issue in con­tem­ porary African literature. Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe and Kehinde, Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale, Alasan Mansaray’s A Haunting Heritage and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street confirm this preoccupation. The circumstances leading to migration are diverse but most instances of migration are geared towards a desire for something better than that which exists in the home nation. That desire to improve one’s situation motivates the migrations in Americanah and Path. In Americanah, Ifemelu’s decision to migrate is propelled by bad leadership which threatens to cripple the university system in Nigeria: staff salaries are not paid, facilities have broken down and are inadequate, and strike actions are commonplace: Students hoped for short strikes, because they could not hope to have no strike at all. Everyone was talking about leaving … Sister Ibinabo started the Student Visa Miracle Vigil on Fridays, a gathering of young people, each one holding out an envelope with a visa application form, on which Sister Ibinabo laid a hand of blessing. (99)

The frustrations and uncertainty of ever completing her degree motivate Ifemelu to leave Nigeria. In Path, Fina leaves Sierra Leone for America to escape

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her discomfort and feelings of inferiority resulting from deeply entrenched ethnic divisions in Sierra Leone. Fina’s parents refuse to have her circumcised having already lost a daughter to this circumcision practice. Amadu, Fina’s father, defiles the entire village by invading the fafei – the circum­cision bush, a private female sanctuary – to save Fina from ‘the cutting’. Following Amadu’s transgression, her family flees to Freetown. There, Fina becomes a ‘Fulamusu’, characterized by stereotypical physical features. She is made to feel inferior by Krios and other ethnicities that dominate Freetown who regard Fulas as inferior and treat them with disrespect, even hatred, and a sense of superiority (Hollist Path: 37). Consequently, Fina looks forward to going to America where tribe and physical features will not be used to discriminate against her. Migration to America in both cases stems from a desire to escape problems in the home countries – Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, the two young women find that the reality of America differs greatly from their expectations. They confront a myriad of problems in America: racism, sexism and difficulty in finding jobs, but they eventually adapt to American life. Although both achieve relative success in America, they experience homesickness and feel a disjuncture between the moderately successful lives they have achieved and their psychological wellbeing. The disjuncture eventually propels them to return to their respective homelands. The returns presented in Americanah and Path inflect the migration story with the suggestion that a return to the original home is the closure of every migration. These issues are discussed within the quadrangle that emerges incidentally from the novels. Americanah and Path depict African diasporic experience as a quadrangle, with four stages: A, B, C and D of unequal dimensions. The migration quadrangle, as I visualize it, is a pattern of journeys and experiences that best

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describe the specific patterns of migration and return in Americanah and Path. The complex issues of migration and diasporic experience presented by Adichie and Hollist are an irregular square of experiences in which turns, angles and dimensions are different, uneven and produce varied results. The migration quadrangle concept I offer is tentative. However, it demonstrates that transnational migration and its attendant cultural change and selfdefinitions are not smooth linear progressions but, like evolution, they take irregular paths, all of which result in a cycle of migration and a reconfiguration of one’s identity as an individual and a national personality. Unlike the trian­ gu­lar slave trade route, which stripped Africa of its human and material resources and returned manufactured goods, the migration quadrangle involves sojourners who engage in a trade of ideas and return home enlarged and ready to invest their learning and experience for the benefit of the homeland. A–B of the migration quadrangle is the stage of dis­ illusionment and involves the circumstances leading to the migration. B–C is the journey across the Atlantic, the stage of optimism and hope. C–D begins from the arrival in America and comprises the struggle to adapt, the relationship between the diasporic individual and her homeland and the relationship between the immigrant and the host country, which, in these novels, becomes a place of transit. This relationship is inflected by race, identity conflict, suspicion, physical and emotional instability, and a variety of other factors. After years of battling different immigrant experiences, the diasporic individual inevitably gets to the phase of assimilation, integration, negotiations, and complex cultural combinations that impact negatively or positively on the individual. This phase of integration invariably results in either the loss of self, or the evolution of self-definition. At this point, the protagonists have arrived at stage D, the point of cynicism about the place

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of residence, and optimism for the homeland. D–A, the last side/stage of the quadrangle, is the return home – a reversal of migration and of the psychology for leaving the home nation. However, the return is not to the same cir­cum­stances they left. The circumstances from which Ifemelu and Fina escape, and to which they return, differ greatly, but in each instance, return embodies a positive impact on the home nation. Ifemelu and Fina’s experiences in the migration quadrangle are validated by Homi K. Bhabha’s postulations about the conditions of crosscultural collisions, in his The Location of Culture. This essay applies Bhabha’s concept of ‘unhomeliness’ in the analysis of experiences presented by Adichie and Hollist in the quadrangle of immigrant existence. Bhabha argues that ‘there is an estranging sense in the relocation of home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-­ cultural initiations’ (13). He explains: ‘Unhomeliness [is] inhe­r­ent in that rite of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiation’ (13), and that the ‘unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence’ (15). Bhabha’s ‘unhomeliness’ describes the displacement that creeps up on Ifemelu and Fina in America. For example, Ifemelu was ‘disoriented by the blandness of fruits, as though Nature had forgotten to sprinkle some seasoning on the oranges and the bananas, but she liked to look at them, and to touch them; because bananas were so big, so evenly yellow, she forgave them their tastelessness’ (Adichie Americanah: 114). Fina’s life in New York is described as an unfamiliar ‘chess match of fitting unreliable bus schedules with shifting work schedules and factoring in distance, fatigue, and weather conditions between destinations’ (Hollist Path: 70). These experiences of difference and feelings of estrangement are, as Bhabha states, the characteristic conditions of sites of ‘cross-cultural initiations’.

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The displacement of immigrant life pervades Adichie’s short stories. In ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’, Akunna’s white school mates consign her to the status of a museum artefact. Allwell Onukaogu and Ezechi Onyerionwu remark in their review: ‘The black person [in America] is “the other,” and an inferior other at that … [and] Adichie’s characters grow to become conscious of their “otherness”’ (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 245). The issues of race and difference that afflict blacks in America are treated more extensively in Americanah. Mike Peed, in his ‘Realities of Race’, identifies the dominant preoccupation of Americanah as racism and asserts that it examines blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain. In her review, Mildred Barya suggests that in Path, ‘AfricaHomeland and Africa-Diaspora meet and clash, reconcile, clash some more, meet and separate, unite and hang in delicate balance’. Barya’s description of the problems of cultural collision corresponds to the ‘unhomeliness’ Bhabha ascribes to sites of ‘cross-cultural initiations’. Particularly pertinent is that Barya was ‘struck by the similarities between Pede’s book … and Chimamanda’s Americanah … Especially the obsessions and desires that motivate the characters who have left Africa-Homeland, have settled in the US, are quite successful, to pack up and head back to the homeland that still vibrates in their hearts’. She identifies the motivation to leave AfricaHomeland as an important focus in both Americanah and Path. This essay illustrates that the traumatic experiences of racism, identity and the motivation to return are issues of more-important focus in the texts. The first stage of the migration quadrangle, A–B, begins with the poor social and economic conditions in Nigeria and Sierra Leone that give rise to migration. In addition to the perilous educational circumstances Adichie presents, unemployment has made the future bleak and uncertain for those who eventually graduate from universities in Nigeria.

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Aunty Uju is a medical doctor, but she is unable to get a job, so she leaves for America. Obinze, Ifemelu’s boyfriend finishes his degree, but he migrates to Britain because he is not able to get a job with his upper second-class degree. The economic situation in Nigeria forces entire families to leave the country in search of the proverbial greener pastures. As Nana Wilson-Tagoe points out in reference to Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale, it ‘encompasses the history of an entire generation of Nigerians, unanchored, rudderless and adrift in a nation that provides no meaningful forms or standards for living their lives’ (‘Rethinking Nation and Narrative in a Global Era’: 97). This can also be said of Americanah. In Path, Fina is first displaced by her rural Talaba culture before she encounters the deeply entrenched problem of ethnic segregation arising from postcolonial division of African territories. Fulas are regarded as foreigners and the socio-economic situation means that ethnic Fulas are beaten up at random in the city ‘because the government says illegal Fulas and Nigerians are taking work away from Sierra Leoneans’ (Hollist Path: 38). Fina rages at the city that makes her ‘people foreigners in their own country’ (39). The situation in Freetown confirms that ‘contrary to our conceptual assumptions, nations, especially those within ethnic settings, are not natural givens but collective projects that may not always be emancipatory or protective of individual freedoms and interests’; in essence, Fulas are ‘victims of the nation itself’ (Wilson-Tagoe: 102). These happenings fuel Fina’s determination to live in America where ethnicity will not matter. Ifemelu and Fina’s depar­ tures from Nigeria and Sierra Leone confirm Clement Abiaziem Okafor’s opinion that people will readily migrate to ‘foreign lands when they are confronted with calamitous conditions in their homeland’ (‘Exile and Identity in Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe’: 115), with the hope that their situations will be better than in their home countries.

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Adichie and Hollist’s characters travel to other nations to escape uncertainty, hopelessness, unemployment, cultural inflexibility and ethnic bias. While the first stage of the migration quadrangle for Fina is both physical (from Talaba to Freetown) and psychological (to escape ethnic discrimination), Ifemelu’s is entirely psychological, stemming from disillusionment with the Nigerian educa­ tional system. Unlike Ifemelu, whose migration to America was not a long-term plan or even a sought-after dream, Hollist’s protagonist Fina holds tenaciously on to the dream of going to America over the years. Bhabha identi­fies feelings of displacement and disorientation as characteristic of ‘relocation of homeland’ and conditions of ‘cross-cultural initiations’ but, as Americanah and Path show, these feelings also arise from conditions of poor leadership and ethnic divisions. The second stage of the migration quadrangle is B–C, the trans-Atlantic ‘going to America’, the journey of hope. Thankfully, its voluntary nature and the advent of jet engines make it a crossing of hope and fulfilment, unlike that of the triangular trade. The arrival and life in America, C–D, constitutes the third stage of the migration quadrangle. For both Ifemelu and Fina, this is a long stage in which they undergo diverse experiences and reactions to these experiences. In America, cultural conflict, inferiority complex, fear, economic hardship and, above all, racial discrimination confront them. However, these problems produce a new relationship between the migrants and their homeland. Ifemelu and Fina now view Nigeria and Sierra Leone from a geographical distance but also from a position of nostalgia. Vijay Agnew notes: ‘The individual living in the diaspora experiences a dynamic tension every day between living “here” and remembering “there”, between memories of places of origins and entanglements with places of residence, and between the metaphorical and the physical home’ (Diaspora, Memory and Identity: 15). Ifemelu finds

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herself always remembering and comparing people and how things are done in America with Nigerian standards. Aunty Uju’s suitor, Bartholomew visits them and Ifemelu notes, ‘he uses bleaching creams’ and wonders: ‘What kind of a man bleaches his skin, biko?’ (Adichie Americanah: 118). In Ifemelu’s Nigerian experience, only women make the effort to lighten their skin colour. Bartholomew is compared to the expectations of a man in Nigeria, and Adichie implies that this behaviour is only possible because he is one of those who came to America and ‘got lost’, as people back home would say (117). When Ifemelu shares a room with three white girls, her roommates seem to operate from an ‘unquestioning certainty’ that fascinates her: ‘They often said, “Let’s go get some” about whatever it was they needed – more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor – as though this getting was not an act that required money. She was used, at home, to people first asking “Do you have money?” before they made such plans’ (129). As Bhabha predicts, Ifemelu is disoriented by cultural difference and, until she adapts, she exists in the ‘traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history which relate to the wider disjunctions of political existence’ (Bhabha: 15). Fina also suffers the disorienting confusion of cultural difference. Her grandmother, Baramusu’s injunctions are deeply embedded in her mind: ‘Remember this: life is when people work together. Alone, you are just an animal. So, do not cut the rope. Do you hear me? Never cut the rope’ (Hollist Path: 5; original emphasis). Fina is conscious that her solitary existence in America contravenes Baramusu’s injunctions and, when her life is overrun with problems culminating in the aborted wedding, Fina believes that her misfortunes arise from the disobedience of ‘cutting the rope’. Hollist confirms that ‘living here’ and remembering ‘there’ is a diasporan affliction when he observes that Africans in the diaspora ‘became most animated when they discussed the number one topic of immigrant conversation: back

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home’ (129). Thus, the homeland continues to operate for the individual in the present surroundings, and the disjuncture between the familiar and the new is traumatic – ‘unhomely’. The third stage of the migration quadrangle also includes the relationship between the immigrant and the host country. This relationship is characterized by the operations of race, identity, suspicion and a variety of other factors. Ifemelu and Fina’s experiences in different locations in America establish that racial discrimination is the major challenge of immigrant life. Both women discover that tone of skin colour is an important distinction between people. Fina quickly realizes that her escape from problems in Sierra Leone to America means: ‘I just replaced the circles on my back with ones that say black, African, and foreign – no, no alien’ (Hollist Path: 152). A significant example of this phenomenon occurs when Ifemelu meets and dates a white man, Curt. She is consistently reminded of the inappropriateness of this relationship. Most people they meet are surprised and disapproving of the relationship. Each time Curt introduces her as his girlfriend, Ifemelu sees: A surprise that some of them shielded and some did not … that look. The look of people confronting a great tribal loss. It was not merely because Curt was white, it was the kind of white he was, the untamed golden hair and handsome face, the athlete’s body, the sunny charm and the smell around him, of money. If he were fat, older, poor, plain, eccen­tric, or dreadlocked, then it would be less remarkable, and the guardians of the tribe would be mollified. (Adichie Americanah: 294-5)

These reactions illuminate some issues that impact on the operations of racism. Class issues are deeply and complexly intertwined with racism; thus it generates surprise that a rich white boy would date a poor black girl. Interestingly, beauty also plays a significant role, which is why it would

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be alright for an ugly or eccentric white man to date a black girl, but it is an abominable transgression for a rich, golden haired American boy to do so, no matter how pretty she is. Ifemelu ‘might be a pretty black girl, but she was not the kind of black they could, with an effort, imagine [a white man] with: she was not light-skinned, she was not bi-racial’ (295). Adichie sketches the hierarchy of race in Ifemelu’s blog post, ‘Why Dark-Skinned Black Women – American and Non-American – Love Barack Obama’: Many American blacks proudly say they have some ‘Indian.’ Which means Thank God We Are Not Full-blooded Negroes. Which means they are not too dark. (To clarify, when white people say dark, they mean Greek or Italian but when black people say dark, they mean Grace Jones.) American black men like their black women to have some exotic quota, like half-Chinese or splash of Cherokee. They like their women light … And this is the reason dark women love Barack Obama. He broke the mold. He married one of their own. (215-16)

Adichie illuminates the ladder of American racial hier­ archy, which grades according to skin colour, highlighting the fact that ‘recognizably black’ is obviously different from Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Indian, Egyptian or Mexican black. The world treats you differently when you are ‘recognizably black’ (331). In these regional differences, we find the shifting meanings of skin colour. The racial ladder is clearly mapped out: whites occupy the top of the ladder; non-black races occupy the middle; and African-Americans, Small Islanders such as Jamaicans and Africans occupy the lowest rungs of the racial ladder. Within the lower rungs occupied by African-Americans and Africans, there is further stratification. In Path, Fina’s boss in the child care centre, Juanita, a non-African black woman, shouts: ‘What the fuck are you doing, African?’ (Hollist Path: 71), assuming that it is Fina who has tied

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up a child with a skipping rope when in fact, it is one of the other workers. Fina comes to realize the negative connotations of being African among other blacks. Readers also witness the cultural bias of Africans against other blacks in the scene of Fina and Cammy’s aborted wedding. The cabal of Sierra Leoneans come to let the foreign Caribbean bridegroom know that they will retaliate if he dares to mistreat their sister. Sierra Leoneans obviously do not regard Caribbeans as Africans or brothers. The same bias exists on the part of the Caribbeans who see that their brother is getting married to this ‘African gyal’ (131) and they refer to ‘dem Africans’ (133) with hostility. Adichie and Hollist illustrate that being black is essentially characterized by difference. Fina’s boss, Juanita, stereotypes the ‘sort of thing’ an African would do. In Americanah, a black Ivy League professor tells Ifemelu how he was motivated to get straight ‘A’s in high school because a white teacher had told him not to bother about academia, but that he should ‘focus on getting a basketball scholarship, [because] black people are physically inclined and white people are intellectually inclined, it’s not good or bad, just different. So he spent four years proving her wrong’ (Adichie Americanah: 375). Ifemelu’s experience with the carpet cleaner who comes to clean out the house where Ifemelu works as a baby sitter to a white family is similarly illuminating. When she opens the door, ‘surprise flitted over his features, then it ossified to hostility … She looked at him, a taunt in her eyes, prolonging the moment loaded with assumptions: he thought she was the home owner, and she was not what he had expected to see in this grand stone house with white pillars’ (168). Ifemelu is black, and therefore, she does not fit his idea of the owner of a stately house. When Ifemelu tells him, ‘Mrs Turner told me you were coming’, he is instantly reassured: ‘It was like the conjurer’s trick, the swift disappearance of hostility. His face sank into a grin. She, too, was the help.

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The universe is once again arranged as it should be’ (168). The expectation that blacks should be poor confirms that class plays a major role in racism. This expectation also occurs in Path. Fina works several jobs to fulfil the ‘American dream’, and eventually, she is able to buy a good car and begin mortgage payments on a town house in an upscale neigh­ bourhood. Fina reports to her friend, Aman, that the house and neighbourhood are ‘so upscale that twice now the security people have asked me if I live here’ (Hollist Path: 89). Like the carpet cleaner, their reaction is a disappointed and hostile surprise that a black woman is able to afford such a house. Fina is an aberration in that upscale white neighbourhood. Her experience further attests to the simultaneous operations of race and class which impact greatly on Africans in the diaspora, resulting in all kinds of identity crisis and problems of self-definition. The issues of identity and self-definition are major maladies of African diasporic life. The ambivalence of being between the demands of two cultures manifests in different ways. At a point in Path, Fina was afraid of sounding too African. The negative connotations of being black were such that ‘identifying her place of birth now became fraught with anxiety’ (72), eroding her psycho­ logical well-being. She exists in that traumatic site of ‘unhomeliness’. Another Sierra Leonean immigrant, Heze­ kiah Mendelssohn Bacchus, known popularly as Kizzy, manifests a variant of identity crisis. Hollist describes Kizzy as ‘one of those immigrants who found himself, came to value his individuality, potential and freedom, in America. He loved, adored, and was awed by his adopted country. His was not a half-hearted love … It was an utter love, the grateful Cuban-exile kind that puzzled and sometimes even frightened the natives’ (129). So Kizzy finds nothing good about Sierra Leone: ‘I didn’t see one good road in the ’hole gad dam country, man. Let’s not talk ’bout education

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… Am gonna stay right here in good ol’ US of A. Ain’t never goin’ back’ (130). As a result of the negative connotations of being ‘recognizably’ black, Kizzy wants to destroy his African identity in a desperate effort to be American. In Americanah, there are others like Kizzy. Aunty Uju tries to hide her African identity in the presence of white people. She adopted a ‘nasal, sliding accent … when she spoke to white Americans, in the presence of white Americans, in the hearing of white Americans. Pooh-reet-back. And with the accent emerged a new persona, apologetic and selfabasing’ (109). Aunty Uju and Kizzy are neither here, nor there, pursuing identities that cannot be available to them, chasing after illusions. Ifemelu suffers identity crisis too; she perms her hair and assumes an American accent which she perfects from: Careful watching of friends and newscasters, the blurring of the t, the creamy roll of the r … and the sliding response of ‘oh really’, but the accent creaked with consciousness, it was an act of will. It took an effort … If she were in a panic, or terrified, or jerked awake during a fire, she would not remember how to produce those American sounds. (175)

Clearly, the effort to assume an identity that is not yours is hard work. It is uncomfortable and traumatic; it is Bhabha’s ‘unhomely’ situation. Living with the tension and ambiguities of racism and identity issues manifests in several ways; the African immigrant may become so diminished that she may seek to lose identity like Aunty Uju and Bartholomew in Americanah. An immigrant may develop contempt for his home country like Kizzy in Path, and ‘in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European [or American]’ (Adichie Americanah: 192). The individual may also achieve selfdefinition like Ifemelu and Fina. Both women recover from the crisis of identity they suffer; their recovery results from

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self-perception and the evolution of a defined self-identity which enable them to recover from the traumatic situation of being black in America. This third stage of the immigrant quadrangle also includes the phase in which Ifemelu and Fina have adapted to the requirements of their diasporic homes, have become integrated into an American life style, and are successful within it. The assimilation of Fina and Ifemelu into American social life occurs simultaneously with an evolution of self-identity and self-acceptance; it is a stage of recovery. Ifemelu’s reclamation of self from Herculean struggles to be American is prompted by a telemarketer’s compliment on the phone: ‘You sound totally American’ (177). As she hangs up the phone, Ifemelu feels shame for considering it a compliment: ‘She had won, indeed but her triumph was full of air … because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers. And so [she] resolved to stop faking the American accent’ (177). Not only does she resolve to discard the carefully cultivated accent, she decides to revert to her preferred natural hair and corn row braids. Sitting on the identity fence has, indeed, been a strain because Ifemelu feels ‘a rush of pleasure from giving the t its full due in “advantage,” from not rolling her r in “Haverhill.” This was truly her; this was the voice with which she would speak if she were woken up from a deep sleep during an earthquake’ (177). For Ifemelu, returning ‘her voice to herself’ (182) is a notable landmark in her diasporan evolution. It is akin to acquiring a new American self which is honestly hers, and with it comes self-confidence and a sense of freedom. She could now embark on a series of negotiations to sustain her self-definition. Ifemelu has now arrived in the phase where she can be ‘comfortably’ herself in the diaspora. Ifemelu’s blog, Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black, is a huge success. In

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her blog posts, she relentlessly addresses the issue of race, consciously promoting her African (Nigerian) identity. The blog is a strategy for subversion, therapeutic and emancipatory; above all, it opens up a new understanding of other cul­tures and races. In Path, Fina, though less consciously, recovers selfdefinition and also begins to negotiate her position in the diaspora. When Cammy reacts to a television report of circumcision as ‘outrageous and criminal’, Fina challenges him: ‘It’s the double standard and hypocrisy that makes me mad. You respect the rights of Adults in America and Europe to practice circumcision as in the name of religion and personal freedom, but it doesn’t cross your mind that Africans are entitled to the same respect’ (Hollist Path: 101). Cammy’s reaction illustrates the Western perception of circumcision as a physical mutilation of the female body that implies violence. Although Cammy is originally of African origin, his ancestral history of migration from Africa is within the context of the triangular figure of migration in which there is no return. As a result of generations of acculturation and assimilation of Western life values, Cammy’s perceptions are, as one would expect, Western in orientation. Fina argues that circumcision is not negative for Africans who practise it. Considering the fact that many people in Africa are against the practice of circumcision and some African nations have outlawed the practice, it seems ironical that a modern young woman would defend this practice, more so, as she has lost a sister to circumcision. However, Hollist’s ultimate message, embedded in this controversial argument, is about cultural relativity; that African attitudes must be accorded the same respect given to European lifestyles and cultural practices. Fina’s argument arises from self-definition and although it may not guarantee a compromise, these subversive negotiations inevitably open up new sites of thinking and operations.

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Ifemelu and Fina eventually make a success of their lives in America but happiness continues to elude them because they are never able to lose themselves enough to become even ‘fleetingly American’. Ifemelu gets to understand America well, but she still does not understand why there is no place in the entire Princeton town that could braid natural hair like hers when there are a multitude of hair dressing places, so she has to travel to Trenton to braid her hair. She is not comfortable with the idea that people must be slim to be beautiful, that ‘fat’ is a bad word in America ‘heaving with moral judgment like “stupid” or “bastard”’ (Adichie Americanah: 5); neither does she get used to oranges without seeds or beautiful bananas with­ out taste. Ifemelu’s blog is doing well. She is now earning good money; she has a loving African-American boyfriend, but her soul is filled with ‘amorphous longings, shapeless desires and … glints of other lives that she could be living, that … melded into a piercing homesickness’ (6). Her decision to move back home comes as a shock to Blaine, but when he asks ‘why?’ (7) Ifemelu does not have a good cause or a tangible reason that others would understand. It seems somewhat irrational to move back to Nigeria at the height of her American success. Yet, the pull of Ifemelu’s home background proves to be stronger than American comfort and advantages. Similarly, Fina gains mastery of the American lifestyle and she achieves success with hard work and gruelling time schedules but her success feels empty and she decides to return to Sierra Leone. As in Ifemelu’s case, no one is able to understand what seems like a senseless decision. Fina’s friend, Aman, is stunned: ‘I can’t figure out you Africans. I don’t know of anyone of you who has ever returned … I wonder why you’d want to go back, especially now’ (Hollist Path: 160). Cammy, Fina’s fiancé, is sure that Fina cannot be serious, wanting to go back to the ‘insanity in Sierra Leone’ (181), but Fina defends her decision. She explains

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that there is a certain stability and peace in knowing what insanity to expect and understanding it. Sierra Leone will hold no hidden surprises, unlike America. Fina articulates her problem with America clearly; the mansion, rich food in exotic restaurants, and the new car do not bring fulfilment. Her successes leave her ‘unsatisfied, unfulfilled’ (90), but her decision to return to Sierra Leone will bring her ‘wholeness, fullness, completeness – what she sought and what the green card, townhouse, and car had failed to deliver’ (90). Fina and Ifemelu need what America is unable to provide. The explanation arising from the contexts of Ifemelu and Fina is that their ‘Africanness’ follows them across geographical boundaries and does not depart in confrontation with, and successful adaptation to, Western metropolitan existence. Ironically, every stage of progress seems to increase the self-definition the two protagonists attain, and the well-structured advantages and certainty of American life, the same benefits that the women had hoped to achieve from American existence, lose their attraction. The return to Nigeria and Sierra Leone is stage D–A, the fourth and final phase of the migration quadrangle sketched out in Americanah and Path. Their return is a reverse migration, and in both cases, voluntary and ironic. Ifemelu and Fina are cured of false impressions of America; their eyes are now open to the reality of being black in America, and they recognize the difference between their illusions and reality. In their undulating journeys to selfdefinition, America loses its attraction and power as they realize that there is no place like home in spite of all its problems. Home, a place where one is psychologically connected to one’s physical reality, is, undeniably, better than a comfortable but faceless existence in which one’s identity is problematic and cultural space is hard to find. So, Fina and Ifemelu migrate back to their original nations but to different circumstances. This reverse migration is captured in the Igbo world view and in the

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popular Igbo saying ‘Agaracha must come home’ (the journeyman/traveller must come home), which suggests, as Adichie and Hollist do, that return is the closure of every migration. Ifemelu returns to Lagos after thirteen years of absence and finds that everything seems to have changed, and she starts to wonder if something is wrong with her (Adichie Americanah: 429). She comes to realize that things may not be much different from what they had been when she left, but she now deals with Nigeria as an adult, not as the teenager she was when she left. Ifemelu also realizes that her taste has changed owing to the acquisition of American attitudes, and like all ‘Americanahs’ (diasporic returnees), she faces the problem of reintegration into Nigerian culture. Ifemelu joins the Nigerpolitan Club, returnees in Lagos who come together weekly to share experiences and ways in which they can network. These returnees are characterized by hybridity. They lament the fact that it is difficult to find a vegetarian meal in Nigerian restaurants, but they recognize that ‘Nigeria is not a nation of picky eaters, for whom food is about distinctions and separations. It is a nation of people who eat beef, and chicken, and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup, and it is called assorted [much like] the way of life here … assorted’ (421). Although they decry the state of things in Nigeria, they are cured of illusions about America. More importantly, most Americanahs return with ‘dreams in their pockets and a hunger to change the country’ (421). Ifemelu and Fina return, having acquired attitudes and attributes that will impact advantageously on their home nations. Ifemelu has acquired an attitude of dedication to work and self-reliance in America which impacts positively on those with whom she interacts. Ifemelu’s first place of work in Lagos is at Zoe, a lifestyle magazine, and Ifemelu finds that Aunty Onenu, the owner of Zoe, does not have a passion for the job (391), and the

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other members of staff seem laid back (417). Her attitude to work causes Aunty Onenu to exclaim: ‘You are a real American! Ready to get to work, a no-nonsense person!’ (392). Ifemelu proposes more practical and useful ideas for the magazine, and over time, new ideas of work and practical utility are planted. Returning to war-torn Sierra Leone, Fina is determined to contribute towards rebuilding the country. She plans to build a centre for girls orphaned, abused, ostracized or displaced by war; she also plans to continue to help her sister, Isa, take care of her grandmother, atone for her father’s transgression and reconcile with her past. However, on arrival, she finds that Talaba has been destroyed by war, and her grandmother is dead but her teachings never depart from Fina’s mind. Fina is eventually employed as the deputy director of the Waterloo refugee camp, where she oversees the rehabilitation of orphans, runaways, and youths traumatized or displaced by war. For Fina, the job is ‘the opportunity to fulfill her dreams’ (Hollist Path: 256). She dedicates herself to repairing psychologically, emotionally and, sometimes, physically damaged youths, gives them ‘strength’ and ‘draws’ joy from them. She finds the gradual process of helping youths heal very fulfilling. Repairing the youths is to repair and build the future of Sierra Leone. Fina does not find a past to return to, but creating a family for strangers, uniting displaced families, and her work at the refugee camp provide Fina with the avenues to ‘invest her time and energy on the present and future’ (255) of Sierra Leone. Americanah and Path present the structure of trans­ national migration, ending in reverse migration, in a pattern that can best be described as a migration quadrangle. The quadrangular structure implies that the intersecting issues of immigrant experience are too complex to be linear pro­ gressions, but are necessarily irregular squares with varied angles, dimensions and sharp turns. Both novels displace

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histories of illusions and assumptions about transnational migration, as well as about African migrants. They enable the emergence of new understandings, and make it possible to envisage new futures for transnational migrations.

WORKS CITED Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013. ——‘The Thing Around Your Neck.’ The Thing Around Your Neck. London: Fourth Estate, 2009: 115–27. Agnew, Vijay, ed. Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home. London: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Barya, Mildred. ‘So the Path Does Not Die by Pede Hollist.’ (2 July, 2014) http://mildredbarya.com/2014/so-the-path-does-not-dieby-pede-hollist. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Hollist, Pede. So the Path Does Not Die. Bamenda: Langaa, 2012. Okafor, Clement Abiaziem. ‘Exile & Identity in Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe.’ African Literature Today. Vol. 24 (2004): 115-29. Onukaogu, Allwell Abalogu and Ezechi Onyerionwu. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Aesthetics of Commitment and Narrative Text. Ibadan: Kraft, 2010. Peed, Mike. ‘Realities of Race: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.’ (7 June 2013) www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/books/ review/americanah-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie.html. Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. ‘Rethinking Nation & Narrative in a Global Era: Recent African Writing.’ African Literature Today. Vol. 25 (2006): 94-108.

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Recent African fiction can help provide critical and com­ passionate perspectives on African migrants, complementing or correcting the impressions encouraged by images in the international media of sinking ships, and corpses washing ashore in the Mediterranean Sea. This is the argument of Dominic Thomas (‘The Global Mediterranean’: 153) with respect to Francophone African literature from the past twenty years; of Debra Faszer-McMahon and Victoria L. Ketz (African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts: xvii) with respect to Africans’ fictional accounts of journeys to Spain; and of Bimbola Oluwafunlola Idowu-Faith with respect to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah. In ‘Fictionalizing Theory, Theorizing Fiction’, explaining how the character Obinze leaves Nigeria because of ‘the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness’, Idowu-Faith proposes that Americanah reveals an oversight in the empirical scholarship on migration, which tends to consider little apart from the economic forces that motivate emigration (3). Idowu-Faith sees the voluntary return to Nigeria of Ifemelu and Obinze in the same light, namely, as choices that cannot be explained by quantitative or even rational factors, but merely by a vague preference for home, or hunger for excitement. Thus fiction constitutes data for sympathetic understanding of urgent socio-political realities. Idowu-Faith overstates the novelty of the suggestion in Adichie’s novel that flight from choicelessness might be a 164

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primary reason for migration from Africa and, equally, for return migration to Africa. Such themes are also examined, for instance, in Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, not to mention Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. She also understates the force of economic factors in Adichie’s account of African migrants, for surely Ifemelu and Obinze are both content to resettle in Nigeria partly because they recognize they will be able to join its elite society? However, she is on stronger foot­ ing when she begins approaching the literary text not as a source of socio-political data but as a creative writer’s advocacy for one particular response to that data, as, in her words, ‘a subtle call to intending migrants plagued by “choicelessness” and looking for something exciting somewhere else, to first look inwards within the homeland’ (17-18). In the past decade, a remarkable number of short novels have been written and published in continental Africa’s smallest country, The Gambia, that describe life trajectories much like Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s. These novels reflect on the phenomenon of Gambian youth migration to the urban coastal area and to Europe. Like Americanah, these novels feature protagonists who leave Africa, potentially for good, but who ultimately and voluntarily return. This theme, which is certainly the most common among recent Gambian novels, should be taken less as literary evidence that such a life trajectory has become normal or normative in Gambian society than as a rhetorical intervention into an urgent, active debate in Gambian society. These novels’ manner of publication and the reasons they suggest for return migration indicate that they envision a very different audience from Adichie’s extremely international audience. Accordingly, they intervene differently, and in different debates. In this essay, I bring them into dialogue with contem­ porary research on the bildungsroman, or novel of formation,

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which is a category in which the Gambian novels obviously belong. A bildungsroman typically depicts a perceptive young person’s psychological and social development, drama­tizing the tensions between authentic subjectivity and responsible socialization, and reaching towards (though not always attaining) reconciliation between the two. I contrast my reading of the Gambian novels with critics’ assessments of two subcategories of the bildungsroman: the ‘classic’ Euro­ pean bildungsroman from the Age of Revolutions, which typically affirms individualistic bourgeois aspirations; and the postcolonial African bildungsroman, which takes the contradictions of the postcolonial political and psychological context to frustrate the hope of harmonious individual development that had initially called the bildungsroman into being. The great discrepancy between the Gambian novels under study and what critics consider to be the postcolonial African bildungsroman helps shed light upon the difference between local West African literary production and the ‘global’ postcolonial literature that circulates through the global literary marketplace and its affiliated scholarship. As I have indicated in my critique of Idowu-Faith’s reading of Americanah, I think these novels on migration are more helpfully taken as responses to, than as examples of, migration, or as politically and ethically charged interventions rather than as mimetic representations of individuals’ political and ethical activity. As an example of how growing up is figured in the Gambian novels, we can take Dawda Faye’s The Broken Reed, a bildungsroman about Jegan, from the idyllic village of Ngalangeh where ‘the sun was sparkling, birds chittering, donkeys braying at intervals, and villagers headed to their farms, their expressions gay. Laity [his father] and Jegan were busy on the farm with a weeding machine’ (1). Jegan leaves the village in early adolescence because he is unable to pay his school fees after his father’s death. Though his affliction is never given the name ‘choicelessness’, in effect

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Jegan is seeking options for his future, and, through hard work and plenty of good luck in the city and in Europe, he ultimately finds many options. By the end of the novel he is both a hospital administrator and an MP for Ngalangeh’s constituency: Jegan is a successful returnee. His motivation as a leaver and then as a returner differs from Obinze’s most of all in that his intentions have in view the good of the community, particularly his widowed mother. In its forty-six pages, the novel never doubts that Jegan’s Bildung (maturation) is intertwined with the improvement of Ngalangeh. This conviction is articulated by Jegan’s urban landlady who exhorts him, when he receives in the mail an airplane ticket and an admissions letter from a French university he has never heard of, to ‘learn very hard so that you can salvage your mother from her condition’ (32). Since the development of an individual subjectivity is not the novel’s primary objective, the movement in the plot is achieved by Jegan’s acquisition of skills and resources that will allow him to become a community benefactor, and by encounters with people who will turn out to help or hinder him in that direction. Young troublemakers Ebu and Ali frame Jegan as a drug dealer, whereas the kindly guard at the public market in the main town rushes to the prison to exonerate him. The chairman of the Scholarship Advisory Board succumbs to bribery, denying Jegan the scholarship he deserves, whereas the Frenchman, Remond, recognizes Jegan’s honesty and industriousness, hiring him as a gardener and funding his studies abroad. Upon his return to The Gambia, Jegan is prevailed upon by community leaders to run for election. With promises of hard work and continued access to foreign donors, he obtains twice the votes of the incumbent and is elected: ‘I know you need in this constituency a hospital, a modern market and a high school … I will build them for you, my people, and my land’ (45). Nothing fundamental needs to change in

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Ngalangeh or in Jegan for the latter to fit in comfortably in the former; but once Jegan fits back into Ngalangeh the village changes for the better. In the ‘local’ section at The Gambia’s largest bookshop, Timbooktoo, where I first encountered Faye’s novel, about half the sixty books are fiction; the rest are biographies of prominent leaders, young-adult romances, books of recipes, bird guides and guidebooks on workplace success. Of the works of fiction, about a third can be considered bildungsromans, and in ten of these the predominant plot is of migration – either domestically to the city (Greater Banjul) or internationally from The Gambia to a European country – followed by return. Many of the biographies have a similar plot line, which differs from the bildungsromans typically discussed in African literary criticism. Although the term ‘bildungsroman’ is often translated as ‘novel of development’, in the Gambian bildungsromans available at Timbooktoo, another definition of ‘development’ is moreoften deployed – ‘the development of your country’ (Faye: 33), which is to say community development – and this kind of development becomes the yardstick by which the individual’s progress is measured. This distinction begins to explain why the scholarship on the African bildungsroman takes an approach and reaches conclusions that are hard to apply to the Gambian books. Another reason for this is certainly that the novels under study, simple in plot structure and in vocabulary, averaging only eighty pages in length, are evidently intended for young readers, which in West Africa typically means those educated past the primary level (de Bruijn Sensational Aesthetics: 65; 95). In this they stand apart from the art-novels like Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir that are more attractive to academic readers both in Africa and elsewhere; such books are published by international publishers and usually sold at prices far beyond the reach of most Gambian readers.

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Although both sets of texts allow themselves to be placed in a common category, ‘bildungsroman’, the differences in audience and in plot organization call for a more detailed analysis of genre. Karin Barber, in her work on oral and written texts across Africa, explains that genre is ‘the pivot between the producer and the receiver of a text, the hinge between past creations and future ones, and the interface between coeval texts’ (The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: 53), as well as the ‘key to … the emergence of new forms in new social circumstances’ (39). Prevailing social circumstances in twenty-first century Gambia can be illuminated by exploring the structural similarities among these Gambian texts as well as their differences from African (including other Gambian) novels dis­cussed in the literature on the postcolonial African bildungs­roman – and, surprisingly, the similarities they share with European novels regarded as the earliest bildungsromans. A basic formal characteristic that unites most of the Gam­ bian bildungsromans is that their protagonists return home and reintegrate smoothly into their society of origin; the art-novels, on the other hand, tend to con­ clude ambiguously, abandoning the protagonists before indi­cating whether or not they will successfully navigate the transition into a stable adult identity. Much scholarly work on the African bildungsroman tends to find in the life trajectory of a hero a description of the options for an individual’s inner development available in the author’s social and political context. This might imply that the Gambian novels’ optimism shows they are unaware of the colonial or the post­colonial condition; they would be taken as politically naive in a similar way to the ‘Jim Comes to Joburg’ novels produced under the South African apartheid regime, which by depicting migrants’ failures effectively encouraged black youth to stay clear of the economic hubs like Johannesburg (see Stephanie Bosch Santana’s ‘Migrant Forms’, and Stephen Gray’s ‘Third World Meets First World’).

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I argue, however, that this disparaging verdict would be unnecessary, because the novels under study are quite aware of the alternative trajectories available to their protagonists and their societies. Those trajectories are exactly what they are speaking to, and speaking against. Their happy endings are best taken as ambitious and imaginative rhetorical statements, too ambitious to be content with simple social description. Ironically, then, the scholarly analyses that would disparage them as unsophisticated or anachronistic illustrate the very assumptions that the bildungsromans take for granted and seek to transcend.2 It is not hard to imagine why scholars have been very interested in bildungsromans produced in colonial and postcolonial African contexts. One reason the African bildungsroman has attracted broad scholarly interest is surely because of the intriguing intersections between its plot structure and colonialism’s guiding metaphor of the colony as a child to be carried towards adulthood by its colonial parent. If the mid-twentieth century African colonies were restless adolescents discovering their identities and lurching towards the maturity of cultural modernity and political independence, by the same logic these colonies were ideal breeding grounds for the sort of bildungsroman analysed by Franco Moretti in his Marxist reading of the eighteenth-century rise of the European bildungsroman. Moretti finds the bildungsroman to be the central symbolic form for an age in which ‘the biography of a young individual was the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and the evaluation of history’ (The Way of the World: 227). To be specific, it dramatizes the young bourgeoisie’s yearned-for ascent to the privileged leisure of the aristocracy recently dethroned. Apollo Amoko is one critic who finds that the era of Africa’s decolonization was an ideal hatchery for the bildungsroman. This is not a case of a colonized mind imitating a metropolitan form, but rather a historical i­so­

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morphism in which two similar contexts independently generated similar forms: Although Moretti addresses the historical European origins of the genre, his arguments apply with uncanny pre­cision to the historical rise of the Bildungsroman in Africa … Like its European forebear, the emergence of the African Bildungsroman coincided with a period of radical transformation and social upheaval when, in the wake of colonialism, the traditional ways of being were seriously under­ mined, if not forever transformed. Like its European counterpart, the African Bildungsroman focuses on the formation of young protagonists in an uncertain world. (‘Autobiography and Bildungsroman in African Literature’: 200)

Amoko is one of several politically minded critics of African literature who respond explicitly to Moretti and who imagine the process of breaking free of the chains of colonialism and (re-)discovering an ‘authentic’ cultural or national identity as in some sense a process of growing up. Such political-allegorical readings recall Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that all ‘third-world’ literary texts are in some sense national allegories. Jose Santiago Fernandez Vasquez, for example, suggests that an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European genre has been so successful in postcolonial contexts partly because a bildungsroman protagonist’s struggle for self-definition can so easily be allegorically equated with a nation-state’s struggle for independence (‘Subverting the Bildungsroman in Post­ colonial Fiction’: 33). Simon Hay points out that the postcolonial bildungsroman reflects a society preoccupied by the need to stabilize ‘the necessary contradiction between individuality and conformity’ (‘Nervous Condi­ tions, Lukács, and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman’: 321). If a bildungsroman is to be read thus as a national politi­ cal allegory, post-independence disillusionment and the experience of neocolonialism leave no room for a happy ending where the protagonist unambiguously reaches adult

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maturity. This is, I suspect, why the scholarship on African literature has given little attention to the ‘affirmative’ or ‘idealist’ bildungsroman, a category for novels like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister that allow their protagonists, having passed through the trials and tribulations necessary for developing maturity and for keeping readers engaged, to reintegrate comfortably and fruitfully into their societies of origin (Slaughter Human Rights, Inc.: 118; Redfield Phantom Formations: 64). Marc Redfield assesses this sub-genre as follows: ‘The idealism of the classical, affirmative Bildungsroman seems to have lost much of its social and aesthetic appeal in the ages of modernist irony and postmodern suspicion – except in popular, “subliterary” culture, where its ideological (and rather naive) optimism seems stronger than ever’ (‘The Bildungsroman’: 193). Moretti actually dates the loss of appeal before the age of modernist irony, for he maintains that by the mid-nineteenth century it was no longer possible to take seriously the bourgeois dream of taking the place of the discredited aristocracy. Joseph Slaughter’s study of postcolonial bildungsromans extends Moretti’s when he explains that ‘in its historical social function as a novel of demarginalization, the affirmative Bildungsroman has traditionally served to legitimate authority by normalizing the dominant socio-political practices and patterns of nation-statist modernity’, which is why, he adds, they have been put to good use in colonial pedagogy (158). These critics would certainly not regard the Gambian novels studied here as ‘postcolonial’. Postcolonial African bildungsromans, by contrast, resist the foregone conclusions of the affirmative bildungsroman, leaving their protagonists in a state of ‘arrested develop­ ment’ – a phrase proposed by Jed Esty (Unseasonable Youth: 21). ‘The African bildungsroman’, explains Ralph Austen, ‘characteristically abandons its protagonist at the threshold between youth and the beginning of maturity, seldom

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making clear how this next stage will be fulfilled’ (‘Struggling with the African Bildungsroman’: 221-2). Austen is thinking in particular of Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir and Wole Soyinka’s Aké, narratives in which our last look at the semi-autobiographical protagonist is as he leaves his place of origin to pursue a colonial education. Esty provides one explanation for this tendency, explicitly responding to Moretti’s view of the early European bildungsroman: colonial modernity ‘throws out of joint the Goethean formula for narrative closure’ by denying the individual any stable and welcoming sense of national culture as the backdrop to her or his development (‘The Colonial Bildungsroman’: 415). Hay argues that the ambiguous conclusion Austen describes is part of what qualifies a bildungsroman for the designation ‘postcolonial’. Taking a genre-focused approach to Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, which defers its protagonist’s coming of age to the narrative future, after the close of the novel, Hay shows that the conventions of the (affirmative) bildungsroman are acknowledged but never finally accepted or rejected. Hay’s verdict is that this situation is a ‘productive contradiction’ (340) that holds out the possibility of on-going struggle. The broad literary-historical story line suggested by the composite sketch I have drawn from several literary scholars’ conclusions is that the postcolonial bildungs­ roman, despite its reputation as a story about growing up, is typically in fact a story in which growing up is not fully possible. This generalization applies to two Gambian novels of a generation ago, both initially published outside Africa, that have garnered scholarly attention and that conclude with an ambiguity as to whether maturity has been reached. In both Ebou Dibba’s Chaff on the Wind and Bala Saho’s The Road to My Village, the protagonist’s migration away from a harmonious home village introduces moral contamination and psychic destabilization that are never resolved (Gomez Territoire, mythe, représentation dans la littérature gambienne:

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94). As explained above, the bildungsromans that differ from this pattern are the early, optimistic bildungsromans from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, plus what are known as the ‘subliterary’ novels hardly worthy of consideration (Redfield ‘Bildungsroman’: 193). Then what are we to make of the recent Gambian bil­dungs­ romans, and their remarkable consonance in deviating from the norm of the postcolonial bildungsroman? Their protagonists return home and reintegrate, and this is no sign of arrested development. The changes they have under­gone, rather than making them ill at ease in their original environments, either eliminate the problem that originally led the protagonist to leave or shift the prota­ gonist’s perspective so that he or she no longer feels con­ trolled by the desire to depart. Kemeseng, protagonist of Papa Jeng’s The Boat Boys, for instance, brings back enough money from the Canary Islands to buy one plot of land for himself and one for his parents. Omar, protagonist in Demba Ceesay’s The Worn-Out Dream, returns to his village after several years in The Gambia’s coastal urban area, afflicted by a mental sickness brought on by the failure to secure a good job or a European visa; after the community restores him to health, he is ready to take his place as a contributing adult member of the village. Politically, these stories are not best interpreted as national allegories that legitimate a particular socio-political arrangement or that confirm by their inconclusiveness any postcolonial psychic or social condition.3 They are to be understood as proposals for an ideal new socio-political arrangement rather than realistic reflections of an existing one. Simply identifying their similarities with the ‘classic’ European bildungsroman and analysing them as ‘compromises’ that introduce local characters or themes into metropolitan formal structures, in the manner of Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, generates very limited insight about the texts and their contexts. Instead of issuing allegations

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of formal imitation or verdicts of ‘subliterary’ we can ask fruitful questions about authorship and audience, form and genre, politics and representation. Rather than reflecting a regressive decision to affiliate with the earliest and most conservative form of bildungs­ roman, the clear and unwavering positioning of ‘home’ in the novels is a gesture of inclusion towards a primary Gambian readership. Each of the novels under discussion is self-published and printed locally in The Gambia, and in each case where the author prefaces his or her story with introductory remarks, the remarks indicate a didactic intention for Gambian readers. ‘Giving hope to the youth,’ says Jeng in introducing The Boat Boys, ‘will make them stay at home for they too know that there is no place like home’ (n.p.). This didacticism is nothing odd, of course, for since ‘bildungsroman’ was first named it was associated with the pedagogical project of guiding the reader towards maturity (Slaughter: 149; Boes Formative Fictions: 1). This guidance is most explicit in Ramatoulie Othman’s Costly Prices, which takes the form of a cautionary tale told to a troubled adolescent boy by a Gambian social welfare officer who looks back at his own traumatic migration experience and subsequent return home. Musa, the social worker, had in his late adolescence pursued adventure and easy wealth by befriending an older Englishwoman named Louisa, marrying her, and moving with her to Birmingham, UK. The author explained in an interview that she was keen to show Musa not as choiceless, as compelled by poverty to emigrate, but as pulled by the allure of the foreign and pushed by an unwillingness to work hard in studying or earning. He lives to regret his choice, for in England Musa’s marriage collapses and he is lured by an old enemy into drug use, finally collapsing financially and psychologically before returning to his family to be nursed back to health. He learns his lesson, seeks the help of a psychologist, gets

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a stable job as a social welfare officer and settles down with a Gambian wife. After listening to Musa’s account of his Bildung, his client Katchi responds exactly as Musa hoped: ‘I think I will take your advice to finish my education before going abroad’ (Othman: 121). This kind of Bildung is not fully complete until it can be narrated as a lesson for the next protagonist. These novels refuse to idealize exile, a refusal that distinguishes them from a main strand in postcolonial literature and criticism that can be traced back to the work of Edward Said. For Said, the tragedy of exile becomes a blessing to the intellectual who, because he or she is dislocated, is freed from stifling loyalties and foregone conclusions, thus acquiring revolutionary potential (Said Culture and Imperialism and Reflections on Exile and Other Essays; Zeleza ‘The Politics and Poetics of Exile’: 10). Responding to this strand, Dan Ojwang explains that ‘there is a sense in which the allure of exile within the culture of modernism and its complex heritage can be attributed to the belief that the centred models of culture and identity advanced by nationalism, and its rhetoric of tradition, imprison human potential’ (Reading Migration and Culture: 23). However, Ojwang argues that East African literature rejects this Saidean embrace of exile, taking it merely as a stop along the road that returns home. Likewise, Stephanie Newell finds that Ghanaian popular fiction characteristically deviates from the valorisation of exile in much global postcolonial literature (Ghanaian Popular Fiction: 8). When the Gambian bildungsromans enthusiastically present returning home as the climax of Bildung, they are thus denying that centred models of culture and identity imprison human potential and on that basis they are able to contest images that promote exile. Yet perhaps exile is not the best name for what these novels are rejecting. The novels should be understood in the context of what social scientists would call a culture of

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migration, which is to say a culture where the possibility of migrating, or even of loved ones migrating, has an important effect upon the structure of values and social relationships (see Kandel and Massey ‘The Culture of Mexican Migra­ tion’). Empirical data suggests that migration affects The Gambia even more than its neighbours. Although The Gambia is continental Africa’s smallest nation and one of its least populous, in 2014, Gambian immigrants arriving in Italy by sea were more numerous than citizens of all but three other African countries, and Gambians were more numerous than citizens of all but four African countries among those claiming asylum in EU countries (Maguire et al. ‘The Mediterranean’s Deadly Migrant Routes’; European Commission ‘Asylum Statistics’). The Gambia also has con­ tinental Africa’s highest rate of emigration among those with tertiary education (Kebbeh ‘The Gambia’: 8).4 Economically speaking, international migration is a key and systematic livelihood strategy for Gambians (Gaibazzi ‘God’s Time is the Best’:123; ‘Visa Problem’: 42) On the level of culture it is one of the principal models of success, helping to determine major life decisions not only for those who depart but also for those who plan but fail to depart, as well as for those connected by kinship to individuals hoping or succeeding in departing (Gaibazzi ‘Home as Transit’: 172). The novels constitute evidence of how migration and its allure structure an entire society, and they seek to counterbalance this allure. ‘Dad’, says Musa, before meeting his future wife Louisa, ‘many of my friends have gone abroad with no papers, and they are making it out there, sending money and cars back home’ (Othman ‘Costly’: 16); Othman’s novel will deflate Musa’s hopes. Seedy Drammeh begins Meet Me in Banjul admitting that ‘some youths are curious to travel around the world in search of greener pastures [believing] that life could be better elsewhere than staying in the country’ (7);

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Drammeh’s autobiographical account will discredit the youthful hopes as wishful thinking. That the novels are designed carefully to counterbalance dominant glamorous images of migration supports my contention that they are not ‘rather naive’ but calculated, with specific, real-world goals in mind. Another way of saying this is to borrow from Newell, who demonstrates that literary writings in West Africa are typically ‘problem-solving texts’ (West African Literatures: 90). She is disagreeing with those who lament a ‘book famine’ in contemporary West Africa, and who to do so disqualify as literature anything didactic, anything striving to depict a real (as opposed to wholly imaginary) world, and anything published by a local publishing house. Newell notes that because the West African texts she studies violate these common critical assumptions, they actually enjoy more freedom from explicit or implicit censorship, and they can offer a more valuable view into the societies that produce and consume them. West African readers, she argues, characteristically seek instruction for living (168).5 Precisely the same thing can be said about the Gambian novels surveyed here, which deviate from the generalizations made by most critics of the postcolonial African bildungsroman. An example of how these Gambian novels articulate and attempt to solve problems related to youth migration, can be found in Pa Landing Manneh’s novel, The Rainbow Pupil, the only Gambian bildungsroman I have found with a female protagonist. Sera comes from a remote Gambian village, Sitta, and rises to stereotypically superlative academic success: the highest marks in the village admit her into the country’s most prestigious high school, where she becomes head girl; the highest marks in all of West Africa on the international examinations admit her to Oxford where she ultimately obtains a Ph.D in biochemistry. This ascent takes place without a single antagonist to overcome, for

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the novel implies a harmonious society eager to celebrate its high achievers: ‘her achievement was the village’s gain’ and brought with it a proportionately ‘heavy responsibility for the future, for her, for her family and for her village’ (Manneh: 10). What must be overcome is an attitude about migration that is also a problematic attitude about Bildung, namely that growing up is incompatible with coming (or staying) home. Before her departure for Oxford, Sera makes a trip back to her village that, in signalling that the protagonist has not abandoned ‘tradition’, satisfies what Austen sees as a convention in the African bildungsroman (217). Her ailing grandfather laments how modernization and urbanization disrupt the village: ‘Our culture is under threat’ (Manneh: 41). He begs Sera to buck the trend among her peers and return when her studies are finished. Though at first glance he seems to be appealing for cultural preservation, to be recruiting Sera as an agent to defend the status quo, he is actually providing a script for Sera’s successful Bildung: ‘Grand child [sic], take this advice, come to the village every so often and you will be saved’ (41). Any attempt to redefine herself apart from the practices and beliefs and geography that her grandfather represents will fail, because ‘the truth is we can’t be what we are not’ (41). However, Sera needs no convincing about her essential identity. The next year, at Oxford, presuming to speak on behalf of African students, she will tell her friends that African students are committed to returning to Africa in order to work for its betterment. Working for the community’s or even the continent’s betterment will be a way of achieving her own because, and here she quotes a well-known proverb: ‘No matter how long a log stays under water, it will never change into a crocodile … Don’t think that all of us [African students] will not go back to where we belong’. She could not comprehend why Africans would give every­

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thing to relocate to Europe just to escape the implications of living in Africa. To her home offered the best of comfort and she would not swap it for anywhere. (46)

Sera practises what she preaches and returns to Sitta with her Ph.D, but even then she has to speak firmly to those who suppose she won’t ‘finally settle down’: ‘I acquired knowledge to help my homeland. That’s why I came home’ (51). She contributes to Sitta’s development and thus completes her own. Clearly there were other paths available for getting Sera to maturity, paths not returning home, but those paths are the problem that her novel aims to solve. The novel’s audience is aware of them, and allusions to them function to activate for the audience a live debate. The path Sera chooses and the path the author Manneh advocates are, of course, the same as in the other Gambian bildungsromans I have surveyed. Rather than sympathetically analysing the choicelessness that motivates certain migrations, these novels model how their intended young-adult readers can choose to be reverse migrants or to defer or decline to migrate. In extolling the pleasures of home and dissenting from prevailing views on migration, these novels participate in live conversations. Because it is neither their intention nor their destiny to circulate within the global market of postcolonial literary production that, in the powerful critique of Sarah Brouillette, is ‘fundamentally determined by capitalist social relations’ (‘World Literature and Market Dynamics’: 98), they enjoy an autonomy from the global commercial sphere that distinguishes them from the wellknown authors Brouillette discusses (Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace: 3), or from Adichie’s Americanah; in this sense they are like artisans (Newell Ghanaian: 98). Their loyalties are primarily local. Drawing generalizations about a group of six short, recent Gambian novels and contrasting them as a group with globally known African bildungsromans as discussed

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in contemporary criticism has made possible a focus on genre, the pivot between texts’ producers and receivers. This in turn has brought into relief some of the characteristics of the communities whose problems the novels try to solve. In refusing to valorise exile but extolling instead the path of return, these novels indicate the norms and debates that help define what home is. Thus a focus on the genre of these ‘local’ novels provides a measure of precision to what is meant by ‘local’.

NOTES 1 I wish to thank Sana Saidykhan, my colleague at the University of The Gambia, for sharing his insight into the Gambian novels that are at the heart of this research and for engaging me in constructive dialogue as I developed the lines of my argument. 2 Thus Idowu-Faith correctly identifies how Adichie’s novel constitutes a challenge to assumptions that are codified in the expectations that make up readers’ (and critics’) understandings of genre: Adichie, she contends, aims to ‘mak[e] return migration the normal occurrence at the end of a migration story’ (20). 3 In concentrating on questions of genre and audience, this essay should not be taken to indicate that the novels are unable to sustain political-allegorical readings. In fact, the most fruitful avenue for critics searching for the postcolonial nation-state in these Gambian novels would be to begin with its scrupulous concealment. The happy reintegration of migrants into their communities of origin could on this reading be taken as an affirmation of the political status quo. Thus, just as Moretti finds the classic (affirmative) European bildungsroman to demonstrate that the rising and thriving of the bourgeoisie could have been achieved without the French Revolution, the Gambian novels demonstrate that a Gambian revolution can be avoided. Indeed, in The Gambia, most literary writers are careful to avoid critique of the regime. 4 Note that the data on migration of skilled workers is badly out of date, collected in 2000; but the figures are still used in numerous publications since 2010 because no more recent data is available. 5 Historically, didacticism came to be expected by readers of West

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African texts partly because of the influence of Christian missions during the colonial period, but didacticism is also associated with indigenous genres such as the folktale and dilemma tale (Newell Ghanaian: 85, 87). As stated above, the genre of the bildungsroman typically also implies a high degree of didacticism.

WORKS CITED Abani, Chris. GraceLand. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann, 1987. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Knopf, 2013. Amoko, Apollo. ‘Autobiography and Bildungsroman in African Literature.’ The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel. Ed. Abiola Irele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009: 195208. Austen, Ralph. ‘Struggling with the African Bildungsroman.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 46, No. 3 (2015): 214-31. Barber, Karin. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Boes, Tobias. Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Bosch Santana, Stephanie. ‘Migrant Forms: African Parade’s New Literary Geographies.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 45, No. 3 (2014): 167-87. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Market­ place. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ——‘World Literature and Market Dynamics.’ Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets. Eds. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen. New York: Routledge, 2015: 93-108. Ceesay, Demba. The Worn-out Dream. Kanifeng, The Gambia: Fulladu, 2013. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. Emeryville, CA: Seal, 2004. de Bruijn, Esther M. Sensational Aesthetics: Ghanaian Market Fiction. Diss. University of Toronto, 2014. Dibba, Ebou. Chaff on the Wind. London: Macmillan, 1986. Drammeh, Seedy. Meet Me in Banjul. The Gambia: n.pub., 2012. Esty, Jed. ‘The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe.’ Victorian Studies. Vol. 49, No. 3 (2007): 407-30.

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——Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. European Commission. ‘Asylum Statistics.’ (3 September 2015) http:// ec.europa.eu/eurostat. Faszer-McMahon, Debra and Victoria L. Ketz. African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts: Crossing the Strait. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. Faye, Dawda. The Broken Reed. n.p: Trinity Enterprise, 2012. Gaibazzi, Paolo. ‘“God’s Time is the Best”: Religious Imagination and the Wait for Emigration in The Gambia.’ The Global Horizon: Expectations of Migration in Africa and the Middle East. Eds. Knut Graw and Samuli Schielke. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012. ——‘Home as Transit: Would-Be Migrants and Immobility in Gambia.’ The Challenge of the Threshold: Border Closures and Migration Movements in Africa. Eds. Jocelyne Streiff-Fénart and Aurelia Segatti. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012. ——‘Visa Problem: Certification, Kinship, and the Production of “Ineligibility” in the Gambia.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 20, No. 1 (2014): 38-55. Gomez, Pierre. Territoire, mythe, représentation dans la littérature gambienne: Une méthode géocritique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. Gray, Stephen. ‘Third World Meets First World: The Theme of “Jim Comes to Joburg” in South African English Fiction.’ Kunapipi. Vol. 7, No. 1 (1985): 61-80. Hay, Simon. ‘Nervous Conditions, Lukács, and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman.’ Genre. Vol. 46, No. 3 (2013): 317-44. Idowu-Faith, Bimbola O. ‘Fictionalizing Theory, Theorizing Fiction: The Stylistics of Return Migration in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah.’ Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal of African Migration. Vol. 7 (2014): 23-46. Jameson, Frederic. ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.’ Social Text. Vol. 15 (1986): 65-88. Jeng, Papa. The Boat Boys: Barcelona or Barrsaxa. Banjul, The Gambia: Omar Sarr Digital Publishing, n.d. [2007]. Kebbeh, C. Omar. ‘The Gambia: Migration in Africa’s “Smiling Coast”.’ The Online Journal of the Migration Policy Institute (15 August 2013) www.migrationpolicy.org Kandel, W. and D. Massey. ‘The Culture of Mexican Migration: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis.’ Social Forces. Vol. 80, No.3 (2002): 981-1004. Laye, Camara. L’enfant noir. Paris: Pocket, 1994.

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Maguire, Emily, Lucy Rodgers, Nassos Stylianou and John Walton. ‘The Mediterranean’s Deadly Migrant Routes.’ (22 April 2015) www.bbc. com Manneh, Pa Landing. The Rainbow Pupil. n.p: n.pub, n.d. [2011]. Mda, Zakes. The Heart of Redness: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Moretti, Franco. ‘Conjectures on World Literature.’ New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68. ——The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Trans. Albert Sbragia. New York: Verso, 2000. Newell, Stephanie. Ghanaian Popular Fiction: ‘Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life’ and Other Tales. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. ——West African Literatures: Ways of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ojwang, Dan. Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Othman, Ramatoulie. Costly Prices. n.p: Ahmadiyya, 2005. ——Interview with Stephen Ney. Banjul (28 May 2014). Redfield, Marc. ‘The Bildungsroman.’ The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 191-94. ——Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the ‘Bildungsroman’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Saho, Bala. The Road to My Village. Banjul: Mangroves, 2010. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993. ——Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Soyinka, Wole. Aké: The Years of Childhood. New York: Vintage, 1989. Thomas, Dominic. ‘The Global Mediterranean: Literature and Migration.’ Yale French Studies. No. 120 (2011): 140-53. Vasquez, Jose Santiago Fernandez. ‘Subverting the Bildungsroman in Postcolonial Fiction: Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef.’ World Literature Written in English. Vol. 36, No.1 (1997): 30-8. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa.’ Research in African Literatures. Vol. 36, No. 3 (2005): 1-22.

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Returns ‘Home’ Constructing Belonging in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi HELEN COUSINS

The idea of ‘return’ implies both a ‘to’ and a ‘from’; it does not infer settling as the term ‘home’ does, but rather movement between places that are home and those that are not. This article seeks to explore how the idea of returning to ‘home’ is developed in the context of travels between Africa and England in three novels by black British writers. These novels are: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl; Diana Evans’ 26a; and Bernadine Evaristo’s extended version of Lara. Each of these books features a mixed-race protagonist with one black Nigerian and one white English parent; they are all born and grow up for most of the narrative in England. In each novel, the protagonist travels from England to Nigeria at some point in the narrative and then from Nigeria to England. However, the intention of my discussion is not to explore how Nigeria might be constituted as home for Nigerian-British, mixed-race individuals, nor only to analyse how they are alienated in each place (although this will be considered); rather, the discussion explores how ‘home’ is constituted for these characters in ways other than their connections to place, but also how such non-geographical locations are recognized because of the protagonists’ returns to Nigeria. The idea of home is a complex one, explored across disciplines in different ways ranging from examinations of the physical house to more subjectively experienced or imaginatively constituted places. As a metaphorical term, 185

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as David Seamon notes, home is ‘an abstract signifier of a wide set of associations and meanings’ (cited in Manzo ‘Beyond House and Haven’: 48), where those meanings are associated with being comfortable, with belonging and familiarity. This is not to deny connections with the physical locations which are the settings for the books being discussed here but these are not the ‘images of felicitous space’ (The Poetics of Space: 19), as described by Gaston Bachelard, which are the spaces constituted by the human imagination as ‘the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love’ (19). In the novels, those spaces are aligned with places in the real, material world which tend to be the hostile spaces that Bachelard refuses to discuss. Indeed, what is of interest here is how some other spaces, which have been ‘seized upon by the imagination’ (19) in these novels, are home despite the hostility of the outside world. The interplay of both spaces is important – and recognized by Bachelard who notes that ‘with regard to images, it soon becomes clear that to attract and to repulse do not give contrary experiences’ (20) but rather enrich the imagination. In all of the novels being considered, it is the hostility of physical space that prompts the protagonists to develop alternative conceptions of home. As mixedrace individuals, in the physical environment, they appear inevitably to occupy an ‘in-between’ or a ‘hybrid’ space where home is never achievable. As John McLeod notes, Lara’s travels back to Brazil and Nigeria in Lara are efforts in search of a true self when she is ‘confronted with the problems of self-definition in a racist city’ where both the black and white people she encounters question her authenticity (‘Extra Dimensions, New Routines’: 48). By tracing the meanings of the trope of ‘home’ in these novels, I hope to show how these texts question the assumption that mixed-race equals in-between by exploring alternative locations to the realist, physical ones.

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If, as Gerhard Stilz defines it in Territorial Terrors, ‘home’ is ‘the place of one’s first orientation in the world, the “central” node on which “our” personal identity has been nurtured, the place to which one “belongs” and returns’ (9), then in each of these texts, England makes a claim for being that home place, yet it is not a simple claim to make. McLeod has suggested that ‘to be “at home” is to occupy a location where we are welcome’ (Beginning Postcolonialism: 210), but in postcolonial England such a welcome for its black citizens is not automatic. For example, Caryl Phillips notes in Colour Me English the rejections he faced growing up in Leeds as a black child: I was constantly being told, ‘Go back to where you came from’, but in reality I had nowhere to go back to. Some among my generation did grow dreadlocks and try to retreat into a strangely essential black identity, and they began to speak of Africa as ‘home’, but I knew that we were not going anywhere and that we would have to wrestle with Britain to make their story fit our lives. (12; original emphasis)

Even as Phillips asserts his belongingness to England, the challenge to ‘go back’ indicates that his declaration competes with other national discourses which attempt to interpellate him as outside that ‘home’ space. However, this article explores how the idea of home, as expressed within the novels being studied, can be read outside of that binary which holds Phillips in a hybrid tension between being inside and outside. By considering the local and familial communities inhabited at different moments by protagonists, I want to show how a sense of home develops for the protagonists through a dialectical process of ‘returns’ between England and Nigeria, and that both locations are invoked within its formulation. Of the three novels, Lara illustrates, perhaps, the most conventional literary treatment of in-between-ness. In this novel in verse, Evaristo emphasizes the heterogeneousness of Lara’s heritage, tracing both her black and white ancestry:

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her black ancestors enslaved in Brazil whose descendants return to Nigeria and in later generations move to England; her Irish forebears, who immigrate to England in the 1800s, and others who intermarry with German refugees. This works against a simple hybridity for Lara that might have marked her as the child of an essentially black and an essentially white parent. Evaristo seeks to counter the dominant idea within the genre of black British literature of mixed-race or diasporic hybridity through her presentation of Lara’s complex racial background. Yet, as noted above, the white and black communities she attempts to occupy growing up in 1960s and 1970s England reject her on grounds of their perception of her as not properly either black or white. Following her travels to Nigeria and Brazil, the final and often quoted stanzas of Lara indicate Lara’s recon­ ceptualization of her place in the world as a multiply-raced person: think of my island, the ‘Great’ Tippexed out of it, tiny amid massive floating continents, the African one an embryo within me. I will wing back to Nigeria again and again … Back to London, across international time zones. I step out of Heathrow and into my future. (Evaristo: 188)

Lara’s return to Nigeria, and then to Brazil, has allowed her to claim as home that small island – Britain – constituted now through her new cosmopolitanism. She has toyed with how much she belongs to Lagos: ‘This is the land of my father, she thought. / I wonder if I could belong’ (156). But in Lagos she is ‘oyinbo’ or ‘whitey’ as her father glosses it (156). In Brazil she ‘hopes the past will close in on [her]’ (185) but finally realizes that, the ‘past is gone, the future means transformation’ (187). However, particularly striking is Lara’s notion of the African ‘embryo’ within her.

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This is not an image of hybridity where the two cultures of her parents combine in her to produce a different, third, hybrid thing. Rather it is a new way for Lara to occupy her ‘place of first orientation’ as Stilz puts it – that is England. In this conception, Africa is enfolded into that English self; contained by it, part of it but also separate. That reconfiguration has been sparked through the physical visit to her ancestral homelands. Her confidence in claiming England as her home has derived from that process of ‘going back to where she came from’, to use the rhetoric of xenophobia encountered by Phillips, but she is no longer interpellated by those discourses which seek to un-home her. Her experiences of ‘return’ confirm England as her home and the place where her future will unfold. That unfolding will include the growth and development of the African embryo (as is its nature) in order to explore ways in which to fulfil Phillips’ determination to make England accept its black population as a natal part of the nation. In McLeod’s analysis, Lara’s ending provides a starting point for novels by black British writers in which ‘the transformation of a vexed Black British identity no longer seems so recurrently central’ as they reach towards ‘a different kind of reinvention of the UK, one which reaches beyond the more specific parameters of Black Britishness’ (‘Extra’: 47). I suggest that the enfolding and containing image of the body with growing embryo encapsulates one such different reinvention. Those reinventions can also be discovered in 26a and The Icarus Girl which share and develop the motif of home as incorporated within the body; in addition, they share with Lara a process whereby the understanding of home as bodily experienced is reliant on the characters’ returns to Nigeria and re-returns. These returns are specifically English returns, and here I am interested in the extent to which these texts describe an English home, as reflected in the title of Phillips’ book Colour Me English.

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Mixed-race twins are central to both 26a and The Icarus Girl – which brings the discussion into the realm of the ‘half-and-half’ in an additional way to Lara’s racial halfand-half hybridity. In 26a the identical twins Georgia and Bessie are born in London to an English father and Nigerian mother. They describe themselves as having ‘differences … almost invisible to outsiders. They were the same … They were twoness in oneness’ (Evans: 42). The hybridity of their mixed-race ‘half-and-half’ parentage is less significant than being twins – half and whole simultaneously. If home is the ‘place of one’s first orientation’, then this place for Georgia and Bessie is each other. The twins label their loft bedroom as 26a, an ‘extra dimension’ (5) within the family home which is number 26. As McLeod points out, that space indicates how ‘Georgia and Bessie’s story sits synchronically inside British life just as 26a is readily accommodated inside 26 Waifer Avenue as an ordinary place with a particular “extra dimension”’ (‘Extra’: 47). It is the physical correlative of the twins’ twoness in oneness. For Georgia in particular, it is that twoness in oneness that creates home; her only ‘place to go’ is ‘Bessie. Bessie and me … where bad things never happen’ (Evans: 101). Early on in the narrative, the family ‘return’ to Nigeria where their mother was born and where she met their father when he was working abroad. This is an extended three year visit as, once again, their father’s work takes him to Lagos. Because they go together, the twins’ sense of being at home remains even though they miss their life in England at first. They find that, although ‘home had a way of shifting, of changing shape and temperature. Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity’ (54). That substance of home is destroyed when Georgia is raped by the compound watchman and she cannot tell Bessie what has happened. At this point in the twins’ lives it is for ‘the first time ever, in this land of twoness in oneness, that something had

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seemed unsayable’ (69). That first division of the twins’ singularity into a binary prefigures Bessie’s assertion of independence on returning to England which eventually leads to her undertaking an independent work-visit to the Caribbean. Bessie explains to Georgia: ‘It’ll be good for us … it’s time, to find out who we are when we’re on our own’ (133). Georgia’s riposte to Bessie is: ‘I am on my own when I am with you’ (133). It appears then, that the effect of returning to Nigeria has been detrimental to the twins’ sense of belonging. Yet, it is through the return to Nigeria – or more precisely their mother’s family compound – that Georgia finds the solution to remaining as the twoness in oneness that means home. In the village, their grandfather tells them a story about the twins Onia and Ode. They were born, he tells them, in a time when people believed ‘Twins were a curse … And they had to be destroyed’ (63). Ode, the second born, was burnt as was the custom, and after this Onia got sick. She only recovered when Ode’s ghost entered her body, living there for one year ‘because that is how long it took for the soul to be ready to leave the earth’ (63). The twins are frightened by the story but, although their mother reassures them by saying, ‘“[i]t’s not true”, privately she knew it was. All the stories Baba told were true’ (63). Their father seeks to reassure them by dislocating the tale from the here and now, reminding them that this was ‘a long, long time ago remember’ (63). However, the twins seem more inclined to take their mother’s part. For them, it is not a tale of the past. Hearing the story in the physical place where it happened suggests strongly to the twins that this story is not merely a myth but a culturally true way of perceiving the world. Hence, on returning to England, and after Bessie has tried to establish the twins’ ‘twoness’ with her independent travel, Georgia uses the power of twins, as illustrated by the story of Onia and Ode, to re-home herself back in

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England when she commits suicide and inhabits Bessie’s body (209). However, this is not a simple matter of the twins connecting with and then embracing their Nigerian ‘half’ and rejecting the British ‘half’ in an attempt to overcome their racial hybridity. The spirit realm has been present in England before the family visit Nigeria; and it is occupied, as McLeod notes, by both English and Nigerian figures – for example the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and the twins’ Nigerian grandmother (‘Extra’: 48). This moves the text outside of the genre of ‘magical realism’ in which it is often read (see, for example, Brenda Cooper’s ‘Women Dancing on Water’) as the spirituality is not strictly speaking a ‘recuperation of precolonial culture’ (Ashcroft et al. Post-Colonial Studies: 119) used to express social revolution through culturally local forms in formerly colonized countries (118). Georgia’s possession of Bessie has its roots in her earlier experiences of first imagining visiting Gladstone in the house in Gladstone Park (Evans: 11), and then visiting him there in her dreams (24). Georgia is therefore already able to move outside of her physical body before she hears about that particular application of possession for separated twins from the Yoruba story. This occupation resonates with Lara’s African ‘embryo’; in both cases an apparent oneness is a twoness, one enclosed inside the other. However, this is not, as in Lara, expressed as an English body enfolding an African one but an act that more fluidly intertwines the Yoruba and the English while maintaining the separate beings. Bessie can still feel Georgia as separate within her body, occupying the right side and able to leave and return at will (222). Thus the possession is not just a different way of expressing a half-and-half hybridity but a way in which the twins’ physical movement between places has actualized an alternative way to be black and English and at home; and it is expressly grounded in England through

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the evergreen tree visible from the twins’ childhood bed­ room window (6). The tree is a meeting point for the twins when Bessie is away in the Caribbean (141) and after Georgia leaves Bessie’s body after one year (230). The spiritual and physical worlds connect there at that English home place. The protagonist in The Icarus Girl, Jess or Jessamy, follows a similar trajectory of Nigerian and English returns, and her status as a twin is also very significant in her understanding of where home is located. Jess is eight years old and somewhat of a loner. The solution for her Nigerian mother is for the family to visit Nigeria prompted by her feelings that ‘it wasn’t right for Jessamy to play by herself so much … In Nigeria … children were always getting themselves into mischief, and surely that was better than sitting inside reading and staring into space all day’ (Oyeyemi: 5). However, Jess continues to be an outsider in Nigeria. She describes herself as ‘half a world away, still feeling alien’ (13). Like Lara, she is called oyinbo, translated by her mother in this case as ‘somebody who has come from so far away that they are a stranger’ (17). Sarah Ilott and Chloe Buckley suggest in ‘Fragmenting and Becoming Double’ that Jess ‘finds her mixed Nigerian and British heritage problematic and struggles to find an identity fitting for herself since she identifies wholly with neither her mother’s nor her father’s culture’ (2). Yet neither Jess nor the reader is aware that Jess is a twin whose sister died at birth. Therefore, it is not so much that she is half-and-half but that she is just half: ‘only half a twin’ (Oyeyemi: 293) having lost ‘half of [her]self’ (301). In Nigeria, it appears that a solution is offered by the appearance of a mysterious potential twin whom Jess calls TillyTilly, and who reappears when Jess is back in England. However, it becomes clear over a long and very troubled relationship with this being that in many ways – as for Georgia and Bessie – the return to Nigeria has had very negative consequences for Jess’s capacity to feel at home. All her ‘trouble’ as she calls it ‘STARTED in Nigeria’

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(6). TillyTilly frequently gets Jess into trouble and, then, on the grounds that it is always actually someone else’s fault, promises to ‘get’ that person. Jess is willing – even if uncomfortable – when this is her teacher but when TillyTilly ‘gets’ Jess’s father, Jess starts to get scared. More directly endangering Jess, TillyTilly drags Jess into the spirit world and attempts to take possession of her body. It is not entirely clear who or what it is that Jess has found in her grandfather’s compound in Nigeria. It is apparent that she was a twin although whether she pre- or post-deceased her twin, or what the circumstances of her death were, is not explained. Over the course of the novel it becomes clear that TillyTilly is definitely not Jess’s own dead twin sister; and that she is now something else and she is dangerously destructive. After an incident when TillyTilly pushes Jess’s friend, Siobhan, down the stairs hospitalizing her – something for which Jess, of course, gets the blame as TillyTilly is not real to the adults in England – Jess’s parents decide that they need to take her back to Nigeria. Yet it is during this re-return to Nigeria that TillyTilly takes possession of Jess’s physical body. The real Jess is displaced into a spirit realm referred to as the Bush in the novel. As noted by Elinor Rooks: the bush has been put to many different uses by West African communities. The bush can be figured as agrarian, rural or wild; as a site of historical trauma or of potential enrichment; as a source of inspiration or of possible madness. Practical interactions with the bush become entangled with theoretical and imaginative understandings: it is simultaneously the space within which one farms and a space which is haunted by ghosts of slavers. (‘Vernacular Critique, Deleuzo-Guattarian Theory and Cultural Historicism in West African and Southern African Literatures’: 14)

Oyeyemi connects primarily to the spiritual signifiers associated with ‘the Bush’ in relation to ‘historical trauma’, madness and ghosts (14), in her use of this space in The

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Icarus Girl. Soon after this displacement, Jess (who is not Jess but TillyTilly) is involved in a bad car accident and is left in a coma. In this Nigerian setting, it is Jess’s grandfather who appears to understand that the root of Jess’s problem is an attack from the spirit world. Back in England, once Jess discovers she is a twin – information given to her by TillyTilly – Jess’s parents ask him to make an ibeji statue for Jess in an attempt to put Jess’s troubles to right. Jess’s mother explains to her about ibeji statues: ‘if one twin died in childhood before the other, the family of the twins would make a carving … so that the dead twin would be … happy’ (192). Jess’s parents had not done this for her at the time Fern, her twin, died but now an ibeji statue is made for Jess and kept for her and Fern at her grandfather’s house. Following the car accident, Jess’s grandfather brings the ibeji statue to the hospital where it ‘guarded the corner for the little twin who needed its help / needed the forgiveness it brought’ (318). Whether it is the shock of the car accident, or the presence of the ibeji statue, Jess starts to fight back against TillyTilly’s possession of her body in the hospital. The car accident has created ‘a jolt’ that Jess experiences in the Bush and lets her ‘see a way to return’ (319) as it loosens TillyTilly’s hold on her body. Soon afterwards – perhaps because of the presence of the ibeji in the hospital room – Jess realizes that the girl who has been carrying her through the wilderness is Fern, her dead twin: The girl … drew Jess close so that she was gazing silently into her face. Jess realised with a feeble, drowsy awe that she was looking at herself … She was wrong, the silent girl told her with a slow shake of the head. Not … herself. It’s … her. (321)

Jess offers to share her other, ‘proper … Yoruba name’ (321) with Fern who died before she was given hers. This

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appeases Fern, and now Jess, with the strength of having her ‘sister-girl’, can face TillyTilly and attempt to jump back into her own body. The end of the book is entirely ambiguous in regard to Jess’s final fate; but, for the purposes of this argument, we can note that a change in Jess’s situation is effected by her becoming whole with her twin. The implication might be that it is only her Nigerian other ‘half’ that brings the completeness that gives her a way to belong, to be at home. However, Jess’s white English friend, Siobhan, also contributes significantly to the part of the narrative that takes place in the Bush. After TillyTilly’s possession of Jess but before the car accident, when Jess is lost and despairing in the Bush, ‘someone came and bore her away on their back’ (319). That someone, ‘was Siobhan, red hair brilliant against the delicate white skin of her naked skin; only she knew it wasn’t Siobhan really’ (319). The real Siobhan has been lost to Jess through the actions of TillyTilly who is delighted to end their friendship. TillyTilly has sneered at Jess’s attempts to fit in through her relationship with Siobhan, telling Jess to ‘stop looking to belong half-andhalf child’ (250). Siobhan segues into Fern once the ibeji is placed in the hospital room, yet the merging of Jess’s twin with her only proper friend indicates the significance of Siobhan in the narrative. Siobhan has been to Jess simply ‘a good friend, and really nice’ (217). If, as McLeod suggests, home is, ‘where we can be with people very much like ourselves’ (Beginning: 210), then Siobhan is one of those people for Jess. TillyTilly has warned Jess not to say anything about her to Siobhan as ‘people who aren’t from the same place as us don’t understand about all that’ (Oyeyemi: 217) but it is increasingly clear that while Jess and TillyTilly are not from the same place at all, Jess and Siobhan are. During that period of Jess and Siobhan’s friendship, Jess realizes, when asked by TillyTilly: ‘D’ you still want to be like me,

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Jessy?’ that she does not. Instead, ‘for a little while it had seemed to be … OK just to be her, Jess’ (218). Hence Siobhan functions to complete Jess in similar ways to Fern by allowing her to be at home. TillyTilly’s claims that Jess can be at home with her are shown to be false; her possession of Jess is not for belonging, as in 26a, but an attack on Jess who has refused to walk with TillyTilly as her twin in the wilderness. It is in essence a dispossession as TillyTilly attempts to use Jess’s body to create a homespace solely for herself: the suggestion in the text is that, in life, TillyTilly’s home, her family and her twin were wrenched away from her by a violent attack following which ‘there is no homeland – there is nowhere where there are people who will not get you’ (250). However, the motif of dispossession in these three texts suggests that to be at home as a black (or mixed-race) person in England is not achieved by embracing the African aspect of one’s past. In The Icarus Girl, TillyTilly’s complete possession of Jess, ejecting her into the Bush entirely, loses that idea of being two things in one found in 26a and Lara. Jess and Siobhan’s friendship, had it developed, might have taken on those features, like a binary star circulating around each other, separate yet necessarily connected. The Icarus Girl may not follow the enfolding ‘twoness-inoneness’ motif of the other texts but it does operate through notions of familiarity, ‘homeness’, and the ‘sameness’ of twins found in 26a. The lack of clear success in occupying home through the friendship with Siobhan in The Icarus Girl is due to TillyTilly’s interference when she pushes Siobhan down the stairs and allows everyone including Siobhan to think it was Jess’s action. The reality of their violently broken friendship prevents it being sustained as a place of home for Jess who realizes when Siobhan carries her in the Bush that she is not being carried ‘home. Not home, never home’ (319). However, in that embryonic friendship, it offers, like the other novels considered here,

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one of those ‘reinventions’ noted by McLeod, that moves beyond race in presenting an ‘articulation of the nation … that goes beyond the affective and political concerns of black Britons and demands adaptation by all kinds of British subjects’ (‘Extra’: 51). It asks for a recognition of a postcolonial Britain – and a postcolonial England – that incorporates all of its citizens alike. The failure of Jess and Siobhan’s friendship recognizes that revisioning Britishness is no easy undertaking; even more challenging is the incorporation of multiculture into English identities, and yet, still, writers need to persist in their task. As Kwame Dawes noted fifteen years ago, these authors are among those who are: fixated on home – a geographical home … [but] that home is no longer the Caribbean or Africa – home is Britain. In other words they are contending with the ‘homeness’ of Britain. It is an uncomfortable contention and one that does not always lead to the same conclusion, but it begins at the same fundamental place: … this is home. (‘Negotiating the Ship on the Head’: 19)

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd edn. E-Library: Taylor & Francis, 2007. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. M. Jolas. New York: Penguin, 1964. Cooper, Brenda. ‘Women Dancing on Water: A Diasporic Feminist Fan­tastic?’ Contemporary Women’s Writing. Vol. 6, No. 2 (2012): 140-58. Dawes, Kwame. ‘Negotiating the Ship on the Head: Black British Fiction.’ Wasafiri. Vol. 14, No. 29 (1999): 18-24. Evans, Diana. 26a. London: Vintage, 2005. Evaristo, Bernadine. Lara. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2009. Ilott, Sarah and Chloe Buckley. ‘“Fragmenting and Becoming Double”:

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Supplementary Twins and Abject Bodies in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl.’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Vol. 51, No. 3 (2016): 402-15. Manzo, Lynne C. ‘Beyond House and Haven: Toward a Revisioning of Emotional Relationships with Places.’ Journal of Environmental Psychology. Vol. 23, No. 1 (2003): 47-61. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. ——‘Extra Dimensions, New Routines.’ Wasafiri. Vol. 25, No. 4 (2010): 45-52. Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Phillips, Caryl. Colour Me English: Selected Essays. London: Harvill Secker, 2011. Rooks, Elinor. ‘Vernacular Critique, Deleuzo-Guattarian Theory and Cultural Historicism in West African and Southern African Litera­ tures.’ Diss. University of Leeds. 2014. Stilz, Gerhard. Territorial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Post­ colonial Writing. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007.

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‘Zimbabweanness Today’ An Interview with Tendai Huchu HELEN COUSINS & PAULINE DODGSON-KATIYO

Tendai Huchu is a Zimbabwean novelist who currently lives in Scotland. His critically acclaimed first novel The Hairdresser of Harare was published in 2010 and has been translated into several languages. In 2013 he received a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Sacatar Fellowship. His short story ‘The Intervention’ was shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing. His second novel The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician was pub­lished in 2014. It tells three parallel stories of Zim­ babweans living in Edinburgh. We interviewed Tendai via an email exchange. HC/PD: Tendai, this issue of African Literature Today focuses on diaspora and returns to Africa. We’re very pleased to have the opportunity to talk to you about your novel The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician and the multiple ways in which the novel relates to this theme. Several of the characters express their desire to return to Zimbabwe but, for various reasons, they are unable to do so. Does this imply that, once someone has been away from Zimbabwe for a long time, being in the diaspora becomes a way of life? TH: I would not say they’re ‘unable’, rather, they choose not to, and that’s an important distinction. I would never try to portray these expatriates as being without some degree of control over their circumstances. All my characters are 200

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fully autonomous and they make certain choices, and, as we all know, every choice one makes comes with a trade-off of one sort or the other. They have the same autonomy and same agency that the western character who goes to Africa or Asia has to return to their place of origin. Migration in either direction is a choice; the difference in the reception of the traveller on either side is a reflection of the power dynamics of the era we currently live in, but this doesn’t affect the free will people have to go or stay where they will. I’m also uncertain about what the second part of the question means: ‘being in the diaspora becomes a way of life?’ – being anywhere is a way of life. There’s a great Spike Milligan line: ‘Everybody has to be somewhere’. And for me, it is as simple as that; there is nothing particularly special here. HC/PD: Music, the Magistrate says, ‘forms memories’ (3). Music, in all its diversity, is a central theme throughout the novel. Is there a sense in which this diversity of styles and traditions can lead to fusion or unity? The Magistrate’s love of the Zimbabwean musician Alick Macheso seems to point in this direction. You describe Macheso as the son of poor Malawian/Mozambican parents, who, now, as a musician, fuses Zimbabwean Sungura with other African rhythms and styles. Is this a riposte to nationalist ideas about indigeneity and who has the right to call themselves Zimbabwean? TH: The idea of cultural purity is a false concept. Except for the few isolated ethnic groups in the Amazon or on remote Pacific Islands, human culture is highly dependent on continual, shameless appropriation. Diversity is the stuff of progress, the constant intercourse between different peoples is what fuels ingenuity. Fusion is inevitable within art itself, but this does not necessarily lead to unity at a social or political level, although one would hope that it makes the process more likely.

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The nationalist ideas about indigeneity in Zimbabwe are centred on the sort of twentieth-century nativist, uberpatriotic doctrines that have been largely discredited. Zimbabwe itself is an artificial construct and so too are the Shona people who make up its majority. The only people who push these things forward are the politicians who use this philosophy to justify their rent-seeking, blood-sucking, which is veiled as indigenisation, because the majority who qualify as ‘indigenous’ are yet to see any benefits from this ideology. Give me Macheso over any one of our politicians from either side of the political divide any day. HC/PD: To follow on from this, the Maestro is a white Zimbabwean. He’s isolated, doesn’t mix with other Zimbabweans or belong to a family or community. We would be interested in knowing more about the thinking that went into your creation of the Maestro. TH: I conceived the Maestro as a brooding loner, cut off from society, his mind fragile, searching for a meaning to his life. If you are looking for an extra-textual answer, then, perhaps, this ties in with your ‘indigeneity’ question earlier, because in the public political pronouncements of the Zimbabwean government of the era the book is set in, whites could not be authentically Zimbabwean – they were British, regardless. And here we have a guy who by virtue of his skin tone and ancestry can’t fit into the very Britain we are told he belongs in. I thought that was an interesting dynamic. But if you put that to one side and go back into the text, at one point he likens himself to Kirilov, a character from Dostoyevsky’s Demons. The Maestro has a metafictional role in this text in that (perhaps somewhat like his author) he tries to find meaning in literature and the art form falls short. I myself have doubts about the grand theoretical pronouncements of what the novel in particular can do to shape society and, by extension,

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humanity as a whole. Does this make me a heretic within the novelistic profession? I envisioned The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician as a book of illusions, which, while it presents itself as one thing, constantly undermines that position. Another example: the novel is offered to you as a literary novel, but by the time you get to the end, you realise it is a genre novel of a very specific kind. It might not even be a novel; rather it might be three separate but slightly interconnected novellas. The Maestro and the other characters are all as isolated as they are interconnected. I should also add that in my initial conception of the text, I wanted to write something about micro-identities (not the my-grandfather-is-half-Irish-halfMexican-and-my-mum-is quarter-blah-blah-variety), how we present different faces to the world at different times and the Maestro represents this by being one thing at work and another at home. I should stop now. HC/PD: The Magistrate seems to be a fairly familiar charac­ ter in novels about immigration: he is a well-educated, elite Zimbabwean ‘reduced’ to working at menial jobs in the UK as his qualifications are not recognized. Farai (the Mathematician) is quite different – rich, confident and learning skills that he imagines will allow him to be a success when he returns. What was your purpose in creating Farai as one of the three main characters? TH: Folks like Farai exist, the kind born with a silver spoon and a red carpet laid out ahead of them right up to the grave. I wanted these characters to be very different in their backgrounds, and these differences would play out in how they see the world and interact with it. The Magistrate and the Maestro might be engaged in an existential struggle, but for Farai the Mathematician, the UK, and the world itself, is nothing but one big playground. His reality makes him blind to the struggles of those around him – this is only natural. I think the novel as a project is richer for

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having the one guy who does not give a fuck and will not fit readily into that easy stereotype of the struggling darkskinned migrant. HC/PD: After the Magistrate’s daughter, Chenai, gives birth to her daughter, Ruvarashe, her baby’s rukuvhute (umbilical cord) is buried in the family’s garden as a way of ‘binding Ruvarashe and, by extension, themselves to this place’ (241). This carrying over of a Zimbabwean tradition into the diaspora suggests a double rootedness. The Magistrate, though, doesn’t share this. He has his roots in one place and the city he lives in is ‘a city that he dared not call home’ (261). Is it easier for a younger generation to feel connected in ways that are not to do with ‘place’ or that are multi-placed? TH: I agree with your observation that the Magistrate is merely serving his time here; he is rooted in Zimbabwe and will return. This is not a bad thing – there are people who do not want to be assimilated into western society, while they may live there all the same. I would contend that westerners are worse in this regard, settling in other people’s countries and not bothering to learn the language or integrate with the locals, but that’s a different story for a different day. Young people (speaking as a dude who was once young) tend to go with the flow, they make easy friendships, build intense social networks out of thin air, and so the way they navigate the world and perceive it is very different, because they aren’t carrying the baggage of prior experience. This stupidity on the part of the young translates into a kind of fluidity because they aren’t yet set into a particular character or identity, and this is a good thing, particularly in a world that grows ever more interconnected. HC/PD: The Magistrate and the Maestro walk or run through the city. Your descriptions of the Edinburgh

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they traverse are wonderfully evocative. The idea of the flâneur seems to permeate the novel. Although flânerie has been used in postcolonial fiction to indicate belonging or developing a sense of ownership, the Magistrate and the Maestro seem to have more negative experiences. Never­ theless, there is a sense that the city is important in their lives. Does writing/walking the city give you and your characters an Edinburgh or Scottish identity? TH: I like the idea of the flâneur in literature; it is a great way of exploring spaces and the individual within them. But, while it may seem my characters subscribe to this ideal, you will notice their movement through the city mostly has practical purposes. The Magistrate walks to flee his wife at home and after that he sees different parts of the city as he commutes to work, Farai is always on the prowl, whether going to parties or for his studies, and the Maestro runs primarily for exercise and later he moves around because he becomes a tramp. These guys explore the city vigorously and actively, but they might not be the romanticised gentlemen flâneurs they appear to be at first glance. Again, I think this is in line with my idea that the novel constantly undermines whatever position it occupies. Apart from the Magistrate’s daughter Chenai who seems to be morphing into a Zimbo-Scot hybrid, I think the rest of the characters are Edinburghers in the sense that I think adopting the identity of a city or postcode is less problematic than shifting national allegiances. Farai has no interest in that whatsoever, the Magistrate could not bear it, and the Maestro is incapable of making that transition. Perhaps the character Scott may be the only one who truly manages to do this, but it comes at great cost to himself. I think it is natural for a book set in a city to contain so much movement because living in a city demands it, but modern cities in their cosmopolitanism often occupy a different psychological space to the large swathes of countryside which are more in line with an idealised national character.

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HC/PD: Early in the novel, Chenai tries and fails to read Harare North, Brian Chikwava’s novel about Zimbabweans in London. She asks why Chikwava wrote the novel if he ‘cannae be bovvered to learn proper English’ (4). Like many Zimbabweans of your generation, you had a formal education in Standard English. Now, you, Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo experiment with language, using varieties of English and, in the case of The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician, Shona, street language, text messaging. We would be interested to know whether Shona has influenced the novel’s language and rhythm, and whether you think there are both freedoms and constraints in this experimentation and hybridity. TH: My good fellow, one quickly realizes the learnt experience of a language is very different from the lived, spoken reality of it. The English speak the worst English imaginable, and the Scots only fare a little better, if at all. I think in terms of formal linguistic experimentation Chikwava and Bulawayo do really exciting things. In my case, my reasons for playing with language in this novel were very practical, perhaps even mundane. The three titular characters, while in the same city, have different lived realities, so the language and grammar, right up to mechanical issues, punctuation and stylistic preferences, had to be different for all three. For example, the language in the Magistrate’s section is a lot more formal, classical even, in line with his age and former status as a member of the judiciary, whereas the free-flowing urbane slang in the Mathematician’s reflects his hip character. The dense, claustrophobic text in the Maestro’s section is because the guy is often in his own head with limited engagement with the outside world. When I first drafted the work, it was one integrated conventional novel, but somehow that didn’t work. I simply could not see these three characters inhabiting the same linguistic universe, particularly when the points of view changed, so

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‘Zimbabweanness Today’: An Interview with Tendai Huchu  207

I had to make the necessary technical adjustments to the book. Shona is my base code, and while I have some degree of fluency in English, Shona is the default-factory operating system my mind is programmed in, English an optional secondary software retrofitted a little later in life, so it is running off a Shona foundation and I think this is reflected in my sentence construction. I don’t see any constraints within experimentation, because the whole idea is to free oneself from pre-set rules and create something new. HC/PD: The Magistrate, like his daughter, doesn’t like Harare North; he prefers facts to fiction. However, through­ out the novel, the Zimbabweans criticize the western media either because Zimbabwe is off the radar or because it is only represented stereotypically by keywords such as ‘DESPOT, BASKET CASE …’ (85) that Farai knows by heart. Can fiction cut through the keywords approach and provide a more nuanced representation of Zimbabwe than conventional reporting? TH: I think Chikwava has a fatwa on my head at the moment. There is a running joke I have with the guy about my first reaction when I picked up Harare North in Waterstones on Princes Street and was shocked by how ‘badly written’ I thought it was. Hell, it was only the second time that I picked it up (on a subsequent visit) that I bought it and read it and saw what the guy was doing, the genius of it all. I still couldn’t resist taking a pot-shot in my novel. Fiction is great because it reveals truth through un­ truths. Fact makes claims that human-level intellect is seldom actually able to provide. The media claims to pres­ ent us with ‘fact’, but various studies have shown that this ‘fact’ is often presented through biased language, whether intentional or not, which alters the meaning of these ‘facts’. For this reason, I actually prefer FOX News, or the ZBC, or

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Russia Today, because when I watch these channels, I can immediately spot the bias and the slant in their reportage. The other mainstream western channels are so ubiquitous and powerful, that half the time we take what they say as received truths from infallible organs, and I think this is dangerous. Good fiction demands nuance and a presentation of complexity which allows the reader to have more meaningful engagement with the text, should they so choose. Fiction demands criticism and analysis in ways the news would rather not have us do. Bad fiction, though, is still possible, and, fortunately, it operates at a level of stereotypes, so it is easy to identify as being something other than art. Now, I am not saying the news is a bad thing, or that the world would be better off without it – that’s ridiculous. What I am saying is that we should be mindful enough to make up our own minds about what’s really going on in the world we live in. I know I probably sound like one of those conspiracy theory nuts by just saying this, but, hey ho. HC/PD: As we read the novel, we’re aware that it’s post­ modern and cosmopolitan with interlocking stories, frag­ men­ta­tion and intertextuality. It comes as a shock, therefore, when we reach the end, and find that you’ve brought us back to a world of party politics, opposing ideologies and dirty tricks. This suggests that there is no escape that, even in the diaspora, Zimbabweans could become victims of the state they thought they had left behind. We’re curious to know why you wrote such a pessimistic ending. TH: It’s hard to explain this without giving the game away for the reader who might not yet have read the text, but here goes … There are many hints and clues right at the start of the novel about what is really going on, then the book pivots and takes you on a wild goose chase. I hope you noticed how Alfonso was the first character the book introduced and then, inexplicably, he is relegated into a

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‘Zimbabweanness Today’: An Interview with Tendai Huchu  209

secondary role, which undermines the usual convention of introducing the lead character first. It was a lot of fun for me, dragging the reader in the wrong direction, but the whole idea was to try and show how this political and ideological world is ‘inescapable’ because it is the superstructure that governs our very ordinary existence. In my work, I often find that I am trying to bring the grand and the mundane together, and this is part of that attempt. These Zimbabweans are not victims, Alfonso, for instance, is a player in the great game, so are the rest, with varying levels of active engagement, and this is how politics plays out all over the world. Refusing to engage or being blind to political reality is still engagement because power transmits itself through politics and we are all subject to it – we simply don’t have a choice in the matter. I will agree that the ending, or shall we say endings because there are three conclusions in the text, which in itself is made up of three separate novellas, is pessimistic. I don’t seem to do ‘happy ever after’ so well, but who knows with the next novel maybe I’ll … HC/PD: In a recent issue of Kwani? focused on Kenya and migration, Billy Kahora writes that ‘the Diaspora is key to the understanding of being Kenyan at several levels’ (16). If ‘being Kenyan’ were to be replaced by ‘being Zimbabwean’ would this statement resonate with you? TH: I think Kahora is onto something here. Zimbabwe’s migration though is very different from the Kenyan experience, because in the Zimbabwean case we have mass migration and depopulation, whereas Kenya, for all the citizens it may lose abroad, it more than makes up for them in terms of the large refugee and immigrant population it hosts from several continents. I would imagine the Zimbabwean case (if the various estimates aired in the media are to be believed a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population has moved abroad) is more akin to the great Irish migration. I

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went to a school in Harare called Churchill Boys High and there were 19 of us in my stream doing ‘A’ Levels when we finished high school. Of the 19, 16 of us live abroad, 2 are in Harare and the last committed suicide in Zimbabwe a few years after we left school. That’s fucking crazy right? How can anyone claim to understand Zimbabwe without understanding these kids who were like, ‘Hasta la vista, will the last person out turn off the lights’? So I think the concept of what it means to be Zimbabwean no longer centres on the particular geographical location between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. The family as the base unit of the state is now fragmented in ways that have not been seen before at this scale. The government responded to this development in fascinating ways, barring dualcitizenship and the right to vote from its diaspora, which it suspects of having the wrong ideological leaning, and, paradoxically, encouraging remittances and investment from the same group of people. I don’t think we have the time to fully investigate the dynamic between the diaspora and home populations, and I suspect this is something we will only begin to understand, 50, maybe even 100 years from now once the dust settles, if at all. But, if you ask me, I think some sort of collective schizophrenia or some kind of insanity defines Zimbabweanness today.

WORKS CITED Bulawayo, Noviolet, We Need New Names. London: Vintage, 2014 [2013]. Chikwava, Brian. Harare North. London: Vintage, 2010 [2009]. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Demons: A Novel in Three Parts. Trans. Robert A. Maguire. London: Penguin, 2008 [1871-2]. Huchu, Tendai. The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. Bula­wayo: amaBooks, 2014. Kahora, Billy, ed. Kwani? Nairobi: Kwani Trust, 2012.

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Featured Articles

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Remembering Early Issues of African Literature Today* BERNTH LINDFORS

African Literature Today, launched in print in the UK by Eldred Jones in 1968, was the successor to a Bulletin of the Association for African Literature in English that he had started editing in a modest cyclostyled format four years earlier in Sierra Leone as an outlet for scholarly commentary on the new literatures that were emerging in Anglophone Africa. The Bulletin wasn’t the first journal published in Africa to carry literary criticism. It had been preceded by Black Orpheus in 1957, Transition in 1961, and Abbia in Cameroon in 1963, as well as by a number of campus magazines such as Penpoint at Makerere University in Kampala in 1958, The Horn at University College Ibadan in 1958, and The Muse at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka in 1963. But in these other journals, discourse on literature was a sideline, not the primary focus. Eldred Jones, one of the earliest university teachers of African literature, was also one of the earliest scholars to devote serious scrutiny to what African writers were producing. And through his pioneering editorial efforts he made it possible for others to express their ideas on this interesting new phenomenon too. His initiatives helped to turn African literary studies into a proper academic discipline. But he was not the only one promoting this kind of cultural activity. Scholars elsewhere who were beginning to study the emergence of new English language literatures in areas of the world outside Britain and America were 213

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also engaged in developing vehicles for communication of their ideas. The 1960s saw the founding of a Journal of Commonwealth Literature in England in 1965 as well as a Conference on British Commonwealth Literature Newsletter in the United States in 1966, which in 1971 was expanded into a journal called World Literature Written in English. An older American journal, Books Abroad, founded as early as 1927, became World Literature Today in 1976. In addition, three Anglophone literature journals in India – The Literary Criterion, The Literary Half-Yearly, and The Commonwealth Journal – all published in Mysore, became increasingly international, and Canadians established Ariel in 1970 as their contribution to the broadening of English literary studies. In the process the word Commonwealth, a hangover from the British Empire, tended to be displaced by the word Postcolonial, which included non-British territories as well. In the same period, a number of journals dealing primarily with Anglophone African literature began to appear: The Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts in 1966, Nexus in 1966, Busara in 1968, The Conch in 1969, Ba Shiru and Research in African Literatures in 1970, Okike in 1971, Benin Review in 1974, and many more later. Some of these did not last long, but they were soon replaced by others, in what Kole Omotoso once called the ‘Abiku complex’ in African journal publishing,1 comparing the evanescent nature of these publications to that of spirit children who live awhile, then die young and get reborn, usually to the same cursed mother. African Literature Today managed to resist that curse, though it too has had its fallow periods when its very survival seemed uncertain, even after changing from a biannual to an annual pattern of publication. It has produced only 33 issues over 48 years, having been saved from extinction mainly by steadfast support from James Currey Publishers, now a branch of Boydell and Brewer. Research in African

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Literatures, by contrast, now in its 47th year of publication, has produced 126 issues, having grown from a biannual in its first six years, to a triannual in its next three years, and to a quarterly for its remaining 38 years. The difference has been robust institutional support, first from the University of Texas at Austin in its first twenty years, and then from both Indiana University and Ohio State University for the past 27 years. In its first three years RAL was given away free of charge to individuals and institutions worldwide. This became an expensive gesture so subscriptions were introduced in Europe and America thereafter, but the journal remained free of charge in Africa for another three years until even that liberal level of generosity had to be curtailed. Nevertheless, it was an excellent way to start a journal, for African scholars who saw it on their campus quickly began to submit manuscripts for publication. I could tell you many stories about Research in African Literatures in those early years, but the only stories I can tell about African Literature Today concern my own experience with it. I am still proud of the fact that an essay of mine on Achebe’s proverbs, written while I was a doctoral student, appeared in the opening pages of the first issue of this journal.2 A year later my essay on the popular fiction of Cyprian Ekwensi was featured in the third issue,3 and it is possible that these two essays, perhaps more than anything else, helped me to find a job teaching African literature at the University of Texas at Austin. I was quite pleased with my progress until I received issue number five in which I discovered that a Nigerian doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison disagreed with my interpretation of Ekwensi. Indeed, he believed I had no right to comment on him at all because I was not a Nigerian, had never interviewed Ekwensi, and didn’t know enough about his background, education, and involvement in urban life. Moreover, he felt that I, like most other Western critics, preferred African works set in

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the bush because these reflected primitive ways rather than ‘the Africa of today’ in all its complexity.4 In other words, I was blinded by my rampant racist ethnoentrism and was seeking the overthrow of an icon of modern African literature by attacking Cyprian Ekwensi. As if that wasn’t enough, another article in the same issue took issue with my views on Achebe’s proverbs, claiming that by examining them outside their context, without considering the ‘total linguistic structure’ in which they were deployed, I came to erroneous conclusions about what they signified. This was the argument of a young Welsh critic who seemed to be saying that my approach to Achebe’s oral art wasn’t primitive enough; I ought to have looked for deeper cultural meanings embedded in such verbal nuggets.5 This response at least did not question my morals or intentions. It simply presented another way of interpreting the same body of data. It was a reasoned argument, not a hatchet job. I attempted to answer both critics in an essay entitled ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’ in the seventh issue of African Literature Today, in which I asserted that no critic was capable of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth about a literary work, and that metacriticism – that is, criticism of critics – should emanate from the intellect, not the spleen, and should always have as its ultimate aim a true illumination of a work of art, albeit seen from an inherently limited perspective.6 I thought this controversy was a useful exchange, especially for me, forcing me to take into account alternative points of view while framing a response to them. There is only one small disappointment I experienced when contributing to these early issues of African Literature Today. In that same fifth issue in which I had been attacked from two sides, it happened that an essay of mine on T.M. Aluko’s satirical fiction appeared in which I had characterized him a ‘tickling gadfly’, a term that seemed

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to me to be an apt description of his satirical method.7 Unfortunately a misprint in that issue transformed ‘tickling gadfly’ into ‘trickling gadfly’, suggesting I was comparing him to an insect unable to control its urine. I found this greatly embarrassing, and I can only imagine what Aluko must have thought of this unflattering epithet, but I didn’t want to complain to Eldred Jones about it, for I knew that at that point in his life he was starting to go blind and no doubt must have employed someone else to do the proofreading of the journal for him, though I expect he might have been highly amused to hear of such a ridiculous blooper. I continued to contribute essays to African Literature Today subsequently, though not at the same pace, but whenever I revisited Nigeria in later years and gave lectures and interviews on university campuses, I was peppered with questions about whether any of my early opinions of Achebe and especially Ekwensi had changed in the interim. They had not forgotten my pontifications on the pages of African Literature Today from years before. There was less curiosity about what I had said about Aluko, and I was grateful for that until I was invited at the University of Calabar to sit in as a witness at the defense of a doctoral dissertation on Aluko and heard my misprinted description of him repeated verbatim as part of a survey of the critical reception of his works. This made me even more fully aware of the profound influence that African Literature Today was having on academic discourse in Nigeria and presumably throughout other parts of Anglophone Africa as well. It was a source that students and their teachers relied on. So my engagement with this journal in its formative years may have given me a larger audience in Africa than I deserved. It also enabled me to connect instantly with university colleagues who were among the first generation to venture to teach African literature. And I met a lot of

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African writers along the way, some of whom became good friends. I still recall with pleasure an occasion at a conference in Sweden when a tall individual approached me and introduced himself by saying, ‘I’m that cowboy you once wrote about’. This was Cyprian Ekwensi, who was recalling what I had written in African Literature Today about Wild West influences on the adventures depicted in his novella Juju Rock. He was not angry. He apparently had by then forgiven my youthful indiscretions, and since I too by then had forgiven his, we had a very enjoyable relationship thereafter. The same is true of the two critics who attacked me in issue number five. We are now the best of friends, having mellowed with age into a state of geriatric bliss. And as a consequence, we all remain in full agreement that what African Literature Today hath joined together, no one can ever put asunder.

NOTES * Round Table Presentation on ALT Series at the 42nd Annual Confer­ence of the African Literature Association (6-9 April, 2016), Atlanta, Georgia. 1 Cited in Bernth Lindfors, Loaded Vehicles: Studies in African Literary Media (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996), 45. Print. 2 ‘The Palm-Oil with which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten,’ African Literature Today 1 (1968): 3-18. Print. 3 ‘Cyprian Ekwensi: An African Popular Novelist,’ African Literature Today 3 (1969): 2-14. Print. 4 Ernest Emenyonu, ‘African Literature: What does it take to be its Critic?’ African Literature Today 5 (1971): 1-11. Print. 5 Gareth Griffiths, ‘Language and Action in the Novels of Chinua Achebe,’ African Literature Today 5 (1971): 88-105. Print. 6 ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant,’African Literature Today 7 (1975): 53-64. Print. 7 ‘T. M. Aluko: Nigerian Satirist,’ African Literature Today 5 (1971): 41-53. Print.

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African Literature Today Its History, Story, Impact & Continuing Journey* EUSTACE PALMER

As we were going to press for ALT 33, we heard the sad news of the passing of Marjorie Jones, devoted wife of Professor Eldred Jones, and co-editor for several years of African Literature Today. She was 89, a year younger than Eldred, and since he had been blind for about thirty years, she was literally his eyes, reading books and articles to him, doing his writing and editing, driving him around and shepherding him to conferences. She was in her own right a significant literary figure who, first as editorial assistant and then a co-editor of ALT, helped to shape the nature of that journal and determine its future. She was also co-editor, with Sheikh Umarr Kamarah, of a collection of poems in Krio, the Lingua Franca of Sierra Leone. But as if that was not bad enough, I received news, just before leaving for this conference, that Eldred’s house, a majestic building at Leicester a few miles from Freetown and Fourah Bay College, with a beautiful view of the estuary of the Sierra Leone River, was almost burnt down in a fire started by some careless persons who were burning brush for farming. Eldred and Marjorie had lived in that house for more than thirty years. Marjorie, who took great pride in her skills as a designer, played a great role in designing both the structure and the interior of the house. The house contained, to my knowledge, a number of priceless works of art, such as paintings and sculptures and other memorabilia from their several trips abroad. According to 219

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the reports I received, none of these could be salvaged. But most heartbreaking of all for a scholar of Eldred’s reputation and caliber, was that his entire library, containing all his books, articles, important documents and other papers, was completely destroyed. That this should have happened to a man who turned 91 this past January, and who had lost his life’s companion and total support only a few months earlier, was absolutely devastating. It is almost too trite to say that one hopes the Almighty will give him the strength to bear the blow. After that sad piece of news, let’s get down to African Literature Today. Some of you may know that it started as a very slim journal in 1968, published from Fourah Bay College with Eldred as editor. Heinemann Educational Books was the publisher, and the early issues (which came out twice yearly if my memory serves me right) contained about 60 pages. Even though it was a relatively slim publication, the articles published and the general tone of the journal played a considerable role in shaping the direction of the criticism and analysis of the bourgeoning African literature. Issue number 2 of January 1969 con­ tained the following four articles: ‘James Ngugi as Novelist’, by Ime Ikiddeh; ‘Camara Laye: Idealist and Mystic’, by A.C. Brench; ‘Africa in Negro-American Poetry to 1929’, by Michael Furay; and ‘Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters – Reading Notes’, by Eldred Jones. There were two reviews: ‘David Rubadiri The Bride Price and Legson Kayira The Looming Shadow’, by Gerald Moore, and ‘Aimé Césaire Return to My Native Land’, by Abiola Irele. Most interestingly, there was a letter containing a very acerbic comment by Ime Ikiddeh on an article written by Ronald Dathorne on Okigbo’s Heavensgate in the first issue of the journal. Though Ikiddeh did not mince his words in his harsh criticism of Dathorne’s effort (he at one point claimed that Dathorne had ‘overstretched his imagination to the point of absurdity’), I remember Eldred commenting

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that, taken together, the two contributions gave a very good assessment of the measure of Okigbo’s achievement in the poem. It can be seen from this that the early ALT was devoted to analysis of the work of writers that are now an established part of the canon and contained the healthy argument and discussion that became typical of the journal. In this regard, I remember, in particular, two sets of exchanges. One was between myself and Mrs Adeola James who wrote a rather unfriendly review of my first book, An Introduction to the African Novel, a review which elicited an equally spirited response from my humble self. The other was an engaging conversation between two pioneers, now great names in the discussion of African literature, Ernest Emenyonu and Bernth Lindfors, about the quality of Ekwensi’s work and the nature of his achievement. Although Emenyonu and Lindfors were on opposite sides of the critical fence, so to speak, their exchange, taken all in all, gave a pretty solid assessment of the true quality of Ekwensi’s art and the problems confronting his readers. All these exchanges highlighted the issues facing scholars in the evaluation of African literature and the parameters by which that literature should be judged. It was quite obvious that African Literature Today was playing a major role in shaping the direction of the criticism of African literature. I came on board as part of the editorial team in 1982 as Review Editor. Shortly after, it was decided that I should be appointed Associate Editor and Marjorie Jones should be Editorial Assistant. This meant that Marjorie would, in those pre-computer days in so far as Africa was concerned, retype those articles that needed to be retyped before the entire manuscript was forwarded to Heinemann. It was also decided that ALT would be published once a year in book form, and each volume would be devoted to a particular theme. Of course, this had advantages and disadvantages.

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One major advantage was that ALT, in each issue, could concentrate on a particular trend in the development of African literature. I was particularly proud of ALT 15, which was solely devoted to African women writers and brought the achievement of emerging women writers like Mariama Bâ to the fore. However, a major drawback was that the kind of healthy exchange that had been going on in the discussion of African writing, such as that between Lindfors and Emen­ yonu, was inhibited. For instance, if one wanted to react to the views expressed on a woman writer in ALT 15 one could not until another issue devoted to women’s writing. Of course, this kind of problem could have been solved by having a discussion section. As far as the dynamics of having two editors was concerned, the arrangement was that Eldred and I would edit alternate volumes. For ALT 15 for instance, I selected the reviewers for the articles, forwarded the articles to them, and then, in consultation with Eldred, made the final selection of those to be published. I also corresponded with the authors about necessary changes and so on. I would also do the editing and write the editorial, and Eldred would do the same for the next volume. I left Sierra Leone for the United States in 1992, but my connection with African Literature Today actually ceased in 1994 when Marjorie’s position was consolidated as Co-editor. When Eldred could no longer continue, Ernest Emenyonu was appointed editor. In terms of the future, I think ALT could play a very important role in bringing forward new writers. It has done so to a certain extent. Volume 20, for instance, was devoted to ‘New Trends and Generations’. However, more could still be done. There is a sense in which we the critics have been stuck in the past and continue to concentrate on the works of the established writers like Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi and Aidoo, ignoring the new literature emerging

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from places like Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. We really should be concerned with African literature TODAY. Secondly, ALT could engage in a serious discussion of what constitutes African literature TODAY. Apart from writers based on the African continent, there are now hordes of writers of African ancestry based in the African Diaspora, like Aminatta Forna and Delia Jarrett-Macauley, some of whom have never been to Africa or have spent very little time in Africa. Must they also be considered African writers, and can we extend the same parameters to a discussion of their work that we have done to autonomous African writing? African Literature Today should also consider the possibility of going on-line, so that it could reach hordes of African readers who might be unable to purchase the, for them, rather expensive volumes. That way, ALT would continue to grow and adapt and be extremely relevant, as it has always been.

NOTE * Round Table Presentation on ALT Series at the 42nd Annual Con­ ference of the African Literature Association (6-9 April, 2016), Atlanta, Georgia.

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On African Literature Today*

HELEN CHUKWUMA

The beauty and continuous relevance of African Literature Today lies first in its title. The title gives it currency and therefore responsibility. African literature today becomes past in its tomorrow. Thus it has to ‘gather these rose buds while it may’ by continuously seeking out trending ideas and styles of their communication, theories, themes and tendencies in the creative production and articulation of African Literature. African Literature is not realized or experienced as a static mold, a fossilized entity or at best a follower in servitude of other world literatures. No; after the initial floundering of writers to come to terms with the definition of what they do i.e African literature in that memorable conference in Kampala, Uganda in 1962, the writers found their voice.

Origin and Antecedents Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and the new intelligentsia gave expres­ sion to their political thoughts and propaganda through the print media. In addition, there were budding writers who sought a medium for their creative impulse. The fifties was the age of experimentation in creative writing marked with defiance and pride in the new learning of a foreign tongue through which communication was possible. As undergraduates in the early sixties, we grew up with such magazines and journals as Drum magazine of South Africa 224

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founded in 1951 and we read snippets of narratives, poems, profiles of important personalities as well as pictures of women scantily dressed in supposedly seductive poses. Though started by white South Africans, it quickly slipped into black management. I remember such names as Bloke Modisane, Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi, Arthur Maimame, Ezekiel Mphalele and Mazizi Kunene. Writers were being formed there. Then we had Transition magazine which took on a more serious outlook in projecting letters and literature. Founded by Rajat Neogy in 1961 in Uganda, East Africa, it was closed in 1976 for lack of sustainability. Wole Soyinka served as its editor in 1973 before it was closed down in 1976. It is now housed in America by Henry Louis Bates who nestled it in Harvard’s Hutchins Center for Africa and Diaspora Research. It has expanded to have a diasporan dimension. We had Okike journal established at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, edited by Chinua Achebe and devoted solely to creative works. It later added book reviews and criticism in a segment of the journal. That passed. Then we had Conch journal still in America introduced by Sunday Anozie in the early seventies. That journal, too, passed. Research in African Literatures is a relatively new arrival, founded in 1970 with Bernth Lindfors as editor in Austin, Texas. It is now housed in Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Why am I going down memory lane? Because this is the best way to situate Africa Literature Today. It was founded in 1968 and it is waxing strong even at incipient old age. It was founded by Heinemann, London to reflect and accommodate the new wave of critical exigesis pouring out from the universities drunk in the new wine of African creative writing. It started as a bi-annual publication but in 1971 it transited to an annual publication. Indelible in

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our minds is the conjugal paired editorship of Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones and his wife Marjorie. The journal was housed in Fourah Bay Sierra Leone and it was a mark of prestige to be published in ALT. The pair maintained a rigid format as I was to learn when in the seventies, I sent an article to ALT and I was roundly cautioned that the journal has stipulated themes for each issue and that I should abide by them. I developed cold feet thereafter. Some fitting tribute must be paid to this pair of editors as devoting an issue of ALT to their life, work and times as a memoir. Kindly note. What has become a characteristic feature of ALT editors is the conjugal pair of editorship; first Eldred and Marjorie and now Ernest and Pat. This is healthy and sustaining. We have an adage in Igbo ‘Odapu na isi, ubu ebulu’ If it falls from the head, the shoulder carries. This purports a safe anchor for ALT. For indeed when the editor emeritus Durosimi Jones’s vision started failing, it was the wife who fielded the much needed support. In recent editions of ALT, we have seen major inroads made in the sphere of trends in African Literature. Some of these are History, War, Women writers, New writers, Children’s literature a much neglected field and others. Of note is the introduction of Film in ALT 28. This is a welcome development because of its robust practice especially in Francophone and Anglophone West African states. A recent trend of great interest is the Returnee in African and Diasporic literature. This has fittingly engaged art to reality. We commend the editors for their work and commitment to our common legacy. Our journey so far is highly commendable. What is left now is how to preserve this great legacy. May we suggest a museum to house all copies and drafts and all accompaniment of ALT with videos and scripts? Can we digitalize it in electronic format since the modern world is fighting shy of books and book-related artifacts.

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Can and will ALT organize and publish a short story and poetry competition on select topics as war in Africa, Women Trafficking, the Environment? How about Trans­ lations starting with English/ French editions? This will increase our readership. These are my thoughts for the way forward. Congratu­ lations to ALT and its dynamic editors and editorial board and in Nigerian pidgin humor, I wish you more ‘Jeleen’ to your elbow.

NOTE * Round Table Presentation on ALT Series at the 42nd Annual Conference of the African Literature Association (6-9 April, 2016), Atlanta, Georgia.

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Literary Supplement

4 POEMS BY TSITSI ELLA JAJI * The Not-Jobbing Blues I am jasper to your Cheops. Peace be upon you. And also with us. Hoisting her voice onto the screen, she squalls: “I passed GCSE in 1986. My small boy is now old enough to marry, and I have never held a job.” No sphinx before onions, I squint like pity. I sleep in Tunisia but I wake with the sun. The world is all a-twitter but the schism is the form. Dear Lion of Alexandria. Dear Desert, o dear Ra. The land of immolation, o the rising stench of garbage. The placard’s dilemma remains: I AM A MAN, and yet, what always ends as it begins? I ask you this: Ain’t I a woman? Academe It always comes as a surprise that I am here. 229

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Manual for Initiation into the Zebra Sisterhood Try to avoid the fool who mistakes a zebra for a pack mule. That fool is probably a jack ass. Get too close and you may get a kick in your nuts. (So: grow a pair, and join the tribe). Benin Bronze After Elisabeth Frink Our face is one thick gild, old metal screens our here. Our now reflects your now: an oily light besmears us all. Live matter slicks our temples: we are sheened. We take umbrage, bronze it. We, this brazen bloc. Night flares to light our way and sear our nostrils. Unthrown, we chase our goldenblinkered lover. Justice stares as if to meet our purple gaze. Clavicle to clavicle, we shall overcome one day. * Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s poetry has appeared in Munyori, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, and Bitter Oleander Review. She is an Associate Professor of English at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. All poems © Tsitsi Ella Jaji and reproduced by kind permission of the author.

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Reviews

Xavier Garnier and Pierre Halen (eds), Littératures africaines et paysage Etudes littéraires africaines 39, June 2015, 263p, np ISSN 0769-4563

This rich volume brings together nine contributions on the landscape in African literature, considering novels covering parts of the African continent from Senegal to South Africa, in order to examine the relevance of the concept of landscape to the study of African literatures. The volume first surveys the treatment of landscapes in European history from the Renaissance to the Romantic period, alluding to a Western memory bank, a kind of literary and artistic baggage. It reveals the gulf between this European literary and artistic construction and reading of landscapes, informed by Renaissance models, and the African perspective, and shows how inadequate the European reading grid is in its approach of African landscapes, as evidenced by colonial literature. The authors take readers through various types of landscapes, either seen from above or fragmented pictures, highlighting the difference of treatment between African and European approaches, before summarising the listed approaches and considering the place of landscape in the various cultures. This is convincingly illustrated in Malanda’s contribution on imaginary Edenic landscapes in children’s literature – a study of three books published in the 2000s and 231

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presenting a colonial type of rapport between humans and animals – echoing the colonial past in their portrayal of heroes protecting wild animals in Eastern Africa. While the author denounces both colonisation and the destruction of nature, her text confirms the huge difference between the African and European perception of landscape. Savannah is presented here as a wild animal habitat, where humans are not welcome, and its destruction as a crime. Natural reserves and animal parks are described as a reparation, restoring the precolonial past, while they were actually initiated by colonials, which makes these novels a product of the colonial enterprise. While the texts from the colonial period offer visual descriptions of landscapes, influenced by European traditions, Samin’s study of the Karoo landscape in South African literature, a beautiful reflection highlighting the writers’ desire to penetrate the landscape and identify with it, vividly exposes the challenge posed by these landscapes to Afrikaners. It illustrates these writers’ search for a language to adequately recreate the Karoo landscape and the failure of their texts to conjure anything but an empty, utterly alien, unknown and wild space. Rogez’s contribution focuses on South African literature and on the farm novel, a genre developed by Afrikaners, signalling the mastery of the land by colonisers inspired by American pioneers and revealing the relationship between identity and land management. For her, post-apartheid writers now evolve a new vision of landscape, a fusion between urban and semi-rural landscapes. While Senghor and other Negritude writers have developed a hybrid landscape which, while influenced by Western models, tries to offer a more African version of the concept, the volume, after a brief mention of the Negritude movement, tracks the African authors’ fight to extract exoticism from African landscapes, invoking authentic African landscapes in a bid to stem the flow

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of distorted images misrepresenting the continent. Riesz’s study of Couchoro’s treatment of landscape in his 1929 novel, L’Esclave, reveals the influence of beliefs on people’s apprehending of landscapes and establishes a tight correlation between nature, landscape and culture. African writers respond to the Western images of Africa with new, close-up, multi-sensory and different visions of the con­ tinent. Landscapes, structured by the peoples’ language and culture, and read through their memory database, are powerful identity-boosters and markers. They also sketch the evolution of the literary treatment of landscape, following the development of photography and cinema, and now involves all senses, including touch and smell, as shown in Labou Tansi’s multisensory approach to Congo’s rivers and forests. The authors reveal how different this concept is in African literature where people are given the pride of place while landscapes remain in the background. Sela considers the writing down of African landscapes in Ousmane Sembene from the past to the present and writers’ political choices, with the introduction of machinery and the new man ushering the continent into modernity. In the end, a number of landscapes – institutional, cultural and identitymarking, literary, political and spiritual – are considered, and presented as a subjective vision and a personal creation of the writer. The varia which follow, on a Rwandan survivor’s testi­ mony and on the myth of Pokou the Ashanti queen, com­ plete the study of landscape with related issues of geno­ cide, migration and exile. The last seventy pages enrich this valuable sum with some forty book and journal reviews, bibliographical notes and abstracts of doctoral theses defended in 2014. FRANCOISE UGOCHUKWU The Open University

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Mukoma wa Ngugi. Mrs. Shaw (A Novel) Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015, 235pp, $29.95 ISBN 978-0-8214-2143-7 hardback

In 2004, the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o returned to Kenya, his homeland, after twenty-two years of political exile. The much publicized exile’s return of Kenya’s preeminent writer and intellectual was in part to highlight the new impetus of change happening with the election of a new government in Kenya, led by Mwai Kibaki. The election had swept away the old order of the KANU party of Arap Moi, who in 1977, had jailed Ngugi for staging a play that was critical of the government. Ngugi moved to exile in 1982 following a great threat to his life, and from exile, had remained one of the fiercest critics of the old guard that emerged from the end of colonialism in Africa. Ngugi’s return to what was presumably a ‘new Kenya’ was heralded as very symbolic in amplifying the change taking place. Ngugi’s arrival underpinned the new promise of a beneficial social order that would mark those new beginnings. The novelist thus returned from exile in a much publicized way, and was roaringly received. Part of Ngugi’s itinerary on this journey of return included a cycle of lectures and readings from his satirical epic written originally in Gikuyu, now published as Wizard of the Crow; a satire of power that looks and skewers Kenya’s political buffoonery in cracking, scatological prose. However, one night during this return, on 14 August , at his apartment at the Norfolk Towers, the novelist and his wife, Njeri, were attacked, and the consequence of that attack led to a broad scandal, theories of conspiracy, and certainly trauma, of the kind that needs expiation. It raised the question, ‘what is the meaning of return?’ for the exile separated from the homeland; forced to flee from a haunting history. Ngugi wa Thiong’o has yet to write that novel of expiation, but his son Mukoma wa Ngugi seems to have appropriated

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the fundamental questions raised by his father’s return to Kenya and the violence that marked that return to craft a very intimate story that shares a deep correspondence with the facts of that lived experience. Mukoma wa Ngugi’s novel, Mrs. Shaw, seems indeed to be driven – inspired by that experience of violence and trauma that accompanied his father’s homecoming after over two decades of exile, first in the UK, and for much of the time in the United States. Mrs. Shaw is a story of friendship and the thawing of friendship; it is about tragic love, and about the impossibility of return. It is about exile, and the strange, lingering hunger for home; it is about the obligation to return and complete a cycle from which one had been abruptly, viciously claimed. The rupture of time in exile is always evident in that gap of fading and difficult memory that makes return almost psychologically impossible. But that is not the entire story: it is equally a story about sacrifice and the quest for redemption. It is not a nostalgic story. It is a story that casts a harsh glance at the meaning of the tragic hero. It is the story of a fictional African country, Kwatee, in the grip of political change from which the novelist discerns a profound futility, given that the historical conditions that had shaped Africa’s postcolonial experience of nation-making are like unsettled ghosts. It is precisely to settle those ghosts that made Kalumba to return to Kwatee, from where he had been separated after being part of a political struggle. It is all too familiar, this story, this condition: Africa’s political struggles are dreary affairs. They are even drearier these days in novels, where their explorations seem already exhausted since Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones, and Why Are We so Blest. What we do see is Kalumba, ten years already in Wisconsin, studying for his doctoral degree, where he meets with an old Kenyan hand, a former British settler, Mrs. Shaw. Mrs. Shaw is an interesting case: she had lived in Kwatee, this

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‘first site of the British gulag,’ this fictional African nation that has the hint of Kenya, in the last years of the anticolonial movement in Africa as a young bride, during the Mau-Mau events, where her husband had been a District Commissioner. We soon learn her tragic story. As a young English wife in the brutal years of the British Empire and colonization of Kwatee, Mrs. Shaw herself had equally suffered from the brutality of her husband, who has the task, as a British colonial officer to bring down the rebellion of the ‘natives’ brutally. There are hints of rape and pillage. The dark secret and unnamable things of the British Empire are embodied in Mrs. Shaw. She carries both the guilt of that colonial past and its contradictions, for it soon becomes clear, that like the colonized, colonial brides, the wives of the ‘colonial masters’ suffered as powerfully from the domestic variety of colonialism. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Shaw wears the scar of a terrible memory as both victim and beneficiary of rapine, and that her own form of expiation is at a terrible price: she kills her husband in Kwatee, and preserves his skull, which she seems to keep as a memento in a dark, private museum of horror. It is a ghoulish kind of honor carrying the skull of a dead – murdered – British colonial District Commissioner and enforcer of colonial laws. It reminds her of a terrible legacy of violence, and we are drawn to her ironic virtue, but not in ways that humanize her, as rather in the ways she reminds us that the horror of colonial violence is lingering, and haunting, and is registered in the unresolved ghostliness of that historical encounter. Its effect, Mukoma wa Ngugi seems to suggest in the symbolic presence of the colonial master’s skull, preserved in the archives of colonial memory or history, is the source of the continued deformation wrought on Africa and the postcolonial society or nations, by lingering or preserved effects of that history. Kalumba and Mrs. Shaw develop a close relationship in

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Wisconsin, and are to be found in the Eagle bar, drinking, and bantering about guilt and the past. But Kalumba had been brought there, to that narrative moment, by his own involvement in the postcolonial struggle, as a young political activist in Kwatee; a member of a new generation raising questions about the contradictions of their own society at the end of colonialism. He is a man on the run. He had witnessed a massacre, whose political consequences would be devastating. The established political order in Kwatee had rounded up key members of the political opposition, killed them, and covered it up, by burying them in secret graves. Kalumba had been forewarned, and he had escaped the killings, but from his hideout, had witnessed the executions. Among those massacred is his best friend Ogum’s father, a well-known preacher. Kalumba, wracked by a sense of guilt, both because he felt powerless to help his best friend’s father, whose dying eyes meet with his in his hiding place, and because he was in some very important way, a catalyst to the killings, tells his friend Ogum. He and Kalumba’s lover, Sukena, organize his escape and exile from Kwatee. Exile breaches the love between Kalumba and Sukena, who soon after his escape, becomes Ogum’s lover. Ogum and Sukena seek his approval; an acknowledgement of the futile wait, for exile ruins everything, including the sheerest love. Exile changes Kalumba. In exile he finally comprehends his father’s infidelity to his mother, and his father’s futile ablution of tending the grave of the woman he despised and was about to leave before she dies in an accident. Kalumba’s father, the school headmaster, is imbued with this Zen-like resolve and commitment because he had realized that nothing else matters but the simple, futile acts of self-forgiveness. Kalumba thus forgives Ogum and Sukena for their infidelity, falls in love with a fellow exile, Mellissa, a Puerto Rican artist, whose own father is in jail in New York for his political activism. This, with his new,

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resolved friendship with the old Mrs. Shaw, who begins soon after to lose her own memory from Alzheimer, serve the new foundation and meaning of Kalumba’s life. Mrs. Shaw’s receding memory in the novel almost seems to suggest an important narrative symbolism – that Kalumba must serve as Mrs. Shaw’s final memory, the keeper of her bequest, and inherit the colonizer’s skull, and resolve the crisis of unfinished history. Thus he sets out to do this finally, when on the strength of the new elections in Kwatee, that swept away the old order, exiles like Kalumba begin to return. Kalumba’ return is like Ngugi’s return. There is fanfare, and there is anxious wait. There are tentative gestures to restore familiarity with the land, and the people, and with lost loves, and there is also the subterranean tension; the stage set for betrayals. Kalumba’s tragedy comes from his unwillingness to remain silent. Silence is often the veil imposed on atrocity to make it disappear. Kalumba chooses to speak; to be a witness to truth, and in saying the truth, and revealing the vast conspiracy of silence, and the secret mass graves of the massacred, he earns the enmity of those who wish to invest in silence to keep the ‘movement’ going. Among those who betray Kalumba is the man he calls ‘brother’ – his best friend Ogum. It is betrayal of scriptural proportions. Ogum has long harbored a deep grudge against Kalumba, first, for denying him the abstract privilege of witnessing his own father’s death, and in being a witness to pa Ogum’s death, Ogum somehow holds Kalumba responsible, and invests him with some kind of perverse guilt. Secondly, Kalumba is the perpetual third wheel between Ogum and Sukena, the woman they both love. Ogum decides that Kalumba is better off returning to exile than sharing the political stage with him in the new Kwatee, and he organizes, with the help of the leaders of the movement, afraid of Kalumba’s increasingly populist

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appeal, to kill him at a public rally. Kalumba’s death thus raises the question about the meaning of change, and indicts, in Mukoma’s sense, the profuse futility of artificial change in Africa, not founded on truth, but which rests on the necessity of making dangerous compromises with the past. Mrs. Shaw seems to suggest that for change to happen truly in postcolonial Africa, it must be willing to confront our tragic past, or as the great novelist, Chinua Achebe did say, to understand fully where the rain began to beat us. OBI NWAKANMA English Department, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA

Elleke Boehmer. The Shouting in the Dark Ross-Shire, Scotland: Sandstone Press, 2015, 273 pp, $16.95/£8.95 ISBN 978-1-910124-29-1 paper

The Shouting in the Dark begins with an actual door opening into Ella’s mother’s apartment in the Netherlands, where she had returned after living in apartheid South Africa: ‘The door slams closed and the crash sparks in her memory an echo pattern of noises that has followed her across the day, doors upon doors falling behind her.’ But that door opening might just as well be a metaphorical devise of the story, of the door opening into the consciousness of the protagonist, and guiding us very carefully into the inner spaces of the narrator’s mind. It is the end of a journey, which in itself marks the break with her past, and with the turbulent ties of her ambivalent ancestry with the Dutch, the Netherlands, and Europe, as well indeed as a revelation of her uncertain and ambiguous place or status in Africa, and as an African.

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Ella has just returned from the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs where she has gone to register her bid for Dutch citizenship, only to find out that her own father did not register her name in the Volksregister as a citizen. ‘There is no name, no date, no details’ and she is compelled to leave the Netherlands, and return to her own roots in Durban, South Africa. Devastated by the discovery, Ella returns to her mother’s apartment, and takes a full measure of things, and wonders if her father’s failure to register her ancestry is an omission or a fact of his despise of his daughter. But we know soon enough that this is merely the opening; a foreground to the story, and that the matter is not quite as simple as that. In ample and sometimes harrowing detail, Elleke Boehmer stages the life of this young woman, Ella, and makes her carry the burden of a terrible and complicated history of settler colonialism, apartheid, displacement, and of the impact on the most ordinary of lives, of the policies that shaped South African citizenship and nation­ hood for generations. Ella is caught in the cobwebs of the uncertainties of the meaning of nation. Is she Dutch, shaped by her own mother’s powerful longing for her ancestral home, or is she African, shaped by her own father’s powerfully ironic disavowal of his own European past and ancestry? It is complicated. Ella’s father is a book keeper, whom we first meet in this novel, through Ella’s eyes, as he watches with his black rimmed, book keepers glasses, through binoculars, watching ships move in and out of the Port Natal harbour from his own redoubts. Ships remind him of his own years of freedom; of a farremoved and romanticized time, before the war, when his world seemed easily negotiable. Before he was a book keeper, he had apparently fought in the World War II, as a sailor on the Royal Netherland Navy, N-class destroyer, the Tjerk Hiddes. He had become disillusioned by Europe from the war. He carries his disillusionment to Africa, to

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settle, make a new life, and give up Europe, by creating something new and deeply personal out of Africa. They settle first in Durban, and soon the family moves. The circumstance of their moving is intriguingly conveyed, and hints at the possibility of a growing and forbidden love between Charley and Ella’s mother, Irene, newly arrived settler in South Africa with its rigid racial boundaries, expectations, and the demands of clear manners on the European settler community. Irene’s increasing and growing relationship with Charley, the gardener, aged just eighteen, alarms and infuriates the father: One morning the father catches the mother in the act, the misjudgment, stupidity, trespass, he doesn’t quite know how to put it – With Charley standing by, shuffling, still holding his coffee mug, the father spells out to the mother in Dutch, right here in the yard, that whites in Africa don’t consort with natives, no, not even when they’re good workers like Charley and aged just eighteen. ‘In this country it isn’t for blacks to aim high. That’s the country’s strength. It is for the white to aim high. Blacks can’t aim high, they don’t have the mental power. Charley is being plain brutaal drinking coffee with his Madam. Cheeky, Irene, brutaal, setting himself above his station. Don’t encourage him.’ The mother puts her hands on her hips and puffs out her cheek but makes no reply. Ella keeps out of sight behind the windy-river.

Such is the very brutal, matter-of-fact sense of that world organized to keep blackness out, and to estrange everyone else. Soon, the family moves farther in-land to Braemar, too remote and distinct in its isolation, enough to form an important dimension to the meaning of this novel. Ella’s father is escaping from familiar things that remind him of his European past. Africa is his new world, and the powerful lust he feels for the land is conveyed powerfully in his rejection of any sense of a return to Europe. He claims Africa, but not its people. He claims the South of Africa, with its disconcerting beauty as his own new place

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of both discovery and recovery, from the world that had offered him nothing both the brutal war and the moral collapse of Europe. The narrative grows in the backdrop apparently of the immediate post-war policy of racial discrimination in South Africa, with the election of D.F Malan, and the rise of the National Party with its appeal to white unity and white difference, resulting in the prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of, the various laws banning sexual contact between black and white, and particularly the population Registration Act of 1950, that required a separate category of the races, against a background of Africa in the early years of the nationalist movement and rapid decolonization. These events are the silent underpinning conditions of the novel, as Boehmer’s story unbundles the profound contradictions of that society through the ambiguities that mark the central character’s life. Where Durban offers a whiff of urban civility, Braemar, the little coastal town to which the bookkeeper exiles his family, ‘cut off from the Dutch immigrant community in Durban,’ is evocatively dreary; a place to stultify the soul, an inward land of clinging shadows, giant livid locusts, ugly, carbuncled toads, and withered Zulu children, survivors of the 1950 polio epidemic who beg alms from house to house. ‘Everywhere the land is scarred with Zulus losses, abandoned huts and hearth stones, red fissures that run through the earth like open sores.’ Braemar embodies the tragic and unyielding land. Its solitary and deformed landscape is synecdochal, and conveys an urgency that captures the very essence of Elleke Boehmer’s sense of the futile. Ella’s development in Braemar also mirrors the incremental degeneration of her family. Her father’s life is anxious and dreary, governed by fear and loss: the unspoken rejection of his first wife, an English woman, Edith, and the loss from cancer of his second wife, Ella, who also happens to be the woman for whom Ella is

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named, her own aunt; her mother’s elder sister; the father’s loss of faith in Europe, and his misanthropy; his powerful drive to recreate himself which must be accomplished at the dispossession of the other. He takes his family from Durban to Braemar because he is faced with the truth of human contact, and because remoteness also offers him broad psychological space for self-invention, for escape, and perhaps indeed from the baggage of an old European identity. He loves Africa, its great beauty and promise, but it is Africa of the new European conquest, to be shaped by the European mind: that is the Africa he forces his daughter, Ella to absorb and claim. Ella herself falls in love with Africa on a different term. It is a love which she cannot comprehend because she is as much part of Africa as she is an outsider like her mother, who longs to return to the Netherlands, and maintain a hold to her distinct Dutchness. Ella falls in love with Phineas, the African gardener, and the love is dangerous, unconsummated, and futile, much like Ella’s relationship with Africa. This is essentially the very meaning of Elleke Boehmer’s novel: the story of an ambivalent, uncertain sense of one’s place in a world in which identity belongs to the crossroads. This story is built in circles, and sometimes, it may be a little too flush with excessive narrative details. The characters are deformed from the very beginning, to carry the angry deformity of the conditions they express: the terrible landscape of apartheid South Africa in its early days and the psychological scars and its human cost. Ella’s father does not change, except from the brief moment of his sudden and beatific death, when something of a smile crosses his brow, nor do we in the end fathom Ella’s tragic and unresolved connections to Africa. Perhaps, that is the real point of it: the unresolved quest towards knowing or towards acknowledging the relationship between the narrator and her African homeland, largely because, it

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was a relationship founded fundamentally on a most am­ biguous love. OBI NWAKANMA English Department, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA

Ernest Emenyonu. Princess Mmaeyen and Other Stories Ibadan: Kraft Books Limited, 2015, 108pp, np ISBN 978-918-335-7 paper

Ernest Emenyonu’s collection of six short stories, Princess Mmaeyen and other Stories exposes topical and multicultural issues and problems in politics and society. Some of the stories are set in Africa, some in America, but all interrogate universal questions, and canvass a new sense of direction in the affairs of men. The humor, often sarcastic and caustic, is rendered vividly in measured, restrained and appropriate language that capture the tenor, rhythm and sentiments of the characters and the values they represent in this collection. Princess Mmaeyen and Other Stories beckons on us all to read it, if not for the precision and beauty of its language, but also for the savoring of the distilled experiences of an author whose wisdom, gathered over time and in several climes and circumstances ennobles the fictive enterprise. The first story in the collection, ‘Listen, my Momma Pays Your Taxes’ details the challenges of Africans, par­ ticularly Nigerians who migrate to the United States of America to try out on a new life before returning home, and who in their attempts to integrate cause unforeseen problems which turn awry for diasporic relationships; like making babies and abandoning them. The title itself expresses the frustration of Kathy, one of such children.

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Her then teenage American mother had been deceived and abandoned by one such Nigerian immigrant, Tommy Ben Cliffe. Now a teenager herself, Kathy is a bundle of inter-racial prejudices and confusion. She has a deep aversion for Africans, but particularly Nigerians. For the sin of her father who abandons Kathy’s mother, then his girlfriend, only four months pregnant with Kathy, she builds a wide psychological gulf that complicates her relationship with Africans. Kathy’s hatred for Africans is one which she could not hide even in classrooms, seminars and other public places, and it ultimately impacts on her social life. Her academic life suffers. She has frequent run-ins with authorities; she is what could be called a hot mess whose boyfriend is a convicted druggie who is later murdered by a gang. She insults and curses her teachers and she is defiant of rules. As we read the story, we come to understand that the trouble with Kathy is the problem of her socialization, burdened by a narrative of self-hatred, enabled by her mother who disguises her own disappointments for affection, and turns Kathy against her own ‘race.’ Emenyonu’s stories reveal the tense ambivalence that governs inter-racial contact, and the tragedy of our unresolved pasts. He seems to argue for an urgent change in the circumstances of Africa and her Diaspora. He insists that the change must begin at the source. ‘Nigeria must change so that her future generation will stay at home and be proud of their heritage!’ The second story ‘The Last Laugh’ interrogates the terrifyingly contradictory nature of individuals in whom we invest our deepest trusts, but who are more liable to be antiheros after we have removed the masks. In this story, Emenyonu sets the action in the village of Njam that has just survived the Nigerian civil war, but still mourning the loss of its illustrious sons, especially John. Death, deformation, desolation, destruction, loss and looting of property and spread of diseases are features of the time. More distressing

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is the destruction of St. Andrew’s, the protestant (Anglican) church which is the symbol of Njam’s modernity and unity. While Njam remains culturally united, the churches, the protestant and Catholic denominations become subtle divisive forces in a new war that threatens Njam’s unity. Pa Isaiah, son of the soil, virtuous and committed to St. Andrew’s church is the obvious leader in a period of transition and is the satiric butt of the story. Emenyonu builds him up as a doyen of Christianity in Njam village. He is ‘a man who had given his whole life to the service of the Lord in St Andrew’s church, Njam’, a man whose speeches in and out of church services are beautifully laced with biblical quotations, a man who ‘the catechist had referred to as Elder Zachariah at his request’. He is a motivator, a veritable inspiration and a Nehemiah to Njam people who enthusiastically wish to rebuild their church from the ravages of war. War however, is not a friend of morality and virtue. It brings out the worst in men and so it did to Pa Isaiah. In the allegory of the ‘riddle of the King’s head’ taken from the folklore of the people, Emenyonu discloses the contradictions of his character in the terrible secret of Pa Isaiah’s killing of a kinsman, John Ubanwa, who stole back from a refugee camp ‘to pick up some food or vegetables’, three days before the end of the war. While on this task, John catches Pa Isaiah (Elder Zachariah) redhanded as he is looting an Njam household and because of this Pa Isaiah kills him and shoves ‘his body under a groove in the middle of the thick forest overlooking the site of Njam’s former church. In this story Emenyonu exposes the weakness and greed even of the most respectable and the most seemingly pious and virtuous of men. The third story titled ‘Our Master, R.W. Brown, Esquire’ is built around a protagonist, Rob Webster Brown (MA Cantab.), in the early days of National University, where two camps of expatriate staff from America and Britain respectively engage in ideological and intellectual war,

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with each other. It is Emenyonu’s effort to recapture the intra-campus racism and politics of the early days of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Emenyonu’s alma mater. While the Americans glory in their power and strength in number, the Britons few and reticent are arrogant, and pompous. Robinson Webster Brown, a Briton, finicky, ego­ centric and snobbish, is at the center of this satire. Hardly a representative of the Brits, he despises the Americans, even though he does not socialize with his fellow Britons and treats the Africans disdainfully. This epitome of racism is therefore hated by all and sundry. Here again, all human beings are urged to see themselves as world citizens who should jointly pursue the vision of making the world a better place for all. The fourth story, ‘What the Babysitter and my Bishop Had in Common’ is Emen­ yonu’s indictment of adult abuse and oppression of children. What the two persons have in common is that both of them abuse the child narrator sexually. They are important people entrusted with the care of the child: the baby-sitter, Maria, when the child is five or less, and the Bishop, when he is thirteen betray the child, because they abuse him sexually. Through the naivety and childhood innocence of the narrator, Emenyonu again interrogates an important social problem, namely disrespect for the rights of the child. The fifth story, the title story begins with an epigraph which is the exhortation by prophet Isaiah at his call and cleansing when he begins his prophetic mission. It is recorded in Isaiah 6:1-3 which in essence matches the writer’s purposes. Mmaeyen’s beauty lifts her from the rubble into the bedrooms of men of power and wealth, especially the military elite that held sway at the time. She meets Dr. Earl Richard Johnson, a lecturer in Canaan city’s famous university, an impostor and false claimant to the heir of the famous Johnson and Johnson Company in America, a pharmaceutical conglomerate of global fame. The transformation of Mmaeyen from poverty to wealth is

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Emeyonu’s critique of the failure of long held values and ideals in education, religion, social living and other aspects of existence. The death of the two Obongs respectively mark changes in socio-cultural issues in Judah and Calabar. This story is an intimate exposure of social life in Calabar, and it emphasizes the age-long truth that, there are no secrets in life and that in all affairs of men, the truth will be known when the time is due. ‘The Day Before the Election: June 11, 1993’ is the last story in this very interesting collection of stories. Action takes place, even as the title indicates, a day before the memorable 12 June 1993 election in Nigeria. Historically, this election is adjudged the fairest election ever held in Nigeria. In that election, people voted for a Presidential candidate they believed in, mindless of his religious persua­sion or ethnic origin after forty years of military rule. To many, the election of 12 June 1993 would bring deliverance from bondage to Nigeria. Mbaike, a first class reporter, captures the complexities of the unfolding drama as he reports the campaigns of the three presidential candidates. Emenyonu’s power in the story is his ability to capture very minute details of action; it is that sense of a contained and highly controlled prose that spares nothing in the short story that evokes its eloquent realism. Emenyonu’s Princess Mmaeyen and Other Stories is a canvas on which can be read the difficult history of a nation. The stories urge us to a world of moral regeneration, as well as political and racial tolerance and rectitude. In writing Mmaeyen and Other Stories, Ernest Emenyonu may have joined the ‘talented tenth’ of African writers who use the short story as the means to capture, in the tense austerity of the form, the stories of our complex transitions. Emenyonu’s stories also of course, tend to be a little too didactic, teaching morals, castigating criminal offenders, reminding the young about the perils of intransigence, insubordination, belligerence, and defiance of authority;

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and certainly, of the folly of negating ancestral sanctions as well as the wisdom of age and experience. It is in all a read­­able book. JASPER A. ONUEKWUSI Department of English and Literary Studies Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria

Dayo Olopade. The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa New York: Miffling Harcourt Publishing Co., 2014, 288pp., $14.95/ $35.72 ISBN 978-0-544-48399-6, paper/ ISBN 978-0-547-67831-3 hardback

The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa is Dayo Olopade’s contribution to PanAfricanist thought; she is an Africanist herself. She is a Nigerian-American journalist who is currently based in New York but works in Kenya, among other African countries. The book takes us through her journeys and research in Africa, with a significant attention to the sub-Saharan parts of the continent. She rejects the stereotypical impressions made about the continent and challenges the impressions of Africa, starting with the early European explorers who described Africa as a dark continent. Olopade asserts that it is wrong and misleading to see African people as helpless souls who need to be helped without paying attention to the phenomenal efforts which the people are making to ameliorate their lives and conditions. She reveals the ‘hidden triumphs’ of the people of sub-Saharan Africa, challenging the ‘formality bias’ which has consistently been raised against them. ‘The continent,’ Olapade asserts, ‘needs to be seen and heard, not imagined and then ritually dismissed. Because when you talk to real people in Africa – shopkeepers, day labourers, executives, or educators –

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and commit to telling their stories, once-hidden strength come[s] to light.’ As an African in the diaspora, Dayo Olopade grew up in the ‘fat economy’ of America. Other fat economies include England, Germany, France, and other countries in Western Europe. Sub-Saharan African countries, probably with the exception of South Africa, belong to the ‘lean economies.’ These categories of the ‘fat’ and the ‘lean’ economies determine the map of places and locations in the global geography of prosperity and dispossession. Olopade attempts to reconceptualise the African question using five categories which she include the Family Map, Technology Map, Commerce Map, Nature Map, and Youth Map. There is little doubt that sub-Saharan Africans en­ counter privations daily. These privations, however, often propel them to play ‘naughty,’ to bend the rules and devise new games to solve problems. Olopade describes this dynamism as kanju, a Yoruba word which means to be in haste, and which encapsulates the true reality of contemporary Africa: ‘the specific creativity born from African difficulty.’ ‘The commercial system of Africa is so volatile that one comes across ‘traffic marketing’ by which many African thrive and earn their daily living. Circumvention of economic maladies happens with ‘Kanju solution.’ With Kanju solution, Nigerians have advanced their film industry. With Kanju creativity, African journalists have succeeded in rearticulating and repositioning Africa in the global space. With Kanju magic, Africans have developed their public transportation system; Matatus in Kenya, Danfos in Nigeria, Dala-dalas in Tanzania, and 7-Places in Cameroun. The viciousness and self-centeredness of African leaders who have reduced their countries to the status of ‘failed states’ come under Olopade’s withering analysis. According to her, in Africa, ‘corruption runs the spectrum from low – to highbrow,’ and ‘‘the state framework in Africa is a

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constant impediment to development progress, because in practice, few Africans trust or validate the work of central government.’ Despite the woes caused by political corruption and ‘failed states,’ Africans circumvent their condition by adaptation. Western philanthropy to Africa, she argues, is no more than ‘Channelling charity from fat economies to lean ones in Africa … a fifty-year habit, with a dubious payoff.’ The categories she develops clearly help to frame African reality in very interesting and nuanced ways. The Family Map explains the dynamism of family ties among African people. Olopade juxtaposes her Diaspora (American) experience and that of Africa, and notes that social/family ties have weakened in fat economies (such as America where she lives). However, ‘social ties in Africa are robust – often stronger than mere formal affiliations. In fact, everywhere I travelled, kinship and proximity mattered more than citizenship.’ She enunciates an Africa family philosophy as ‘certainly not limited to blood relations.’ The limitlessness of family ties (beyond blood connections) culminates in communal living which features among Africans in Africa and Africans in Diaspora. For example, even in America, many Nigerian and fellow Yoruba people who do not particularly have ‘blood relations’ with her family resided with the family, and she grew up among Yoruba people, speaking the Yoruba language, eating Yoruba food, and living the Yoruba culture, though she was far away from Yoruba territory in Nigeria. She notes that the sense of family ties, among Africans, is so strong that, even while in the Diaspora, they (Africans) often get committed to family issues back at home. As she puts it; ‘diaspora communities retain a burning stake in the day-to-day at home’ (84). Therefore, according to her, the ‘first feature of Africa’s Family Map is not charity, but solidarity.’ The Technology Map of Africa, and the impact of global satellite systems and cell phones is connecting

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Africans with one another and other parts of the world in profound ways. Mobile and connective technologies have contributed to economic development in Africa, says Olopade, and ‘combined with kanju, African tech leads us to smart, lean solutions in health, financial services, and retail distribution.’ In her study of the Commercial Map of Africa, Olopade notes that ‘Commerce seems to thrive in the cracks and crevices of failed states’ She observes the three merits of human development which commerce has facilitated in Africa; ‘Commerce is common – both widespread and shared,’ ‘commerce is accountable,’ and ‘commerce is a proven tool to create jobs and distribute goods in Africa – including development.’ Olopade argues that ‘Commerce has an unusually democratic foot­print in Africa. Everyone participates.’ Indeed, this is an argument that is very difficult, if not particularly impossible, to dispute. Trade is probably ‘Africa’s only universal language’ which inexorably ‘creates and rein­ forces social ties and provides an alternative to state– citizen relationships.’ The author views the commercial sphere of Africa from the perspective of kanju. According to her, ‘For all the kanju creativity in Africa’s marginal economies, reliable income is uniformly coveted.’ Though some banks and some philanthropists offer loans to investors for commercial purposes, the Africans in Diaspora can play significant roles in the commercial prosperity of Africa. Interestingly, the author has earlier noted that the ‘secret solace’ of the global financial crises of 2008 is that a young generation of Africans in Diaspora (who work in the areas of agriculture and technology, to corporate finance) ‘have set off for home, setting up ‘move back clubs’ to support their transition.’ Many Africans in Diaspora have returned home to contribute to and develop the commerce and economies of their mother lands. Therefore, the initial moving away from home which culminated in ‘Brain drain’ is now an advantage as

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it has become ‘Brain gain’ for African people. In the Nature Map, Olopade engages the question of power/electricity in Africa. ‘Energy poverty in Africa traps the region in real poverty’ The energy poverty of Africa however does not mean that Africa does not have power because, in fact, the petroleum and natural gas used in fat economies are exported from Africa. The problem with energy poverty in Africa is because ‘national governments have failed to pass on the benefits of energy wealth.’ On the Youth Map of Africa, the author does not bother to define the age-ranges that define youthfulness. However ‘Waithood’ is the prevailing status of the youth in the sub-Saharan parts of the continent as people of the old generation continue to perpetuate themselves in power, giving the youth real chance to operate. The story of Proscovia Alengot Oromait, a nineteen-year-old woman, who was sworn into the Ugandan parliament in September 2012 nonetheless signifies an important development; a little ray of hope as young people in Africa continue to garner experiences that are relevant and practical. As governments develop school curricula that go beyond the rote-learning system of schooling to more creative system of education, the youth of Africa will open new channels of opportunity. In the concluding chapter of the book, Olopade engages in a very close analysis of the real situation of con­tem­ porary Africa. Millions of African people, she notes, have a vision of what to do which includes the socio-economic and civic empowerment of the people, fair trade, women’s rights, and modern education but how to achieve these things is not always clear to them. Some people believe in loyalty but the author raises some important question about it: to whom or what should loyalty be showed? To the western-oriented state and parliamentary democracy (government) or the less culturally-oriented and decentralized institutions in the states? Indeed, as

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she opines, these categories are the ‘two publics’ in the contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. It is a fascinating book. Being a person of African descent (African Diasporan) in the United States, Olopade is able to reflect her diasporic experiences in the book – her rootedness in the two worlds. She demonstrates familiarity with Nigeria, her root, and America which gave her home. ‘My mother’s grandfather, from south-central Nigeria, was a very ordinary farmer’ she writes. ‘My great-grandmother had six children, only one of whom took up the agriculture mantle...my grandfather is buried in Ire [Nigeria], and my aging grandmother is among its best-known residents.’ There are many powerful, anecdotal statements in this highly readable work, which frequently juxtaposes her Nigerian and American experience. In Nigeria, for instance, it costs her about sixteen thousand dollars to be treated for malaria by the medical doctors, while in Chicago – the disease which she developed as a result of the mosquito bite she underwent when she travelled to Nigeria cost her thousands of dollars. The author equally demonstrates a sound familiarity with different parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Her book reveals her peregrinations to such countries as Tanzania, Rwanda, Mozambique, Liberia and many other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Certainly, the major findings of her book are derived from personal contacts and interviews with African people. It is commendable that she consults such scholarly works as Abhijit Banerjee’s Poor Economics and Daryl Collins et al.’s Portfolios of the Poor, among others. Regrettably, she seems to have only mentioned and discussed those texts in passing. She lost the opportunity to significantly use the texts to theorize her discoveries and her thoughts about Africa. This is but a relative weakness. In sum, though she does not significantly integrate theoretical thoughts into the wider scope of her discussions, the language and style she adopts can be, relatively, considered as

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journalistic – the author herself is a journalist. The writing style she adopts can, therefore, be read and understood with sympathy PELUMI FOLAJIMI Depart of African Cultural Studies 1410 Van Hise Hall University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

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Diaspora & Returns in Fiction

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 34 Guest Editors: Helen Cousins & Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu Assistant Editor: Patricia T. Emenyonu Associate Editors: Jane Bryce • Maureen N. Eke • Stephanie Newell Charles E. Nnolim • Chimalum Nwankwo • Kwawisi Tekpetey Iniobong I. Uko • Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

FORTHCOMING ALT 35 Focus on Egypt Cover: © EcoPic/iStockphoto

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-148-0

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Editor Ernest N Emenyonu

Articles on: Nuruddin Farah / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / Pede Hollist Ayi Kwei Armah / Dinaw Mengestu / Benjamin Kwakye Black British Literature/Gambian Bildungsroman/Migration Interview with Tendai Huchu Featured Articles: by Bernth Lindfors / Eustace Palmer / Helen Chukwuma Literary Supplement: 4 Poems by Tsitsi Ella Jaji Reviews

Diaspora & Returns in Fiction ALT 34

This special issue focuses on literary texts by African writers in which the protagonist returns to his/her ‘original’ or ancestral ‘home’ in Africa from other parts of the world. Ideas of return – intentional and actual – have been a consistent feature of the literature of Africa and the African diaspora: from Equiano’s autobiography to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah. African literature has represented returnees in a range of locations and dislocations from having a sense of belonging, being alienated in a country they can no longer recognize, or experiencing multiple identities. To what extent can the original place be reclaimed with or without renegotiations of ‘home’?

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 34