Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing [1 ed.] 9789004342064, 9789004342057

Citation preview

Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing

Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature

Series Editors Theo D’haen (University of Leuven) Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong) C.C. Barfoot (University of Leiden) Hans Bertens (University of Utrecht)

VOLUME 83

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/tscl





Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing By

Jopi Nyman

leiden | boston

 Cover illustration: © Ihnatovich Maryia.

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0927-5754 isbn 978-90-04-34205-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34206-4 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.



Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction 1

part 1 Refugees and Displaced Migrants Introduction to Part 1 11 2 Refugee(s) Writing: Displacement in Contemporary Narratives of Forced Migration 15 3 Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home 37 4 Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier 56 5 Borders and Transitive Identities in Jamal Mahjoub’s “Last Thoughts on the Medusa”  74

part 2 Memories of Migration Introduction to Part 2 91 6 Home, Memory, and Identity in the Culinary Memoirs by Madhur Jaffrey and Diana Abu-Jaber 94 7 Migration and Melancholia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way 114 8 Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Caryl Phillips’ Dancing in the Dark 134

vi

Contents

part 3 Migration, Travel, and Postcolonial Europe

Introduction to Part 3 155

9

Transnational Europe in Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns 158

10

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes  173

11

Globalizing European Peripheries: The Transnational and the Translocal in Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue 193

12

Cross-Cultural Kitchen: Britishness, Globalization, and New Migrants in Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen 210

Bibliography 231 Index 246



Acknowledgments This book is a result of several years of research and writing on postcolonial and transcultural literatures, and I would like to thank the following colleagues for their kind help and feedback at various stages in the process: Elisabeth Bekers, Maggie Bowers, Chiara Brambilla, Rocío Davis, Nouri Gana, Vanessa Guignery, Marja-Leena Hakkarainen, Sissy Helff, Graham Huggan, Lene Johannessen, Tabish Khair, Pekka Kilpeläinen, Joel Kuortti, John McLeod, Maria Olaussen, Alan Rice, Silvia Schultermandl, Johan Schimanski, John A Stotesbury, Tina Steiner, Anna-Leena Toivanen, and Stephen Wolfe. I should also like to thank the University of Eastern Finland for institutional support, and the University of Leeds for a Visiting Professorship in the spring of 2013. Once again, my greatest thanks are to Kristiina. The research reported in this volume has received funding from the Academy of Finland (project 205780) and the research project Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a Post-Cold War World (EUBORDERSCAPES) financed through the eu’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (SSH.2011.4.2-1-290775). Earlier versions of several chapters included in the volume have appeared in print previously, and I wish to thank the publishers for the permission to publish the texts in revised and expanded form. An earlier version of Chapter 2 has appeared as “Refugee(s) Writing: Displacement in Contemporary Narratives of Forced Migration” in Africa Writing Europe: Opposition, Juxtaposition, Entanglement, eds Maria Olaussen and Christina Angelfors (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 245–68, and is published by permission of Koninklijke Brill nv. Chapter 4 is based on the article “Globalizing Africa, Universalizing the Child: Towards Transnational Identity in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: The Memoirs of a Child Soldier” in A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, eds Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu (Münster: lit Verlag, 2010), 215–29, and the revised version is published by permission of the editors. Chapter 5 has been originally published as “Borders and Transitive Identities in Jamal Mahjoub’s ‘Last Thoughts on the Medusa’” in Border Imaginations, Imaginaries and Images: From Bordering to Borderscapes, eds Chiara Brambilla, Jussi Laine, James Scott, and Gianluca Bocchi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 221–29, and is published by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. Chapter 6 has appeared as “Cultural Contact and the Contemporary Culinary Memoir: Home, Memory and Identity in Madhur Jaffrey and Diana Abu-Jaber” in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 24.2 (2009), 1–17, copyright © The Autobiography Society, and is

viii

Acknowledgments

published by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. Chapter 7, published as “Reading Melancholia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way” in English Studies in Africa, 56.1 (2013), 4–16, copyright © University of the Witwaterstrand, is published by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. A shorter version of Chapter 8 has appeared as “Transnational Spaces in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark” in The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and Music, ed. Rocío G. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 33–43, and is published by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. Chapter 9 has appeared as a part of the more extensive article “Europe and Its Others: The Novels of Jamal Mahjoub” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture, ed. Nouri Gana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 217–45, and is published by permission of Edinburgh University Press. Chapter 10 was originally published as “Beyond Liverpool, 1957: Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46.3 (2011), 493–512, and is printed by permission of Sage Publishers. Chapter 11 has appeared as “Globalizing European Peripheries: The Transnational and the Translocal in Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue” in Changing Nations/Changing Words: The Concept of Nation in the Transnational Era, eds Joel Kuortti and O.P. Dwivedi (Jaipur: Rawat, 2012), 197–206, and is published by permission of the editors and the publisher. Early versions of some sections in Chapter 12 have appeared in “A Carvery of Hybridity: Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen” in Hybridity: Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts, eds Vanessa Guignery, Catherine Pesso-Miquel, and François Specq (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 92–102.

chapter 1

Introduction

Narratives of Contemporary Mobility

Migration, mobility, and travel are central to today’s world of rapid transformations, quick movements, and allegedly easy adaptation to life in new surroundings. To counter such visions promoting unrealistic views of the processes of globalization and its triumphant hybridities, this book examines contemporary literary narratives of global migration with particular attention paid to three key themes – displacement, memory, and travel – that structure the migrants’ journeys and their experience of a new way of life. Migration and mobility, as this volume argues, generate new social and cultural narratives that examine various border-crossings and diverse sites where cultures come into contact with each other. While examining some of the emergent narratives of globalization and hybrid and transforming identities, this volume will also explore the ways in which migration and relocation are experienced, given their frequent rootedness in long-standing discourses of race, nationalism, and xenophobia. The volume will also show how these experiences are often expressed in a language of affect and pain. In fact, cultural encounters and global mobility, as the fictional and autobiographical texts studied in this volume show, give at least as much impetus – if not more – to dis-ease and discontent as they do to the celebration and uninhibited performance of postmodern subjectivity, as shown, in particular, in my readings of the novels by the black British writers Caryl Phillips and Abdulrazak Gurnah. In so doing, this study, while recognizing that migration and hybridity have a major function as critiques of nationalisms and essentialist identities, also contributes to the critique of such forms of postcolonial discourse that celebrate them as unproblematic ways of countering hierarchies and hegemonies.1 Rather than freely moving nomads remaining distant from other cultures, contemporary migrants need to negotiate their identity while travelling and entering new spaces. What should be recognized is that in the West, at least since the time of slavery, large-scale migrations are also moments of historical trauma, forced diaspora, and racial violence, as scholars such as Paul Gilroy 1 See Sten Pultz Moslund, Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 8–10.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_002

2

chapter 1

have shown. It is the double function of the Black Atlantic (and other similar routes) that is important: while giving rise to such cultural forms as jazz and tango, the Black Atlantic is also at the core of memories of pain, of the loss of community and home, that are shared by the diasporic communities that it has created.2 This book examines the above-mentioned aspects of mobility by paying close attention to both the melancholia of displacement and also the promise of transculturation and hybridity as addressed in contemporary narratives of migration. In doing so, this study continues to examine the thematics of my previous study but from a new angle: while the focus of Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Writing (2009) was on questions of diaspora and hybridity,3 in this volume my concerns lie with migration and the cultural encounters and transformations that it generates, with particular reference to both fictional and autobiographical texts.

Encounters and Transformations

The ability of cultural encounters to engender new cultural phenomena and identities has received wide attention in recent years in postcolonial and transcultural studies. They and their formation have been addressed in various ways, including the more traditional focus on the colonizer–colonized encounter, as seen in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation (1992). In her analysis of colonialist travel writing, Pratt sees such “contact zones” as sites of mutual interaction rather than as mere sites of coercion, “foreground[ing] the[ir] interactive, improvisational dimensions”.4 Following Pratt, several writers have seen such encounters as producing new identities that resist dominant and colonial hegemonies, as seen in the widespread use of such critical terms as Homi K. Bhabha’s “colonial mimicry” and “hybridity”. For Bhabha, cultural contacts and the experience of in-betweenness often felt by migrants and refugees generate new, hybrid identities that resist conventional categorizations and nationalisms.5

2 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1996 [1993]; Sara Clarke Kaplan, “Souls at the Crossroads, Africans on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic Melancholia”, Callaloo, xxx (2007), 511–26. 3 Jopi Nyman, Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Writing, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992, 7. 5 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, 33–37, cf. 12.

Introduction

3

This process is, of course, not limited to the conditions of colonialism. Several scholars have emphasized that cultures have always influenced each other through various modes of travel and trade that have linked cultures with each other in ways that are not always self-evident but need to be foregrounded. This is seen for example in Stephen Greenblatt’s claim for the field of mobility studies, which aims to examine both “hidden as well as conspicuous movements of people, objects, images, texts, and ideas”.6 It can also be found in James Clifford’s discussion of “traveling cultures”, where he argues for the need to study both local and cosmopolitan experiences as they both contribute to cultural experience and problematize conventional dichotomies such as “native” and “traveller” and “dwelling/traveling”.7 And it can be found, again, in Isobel Hofmeyr’s work examining the cultural interaction in spaces surrounding the Indian Ocean,8 as well as in Robert Stam’s and Ella Shohat’s work on the Red Atlantic that shows how cultural influences travel in both directions, providing a link between European and indigenous American cultures.9 Similarly, work on diasporic cultures has revealed their multiple attachments and transnational character. In other words, as suggested in Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of border-crossing media- and other scapes,10 mobility – of people, culture, and texts – challenges nationalisms and fixed identities. As sociologists such as Ulrich Beck have suggested, contemporary societies show that travel and staying abroad is no longer a class privilege. Rather, the ordinary and everyday character of cultural and national border-crossings by groups such as migrant workers, their families, pensioners, exchange students, and others has led to a situation that Beck calls “cosmopolitanism from below”,11 where cultural

6

7 8

9

10 11

Stephen Greenblatt, “A Mobility Studies Manifesto”, in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, by Stephen Greenblatt with Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 250; emphasis original. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992, 24. Isobel Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives”, Social Dynamics, XXXII/2 (2007), 3–32. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “The Red Atlantic: Travelling Debates”, in Ethnic and Racial Identities in the Media, eds Eleftheria Arapoglou, Yiorgos Kalogeras, and Jopi Nyman, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 13–40. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 33–37. Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Polity, 2006, 103.

4

chapter 1

encounters are part of the normal life of the contemporary world, rather than limited to the life of the globetrotting cosmopolitan elite.12 The texts analysed in this volume foreground many of the diverse effects and experiences of migration and mobility, ranging from the refugee experience to the ways in which migration transforms European cultures and identities – or makes their historical and hybrid formation visible. In his discussion of the characteristics of the migration novel, Søren Frank suggests that such works display a “‘double consciousness’ in terms of language, place, culture and/or religion” and reconstruct identities in order “to counter the monocultural images of the nation and its people with cosmopolitan ones”.13 While central to much of contemporary postcolonial and/or transcultural writing, these themes are often developed in contexts where national identification is problematized and the potential of cross-cultural and transnational frameworks for the construction of identity is recognized. For example, the identities of the central characters in such widely known migrant novels as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) are placed within transnational frameworks where the act of crossing oceans is a means of linking cultures and people. While Gurnah’s Omar Saleh’s Zanzibari identity is a product of various colonialisms and related discourses, the important role assigned to the trade routes characterizing the interaction across the Indian Ocean shows that he is not a product of a single culture or nation, as would be maintained by standard Western views based on geographical location, the nation-state, and its significance for identity. Similarly, Ghosh’s novel, which follows indentured labourers on their journey from India to Mauritius in the nineteenth ­century, shows how cultural encounters are omnipresent in the spaces of Southern Asia and that identities are fluid and mobile, diasporic and transnational, rather than fixed and rooted, yet they are always formed historically and contextually.14 To employ Frank’s terms, texts such as these delve into history and carry out “archaeological excavations into the past that unearth the impure and hybrid quality of these identities”,15 that is, they counter contemporary 12

Cf. Simon Gikandi, “Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of L­ ocality”, in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, eds Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, London: Routledge, 2010, 31–34. 13 Søren Frank, “Literature of Migration: A Conceptual Meditation”, in Migrations, Intercultural­Identities and Border Regions (19th and 20th Centuries). Migration, i­dentités interculturelles et espaces frontaliers (XIXe et XXe siècles), eds Elien Declerq, Walter Kusters, and Saartje Vanden Borr, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012, 22–23. 14 See Claire Chambers, “The Indian Ocean in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh”, Wasafiri, XXVI/2 (2011), 87–91. 15 Frank, 23.

Introduction

5

views of national unity and ideological views of purity by laying bare interactions, often between Europe and its Others, that have been forgotten and silenced, as my readings in Part 3 in particular will show. In so doing, this volume seeks to contribute to the debate concerning the need to revise the role of Europe in postcolonial discourse, where it has been seen mainly as “irritating”, and “postcolonial Europe” has been regarded as a problematic term.16 As Paul Gilroy argues, it is crucial to understand how the colonial project is located within Europe, its institutions, and culture, and that this history continues to affect us: We need to be able to see how the presence of strangers, aliens, and blacks and the distinctive dynamics of Europe’s imperial history have combined to shape its cultural and political habits and institutions. These historical processes have to be understood as internal to the operations of European political cultures. They do not represent the constitutive outside of Europe’s modern and modernist life. They can be shown to be alive in the interior spaces and mechanisms through which Europe has come to know and interpret itself, to define its passions, paths, and habits in opposition to the u.s. models that are identified with an inevitable future of racial conflict.17 While such constructs of European and other identities that stem from cultural encounters may be termed alternatively as “hybrid”, “mixed”, “cosmopolitan”, or “transcultural”, what remains more important is what the terms signify: moments or conjunctures when new configurations of cultural interaction emerge in new spaces and transform established practices and identifications. According to Bhabha, cultural encounters are moments of identity construction: “the problem of cultural interaction emerges only at the significatory boundaries of cultures, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs are misappropriated”.18 In a similar way, Azade Seyhan describes the characteristics of such narratives emerging in spaces that are produced by the interaction between different cultures and nations: Understandably, narratives that originate at border crossings cannot be bound by national borders, languages, and literary and critical traditions. 16

Frank Schulze-Engler, “Irritating Europe”, in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 669–70. 17 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, London: Routledge, 2004, 157. 18 Bhabha, The Location, 34.

6

chapter 1

Born of crisis and change, suffering alternately from amnesia and too much remembering, and precariously positioned at the interstices of different spaces, histories, and languages, they seek to name and configure cultural and literary production in their own terms and to enter novel forms of inter/transcultural dialogue.19 As already suggested, such new forms are identities that are not always ­voluntary – travel and mobility are not always chosen but may be forced upon the migrant subject. Migration, while leading to new identifications and locations of identity, also involves narratives of displacement and dislocation, and memories of loss, famine, and death, as testified, for instance, in the histories of the Armenian and Irish diasporas. Such shared experiences remain longstanding cultural traumas in diasporic cultures.20 Similar narratives are notably present in contemporary globalization. Rather than consisting of an unlimited movement of peoples, things, and ideas across national and cultural borders, ecological disasters as well as political and military violence push human beings towards the borders separating Europe from Africa, Australia from Asia, and the United States from Latin America. However, the border, as scholars in border studies remind us, does not only separate but also brings together various actors, and creates new modes and spaces of interaction, new borderscapes where identities, belonging, and citizenship are negotiated and reconstructed.21 Populated with migrants and travellers of various kinds, all with their individual histories, these spaces generate new stories, as suggested by Seyhan, stories that tell of both migrants’ past struggles and their new affiliations.

Organization of the Volume

This volume has been divided into three Parts (i–iii) that examine contemporary Anglophone narratives of global mobility, cultural encounters, and travel 19 20

21

Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 4. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma”, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 1. See David Newman, “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ‘Borderless’ World”, in Border Poetics De-limited, eds Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007, 27–57; Chiara Brambilla, “Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept”, Geopolitics, XX/1 (2015), 1–14.

Introduction

7

in the contexts of displacement (Part 1), memory (Part 2), and the subsequent construction of new European identities (Part 3). While each part has a separate introductory section presenting their concerns, I will introduce the thematics of the volume briefly here. Part 1 focuses on narratives dealing with displaced persons, especially refugees and forged migrants, in fictional and non-fictional narratives by professional and non-professional writers such as Simão Kikamba, Ishmael Beah, Jamal Mahjoub, and the group of writers associated with the Refugees Writing in Wales project. Part 2 examines the role of memory in autobiographical and fictional narratives of migration and cultural adaptation by Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Abu-Jaber, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Caryl Phillips. Part 3 shows how contemporary postcolonial writing by Jamal Mahjoub and Monica Ali revises European identities by showing how they have been formed through encounters with other cultures both historically and today. What the texts under study show is that, owing to such encounters, the identities of entire nation-states and metropolises have undergone serious transformations and extensive cultural mixing: the global is present in the local, the binary notion of centre and periphery is being erased, and established paradigms in both European and postcolonial studies are in need of refinement. They also declare, however, that such major changes are not unproblematic and that migration is not always a choice. The choice of texts addressed is by no means exhaustive, as the themes of migration and displacement are frequently dealt with in postcolonial literatures. However, what I have wanted to do is to provide a comprehensive and wide-ranging perspective on these three key themes in order to push the boundaries of postcolonial and transcultural studies. In so doing I will explore both well-known and more marginal writing by both professional and non-professional writers, as seen in the refugee narratives explored in Part 1 in particular. Similarly, the thematics of memory in Part 2 is approached by examining both fictional and autobiographical discourse on migration, adaptation, and cultural contact from a perspective that does not forget the painful and traumatic issues often linked with migration but frequently dismissed in conventional analyses of hybridity. The texts discussed in Part 3 have been selected because of their attempt to address the transformation of Europe and European identities in an increasingly transnational world: while Mahjoub’s works contextualize the change historically, Ali’s novels present surprising intra-European connections. By discussing these texts focusing on Europe, my aim is to show the relevance of postcolonial studies and writing to the remaking of Europe. In sum, the current volume explores contemporary cultural representations of transforming identities in conditions of insecurity and increasing global

8

chapter 1

mobility. Complementing as well as expanding the conventional concerns of postcolonial studies, these readings of fictional and non-fictional texts aim at revealing both silenced and emerging narratives of cultural encounters as well as affective and discursive responses to such moments. In so doing, the studies seek to develop the potential of postcolonial studies and expand our awareness of the entanglement of diverse spaces and nations in the making of contemporary culture as well as in the formation of European and other identities.

part 1 Refugees and Displaced Migrants

∵

Introduction to Part 1 The involuntary character of migration is at the core of Part 1, which consists of four studies dealing with the contemporary experience of forced migration and displacement in Africa, Europe, and the United States. As applied in this section, the idea of displacement follows the view that suggests that even in the conditions of migration and travel “places – local attachments – remain important”.1 The migrant narratives under study, while showing their characters’ occasionally successful attempts to reconstruct a sense of attachment, emphasize that the migrants tend to remain displaced, not fully integrated into or accepted by their new community. In this sense it is important to distinguish between different forms of migration and various kinds of migrants, as critics such as David Farrier have suggested that to “equate … voluntary exiles and asylum seekers” may lead to the creation of hierarchies.2 In the case of forced migrants, the sense of belonging cannot be easily reworked in a hostile host community, as several chapters in this part show. By examining their narratives in detail, this part aims to counter simplified media images and populist discourses of forced migrants that often construct them as markers of crisis and as threats to national unity and security.3 Writing of the representation of migrants is Swiss newspaper articles and their online comments, Daniel Rellstab claims that the categorization of migrants in negative or positive ways is dependent on political discourses and interpretation models offered: online commentators tend to follow the categories presented in the articles, which may lead to the reproduction of biased and negative views on migration and migrants.4

1 Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Oxford: Polity, 1999, 29. 2 David Farrier, Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary behind the Law, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013, 4. 3 On British discourses, see Agnes Woolley, Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 2–3 and 10–14; Jonathan Charteris-Black, “Britain as a Container: Immigration Metaphors in the 2005 Election Campaign”, Discourse and Society, xvii (2006), 563–81. 4 Daniel Rellstab, “Refugees? No Refugees? Categorizations of Migrants in the Wake of the Arab Spring in Swiss Online News and Comments”, in Representations of War, Migration, and Refugehood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds Daniel Rellstab and Christiane Schlote, London: Routledge, 2015, 130.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_003

12

Introduction to Part 1

The shared concerns of these texts – journeying and problematic adaptation, problematization of home, trauma and recuperation, limited subjectivity and lack of agency – make it possible to think about refugee writing as a genre. Comprising both fictional and non-fictional narratives of forced migration, and using different modes of writing from prose to poetry, the texts in the genre can be markedly different but what unifies them is their focus on the experiences of forced migrants and an ethico-political message. Rather than mere romans à thèse, however, the works in the genre may contextualize their themes in more general issues of postcoloniality and nationalism, or in trauma and loss. What they share is an attempt to make their subjects heard with their personal and individual histories, even though they may have been reduced to the conditions of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” or “naked life” experienced in locations such as refugee camps.5 At one level refugee writing works to counter socio-cultural images and stereotypes, at another it seeks to provide voice to a particular person. Writing from the perspective of trauma theory, Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests that a central issue in refugee writing is “to be recognized as a legal person”.6 According to Stonebridge, while the attempt to find a language to express the traumas of the refugee experience is highly problematic, through writing refugees explore individual responses and feelings and are on the way towards empowerment: “Rights … are rewarded for the ability to voice the human. In the granting of a common personhood, the rents (traumas) in law and language experienced by the refugee are passed (and pasted) over”.7 The analyses in Part 1 deal with questions of forced migration from different perspectives. The first chapter in this section explores a set of narratives written by refugees and asylum seekers in Swansea, Wales, a provincial city burdened with unemployment and xenophobia. In my discussion of their often autobiographical stories and poems, I examine the various ways in which the refugees imagine themselves and their journeying to Britain. The notion of refugee identity is addressed as a consequence of contemporary forced migration and defined as a form of identity in whose formation dislocation and liminality play a major role. The materials under study have been published in the three volumes of Refugees Writing in Wales, edited by Eric Ngalle 5 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 21–23. 6 Lyndsey Stonebridge, “‘That Which You Are Denying Us’: Refugees, Rights and Writing in Arendt”, in The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, eds Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, London: Routledge, 2016, 114. 7 Ibid., 117.

Introduction to Part 1

13

Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, and published by Hafan Books in Swansea in 2003–2005. The narratives, poems, and stories collected in these volumes deal with the refugee experience in Britain and provide snapshots of the life of asylum seekers in a British city, where racial violence is a fact both in the streets and in the schools. By examining these fictional and ­autobiographical texts by non-professional authors, both adults and children, the chapter shows that they have not only aesthetic but also personal and communal functions. It is argued that the produced refugee identity is a form of liminal identity where the forced migrant counters the dominant culture and resists its racist gaze. What is particularly important in the analysis is the refugees’ response to the cultural spaces of Britain and its discourses. While the general tone of the texts under study emphasizes dislocation, some poems show possibilities for relocation and hybridization of identity. Chapter 3 explores the representation of the refugee’s journey towards his or her dream of safety in the novel Going Home (2005), by the Angolan-born South African writer Simão Kikamba. The representation of the refugee experience in the novel shows how its protagonist Manuel Mpanda is forced to constantly negotiate his position in relation to the Southern African nationstates seeking to control their external and internal borders. Through the ­experiences of the refugee’s journeying across various borders and nations, narrated as open and closed spaces, the novel aims at interrogating institutionally and discursively reproduced xenophobic views that demand the exclusion of illegal migrants. To counter such attempts, Kikamba’s refugee, dislocated, discriminated against, and unable to achieve belonging, is shown to be capable of crossing borders, critiquing the closedness of such nations, and adding to arguments for more openness and inclusion in a world where the significance of the diverse forms of migration and mobility cannot be denied. The subsequent chapter examines the representation of the child soldier in Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), which tells its narrator’s journey from war-torn Sierra Leone to the safety of the United States. While not a refugee narrative per se, Beah’s text explores one of the root causes of contemporary forced migration, civil war, and traces the journey of those wishing to seek asylum and a better life in the West. What is particularly important is the way in which Beah’s best-selling memoir, while locating its narrator in the conditions of civil war and violence, reconstructs its child narrator through the discourse of trauma and links his identity construction with globalization and migration. By means of a therapeutic process, the traumatized child soldier is remoulded and re-educated, and becomes able to enter new worlds as one of the migrants in the modern West. In so doing, it makes the ruthless killer palatable to an international readership: A Long Way

14

Introduction to Part 1

Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier relies on the idea of the alleged purity and innocence of the figure of the child. What emerges as central to the reconstruction of the narrator’s identity is its transnational character and the emphasized role of globalized American popular culture: it is the boy’s transnational identification with rap music that links him with the United States, the globalized West, and their imagined identities. Yet the book remains ambiguous: while primarily a survival story praising individualism, the shades of trauma remain in the memoir, making the narrator an example of the traumatized losses experienced by his generation and nation, and ultimately the entire African continent. In other words, migration serves as a solution to his displacement and trauma. Contemporary narratives of forced migration often follow their subjects’ journey towards Europe, showing various ways in which the migrants cross borders, legally and illegally, with the aim of achieving security in Europe. Chapter 5 addresses the issue by examining the role and representation of borders, bordering, and borderscapes in “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” (2008), a short story by the black British/European writer Jamal Mahjoub telling of African migrants on their way to Europe. While Mahjoub’s novels explore Europe’s relations with its immigrant Others, “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” presents the perspective of the illegal immigrant seeking to cross into Europe from Africa, and thus invites a border reading. In this chapter, I read “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” in the context of recent theorizations of the ­border, which show how the transformation of identity is generated by the border crossing. The chapter discusses the journey of the story’s protagonist from South to North and pays particular attention to the ways in which Mahjoub’s narrative employs the rhetorical figure of metonymy as a means of narrating transnational identity, as the literary theorist Stephen Clingman has suggested. The border-crossings represented in Mahjoub’s story are also grounded ­historically and culturally, as they are not mere characteristics of contemporary globalization or nomadism. The portrayal of the young African boy who eventually makes his way to the Louvre shows that the transformation of ­identity is p ­ ersonal, cultural, and national. In this process, the text relocates the border and represents European nation-states as borderscapes where the allegedly pure identities of the nation-states are replaced with the transnational identity of the new migrant. In other words, “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” is a counterhegemonic text that imagines and explores alternative spaces of identity while questioning the maintenance of borders.

chapter 2

Refugee(s) Writing: Displacement in Contemporary Narratives of Forced Migration In contemporary representations of forced migration, the case of Africa is often emphasized. Media representations turn the refugee issue into a spectacle where migrants attempt to reach Europe in overloaded boats, often failing in the process. Following the example of scholars in such fields as sociology, political science, media studies, and social work,1 postcolonial literary studies have also started to pay attention to refugees and their (self-)representation.2 To carve out new ways of approaching the field of refugee writing, the aim of this chapter is to address the narrative representation of African refugees and asylum seekers in contemporary Britain through a discussion of a variety of literary texts they have produced – my choice to use the term refugee in this chapter is based on the positionality and self-identification of these migrants in the books under discussion. The notion of refugee identity is addressed as a consequence of contemporary forced migration and defined as a form of identity in whose formation dislocation and liminality play a major role. The materials under study come from the first three volumes of Refugees Writing in Wales, this is, Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales (2003), Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2 (2004), and Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3 (2005). All of them have been edited by Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann and published by the non-profit publisher Hafan Books in Swansea between 2003–05.3 The narratives, poems, and stories collected in the three volumes address directly the refugee experience in Britain and are part of a project seeking to connect migrant writers with local ones. The collections offer rare glimpses into the reality of asylum seekers in a deprived British city, where racial 1 For recent interdisciplinary studies see Representations of War, Migration, and Refugehood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds Daniel Rellstab and Christiane Schlote, London: Routledge, 2015. 2 See, for example, Farrier, Postcolonial; Woolley; and the work by Helff. 3 Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003; Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004; Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_004

16

chapter 2

violence is wide-spread. The third volume is, indeed, dedicated to the memory of Kalan Kawa Karim, “killed by a blow to the back of the neck in a cowardly, unprovoked, racially motivated attack, in the early hours of 6 September 2004 in the centre of Swansea”.4 The collections include narratives by refugees – and other writers – from all over the world, both adult and children, but in this chapter my focus is on narratives written or produced by people of African origin. The volumes, however, include contributions from refugees from such countries as Iran, Iraq, Chile, Albania, and Pakistan. It should be noticed that all contributors to the volumes are not necessarily professional authors – or writers who write in English. Some of the narratives are tales and memoirs, or they are based on oral stories. Rather than merely aesthetic contributions, they have personal and communal functions. As Tom Cheesman points out to in his “Preface” to the first volume: “All attest to the double value of refugee writing: to work through personal traumas, and to communicate with the world as individuals, instead of as the faceless, bogus bugbear of much uk media and ignorant public opinion”.5 Thus this chapter aims to show how these narratives produce refuge as a form of liminal identity where the refugee needs to cope with the dominant culture and resist its racist gaze. In so doing, I will discuss first the image of homeland offered in these stories and then address their responses to the cultural spaces of Britain.

Forced Migrants vs. Exiles

It is clear that the texts are linked with contemporary global migration and cannot be addressed as representations of conventional exile. It has been argued that the twentieth century is the century of war and refugees, which can be seen in the high number of refugees all over the world. In his book on the topic, Phil Marfleet claims that while globalization argues for open trade and free mobility, it has also constructed “new physical and cultural barriers” that exclude forced migrants.6 But who is this forced migrant to be barred from entering the nation-states of Europe? The idea of the refugee is historically changing and contingent, regularly “redefined by politicians and officials”.7 4 Anon., “Dedication”, in Between the Mountain and the Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 1. 5 Tom Cheesman, “Preface”, in Between the Mountain and the Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 7. 6 Phil Marfleet, Refugees in a Global Era, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 5. 7 Ibid., 13.

Refugee(s) Writing

17

Hence, the refugee is a construct, but one that carries remarkable political weight: “Refugees are produced by a number of factors: economic, political, social, cultural and environmental. Their lives are shaped by formal political and legal structures, and by both official and popular ideas of nation and nationalism, citizen and alien, ‘race’ and ethnicity”.8 An example of this is evident in the words of Rebekah F., aged 10, writes in “Black is …”, her contribution to the first volume. The poem makes explicit the widely-spread negative view of forced migrants and a general atmosphere of racial prejudice. To quote: This is what they say: Black is evil, It is dark, The colour is dull. This is what they say: In black there’s a spark, A spark that’s nasty. These are words people say, And this makes them sad. Is it out of hate? or the colour of their skin? But white people here Have racism within.9 Such views are evident in the ways in which dominant Western discourses of politics, law, and the media define their topic, generating images and stereotypes of hordes of barbarians entering our lands. As Marfleet points out, the viewpoint advocated by Western states encourages us to think about refugees in this manner, not as individuals with particular histories: instead, they are represented as “rootless opportunists whose claims for asylum are illegitimate and whose presence threatens host societies”.10 In Britain, the increasingly more visible presence of refugees has generated what Kundnani calls the 8 9

10

Ibid., 7. Rebekah F., “Black Is…”, in Between the Mountain and the Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 23. Marfleet, 193.

18

chapter 2

“new popular racism”,11 transmitted in the name of the nation as dominant ­images popularized in mainstream media (tabloids) and enacted in everyday racism.12 As Black British writing has openly challenged the racialized bias of the English literary canon, the counter-discursive work produced by refugees seeks to invalidate dominant stereotypes of refugees as opportunists. The narratives constantly pay attention to racism and the perceived image people have of refugees, which can be seen in the first stanza of the poem “I Feel like Nobody Here” by Maxson Sahr Kpakio, journalist and refugee activist originally from Liberia: I feel like nobody here, ashamed, like everybody Hates me, But they don’t know me, they really Don’t know who I am either, Only they know what they read in the Newspapers about me And that is not me.13 By conflating the speaking “I” of the poem with the objectified and dehumanized object of popular newspaper journalism, Kpakio successfully conveys the frustration of a refugee and challenges dominant representations, and shows how he attempts to forge a full personhood. The poem also shows the refugee as an individual, not as the nameless victim of civil wars and famine, seeking entry into Europe, as emphasized in their media representations. If examined­ in the terms of David Farrier, Kpakio’s asylum seeker, living in the hostile “condition[s] of waiting, uncertainty and dependency”, is prevented from “selfcreation”.14 This predicament juxtaposes the refugee with the xenophobic discourses of the host nation described by the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah’s in an article published in the Guardian in 2001: The debate over asylum is twinned with a paranoid narrative of race, disguised and smuggled in as euphemisms about foreign lands and cultural 11

Arun Kundnani, “In a Foreign Land: The New Popular Racism”, Race & Class, XLIII/2 (2001), 41. 12 Ibid., 48–49. 13 Maxson Sahr Kpakio, “I Feel like Nobody Here”, in Between the Mountain and the Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffmann, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 68. 14 Farrier, Postcolonial, 6.

Refugee(s) Writing

19

integrity. The Anglo-Saxon species is once again rumoured to be on the verge of extinction, when a glance around the world shows how successfully it has invaded and displaced others.15 Thus, to offer an alternative to such ideological visions, this chapter approaches refugees and refugee identity from a perspective that takes into account what refugee studies scholars consider the central issue structuring the experience of forced migration: displacement. To use the words of Marfleet, Displaced people have been forcibly separated from or … compelled to abandon their resources …: material possessions; access to land, housing and employment; kin and communal relationships; and familiar languages, traditions and institutions – the whole complex of economic, political, socio-cultural and psychological elements that make up the framework for existence of each and every human being.16 As the quotation shows, forced migration can be distinguished from the notions of nomadism and exile often glorified in literary studies and critical theory. Caren Kaplan, in her Questions of Travel (1996), shows that several critics have sought to maintain the distinction between the refugee and the exile because of their attraction to the myth of solitary creation.17 For instance, in his famous essay “Reflections on Exile”, Edward W. Said contrasts the mass experience of refugee with that of exile: “‘exile’ carries with it, I think, a touch of solitude and spirituality”,18 and also suggests that only the latter experience is of significance as the former is “without a tellable history”.19 Said’s ideas are based on the modernist cult of the exilic writer, a Conrad or a Joyce, whose creative process is triggered by the “solitude” which allows him to see more clearly. An understanding of identity as diasporic and transnational, being linked to several national formations, is distinct from earlier approaches to exilic writing, often produced by the elite, artists and political dissenters, in metropolitan spaces. In such studies as Terry Eagleton’s Exiles and Émigrés: 15

16 17 18 19

Abdulrazak Gurnah, “Fear and Loathing”, The Guardian 22 May, 2001, online ed., available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. Marfleet, 193–94. See Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, London: Duke University Press, 1996, 101–42. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003, 181. Ibid., 176.

20

chapter 2

Studies in Modern Literature (1970) and Andrew Gurr’s Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature (1981), the experience of exile and being cut-off from one’s own culture is understood as liberating. In analysing twentieth-century literature in Britain by writers such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad, Eagleton claims that “the great art of English literature” by “foreigners and émigrés” stems from the authors’ “access to alternative cultures and traditions”.20 For Eagleton, creativity results from the conditions of exile and a felt uneasiness with dominant values: “I am concerned not so much with the work of ‘literal’ expatriates but with the ‘social’ exiles: with the work of Englishmen who reveal most acutely the cultural limitations which … are closely related to the problem of the ‘émigre’”.21 Similarly, Andrew Gurr, in his analysis of postcolonial writers including Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Naipaul, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, writes about “the freedom of exile” provided by “the insight which distance gives”.22 In privileging an individual exile, the experiences of entire groups are not heard, yet the emergence of refugee writers shows that their histories can be told. As a genre or mode of expression, refugee writing appears different from that by migrant writers such as Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee, in whose fictions transitions from one culture to another appear much less problematic and patrolled than what is shown in refugee narratives. Recently a similar view of the particularity of narratives of forced migration has been presented by Agnes Woolley. In her view narratives of forced migration are markedly different from conventional narratives of diaspora identity and represent “specific modes of migration and dwelling”.23 However, refugee identity as an expression of displacement can be understood as an identity in transit, moving from the original home to refugee camps and centres, crossing borders legally and illegally. Such an identity can be described as liminal, the term understood here in the sense proposed by Victor Turner, in which the individual moves from a fixed sense of self and location into a new, different position. Thus identity, to use Turner’s words, “becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of

20 21 22 23

Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigres: Studies in Modern Literature, London: Chatto & Windus, 1970, 15. Ibid., 18. Andrew Gurr, Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1981, 25. Woolley, 3.

Refugee(s) Writing

21

the attributes of his past or coming state”.24 This is, indeed, the effect of displacement, where the migrant is forced to give up the familiar, not knowing what the future will provide. This liminality, the status of being at the threshold, is constructed in at least three ways: physically, symbolically, and spatially. The physical dimension can be seen in the emphasis on border patrolling, where nation-states seek to prohibit other bodies from entering their soil. Narratives by refugees offer various illustrations of such processes of exclusion. The symbolic aspect of liminality is weaved into the narratives of forced migration through the use of languages and images of confusion, where the sense of exile and exhaustion create an uncanny sense of in-betweenness. As Linda Camino puts it, the refugee’s liminality suggests that s/he is “caught between old and new surroundings”.25 The spatial element is present in the practices of journeying and, in particular, mapping the space(s) of forced migration. This can be seen in some texts where the refugees explore their new surroundings and present cultural comparisons between the two spaces. While the speaker in “Clyne Gardens” wonders whether entry to the tranquil greenery of the park is free, the poem “White Man” comments on the pace of life in Europe: “Never has any time/Rushes everywhere”.26 Similarly, “The British” reveals that “They say ‘sorry’ but do they mean it?”27 Through comments on the way of life, the refugee writes herself into the space but maintains her difference and own distinct identity. Thus the refugee identity is constructed through movement, and since the refugee is not at home, her/his location is dislocation in the space of the Other – Agamben has suggested that the refugee is “a disquieting element in the order of the nation-state [and] brings the originary fiction of sovereignity to crisis”.28 My readings of the representation of forced migration will focus on questions of space and journeying. I will emphasize what kind of meanings are given by the refugees to the space they enter, and how they are positioned by prevalent discourses of exclusion. In so doing, I wish to approach refugee identity not as one of victimization, or as mere example of Agamben’s “bare life”, 24 25

26

27 28

Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974, 232. Linda Camino, “Refugee Adolescents and Their Changing Identities”, in Reconstructing Lives, Recapturing Meaning: Refugee Identity, Gender, and Culture Change, eds Linda Camino and Ruth M. Krulfeld, Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1993, 30. Sylvie Hoffmann, comp., “Swansea Collage” [2003], in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 78. Ibid., 77. Agamben, 20.

22

chapter 2

but I seek to discuss its discursive construction and the meaning potential it has in contemporary culture.

Writing into Being

The refugee narratives provide a multifaceted picture of the journeying of the forced migrant from the place of origin to Britain and their often hostile ­reception. The narratives can be divided into two major groups: texts dealing with the reasons for and phases of the refugee experience and texts narrating of their experiences in Britain. The first group includes texts emphasizing questions of politics, oppression, poverty, and lack of civil rights. Some narratives emphasize the pain of the migrant by offering images of torture, war, racism, but they also discuss such issues as homesickness and nostalgia. The effects of political turmoil can be seen in many narratives describing the situation in such countries as Congo, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. For instance, in his “The First Fear”, a short story set amidst the raging rebel war in Congo-­Kinshasa, Aimé Kongolo describes the fate of Tourra, a politics professor, who is shown to return to Kivu, a town in the eastern parts in the Republic of Congo, after seven years of absence due to the civil war, thinking that he is now able to “belong somewhere”.29 In a similar vein, in the poem “Africa, Mother” Aliou Keita from Mali stresses the need for peace and unity as a solution to the problems of warfare and famine.30 Rather than focusing on topics such as civil war, some other texts foreground issues of censorship and freedom of speech as factors contributing to migration. The writings by the Sudanese writer Abdalla Bashir-Khairi deal with the lack of human rights in Sudan and underline the strength of censorship. The short story “The Text Committee” describes satirically the power of “the Tribunal Committee of Textual Rectification”.31 The task of this committee is to examine and censor all possible texts, and its chair, “a true maestro”, has perfected his task: “He assigned to himself, long ago, the task of writing the idealizing reports refusing permission for any text that fails to restrict itself to 29 30 31

Aimé Kongolo, “The First Fear”, in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 39. Aliou Keita, “Africa, Mother”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 63. Abdalla Bashir-Khairi, “The Text Committee”, trans. Ibrahim Gafar, ed. Tom Cheesman, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 43.

Refugee(s) Writing

23

the literal precepts of the official dispensation”.32 By describing the questions that they pose to writers, Bashir-Khairi points to an atmosphere of paranoia and an inability to present a critique of the state of affairs, and also reveals the impossibility to voice dissent in such conditions. As the political is redefined as the linguistic, this silencing is constructed as a form of grammatical and thus apparently objective work, rather than as official censorship: To these oppressive adepts are due the poll-taxes of speech. Through them alone all texts must pass, and none may be corrected except by their committee. They thunder that the writer of the play The Cock of Al-Hajja Bhana must spell the title differently. And they add, in an insinuating tone: “What do you really mean by the cock of Al-Hajja Bahan, anyway? And who do you mean, eh?” Before he answers this question himself, the maestro says haughtily: “Leave the text with us to correct the linguistic errors with which it is no less than rife. Go and don’t come back until we summon you!”33 The danger of dissent expressed through literature can be seen explicitly in the poem “I Guarantee” by the Zimbabwean William G. Mbwembwe. This poem presents a series of contrasts between the government’s official explanation of the state of affairs and the way in which they are experienced at the grassroots level: I can guarantee, the rate of crime is very low in Zimbabwe Everybody’s into it, it’s the norm I can guarantee, fuel is plenty-plus in Zimbabwe Always at a filling station at the other side of town34 The poem culminates in the lines telling of the danger of dissent: “I can guarantee a long life in Zimbabwe/Just don’t carry this poem with you”.35 What these texts reveal is lack of cultural rights and that of the right to narrate in particular, the latter considered by Homi K. Bhabha a fundamental human right and central to the experience of migrants and minorities: 32 33 34 35

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 43; emphasis original. William G. Mbwembwe, “I Guarantee”, in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 28. Ibid., 28.

24

chapter 2

The right to free thought and speech is fundamental to the right to narrate.… To protect the “right to narrate” is to protect a range of democratic imperatives: it assumes that there is an equitable access to those institutions – schools, universities, museums, libraries, theatres – that give you a sense of collective history and the means to turn those materials into a narrative of your own. Such an assured, empowered sense of “selfhood”, the knowledge that to tell your story is to know that there is a “public culture” in which it will be heard and could be acted upon, depends upon the nations’ guardianship of what Article 5 of the International Convention on Economic, Social and Political Rights defines as “the right to take part in cultural life.”36 In discussing the lack of civil rights in their countries of origin, some authors rely on literary conventions such as the fairy tale and allegory, through which they are able to approach the political problems of their country of origin and narrate their experience. This can be seen in such stories as “The Poet’s Garden” by the Algerian author Soleïman Adel Guémar. The protagonist of this story, the poet, who lives “on the roof-terrace of a high-rise apartment block … in an old washroom, three metres by two”, seeks to transform this desolate space “into a pretty little garden”.37 The story shows how he gradually constructs such a utopian space, “a garden as lovely as those of ancient Babylon” carrying soil to his terrace – “‘A poet’s whim!’”.38 However, after years the existence of such a dissident place is suddenly reported to the government by Sidi-El-Hadj El-Thawri, who has just married his young daughter to an elderly army officer. As the story pits the poet’s fanciful creation against what roof gardens are really for (“It’s for television aerials, or maybe for playing football or a bit of jogging”39), the allegory is revealed to deal with fundamentalism and censorship. As a sign of this, the local businessmen promise money for the person who manages to kill the poet, “to achieve this patriotic honour”.40 Unsurprisingly, the end of the story shows the mob entering his garden and throwing the poet into what appears to be his death. Yet his fall is never-ending and miraculous, suggesting that he is beyond the reach. What the story seems 36 37

38 39 40

Homi K. Bhabha, “On Writing Rights”, in Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1999, ed. Matthew J. Gibney, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 180–81. Soleïman Adel Guémar, “The Poet’s Garden”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 78. Ibid., 78–79. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81.

Refugee(s) Writing

25

to suggest is that the power of words in transforming spaces and ideologies cannot be underestimated: the poet’s work, his garden, is described to be able to take men’s thoughts away from murder and violence: The garden was sublime. There were flowers of every colour and every possible shape. Nothing like them had ever been seen. One by one, the poet’s attackers turned away from the spectacle of his fall to admire the splendours of his garden.41 The final image of the story hints at a different future when poets are not fools but have a major role to play: “And the young boys played at being the little poet”.42 The poems by Soleïman Adel Guémar are not always allegorical. Rather, images of torture and lack of civil rights are central to his writing, testifying of his commitment to the principles of human rights. A harsh critique of their violation can be seen, for instance, in the series of poems named “State of Emergency (Six Poems)”. “State of Emergency”, the first poem in this series, opens with images of military violence and organized torture, and its ending shifts the focus from the individual to the nation. Subsequently it suggests a more general sense of humiliation and links individual traumas to national ones: army boots kicking my face in fingernails torn out one by one skull savaged by adrill militia-men at my bed in shifts until morning awaiting the order to slit my throat avidly …. Algiers betrayed ordered to the electrodes adopts a posture which is foetal43 41 42 43

Ibid., 82. Ibid., 82. Soleïman Adel Guémar, “State of Emergency (Six Poems)”, in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 30–31.

26

chapter 2

The poetry of Guémar is particularly striking in its intertwined images of violence, torture, and political disappointment. While the above poem shows a body in pain, a human being humiliated, “Fire of Joy” discusses the poet’s nation of origin through images of blood and death: land bled dry murdered unceasingly will you ever give birth to the child I’m expecting from you44 As the poem “Known Places” puts it, these landscapes of terror are burning with fire; they are full of “road[s]” where one can find remains of bodies swollen by heat eaten by animals [and] the burned field still smoking here monsters passed45 By reversing the idea of place as meaningful to identity, the poem emphasizes the loss of home and refuses nostalgia and hope of return to such a place of death and destruction. To stress this sense of disappointment and the failure of democracy, “Illusions” speaks of our inability to learn from history. For Guémar, safety is a mere misapprehension, a temporary recluse before the next wave of oppressors marches in: and we thought we were back together again in a land of asylum while others hiding in the border shadows were already waxing their new boots but you didn’t know it yet .… 44 45

Soleïman Adel Guémar, “Fire of Joy”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 65. Soleïman Adel Guémar, “Known Places”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 67.

Refugee(s) Writing

27

and when you thought you heard their nearly new boots resounding on the smoking tarmac it was already too late46

Counterin Racism and Prejudice

While the volumes include writing by refugees of all ages and backgrounds, the issues of race, racism, and prejudice as a part of their experience of Britain are shared by many writers. However, a complementary perspective to the experience of Rebekah F. addressed above, providing us with a glimpse of hope, can be found in the writings by the nine-year-old Alice Salomon Bowen, whose mother is mentioned to work at a community centre frequented by forced migrants. While the prose text “Let’s Get Along” locates its speaker as “Alice. I’m only nine”, it also shows her insistence on equality and understanding of difference: “Just because they are different doesn’t mean they are bad or trying to hurt us in any way”.47 As her writings show, the British perspective is not entirely inhostile. In the short poem “Friendship”, she puts her call for friendship and equality in the following way: Friends of all COLOURS Friends of all NATIONS Friends of all CULTURES Friends of TODAY Friends of TOMORROW Friends FOREVER48 More generally, in these writings Britain appears as a contradictory space. While it offers a future free from violence and oppression, it also shows racial prejudices and problems. Kamal Sbiri has suggested that such a perception is 46 47

48

Soleïman Adel Guémar, “Illusions”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 66. Alice Solomon Bowen, “Let’s Get Along”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 20. Alice Solomon Bowen, “Friendship”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 20.

28

chapter 2

a characteristic of refugee writing: while home may function as “a source of inspiration”, the new reality is a disappointment and may not amount to “more than a possibility of having a voice”.49 The images of Britain offered in the narratives pinpoint the refugees’ problematic moments of entry and negative ­experiences. In describing the refugees’ responses to life in Swansea, the narratives render its atmosphere as one of racism and discrimination. This appears to be particularly striking in a set of poems, “Swansea Collage”, a version of which can be found in each volume. These “collages”, based on conversations and poems by mainly French-speaking African women, have been put together by Sylvie Hoffman, one of the editors of the volumes. In short poems forming the collage, occasionally not longer than merely one or two lines, the refugee writes back, questions and wonders about her dislocation in the newly entered host country, often dismayed or outright frightened: The cars I am frightened The streets I am frightened The sea I am frightened I am frightened for my children50 Furthermore, the poem “Behind the Facades” shows a refugee mapping the city where each building looks like a church: What is behind? Is this a church? No, no… it’s a school Is this a church? No, no… it’s an Indian restaurant Is this a church? No, no… it’s the old Swansea police station51 Alienated and excluded from the space they encounter, these migrants display, to use the terms of geographer Edward Relph, existential outsideness, a sense 49 50 51

Kamal Sbiri, “Writing Refugee in the Era of Displacement: Reflections on Poetry”, Transnational Literature, IV/1 (2011), 1–11. Hoffmann, comp., “Swansea Collage” [2003], 75. Ibid., 74.

Refugee(s) Writing

29

of non-attachment and non-belonging to a place.52 In these poems the issue of outsideness extends from physical space and urban landscape to customs and cultural difference, and it underlines the sense of displacement characterizing many of the texts in the collections. Reflections on difference, however, show that the refugee is in the state of liminality and is involved in a process that may lead to the reconstruction of space and identity. This is clear in the following two poems, of which the first one, “At Home”, contrasts home with Britain: We get up with the sun We go to bed with the sun No one sends us an electricity bill at the end of the month53 The second poem, “Swansea Central Library”, is a significant text and needs to be read in the context of remapping space. It inserts the refugee into a community, which while consisting of refugees, finds itself a space in Britain, as the city library becomes a site of interaction and mutual friendship, a home away from home. Yet the poem also reveals that these women are deprived of their original home and community, and have only each other to send messages to: We send each other e-mails round the computer table A good meeting place A safe haven54 A similar notion of a safe meeting place can also be seen in the first collage where the only place welcoming the migrant is a church: “Yes, this is a church/ You can come in if you wish”.55 What is important is that these two sites are transformed through the agency of the refugee from threatening spaces into familiar places: to use the terms of the anthropologist Marc Augé, the nonplace becomes a place, “relational, historical and concerned with identity”.56 To use Relph’s concepts, in this location the sense of outsideness is replaced with insideness, defined by David Seamon and Jacob Sowers as a way of feeling

52 53 54 55 56

Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 2008 [1976], 51. Hoffmann, comp., “Swansea Collage” [2003], 77. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 74. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, London: Verso, 1995, 77.

30

chapter 2

“safe rather than threatened, enclosed rather than exposed, at ease rather than stressed”.57 While the tone of some poems is melancholic and even angry, humour provides occasional relief, as revealed in the response to the speaker of the poem “Kingsway Centre”, where she is taking language classes: “How is your English coming along?/– ‘I must’”.58 In the “Swansea Collage” published in the third volume, sardonic humour is present in practically all texts, but especially in “Geography for Beginners”, which takes the form of an exercise in a textbook: I am from Palestine. I don’t want money. I have learned to live without money. Just show me, where can I sleep? Where can I sleep? I am from the Sudan … (Read again from after “Palestine” to the end) I am from Congo-Kinshasa (Repeat the exercise) I am from Ethiopia (Get the idea?)59 The final instructions tell the learners that they should be able to complete the exercise on their own: “Take a map of the world, pick a country at war – civil war or any other war – and you can practise this exercise in the comfort of your own home. If you need help, just ask anyone in the queue at the Welsh or Scottish or English Refugee Council”.60 In rewriting instructional discourse from the perspective of the refugee, the text not only mocks British ignorance about the political situation in non-Western countries but also shows how the migrant by appropriating the textbook genre transforms from the one who is taught (“I must”) to the one who teaches, from object to subject. As the reconstruction of identity plays a central role in the process of adaptation, this rewriting 57

58 59

60

David Seamon and Jacob Sowers, “Place and Placelessness (1976): Edward Relph”, in Key Texts in Human Geography, eds Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine, London: Sage, 2008, 45. Hoffmann, comp., “Swansea Collage” [2003], 78. Sylvie Hoffmann, comp., “Swansea Collage” [2005], in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 104; emphasis original. Ibid., 104; emphasis original.

Refugee(s) Writing

31

signifies their gaining of an empowered identity. In the process of rewriting, Africa and other continents write Britain and Europe, and the refugees construct a transnational identity based on shared experience. Erin Goheen Glanville, who has applied diaspora theory to a set of generically different refugee texts including poetry, short fiction, and popular music produced by diasporic writers and artists in Canada, suggests that the position of the refugee as carrying “diasporic consciousness” allows for a rethinking of the potential of their position in between the nations – not only as problems within the nation-state.61 Rather, the diasporic context of refugee texts is able to reveal what she calls the process of “rerooting”, a reconstruction of belonging, by “remap[ping] diasporic experience as a struggle towards belonging that is obstructed by a much broader set of circumstances than a simple story of collusion with/antagonism against the nation-state could indicate”.62 This is, indeed, what appears to take place in the library and the centre. This process of reconstructing identity and community shows the problems embedded in Said’s notion of exile and reveal how Kaplan’s deconstruction of these apparently binary categories, exile and refugee, makes it possible to recover the history and cultural expression of the displaced refugees: “Historicizing refugee experience might bring a previously invisible category back from the wilderness of the margins of criticism and literature, perhaps through the inclusive mantle of the term ‘diaspora’”.63 The notions of displacement and diaspora are then in dialogic relationship with each other. While the former suggests a loss of familiar space and the need to accommodate, the latter links the displaced with each other, suggesting that diasporic identity may be more related to community and shared history than to a particular place of origin. What this means is that the communities constructed around the experience of forced migration may be different from those of traditional diasporas: the diasporic identity of a particular ethnic or national group may be replaced with transnational alliances and communities where the alliances cut across binaries and politics of location in a counter-hegemonic manner.64 61

62 63 64

Erin Goheen Glanville, “Rerouting Diaspora Theory with Canadian Refugee Fiction”, in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, eds Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, London: Routledge, 2010, 134. Ibid., 137. Caren Kaplan, Questions, 125. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity”, in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, eds Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 13.

32

chapter 2

Reinscribing Home

The issues of home and not-home are emphasized in much exilic and diasporic writing, and the poems occasionally offer glimpses of what has been left behind. As Guémar puts it in a poem called “Exile”, the migrant’s longing for home is evoked easily and surprisingly: my country gives off a scent which calls you by your first name the moment you turn your back your heart squeezes as at your first embrace65 The only way, however, to reach this space is through memory and fantasy: “my lunar memory/has woven flying carpets”.66 Yet the pull of the home has been shown to be negotiated when the subject occupies a diasporic identity, where multilocationality replaces the privileging of the site of origin. What diasporic narratives emphasize is homing desire, discussed by Avtar Brah as an alternative to fixed narratives of origin.67 To quote Brah, “Diasporic identities are at once local and global. They are networks of transnational identifications encompassing ‘imagined’ and ‘encountered’ communities”.68 In constructing diasporic identity, the immigrant links herself not with one transnational community but with several, crossing national boundaries and accepting the possibility of home other than the originary one. Such a process can be traced in the poetry of Eric Ngalle Charles, whose journeying has taken him from Cameroon to Russia and further to Swansea. In addition to conventional subjects such as love, Charles’ poetry also reflects on his childhood and its (post)colonial character, and it also imagines Britain as a new home. In the poem “My First Language”, the presence of different languages links Africa to Wales, and emphasizes the many layers of postcolonial and multilingual identity: 65 66 67 68

Soleïman Adel Guémar, “Exile”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 70. Ibid., 70. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge, 1996, 192–93. Ibid., 196; emphasis original.

Refugee(s) Writing

33

I thought I am Portuguese, Never owning a plantation Of my own, Then I thought I am German, Then I realised The English kicked The kingdom out. They said I was French – Oh no, Marie! le bread! Thanks to the queen – Queen Victoria that is – I was given the name Charles. Rumours say he was the great. Maybe I’m a Mormon Tracking a family tree.69 In narrating different histories for himself, the speaker emphasizes the connections between Europe and colonized Africa, and their impact for today. The final words of the poem make this point clear by emphasizing the legacy of multilingualism in Africa: I know my language, Existing passively, As others came And others left Surprised why I speak in tongues.70 In another poem published in the same volume, Charles goes further in linking African and Welsh spaces with each other to present a hybrid identity. 69

70

Eric Ngalle Charles, “My First Language”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 29. Ibid., 30.

34

chapter 2

“A Mountain and a Sea”, a poem about the speakers projected “home-coming”, can be seen as multi-locational poetry where the features of the original home in Africa are rewritten onto a European landscape. In writing about the Welsh mountains, the speaker links them with stories and images of his past and his cultural traditions: Her giant gaze Looking down at me Like Yomadene, The guardian, The mountain Where my grandmother Lived after her death. A mountain of broken hearts. That for my homecoming.71 To underline the transformation of identity, and its transnational links, the poem next imagines a strikingly pastoral Welsh image of “[a] shining mountain” with grazing sheep,72 which is followed with an explicit reference to the speaker’s rebirth in Wales. At this moment the speaker is able reconstruct his identity and locate himself in the Welsh space: On a wet journey to Llandudno Washing away pain and longing A re-born voice crying Between a mountain and a sea.73 The final lines also suggest of the possibility of making this space one’s home, as they locate the speaker’s “home-coming” in this space, “[b]etween a mountain/And a sea”.74 Thus Charles’ poem reinscribes home in the acquired space and landscape of Wales, yet this home embodies the migrant’s memories of other homes ­beyond 71

72 73 74

Eric Ngalle Charles, “A Mountain and a Sea”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 91. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 91.

Refugee(s) Writing

35

the sea. Such a process of home-building is described by Sara Ahmed et al. as a way of collecting fragments and other traces of a former home: “Making home is about creating both pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of the present”.75 Hence, both the poetry of Charles and the images carved out in the different versions of “Swansea Collage” are attempts to negotiate dislocation which use writing as a means of making home in the space of the Other, where the presence of the refugee is on occasion barely tolerated. As “In the Fish and Chips Shop”, a poem in “Swansea Collage”, shows, “Broad smile:/– ‘Are you on holidays?’”76 Yet the innocent-sounding question by the smiling the shop assistant is not necessarily welcoming: the “broad smile” may easily turn into coldness and hatred should the answer to the question turn out to be a non-desired one, this is, one revealing that the alleged vacationer is an asylum seeker, an outsider in the place-bound world of the insider. What this reveals is that space and place are social constructs and based on social relations, and the presence of migrants in allegedly homogeneous local cultures may be considered a disruption and offence rather than a result of globalization.77 Conclusion Not only do the images and stories told by African refugees themselves in these volumes offer insight into the problems encountered in their countries of origin but they also tell of processes of dislocation, exile, and cultural adaptation. In their emphasis on the problematics involved in forced migration – the traumas generated by civil war atrocities and the racism encountered in Britain in particular – the narratives appear to foreground the negative experience of migration, and understandably so. Nevertheless, as I have shown, some refugee narratives also suggest the possibility of reconstructing home and identity in the context of Britain. While the figure of the forced migrant as such cannot be romanticized and posited as a privileged model of identity in the postcolonial world, its presence 75

76 77

Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, “Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration”, in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, eds Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, Oxford: Berg, 2003, 9; emphasis original. Hoffmann, comp., “Swansea Collage” [2003], 77. Cf. Doreen Massey, “The Conceptualization of Place”, in A Place in the World: Places, Cultures and Globalization, eds Doreen Massey and Pat Jess, Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1995, 51–52.

36

chapter 2

in the former centre shows that it cannot be evaded and easily transported. As testified in refugee narratives, the frontiers of Europe are not closed but penetratable, and its shores not beyond the effects of global forces, as recent events have shown. As stories of dis- and re-location, these narratives tell of the emergence of a new phase in European culture, where global flows affect the national narratives of formerly homogeneous nation-states and generate new forms of identity. As the texts analyzed also show, unfortunately their construction is often also resisted and migrants’ presence considered a problem.

chapter 3

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home While the previous chapter examined African refugees in Britain, this chapter focuses on the experience of forced migration in Southern Africa in the novel Going Home (2005) by the Angola-born writer Simão Kikamba.1 What characterizes representations of African refugees is what Jo Ellen Fair and Lisa Parks find central in their analysis of the western news portrayal of Rwandan ­refugees during the atrocities in 1996. In their view, refugees are represented as a deterritorialized mass, flowing across national borders and occupying such spaces as refugee camps and tents, a view that dominates the media and transforms refugees into distant recipients of western help and Africa into “a place of crisis”.2 Many representations of African migrants direct our attention to these marginalized figures representing the masses in motion, people cast forth by the atrocities of civil wars or impending ecological disasters. While much of cultural research on migration has dealt with media discourses, also literary critics are addressing the issue and present readings of forced migration in culture.3 Since the early 2000s, the issue of the African refugee has been dealt with in diverse autobiographical and fictional narratives telling of forced migrants and also in texts written by them, as discussed in the previous chapter. In addition to films such as Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), displaced characters can be found in recent literary works including the novels A Distant Shore (2003), By the Sea (2001), and Refugee Boy (2001), by the black British writers Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Benjamin Zephaniah, respectively, which address the experiences of African refugees upon entering Europe,4

1 Simão Kikamba, Going Home, Roggebaai: Kwela Books, 2005. 2 Jo Ellen Fair and Lisa Parks, “Africa on Camera: Television News Coverage and Aerial Imagining of Rwandan Refugees”, Africa Today, XLVIII/2 (2001), 35–36, 49. 3 See Rellstab and Schlote; Farrier, Postcolonial; and Woolley. 4 See Sissy Helff, “Illegal Diasporas and African Refugees in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, xliv (2009), 67–80; Sissy Helff, “‘The New Europeans’: The Image of the African Refugee in European Literature”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, I/2 (2008), 123–32; and Nyman, Home, 127–44.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_005

38

chapter 3

and in diverse autobiographical narratives produced by African migrants to Europe and the United States.5 While representations of intra-African forced migrants are less known, a good example of the contemporary African refugee’s journeying towards the fulfillment of her or his hopes can be found in Kikamba’s novel portraying the lives of illegal migrants in South Africa. In South Africa, according to the World Refugee Survey by the u.s. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the number of refugees is approximately 256,000.6 The former i­nflux of ­Mozambiquean and Angolan refugees has been replaced by increased numbers of forced migrants from Zimbabwe, who have become objects of x­ enophobia and hate crime, as seen, in particular, in the serious anti-­immigrant attacks in 2008. Other significant countries of origin include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Ethiopia. This experience is central to the ­concerns of this chapter: it is my aim to discuss the representation of migrants in Kikamba’s novel that has received only cursory critical attention. Tony ­ ­Simoes da Silva, treating the novel in passing, focuses on the figure of the refugee as a universal and global experience to suggest that they represent “a new kind of person, a citizen of the world unencumbered by nationality”.7 In her article on contemporary South African representations of “xenophobic violence” Helene Strauss sees Kikamba’s novel as a part of an emerging trend of narratives that reveal the current “crisis of hospitality” but does not address the novel in detail.8 In his unpublished dissertation, Sydoine Moudouma Moudouma approaches the novel from a perspective that concentrates 5 See Dirk Göttsche, “Cross-Cultural Self-Assertion and Cultural Politics: African Migrants’ Writing in German since the 1990s”, German Life and Letters, LXIII/1 (2010), 54–70; Sissy Helff, “Refugee Life Narratives – The Disturbing Potential of a Genre and the Case of Mende Nazer”, in Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, eds Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff, and Daniela Merolla, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 331–45; Sissy Helff, “Memories of Migration: Tracing the Past through Movement in Film”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, VIII/1 (2015), 1–14; and Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo, “Asylum Stories: Constructing Zimbabwean Identities in the Diaspora”, in Neo-Colonial Mentalities in Contemporary ­Europe? Language and Discourse in the Construction of Identities, eds Guido Rings and Anne Ife, ­Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 67–83. 6 u.s. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, “World Refugee Survey 2009 – South Africa”, online, available at: , accessed 4 Aug. 2016. 7 Tony Simoes da Silva, “Paper(less) Selves: The Refugee in Contemporary Textual Culture”, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture, XXX/1 (2008), 67. 8 Helene Strauss, “Cinema of Social Recuperation: Xenophobic Violence and Migrant Subjectivity in Contemporary South Africa”, Subjectivity, IV/2 (2011), 105.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

39

on the representation of borders and borderlands to problematize their ideological functions.9 Owing to the importance of the novel’s thematics, it deserves a more extensive study. In this chapter I will approach it as a critique of nation-based thinking that is revealved through the journeying of Manuel Mpanda, an educated Angolan-born young man living in Zaire since childhood, towards a better life. The novel shows how his journey takes him first to Angola and later to a desolate life in Johannesburg, South Africa. Through Manuel’s story, the novel touches upon questions of forced migration, home, and displacement, and addresses critically the treatment of forced migrants in contemporary Southern Africa, a fact that has been addressed by social scientists such as Francis B. Nyamnjoh.10 My reading of the novel will centre upon the narrator’s journey through the postcolonial spaces where nation-states seek to control their external and internal borders. By contrasting open spaces with images of closed spaces, the novel shows how global mobility clashes with the exclusiveness of the nation-state and its insistence on borders. As a result, the protagonist is constantly forced to renegotiate his position as a migrant who is either between the various nations or in their margins.

Exiles or Forced Migrants?

Although the experiences of exile and refugee life as such are not new as they have been addressed by many African writers, ranging from Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka to Breyten Breytenbach and Dennis Brutus, the contemporary representations locate the forced migrant’s mobility in contemporary global mobility rather than emphasizing political dissidence as the main cause of exile and refugee life. The traditional perspective on the refugee experience has been that of political exiles and their attempt to “escape … from the destructive authoritarianisms of postcolonial rule”.11 Exile has been often conceived of as an experience in which separation from home and one’s own culture is both constraining and beneficial, enabling the exile to recreate home 9

10 11

Sydoine Moudouma Moudouma, “Intra- and Inter-Continental Migrations and Diaspora in Contemporary African Fiction”, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of English, University of Stellenbosch, 2012, 55–65. See Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa, London: Zed Books, 2011. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa”, Research in African Literatures, XXXVI/3 (2005), 11.

40

chapter 3

and identity insightfully through memory,12 even though the pains of exile have been harshfully commented on by many African writers and intellectuals from Lewis Nkosi to Ngugi wa Thiong’o.13 In the West dominant discourses define refugees as a mass rather than as individuals with particular histories. To confront such stereotypical representations, a revaluation of the stereotype of the refugee – or the need to “restor[e] the individuality [of the refugee]” as Sabrina Brancato puts it – has been addressed by critics.14 In her reading of Gurnah’s By the Sea, Sissy Helff underlines its critique of the victimization of the refugee and suggests that by uncovering past narratives intertwining the histories of Europe and Africa it problematizes widely-held views of European identity.15 Similarly, studies of autobiographical texts by refugees stress the need to counter dominant stereotypes by making the refugees’ voices heard. While the second chapter of this study examining texts produced by African refugees and asylum-seekers in Wales brings into the open the multiple stories of displacement and relocation told by refugees of their individual reasons for leaving and responses to the new host nation, Brancato comments on Nuruddin Farah’s Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (2000), a collection of interviews and testimonies by Somali refugees in various parts of the world, and suggests that this “polyvocal and contrapuntal” text pays attention to the “uniqueness of each individual story”.16 Yet the concept of the refugee is more problematic since the decision of who may acquire such a status is a changing and politicized one: refugees are produced in varied institutional and media discourses involving ethnicity, nationalism, and citizenship.17 It should also be noticed that the problematics concerning the concept also involve the problem of distinguishing between economic and other migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Writing of the Zimbabwean community in South Africa, Sisulu, Moyo, and Tshuman suggest that the conventional idea of the refugee being unable to return to one’s home country does not apply to these often undocumented migrants, since their migration is based on both political and economic reasons and that 12 13

Gurr, 25–29. See Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile and Other Selections, London: Longman, 1983, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, London: James Currey, 1993. 14 Sabina Brancato, “Life Maps: Toward a Cartography of Refugee Experience”, Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropan Studies, III/2 (2008). 15 Helff, “Illegal”, 73–77. 16 Brancato. 17 Marfleet, 7.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

41

there is a significant degree of travel to Zimbabwe owing to the openness of the border.18 In other words, the South African context problematizes the applicability of conventional terms, and Kikamba’s novel approaches such cross-border mobility through the stories of such migrants as Benedito from Mozambique. What emerges as a central issue in various texts about and by refugees is the notion of spatiality, as is also evident in the frequent use of such metaphors and images as journey, crossing, displacement, and home in Kikamba’s novel. As I will show in my reading, Kikamba’s novel is a narrative of journeying through and in various national spaces, spaces that are often hostile and that aim at the exclusion of the refugee. This figure is frequently considered as a trespassing stranger and relegated to the margins of society, while he or she is merely seeking to reconstruct a sense of home. This can be examined in the light of Upstone’s study of the representation of space in postcolonial narratives where she argues for the notion of “post-space” characterizing postcolonial narratives and their spatial imagination.19 The spatial politics of such fictions aims to counter the attempts of the colonial order to create “mapped, defined locations and ‘natural’ territories”.20 In other words, the journey of the refugee opens up a possibility for critiquing the nation-state and its practices of exclusion: the literary representation of the refugee argues for the need to challenge the closedness characterizing the space of the nation-state. What distinguishes Upstone’s notion of postcolonial space is that it is not one of postmodern celebration but overtly political. In describing the effects of travel in such a space, she suggests that it “offers the possibility for an alternative kind of journeying: one which is neither postmodern free play or colonial repetition, but is instead an interrogation of both these extremes”.21 What this means is that the journeying refugee, while constrained and limited by the power of the nation-state, remains capable of critiquing and trespassing its conventions because of their marginalized position in relation to (and difference from) the host nation. As I will show in my discussion of the refugee experience in Kikamba’s novel, the issues of space, journeying, and home are all important to the formation of Manuel Mpanda’s identity.

18

19 20 21

Elinor Sisulu, Bhekinkosi Moyo, and Nkosihathi Tshuma, “The Zimbabwean Community in South Africa”, in State of the Nation: South Africa 2007, eds Sakhela Buhlungu, John Daniel, Roger Southall, and Jessica Lutchman, Cape Town: hsrc Press, 2007, 565. Sara Upstone, Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 67.

42

chapter 3

From Home to Away

Kikamba’s novel is a narrative of an African migrant’s journey through various postcolonial spaces haunted by memories of colonialism, civil war, and ethnic hatred, all factors that shadow its protagonist’s life from early childhood onwards and contribute to his displacement. Simoes da Silva describes the novel as a typical example of today’s migrant narratives as it tells of its protagonist’s “nomadic existence through several different levels of marginality”.22 Forced migration is indeed ever-present in Mpanda’s life: “I left home for Angola one hot Monday morning in late May 1991. It was an emotional return to the land of my birth, a land I had left as a two-year-old boy strapped to my mother’s back, and of which I had no souvenir except the longing to return”.23 Regardless of his father’s warnings and stories of violence dominating the past of the family, life in Kinshasa where they have been treated as second-rate citizens does not satisfy the protagonist’s desire to belong. In contrast to the reasonable safety experienced in Zaïre, Mpanda sets out on his journey reliant on his youthful idealism, believing that the peace treaty of Bicesse marks an end to the warfare: “There is peace in Angola now …. The people of Angola are tired of the war …. They won’t allow war to return”.24 Yet the father’s sarcastic comments on the vicious circle of politics and the division of the country form a more realistic reading of the situation as they are culminated in the violence following the September 1992 election day that leads to the death of Mpanda’s teacher colleague Sakala and other atrocities. In narrating Mpanda’s wish to return to Angola, the novel emphasizes his unbelonging by using the journey motif to underline the illusory character of the permanence of home. Just as the Kinshasa home is merely a further location on the long journey of Mpanda’s refugee family, the places that provide him with a sense of security and comfort are always prone to rupture, as is repeatedly shown in the novel. His position exemplifies the way in which contemporary representations of the refugee experience approach the topic. As Simoes da Silva suggests, they put forward an emergent idea of a “refugee subject position”: the refugee is no longer a temporary exile in a major cosmopolitan city but someone whose identity is linked with issues of “power distribution, world economics and wealth management”.25 Mpanda’s position also shows what Gikandi sees characterizing the contemporary refugee: they 22 23 24 25

Simoes da Silva, 66. Kikamba, 19. Ibid., 32. Simoes da Silva, 59.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

43

represent an alternative mode of today’s global migration as “the Other of the cosmopolitan” and generate a sense of uneasiness characterizing the liminal space they occupy.26 In this sense his experience of forced migration is constantly re-enacted, underlining the instability of the position of the migrant and their displacement. For instance, Mpanda’s married life in Luanda with Isabel and their daughter ends in political turmoil and is followed by a solitary refugee life in South Africa, and none of his apartments in Johannesburg offers permanent solace. The final pages of the novel show him without a place to stay, missing his family who have already returned to Angola. The absence of home as a site of security stresses how the life of a refugee is precarious and depends on politics and decisions made by others. The final paragraphs of the novel emphasize the exclusion of the refugee as they show that Mpanda has been locked out of his apartment and is once again forced to find another place to stay, another temporary new home: For a while, he pondered over his plight. Then he shrugged his shoulders and walked down the stairs and back into the street. Wondering if he would ever belong.27 While Mpanda’s journey is initially a personal quest aiming to leave the vicious circle extending over the life of generations of Southern African refugees, the novel shows how his life is affected by political decisions and acts of exclusion that separate him from the nation-states he enters. Such moments, Upstone suggests, reveal the realities of contemporary migration and run counter to “simplistic postmodern readings that associate journeys with unproblematic fluidity”.28 Rather than a touristic journey with easy border-crossings, Mpanda’s journey is monitored by the representatives of the nation-state who interrogate border crossers and harass paperless immigrants. For instance, Mpanda is shown to be under tight surveillance by the Angolan secret police because of his unita sympathies and his employment as an interpreter with the Namibian Embassy. Suspected of being a spy because of his work as an interpreter for the Namibian Embassy, he is summoned to the police station and ordered to prepare a list of all known unita members. The episode shows how he becomes a recipient of a serious threat, which is to lead to his escape to

26 Gikandi, 26. 27 Kikamba, 221. 28 Upstone, Spatial, 65.

44

chapter 3

South Africa: “‘You’ve got a very beautiful wife and kid,’ the officer said, as we rode back to town. ‘You must look after them.’”29 The novel, however, shows that the South African police are shown to be wary of illegal migrants and do not wish to see them there. Nyamnjoh stresses the contemporary tendency to see black African migrants in negative terms and claims that the attempt to “polic[e] the borders” is a wider strategy of exclusion practiced and “shared by government authorities, immigration officials, the media and general public” that aims at making the migrants ­“collectively unwelcome”.30 As the novel discusses the issues in detail, it is indicative of what Strauss identifies as cultural resources capable of “resisting the epistemic distortions that inform hostility and violence directed at those perceived as outsiders to the South African national community”.31 The critique is evident in the way the novel comments of abusive and discriminatory practices. For instance, Mpanda’s careless words lead to his incarceration and the destruction of his documents by “two black policemen in uniform, guns in holsters and chests bulging with bulletproof vests”.32 While the incident reveals a widespread negative general attitude towards African refugees and their presence in South Africa, discussed in the studies by Fasselt, Flockemann et al., Nyamnjoh, and Strauss,33 the passage also criticizes the unfair practices used by the state’s representatives towards migrants who in their view “have no right to be here”: “This is not your country”.34 In so doing the novel reveals how precarious the position of the refugee is and how easily they may transform from “legals” into “illegals”. What starts as a routine interruption to Mpanda’s everyday shopping stroll leads to his imprisonment and loss of status. Rather than merely destroying Mpanda’s papers, the policemen’s xenophobic behaviour is a response to the foreigner’s presence that allegedly threatens the unity of the nation-state, as promoted in current South African discourses 29 30 31 32 33

34

Kikamba, 115. Nyamnjoh, 14. Strauss, 104. Kikamba, 11. See Rebecca Fasselt, “Ke nako (It Is Time) to Scrutinize Ubuntu: Reading ‘South African Hospitality’ towards African Immigrants in Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline”, paper presented at the 4th Global Conference: Multiculturalism, Conflict, and Belonging, Oxford, United Kingdom, 23–26 Sept. 2010, available at: , accessed 12 Aug. 2016; Miki Flockemann, Kudzayi Ngara, Wahseema Roberts, and Andrea Castle, “The Everyday Experience of Xenophobia: Performing The Crossing from Zimbabwe to South Africa”, Critical Arts, 24 (2009): 245–59; Nyamnjoh; and Strauss. Kikamba, 12.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

45

emphasizing indigeneity and exceptionalism,35 rather than equality or acceptance. To paraphrase Gikandi’s terms, Kikamba’s refugees appear to have fallen in the “cracks” between “the failed state[s]”.36 The representation of refugees in Kikamba’s novel can also be placed in the context of narratives of forced migration in Southern Africa. For example, the novels of the exile author Bessie Head derive from their author’s own situation as a refugee, as seen particularly well in the novel When Rain Clouds G ­ ather (1969), set in a small refugee community living in a small village in rural ­Botswana. Maria Olaussen has examined the position of the arriving stranger in Head’s fiction and suggests that the figure is both a threat and a promise: it is able to blur the situation by showing that “the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, villagers and strangers cannot be clearly maintained”.37 In other words, the presence of the refugee may generate various responses by calling into question naturalized roles and practices. Such a phenomenon has been commented on by various critics of today’s South African literature, where African migrants and refugees have become recurring characters. In her essay on Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline (2000), Rebecca Fasselt notes how the general unwelcoming atmosphere towards migrants as “African Others”, which culminated in the xenophobic attacks in 2008, is commented upon repeatedly in various contemporary novels.38 With particular reference to Skyline, a novel set amongst a multinational refugee community in Cape Town, Fasselt claims that its application of the potentially welcoming but currently ideologically framed and exclusionist discourse of ubuntu (humanity) remains insufficient and only partially successful in “envision[ing] different spaces of hospitality where conventional binarisms are broken down and brought into negotiation with each other”.39 Similarly, Miki Flockemann et al. have discussed Jonathan Nkala’s autobiographical play The Crossing (2009), a performance reconstructing Nkala’s experience of crossing the border from Zimbabwe to South Africa. Locating the one-man play in the context of the violent attacks against non-South Africans in 2008, Flockemann et al. suggest that this story of a foreigner’s “destabilising presence” challenges the discourses of exclusionism and inequality represented in the play in the racist and humiliating behaviour

35 36 37

Flockemann et al., 248; cf. Nyamnjoh, 28–81 and 228–30. Gikandi, 23. Maria Olaussen, Forceful Creation in Harsh Terrain: Place and Identity in Three Novels by Bessie Head, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997, 143. 38 Fasselt. 39 Ibid.

46

chapter 3

of the characters whom the play’s protagonist meets on his journey.40 What emerges is a multi-layered sense of connection, not only between the performer and his audience, but also at the level of “foreigners” and others. As Flocke­ mann et al. conclude: “The focus on commonality challenges discourses of indigeneity and difference, where difference, instead of being employed in the project of achieving social equality, becomes co-opted to exacerbate prevailing social schisms”.41 In other words, Nkala’s play, unlike Kikamba’s novel, remains optimistic in presenting a sense of communality as a counter-discursive means to tackle with the xenophobic attitude towards Africans migrants and refugees in contemporary South Africa.

The Closed Spaces of the Refugee

Going Home develops its critique of the officials’ practice of absolute power over refugees and migrants by using the trope of incarceration, which transforms the spaces of Angola and South Africa into closed spaces. The imagery is particularly evident in the novel’s description of institutions that allegedly serve the nation – here Kikamba’s critique is not limited to the case of South Africa as critics tend to suggest but has a wider reference.42 The first example is the headquarters of the Angolan secret service, located in a space of fear and violence, near “the recent scene of an horrendous massacre of people from the Ovimbundu and Bakong ethnic groups”, and which are housed in “an isolated compound with a high wall” and to be entered “through the big steel gate”.43 Its interrogation rooms contain tape recorders and video cameras controlled by uniformed officers with their “Stalin-style moustache”.44 Surveillance and control are the means of maintaining the power of the nation-state. In a similar vein, the two South African policemen who arrest Mpanda transport him and other arrestees (who are Senegalese, Nigerians, and Congolese) to “a damp cell”45 at the Hillbrow police station in a dark police van where “[h]e could feel the presence of people and hear their breathing, but could see no one”.46 The closed space of a van reserved for immigrants is contrasted with the open 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Flockemann et al., 246–54. Ibid., 254. Cf. Strauss, 104–05. Kikamba, 114. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 12.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

47

space of the street full of unharassed citizens of the nation-state: “As he struggled to sit up Mpanda caught a glimpse through the wire mesh of the window and saw two girls with tinted hair and washed-out blue jeans strolling past, speaking in Zulu, laughing merrily and clapping their hands”.47 This imagery is also applied to the description of his final destination, the Lindela deportation camp. This prime marker of closed space with its “high ochre-coloured walls, the barbed wire and the police with dogs” is compared to a concentration camp.48 As the camp is “bustling with thousands of black immigrants, men and women brought here as a result of the crackdown on crime”,49 the novel suggests that contemporary political discourses emphasizing xenophobia construct migrants and refugees as criminals who need to deported. Nyamnjoh indeed reports on several cases where the human rights of migrants have been abused, and mentions the Lindela centre as a particularly notorious site of violence.50 The imagery of closed spaces is linked in the novel with the refugee’s diminished autonomy and ability to be in control of his or her own life, including sexuality, as seen in the case of the Zambian woman who has sex with the guards to avoid incarceration. This is also the case of Mpanda, who upon his arrival in Luanda becomes first a carrier for the successful marketwoman Teresa, Ma Tete, and then her sex slave: “For the next two weeks Teresa had sex with me whenever she wanted – sex at dawn, sex during the day, sex in the evening, sex at night, sex every day till I grew sick of it. Every now and then she would warn me that if a word of it got out she would throw me out and ensure that I threw up through my nostrils all the food I eaten at her place”.51 For Mpanda, the loss of masculine status diminishes his gender identity as it makes him a mere object of female desire: “I felt like I was suffocating underneath her massive body, and when I tried to get her to lie underneath me she refused, saying that she was in charge and had to set the rules”.52 By describing the refugee status through sexualization, the novel transforms Mpanda from the conquering male sexually abusing women into a character lacking autonomy and power. While some spaces described in the novel appear more open, they hide fear and violence. Beautiful landscapes are not pastoral locations of harmony: regardless of its appearance, the town of Mbanza-Kongo in Angola is prone to 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 13. Nyamnjoh, 52–53. Kikamba, 65. Ibid., 64.

48

chapter 3

burst into violence any moment as seen in the description of its armed inhabitants. This town is not a safe haven for refugees: The rocky hill on which Mbanza-Kongo sat was touched with crimson from the setting sun. The landscape around it was lush and green, merging with the distant, undulating hills into breathtaking scenery. As we drove uphill towards the town we passed men carrying machetes and rifles, and women laden with basins, infants strapped to their back.53 Similarly, the big cities of the novel are full of social inequality and poverty that lead to street violence and fear. As the shanty town of Nocal in Luanda, where Mpanda’s cousin Maria Joana lives, has a rough reputation for gun crime, its sounds generate terror in Mpanda and force him to “curl… [him]self into a ball”.54 In a similar way, in Johannesburg a group of dreadlocked youths randomly select Mpanda and his new business, a braai stand, as an object of hate crime and insult. His offer of free skewers of meat as a means of saving his enterprise is in vain and merely met with xenophobic discourse as they consider him as a Makwerewere, a derogatory term referring to migrants from black ­African nations considered undeveloped and whose inhabitants are stereotypically found racially and culturally inferior to black South Africans.55 For them, Mpanda is dehumanized as he becomes one of many, “an illegal immigrant”, a mere kwere-kwere, with “no right to be here” and who should “[g]o home to [his] own fucking country”.56 This reference to the title of the novel is, however, ironical: which country should Mpanda return to? The anti-immigrant behaviour depicted in the passage is one of the many ordeals Mpanda faces in Johannesburg, as the novel unfolds a series of problems, ranging from everyday racism to institutional discrimination. Unable to find work, his initial idealistic belief in the new South Africa with its democratic post-apartheid politics – “South Africa is the ideal place. It’s a country with a lot of opportunities. They’ve just held their first democratic elections” – gradually transforms into a sense of disappointment.57 The predicament of the refugee in South Africa is captured in the words that Muteba, a fellow migrant, utters in a bar in Johannesburg. Muteba, like Mpanda, regardless of his university degree, is employed as a humble security guard and urges Mpanda 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 50. Nyamnjoh, 39–40. Kikamba, 164. Ibid., 121.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

49

to accept any job: “They say there are no silly jobs and they’re right”.58 The politics and practices of exclusion extend from an unfriendly barman whose words “Welcome to South Africa, dear stranger!” are uttered in a tone that “suggested that he was not pleased to see me” to the aggressive warden of the Home Office.59 This aggressive guard with a “huge body” and “a big black club” openly identifies himself as the gatekeeper of the nation-state whose task it is to “keep order” and teach the “newcomers” how to behave.60 Through such examples, the novel shows how the idealistic views of the arriving migrants are juxtaposed with the exclusionary politics and practices of the nation-state that sees itself as a closed space. This appears to follow the discursive logic of exclusion as evident in prominent South African discourses. As Nyamnjoh suggests, the construction of the category of Makwerewere is based on the juxtaposition between “South Africans as ‘deserving citizens’ and Makwerewere as ‘undeserving outsiders’”, as also shown in Phaswne Mpe’s 2001 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow.61

Transforming Everyday Space

By showing how the protagonist’s experiences and observations during his journeying to South Africa provide critical representations of the refugee experience when facing an exclusionist nation-state, the novel challenges the absoluteness of the nation-state through glimpses of alternative spaces that appear much more open. In so doing it shows the opportunity to “reroot”, to reconstruct belonging, as Glanville has suggested.62 Such locations are transnational and can be found in spaces between the nations and also in urban spaces amidst migrant communities. While the figure of the refugee is not to be romanticized, the role of such marginalized spaces in countering the demands of the nation-state is not without significance because they also offer signs of resistance. What this means is that the “destabilising presence”, to use the term of Flockemann et al.,63 of the refugees in the novel shows the extent to which national borders are artificial and porous and also the way they contribute to the transformation of ordinary everyday space. As a sign of the 58 59 60 61 62 63

Ibid., 150. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 143. Nyamnjoh, 43. Glanville, 137. Flockemann et al., 246.

50

chapter 3

former, the role of refugees as forming a critique of borders can be seen in the fluidness that characterizes the protagonist’s mobility on the border between Angola and Zaïre. The following passage addresses the arbitrariness of the colonialist construction of the border, showing that the nation-state, with borders rooted in the era of colonialism, is unable to control the movement of everyday border crossers. Here the border does not divide but rather brings different people together. Rather than clear, unambiguous, and sinuous like its cartographic representation drawn by the colonizers,64 the border between Angola and Zaïre is a mere “river below a bridge” hosting a vibrant community: The marketplace was bustling with people buying and selling – Zaïrians from Songololo, Kimpese, Lukala, Mbanza-Ngungu, Kinshasa and Matadi, and Angolans from Mbanza-Kongo, Cuimba, Tomboko, N’zeto and Luanda. Most people from Angola spoke Portuguese and a few spoke Kikongo, while people from Zaïre spoke French, Lingala or Kikongo. As was customary people were shaking hands, enquiring about their respective families. When the border was left open for people to move freely I crossed back into Zaïre and stood at the spot where the woman had been fighting for her sack of fish, wondering what had happened to her. I went back to Angola, leisurely criss-crossing between the two countries.65 This passage can be examined in the light of the journey motif as discussed by Upstone, in whose view the postcolonial journey is a way to re-examine “the colonial myth of spatial order”,66 this is, the notion of absolute control of colonial space by the colonizer. In other words, control by the colonial state – or the nation-state – is an illusion challenged by the fluidity and chaos of the space that they wish to control, as these qualities remain able to “undermine the authority of the territory and the map”.67 What is important from the perspective of this chapter is that for Upstone the journey motif is a counter-hegemonic means able to “challenge stable constructions of place” and “relieve many of the tensions of fixed locations”.68 This is the case in the novel. As the passage 64 See Moudouma, 61. 65 Kikamba, 28–29. 66 Upstone, Spatial, 11. 67 Ibid., 11. 68 Ibid., 57.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

51

shows, the absolute border, the “sinuous line” constructed as a colonial fantasy, is, as suggested by Upstone, more fluid and open. What is more important than the state is that these ordinary people who represent various ethnicities inhabit a multicultural space that has been artificially divided between various (colonial) nations. The alleged closedness of the nation-state, symbolized in fixed and patrolled borders, is undermined by emphasizing that migrants permeate the border, hopping on and off, literally on both sides of the border line, and in so doing perform acts of resisting the allegedly absolute character of the border line to divide. In other words, the novel emphasizes that the nation-state’s ability to guard its borders is a fantasy and now prone to erasure by uncontrollable and marginalized characters such as refugees and migrants. Moudouma comments on the above passage by arguing that the space around the border is a borderland, “a zone of exchanges and reconnection”, and suggests that “[t]he borderland resists the presence of the imposed border and allows people to circulate across the land”.69 The porousness of the border is revealed in the words of the Mozambican Benedito, a fellow detainee at Lindela, who is waiting for his deportation: But the sooner I am deported the sooner I will come back.… I will jump over the border at Ressano Garcia. It’s not the first time. They are wasting my time by deporting me. I have to come back; my girlfriend and child are here. They need me.70 The only real effectively patrolled border, however, appears to be that between Africa and Europe as seen in the fate of Mboso, a friend of Mpanda’s, who fails to travel to Gatwick on a fake passport: upon embarking on the plane the police select him, as “the only black man on the flight”,71 for detailed scrutiny, which takes him to a detention centre. While Mboso’s unsuccessful, aborted journey is an example of what Anna-Leena Toivanen calls “failing cosmopolitanism”, a frequent trope in contemporary African writing telling of attempts to reach Europe,72 Benedito is an example of what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called contemporary “cosmopolitanization”73 69 70 71 72

73

Moudouma, 61. Kikamba, 15. Ibid., 192. Anna-Leena Toivanen, “Failing Cosmopolitanism: Aborted Transnational Journeys in Novels by Monique Ilboudo, Sefi Atta and Aminata Sow Fall”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, LII/3 (2016), 359–60. Beck, 9.

52

chapter 3

or “cosmopolitanism from below”,74 forms of mobility that describe the experience of a vast number of mobile migrants masses in the West in particular. These terms refer to the experiences of today’s ordinary, everyday border crossers rather than to those of a limited class, as is the case in the traditional use of the term cosmopolitanism. Benedito’s border-crossing movement is an experience of everyday mobility characterizing contemporary globalization and migration. Benedito’s view quoted above is also linked with the forced migrant’s ability to transform and appropriate spaces. In addition to border crossing as a means of countering exclusionist and nationalist practices, the novel shows how forms of everyday resistance transform lived spaces and problematize naturalized social divisions. As the novel shows, the community of African refugees living in the margins of South Africa forms a counter-cultural space where the values and norms of the dominant culture are subverted. This can be seen when Mpanda and his friend Mbala operate an illegal sumbela, this is, they use somebody else’s telephone line for the purpose of making cheap calls much needed by the refugee community. This act exemplifies Henri Lefebvre’s idea that spaces belonging to the state can be appropriated by countercultures or other collective subjects for their own purpose.75 As Kikamba writes: We allowed only two people inside the lounge at a time, asking the others to wait outside for their turn. Too many people in the lounge would attract unwanted attention. Mbala stood outside to screen the clients, directing prospective clients to the phone and turning down troublemakers, while I manned the phone with a stopwatch to make sure the client used only what they had paid for. We charged R3 a minute, a lot cheaper than the public phone rate.76 However, such moments and spaces beyond the control of the nation-state remain temporary, and the refugees, in the end, remain dislocated in the margins of South African society, forced to support themselves with petty crime and unable to educate their children. Writing of such life with reference to the politics of exclusion in South Africa, Strauss describes it with the help of concept of “bare life” as outlined by political theorists Hannah Arendt and 74 75 76

Ibid., 103. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, 381–84. Kikamba, 176.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

53

Giorgio Agamben. In such a situation “a person’s loss of political and legal status – typical of the position occupied by the stateless person – results basically in that person’s ‘expulsion from humanity altogether’”.77 In Kikamba’s novel, the lack of rights and citizenship, as well as the related insecurity of life, is approached from the personalized experiences of African migrants and expressed particularly strongly in Mpanda’s desperation and inability to tell his daughter why she cannot attend school in South Africa. Deprived of hope, the novel’s characters are able to find pleasure only in music and dancing, in bodily and temporary acts capable of suppressing traumatic experiences and filling in for losses: When a woman held my hand for a dance, I didn’t resist. A rumba was better enjoyed with a partner. Yet, nothing she did made her presence real. She was merely filling in for Isabel.78 Such fleeting moments are, however, rare and tell of the traumas that refugee life creates. The fulfillment of one’s dreams is constantly postponed and placed somewhere else, here in Angola, South Africa, and finally Europe: “You see, in London, asylum seekers have free accommodation, free food, and free education. In London, asylum seekers are never humiliated like in South Africa”.79 This belief in the healing power of some other place emphasizes the sense of dislocation characterizing the refugee’s journey, and it is further stressed in the novel by showing that trade in forged and stolen travel documents becomes Mpanda’s main source of income. While the possession of the right passport may guarantee entry into Europe and provide one with an opportunity to transcend the closed spaces of the refugee’s everyday life, for many such as Mboso it remains a mere dream. The fake passport, however, is a marker of the refugee’s fluid and mobile identity and as such offers hope on their journey away from displacement, through porous borders, towards the possibility of belonging and locating a post-space beyond colonialist and nationalist claims based on the exclusion of difference. This, however, may remain a utopian possibility for actual refugees who are often people without such papers. Simon Gikandi has distinguished between two forms of postcolonial identity generated by globalization, one privileged and the other underprivileged: while refugees, forced to experience the global and lacking a place to return to, do not wish to

77 78 79

Strauss, 109. Kikamba, 188. Ibid., 189.

54

chapter 3

be cosmopolitan but “set out to demarcate a zone of ethnicity and locality [in the metropolis]”,80 the elite claim to be a citizen of many cultures and nations; but it is to claim rootlessness in order to position oneself in multiple cultural spaces and to have access to the goods that come with them. But by positioning itself as the stand-in for both metropolis and ex-colony, postcolonial cosmopolitanism conceals its own peculiar, particular, and often privileged entry into the world cultural system. By claiming to speak for others, postcolonial elites elide the circumstances by which the majority of the ex-­colonial enters the world system, as refugees and illegal aliens, and how the process of entry and its terms of engagement generate a different narrative of global cultural flows.81 Kikamba’s forced migrants remain underpriviledged and displaced. While they do have different backgrounds and histories as individual subjects, they are, as Simoes da Silva mentions, outsiders whose unbelonging challenges the nationstate.82 Their identity, constructed in transit through their movement from the original home to refugee camps and centres, crossing borders legally and illegally, is one that problematizes naturalized notions of national citizenship. In fact, Simon Gikandi sees contemporary refugees as possessing an atypical form of postcolonial identity: they are “strangers in the cracks of the failed state” and examples of “the rerouting of postcolonialism … authorized by a signature gesture of displacement”.83 In Kikamba’s novel the refugee does not emerge as a privileged figure but as one whose narrative opens up an alternative experience of globalization relevant for developing an in-depth understanding of global flows and their significance. In so doing, the refugee’s journey in Kikamba’s novel comes to consist of a series of dislocations and disappointments and shows the difficulties involved in gaining inclusivity and belonging. To use the words of its homeless protagonist at the end of the novel: “Then he shrugged his shoulders and walked down the stairs and back into the street. Wondering if he would ever belong”.84 While seeking belonging, he remains a placeless outsider in the new South Africa.

80 81 82 83 84

Gikandi, 26. Ibid., 33–34. Simoes da Silva, 58–59. Gikandi, 23. Kikamba, 221.

Mapping Refugee Spaces in Simão Kikamba’s Going Home

55

Conclusion This chapter has sought to read Simão Kikamba’s South African refugee novel Going Home as a narrative seeking to address the refugee’s journal from a personalized angle. While its protagonist Manuel Mpanda is located in a historical and social framework emphasizing the long-term effects of colonial warfare and political turmoil in generating forced migration in Southern Africa, the narrative of his journey constructs him as an individual with a family and a history. While he may appear as one of the many refugees populating the streets of Johannesburg, the novel, by showing the personal background of the refugee, counters dominant media images as well as critically interrogates the practices of contemporary Southern African nation-states by linking the maintenance of xenophobic views and practices with state institutions such as the police and the military. To counter the dominant view, the novel shows alternatives to the closed and patrolled spaces of nation-states by constructing the refugee as a figure with some potential to resist and transgress such practices. The transnational space constructed through the refugee’s border crossings emerges as a utopian space where they may be able to resist the exclusionary discourses of the nation-state and negotiate their identity, but more often remain displaced outsiders with limited political agency.

chapter 4

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier The previous chapters have examined the process of forced migration and its effects on the migrant. This chapter examines in more detail the roots of forced migration as mediated in Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.1 This representation of the African child soldier and its transformation is a contribution to a body of narratives telling of the phenomenon such as Bernard Ashley’s fictional Little Soldier (1999) and China Keitetsi’s autobiographical Child Soldier (2004). Such narratives tend to emphasize the survival of their protagonists by re-locating them in new social and cultural settings far away from their homes embedded in violent conflicts and ethnic hatred. In this chapter it is my aim to discuss the representation of the African child soldier and his long path of migration to the West with particular reference to Ishmael Beah’s memoir. I show how this autobiographical text places its narrator in discourses of violence, trauma, and globalization in order to construct a subject ready to enter Western modernity and “America”, thus transnationalizing his identifications and making him another migrant aspiring towards the West. In other words, while the memoir is not a conventional refugee narrative, Beah’s text is highly relevant in the context of global mobility and intercultural identity construction as it negotiates displacement and places its narrator in the context of migration. I suggest that the memoir’s construction of universalized childhood is linked with a story of its protagonist’s trauma and migration. Beah’s book addresses the roots of forced migration by charting the life and movements of its narrator, the young Ishmael, who loses his family amidst the violence of Sierra Leone and is forced to join the Sierra Leone Armed Forces to fight against the “rebels”, the Revolutionary United Front, a group of whose soldiers one half have been estimated to have been ca. 8–14 years old.2 Following the life of Ishmael from his first awareness of civil war, at the age of 12 in 1993, to his successful escape to Guinea and subsequent life in the United States in the late 1990s, the narrative unfolds a period of social turmoil by showing violent armed conflicts, death of civilians, and a chaotic coup. During 1 Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, London: Fourth Estate, 2007. 2 Ilsa Glazer, rev. of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism, by David M. Rosen, Anthoropological Quarterly, LXXIX/2 (2006), 377.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_006

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

57

the narrative Ishmael transforms from a young school-boy into a ruthless and drugged soldier and finally becomes a sensitive and intelligent representative of his nation’s youth at a UN-sponsored meeting in New York. An international success, the simply-narrated book has not only been on the top of the New York Times Bestseller list but it was also the book of the week on bbc Radio 4 in May 2007. The text has also generated a debate whether all of its details are true and whether its author has spent such a long time in the army and experienced all that he claims.3

From Local to Global

Beah’s text reveals the local problems that function as the roots of its protagonist’s migration and contribute to the somewhat idealistic image the memoir constructs of him. Beah’s autobiographical text resembles some other narratives in the genre which tell of a child’s experiences in extreme conditions of fear, violence, and war and call for empathy in reading. In an article examining narratives of what she calls “ethnic suffering”, Sidonie Smith claims that by telling and making their stories available, these witnesses to terror and abuse are positioned in a contradictory situation as they hand over their stories to journalists, publishers, publicity agents, marketers, and rights activists whose framings of personal narratives participate in the commodification of suffering, the reification of the universalized subject position of innocent victim, and the displacement of historical complexity by the feel-good opportunities of empathetic identification.4 While in Beah’s narrative ethnicity is addressed in the context of displacement and migration, the memoir’s use of a child narrator links it to the texts examined by Smith, Zlata Filipovici’s Sarajevo-based Zlata’s Diary (1994) and the 3 The debate is described in Gabriel Sherman, “The Fog of Memoir: The Feud over the Truthfulness of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone”, Slate.com, 6 Mar. 2008, available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. See also Allison Mackey, “Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives”, Research in African Literatures, XLIV/4 (2013), 99–122. 4 Sidonie Smith, “Narrated Lives and the Contemporary Regime of Human Rights: Mobilizing Stories, Campaigns, Ethnicities”, in Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Globalized World, eds Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglou, and Linda Manney, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2007, 144.

58

chapter 4

famous­ Anne Frank’s Diary (1947), both narratives of “lost childhood”.5 To address the loss of childhood and underline the sense of displacement, A Long Way Gone transforms its narrator’s long awaited participation in a local talent show in a nearby village into years of forced military service as an “innocent victim” of civil war. The scene is set as follows: To save money, we decided to walk the sixteen miles to Mattru Jong. It was a beautiful summer day, the sun wasn’t too hot, and the walk didn’t feel long either, as we chatted about all kinds of things, mocked and chased each other. We carried slingshots that we used to stone birds and chase the monkeys that tried to cross the main dirt road. We stopped at several rivers to swim.6 Such pastoral glimpses into childhood and its days of unlimited freedom sentimentalize the narrative and package it for consumption in the sense proposed by Smith.7 Peaceful moments are juxtaposed with the realities of civil war: during their leisurely walk their village is attacked, an incident that leads to loss of home and displacement. To use the words of Smith, such passages fulfil a major ideological function in directing global (mainly Western) readers towards the allegedly tragic fate of a young protagonist: The commodification of stories of ethnic suffering obscures the complex politics of international events, stylizes the story to suit an educated international audience familiar with narratives of individual triumph over adversity, evokes emotive responses trained on the feel-good qualities of successful resolution, and often universalizes the story of suffering so as to erase incommensurable differences and the horror of violence. The commodification of the young girl’s diary gives us a version of the story of “Anne Frank” – but with a happy ending.8 There is, indeed, a similar logic at work in Beah’s story of survival and individual success where the local is embedded in the global through migration. Rather than a mere story of African childhood, the text is narrated from the safety provided by the United States, which is indicated in an early unnumbered chapter

5 6 7 8

Ibid., 152. Beah, 7–8. See Smith, “Narrated”, 144. Smith, “Narrated”, 154.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

59

entitled “New York City, 1998”.9 This section locates Ishmael amongst his new friends eager to learn more about his past. While his American friends are – quite ironically – enchanted with the alleged glory associated with weapons and warfare, the passage emphasizes Ishmael’s unwillingness to reveal his past. In so doing the passage draws a contrast between the naïveté of his actual audience that finds violence “cool” and the knowledge of his implied audience, the educated readers aware of the harsh realities of civil war in Africa and its global effects. What is established is an emotive identification with the ordeals of its child protagonist, now aged 17 and relocated in America: My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is a war.” “Did you witness some of the fighting?” “Everyone in the country did.” “You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.” I smile a little. “You should tell us about it sometime.” “Yes, sometime.”10 By using the trope of the child/child soldier, the text seeks to promote an affectual economy derived from the notions of purity and innocence associated in the West with the figure of the child. Not only is this revealed in the cover of the book portraying a young boy carrying a machine gun but also in the text’s way of portraying the child soldier as transgressing the established values and activities commonly associated with childhood. In Beah’s text, children and adolescents, “boys our age”,11 kill and are killed. The youngsters are shown to be terrorizing the region and “patrolli[ing] in special units, killing and maiming civilians”.12 Similarly, when Ishmael becomes a member of the army, he learns to kill, not only as a combatant but also for fun, as part of organized competitions aiming to boost a sense of group identity. The following passage shows 9 10 11 12

Beah, 3. Ibid., 3; emphasis original. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 37.

60

chapter 4

how other human beings are dehumanized and reduced to the role of “simply another rebel who was responsible for the death of my family”.13 To quote the memoir, The corporal gave the signal with a pistol shot and I grabbed the man’s head and slit his throat in one fluid motion. His Adam’s apple made way for the sharp knife, and I turned the bayonet on its zigzag edge as I brought it out. His eyes rolled up and they looked me straight in the eye before they suddenly stopped in a frightful glance, as if caught by surprise…. I dropped him on the ground and wiped my bayonet on him. Reported to the corporal, who was holding a timer. The bodies of the other prisoners fought in the arms of the other boys, and some continued to shake on the ground for a while. I was proclaimed the winner, and Kanei came second. The boys and the other soldiers who were the audience clapped as if I had just fulfilled one of life’s greatest achievements.14 The coldness of the narration and the representation of death as celebration add to the disappearance of the idea of a pure child and place it in other contexts. At the same time they direct the expected audience towards lamenting a childhood violated and lost amidst violence, beyond familial networks and proper moral guidance. What this means for the audience is that it is forced to abandon its sentimentalized and West-centred understanding of the innocence of childhood in an imagined third-world country. By replacing the pastoral vision of the African countryside with a landscape of terror and death, the text foregrounds the abuse and violence pertinent to the conditions of civil war and destroys naïve visions of Africa by portraying realities behind forced migration. This is seen in the double identity of Ishmael: he is a music-loving footballer as well as a ruthless killer. In the view of Sidonie Smith, life narratives of this kind expound a vision of the universality of childhood that both attracts and shames the international audience, calling them to act and save the children as any parent should.15 They also transform the suffering ethnic child to a representative of “the universal abstraction of the child of human rights” that is “everybody’s child and thus nobody’s specific child, living in a certain location”.16 In Beah’s story, the universality of childhood, boosting audience identification with the imagined 13 14 15 16

Ibid., 124. Ibid., 125. Smith, “Narrated”, 158. Ibid., 158.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

61

innocent child, is evoked at several points in the narrator’s way of referring to the boys as mere children with no evil intent. As he puts it upon meeting a cautious and uncommunicative man with a large family, “I was … disappointed that the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very experience of meeting people. Even a twelve-year-old couldn’t be trusted anymore”.17 This transformation of a child into a potential killer is emphasized even further when Ishmael and his friends start their escapade, but the people in several villages mistake the multiethnic motley group of half a dozen adolescents for dangerous rebels: “Many times during our journey we were surrounded by muscular men with machetes who almost killed us before they realized we were just children running away from the war”.18 This culminates in their being expelled from a coastal village and the recapturing by the villagers who threaten to kill them: “‘You children have become little devils, but you came to the wrong village …. Well, this is the end of the road for devils like you. Out there in the ocean, even you rascals cannot survive’”.19 Through such instances, the reader is invited to sentimentally reflect on the helpless child under abuse. As this shows, the local discourse of demonizing violent child soldiers and the idealistic West-centred discourse promoting the sanctity of childhood are both present in the narrative. The figure of the demonized killer-child, however, is not without a basis, as shown in the above passage telling of Ishmael’s first kill. In order to represent the child as a figure of possibility, making it thus acceptable to the Western audience, the narrative both positions Ishmael in the discourse of innocent childhood and represents his actions as stemming from ideological brainwashing and drugs. In this sense Ishmael’s emerging transnational identity rests on his positive characteristics that promote audience identification and locate him in a morally acceptable position open to learning. This doubleness of Ishmael’s identity – he is sensitive yet brutal, a killer and a victim, non-Western and Western – conforms to what has been suggested in social and anthropological studies of child soldiers. For instance, Harry G. West has criticized a stereotypical conception portraying fighting children as ruthless killers and killing machines with no sensitivity towards their own communities.20 West suggests that the two roles – “victim and perpetrator … are not mutually exclusive”; similarly, research results suggest that in particular contexts where for instance socialization into violence is not uncommon, 17 18 19 20

Beah, 48. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 66. Harry G. West, “Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of frelimo’s ‘Female Detachment’”, Anthropological Quarterly, LXXIII/4 (2000), 180.

62

chapter 4

its meaning is not universal: “experience of violence is in significant measure culturally determined”.21 This also explains its coolness amongst Ishmael’s new friends, American high school students growing up amidst rap videos and urban gangs. It may also be noted that the anthropologist David Rosen has traced the roots of the atrocities in Sierra Leone committed by ruf to the country’s social history where violence, warfare, and slavery have placed a major role since pre-contact times, and youth violence was later institutionalized in the form of secret societies that participated in violent anti-colonial struggles.22

Transnational Identifications

The memoir’s discourse of affect is further placed in the context of the transnational that becomes the site of the protagonist’s identity formation. In order to negotiate the essentializing discourse of the killer-child and make it more palatable to the Western audience, Beah’s narrative emphasizes the positive aspects of the universal child and constructs it as a playful creature, prone to song and dance that express its joyful character: We chased and wrestled each other in the sand, played somersault and running games. We even bundled up Alhaji’s old shirt and tied a rope around it to make a soccer ball. We then played a game, and each time one of us scored a goal, he would celebrate with a soukous dance. We shouted, laughed, and sang our secondary school songs.23 What is particularly significant is that it is through music, and especially American rap music, that Ishmael enters the transnational network characterized by the global presence of American popular culture. Rap plays a major role in the memoir as early as its opening pages where Ishmael, his brother and several friends make preparations for participating in a talent show in Mattru Jong, a town close to their home village. The first pages of the narrative also reveal that Ishmael is not without links with the wider world since the American company employing his father works has brought music television to his home town:

21 22 23

Ibid., 180–81. Glazer, 377–78. Beah, 59.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

63

We were first introduced to rap music during one of our visits to Mobimbi, a quarter where the foreigners … lived.… One evening a music video that consisted of a bunch of young black fellows talking really fast came on the television. The four of us sat there mesmerized by the song, trying to understand what the black fellows were saying. At the end of the video, some letters came up at the bottom of the screen. They read ‘Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight.”’ Junior quickly wrote it down on a piece of paper. After that, we came to the quarter every other weekend to study that kind of music on television. We didn’t know what it was called then, but I was impressed with the fact that the black fellows knew how to speak English really fast, and to the beat.24 The presence of hip-hop in Sierra Leone and the significant role it plays in Ishmael’s life illustrates Arjun Appadurai’s concept of mediascapes, spaces that are peculiar to the contemporary global cultural economy where cultural products cross national borders and flow uninterruptedly into other territories.25 Transmitted usually by electronic, audio-visual media, these “strips of reality”, images and narratives, offer scripts for imagined lives.26 For Ishmael, hip-hop music and music videos in particular offer new sites of identity, where young black men may be active and perform to appreciative audiences. In this sense Ishmael’s fascination with hip-hop can be seen as an example of what the critic George Lipsitz sees the genre’s political basis: as a diasporic music it addresses the different members of African diaspora and is not limited to merely us (or Western concerns).27 For Lipsitz, hip-hop is a sign of oppositional, counter-hegemonic identity politics: At a time when African people have less power and fewer resources than at almost any previous time in history, African culture has emerged as the single most important subtext within world popular culture. The popularity of hip hop reflects more than an outlet for energies and emotions repressed by social power relations. Hip hop expresses a form of politics perfectly suited to the post-colonial era. It brings a community into being through performance, and it maps out real and imagined relations 24 25 26 27

Ibid., 6. Appadurai, 35–36. Ibid., 35. George Lipsitz, “Diasporic Noise: History, Hip-Hop, and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sound”, in Popular Culture: A Reader, eds Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, London: Sage, 2005, 509–10.

64

chapter 4

between people that speak to the realities of displacement, disillusion, and despair created by the austerity economy of post-industrial capitalism.28 In other words, the promise that rap music gives to Ishmael is one of c­ ommunity that appears to operate at two levels. First, rap links Ishmael with his friends. In the manner of adolescents all over the world, Ishmael and his friends form a pop group desiring to perform in outfits consisting of “baggy jeans”, “soccer shorts and sweatpants for dancing”, and “three pairs of socks that we pulled down and folded to make our crapes [sneakers] look puffy”.29 Second, it is rap music, observed first on television and later from C-cassettes, that locates him in the transnational flow of globalization where identity ­positions are made available through identification with popular cultural celebrities and ­performers – and who, being black, illustrate positions of prestige and embody success to a degree hitherto unknown to Ishmael as indicated in his words quoted above: “I was impressed with the fact that the black fellows knew how to speak English really fast, and to the beat”.30 However, it is should be emphasized that as a form of American popular culture hip-hop music is embedded in discourses and ideologies promoting particular locations of identity and is thus not neutral in any way. Rather, as Lane Crothers mentions, American popular culture works with and reproduces allegedly central American values ranging from tolerance and equality of opportunity to individualism and democracy.31 Through their representation, these values offer the international audience, including Ishmael and his friends, models and positions that it may identify with. As Crothers argues, also American hip-hop culture shares the same basis of values but chooses to present a particular version of Americanness.32 It is through figures such as the notorious gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur that the dark side of American values can be noticed: Freedom became freedom to consume, to hate, and to dominate. Liberty became the right to do whatever one wanted to do without limit or consequence. Equality results from the violent protection of whatever is one’s 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 511. Beah, 7. Ibid., 6. Lane Crothers, Globalization and American Popular Culture, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 75–78. Ibid., 92–94.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

65

own. Shakur’s music and life reflect the values of American public culture in their darker dimensions.33 While the memoir relates rap music as a way of creating community and can be seen to promote black diasporic identifications, hip-hop culture emphasizing sexism, aggression, and unlimited consumerism has also been argued to be a tool that works for “the corporate machine and u.s. imperialism”.34 As Janell Hobson and R. Dianne Bartlow write in their Introduction to a special issue of the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, the music industry has been at least indirectly involved in international violence by “inspiring … the racialized killing of civilians overseas in cross strategies that have partnered the music industry with the military, which distributes misogynistic music to soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq so that they can be appropriately pumped up on the battlefield”.35 This transnational identification, through music and dress, links the boys with US-based international popular culture and deconstructs their Africanness. Music is also a literal lifeline when the boys face death in the hands of the furious inhabitants of a coastal village they visit. Asked to explain what sort of weird music it is that their cassettes contain, Ishmael puts on a show and dances to the tune “opp” by the early 1990s us rap group Naughty by Nature: I knew the words by heart and felt the beat. I didn’t feel it this time. As I hopped up and down, hunched and raising my arms and feet to the music, I thought about being thrown in the ocean, about how difficult it would be to know that death was inevitable.36 As a result of this amusing playback performance, the chief of the village comes to recognize that “I [Ishmael] was just a child”, asks for another performance (“I Need Love” by ll Cool J), and allows the boys to leave the village.37 American popular music is also present on other occasions in the narrative. References to it include the boys’ performances, a mention of a dead rebel boy wearing “a Tupac Shakur T-shirt”,38 and the lyrics of Run-D.M.C. songs 33 34 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 94. Janell Hobson and R. Diane Bartlow, “Introduction: Representin’ Women, Hip-Hop, and Popular Music”, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, VIII/1 (2008), 7. Ibid., 7. Beah, 67. Ibid., 67–68. Ibid., 119.

66

chapter 4

that Ishmael copies down when released to Benin Home, a rehabilitation centre.39 It also has a significant role to play during his recovery at the centre in Freetown, where the children prepare a talent show to their international guests representing “the European Commission, the un, unicef, and several ngos”.40 The memoir describes the event as Ishmael’s entry into Western culture: “I read a monologue from Julius Caesar and performed a hip-hop play about the redemption of a former child soldier that I had written with Esther’s encouragement”.41 While this symbolic rebirth completes his journey started in the beginning of the book, it is also indicative of his future: Ishmael is to be selected as a representative of the former child soldiers to participate in an international conference on children’s issues in New York, where he is to move eventually to live with his new “mother”. In other words, Western culture plays a role in Ishmael’s migration to the United States. It should be noted that the representation of music in this narrative of mobility is not beyond the sphere of ideology. In addition to linking Ishmael with the global youth who enjoy a shared culture, American popular music also de-emphasizes the significance of his specific ethnic origins, this is, his Africanness. His survival story is recast as one of Americanization, made possible through his exposure to international culture, a process where displacement becomes re-placement. In addition to providing points of entry into the West, rap, as well as Rambo,42 crapes, and his school-level recitals of Shakespeare, assist the readers in realizing that the narrator is a universalized child, a member of our common global Anglophone culture. As a result Ishmael’s “otherness” is dissolved and his identity as a violent child soldier dissolved.

Trauma and Migration

Yet this narrative of reconstructing Ishmael as an American can be framed in the discursive framework of trauma and recovery that plays a role in many migrant narratives. As I have argued, the narrative de-emphasizes Ishmael’s Africanness by focusing on his transnational identification and entry into globalized popular and youth culture. Symbolically and morally, however, his uninnocence remains problematic for the forging of a new identity – after all, he is a child gone wrong, a killer and murderer, and he must be purified before he 39 40 41 42

Ibid., 163. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 6.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

67

is ready to take up his position as a fully-fledged American. While the text has already the paved way for his entry into the West through his status as a universal child, it becomes a narrative of purification by adopting a discourse of trauma that reconstructs Ishmael as an agent free from the burden of the past. In a similar vein, Helff’s reading of the Sudanese Mende Nazer’s co-authored autobiography Slave: The True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and Her Fight for Survival (2004) shows how the genre of refugee life narrative, combining individual traumas with allegedly “authentic” stories of survival and migration, remains unreliable yet “disturbingly powerful” precisely because the repeated and performed features of the genre reveal the operational logic of “the ‘closed system’ of asylum in host countries”.43 Autobiographical representations of forced migrants seek to make them heard as individuals, with personal histories and stories to be told. The reconstruction of Ishmael’s identity – his purification – is embedded in the context of trauma and involves the problem of narrating trauma. Various critics have addressed the relationship between trauma, writing, and reading in the context of such personal and cultural traumas as the Holocaust, slavery, and the Vietnam War, all events and conditions marking a person’s life for a long time. In this context a particularly significant phenomenon addressed by theorists of trauma is the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (ptsd), defined by Cathy Caruth in the following manner: there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the vent, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event.44 In discussing the condition in detail, Caruth pays attention to the fact that the ptsd emerges later in life, not upon the moment of experiencing a traumatic event – this is indeed the case with many soldiers returning home from the battlefield. To quote Caruth: [it] consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the moment, but only 43 44

Helff, “Refugee”, 344. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction”, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, 4.

68

chapter 4

belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.45 What is emphasized in trauma theory is the problematic involved in narrating trauma. While the view presented by Caruth has been criticized by critics emphasizing orthodox Freudian views,46 its emphasis on the belatedness of the trauma historicizes trauma and makes the concept useful for scholars in cultural and literary studies: “a traumatic experience can only be historical if it can manifest itself at a later date”.47 According to Kilby, to analyse trauma is difficult as it resists representation: “trauma scholars have met the demand by arguing that the failure to represent the impact of trauma testifies to the reality of its impact. There are simply no images or words with which to capture the event”.48 Trauma, in other words, is an example of unrepresentability; in his reading of the writings of Caruth and Paul de Man concerning the problem of language and referentiality, or representation and reality, Tom Toremans, however, pays attention to the role that literature may have here in forming an ethical attitude: Caruth’s rhetorical reading of de Man’s writing … allows it to redeem this promise of a truly ethical writing, a writing that theoretically transmits trauma through the insistent and non-phenomenological reference to the “other”, beyond epistemology and the duality between cognition and trope. What happens, in other words, is literature.49 The presence of the traumatizing effects of the war is overwhelming in Beah’s memoir. Its first chapter, for instance, shows traumatized families with children who pass through Ishmael’s home village and “jump at the sound of chopping wood” and refers to parents “lost in their thoughts during conversations”.50 What is portrayed as being worse than the physical and physiological effects of the war are the mental and affectual damages it generates: “it was evident they had seen something that plagued their minds, something that we would refuse 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 4–5. Jane Kilby, “The Writing of Trauma: Trauma Theory and the Liberty of Reading”, New Formations, xlvii (2002), 217–18. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 221–22. Tom Toremans, “Trauma: Theory – Reading (and) Literary Theory in the Wake of Trauma”, European Journal of English Studies, VII/3 (2003), 339–40; emphasis original. Beah, 5.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

69

of accept if they told us all of it”.51 The horrors and cruelty witnessed and performed by combatant children and adults alike include villages burnt and their inhabitants killed, men and women carrying their dead children, and several visually detailed descriptions of killings and dead people: One of them lay on his stomach, and his eyes were wide open and still; his insides were spilling onto the ground. I turned away, and my eyes caught the smashed head of another man. Something inside his brain was still pulsating and he was breathing. I felt nauseated.52 Ishmael’s transition from a boy playing soccer into a child soldier follows the army’s need to recruit most of the young boys in the village of Yele. Upon joining, everyone gets a pair of new crapes (Adidas, Nike or Reebok) with army T-shirts and shorts.53 While the military training given is minimal, the ideological work provided is effective and emotive, centering upon a repeated mantralike phrase: “Over and over in our training he would say that same sentence: ­Visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you”.54 What the sentence generates in Ishmael is anger and hatred, images (and later also actions) of killing rebels: “I imagined capturing several rebels at once, locking them inside a house, sprinkling gasoline on it, and tossing a match. We watch it burn and I laugh”.55 Military education is completed with watching war movies, smoking marijuana joints, and sniffing cocaine.56 While learning to perform his new role, Ishmael, however, suffers from occasional migraines hinting at the traumatizing effects of war and terror.57 The turning point in Ishmael’s story occurs when after years in the army he becomes one of the child soldiers selected by the unicef to leave the fighting and enter civilian life. Since his loyalties at this stage are with the army, seen in his words “My squad is my family, my gun was my provider and protector”,58 he resists the adoption of a role he finds inferior by fighting, stealing, and misbehaving at the rehabilitation centre. Yet the traumatizing effects of the war 51 Ibid., 3. 52 Ibid., 100. 53 Ibid., 110. 54 Ibid., 112; emphasis original. 55 Ibid., 113. 56 Ibid., 121. 57 See ibid., 109 and 121. 58 Ibid., 126.

70

chapter 4

and the loss of childhood are revealed to the reader through a depiction of his physical withdrawal symptoms59 and by emphasizing the need to deal with the past by speaking about it: But even when I was finally able to fall asleep, I would start awake less than an hour later. I would dream that a faceless gunman had tied me up and begun to slit my throat with the zigzag edge of his bayonet. I would feel the pain that the knife inflicted as the man sawed my neck. I’d wake up sweating and throwing punches in the air. I would run outside to the middle of the soccer field and rock back and forth, my arms wrapped around my legs. I would try desperately to think about my childhood, but I couldn’t. The war memories had formed a barrier that I had to break in order to think about any moment in my life before the war.60 As the passage shows, the discourse of trauma is foregrounded in a frequent use of actual memories and in nightmares based on visual flashes from the past, all symptoms of the ptsd. What the text emphasizes is the need to work through the past, to remember moments of happiness and joy that pre-date the violent past should a new self be formed. “‘This isn’t your fault, you know. It really isn’t. You’ll get through this’”,61 as one of the nurses puts it after a difficult night. As is characteristic of many a trauma narrative, a major part in this process is played by his therapist, the nurse Esther, who is the first person to whom he – unwillingly though – talks about his experiences in the war.62 This begins a new stage in his life. By gradually revealing his dreams to Esther, and through copying, studying, and singing the song lyrics of Run-D.M.C. and Bob Marley, Ishmael’s dreams transform and he finally dreams of his family.63 The sense of guilt and “gruesome memories” gives way to an inquisitive attitude: he looks at the sky and the moon, as once told to do so by his grandmother, and listens to the sky as it has “answers and explanations for everything; every pain, every suffering, joy, and confusion”.64

59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 139. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 166.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah



71

Therapy and Reconstruction

The function of the therapeutic discourse is to reconstruct the subject and make her/him able to cope with life in a new way. Indeed, upon resolving his traumas Ishmael enters normal life gradually, relocates a long-lost uncle, and moves to live with his family, enjoying their company and spending cosy evenings listening to the tape recordings of the local storyteller Leleh Ghomba.65 At the age of 16, Ishmael travels to New York to represent the children of Sierra Leone at an international meeting arranged by the United Nations, where he learns to know new friends and participates in workshops on storytelling conducted by Laura Simms, a white woman with a knowledge of oral stories from all over the world, who is later to become Ishmael’s new “mother”.66 What the visit to the United States reveals is also the transformation of the narrator’s self as can be seen in his final speech addressed to the un Economic and Social Council: “I have been rehabilitated now, so don’t be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child. We are all brothers and sisters”.67 In other words, the former abject self has been left behind in Africa, and a new self speaks itself in the West. The emerging desire to enter the West and the United States in particular is also present in the way in which Ishmael relates himself to the nation. He is fascinated by the city of New York, its glittering lights and skyscrapers. Times Square, in particular, comes to symbolize the urban space, its titillation, glamour, and opportunities, all speaking to the narrator: We were busy looking at the buildings and all the people hurrying by when we suddenly saw lights all over the place and shows playing on huge screens. We looked each other in awe of how absolutely amazing and crowded the place was. One of the screens had a woman and a man in their underwear; I guess they were showing it off. Madoka pointed at the screen and laughed. Others had music videos or numbers going across. Everything flashed and changed very quickly. We stood at the corner for a while, mesmerized by the displays. After we were able to tear our eyes away from them, we walked up and down Broadway for hours, staring at the store windows. I didn’t feel cold, as the number of people, the

65 66 67

Ibid., 188. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 198.

72

chapter 4

glittering buildings, and the sounds of cars overwhelmed and intrigued me. I thought I was dreaming.68 Unsurprisingly, the return to Freetown is anti-climactic as Ishmael soon finds himself amidst a new revolution and ruf rule. Subsequently, for him the place to escape to is the United States, the land of his dreams, which eventually happens. While the autobiography suggests that the traumas and nightmares do not entirely disappear in the United States, the reconstructed self is now in control of itself, aware of its past, civilized and ready to be inserted into America. Regardless of the fact that some of the “painful memories” of the past should be “wash[ed] away”, the narrator has gained an understanding as they form “an important part of what my life is; what I am now”.69 For the reconstructed unified child, migration to America makes possible to rediscover the happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past.70 Here, in New York, with a transformed and reconstituted self, ends the narrator’s journey, or, to use the title of one of favourite reggae albums, his Exodus.71 The novel is, then, a success story, as is confirmed by its book jacket showing a smiling young man, as noted by a reviewer: “Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen”.72 Conclusion Beah’s text addresses displacement, migration, and globalization at various levels including popular music, transnational identification, and the causes of 68 Ibid., 198. 69 Ibid., 19. 70 Ibid., 20. 71 See ibid., 162. 72 William Boyd, “Babes in Arms”, rev. of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2007, online ed., available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016.

Transnational Migrant Identity in Ishmael Beah

73

forced migration. By relocating himself to the United States, the narrator of the memoir completes the formation of his transnational identity. For Ishmael, as also for his idol Bob Marley, the reconstruction of identity is a firmly transnational process involving globalized popular culture and imagined identities which allow for identification as one of “us” rather as “them”. His entry into respectability, initially problematized by a violent past as a monstrous child soldier, is now levelled by a therapeutic process that has transformed and purified him. As a result, the African child soldier has become an adolescent inhabitant of the globalized West and the United States in particular. Yet the passage quoted above, as it divides the narrator’s life into three distinct “worlds”,73 displays a sense of uneasiness related to the inability to escape the traumas of the past. Ishmael’s traumas, then, are more than personal but linked with the causes that have generated forced migration from Africa to the West. Although occasionally downplayed in Beah’s narrative emphasizing an individual’s successful story of survival and success, the traumas of violence and migration are shared by a whole generation and nation, maybe even by a continent, troubled by the loss of families, communities, and familiar places, and displaced by violence and war. 73

See Beah, 20.

chapter 5

Borders and Transitive Identities in Jamal Mahjoub’s “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” This chapter concluding the first part of the volume shows how narratives of forced migration often follow the migrants’ journey towards Europe and reveal various ways in which they cross borders, legally and illegally, with the aim of achieving security in Europe. To address the issue, I discuss the role and representation of borders, bordering, and borderscapes in “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” (2008), a short story telling of African migrants on their way to Europe by the Sudanese British writer Jamal Mahjoub.1 This story continues Mahjoub’s long-standing interest in Europe and its historical construction. His novels such as The Carrier (1998) and The Drift Latitudes (2006) explore Europe’s relations with its immigrant others in the historical and contemporary contexts of postcolonialism, cultural hybridity, and transculturation.2 As a part of this project, “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” presents the perspective of the illegal immigrant seeking to cross into Europe from Africa, and thus invites a border reading focusing on the particularities of this experience of entering Europe. In this chapter, I will read “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” in the context of recent theorizations of the border that emphasize the transformation of identity as an experience generated by the crossing. In my analysis I examine the journey of the story’s protagonist from Africa to Europe by addressing the ways in which the story foregrounds the rhetorical trope of metonymy as a means of narrating transnational identity, as suggested by the literary theorist Stephen Clingman.3 I suggest that for Mahjoub’s story border-crossings are not mere characteristics of contemporary globalization but they are grounded historically and culturally. As seen in the character of the young African boy who makes his way to the Louvre, the transformation of identity is both personal, cultural, and national. In so doing the text relocates the border and transforms European nation-states into borderscapes where racial and national difference 1 Jamal Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts on the Medusa”, Wasafiri, XXIII/4 (2008), 69–71. 2 See Jopi Nyman, “Europe and Its Others: The Novels of Jamal Mahjoub”, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture, ed. Nouri Gana, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 217–45. 3 Steven Clingman, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and Nature of the Boundary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_007

Borders and Transitive Identities

75

reconstructs their allegedly pure identities through the transnational identity of the new migrant. In other words, “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” is a counter-hegemonic text that imagines and explores alternative, transnational spaces of identity formation by questioning the power of nation-states.

Migrants, Borders, Transitions

The representation of borders and moments of border crossings is a central characteristic in migrant literature as its characters seek to enter more secure spaces, often using any means necessary. In such narratives, the border has come to mark more than national and cultural difference: while it constructs alterity and maintains the division into “us” and “them”, it does so for a particular purpose. This purpose, according to Yosefa Loshitzky’s study of cinematic representations of “strangers” seeking to enter Europe, is based on the Europeans’ conception of migrants “as challenging and threatening to their territory, identity and ways of imagining themselves and others”.4 The idea of “Fortress Europe”, Loshitzky suggests, promotes “racial, ethnic, and religious boundaries” and tries to keep African and Asian migrants away.5 The process of exclusion supports the view that the globalized world is far from being borderless.6 In contrast to such monological views separating Europeans and their Others, postcolonial writing such as that of Jamal Mahjoub may seek to rewrite the dominant image of the migrant seeking to enter Europe. While conventional views of forced migrants construct them as a mass, reproduced in the countless media images of small boats and rafts full of silent migrants,7 various narratives ranging from autobiographical narratives and poems to contemporary fiction by black British authors have sought to challenge the ideas promoted by popular media. While some narratives of the migrant experience represent their protagonists as individuals and suggest that the border crossings may lead to a better life and a possible reconstruction of home, many narratives display no such solutions but consider them utopian. Caryl Phillips’ 2003 novel A Distant Shore, in particular, shows how its protagonist leaves his home in war-torn Africa and enters Britain illegally, only to discover that the nation is

4 Yosefa Loshitzky, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, 2. 5 Ibid., 2. 6 Cf. Newman, 29–32. 7 See Marfleet, 193.

76

chapter 5

plagued with racism and violence, which leads to his death.8 In a similar vein, as Chapter 2 in this volume has shown, the autobiographical reflections by African refugees and asylum seekers in Wales point to the loneliness of the migrants and the racialized boundaries between them and the host community. Mahjoub’s story of migration examined in this chapter is a further example of migrant narratives and shows that global currents often generate mobility and displacement. In such narratives focusing on global mobility, the border plays an important role, both concretely and symbolically. Rather than a mere site of separation, it should be examined in the larger context of what David Newman refers to as “the process of bordering”.9 For Newman, borders are processes and institutions, demarcated and managed by socio-political elites, and they generate various border phenomena and experiences from border management procedures to the notion of border as a space of transition and contact.10 Narratives of – and by – migrants and other border-crossers illuminate these processes and experiences, showing the constructedness of the border and revealing its diverse roles. As Schimanski and Wolfe suggest, “Borders involve movements of people from one place to another; attempts to control space with borders, creating situations of radically asymmetrical relations of power; and attempts to imagine the spatial dislocations of people, objects, or ideologies within the globalized economy”.11 Recent debates in border studies have revealed a need to move towards more complex and theorized reflections on the border to understand its dynamic character. As a contribution to the discussion, this chapter provides a reading Mahjoub’s border-crossing narrative by approaching it through Stephen Clingman’s theorization of transnational fiction as a narrativization of transition and identity transformation in the conditions of border crossings. The migrants described in Mahjoub’s story are, to use Stephen Clingman’s definition, in a world that is characterized by “two competing descriptions and tendencies, of the many and the one”.12 In other words, the globalized world of “many”, with its various multiplicities and flows, is pitted against the world of “one”, which is dominated by fundamentalisms, walls, and nations.13 8 9 10 11 12 13

Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore, London: Vintage, 2003. Newman, 35. Newman, 35–38. Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, “Entry Points: An Introduction”, in Border Poetics De-limited, eds Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007, 12. Clingman, 5; emphasis original. Ibid., 5.

Borders and Transitive Identities

77

As my reading of the story’s final scene will show, the location of the migrant in this ambiguous space and their attempt to enter the closed spaces of European nation-states is an example of what Clingman refers to as a characteristic of transnational fiction, a mode of writing created “by, and directed towards, migrant and multi-lingual communities, who exist in multiple and in-between spaces. It is, in essence, a migrant and migrating literature”.14 “Last Thoughts on the Medusa”, in other words, foregrounds global migration and shows how the presence of the migrant in European nation-states transforms such spaces into borderscapes where new configurations of identity emerge. Seeking to problematize the notion of migration, Clingman claims that the sense of migration pertinent to transnational fiction is more a matter of form than merely being connected with representations of travel in narratives or travellers themselves. Applying linguist Roman Jakobson’s famous distinction between selection and combination as the two principal axes of language production, Clingman argues that transnational fiction and its understanding of identity is based on the logic of metonymy rather than that of metaphor, on combination, association, and chains of meanings rather than on similarity and interchangeability.15 What this means for literature is that the rule of metonymy generates a particular kind of linguistic self based on “transition, navigation, mutation, alteration, a whole morphology of meanings” – the notion of transitivity characterizes the open-endedness of identity constructions.16 An identity of this kind opposes the demands of what Clingman discusses as the logic of the “one”: a formulation such as this guards against definitions of identity which are substitutive, especially where such substitutions flatten out and congeal all difference into singularity. This means it also guards against representation in specific senses, where the definition of identity claims to represent the sole and absolute possibilities of the self. … Any version of identity, “I am x”, where “x” equals the sole and total definition of the “I”, is inimical to transition, possibility, change.17 The transitive character of identity proposed by Clingman is one that is in constant mobility, rather than stable, heterogeneous and hybrid rather than fixed, 14 15 16 17

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15; emphasis original.

78

chapter 5

and can thus be likened to postmodern and postcolonial understandings of identity as a process. What is conspicuous in Clingman’s theory of the transitive self is, however, the way in which it is anchored, first, in the linguistic form of metonymy, and, second, in the idea of navigation as a mode of overriding and linking national borders. To support his view, Clingman argues that the notion of navigation can be explained linguistically as the way in which human beings utilize the linguistic notion of recursivity according to which it is always possible to add new elements to a sentence, a process that is without an end.18 The promise of the latter term is in his view also validated by the findings of evolutionary biology and linguistics where it has been argued that a child learns to walk and speak practically at the same time.19 Speculatively, Clingman poses the following question: What is the correspondence has to do with navigation? Think of it this way: you begin the sentence, and when you begin you are not quite sure how it will end. You navigate your way through its recursive and combinatory possibilities, looking for landmarks, safe havens, and new vistas – just as you might navigate through a landscape half-known and unknown.20 What makes Clingman’s theorization of the transitory and navigating identity relevant for the study of transnational fiction and its constructions of identity – as well as the field of border studies – is the emphasis that he puts on the notion of boundary in the anthropological sense21 and the way in which the process of navigation – that resembles the experience of being at the border – has a transformative function. For Clingman, boundaries, rather than merely inhibiting and dividing concepts, are transitive and never fully grasped or fixed, “like the boundary of the world”: “The boundary of meaning, then, is a transitive boundary; the transitive is intrinsically connected with meaning; navigation depends on, and creates, the transitive boundary which itself may undergo change. In all these ways the boundary is not a limit but the space of transition”.22 In other words, the self that defines itself in relation to the shifting boundaries and oscillates between various locations emerges as 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 18; emphasis original. Cf. Henk van Houtum, “The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries”, Geopolitics, x (2005), 672–79. Clingman, 22.

Borders and Transitive Identities

79

transnational and many, not as national and one. To underline the plurality and non-fixity of the subject, Clingman defines the navigating self as being in a constant process of becoming: navigation does not mean crossing or having crossed, but being in the space of crossing. It means being prepared to be in the space of crossing, in transition, in movement, in journey. It means accepting placement as displacement, position as disposition, not through coercion of others or by others of ourselves, but through “disposition” as an affect of the self, as a kind of approach.23 This conceptualization of transnational migrant identity shows that all attempts at border crossings are at the same time instances of identity reconstruction, of translation, of otherness emerging in the self and transforming it. The emphasis on transformation links Clingman’s theorization of the transition and emergent identity transformation with recent work in border theory and the notion of the borderscape in particular. Owing to the processual turn in border studies and its emphasis on bordering rather than the border as such, border theorists such as Brambilla suggest that the concept of the borderscape is capable of capturing the complex dynamics of the border as a site of interaction and “a mobile and relational space”.24 Such locations, it appears, are both transforming and transformative. In their discussion of borderscapes, Rajaram and Grundy-Warr suggest that they are not static sites or instrumental concepts but “zone[s] of varied and differentiated encounters” where meanings and identities are negotiated.25 In other words, such locations serve as sites where hegemonic and non-hegemonic forces and ideologies come into contact and may generate new identities and configurations. In this sense borders are, as Brambilla puts it, “paradoxical structures that are both markers of belonging and places of becoming”.26 Generating transitions and becomings, rather than merely fixing identities and configurations, borders and borderscapes in particular problematize conventional ideas of the role of national borders and allow for the formation of transnational and transcultural identifications often discussed in postcolonial studies through the discourse of 23 24 25

26

Ibid., 25; emphasis original. Brambilla, 9. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, “Introduction”, in Borderscapes: Human ­Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, eds Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl GrundyWarr, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, xxx. Brambilla, 11; emphasis original.

80

chapter 5

hybridity.27 As Mahjoub’s short story shows, the borderscape is a site of such encounters where the representation of transnationalism and its role in the transformation of identity in the nation-states of contemporary Europe is foregrounded.

Navigating Migrant Identity

At a general level, Mahjoub’s narrative discusses contemporary South–North movement through its story of the stormy passage of African migrants from Mali, Ghana, and unnamed countries who seek to enter Europe. In the story, the fully packed small boat has run out of petrol and is now drifting aimlessly on the stormy sea, somewhere off the coast of Mauritania, as is made clear in its intertextual references to the painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) depicting the wreck of the boat Medusa by the French Romantic painter Jean Louis Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). To underline the links between the text and painting, the final scene of the story is set in a gallery at the Louvre, where the painting is now displayed. As I will show, Mahjoub’s story’s aims are more political than aesthetic – while the significance of the latter is important, the aesthetic is unquestionably politicized by locating Géricault’s canonical painting in the discourses of migration and colonialism. The story seeks to provide non-mainstream images of illegal migrants by locating them in the contexts of global mobility and transformation of identity. The migrants, however, are desperate to enter Europe, the space of promise and a better future, as seen in their motivation: “dreams … had carried all of them this far”.28 The means of their journey, the boat, is also significant. In the postcolonial context it evokes the memory of the Middle Passage and the role of the boat as a chronotype that links different times and locations, and in so doing creates the shared experience of the black diaspora, as suggested in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic.29 Mahjoub’s story is a narrative of borders and their role in constructing belonging and becoming that give prominence to the sea that both separates and unites European and African spaces. As in Géricault’s painting, the sea is represented as a space of risk and hostility to emphasize the dangers of the crossing, and its role is stressed in ways that extend from the literal and realist to the 27 28 29

See Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman, eds, Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 70. See Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4.

Borders and Transitive Identities

81

metonymical. In the story, humans are shown to be at the mercy of the sea, and the boat is portrayed as “rising and falling on the fluttering wings of this salty harness”.30 The migrants are shown to drift, “rock, bereft” in “[t]his enormous cradle”,31 and to receive a “whipping” from the wind.32 As a result, their state is one of despair: Hope extinguished. Anger worn down. There is no arguing with waves that lift like hills, ceaselessly, over and over again.33 While hopelessness and fear for one’s life are present in the narrative, this representation is, however, contrasted with another function associated with the sea as the sea is part of the discourse of the transnational. This is evident in Clingman’s proposition that “[t]he oceans may be barriers to land, but connect one landmass and another”.34 Respectively, the migrants, when crossing the sea, are also in the process of approaching the border that separates Europe from Africa as their attempt is to cross “the murky void” and then to enter the space of the nation-state.35 Here the border has a double function, signifying both fixity as the patrolled border of the nation-state and becoming as the promise of future identity reconstruction. To further emphasize the mobility characteristic of contemporary globalization and to counter hegemonic migration discourses, Mahjoub provides his migrants with histories and distinct life stories rather than describes them as a mass in the manner of mainstream media discourse. Story-telling emerges as an activity that identifies the migrant as an individual, which is something that Mahjoub’s migrants have not expected. When the teacher asks the boy from Ghana to tell his story, the response is one of surprise: “‘My story? … My name?’ His voice quivers”.36 To keep their hope alive, the illegal migrants form a temporary community where they tell stories to each other. In so doing, the novel transforms migrants into pilgrims who, like those in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, tell stories while attempting to reach their destination. The story of the teacher, one of the central characters in the story, is significant in this respect. Mahjoub’s short story mentions his past frustrations and 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 69. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 69. Clingman, 23. Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 71. Ibid., 70.

82

chapter 5

tells that all he wants now is an end to “[a] lifetime spent in waiting” and a new “beginning. A chance to shake off the weight of the years”.37 Other characters with their aims and pasts are also revealed through their stories: Jonas, the young boy from Ghana, dreams of a career in football promised to him by scouts visiting his village; a boxer-looking boy identifies himself as a thief and compares his deeds to those of “Kings and politicians”;38 a slim young man who reveals that he has been a soldier and killer; and the man on the bow with “confidence and charisma” claims ambiguously that the pilgrims will reach a paradise: Out there, beyond this water, is a beach. It is soft and dry and warm and the sun is so hot that in a few minutes you are burning. That beach is waiting for us. And you know what else also? Women. Yes, fine white women. Not story women. Not goddesses. Real women who will wrap their arms around you, hold you to their bare breasts as they pour clean water onto your dry lips.39 In addressing the migrant experience, Mahjoub’s story works metonymically in at least two ways characteristic of transnational fiction as defined by Clingman. In rhetoric, the term metonymy is used to refer figuratively to an object by using an attribute associated with it, whereas the related term synechdoche is a figure of speech where a part of the thing represents the entire object.40 In this story the rhetorical representation of larger objects and ideas is frequently based on the use of parts and attributes. Not only are the story’s migrants part of the larger flow of border-crossers from Africa to Europe but each individual story is also a part of the larger story of migration. In other words, each migrant stands for the whole experience of contemporary migration, as can be seen in the teacher’s description of his students who have no interest in learning about history and the arts but wish for material goods: “They had fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in Paris, Brussels, and Madrid who would sent them money and fancy clothes”.41 Characteristically of metonymy, the modes of family relationships mentioned can be substituted by each other, and appear to form a metonymical chain based on continuity and association. Likewise, the 37 38 39 40 41

Ibid., 69. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. Paul Goring, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Domnhall Mitchell, Studying Literature: The Essential Companion, London: Arnold, 2001, 265. Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 71.

Borders and Transitive Identities

83

three European capital cities named are synechdochic both for the nations in question as well as for Europe as a whole. The idea of an individual standing in for her or his community, as in a synecdoche, is also emphasized in the way in which a migrant’s journey is described as a communal and symbolic investment for a better future for everyone: “So much money he had watched go by. He who had no money. Come back, they said. Bring us luck, they said, pressing their obsolete currency into his palm. It went through him, from one person to another”.42 The synecdochic character of the migrants’ boat is also seen in the way in which it is described in the story: “A scarf is waving high up on the bow”.43 Similarly, the trope is present in the teacher’s description of the loss of his bag containing his “certificates and papers”, which makes him one of the paperless, too.44 Crossing, however, should be seen not only as a physical activity but it can also be read in the framework proposed by Clingman. For Mahjoub’s migrants the journey towards Europe is one during which identity is in transit and the sea is one of the spaces of navigation. The predicament of such characters is that of displacement, discussed in Mahjoub’s story by referring to their position as being “trapped in the confined space of unending vastness”,45 “embrace[d]” by “water and sorrow”.46 Yet the willingness to cross is emphatically present in the narrative and supports Clingman’s idea that transitive identity “means being prepared to be in the space of crossing, in transition, in movement, in journey”.47 This preparedness based on a desire to transform is represented in the story as a heroic and noble feature characterizing these migrants: In the faces bowed before him in the half light, he glimpses nobility. The potential we are all born with and go through life squandering. … Centuries from now people may talk of these voyages the way they spoke of other journeys in history.48 To support my reading of the significance of metonymy for the story, this passage explicitly links the contemporary journey with other historical “voyages” moving people from one place to another in the context of colonialism. 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Ibid., 69. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 70. Clingman, 25; emphasis original. Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 70.

84

chapter 5

Writing Back to Colonial Images

Since the boy’s realization of the transformation of his identity is linked with Géricault’s painting, the intermedial relationship between The Raft of the Medusa and Mahjoub’s narrative needs to discussed in more detail. It is, indeed, more than one of simple intertextual reference. In fact, the first sentences of the story are applicable to either work, as the story shows: A ship, someone cries, and they all begin to stir. The air between them charged with hope. Stay still, he says. Not everyone at one. The boat will tip over. And for a moment, he thought it truly would.49 The story shows in detail how a young boy, a survivor of the shipwreck, examines the painting at the Louvre: The boy steps closer. Sees the brushstrokes. Striations that cut deep like ancient geology carved into the canvas. Lines made by the soft hairs of the mountain goat clipped to the end of a brush. Dragging the paint into waves and eddies, into rounded hips and thighs, bare torsos, ripped sails, fingers crooked towards the sky. A figure on the bow waving a scarf at a dot on the horizon.50 This is an example of ekphrasis, that is, a verbal representation of the visual, here a literary description of a painting. In W.J.T. Mitchell’s view, one of the functions of ekphrasis is to generate “ekphrastic hope” that allows us to “discover a ‘sense’ in which language can do what so many writers have wanted it to do: ‘to make us see’”.51 Upon such moments, as Mitchell argues on the basis of Murray Krieger’s ideas, ekphrasis becomes an example of “the anesthetization of language in … the ‘still moment’”52 that brings the text and the image together in “a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext”.53 Richard Brock’s postcolonial reading of Mitchell’s concepts is useful in explaining the issue as he emphasizes that the images of the “still” – or “pregnant” – moments, often historical, in the visual arts are not fixed but open to “counter-discursive” readings: 49 50 51 52 53

Ibid., 69. Ibid., 71. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, 152. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 154.

Borders and Transitive Identities

85

ekphrasis functions as nothing less than a comprehensive shorthand for the aims and operations of postcolonial discourse theory: a series of articulations positioned at the margins of a spatialized Eurocentric history, functioning to narrativize, and “envoice”, the silenced, marginal discourses buried within this history.54 Consequently, Mahjoub’s use of the ekphrastic gives voice to a marginalized discourse that counters the conventional construction of the boat as an object of colonialism and cruelty. While linking the contemporary with the past, and reminding the reader of the dangers of previous crossings, the short story seeks to insert the boat in a discourse of hope through its insistence on community. Whereas Géricault’s sailors resorted to cannibalism, Mahjoub’s migrants appear to form a community helping each other. By showing the difference between the people occupying the boats, the narrative transforms the conventional representation of a boat from one of silence, fear, and exhaustion into one where “strangers” have become “intimate companions”55 who find pleasure in storytelling and especially in their “triumphant chatter” over football and provide warmth to each other by sitting as close to each other as they can.56 The surviving boy, whom the teacher had promised to take to the Louvre to see Géricault’s painting, remembers his less successful friends with warmth while gazing at the painting at the end of the story. While the journey apparently ends in the death of the majority of the crossers, the closing paragraphs of the story reveal that the boy is a successful crosser. His experience of watching the painting at the gallery tells of his transforming identity and the teeming possibilities offered by his transition: He has never felt anything like this before. Not in God, nor in school, nor even kicking a muddy ball around a field. Nothing like this. This spirit. He looks at the painting and he wants it. Not the painting, because for a start you wouldn’t be able to get it through the door, and even then there wasn’t a wall big enough to hang it in the apartment. He wants this. The power to evoke this feeling. This emotion.… For a second he saw it all clearly. The life before him. The work that could reach across the murky void to

54 55 56

Richard Brock, “Framing Theory: Toward an Ekphrastic Postcolonial Methodology”, Cultural Critique, lxxvii (2011), 134; emphasis original. Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 69. Ibid., 70.

86

chapter 5

illuminate everything. He would rise and people would pause, look and listen. His mind buzzed with the open-ended nature of possibility.57 Examined in the context of Clingman’s theory of the border-crossing identity, the passage reveals the transitive character of his identity, generated through the process of crossing over. The navigation, life in the space of in-betweenness involving various choices, provides him with a new, “open-ended” identity enabling choices and negotiations in the world of the “many” rather than in that of the “one”.58 No longer a victimized migrant, Mahjoub’s boy emerges as a young AfroEuropean aware of the role of the colonial past and its violence that has forced his friends to “vanish … through a hole in the canvas”.59 In so doing the narrative appears to be involved in further navigations of identity because of its critique of Europeanness as well as of Frenchness. By negotiating and problematizing such categories, the text shows that the insertion of Géricault’s canonical painting in Mahjoub’s transnational short story is more than a postcolonial act of critiquing or writing back to the national canon. Rather, as the thematics of the Géricault painting reveal, the national is already transnational because of the colonial identity of the painting and its location in the Euro-African borderscape, which also resonates with Edward Said’s view emphasizing the interconnectedness of metropolitan centres and colonial outposts that characterizes various national canons of Euro-American art and literature.60 The preferred mode of identity in Mahjoub’s story uses the trope of navigation to locate France/Europe in Africa and, conversely, Africa in France/Europe, showing how the identities of both are present in and transform each other through travel and cultural contact. This appears to confirm Clingman’s view suggesting that “identity itself has become a route – punctuated, transitional, altering”.61 At the same time, the presence of the young African in Paris shows how the notion of the border is revised and its location questioned: through his entry to the Louvre, this synecdochic representation of the allegedly pure European tradition of high culture and the canon transforms into a borderscape where racial and national differences are emphatically present and the past re-enacted. As a result, the narrative is involved what Brambilla sees as a way of problematizing the location of the border, “involving a focus on the way 57 58 59 60 61

Ibid., 71. Cf. Clingman, 5. Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 71. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]. Clingman, 92; emphasis original.

Borders and Transitive Identities

87

in which the very location of borders is constantly dis-placed, negotiated and represented”.62 To use Brambilla’s terms, the borderscape constructed in the Louvre is counterhegemonic,63 since it resists and transforms official discourses defining migrants and their possibilities to enter Europe/France, either as migrants or through the artistic canon. The significance of the counter-hegemonic discourse is supported in the story by separating the forced migrant from Africa from the other tourists from different countries who visit the Louvre and admire the same painting. What the latter see in the painting, and how they read it, is different from the memories that it evokes in the story’s central character. While at the end of the short story the boy decides to buy a postcard of the painting to “keep in his pocket” and to “remember it [the painting] by”, his reasons remain different from those of the tourists.64 This difference can be discussed through the notion of “the refugee gaze” presented in Loshitzky’s discussion of refugee cinema where it is distinguished from the touristic gaze.65 In Loshitzky’s view, the former mode of gazing is one that, rather than pleasure, “seeks survival” and sees the landscape travelled through as “an enemy to be overcome”.66 These observations characterize the role of the gaze in Mahjoub’s story, ranging from the description of the violence of the sea to the way in which the people on Géricault’s raft live their “still moment”, unaware of whether they are to be saved or not. In other words, the African boy’s gaze at the Louvre is that of the refugee, but at the same time a transformed one as he is now aware of his survival and new identity, and willing to envoice the hitherto marginalized experience. As a narrative of a successful border crosser, his story departs from the condition of the displaced Africans selling various trinkets in front of the Louvre as depicted in Mahjoub’s earlier novel Travelling with Djinns (2003). Rather than seeking entry, they have turned their back on the museum and prioritize their daily struggle: “Paying to stand and gaze at old paintings comes low on the list of priorities when you are trying to eke out a living from the pavements”.67 In “Last Thoughts on the Medusa”, however, the border crosser enters the museum and confronts the national canon, yet aware of its colonial and transnational history and able to relate the past struggles to his personal crossing. The postcard, while a commodified touristic souvenir, is also a symbolic object that links the 62 63 64 65 66 67

Brambilla, 6. Ibid., 7. Mahjoub, “Last Thoughts”, 71. Loshitzky, 27. Ibid., 28. Jamal Mahjoub, Travelling with Djinns, London: Chatto and Windus, 2003, 105.

88

chapter 5

central character with his transnational identity and the significance of the border-crossing experience in his life. Conclusion This chapter has suggested that the representation of border crossings in Jamal Mahjoub’s short story “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” focusing of African migrants’ attempt to reach the shores of Europe reveals the role that borders and often racialized boundaries play in the transformation of identity. By framing the narrative in the logic of metonymy as suggested in Steven Clingman’s theory of transnational fiction, I have sought to show that the migrant’s identity is formed in the process of crossing and is indicative of larger global processes. Furthermore, the role that Mahjoub’s story gives to intertextuality and ekphrasis through Géricault’s painting emphasizes further the links between contemporary migration and the colonialist project. What distinguishes Mahjoub’s story from many others is its awareness of the historical character of border crossings and borderscapes as well as the recognition that identity can be constructed in the act of navigating the space of in-betweenness. Similarly, the reconstruction of the African boy’s identity also problematizes the maintenance of hegemonic national identities and carves out new forms of Europeanness. In further research, there is a need to discuss more widely narratives of such border crossings where similarly successful stories appear less frequently. For instance, while Ville Tietäväinen’s 2009 Finnish graphic novel Näkymättömät kädet [Invisible Hands] provides a somewhat similar representation of the migrant’s act of crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in a small boat, but his narrative foregrounds racism and despair and ends in its protagonist’s mental breakdown and death.

part 2 Memories of Migration

∵

Introduction to Part 2 Part 2 explores the role of memory and history in the making of contemporary migrant writing by paying particular attention to the role of affect and emotion in diverse cultural contexts. By examining postcolonial narratives of mobility that are either set in the past or explore the meaning of the past in the contemporary, the three chapters show how personal, communal, and cultural aspects of the past affect memories of home and migration. Memory plays a particularly strong role in migration and migrant writing, as it provides continuity to the individual and the group by linking the past with present.1 Place is, indeed, crucial, but rather than looking for the origins of memory in a particular site, scholars such as Creet emphasize that mobility is “the condition of memory” and that “memories of migration” are “socio-political phenomen[a]”.2 Memory, in other words, is collective and cultural, and linked with migration and movement. As the readings in this part will show, rather than expressing merely ­nostalgic views of the past, memories also address the violence, trauma, and racism that have led towards migration or which have been encountered during the process of migration. Here my understanding of the role played by memory follows that presented by Dominick LaCapra, whose discussion of the recent interest in the role of memory emphasizes the significance of trauma and the role of memory sites (lieux de mémoire) in narratives dealing with personal and communal pasts.3 To quote LaCapra: Memory is both more and less than history and vice-versa. History may never capture certain elements of memory: the feel of experience, the intensity of joy or suffering, the quality of an occurrence. Yet history also includes elements that are not exhausted by memory, such as demographic, ecological, and economic factors. More important perhaps, it tests memory and ideally leads to the emergence of both a more accurate memory and a clearer appraisal of what is or is not factual in remembrance.4

1 Julia Creet, “Introduction: The Migration of Memory and Memories of Migration”, in Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, eds Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011, 3. 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998, 8–10. 4 Ibid., 20.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_008

92

Introduction to Part 2

To foreground the felt experience of migration and family trauma, the chapters in this part of the volume pay particular attention to the affective register used to narrate migration. This is seen in the nostalgia (and also anti-nostalgia) of the family memoirs addressed, as well as in the melancholia and self-hatred in the narratives of Gurnah and Phillips, where race and trauma play a central role. From the perspective of LaCapra, these elements contribute to the “feel of experience” and “the intensity of joy or suffering” that he mentions. While Jaffrey and Abu-Jaber approach the past through sensory experiences and memories of food, Gurnah and Phillips foreground trauma and suffering in their fiction.5 Chapter 6 examines two contemporary memoirs by migrant women where food is articulated with with migration and identity. The texts under study are Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India (2005), by Madhur Jaffrey, the well-known chef and author of Indian cookbooks, and The Language of Baklava (2005), by the Arab American author Diana Abu-Jaber. In the era of increasing global mobility, representations of the culinary in postcolonial and ethnic life writing are linked with the ongoing construction of hybridized identity and the desire to negotiate identity in new transnational spaces. By narrating stories and memories of home and family, these texts expose the formation of self within a context of cultural interchange where the tropes of taste and food play a double role, stitching the group together but also separating it from the dominant. The chapter shows that they explore difference and transculturation by actively using food, memory, and home to shape new forms of identity. While Jaffrey’s book is nostalgic and focuses on the family home, Abu-Jaber’s work show how food is central to the construction of the identity of its narrator, a second-generation Arab-American. It also shows how food separates the immigrant from the host. In these narratives, then, the culinary marks more than a domestic past: as I demonstrate, it signifies the reshaping of identity characteristic of postcolonial life-writing and points to the importance of memory and community for im/migrants. The following chapter examines the representation of melancholia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s second novel Pilgrims Way (1988), a story of Daud, a failed student who now works as a hospital orderly. A disillusioned Zanzibari migrant haunted by his memories, Daud lives a melancholic and marginal life in the Britain of the 1970s. The theoretical framework applied consists of an analysis of the condition of melancholia presented by Sigmund Freud in his 1917 work Mourning and Melancholia and its later postcolonial applications by theorists 5 On Gurnah, see in particular Felicity Hand, “Untangling Stories and Healing Rifts: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea”, Research in African Literatures, XLI/2 (2010), 76.

Introduction To Part 2

93

such as Anne Cheng, David Eng, and David Kazanjian, who have examined the concept in the context of race and migration. The chapter discusses the novel’s representation of melancholia and addresses its protagonist’s attempts to negotiate his position under the conditions of migration and racial prejudice. These include the creation of alternative colonial pasts for the people whom he encounters, his act of writing (imaginary) letters to various real and fictional characters, and the gradual reconstruction of his identity through his attachment to Catherine. The chapter suggests that at the core of the protagonist’s melancholia are the historical traumas generated by the legacy of colonialism in East Africa, his memories of the related loss of family and community, and the disillusion generated by his migration to a racist Britain. Caryl Phillips’ fictional and non-fictional writing explores the problematic formation of black diasporic identity in transnational and trans-Atlantic spaces and the legacy of racism. The issues of racial and diasporic identity form the core of Phillips’ 2005 novel Dancing in the Dark, a narrative of the character and career of the Caribbean-born us vaudeville/blackface artist Egbert (Bert) Williams (1874–1922). Chapter 8 argues that Phillips’ treatment of Williams can be read in a transnational context, not only in that of African American culture and history. As the chapter shows, Phillips’ Dancing in the Dark reveals how black American identities are part of the black diaspora and its history and how problematic the migration from the Caribbean to the United States can be. In so doing the novel places the questions of “race” and racialized identity in a transnational context in order to revise our understandings of past migrations. Claiming that the dominant conception of black American identity is strongly based on American racial stereotypes and especially the trope of the blackface, the novel presents an alternative version of black identity. In Phillips’ novel, this is most notably present in its West Indian protagonist’s transnational links with the black diaspora and shown in his memories. The chapter shows that the way in which the protagonist adopts and performs a stereotypical African American identity, repressing its alternatives, is a highly problematic and traumatizing strategy. As I will show, the story of his traumatic performance of identity is supported in the novel by using a variety of Gothic conventions.

chapter 6

Home, Memory, and Identity in the Culinary Memoirs by Madhur Jaffrey and Diana Abu-Jaber While food and taste have traditionally played a major role in ethnic literatures as ways of preserving tradition and creating communal spaces, the recent expansion of the popularity of food writing cannot be examined as a mere search for nostalgia, rootedness, and traditional, essentialized forms of identity. Rather, in the context of intercultural exchange and increasing global mobility, representations of the culinary in autobiographical writing are linked with the ongoing construction of hybridized identity and the desire to negotiate identity in new transnational spaces generated by migration. As I will show in this chapter, one example of this phenomenon is culinary life writing by ethnic and postcolonial writers who reflect on the role of food in the making of subjectivity by linking it with memory. Through narrating stories and memories of home and family, their writings expose the formation of self in a context of cultural interchange. In this process the tropes of taste and food play a double role, stitching the group together but also separating it from the dominant. Yet contemporary culinary memoirs also posit food and taste as tropes with potential to bridge cultural difference and create new transcultural identities. In this chapter my focus is on two twenty-first-century memoirs by women, which use different representational strategies: Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India (2005) by Madhur Jaffrey,1 chef and author of Indian cookbooks, and The Language of Baklava (2005) by the Arab American­ novelist Diana Abu-Jaber.2 In my analysis of these texts I will show that they explore issues of difference and transculturation by actively using food, memory, and home to shape new forms of identity. While Jaffrey’s nostalgic narrative emphasizes the role of the family home and its traditions, Abu-Jaber’s memoir exploits to a great degree her positionality as an Arab American woman in constructing transcultural culinary identity. While the two texts reveal the central role of food and cooking in the making of migrant women’s identity, they also show how varied this role is. In contrast to Jaffrey’s nostalgic memories from a safe Indian childhood, Abu-Jaber’s narrator shows how food may also function 1 Madhur Jaffrey, Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, London: Ebury Press, 2006 [2005]. 2 Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava, New York: Pantheon Books, 2005.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_009

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

95

as a marker of difference that separates the migrant from the host. In these narratives, then, the culinary is directly linked with memory, migration, and identity.

Culinary Memoir: Genre, Form, and Function

Culinary memoirs can be seen as a form of autobiographical writing. While the traditional view of autobiographies has tended to emphasize their role in the making of modern self-reflective subjectivities, research into women’s and ­ethnic narratives of self has emphasized their ability to critique such established masculinist and nationalist messages. In her article “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects”, Caren Kaplan suggests that the generic baggage of Eurocentric autobiographies is ­refuted in often marginalized forms of life-writing which contradict and deconstruct conventional ideas about the genre by transgressing its boundaries.3 In ­Kaplan’s view, such forms as prison memoirs, testimonials, ethnographic writings, biomythography, cultural autobiography, and regulative psychobiography are means of combining an author-centred approach to autobiographical writing with a critical one – the “out-law” genres of autobiography are means of producing “a discourse of situation; a ‘politics of location’”.4 In a similar vein, Gillian Whitlock’s study of colonial and postcolonial women’s autobiographies suggests that they are also means of resisting fixed identities: Autobiographic writing can suggest the multiplicity of histories, the ground “in between” where differences complicate, both across and within individual subjects. To read for processes of multiple identification, for the making and unravelling of identities in autobiographical writing, for what Suleri calls “intimacies”, is an important gesture to decolonization.5 The culinary memoir has a similar politicized function. Rather than producing merely individualist narratives of foods devoured and cooked, these texts are cultural and communal as they insert the narrating and reflecting “I” into 3 Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects”, in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, eds Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, 118–19. 4 Ibid., 119. 5 Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography, London: Cassell, 2000, 5.

96

chapter 6

a cultural and historical location, a location which in the case of migrant and postcolonial authors is particularly politicized and marked by difference. To use the words of Sidonie Smith, the narrating “I” is “a means to interrogate, from within and without, history, memory, culture, and power”.6 The notion of memory plays a particularly strong role in this context. In Smith’s view, narrativized memories have three characteristics: memories are shared with others; they are attached to places and material objects; and they are embodied and thus linked to subjects who use them to construct their identities.7 The culinary memoir is thus a part of identity-construction. It is linked to both private and public settings, to ideas of home and childhood, and also to the ways in which they affect the formation of the subject – and even more so that of a subject crossing from one culture to other, occasionally forced to dwell between the two worlds. What the subject remembers and narrates is then occasionally limited and/or triggered by such conditions. Smith calls such unfolding of past secrets “the embodied politics of remembering”, which she sees as a part of what Ian Hacking has called “memoro-politics”.8 As the memories are selected, sometimes because of individual and cultural traumas, narrativized memories of autobiographical discourse make such secrets available to wider audiences. With particular reference to the interests of postcolonial life writing, Smith suggests the following: We might then speak of the de/colonization of memory as an effect of memory-politics. For the de/colonizing subject is a subject of an overwriting and overdetermining official history (artificial memory). The politics of the secret is the politics of the psychic trauma of de/colonization, of the disavowal of difference. The secret is the secret of the virtual subjection of the post/colonial subject as the embodiment of the past of colonialism.9 In other words, postcolonial life writing is located in the contexts of cultural interchange and de/colonization, unravelling cultural and communal traumas and pasts. It is in this respect that the role of food is important as it links 6 Sidonie Smith, “Memory, Narrative, and the Discourses of Identity in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven”, in Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa, eds Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 40. 7 Ibid., 42–43. 8 Ibid., 44. 9 Ibid., 44.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

97

the migrants with their past and tradition. Historically, ethnic foodways have been part of the “culinary conservatism” of immigrant groups as they have, among other things, maintained cultural traditions, supported religious belief, and been markers of social status.10 To use the words of Hasia R. Diner, for immigrants “food embodied where they had come from and what they had achieved”.11 The importance of food and the meanings attached to it can be seen in the writings of present-day descendants of migrants, women in particular, as the culinary is affected by issues of class, ethnicity, and memory. In her article on the role of food in Italian American women’s autobiographical texts, Alison D. Goeller emphasizes that their descriptions of food, cooking and eating underline important questions “of longing and desire, of self-identity” and that they may become “symbols for the hungry self longing to feed and nourish its soul”.12 For instance, Goeller’s analysis of the role of polenta, Italian corn porridge, in the autobiographical writings of Denise Calvetti Michaels shows how the dish, often associated with working-class eating habits, is linked intricately with family history.13 Lacking the ingredients needed for good polenta, the poor family emigrates to the United States, where the dish becomes a part of the Thanksgiving dinner: as all members of the family participate in ­preparing the dish, their shared past is enacted and family memories evoked: “Making polenta thus becomes a sacred ritual, a family activity that binds them together, a kind of text by which they can tell family stories”.14 In the following readings I will address the culinary memoir as a means of narrativizing memory in the context of the culinary, attaching itself and ascribing meaning to meals and their preparation, dishes and their histories, and eaters, their communities, and social relations. In narrating food memories, culinary autobiographies reveal a wide range of cultural issues ranging from tradition and purity to mobility and mixing.

10

Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, London: Harvard University Press, 1998, 45–51. 11 Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001, 21. 12 Alison D. Goeller, “The Hungry Self: The Politics of Food in Italian American Women’s Autobiography”, in Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing, ed. Rosalia Baena, London: Routledge, 2007, 21. 13 See ibid., 18–30. 14 Ibid., 21.

98

chapter 6

Home and Memory in Madhur Jaffrey

Jaffrey’s memoir focuses on its author’s childhood in India up to her graduation from college in Delhi and subsequent life abroad. With glimpses into the life of an anglicized Indian family, the book appears to be a quite traditional narrative of its author’s early life and education in colonial India in the 1930s and 1940s. What makes it particularly interesting as a culinary autobiography is, however, the way in which it narrativizes memories and descriptions of family meals and food traditions in a socio-cultural context of change. As is to be expected from a widely known author of Indian cookbooks and host of television shows, the book also contains a series of recipes labelled in the book as “Family Recipes”,15 which makes it a hybrid narrative consisting of memories of a childhood replete with family meals, events, and rituals, in addition to providing instructions for the reader interested in re-creating tastes from the author’s past. For instance, in the narrator’s description of the family’s habit of eating nuts at pre-dinner drinks, the tastes of the past are intertwined with memories of her mother: The shells could be tossed into the fireplace, which was fun, but the peeling was sometimes harder. Chilghozas (pine nuts) demanded the most time and concentrations and I liked them the best, especially the raw, untoasted ones with their soft white flesh and green inner core. My preference then ran to walnuts, especially the kaghzi akhrote or “paper-shell” variety. These could be crushed between two hands without help from a nutcracker. As I picked out flesh from the mess of crushed shell, my mother would remind me, “Always eat walnuts with raisins or you will get…” “I know, I know,” I would answer, “a sore throat.” There would be peanuts too, freshly roasted in karhais (woks) filled with sand, and pistachios from Iran, the best in the world.16 Indeed, the focus of Climbing the Mango Trees is on its narrator’s memories of her (extended) family and its food traditions. As the narrator looks back onto her childhood from a contemporary position, the narrative is necessarily ­nostalgic, though not entirely so, as the family rifts and disputes are not ­forgotten – the book pays particular attention to the manipulative character of the narrator’s uncle Shibbudada seeking to dominate the household(s).17 15 Jaffrey, 233–97. 16 Ibid., 86. 17 See ibid., 138.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

99

Gillian Whitlock has suggested that postcolonial autobiographical writing is based on a tension between utopian and dystopian elements: aspects of longing are inseparable from the presence of estrangement.18 Whitlock also argues that this tension is “tension between history and myth, between colonized spaces and sweet places”.19 In the case of Jaffrey’s text, the notion of a sweet place plays a particularly emphasized role, not only in the narrator’s name as Madhur means “sweet as honey”,20 but also in the way in which her childhood becomes the site of an emergent palatine consciousness. “My sweet tooth stayed firmly in control until the age of four when, emulating the passions of grown-ups, I began to explore the hot and the sour”.21 The tastes experienced in the childhood are narrated with extreme precision in memories in which friends, meals, and tastes are all present: A second, even more orthodox Jain girl from Rajasthan, also named Sudha, brought such boiled potatoes and some mixed spices in a newspaper packet, lifted some spice mixture with the tips of her fingers and sprinkled it over the potatoes. I was never able to work out what the magical mixture was. I have not been able to re-create it, perhaps because it has attained mythical proportions in my head. Her potatoes were divine.22 The sweetness of this colonial childhood is repeatedly mentioned in references to tasty foods provided at home and by vendors, ripening fruits and desserts, and various forms of candy. The narrator’s interest in food makes her observe the eating habits of others at school, showing how cultural mixing contributes to the diet of school children: One Anglo-Indian girl with this brown hair who sat at the bench next to me always startled me with unusual combinations. I remember looking over once and seeing the following on her plate: at nine o’clock there were cornflakes; at twelve o’clock there was plain rice; at three o’clock there was cooked masoor dal flowing slightly into the rice; and at six o’clock there was an English sausage. She ate all this with a fork and spoon.23

18 19 20 21 22 23

Whitlock, 179. Ibid., 182. Jaffrey, xi. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 45.

100

chapter 6

Similar hybridization of the culinary dominates the narrator’s home, where the key components of an English breakfast form her father’s first daily meal (“My father had tea, two white eggs and toast for breakfast, day after day”24), and whose vegetarian grandmother’s great culinary invention is referred to as “the East-West dish, spicy cauliflower gratinéed with cheese”.25 Moreover, it is customary to mix dishes from different cultural traditions in the household: “Dinners were a mixture of what we called ‘English’ food and Indian food”.26 In such a sweet childhood space, the colonial history of India, metonymically present in the narrative as a list of buildings erected by various colonizers in Delhi, remains secondary to the children’s healthy appetite. By rendering the struggle for power invisible and unobservable to the children gazing at the city, the text presents the naivety of a colonial child: From the top of the tower we children could proprietorially survey all the Delhis below us. This was our city. There was the thirteenth-century Delhi of the Khilji dynasty, the fourteenth-century fort of the Tughlak dynasty, the fifteen-century tombs of the Lodhi dynasty, the sixteen-century tomb of the Moghul emperor Humayun, Shah Jahan’s seventeenth-­century mosque and the British India with its elegant avenues and circular shopping centre, Connaught Place. Soon our eyes, impelled by our stomach, would settle on something close – a brightly edged cotton duree over which hovered some familiar short ladies. We would think of the meatballs cooked with cumin, coriander and yoghurt and come thundering down the hundreds of steps.27 Yet, as I will show, the dialectic between childhood and adulthood reveals the dystopian character of this colonial autobiography. The maturation process is narrated in parallel with family illnesses, including a grandfather’s death and a sister’s serious leg problem, and with descriptions of social and political change, including the Second World War and the Partition of India, in addition to the despised behaviour of uncle Shibbudada and his wife, whose children get more meat than the other children. This national trauma, unknown to the children observing their own city in the passage above, enters the text through the atmosphere of general violence and the presence of refugees in post-Partition Delhi. Jaffrey describes its effects 24 25 26 27

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 92.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

101

through transformations in the culinary culture of India. As the Punjabis settle in Delhi, they change its economic structure but also its hitherto mainly Hindu culinary traditions. “There was a major change, a revolution really, in the city’s food. Before independence, most upperclass and middle-class families ate at home”.28 While eating out was considered to risk cleanliness and bazaar foods were thus a rare treat,29 the emergence of tandoori ovens and restaurants adds to the city’s social life. These eating places with their “food with a new attitude” show that “very simplicity and freshness was modern and enticing”.30 The restaurant culture of the city is a modernized and hybridized one, as seen in the narrator’s words: Punjabi entrepreneurs noted Moti Mahal’s success and felt they could do better by serving tandoori food on starched table-cloths. They would add Moghul delicacies, even Western hors d’oeuvres of baked beans and sardines to the menu and have a fancy bar that served all manner of alcoholic drinks, including hard cider. They would also offer the occasional weekend dinner dance. Gaylord in New Delhi was one such place. It too was very successful. The new independent Delhi was in an extroverted, celebratory mood, and restaurants became the place to express this new freedom.31 The idea of a new freedom parallels the liberation of the text’s protagonist seeking a different life. Not only is it indicated in the narrative in her preference for “work that felt like play”32 but it is also present in her adolescent experiences with the gradually developing media of radio broadcasting and her later career in cinema. As these harbingers of modernity show, this new and different world is not merely marked by geography but also narrated as a form of natural development: I was happy enough in my last years at school, but something deep inside me knew that the life I was living wasn’t my real life. I was convinced that I belonged in another world. I had no idea what that world might be. I just knew I hadn’t found it yet. One day it would happen. I would step

28 Ibid., 177. 29 See ibid., 178–80. 30 Ibid., 181. 31 Ibid., 182. 32 Ibid., 209.

102

chapter 6

out of one life and into another one, the one I was meant to be in. I was oddly calm and optimistic about it.33 As the passage shows, the traditional life of a member of a soon-to-be-extinct section of colonial Indian culture is pitted against the forces of modernity and globalization. This juxtaposition between the old and the new is present at different levels in the narrative, ranging from the cultural to the culinary. The old is associated with the traditions of the British Empire: the main function of the Anglo-Indian tradition is to frame the family living in Number 7: “Above them [chairs] on the wall, attempting to give the room some cohesion, was a tinted, rather nicely framed photograph of my grandfather, looking quite Edwardian – Raj Narain, Barrister-at-law”.34 Its quaint elements of colonial British lifestyle, with its foods, whiskeys, and Club Sodas, are confronted with the globalizing forces of America and its produce. Items emphasizing the increasing economic­and political role of the United States are the post-war packages of military foods. The memoir equates these tins with “Christmas presents” and reveals how they offer the narrator moments of new sensual experiences: All I remember is that my cousins and I tore them open as if they were Christmas presents, pulling out each carefully fitted tin or package with the greatest glee. Thus I was introduced to my first olive, my first fruit cocktail and first taste of Spam. I rolled mouthfuls slowly around my tongue and pronounced each of them to be exotic and wonderful. I had never eaten tinned fruit or meat before.35 In so doing, the narrator is fully inserted into Western modernity. While she has formerly been restricted to a mimicry of Western life, both at home and at school where she performs the role of Titania in a version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,36 the moment when she is named as a “student leader” who is to receive an American gift, “dozens of crates” of Coca-Cola, signifies this transition. The gift starts a new era in her life as it leads to promotional parties where Madhur performs cool Coke-drinking in the manner of girls of the cover pages of Western magazines: “I took to swigging it from the bottle. I was yet to see the rest of the world but, armed with a pair of pedal

33 34 35 36

Ibid., 206. Ibid., 81–82. Ibid., 183–82. Ibid., 149–50.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

103

pushers, the charm bracelet and, of course, the Coke, I felt that this phase of my life had to be just around the corner”.37 In the book’s “Epilogue”, the immature idolization of the modern and the global is, however, balanced by the reflective words of the narrator. She evaluates her position and thinks about the role of food in her later life: it is when studying at a drama school in London that she feels the need to get cooking lessons and recipes from her mother by post. These make it possible for “old and new words … to mingle as soon as they touched, and that so much of my [her] past would always remain my [her] present”.38 Showing the extent to which the culinary becomes a part of the narrator’s identity, the closing words of the memoir translate the narrator’s maturation into a language of taste. They show a transition from a sweet childhood to the sourness and bitterness of adult life, underlining the role of the culinary in creating this subjectivity: The innocent Indian honey of my infancy was now mixed with pungent Indian spices, the sour and bitter, the nutty and the aromatic. Interwoven with these flavours, like tenacious creepers, were births, deaths, illnesses, caste and creed. Yet somewhere in my depths, each bite, each taste of all I had eaten lay catalogued in some pristine file, ready to be drawn up when the moment was ripe.39

Diana Abu-Jaber, Food, and Trans-Memory

As Jaffrey’s work focuses on its narrator’s childhood rather than on her experiences in a different culture, its politics of memory locate the emerging self in colonial history and recast a first-generation migrant woman’s attempt to liberate herself from colonial culture as an attempt to ally with modernity. Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava focuses on a second-generation immigrant woman with an Arab father and American mother growing up in an Arab American community in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Its narrator hears the community’s voices, stories, and memories, which she then seeks to make sense of by travelling and living in Jordan as an adult to negotiate her own bi-cultural identity. Its treatment of memory emphasizes different issues than those explored in Climbing the Mango Trees. As the author puts it in the foreword, 37 38 39

Ibid., 226. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 231.

104

chapter 6

My childhood was made up of stories – the memories and recollections of my father’s history and the storybook myths and legends that my mother brought me to read. The stories were often in some way about food, and the food always turned out to be about something much larger: grace, difference, faith, love.40 While both texts delve into the world of food, The Language of Baklava is much more of a narrative of in-betweenness than Climbing the Mango Trees. In Abu-Jaber’s text, food and attitudes towards it are further markers that set the memoir’s narrator apart from mainstream Americans from early childhood onwards – here food functions as a marker of exclusion and inclusion, as suggested in Glenn Deer’s analysis of the food topos in bi-racial North-American memoirs: “Cooking and eating are ways of constructing social identity and community solidarity”.41 The following passage shows the down-to-earth relationship of Bud, the narrator’s father, with meat and contrasts their attitude with the sentimentalized and pretentious view of mainstream Americans: I love to be in the kitchen and watch my strong father at work in his undershirt, baggy shorts, and sandals. He’s singing along with the radio and not getting a single word right. But what he lacks in accuracy he makes up for in gusto and verve. He slides a whole side of lamb out of the refrigerator, hoists it up for me and my friend Merilee to admire, and says, “Here he is! Here’s Marvin.” Bud likes to name all big cuts of meat – usually Tom, Dick, Harry, or Marvin. I stand close behind him, four feet high in flipflops, bony shoulders poking through the crossed straps of my sundress, plastic heart-shaped sunglasses propped on my head, and watch as he centers the meat on his chopping block and whomps his cleaver down. My friend Merilee, with her freckles and straw yellow ponytails, shrieks and clatters out the back door. I happily tote the bloody kabobs from the block to the marinade of garlic, rosemary, vinegar, and olive oil. Bud tells me that someday I will make a fantastic butcher.42

40 41

42

Abu-Jaber, xi. Glenn Deer, “Eating the Eurasian Text: Food, Sex, and the Audience in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God, and Juzo Itami’s Tampopo”, in Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, eds William Boelhower, Rocío G. Davis, and Carmen Birkle, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2004, 290. Abu-Jaber, 5–6; emphasis original.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

105

As the passage shows, the construction of the narrator’s ethnicity is framed in narratives of memory and food, emphasizing the difference from their neighbours, mainstream Americans. As the narrator remarks, these preparations for kabobs signify community: “Shish kabob means that there will coolers and ice chests, blankets and salads, pita bread, iced tea, salty braided cheese, hummus” and that “[t]here will also be sisters and cousins and aunties and uncles and even more cousins, because there’s no telling who’s just ‘comeover,’ meaning come over from the old country”.43 This attitude to food and eating sets the family apart from mainstream Americans: the neighbours are astonished to see a family barbecue in the front yard and it appears as a sign of the troubles created by the immigrants. In their view this demands that a neighbourhood watch party be sent to control them: “We are lost in the food, in the smell of grilling, and in the spring when there is a powdery sort of sensation sprinkling down the back of my neck and suddenly I realize a man and a woman are standing at the edge of the street, just a few feet away, staring at us”.44 “[R]eal Americans” such as the narrator’s friend Sally Holmes and her parents lack an interest in food and celebrate with stuff from ready-made packages. These foods are described as “plastic” and “gummy”: Mrs Holmes comes out of the kitchen with a silver tray of instant chocolate pudding in single-serving aluminium tubs and says, “Cocktail hour, ladies!” It tastes like burnt plastic, but I study the way Sally and Mrs. Holmes scrape their tubs and lick the spoons. Later she pours us crystal cups of gummy eggnog from a carton. I jiggle my glass, fascinated with the way its surface quivers in place. This is American food, I tell myself. I don’t like it, I think, because I’ve somehow forgotten it. I must remember.45 What is lacking is a culture of food: American girls are always dieting, whereas the daughters of immigrant families happily enjoy their eating.46 Like the Arab Americans of Abu-Jaber’s community, the other migrant groups of the memoir, such as Italians and Russians, associate food with community and cultural memory. The American attitude is captured in the exchange between the Southern Belle Courtney and Jewish Elise, both fellow college students, during the college’s Jewish Foods Day: 43 44 45 46

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 161.

106

chapter 6

“I’m just saying, I don’t see the point of getting all high and mighty about food anyway,” she says, her voice singed with hurt. “I mean, since when is food religious? It’s not like it can make you hear angels or something.” Elise and I are both looking at her. Elise takes a big bite of falafel and says, “I feel sorry for you.”47 Food, and memories of food, are inseparable from other memories of the narrator’s childhood. They construct her ethnic identity and also link her and her father with the old country. The nostalgic role often ascribed to ethnic food is particularly clear in a passage where the narrator talks about her father’s homesickness, which he eases with a particular meal: Bud misses the old country so much, it’s like an ache in his blood. On his days off, he cooks and croons in Arabic to the frying liver and onions songs about missing the one you love. I ask him whom he misses, and he ponders this and says, “I don’t know, I just do.” Then he gazes fondly at the frying liver as it is singing sweetly back to him. But I don’t understand it. I was born into this snowy Syracuse world. I have no inkling of what other worlds are like.48 What this shows is that the father’s memories of food are not the same as those of the daughter, which reveals the extent to which the first and second generation immigrants differ from each other. The text’s construction of memory appears to resonate with the notion of trans-memory coined by Agnieszka Bedingfield on the basis of Marianne Hirsch’s term “postmemory”, a concept originally describing the experiences of those growing up under narratives of trauma that they themselves have no access to, this is, the children of Holocaust survivors.49 What Bedingfield’s application of the term makes possible is a focus on the present rather than the past: trans-memory involves a cultural as well as a linguistic adjustment – translation into a language of “the present,” of the North American “now.” Blending of the codifying systems of the home/parents (the old country) and the “outside” (the new country) is an element in the process of 47 48 49

Ibid., 221. Ibid., 20. Agnieszka Bedingfield, “Trans-Memory and Diaspora: Memories of Europe and Asia in American Immigrant Narratives”, in Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, eds William Boelhower, Rocío G. Davis, and Carmen Birkle, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2004, 334.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

107

progressive substitution of the parental language by the language of the new continent.50 In her article Bedingfield shows that the notion of trans-memory operates at three levels, including (i) linguistic challenges, especially untranslatability, (ii) trans-generational dilemmas expressed in parents’ “fears and inhibitions”, and (iii) the idea of the return to the old country.51 What I will show in the following is that in The Language of Baklava food is present at all the three levels outlined by Bedingfield. First, linguistic challenges are present in the memoir as linguistic challenges and adjustments. These range from the father’s inability to learn “correct” English to the daughter’s learning of Arabic in Jordan, where they move for a brief period of time in the narrator’s childhood. “She counsels me that as soon as anyone says anything I don’t understand, I should just keep responding with aish. Aish means ‘what,’ and this advice quickly gives me a reputation for being a hard-of-hearing, rather crotchety eight-year-old”.52 In reflecting onto the construction of her Arab identity as a child in Jordan, the narrator talks explicitly about her sense of being in-between languages and cultures, in a space where languages mix with each other and gestures evoke memories of life in America. The passage below weaves identity into food, translating the American pancakes into oiled bread, and the American Diana into the Jordanian Dee-ahna. In other words, identity is inseparable from memories of taste: Sometimes I lose track of what language I’m in and gibber between the two of them, substituting English words for Arabic and vice versa. My favourite breakfast is no longer pancakes, but bread doused with oil and zataar. Just once in a while, something reminds me of my former life: a woman who laughs like my grandmother or a Jordanian cousin who smokes his cigarette the way an American cousin does. When these reminders occur, I stop and think: Am I still an American? And it confuses me, because it seems like a kind of unbecoming or rebecoming – to turn into this other Diana – pronounced Dee-ahna, a Jordanian girl who has forgotten the taste of fluffernutter sandwiches or Hershley’s bars.53

50 51 52 53

Ibid., 334. Ibid., 335–39, 339–42, and 342–45. Abu-Jaber, 53. Ibid., 58.

108

chapter 6

Upon the family’s return to the United States, the narrator listens to her father and his friends and reflects on her linguistic identity. She understands that it consists of different layers and deems that they are both necessary for her as they provide access to different worlds: Their voices press together and climb, and the argument starts. What is it about? I only half understand. Even though it’s just been a year or two since we’ve returned to America, it’s already too long away from Arabic. English is clear as a glass mirror, and Arabic is the silver inside the glass – hidden and essential. The languages show me different things. I hear words I know by heart – war, soldiers, the English, the Israelis, and more, words like mishakkel: problems, craziness, turmoil. The voices grow louder, they leap into flames.54 While the resulting identity is a composite with both American and Arab elements, the text also evokes the problem of untranslatability by showing how the language of the old county is carried into the language of the new country. This is particularly strikingly expressed in talking about the foods by using their original names, which is not a mere strategy of exoticizing them for a mainstream American audience. This can be seen in such passages as “I mope, barely speaking, for a solid week, appetiteless, rejecting Bud’s lunches of stuffed squash, shawerma, kibbeh”,55 and “it’s magloubeh – a dish of rice, meat, and vegetable”.56 While the use of such concepts creates a gap between the text and the reader, adding to the text cultural distinctiveness typical of postcolonial writing as suggested by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin,57 Abu-Jaber’s memoir seeks to bridge this gap with explanations given to the reader in connection with recipes.58 While the cultural gap can be bridged, few mainstream Americans do so in the narrator’s childhood. The somewhat ironic case in point is Jay Franklin, one of Diana’s high school mates, who visits the house as a part of a group of arts-minded students. Coming from a liberal family and having spent some time in the Middle East, he addresses Bud with:

54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 124. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 1989, 62–64. See Abu-Jaber, 58–59 and 120.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

109

“Diana told us you make your own hummus.” Even the wind hum in the trees stops. He pronounces it the way you pronounce the stuff you put in potting soil. But the fact that in Syracuse, in 1976, Jay Franklin knows what hummus is at all is like a little star falling down into our backyard.59 This is ironic because Bud accepts Jay, prepares a meal with him, and drinks and socializes with him to the extent that Diana says to herself: “Bud has stolen my boyfriend”.60 The notion of trans-memory involves “the fears and inhibitions imparted by the immigrant parents to their children”.61 In the case of Abu-Jaber’s memoir, such parental views include the Arab father’s dislike of American values and morals – especially boyfriends are bad and forbidden. These fears culminate in Bud’s nightmarish vision of his children transforming into Americans: by this point, we have lived in Syracuse for several fears, consuming American culture, tv, music, and especially its lavish, oily fast foods – fried fish burgers, fried chicken, and quart-size ice-milk Fribbles from Friendly’s restaurant. Bud is fed up with decadent American culture, tedious, anonymous jobs, and most especially with seeing his children grow into stranger-Americans right before his eyes – dressing like them, talking like them, acting like them!62 The trans-generational conflict becomes evident in Diana’s attempt to escape the demands of the family by skipping her senior high-school year in order to be able to start college a year in advance. Her first year at suny Oswego, in upstate New York, is a part of a narrative of nausea. Each time she returns home she suffers from attacks of pain and vomiting – and always after one of Bud’s special meals with “roasted chicken, shish kabobs, grape leaves”.63 While she initially associates her nausea with father’s inquisitiveness and disapproval of her career in English literature, an early morning incident reveals that feelings of ill-being are more general and linked to issues of identity and belonging: I sense the distances between places, the country house and the suburbs, even between America and Jordan, start to disintegrate. Geography turns 59 60 61 62 63

Ibid., 208. Ibid., 209. Bedingfield, 339. Abu-Jaber, 134. Ibid., 217.

110

chapter 6

liquid. There is something in us connecting every person to every other person.64 As the boundaries between people and nations become permeable, and identity is defined as relational rather than fixed, Diana regains the control of her body, and also her appetite: But I see what I want tucked in back in a plain white soup bowl – yogurt lebeneh. It is the simplest dish in the world: yogurt that has been drained and thickened so it’s mild and rich as cream. … Tonight, this is the purest food in the world. Mother’s milk. It is the sort of food that can’t be replaced by anything else.65 The father’s displacement is constantly present in his desire to return, which is the third element in the notion of trans-memory. The return, as hinted at in the above comments on trans-generational conflict, reveals the father’s disappointment with the immigration experience of the people of his generation. The uncles have all returned home: “Some of them lived in the States long enough to have three careers and raise their children to adulthood, but one by one the brothers all were eventually called back, as if drawn by the very essence of blood”.66 Yet this pull of the past can be made bearable by means of cookery: food and shared meals reconstruct the memory of the past in the present and create a communal experience. While the return is a dream, it is also possible to achieve a sense of home through the culinary: My father and his brothers fly back and forth, whisking over the oceans and continents. They live their lives in the air, in the ether of in-between, the borderlands. Whenever they see one another, they cook, they scoop the warm rice up in the curve of their palms, bring it to their fingertips, and sometimes they feed one another, hand to mouth, in this greatest of intimacies.67 In the memoir Bud returns to Jordan repeatedly, with the family and without it, seeking business opportunities and communion with the family – although the relationships between the brothers appear to be less than ideal. Yet the 64 65 66 67

Ibid., 229. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 326.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

111

return to the ancestral land offers a sense of community that is lacking in the United States: It’s crowded, but the uncles are happy here at their brother’s house. It’s like a snow day for them. Here, they can gossip with abandon, smoke cigarettes, and eat everything that their wives don’t let them eat – ­pastries, candied chickpeas, Turkish delight, sweetened milk with rosewater, ice cream.68 To supplement Bud’s cherishing of the myth of home, the memoir contains a section telling of Diana’s year as a Fulbright scholar in Jordan. This grant enables her to revisit the land of her childhood as an adult, renegotiate her own sense of displacement, and do research for a novel in which “characters undergo … ambitious self-excavation, recovery, and reconciliation as they move between countries …. it is meant to draw together my own deep cultural ambivalences – to try to look right at the conundrum of being Arab-American. Arab and American”.69 The final paragraphs of the memoir reveal how its narrator defines herself as “a hopeless case” who has two bodies and selves, one living in the tradition and the hometown, one “in the distances between stars”.70 This notion of constant mobility, of nomadism and being “a reluctant Bedouin”,71 is a characteristic of contemporary diasporic identity that is linked to both the land of the origin and the space claimed as one’s own.72 The critique of fixed origins and ready-made, gendered models of identity is explicitly present in the narrator’s refusal of life with “babies … in a hometown in a house with an easy, wide-hipped porch”.73 Yet the desire to belong, and the power of cultural tradition and memory, is open to the second self too, but without the need to perform ethnicity according to a pre-meditated script. Rather, as is possible in diasporic identity, the two aspects need not be fighting with each other: “Come back, I want to say to my second self, there is tea and mint there, there is sugar, there is dark bread and oil”.74 To quote the final words of the memoir, which tell

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Ibid., 274. Ibid., 235; emphasis original. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 327. On the figure of the wandering Bedouin in Abu-Jaber’s other work, see Nyman, Home, 191–94. See Brah, 192–93. Abu-Jaber, 326. Ibid., 327; emphasis original.

112

chapter 6

of the acceptance of diasporic identity where home and the world are not in conflict: Why must there be only one home! Surely there is no one as bad, as heartbroken, as hopeless at saying good-bye as I am. The fruits and vegetables, the dishes and music and the light and the trees of all these places have grown into me, drawing me away. And so I go. Into the world, away.75 Conclusion The two memoirs discussed in this chapter open up different ways of constructing identity through memory and the culinary. While Jaffrey’s narrative emphasizes more the role of roots and tradition in the making of an immigrant, Abu-Jaber’s text shows that migrant identity is constantly in flux and the migrant needs to translate herself should she wish to survive in the new and often strange environment and its various cultural, social, and linguistic codes. Owing to its limited focus on its narrator’s childhood in late colonial India, Climbing the Mango Trees represents its lost culture and community in a particular way. While indicating the increasing presence of the global and the political, the memoir’s main function is to tell nostalgic family memories. In contrast of Jaffrey’s narrative, The Language of Baklava shows that the functions of food are both to unify and to separate: while it holds together the members of the migrant family, it separates them from the values and eating habits of mainstream Americans. As seen in the narrator’s way of coping with her eating disorders, the acceptance of multicultural identity as both Arab and American is empowering to her. Both narratives attach memories to food and eating in order to emphasize the cultural specificity of the migrant. In so doing, they reveal the power that memory, home, and the culinary have in the making of a migrant subjectivity, and show different ways of relating to the past. Whereas Jaffrey showcases a harmonious past and allows it only rarely to be pervaded by more sinister forces, Abu-Jaber’s narrative shows both the first-generation immigrants’ pain and unbelonging and their children’s vacillation between the soothing culture of the parent and the assimilating demands of mainstream American culture. Read in this way, the construction of migrant identity is embedded in the forces of globalization that structure this process and regulate it. While Jaffrey enters Western modernity as a willing Coca-Cola consumer, Abu-Jaber’s 75

Ibid., 328.

Home, Memory, and Identity in Culinary Memoirs

113

­identification remains more complex and ambiguous, wishing to find American chocolate bars in Jordan and Arab foods in America. In other words, the narrator of The Language of Baklava resists an either/or choice between Western and non-Western identity and prefers a position allowing access to both of her cultures. Locating its narrator in both traditions, this memoir chooses to emphasize the role of cultural hybridity but by showing the difficulties involved in creating such an identity it refuses to romanticize or exoticize it.

chapter 7

Migration and Melancholia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way In contrast to the opportunities provided by memories of food for the construction of migrant identity, many narratives of migrant pasts address issues of alienation and pain. This is the case in many of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels of migration that foreground a sense of displacement stemming from by colonial pasts and forced migration. His exilic protagonists living in the West tend to remain haunted by what they have left behind in the old country. As Gurnah has put it in an interview, his interest is in the “dynamic condition of being migrant” that he sees as an experience characterizing today’s world, and this condition has what he calls “a tragic character”.1 This is evident in many protagonists of his novels. Suffering from guilt and estrangement, they are often unable to communicate with their families and prefer silence to contact, and solitude to community. In this chapter I approach Gurnah’s writing in the context of postcolonial theorizations of melancholia. As theorists such as David Eng and David Kazanjian, Anne Cheng, and Sara Clarke Kaplan suggest,2 melancholia is not merely a private psychological affliction but it has cultural and historical dimensions often generated by (post)colonial histories. In this sense it is a collective structure of feeling, a term defined by Raymond Williams “as the way in which meanings and values … are actively lived and felt” in our everyday settings.3 Following Williams, melancholia can be seen as a socially generated way of responding to a traumatic issue: while observable at the level of the individual, it is social and “has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics”.4 In Pilgrims Way (1988), Gurnah’s second novel, melancholia stems from the traumatizing cultural memories generated by the experiences of colonialism, 1 Claire Chambers, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 119. 2 See David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, afterword by Judith Butler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003; Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; and Sara Kaplan, 511–26. 3 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 132. 4 Ibid., 133.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_010

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way

115

race, and migration.5 Pilgrims Way has received little attention in criticism, and its most significant readings focus on its use of the pastoral6 and its political commitment to the black community as a means of overcoming racism.7 My perspective is markedly different: I contend that the novel’s melancholic subject seeking to come to terms with and rearticulating the past in the context of migration is involved in the process of “produc[ing] meaning out of lost histories and histories of loss”.8 Melancholia, in other words, is a way of addressing traumas generated by the experience of migration and colonialism. Pilgrims Way is a story of the hospital orderly, Daud, and his life in an unnamed town that is evidently Canterbury, England in the 1970s. Daud, a migrant haunted by the loss of his family and traumatized by his experiences of violence and racism in Britain, lives a melancholic and marginal life in Britain. This changes, however, when he becomes involved with the nurse Catherine, who helps the protagonist to counter his past and work through his traumatic and troubling losses. I argue that Gurnah’s novel addresses racial and postcolonial melancholia, which is manifested in the novel at the level of the dislocated and melancholic individual subject haunted by his past. I first discuss the representation of melancholia in the novel and then address Daud’s attempts to negotiate his position as seen in the creation of alternative colonial pasts for the people whom he encounters and his act of writing (imaginary) letters to various real and fictional characters. The melancholia of the novel is a cultural response to historical traumas generated by the legacy of colonialism in East Africa, traumas that are relived through its main character’s migration to and experience of racism in Britain.

Approaching Melancholia: From Freud to Postcolonial Readings

The notion of melancholia has been important in cultural criticism for a long time, and its contemporary implications derive fundamentally from the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud 5 Abdulrazak Gurnah, Pilgrims Way, London: Jonathan Cape, 1988. 6 Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira, “Between Diasporic Identity and Agency: Versions of the Pastoral in Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way and Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker”, in Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore, eds Jennifer Wawrzinek and J.K.S. Makokha, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011, 235–58. 7 Emad Mirmotahari, “From Black Britain to Black Internationalism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way”, English Studies in Africa, LVI/1 (2013), 17–27. 8 Sara Kaplan, 514.

116

chapter 7

explores ways of responding to loss by presenting two concepts, healthy mourning and pathological melancholia. For Freud, “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on”.9 For Freud, melancholia is pathological and problematizes the survival of the individual.10 Melancholia, unlike mourning, involves a “disturbance of self-regard” generating in the individual such pathological features as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity”,11 leading to self-hatred and a view of oneself “as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable”.12 In their postcolonial reading of Freud, Eng and Kazanjian suggest that melancholia and mourning should be clearly differentiated. While in mourning “the libido is withdrawn from a lost object”, which is a time-consuming and step-by-step process, melancholia is “mourning without end” and stems “from the inability to resolve the grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of the loved object, place, or ideal”.13 Since Freud, the role of the lost object has, however, been described as ambiguous: while mourning is more likely to be linked with the real loss or death of the loved object, melancholia may be a response to a wider range of experiences where one has been “slighted, neglected or disappointed” and which may generate feelings of both “love and hate”.14 When the melancholic immerses in self-torture, s/he gains pleasure from doing so as this is a harmless way of hating the object of one’s love.15 Since this ambivalence peculiar to melancholia is in Freud’s view complex and connected with “the repressed” and “traumatic experiences”,16 theorists point to the usefulness of the term. Eng and Kazanjian, for instance, refer to this ambiguity when they suggest that melancholia may not be entirely pathological.17 They underline that its relationship with the past is “neither fixed nor complete” but it may 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” [1917], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1957, 243. Ibid., 243–44. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 246. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains”, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, afterword by Judith Butler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 3. Freud, 251. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 257. Eng and Kazanjian, 3.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way

117

create “sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future”.18 This means that for Eng and Kazanjian melancholia is not pathological but also productive. As such, it may assist in mourning by revising new narratives and producing different versions of the past that are accessible and explored in cultural texts and practices. In reading postcolonial writing which commonly explores the effects of colonial histories and forced migrations on individuals and groups, several critics have applied the concept of melancholia to address the idea of loss in various racialized and diasporic contexts as a social and cultural phenomenon rather than a mere incident in the psychic history of the individual. With particular reference to the United States, Anne Cheng suggests that racial formation is based on melancholia and forgetting: as racialization has privileged a dominant white identity, African American and migrant communities (so-called “minorities”) have been excluded as racialized others, regardless of the Enlightenment principles of “freedom and liberty” on which the nation was supposedly founded.19 An example of this is Cheng’s reading of the effects of race in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and the black girl’s inability to attain the normative whiteness of the dominant culture. What the girl is to learn is both the assumed superiority of white American culture with its ideals and “the ideal of black womanhood as longing after the white ideal”.20 In their analysis of Asian American students and their narratives of depression, Eng and Han emphasize that assimilation demands that the immigrant complies with the ideals of the dominant culture including “whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class family values”, and “failure to do so establishes one melancholic framework for delineating assimilation and racialization processes … as a series of failed and unresolved integrations”.21 The notion of racialized melancholia is particularly relevant in the contexts of migration and diaspora. This is evident in the analysis by Eng and Han addressing the relationship between Asian American migrants and their problematic assimilation into the United States where they remain unable to attain the dominant national ideal of whiteness.22 Eng and Han also point to the fact that if the first-generation migrants are not successful in resolving the losses 18 19 20 21

22

Ibid., 3–4. Cheng, 10. Ibid., 18. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue of Racial Melancholia”, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, afterword by Judith Butler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 344. Ibid., 345.

118

chapter 7

involved in migration, mourning and melancholia will be re-experienced by the subsequent and successive generations,23 showing that the assimilation process can be defined as a way of negotiating between the two respective positions.24 Successful negotiations, Eng and Han suggest, show that melancholia is depathologized and appears as a productive site of “conflict”, not as mere “damage”, allowing for a communal reconstruction of individual and group identities.25 While Eng and Han address migrants’ melancholia as a clinical problem linked directly with their movement from one culture to another, Sara Kaplan discusses it as a more general, collective, and political issue. In so doing, Sara Kaplan emphasizes the continuous need by racialized and diasporic subjects to address their pasts built upon slavery and colonialism, and suggests that one of the productive uses of melancholia is to confront the histories of loss and their importance for contemporary identity. Kaplan’s definition of melancholia locates it in the context of history and slavery and connects the individual’s losses with a larger body of traumatic memories. For Kaplan, diasporic melancholia is more than an individual’s trauma: it “transform[s] grief into the articulation of grievances that traverse continents and cross time”.26 In other words, Kaplan’s melancholic individual embodies the past of the diaspora and sees herself as a part of the lost collective, one whose losses can be traced to such experiences as the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. This view is clearly linked with that of Paul Gilroy, who suggests that various forms of black ocean crossing mobility, including – but not limited to – slavery, are central to the formation of the black Atlantic experience and worth examining as they enable us to create alternative conceptions of “nationality, location, identity, and historical memory”.27 The notion of melancholia as an unresolved and troubling structure of feeling that guides one’s relationship with the past is suitable for the analysis of the fiction by a writer such as Gurnah, whose novels invariably feature characters who are exiled, displaced, and estranged, lacking contact with their pasts and homes. Such examples include the unnamed narrator in Admiring Silence (1997 [1994]).28 He has left Zanzibar in order to study in Britain, and during the stay of 17 years he has not informed his family of his life in Britain where 23 Ibid., 351–52. 24 Ibid., 363. 25 Ibid., 363. 26 Sara Kaplan, 513. 27 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 16. 28 Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence, London: Penguin, 1997 [1994].

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way

119

he has a long-term white partner and a daughter. Upon return, the silenced past becomes the source of serious problems. Other similar characters are the lonely professor Latif Mahmud in By the Sea (2001), an aloof man who has had no contact with his home since his coming to Europe to study, and Rashid in Desertion (2005) who comes to Britain as student and whose contact with home gradually diminishes.29 What these novels, as well as Pilgrims Way, share as their central concern is an interest in the structures of feeling generated by migration and exile. The following sections show that the traumas of the past follow the unsuccessful migrant in Pilgrims Way and contribute to his melancholia and inability to accept the loss of his loved ones and ideals.

Daud’s Melancholic Condition

Pilgrims Way shows how migration, regardless of its promises, is no end to melancholic losses. Its Zanzibari main character Daud, feeling lonely and disappointed in Britain, fulfils Freud’s definition of the melancholic: to use Freud’s terms, he is characterized by “self-reproaches and self-revilings”, displaying a related fear of punishment.30 These traits are inextricable from his experience in Britain, a country that he first enters as a lonely student and then lives in as a little appreciated hospital orderly. While Daud’s melancholia stems from his loss of home and family, it is also linked with the gradual erosion of his ideals, the failure of his “pilgrimage”, a failure which is described as a process in which his dreams of a better life “had started to seep and ooze and rot”.31 The melancholic tone of the novel is also evident in its ironic title. The word pilgrim has a double meaning, as it refers to both an alien or a foreigner and also to a person travelling to a sacred place. Similarly, Daud’s journey, his way, to Britain, while a pilgrimage to the holy land of Britain, is ironic, as the inwarding-turning nation does not offer him redemption, emphasized in the novel’s setting, the Cathedral City of Canterbury that has served as the goal of many religious travellers since the days of Chaucer. Yet Daud is different from other pilgrims: before the final chapter of the novel he has never entered the Cathedral. The ironic allusion of the title to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is apt: there is no progress for this melancholic migrant but only a long way to follow.

29

Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea, London: Bloomsbury, 2002 [2001]; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion, New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. 30 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 244. 31 Ibid., 231.

120

chapter 7

A closer look at Daud’s melancholia shows further features identified by Freud as typical of the condition. The “disturbance of self-regard”32 is clearly evident in Daud as the novel foregrounds his feelings of disappointment, shame, and despair. These negative features are manifested by his general passivity, lack of interest in his apartment, and his habit of not bothering to wash his clothes. At the beginning of the novel his estrangement has turned into a general condition: He rarely heard from anybody, and he was happy with that. Letters from old friends were always full of an optimism about England that he found embarrassing. They were so far removed from the humiliating truth of his life that they could be taken for mockery.33 The promises of the past have become lost ideals: what has pulled the migrant to the new county has turned out to be false and appears now as “embarrassing” and “mocking”. The loss of ideals and hope, defined by Freud as a part of the melancholic condition,34 is constitutive of Daud’s melancholia and shows how it stems from his disappointment with the promise of Britain. A Zanzibari migrant seeking to escape the violence and insecurity of his home island, Daud has failed to find a safer space. Rather, the xenophobic space of Britain constantly reminds him of his impossibility of being able to fully identify with the dominant – and also racialized – ideal of Britishness – and thus adds to his estrangement. While his colonial upbringing has generated an image of Britain as a site where all hopes and fantasies are fulfilled, the former imperial centre is unable to deliver its promises. Its ideals are not accessible to racialized migrants who have to face the grim realities of the novel’s Britain, its inequality and racism. In the case of Daud, this disappointment and loss of ideals works at two levels: his encounters with racial exclusion and violence in Britain appear to iterate his painful losses experienced in Zanzibar. As Daud reflects on his first year in Britain, the novel emphasizes the extent of the loss and shows how the past traumas extend to the present.35 While the novel contrasts the coldness of Britain with the climate of home and its “warm golden beaches”,36 the African past is not presented in a nostalgic manner but also involves a loss 32 33 34 35 36

Freud, 244. Ibid., 10. See Freud, 243. See Gurnah, Pilgrims, 75. Ibid., 10.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way

121

of friends and community. The migrant’s current loneliness is combined with an embodied sense of fear generated by the potential violence of the British. As this moment “cracks open” the wounds of history, the narrator connects the present with his traumatic memories of violence in Zanzibar. According to the passage below, the space once imagined as a safe refuge, a site of pilgrimage, is not such, but merely a further “gloomy” location of racialized violence: It was a lonely winter. The days were grey and dark… never seen such days. The damp, the chill in the evenings, and nowhere near home. The long evenings muffled to the noise of human laughter. The nights were frightening as men and women grew in size, adding inches in girth and adopting lowering looks at chance encounters. The cold froze the sweat in the anus, running of fear and anxiety. They blasted the cracks open. Gloomy, long winter evenings of painful regret. Gloomy, long winter evenings when the thoughts of friends and home were like torture.37 Since migration is, as Eng and Han suggest, a form of mourning what is lost in the process of leaving home and entering a new world,38 Daud’s experiences posit him as an outcast and an alien. Unable to achieve a new identity – the expected outcome of migration, defined by theorists as “investing in new objects”39 – in the openly racist Britain, Daud becomes an object of racialized melancholia. His high hopes of education, integration, and prosperity, which he had expected to be the positive benefits of his migration, collapse when he fails as a student after two years of study. During the process he has been transformed into a melancholic: once “hardy and resourceful”, he now defines himself as mere “shambles of bitterness and despair”.40 Read in the context of migration, this change evinces further the loss of ideals generated by his experience of migration to the racist surroundings of Britain in the 1970s. The representation of the migrant experience in Pilgrims Way is similar to that presented in several other novels by Gurnah. For instance, By the Sea, as David Farrier suggests, seeks to promote the view that the humanity of each new migrant is to be recognized.41

37 Ibid., 75; emphasis original. 38 Eng and Han, 352. 39 Ibid., 352. 40 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 76. 41 David Farrier, “Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XLIII/3 (2008), 122.

122

chapter 7

Daud’s melancholic condition involves other losses, too, and the loss of home and family plays a particularly strong role. When his father receives the letter informing him on his son’s being expelled from the school, he sends Daud a short note with “only a dozen terse lines” where the son is in effect cut off from his family: “Your mother has not mentioned your name. She has sworn not to until God has shown mercy and shown you the way out of waywardness”.42 When Daud loses these important people, he also loses their community and friendship, as well as the significant places associated with them. The passage addressing his view on the issue foregrounds a sense of ambiguity often seen as characteristic of melancholia. While Daud confesses to missing his family and expresses his desperation, he also blames his parents for their lack of interest and inability to “say one word of kindness”.43 His melancholic condition is also evident in his self-reproachment and passivity. While Daud has had the opportunity of preventing Mr Holton, the head of department, from informing his father of the failure of his studies, he has not chosen to do so, an act revealing that he appears to expect punishment in the manner of a melancholic. Daud’s melancholic self-loathing results from the disappointment caused by his failure as a student and the loss of home and family, but it can also be located in larger cultural contexts. The novel reveals the repression of the violent death of his best friend Bossy during the Zanzibari riots, a traumatic event shadowing Daud’s past and part of his losses.44 The loss of home plays a significant role in the novel and it is emphasized in the fact that Britain is unable to function as a new home for the migrant. Rather, it is a space to be despised because of its coldness and racist mentality, it presents only glimpses of community and warmth: these include occasional assistance at the workplace from other nurses sharing the experience of migration, or evenings in the pub involving a few drinks with friends, usually other migrants. Such moments are, however, fleeting, as any evening in the bar is prone to rupture and outbursts of violence since the African migrant is often thought by other customers to “invade … their gathering and ruin … their pleasure”.45 The fact that Britain cannot be a home to a migrant is emphasized in the representation of Daud’s repulsive apartment of five years referred to as his “slum” because of its rotten floor boards, slimy shower, and dirty and mould-ridden kitchen.46 Upon Catherine’s first visit to his flat, she notices its 42 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 78; emphasis original. 43 Ibid., 78. 44 See ibid., 78. 45 Ibid., 6. 46 Ibid., 67.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way 123

dilapidation and “diseased” chairs,47 and asks in disbelief: “You live here?”48 Since the reconstruction of home is linked with the development of the sense of belonging, as suggested by the theorist Nikos Papastergiadis,49 it is clear that Daud revels in the past, unable to end his mourning and make the space of migration his new home. The novel addresses the physical, embodied aspects Daud’s melancholia, which in Freud’s view are characteristic of the condition.50 This is also the case with Daud, who “weep[s] with loneliness”, “overwhelmed as it was by a relentless internal sobbing”.51 The embodiment of melancholia is developed further, and other bodily responses can be seen in Daud’s behaviour. According to his English acquaintance Lloyd, Daud is too modest and he should learn to cope with and adopt the dominant patterns of behaviour. To use Lloyd’s words, Daud’s adaptation to British codes of conduct, including kinesics, is lacking and an obstacle to his successful assimilation: You let people walk over you too much. Nobody gets anywhere if they can’t be ruthless. … You even walk in the streets with your head lowered.52 Daud’s reported inability to digest English food is a further marker of embodied melancholia. As his “stubborn” body remembers what he has lost, food memories link him with the lost home and community: Sausages gave him diarrhoea, cheese blocked him up for sure. Yoghurt made him nauseous. Breakfast cereals made his stomach bleed and biscuits made him sneeze. This was not the result of a congenitally weak gut, but the insistence of a stubborn one.53 Pilgrims Way constructs Daud as a melancholic character who lives and feels the condition from one day to another. Tortured by traumatic memories and prevented from assimilating into Britain because of his racial difference, he has been unable to attach himself to the new home. The novel foregrounds 47 48 49

Ibid., 112. Ibid., 111. Nikos Papastergiadis, Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity, London: Rivers Oram, 1998, 9. 50 See Freud, 245, 257. 51 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 76. 52 Ibid., 38; emphasis original. 53 Ibid., 86.

124

chapter 7

a central thematic issue characterizing Gurnah’s fiction, the treatment of the migrant. In Tina Steiner’s view Gurnah’s message is that it is “imperative to see others in relation to ourselves, to perceive their right of abode”.54 Pilgrims Way shows how racism adds to Daud’s melancholia and underlines that its causes are both personal and cultural. The following section seeks to contextualize Daud’s melancholia in the discourses of colonialism extending to the Britain of the 1970s and to present his attempt to counter such discourses and work through the historically constructed sense of melancholia.

(En)countering Racial Melancholia in Contemporary Britain

Whereas the previous section mentioned the racism of Britain as a factor complicating Daud’s assimilation, this section expands the discussion and shows how the novel places the racism that the protagonist encounters in the context of colonialism. In so doing the novel emphasizes how colonialist values and stereotypes sustain power in British culture and prevent the migrant from accessing what Cheng refers to as “the heart of the nation”.55 The effects and discourses of racism in modern Britain have been studied widely. In his key work There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), Paul Gilroy analyses the ways in which the black presence in Britain, especially since the famous speeches by the former mp Enoch Powell in the 1968, has been addressed through a discourse of war aiming to end the alleged black invasion of Britain because of the danger it poses for the British way of life.56 In modern Britain, racism operates through the “mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion” in order to define “who may legitimately belong to the national community” and whose place is somewhere else.57 The Britain of the 1970s depicted in Pilgrims Way is a space marked by racism, evident in its response to an interracial couple described as consisting of “stifled sniggers and carelessly suppressed snorts”.58 Such a strategy to represent racism has been found characteristic of Gurnah, as Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen write: “His stories cautiously celebrate alternative social encounters, 54

Tina Steiner, “Writing ‘Wider Worlds’: The Role of Relation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fiction”, Research in African Literatures, XLI/3 (2010), 3; emphasis original. 55 Cheng, 10. 56 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London: Routledge, 1998 [1987]. 57 Gilroy, There, 45. 58 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 222.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way 125

but these are always under threat by exploitative economic relations masked by violent identity politics which defend ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ against the perceived stranger or outsider”.59 The novel’s Britain is a gloomy and closed country where the immigrant encounters overt daily racism in the streets60 and in the pubs,61 especially when accompanied by a white woman, and is likely to be followed by violent-looking men with their threatening dogs.62 In this space racial hatred is constantly present and culminates in violence on several occasions such as the fist-fight between Lloyd and Karta following the former’s continuous racist banter-cum-slander. Another example is the violent attack in the churchyard when Daud is attacked by six men, “the shock-troops of modern European civilisation”, ironically portrayed as representing the failure of the welfare state as they are referred to as “the best that the National Health, Social Security and Child Benefit could produce”.63 What is important in this incident is that for Daud these personal experiences of contemporary racism stem from the historical violence associated with the colonialism of the British Empire, as seen in his habit of constructing military and imperial pasts to the people he meets. Its legacy prevents Daud from entering the nation and is thus at the core of his trauma. The Empire, as seen in the depiction of the old man in the bar in the first chapter of the novel, chooses Daud as the object of its gaze and expects him to “succumb” to its values and practices. Since Daud’s response to the monstrous grin “that won an empire” but hid “bared fangs” is described as “lugubrious”, and his “eyes [as] glassy and blank”,64 he has clearly learnt to perform a pre-defined role in the racialized script to avoid open outbursts of violence. While he thinks of himself as excluded in the manner suggested in Cheng’s analysis of racialized melancholia,65 he does not merely perform in a submissive role or accept the position of the object. Rather, his performance of a scripted role or a stereotype may also be used as an expression of resistance to hegemonic norms. Such examples in Gurnah’s novel include the Chinese waiter who smilingly serves his customers but would refuse to eat the “authentic muck” himself,66 and the Venezuelan barman Ricardo, “a self-invention, another stranger passing 59

Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen, “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah”, English Studies in Africa, LVI/1 (2013), 2. 60 See Gurnah, Pilgrims, 100, 124. 61 Ibid., 6–7. 62 Ibid., 9. 63 Ibid., 226. 64 Ibid., 5. 65 See Cheng, 16–17. 66 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 81.

126

chapter 7

himself off as an-exotic-in-exile, and more grist to the Englishman’s selfesteem”.67 The use of the scripted black stereotype and its potential to critique dominant discourses of race can also be seen in Karta’s comment addressed to the racially condescending Lloyd, for whom Daud is primarily an exotic acquaintance, his black friend: You [Lloyd] carry on and tell your civilised wog [Daud] friend here about how he smells and has big penis and things like that. I think I’ll go mug an old lady or something. I don’t think I can listen to this arsehole any more.68 In Karta’s view, Lloyd’s liberalism and friendship with Daud is a mere pose aiming to underline Lloyd’s alleged liberalism – his insincerity and immaturity is revealed later in the novel as he chooses to conscript into the British Army, apparently as told to do so by his father.69 The importance of the legacy of colonialism and its racial ideologies is at the core of the novel’s discussion of melancholia. For Daud, the values of this “monster” have been guarded by practically by any old man he sees in the town.70 As the cheerful old man in the pub turns out to be a real killer who has participated in colonial wars “in Burma and Abyssinia for King and Country”,71 the spectacled man on his morning walk becomes an imaginary “Corporal” to whom Daud writes an imaginary letter: “I recognized your face from the Tana River campaign, where I saw you chasing the Mullah’s men out of Bajun country”.72 To emphasize the history of Britain as one of imperial violence, present both in the colonial spaces of the past and the racism plaguing the novel’s contemporary Canterbury, Daud weaves many other characters into his imagined versions of history. In so doing he constructs Catherine’s father as “a Colonel in the Coldstream Guards”73 and Sister Kirk, a hospital nurse, “as the plump old Angel of the Battle of Kut”.74 As a result, the novel’s Britishness is entirely embedded in episodes of colonial violence and warfare, and the contemporary racism of Britons such as Catherine’s and Lloyd’s parents is intertwined 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 27; emphasis original. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 228.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way 127

with the historical violence characterizing the formation and maintenance of the British Empire.

Working through Melancholia: Memory, Colonialism, and Rewriting

While constructing its protagonist as a melancholic character, the novel also shows how he works through his traumatizing past. In this process he both articulates painful personal memories and reflects on the discourse of colonialism in a critical manner. Regardless of his attempt to distance himself from his past, Daud’s memories of the country of his origin are painful and haunted by people whom he has once known. In this sense all communication with the home, letters received and those to be written, open up moments and memories of loss, “reproaching him”,75 and in so doing add to his melancholia. The novel suggests that his sense of shame and embarrassment, “his neglect”76 to remain in touch with his friends, is an expression of his melancholia. The contact with the past activates a sense of uneasiness, and the unmourned loss returns to “wobble” his position.77 Another example of shame is related to Daud’s feelings concerning the way in which his English peers treated their penniless and hungry fellow student: “I used to see this hunted look my class-mates would give me a lunch-time”.78 Shame, as Timothy Bewes suggests, is both “an emotion that … prevents one from speaking” or “a measure, within the text, of the text’s failure to communicate”.79 In Bewes’ view it does not belong to an individual but its task is to “characterize … the attempt to speak our experience, the impossibility of doing so, and is unknowable outside any such attempt”.80 Gurnah’s novel voices a similar view. While the protagonist’s shame is linked with his exclusion and his neglect, the attempt to express it seeks to make his traumatic loss heard, regardless of the difficulties involved in articulating it. This is evident in his attempt to narrate and communicate this experience, seen both in the various letters, imagined and real, that he composes, and also in his recounting his story to Catherine. In so doing the novel emphasizes the 75 76 77 78 79 80

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 10. Ibid.,79. Timothy Bewes, “Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché in Caryl Phillips”, Cultural Critique, lxiii (2006), 40. Ibid., 40.

128

chapter 7

act of story-telling as a means of recuperating from melancholia, and Pilgrims Way becomes a further example of the significance of story-telling in Gurnah’s fiction. Unsurprisingly, Felicity Hand remarks that for Gurnah’s characters its function is often that of “a therapeutic remedy against the displacement and alienation they experience in their country of adoption”.81 The issue has also been addressed in Tina Steiner’s analysis of By the Sea: she suggests that the stories told by the characters of the novel point to “the possibility of new beginning”.82 By involving himself in cross-cultural story-telling, Daud both reconstructs his identity and negotiates his dislocated position. Daud’s articulation of shame referred to above reveals his emerging attempt to work through his melancholia – it transforms the former impossibility of speaking out into an act of voicing the unspeakable. While he initially questions Catherine’s right to hear about his shame by referring to her as “nothing to him” and by claiming that she is unable to understand him because she does not share the same experience, this initial view changes significantly in the novel when he realizes the her aim is to “help” and “save him”.83 By working through the shame involved in migration Daud may be able to transform his melancholia into a positive source of agency and rewrite the past in the sense proposed by Eng and Kazanjian.84 In Daud’s view Catherine is the right audience for his story, as she is able to go beyond the stereotypical conception of the black migrant to Britain, to read his story differently. Unlike other white characters in the novel, Catherine relates to him as a fellow human being, not as a stereotype or as “[a] character out of a book? Some hysterical, alienated foreigner or something?”85 While showing that Daud’s melancholia can be eased, the novel insists on the need to understand its origins and suggests that it is rooted in culture and history. Yet such a reading needs to examine the sites and stories where the effects of colonialism and its legacies, the losses and griefs at the core of the trauma, are explored and negotiated. Only by investing them with new meanings can the mourning be successful. The historical trauma of colonialism and the related ethnic violence addressed in Gurnah’s novel function in the same way as the African chattel slavery forming the background of diasporic 81

Felicity Hand, “Story-Telling as an Antidote to Disempowerment”, Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies, I/1 (2007). See also Hand, “Untangling Stories”, 74–92. 82 Tina Steiner, Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature, Manchester: St. Jerome, 2009, 123. 83 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 76. 84 Eng and Kazanjian, 4. 85 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 54–55; emphasis original.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way 129

melancholia­explored in Sara Kaplan’s reading of Dash’s film: “the work of embodied memory is to not only bear witness to long-past, historically-disavowed wounds and losses” but also to “produce new political communities in the context of and in direct opposition to the centuries-long experience of territorial displacement, bodily expropriation, and social genocide”.86 However, in Gurnah’s novel, political communities based on exclusiveness or a shared racial consciousness do not work. What is more important in forming new communities is the recognition of the role of history and abandonment of established modes of thinking based on such essentializing concepts as race and nation. In this sense Pilgrims Way promotes a politics of hybridity where identities are recast and home is relocated, though not unproblematically. Homi K. Bhabha’s point about hybrid identity is applicable to Daud: as a result of “extraterritorial and cross-cultural initiations” his condition and home transforms curiously and redefines his understanding of “home and the world” as “unhomeliness”.87 Upon ceasing to mourn for the past losses, Daud reconstructs his identity in postcolonial Britain and attaches himself to the larger community of people sharing the experience of in-betweenness. As I have suggested above, British colonialism and its effects on Africa play a main role in Daud’s various losses. While such losses may not be entirely healable as Kaplan suggests in her analysis of diasporic melancholia,88 P­ ilgrims Way shows how Daud comes to terms with his past. This is revealed in a particularly significant episode dealing with colonial history told by Daud to Catherine.89 In this story young Daud and Bossy set off on a sailboat to a smaller island, once suitable as a colonial prison. The island episode makes visible some of the negotiations with history and shows how both personal and cultural issues are relevant in order to gain an understanding of the novel’s melancholia. In this respect the fate of his friend is important: the happy day when the two boys sail off to a neighbouring island ends in an outburst of ethnic violence – though the conflict is unnamed in the novel, the reference is most likely to the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, a conflict between the various groups inhabiting the island, Arabs, Indians, and blacks. While Daud survives the unexpected beatings upon his return, Bossy (who has decided to swim back) disappears and is never sighted again, becoming one of the unrecognized victims of the massacre. This trauma involving the loss of friendship characterizing the island’s community leads to Daud’s later melancholia. 86 Sara Kaplan, 521–22. 87 Bhabha, The Location, 9. 88 Sara Kaplan, 521. 89 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 170–77.

130

chapter 7

This episode also shows how extensively Daud’s life is embedded in the history of the British Empire. As a postcolonial text, Gurnah’s novel addresses the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized critically, as it presents the boys’ expedition as a counter-discursive version of travel by colonialist explorers. This is evident in its mocking attitude towards the markers of the imperial experience. These include, for instance, Bossy’s attempt to sing “Rule Britannia” while sailing, an act that is briefly interrupted by Daud’s throwing of “a gourd of sea water”,90 their mocking reading of the Bible (“dust to dust returneth”91) at the site of the former fortress, and their renaming of many parts of the island – the site where the mango trees grow becomes “Mango Park”92 and a rock on the beach where they pose in a tourist-like manner for “a photi” is named as “Bygone My Arse”.93 In a similar vein, a standing pole they discover becomes a target of heated discussion: is it a punishment post ensuring that “the wog bugger … pay[s] his taxes next time” or is it a pillar post of Indonesian origin, a sign of cultural contact showing that maybe the British were not the first foreigners in the region?94 In so doing the island links the local with the global and inserts the boys in the wider transnational context extending from East Africa to Asia and beyond. This strategy of locating East Africa in the wider context of travel and trade networks is used in many of Gurnah’s novels, as several critics have pointed out.95 The episode is a powerful critique of the values and views of British colonialism. The boys’ mimicry of the imperialist discourse critiques its supposedly sacred and pious values. Mockingly, the boys fight “for mangoes with the flies” and claim that “God [is] on our side”.96 Furthermore, when critiquing the discourse claiming that colonialism and Christianity are God’s gifts to the pagan world, Daud resorts to parody and constructs a blasphemous prayer to “Mother Hygiene”, the “Wiper of My Arse”.97 As hygiene is an obsession of his mother, and explicitly represented in the novel as a product of colonialism supported 90 91 92 93 94 95

Ibid., 171; emphasis original. Ibid., 172; emphasis original. Ibid., 173; emphasis original. Ibid., 174; emphasis original. Ibid., 172; emphasis original. See Gareth Griffiths, “Narrative, Identity, and Social Practice in Tanzania: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Ironic Paradise”, in Engaging with Literature of Commitment, vol. 1: Africa in the World, eds Gordon Collier, Marc Delrez, Anne Fuchs, and Bénédicte Ledent, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, 309–18; Maria Olaussen, “The Submerged History of the Indian Ocean in Admiring Silence”, English Studies in Africa, LVI/1 (2013), 65–77; and Steiner, “Writing”, 124–35. 96 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 173; emphasis original. 97 Ibid., 173; emphasis original.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way

131

by such imports as castor oil and quinine, and the embodied shame of submitting to medical inspections seen in such comments as “[a]n itchy penis provoked lengthy and detailed scrutiny of the abused member”,98 Daud’s narrative resists the values and justifications of the colonialist project by carnivalizing them. Their story of colonization is one that, to use Homi Bhabha’s terminology, “is almost the same, but not quite”,99 and it is used as a means of negotiating their identity and providing history with alternative meanings. Yet the episode serves to provide a backdrop for Daud’s melancholic losses as it is the last happy moment of his childhood. The death of Bossy, whose memory is activated in the letter from Karim that reaches Daud in Chapter 12,100 marks the loss of the multiethnic community destroyed in the process of ­decolonization. Since the Revolution, his friends have either left the island or, failing to do so, committed suicide in the manner of the Malagasy poet.101 The loss of this community with its friendships is the unmourned event of Daud’s past, articulated only now to Catherine. Regardless of his various attempts to locate new objects of love in lieu of his losses, Daud has been unable to attach himself to individuals or larger communities but has remained an outsider because of their often exclusionist politics. The Afro-Asian Society “with its grandiose rhetoric” does not provide Daud with suitable tools that could be used in the struggle,102 and the greeting by a black man “with an Afro hairdo of serious proportions” is similarly ambiguous as it is “both a salute and a rebuke”.103 In other words, Daud’s position is one of problematic in-betweenness: he is lost between the past and the present, homeland and Britain, as well as between various exclusionist ideologies. Regardless of Daud’s unacceptance of political ideologies, the novel is not entirely without alternative communities and transnational networks. In addition to the interracial relationship with Catherine, one particular alternative community constructed upon postcolonial solidarity can be located in Gurnah’s novel. Admittedly temporary and less political than the visions of the Afro-Asian society, cricket appears to serve as a means of resistance. What provides Daud and some other members of the novel’s migrant community with an opportunity to come to terms with Britain is cricket. As a sign of this, Daud records in the novel that “England duly disgrace themselves at 98 Ibid., 52. 99 Bhabha, The Location, 86; emphasis original. 100 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 128–30. 101 Ibid., 10. 102 Ibid., 96. 103 Ibid., 113–14.

132

chapter 7

Old Trafford, losing by 425 runs” and sees this win as a “triumph over historical inertia”.104 This important role given to cricket is emphasized in the final chapter. When the West Indies win, he “dance[s] round the house, yelping with mocking laughter and whirling his good arm like a demented dervish”.105 The novel suggests that in sport the history of losses can be revisited and revised in a way that transforms the pathology of melancholia into a productive source by returning agency to those who have been dispossessed and shamed. While this solution may be merely symbolic, its value in providing communal narratives of sharing cannot be underestimated. Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that the representation of melancholia in Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way suggests that the individual’s losses are generated by more general cultural and historical losses where race, colonialism, and migration play significant roles. The protagonist’s melancholia is a response to the unmourned loss of family and friends amidst political violence in late colonial Zanzibar. As this traumatic experience is reiterated in the racism and racist violence characterizing the novel’s Britain, the novel emphasizes that the melancholia of the migrant is intertwined with ruptures in her/his cultural identity. Although such wounds may not be easily healed, the novel shows that traumatized migrants, provided that their stories find listeners, may be able to address their sense of loss. As an indication of this, Gurnah’s shows how its pilgrim-migrant reaches his final destination and enters the sacred space, the Canterbury Cathedral. At this point he is now willing to give up his “neurosis and fears” and liberate “the bunched python of his coiled psyche”.106 While national identification with the dominant remains inaccessible, at least the personal losses and traumas appear to be healable and show that it is possible to change one’s life.107 To use Freud’s terms, by the end of the novel Daud “become[s] free and uninhibited again”.108 This survival story is, however, the story of a successful individual who is purified by the means of a therapeutic discourse, the “talking cure”, and the novel is unable to suggest more general remedies to the wrongs of colonialism 104 105 106 107 108

Ibid., 104; cf. 88. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 232. Ibid., 231. Freud, 244.

Migration And Melancholia In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way 133

and its effects. Similarly, the representation of racism as the general condition of modern Britain is equally pessimistic in tone. The glimpse of hope provided by the novel is, however, important. The pilgrim of the novel is saved, but not through religion or the nation-state – what gives hope to Daud is love, in the sense of replacing the lost object, and the related possibility of relocating himself in the new space through new transnational attachments. The realization that it is possible for the migrant to start anew and build a new life – defined in the novel as “a monstrous monument to the suffering and pain”109 – leads to a reconstruction of identity and the end of melancholia with its partially self-inflicted torture. In the case of Daud, this recuperation is both personal and cultural, since it takes place in the context of hybrid identity that, when accepted, may offer an alternative to the various demands for exclusionism and purity that have given birth to and sustained his trauma. 109 Gurnah, Pilgrims, 231.

chapter 8

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Caryl Phillips’ Dancing in the Dark The pains of migration and the legacy of history for the formation of black identity are central to the work of the Caryl Phillips. While his works are often read as voicing the Black British and Caribbean experience owing to their thematics, such an understanding remains limited since his novels and essays delve into wide-ranging problems concerning the black diaspora and the role of transnational spaces such as the Atlantic triangle in the construction of identity. John McLeod, for instance, sees this as characterizing Phillips’ attempt to transcend nationalist imaginaries: what he finds central to Phillips is his “pursuit of a plural notion of home throughout his work, as well as the impossibility of any attempt to claim him solely as a Caribbean writer, or black British writer, or of pinning him down by using any other defining label”.1 The work of Phillips, in other words, spans diverse spaces and forms of migration. The issues of racial and diasporic identity form the core of his 2005 novel Dancing in the Dark, a narrative of the character and career of the Caribbeanborn us vaudeville/blackface artist Egbert (Bert) Williams (1874–1922).2 This fictionalization of Williams’ life and career is, however, not a mere biographical narrative of its protagonist and his role in the cultural history of black American performance culture in the early twentieth century. As I will argue in this chapter, Phillips’ portrayal of the enigmatic and ambiguous dilemmas confronted by Bert Williams can be read in a transnational context rather than in (primarily) that of African American culture and history. As I will show, Phillips’ novel seeks to negotiate received understandings of black American identity and reveal its links with the black diaspora and the traumatizing experience of migration. Rather than discussing the novel as a biography of a historical person, my interest lies in the ways in which Dancing in the Dark seeks to address questions of “race” and racialized identity in a transnational context by investigating issues of migration and memory. Since the dominant conception of black American identity, as shown in the novel, is based on American stereotypes, and supported and reproduced by using the trope of the 1 John McLeod, “‘Between Two Waves’: Caryl Phillips and Black Britain”, Moving Worlds, VII/1 (2007), 18. 2 Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark, London: Secker and Warburg, 2005.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_011

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

135

blackface, it is in contrast with an alternative version of black identity signified most notably in the West Indian protagonist’s transnational links with the black diaspora. In discussing this juxtaposition, this chapter will show that the protagonist’s adoption and performance of a stereotypical African American identity, combined with a repression of its alternatives, is highly problematic and traumatic. In so doing I will show that the repressed returns to continually haunt Bert Williams as seen in the novel’s use of Gothic conventions.

Representation, History, and Caryl Phillips

In recent years postcolonial critics have sought to analyse the reconstruction of the past in postcolonial and ethnic texts addressing historical events ranging from slavery and the Holocaust to more local memories and countermemories.­Such writings seek to revise and resist dominant narratives of the past by providing alternative accounts of the effects of history, as testified in the work of such contemporary writers as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Amitav Ghosh. While postcolonial representations of history have been seen as ways of constructing new national histories,3 it has also been suggested that such representations may also reveal often silenced transnational links between various communities and cultures.4 For instance, in her interpretation of Amitav Ghosh’s attempt to excavate the migratory and other links characterizing the various communities sharing the experience of the Indian Ocean, Claire Chambers argues that Ghosh’s historical novels aim “to construct a history that transcends national borders and focuses attention to groupings other than the nation-state”.5 This is also the case with Caryl Phillips. Many of his novels, including Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), and The Nature of Blood (1997), seek to historicize the diasporic experience by emphasizing the transatlantic character of black identity and often address American themes. Crossing the River, in particular, starts with the voice of the African father selling his children to slavery, continues with the story of the former slave Martha dying in the us West in separation from her family, represents the narrative of a British slave trader, and closes with a story of the Englishwoman Joyce and her tragic 3 See Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 34–37. 4 See Jana Gohrisch, “Cultural Exchange and the Representation of History in Postcolonial Literature”, European Journal of English Studies, x (2006), 231–47; Nyman, Home; and Chambers, “The Indian”, 87–91. 5 Chambers, “The Indian”, 89.

136

chapter 8

love-story with the American gi Travis.6 Through the various narratives, Phillips appears, first, to locate the contemporary diasporic experience in a historical context, and, second, to construct a multi-voiced, polyphonic narrative challenging the monological voice characterizing colonialist texts. This is also a central aim in Cambridge, a novel of slavery set in the Caribbean, as Lars Eckstein has shown in his detailed analysis of Phillips’ montage-like and “mnemonic” narrative technique. According to Eckstein, this technique contains and transforms colonialist narratives, with the effect that the novel comes to present “an alternative, democratic model of cultural memory”.7 In the view of John McLeod, America itself, however, is for Phillips “an imprisoning location” generating racialized traumas and tragic life stories as seen in Dancing in the Dark and the novel Higher Ground (1989).8 Alternative accounts of history are central to Phillips’ project. In an essay on Stephen Spielberg’s film Amistad (1992) he emphasizes the need to critically evaluate the past and revise it: “A healthy history is one that is open to debate and interpretation, to re-evaluation and re-interpretations”.9 As a sign of this, Dancing in the Dark provides historically located characters with a voice in order to critique and revise late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discourses of race in the United States. To achieve this, the novel uses a variety of narrative voices. While mainly narrated in the third person, the novel, especially in the “Prologue” and “Act One (1875–1903)”, also uses song lyrics, scenes from stage productions, and occasional first-person monologues by the protagonist. In “Act Two (1903–1911)” and “Act Three (1912–1922)” the novel has more first-person narration by various characters including Bert Williams, his wife Lottie, his father Fred, and his partner George Walker and his wife Ada, as well as newspaper clippings and excerpts from reviews. These perspectives seek to make the racialized experience and realities of black performers accessible in a less mediated manner. What the various voices share, however, is a strong critique of the racist practices of the period’s United States, as seen in its portrayal of the harsh treatment of black performers in the frontier towns and “lumber camps” in the us West.10 The events in Cripple Creek, Colorado,

6 7

Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River, London: Vintage, 1995 [1993]. Lars Eckstein, Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, 99; emphasis original. 8 John McLeod, “British Freedoms: Caryl Phillips’s Transatlanticism and the Staging of Rough Crossings”, Atlantic Studies, vi (2009), 195. 9 Caryl Phillips, A New World Order: Selected Essays, New York: Vintage, 2002, 84. 10 Phillips, Dancing, 26–28.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

137

a booming gold town, are the case in point. The following passage shows how Williams and Walker are forced to leave this space of racialized violence: Young Walker and Williams enter Cripple Creek as part of a medicine show, fatigued from days and nights and weeks of rough living, but they still dress well, and they keep their spirits afloat with a high-energy performance that never fails to achieve laughter. But they both know that their chief aim is not to produce laughter but to distract the liquor-filled prospectors so that these desperate and bitter men cannot think clearly about who or what is in front of them. However, here in Cripple Creek, with its newly acquired wealth and its rampant sense of its own importance, the sight of postperformance Walker and Williams in fine clothes causes some prospectors to scratch their heads and think all too clearly about what and who is in front of them and so, at the point of a gun, they strip the fancy clothes from the nigger boys’ backs and force Walker and Williams to wrap themselves in burlap sacks before escorting them to the edge of the town. At ten thousand feet, and bereft of jacket, shirt, pants, and shoes, the young performers walk barefoot out of Cripple Creek with laughter ringing in their ears.11 Echoing the racist discourse and the humiliating laughter of the drunken gold miners, the passage positions the two undressed performers in a context of dehumanization and shows how they are relegated to the status of the uncivilized and the primitive as imagined in colonialist discourses. Walker and Williams, however, resist such categorization. The novel has already criticized such positions in a section addressing short-term jobs as “anthropological specimens”, this is, as “impersonat[ors]” of a group of Africans who turn up too late for the 1894 California Mid-Winter Exposition held at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco,12 an episode apparently based on biographical facts.13 Again, the passage uses the trope of clothing as a marker between the civilized and the primitive: When the “real savages” promised at the African Dahomeyan village exhibit were delayed en route to America, Walker and Williams were among those who donned animal skins, and through the long hard winter­of 1894, 11 12 13

Ibid., 33–34. Ibid., 31. See Camille F. Forbes, Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star, New York: Basic Civitas, 2008, 29–32.

138

chapter 8

and into 1895, we found ourselves close to Africa. We were instructed to impersonate “natives” steaming with perspiration, and we were obliged to kneel before our masters with the clumsy devotion of camels.14 For Phillips, the human zoo, an invention of the late nineteenth century, is a colonialist practice of dehumanization, linking non-Western peoples explicitly with the bestial and the animalistic.15 To emphasize the emotional effects of becoming an object to be gazed, the novel shifts from third-person narration to the first person at this point and provides the reader with Williams’ own description of his experience and his view of Walker’s disgust: The simple truth was, something in his spirit was being corroded by being forced to sit in a pen from sunup to sundown and have people stare and point at him. In fact, it soon became apparent that neither one of us could successfully play primitive, for there was absolutely nothing in our lives that had prepared us for this demeaning role. I watched as poor George sunk further into depression, and although I too was suffering, I chose to dull my pain by studying.16 In other words, neither performer is willing to enter the mocking display of racialized roles and tasks based on those of master and slave, civilized and primitive, human and less human, all roles that are simply “demeaning”. The responses of the performers are, however, emphatically different: while Walker feels trapped in his position, Williams actively chooses to immerse himself in private study and is thus able to reconstruct his identity. This is because of the book that he studies, John Ogilby’s 1670 narrative Africa,17 a book that is to follow him in later life as far as Britain,18 links him with transnational spaces and provides him with counter-discursive knowledge of the black diaspora. Ogilby’s volume, while a colonialist narrative, remains a form of knowledge: it teaches Williams “about the place from which my [his] ‘character’ was supposed to have originated”.19 In so doing it also de-essentializes the African character he has performed at the exhibition by showing Williams how 14 Phillips, Dancing, 31. 15 Cf. Nigel Rothfels, “Immersed with Animals”, in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 209. 16 Phillips, Dancing, 31; emphasis original. 17 Ibid., 31. 18 Ibid., 87. 19 Ibid., 31.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

139

distant the colonialist­representation is from his identity. Ogilby’s book, in fact, teaches him that “Africa was a continent of history and tradition, and not one of rude chaos”.20 To perform imagined Africanness in the prescribed role of the primitive is for Williams merely an experience of “long days of pretense and shame”.21 Unlike in the Caribbean, in the United States the Williams family explore the effects of racial categorization ever since their arrival. This can be seen in the way the novel describes their status in Florida, which they soon leave for California: .

In this new place called Florida they are not treated as West Indian people who have come to America by steamship and who are keen to work; they are not viewed as migrants who are prepared to remake themselves in the new American world, but who nevertheless hold fast to a dream that one day they might return home with money in their pockets to live out the late autumn and winter of their lives. In this new place they are simply Negroes.22 The definition of these Caribbean immigrants as “simply Negroes” in the us South of the 1880s shows the power of the American discourse of race based on segregation, racial stereotypes, hierarchies, and strictly-defined roles. The general discourse based on racialization may contrast with the self-perception of the West Indian immigrants with a distinct ethnic identity that may separate them of African American – scholars have suggested that West Indian immigrants either distance themselves from African Americans or ally with them to counter racist practices.23 In Phillips’ reconstruction of history, the Williams family has a distinct identity but they are treated by whites on the basis of their appearance as mere black. In the novel the family’s status as black strangers in the United States casts them as eternal outsiders or, as Phillips puts it, as “queerly accented stranger[s]”.24 Doomed to a doubly marginalized position in the fringes of the United States, the Williams are forced to adapt to the already existing racialized social roles:

20 21 22 23

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 23–24. Reuel Rogers, “‘Black Like Who?’: Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans, and the Politics of Group Identity”, in Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York, ed. Nancy Foner, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 165–66. 24 Phillips, Dancing, 25.

140

chapter 8

the Williams family now begins to learn how to be both of the Caribbean and of the United States of America; they begin to learn how to be coloreds and niggers, foreigners and the most despised of homegrown sons. Eleven-year-old Bert begins to learn the role that America has set aside for him to play.25 And, indeed, the roles that Bert Williams, together with George Walker, play in San Francisco’s “saloons and variety halls” are limited to the black stereotypes of “southern ‘plantation darkies’ or northern ‘zip coons’”, whereas it appears to Williams that other immigrants from Europe and Asia, as well as from Central and South America, may “breathe free in the misty western air”.26 What is to be performed consists of “clumsy, foolish gestures” and leads to self-deprecation: “Eventually the daily trauma of having to look up to the coloured people in the upper balcony and silently beg their forgiveness begins to take a toll on their young spirits”.27

Becoming Blackface

While this point in the novel emphasizes that Walker and Williams refuse to perform in blackface, which even functions as an obstacle to their career (“They have both chosen to eschew blackface makeup”28), the decision to do so in 1896 marks a rupture in Williams’ identity, a loss of West Indianness, and his full entry into a dehumanizing American discourse of race: And the first time he looked at himself in the mirror he thought of the embarrassment and distress that this would cause his father and his heart sank. Down through his body like a stone, down toward those long, oversized boots that announced him as a clown. How could a West Indian do such a thing to himself? The first time he looked in the mirror he

25 26

27 28

Ibid., 24–25; emphasis original. Ibid., 25. It should be noted that historically this observation is problematic since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had banned the Chinese from entering the country. See Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924”, Journal of American Ethnic History, XXI/3, 36–62. Ibid., 29; cf. 10. Ibid., 29.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

141

was ashamed, but he understood that his job was to make people light so they did not have time to ridicule or hurt him.29 Although the passage hints at a sense of security provided by the mask, it also reveals how the image in the mirror is one of shame, humiliation, and embarrassment. The subject looking at the image in the mirror does no longer recognize itself but looks at the image in awe. The representation and the meanings given to the blackface play a highly significant role in Dancing in the Dark. As the novel reveals, the blackface image staring at the West Indian actor is not himself. Rather, what the mirror shows is a Self transformed into the Other in a manner known from Gothic fictions: Williams’ identity is problematized and reconstructed in an encounter with the uncanny double. What is important is that the blackface double and the racialized African American identity are in sharp contrast with Williams’ West Indian identity. Recent studies of ethnic American narratives have paid attention to the role of Gothic motifs in such texts. In her study, Kathleen Brogan argues that, rather than reminders of individual deeds and dilemmas, the role of ghosts and haunting in ethnic literatures is more cultural and communal as they explore “a people’s historical consciousness”.30 What Brogan finds central in such narratives is that “[t]hrough the agency of ghosts, group histories that have in some way been threatened, erased, or fragmented are recuperated and revised”.31 What this means is that a repressed collective history and identity returns to haunt in the present, as is the case in the story of Bert Williams. Another critic who has paid attention to the issue of haunting is Marisa Parham, who has suggested that “[i]n literary and cultural texts, haunting often appears as allegory, doubling, and irony”.32 It is the blackface that comes to play a haunting role as a textual marker of doubling and the uncanny. As a stereotypical marker of African American identity, the blackface leaves little space for alternative narratives of identity and represses other experiences. The blackface is a stigmatizing marker of African American identity linking contemporary identity with a less palatable past. Marissa Parham argues that such historical issues and motifs are relevant for an analysis of haunting.33 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 57. Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1998, 5. Ibid., 5–6. Marisa Parham, Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture, New York: Routledge, 2009, 3. Ibid., 3.

142

chapter 8

In her study she links the phenomenon with what the French theorist Pierre Nora has termed as les lieux de mémoire, this is, locations or sites of memory, places where history and memory meet: “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded”.34 Such sites of memory are culturally specific, and in their study of sites of memory in African American culture Robert O’Meally and Geneviève Fabre mention such examples as the city, the Civil Rights Movement, and the figure of the mammy.35 While such sites of memory may serve to boost a sense of community and promote empowerment, Parham points to the role that they may play in haunting by retrieving moments of terror from the past: Sites of memory are particularly useful in considering representations of memory and haunting in black life because the term itself speaks to the sometimes beautiful, sometimes harrowing playfulness of haunting, a play rooted in slippages between and across time and space. Site/ sight: where we put it, how we see it (or the myriad ways we see without seeing – hauntings, specters, and uncanny repetitions); site/cite: where we find it (the dig site, the grave, the Middle Passage), how we express it, or how loss informs or structures experience – citationality.36 This forms a fruitful context for examining the representation of the blackface in Phillips’ novel. First, as a negative site of memory in African American culture the blackface contributes to the self-hatred that comes to haunt Bert Williams who has selected the identity signified by the blackface over other alternatives. It marks a past burdened with memories of slavery and inequality, and thus contributes to the haunting caused by the double that the protagonist sees repeatedly in the mirror. Second, the blackface is a citational identity that comes into existence through repetition and imitation. Citationality as performance of ethnic identity is indeed a major theme in the novel and it includes such examples as Williams’ early performance as an African from Dahomey, the African Americans performing as Africans in In Dahomey and Abyssinia, and also their London audience that impersonates and mimics the black 34 35

36

Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux des Mémoire”, Representations, xxvi (1989), 12. Robert O’Meally and Geneviève Fabre, “Introduction”, in History and Memory in AfricanAmerican Culture, eds Geneviève Fabre and Robert O´Meally, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 7. Parham, 10.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

143

performers’ citing of African dances. Citationality, however, does not play a liberating or critical role in the identity construction of the black characters of the novel. Rather than performing and repeating cultural scripts of identity with a difference, as performance theorists such as Judith Butler have suggested,37 Williams is forced to repeat the stereotype for a white audience. This is what distinguishes blacks from other ethnic groups in the novel: “the Jews playing the Germans, and the Germans playing the Irish, and the Irish playing the Chinese, and everybody thinking they can play colored”.38 In a conversation with John McLeod, Phillips comments on this reinvention of identity and sees it as a way of becoming American that was open to all other ethnic groups apart from black people. Blackness remains outside American national identity.39 As a result, the racialized notion of blackface performance and its traumatizing effects are at the centre of the novel. The blackface is a shameful reminder of the racialized past of African America as it constructs a demeaning identity of the African American as “a shuffling, dull-witted, clumsy, watermelon-eating Negro of questionable intelligence”.40 This double identity of black Americans where the stereotype is different from the performer is a major cause of haunting. What troubles Bert Williams is the uncanny face of the stereotype that he sees in the mirror: this face is a concrete memory of being forced to adopt another identity and to cite repeatedly what he is not. When commenting on the real-life Williams, Michelle Stephens in fact points to the West Indian’s ability to transcend linguistic and cultural barriers and pass as an African American, which was not unheard of in the period’s Harlem.41 In contrast to my reading, Louis Chude-Sokei, however, sees Williams’ decision to continue using the blackface after it had been abandoned by other vaudeville artists as a strategic choice creating space for developing performance art.42 In ChudeSokei’s view the blackface, a recognizable marker, links Williams’ innovative performances with the tradition of minstrelsy and at the same time enables experimentation with theatrical and musical conventions.43 37 See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, London: Routledge, 1993. 38 Phillips, Dancing, 92. 39 “Dancing in the Dark: Caryl Phillips in Conversation with John McLeod, Leeds 2005”, Moving Worlds, VII/1 (2007), 103–14. 40 Phillips, Dancing, 35. 41 Michelle Stephens, “African-American Modernisms”, in The Blackwell Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–50, ed. John T. Matthews, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 311. 42 Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, 31–33. 43 Ibid., 31–33.

144

chapter 8

The effects of the blackface are, however, very negative in Phillips’ novel. It constructs an uncanny sense of split identity where the familiar becomes something strange and uncanny. As Williams puts it himself: “And the makeup. George was not happy but I tried the makeup and became somebody else”.44 The loss of identity is emphasized in the following passage from Phillips’ novel where Williams’ face becomes someone else’s, his lips transform into those of an other, and his identity is finally “erased”: There was a moment’s hesitation as he felt the cork slither between his delicate, oversized fingers, and then he began to smear his warm face with the cold potion. Only when he was sure that it was spread evenly across his face did he dare look up and stare into the mirror. He needed to make sure that the edges of the makeup met his hairline. He needed to give himself a consistent tone of blackness, and then he drew on his lips so that they grew beyond his own, swimming out toward his cheeks and down his chin. His lips were the final touch. He erased himself. Wiped himself clean off the face of the earth so that he found himself staring back at a stranger.45

Split Identity

The resulting split identity leads into a rift between Williams and his father, a fact further emphasizing his gradual loss of the black diasporic identity and its replacement with a role performed according to a script prepared by white America and its racist discourses. This shows how the American discourse of race suppresses alternative forms of black identity, transnational and diasporic. This conflict can be seen in the way in which Phillips describes Fred Williams’ reactions to his son’s blackface performance. Father’s reaction underlines the transformation of Bert Williams from the son he used to know into an uncanny double: He sits in nigger heaven and looks down at his West Indian son. At first he does not recognize him, and, when he does, his stomach moves. This bewildered creature with a kinky wig, long ill-fitting white gloves, a shabby dress suit, oversized shoes, a battered top hat, sleeves and trousers that are too short, a mouth exaggerated by paint, this real funny nigger is his 44 Phillips, Dancing, 35. 45 Ibid., 58.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

145

child? This coon with big eyeball-poppin’ eyes is his son? …. What has happened to his Bert? His Bahamian son who would sit patiently with him for hours and study the manner in which chickens threw dust behind them with their webbed feet. Father and son were inseparable.46 In addition to severing the link between father and son, this loss of unity relocates the latter in a sphere dominated by the demands of the Other where he is forced to live a life of citing without access to his earlier West Indian identity. In the view of the father, this is the true character of Americanization, an effect of its racializing and humiliating discourses: “The country has made a nigger of the boy and there is nothing that he can do to fight this United States of America, which he now understands habitually snatches children from the arms of those who gave them life and encourages them to become people who their parents no longer recognize”.47 If the loss of father is examined in the larger context of Phillips’ work, and particularly Crossing the River narrated by the metaphorical figure African father who sells his children to slavery, the blackface appears clearly as a cultural trauma since Williams refers to his first blackface performance as the moment when “he first betrayed his father”.48 The conflict between the two identities, and Williams’ dislike of the cited identity, is also seen in the way in which Williams emphasizes the need to shake off the role in the absolute privacy of his dressing room, a place whose importance is seen its description as “the one place where he is able to think clearly … a place where he can sit alone and remember all that has gone before, and imagine all that is still to unfold”.49 The act of unmasking is indeed emphasized in the novel and shown to be a painful moment of negotiating between identities. For instance, when George’s white lover Eva visits Bert at the theatre after George’s death, he feels “embarrassed” wearing “his makeup” and forces her to stay outdoors as unmasking “was too private a process for him to undertake with an audience” regardless of the extent to which this act humiliates her.50 Similarly, when Williams on an occasion decides to abandon the stage, Phillips describes the moment in a way underlining Williams’ unwillingness to face the double in the mirror:

46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 83; emphasis original. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 177.

146

chapter 8

they know to leave him in peace if the door is pushed to, which it nearly always is. He dabs the white towel in the china bowl of lukewarm water that the stage manager has placed on his dresser, and he then proceeds to rub his face, discoloring the towel as he does so. There is no need for him to look in the mirror. Only when he is sure that most of the cork has been removed does he stand and peel away his jacket, kick off the oversized shoes, and then collapse back down onto the uncomfortable chair. At forty-four he can feel an ominous fatigue in the deadweight of his body.51 The novel foregrounds its critique of the blackface role in various and gradually increasing ways. In addition to mentioning that it has never been fully accepted by the black audience, as seen in Bert’s habit of avoiding the audience upstairs,52 the novel includes several references to the changing times and values, influential African American intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington,53 and the delegation of black businessmen who visit Williams and urge him no longer to perform in the role of “the shambling, pathetic dupe”.54 His friend George Walker has expressed a similar view years earlier: the so-called character that you’re playing is a damn-fool creature who has been created by the white man … times have changed now and we should no longer be standing up in front of the white man and delivering simplistic stories with the right amount of darky naivete.… Time to put the cork to one side, Bert. White people are laughing at you, and colored folks in the audience are only laughing to keep from crying.… Not in the twentieth century. You gotta leave that man behind where he belongs, and it don’t matter a damn how much you want to talk about what you do as art, I’m telling you, please cut that colored fool loose.55 Williams, however, is reluctant to give up his profession and rationalizes his choice by describing himself as “a performer who applies makeup in order to play a part”.56 He also tells his six visitors that the role he is performing exists merely “in my [his] imagination”57 and is “not representative of them or their 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 173. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 179; emphasis original. Ibid., 123; cf. 100. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 179.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

147

worlds”.58 The critique, however, of the expected role of the black artist is to trouble both future African American artists, as Stephens suggests,59 and also Williams, who yearns to ask – but never does – his friend Walker the problematic questions “plague[ing] him”: “Can the colored American ever be free to entertain beyond the evidence of his dark skin? Can the colored man be himself in twentieth-century America?”60 The blackface role appears as traumatizing to both the father and the son. Whereas the former ends up knifing a man criticizing Bert at his barbershop, the son distances himself from his community and family and spends increasingly more time in places in between the theatre and his Harlem home, especially in the solitude of Metheney’s Bar: “A man comes to Metheney’s to be by himself, and none more so than Mr. Williams” who occupies invariably a corner table with “just one chair, to prevent people from making a mistake”.61 In other words, the effects of racialized discourse signified in the blackface lead to a self-hatred for the acquired identity but Williams appears unable to articulate the effect. In fact, the novel shows that when he comes home drunk late at night, Williams looks at his wife (who has been uneroticized into Mother already at this early stage in their marriage) in silence but remains unable to voice his views: his pleading eyes looking up at her. Please don’t be angry at me, Mother. There are things going on in the basement of my twenty-eight-year old soul that I cannot talk about. And George does not understand, brimming as he is with a brashness that makes white men angry and causes coloured men to move a little closer to him in the hope that some of his confidence might ease its way out of his short dark body and into their own cautious hearts. But me, they look at me and wonder, Mother – they look at me and wonder why I am what I am. All of this with his eyes alone.62

Transnational Alternatives

As Williams becomes a hostage of the world of racialized performance reproducing stereotypes satisfying the (white) American audience, this local 58 Ibid., 180. 59 Stephens, 311–12. 60 Phillips, Dancing, 100. 61 Ibid., 61. 62 Ibid., 52.

148

chapter 8

discourse of identity represses its alternative: the transnational construction of black diasporic identity discussed by various black Americans including Garveyites, black Marxist internationalists, and Du Bois. This alternative, rejected by Williams and accessible to him only in memories and dreams, is part of the global cultural imaginary of the novel and takes various forms. What Walker and the novel’s other black writers, composers, and performers offer in lieu of the racialized performance of the traditional minstrel show are two musical comedies addressing directly the experience of the black ­diaspora: In Dahomey and Abyssinia. These two Broadway plays, while definitely not a­ iming at authenticity in their representation of Africa, cannot be written away as mere caricatures: Shane Vogel locates them in what he calls “the tradition of mock transnational performance”.63 In Vogel’s view, this is a tradition that appropriates and misapprehends the customs and languages of non-American cultures for the American audience.64 Vogel suggests, however, that the importance is in the way in which the imagined Africa transforms racial categories and disrupts naturalized identities, linking black audiences with the diasporic imaginary.65 Yet in Phillips’ narrative of Williams, this transnational route is not selected by the black performer. According to Phillips’ novel, for Walker, Will Cook, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the two musical performances represent alternative ways of thinking about and performing black identity, aiming to transcend the stereotypes of the minstrel shows.66 While Walker claims that they give “America both culture and history”,67 unfortunately, in 1906 Abyssinia, an ambitious production set in Addis Abeba and boasting a fully-costumed cast of more than 100, live animals, and a waterfall, fails to deliver artistically and financially: [it] fails to be the artistic and creative breakthrough that George, in particular, so desperately craves, but what aggravates him the most is the claim of the vast majority of the so-called critics that Abyssinia’s greatest failure is that it contains too little of the colored coon Mr. Bert Williams presenting his celebrated corkface routines.68

63

Shane Vogel, “Jamaica on Broadway: The Popular Caribbean and Mock Transnational Performance”, Theatre Journal, X/1 (2010), 4. 64 Ibid., 5. 65 Ibid., 6. 66 Phillips, Dancing, 41, cf. 92. 67 Ibid., 119. 68 Ibid., 124; emphasis original.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

149

From Williams’ perspective the decision appears clear: the audience makes the decisions, and as an entertainer he must follow its wishes. The audience wants a “coherent production”, not a “pageant”,69 which only will secure financial success, available in popular culture rather than in performances of more experimental nature. The price that Caryl Phillips’ Williams pays for his choice of blackmask performance over an awareness of black diasporic history and black modernism is to lead his life as Other, haunted by the rift between the blackface marking the national stereotype and its alternative, the transnational space of black diaspora. The refusal of the latter continues to haunt Williams and is, once again, represented in the novel through the imagery of haunting as seen in his memory of the gaze of the African from Dahomey who stares at his American impersonator at the San Francisco exposition: “The man from Dahomey stands in front of Bert and stares in disbelief at this pitiful apparition and he worries about this strange land called America”.70 The double he has created (of) himself will follow him up to the final stages of his illness. In a passage uncovering the burden of a forced life with conflicting identities his wife hands the mirror over to him: I offer him the mirror, which he holds by the handle, and I watch as he is shaken into panic by the puzzled face in the glass. He eventually absorbs the initial distress of recognition, and I stand patiently to one side, but I know that once the mirror is in his hands my husband is no longer with me. I know that my husband will spend the whole day staring into the mirror, at first tormenting himself, and then comforting his spirit with happier memories, but his well-disciplined countenance will betray little of this inner drama.71 The novel also shows that equality, pride, and dignity are accessible to him only in dreams and memories: “His hot Caribbean past undermined by cold American anxieties, and his tired mind still spinning backward, trying eagerly to reclaim the Bahamian beach that, all those years ago, his parents gave up for Florida”.72 Thinking about his childhood in the Bahamas, Williams recognizes a sense of black dignity that does not exist in the United States where respect and wealth go hand in hand. The alternative space, accessible only in dreams,

69 70 71 72

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 23.

150

chapter 8

is one of equality, located beyond the stereotyping racial discourses structuring the identity of the majority of African Americans in the period: He understands that the pair of them have little money but they possess a refined quality that he must never betray by behaving like the rough barefoot children from Irish Town or Wendell’s Reef, with their backsides hanging out of their pants, children who will never leave the island or visit any place in their imagination. He dreams of the warm tropical Caribbean, and a childhood of few cares or concerns; he dreams of a boyhood blessed with books and sun and sand and long hot days that merge one into the other as though the world will for evermore proceed in a seamless pattern of Caribbean indolence.73 Conclusion This chapter has argued that Bert Williams’ citational identity is linked with the adoption of the stereotypical blackface role that does not allow for resistance or promotion of alternative identities. While Williams’ nightly blackface performances are means of producing identities, they, rather than subversive and transgressive, remain conforming and appear to support the reproduction of racial difference through the use of the blackface stereotype. In so doing they keep on strengthening and repeating the stereotype for the pleasure of the white audience. This leads to the increasing dissatisfaction and emotional problems of the novel’s protagonist as seen in the increasing presence of haunting supported by the use of the Gothic metaphors of the uncanny and the double. The role of these tropes is to underline the strength of historical and cultural traumas shading the life of the West Indian protagonist in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unable to escape the racist discourses and classifications stemming from the eras of colonization and slavery, Bert Williams re-enacts pre-existing cultural scripts night after night through his blackface performances and thus contributes to the maintenance of the past and its ideologies in the present. In this sense the identities of the performer and the audience are dependent on each other, but neither is willing to change as any change would transform the power relations between the two. While the period’s American society reveals a variety of alternative, transnational ways to construct African American identities, they remain utopian to 73

Ibid., 23.

Transnational Spaces, Identities, and Memories in Phillips

151

Bert Williams and are accessible only in dreams of spaces beyond the United States. Paradoxically, such images link Williams with memories of diaspora and underline his tragic loss of community. By choosing to perform in the blackface to a white audience, Phillips’ Williams participates in the reproduction of a national narrative based on racial inequality and pre-existing roles rather than seeks to transform it towards a more tolerant and open direction. In so doing Williams rejects the transnational narrative and its promise of community and shared history often promoted in Phillips’ works, a solution which can only lead to despair and loneliness.

part 3 Migration, Travel, and Postcolonial Europe

∵

Introduction to Part 3 Part 3 focuses on the ways in which contemporary postcolonial narratives address the results of the cultural encounters generated by migration and travel, with particular reference to the works of the Sudanese British author Jamal Mahjoub and British Asian novelist Monica Ali, two writers whose works investigate cultural encounters and mobility in today’s Europe. What this section aims at showing is that contemporary migrant writing contributes to the imagining of a new Europe characterized by various flows of people and ideas, both diachronically and synchronically. The chapters aim at producing a more nuanced way of understanding Europe as a space of travel and mobility where the hierarchical idea of centre and periphery disappears and cultural encounters become visible. The various forms of mobility as represented in the texts under study are both European and postcolonial, showing how migration can be both global and European, and also that it transforms European as well as national and local identities. The readings presented contribute to the postcolonializing of Europe called for recently by a number of critics. While Graham Huggan has examined the issue from the perspective of race, racism, and colonialism and suggests that “Postcolonial Europe” marks colonialism, its legacy, and resistance to such forms,1 Frank Schulze-Engler pays attention to the larger frame of European transformation and underlines the need to relate Europe’s postcoloniality in relation to the discourses of Europeanness and Europeanization in order to counter transatlantic viewpoints.2 This process is central to the work of the novelist Jamal Mahjoub. While Mahjoub’s early novels explored questions of exile and identity, his recent novels have sought to understand the hybrid history and making of European identity and its encounters with others, especially Arabs. As Chapter 9 shows, Travelling with Djinns, a road novel following its narrator’s journeying from Denmark to Spain in an old Peugeot, treats Europe and Europeanness as transnational constructs and shows how the effects of global migration are transforming homogeneous nation-states and dominant views of their ­history. In this novel the migrant identities, fluctuating between Europe and other spaces, are shown to be central to the making of European identity. To contribute to debates concerning its formation and characteristics, Travelling with Djinns relies on a migrant narrator, the Sudanese-born and British-educated 1 Graham Huggan, “Perspectives on Postcolonial Europe”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, XLIV/3 (2008), 243. 2 Schulze-Engler, 669–70.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_012

156

Introduction to Part 3

journalist Yasin Zahir, who shows the historical formation of Europeanness in his comments on cultural memory, including canonical European literature and historical sites and events. Rather than a romanticization, migrant identity emerges as a site of critical intervention forcing us to address the historical and hybridized construction of European identity. In so doing, it shows the extent to which Europeanness is always transforming and constantly negotiated owing to global and intra-European migration. The novel is rooted in the discourses and effects of globalization, as can be seen in its many references to Euro-American cinema and contemporary consumer culture that shape the lives and dreams of people worldwide. Chapter 10 discusses the role of travel in Jamal Mahjoub’s 2006 novel The Drift Latitudes where he continues his exploration of the contemporary and historical encounters between Europeans and their Others, problematizes issues of belonging, history, and identity, and also brings in a transatlantic framework. By telling the stories of the German refugee Ernst Frager and his two British families, Mahjoub’s novel is shown to utilize the tropes of transnational travel and migration to present a critique of discourses of purity and nationalism. Through its uncovering of silenced family narratives, the novel ­hybridizes British and European identities and underlines the need to remember the stories of ordinary people omitted from the official histories. As the novel’s supposedly British families appear to possess transnational links with Sudan, Germany, and the Caribbean, the novel reconstructs European identity as transnational and in need of historical reassessment. As a further contribution to the importance of hybrid identity, the story of black cultural identity and its transatlantic construction in post-Second World War Liverpool is told in tandem with the importance of black music as a means of constructing black diasporic identity. Music and memory are key issues addressed in the chapter. Chapter 11 examines the ways in which contemporary globalization affects the construction of European identities by presenting an analysis of Alentejo Blue (2006), the second novel by Monica Ali. On the basis of the work of the historian James Clifford and such contemporary sociologists of globalization as Ulrich Beck and Saskia Sassen, it is argued that this novel examines, through narratives of travel and stay, the problematics of migration and the transforming meanings of centre and periphery. The chapter shows that rather than simply representing globalization as threatening the alleged purity and tradition of a rural Portuguese village with a premodern lifestyle, Alentejo Blue, read in a transnational framework, uncovers silenced histories of mobility and links its village with the wider world in order to counter dominant views of cultural contact and unilateral globalization. Rather than local and peripheral, its

Introduction To Part 3

157

­Portugal is translocal and participates in various European and global networks. In so doing, it also shows how all identities, including those in European peripheries, are mobile and multiply constructed in relation to the global. Chapter 12 claims that In the Kitchen (2009), the third novel by Monica Ali, continues the discussion of the transformation of Britishness informing Ali’s earlier work since the publication of her acclaimed first novel Brick Lane in 2003. As the novel imagines a transforming Britain affected by contemporary global flows and various actors such as cross-cultural kitchen workers, multinational companies, human trafficking, and an illegal immigrant workforce, it recasts the role of national identity and shows how its protagonist’s personal crisis is also an ethical one that is linked with the dilemmas of contemporary globalization. Read in the context of the views of the cultural theorists Homi K. Bhabha and Paul Gilroy, the novel argues for the urgency to develop a new hybrid form of Britishness in the era of globalization. The transformation of its protagonist Gabriel Lightfoot, told as a katabatic narrative, is indicative of a new and ethically informed form of Britishness promoted by Ali.

chapter 9

Transnational Europe in Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns The fictions of the Sudanese British author Jamal Mahjoub explore contemporary and historical encounters between Europeans, Arabs, and their descendants, problematizing issues of belonging, history, and identity. While Mahjoub’s early novels tended to emphasize questions of exile in a nearly existentialist manner, his more recent narratives engage with contemporary concerns and seek to construct a historical understanding of the hybrid roots and routes of modern European identity and its many-layered trajectories. ­Whereas The Carrier opens up a new perspective onto the constitution of E ­ uropean modernity through its Arab protagonist’s fate in seventeenth-century Europe, Travelling with Djinns, a 2003 road novel following its main character and narrator Yasin Zahir’s journeying from Denmark to Spain in an old Peugeot with his son, places Europeanness in a transnational framework by showing the presence of global migration in allegedly homogeneous nation-states. The novel provides alternative perspectives onto European pasts in order to challenge established views of Europe and its relationship to non-European cultures. The often forgotten intertwinement of Europe and its Others, Arabs in particular, is at the heart of Mahjoub’s body of fiction, including Travelling with Djinns. Dealing with both the impact of colonialist practices in non-European spaces and the resulting postcolonial questions of transculturation and identity, his novels challenge established stereotypes and narratives that emphasize the alleged superiority and purity of Europeanness. In so doing Mahjoub is writing against the discursive practices of Eurocentric orientalisms, whose representations of Arabs, in particular, have been invariably negative and denigrating. According to the now classic view presented by Edward Said in Orientalism, Western knowledge of the Orient has functioned as a means of legitimating Western cultural and political dominance.1 Presuming to present authoritative views, Orientalism claimed that the non-Westerners are decayed and unable to govern themselves. Writing of the French philologist Ernest Renan’s view of the Semitic languages, Said describes Renan’s findings in the

1 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995 [1978].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_013

Transnational Europe In Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling With Djinns

159

following way: “he is … proving that his Oriental languages, the Semitic languages, are inorganic, arrested, totally ossified, incapable of self-regeneration”.2 What Said suggests, then, is that Orientalism is a primarily European project that seeks to distinguish an allegedly superior culture from its Others: Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more sceptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter.3 Various Others have been particularly important for the development of modern national identities, as my reading of Mahjoub’s novel will show. Stuart Hall has described their role with particular reference to the making of Englishness: “To be English is know yourself in relation to the French, and the hotblooded Mediterraneans, and the passionate, traumatized Russian soul. You go around the entire globe: when you know what everybody else is, then you are what they are not”.4 By extension, Europeanness can be understood as a similar and allegedly unified narrative where the intra-European national difference is subservient to the imagining of the various internal and external Others threatening the unity of Europe and its shared traditions. For instance, as Iver B. Neumann suggests, such Others have included, at different points in history, Moors, Saracens, Turks, and Russians – usually Europe’s “­geographically immediate Eastern others”.5 To paraphrase the view of Benedict Anderson, a view telling of Europe being under threat constructs it as an imagined community: while not without “actual inequality and exploitation”, it argues to offer

2 Said, Orientalism, 145. 3 Said, Orientalism, 7. 4 Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity”, in Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King, London: Macmillan, 1991, 21. 5 Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: The “East” in European Identity Formation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 15.

160

chapter 9

a shared mission based on “a deep, horizontal comradeship”.6 Since in reality the sheer multiplicity of cultural traditions in Europe and their complex historical connections and development do not support such a view, the idea of European superiority and unity can be defined as a foundational fiction, to use a term coined by Homi K. Bhabha. The function of foundational fictions is, in the view of Bhabha, to tell a preferred story of the formation of a nation – or any imagined community – in a particular way: in such narratives “the origins of national traditions turn out to be as much acts of affiliation and establishment as they are moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion, and cultural contestation”.7 Yet such narratives are always constructions seeking to homogenize and harmonize the communities in question, and have been challenged through counter-discursive narratives that offer alternative stories of the nation’s – or Europe’s – past and identity in the manner of Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns. In this sense some narratives of the making of Europeanness and European identity are ways of constructing a story of Europe in crisis. In such a narrative the identity of Europe resting on the significance of its past is under threat, and what is in fact threatened is a tradition allegedly shared by all Europeans. As Ash Amin puts it, this idea rests on four pillars or “myths of origin”: The prevailing Idea of Europe is based on four myths of origin: first, the supremacy of a legal system based on Roman law; second, an ethos of social solidarity and common understanding based on Christian piety and humanism; third, a democratic order rooted in recognition of the rights and freedoms of the individual; and, fourth, a universalism based on Reason and other Enlightenment principles of cosmopolitan belonging. These have been seen as the defining cultural traits of the old continent, pitched against, at different times, tribal “barbarism,” religious society, communist or communalist organization, and individualism.8 This vision of a shared tradition has generated both positive and negative effects. While it has boosted a sense of community in Europe as indicated in the European Union and its promotion of a European identity surpassing national 6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Origins of Nationalism, rev. ed., London: Verso, 1991 [1983], 7. 7 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, London: Routledge, 1990, 5. 8 Ash Amin, “Multi-Ethnicity and the Idea of Europe”, Theory, Culture and Society, XXI/2 (2004), 2.

Transnational Europe In Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling With Djinns

161

identifications,9 its emphasis on the exceptionalism of Europe may become problematic and promote a view telling of the continent’s alleged superiority. Linked with the underside of the Enlightenment, such a view is not unconnected with the legacy of European colonization and its explicitly articulated civilizing mission. Such an understanding, articulated strongly in the discourses of European colonialism and the views of contemporary right-wing political movements in Europe, is a narrative of exclusion on the basis of racial and ethnic identity. Historically it has culminated in the expulsion of peoples considered undesired in European spaces, including, for instance, Jews, Arabs, and Turks, not to mention the lack of civic rights amidst Europe’s indigenous and mobile ethnicities such as the Sami and the Roma. A vision emphasizing the superiority of the European tradition has for a long time dominated Europe’s understanding of its Others by creating and maintaining hierarchies and dichotomies. If Europe is understood as a civilization in the sense promoted in the famous thesis on “The Clash of Civilizations?” coined by the historian Samuel P. Huntington, its values are bound to conflict with those of other civilizations.10 Writing of Muslims in Europe in particular, Talal Asad pays attention to the ways in which the media portray Bosnian Muslims: “they may be in Europe but are not of it”.11 In other words, in discourses constructing Europe as a civilization Muslims are claimed to be unable to become Europeans: “It is precisely because Muslims are external to the [Christian] essence of Europe that ‘coexistence’ can be envisaged between ‘us’ and ‘them’”.12 This general view is what Mahjoub writes against. When Leo asks “Who were the Saracens?”, Yasin answers: “Well, they were… us”.13 While recognizing the Othering implicit in the term, the novel argues for a need to reassess Eurocentric histories to negotiate a new form of European identity. In other words, by incorporating other histories and such figures as the late nineteenth-century Sudanese religious leader Mahdi into the narrative, Mahjoub’s novel problematizes traditional historical narratives (both European and non-European) and the forms of identity they have constructed. Yet, it may be suggested, the uncovering of historical identities does not merely criticize Europe’s colonialist and racialist constitution 9

See, for example, Emanuele Castano, “European Identity: A Social-Psychological Perspective”, in Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the eu, eds Richard Herrmann, Thomas Risse, and Marilynn B. Brewer, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, 40–58. 10 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations”, Foreign Affairs, LXXII/3 (1993), 22–49. 11 Talal Asad, “Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 213; emphasis original. 12 Ibid., 213. 13 Mahjoub, Travelling, 58.

162

chapter 9

but shows the transculturation characterizing its past. The power of polarized views such as Huntington’s is evident in the notion of fortress Europe, a metaphor that constructs Europe as a closed entity in the need of defending itself against hordes of foreign invaders. To counter views suggesting that Europe should be apart from the rest of the world, however, a different, more inclusive conception of European identity has been articulated. Such a recasting of European identity has been thought to be crucial should the European Union enjoy the support of various national and regional communities, and be able to accommodate the increasing presence of diasporic and transnational communities inhabiting Europe. While their status as Europeans is often marginal, it is these communities, whose cultures are described by Stuart Hall as the “unintended effects” of globalization,14 that are able to display processes of transculturation and cultural hybridity. As new European literatures and other modes of cultural expression from Finnish-language reggae music to Turkish German cinema emerge as results of migration and cultural interchange, they contribute to more than their ­respective national cultures: they remap Europe in new ways and destabilize the allegedly pure categories of national and European identity. Writing of the recent emergence of multicultural and diasporic writing all over the continent, Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla suggest that the “European borderline is now being redefined by voices which once were excluded or marginalized from its main body”.15 It is here, in the “interstices” between Europe and its Others,16 that the novels of Jamal Mahjoub can be located. As stories of estrangement from pure traditions, his fictions delve into the dilemmas haunting the subject experiencing the effects of migration. While foregrounding estrangement and pain as results of such transitions, they also posit the border as a site where the subject may reconstruct itself anew and benefit from the experience of liminality. In the terms of Homi K. Bhabha, this is the liminal space of in-betweenness where the hybrid subject – such as many of Mahjoub’s characters – is constructed.17 And what such subjects generate is what Azade Seyhan defines as transnational literature, 14

Stuart Hall, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question”, in Un/Settled Multiculturalism: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse, London: Zed Books, 2000, 216. 15 Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla, “Introduction”, in Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, eds Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela ­Merolla, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, 6. 16 Bhabha, The Location, 2. 17 Ibid., 37.

Transnational Europe In Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling With Djinns

163

a genre of writing that operates outside the national canon, addresses issues facing deterritorialized cultures, and speaks for those in what I call “paranational” communities and alliances. These are communities that exist within national borders or alongside the citizens of the host country but remain culturally and linguistically distanced from them and, in some instances, are estranged from the home and the host culture.18 It is the aim of this chapter to address the various modes of interchange between the two cultures that Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns explores by looking at questions of exile and hybridity in a historical context. In my reading of Travelling with Djinns, I will pay particular attention to its representation of Europe as a potential home. In addition, by addressing the effects of global migration, my reading of the novel seeks to show that the contemporary European space is transnational and populated by several communities that were formerly barred from entering it.

Contemporary European Migrants in Travelling with Djinns

Exploring the effects of exile and migration on the construction of contemporary European identity, Travelling with Djinns takes further Mahjoub’s desire to probe of Europeanness. In this novel – as also in the more recent The Drift Latitudes that will be addressed in the following chapter – the migrant identities which formerly fluctuated between Europe and other spaces are now shown to be central to the making of European identity. To contribute to debates concerning the characteristics of such an identity, Travelling with Djinns addresses the constitution of Europeanness by using a migrant narrator, the Sudaneseborn and British-educated journalist Yasin Zahir, who comments on various markers of cultural memory, including the canon of European literature and a range of historical sites and events. For Mahjoub, migrant identity is not a mere romanticization: it is a site of critical intervention that urges us to address the historical and hybridized construction of European identity and shows how Europeanness is negotiated amidst more global flows of migration. While the novel is deeply embedded in discourses and effects of globalization, as is evident in its references to Euro-American cinema and contemporary consumer culture shaping the lives and dreams of people all over the world, it pays attention to the historical formation of European identities. 18

Seyhan, 10.

164

chapter 9

The novel explores questions of exile and migration from a perspective that seeks to problematize contemporary Western discourses on nation, identity, and belonging. These issues are most prominent in the protagonist Yasin, whose marriage to the Danish Ellen is shown to be failing. Seeking to escape from the stressful situation, in a condition complicated by the traumas related to the death of his parents and the rifts between his siblings, the djinns of the title that follow him wherever he goes, Yasin leaves Ellen’s family home after a row, takes his young son, and sets off in an old car. Yet his wanderings are more than personal: they can be seen as ways of discussing migration in contemporary Europe. Moving from one nation-state to another, first from Denmark to Germany and then from France to Spain, Yasin reveals his sense of being merely a trespasser in Europe, “with the mental framework of a transient, an outsider, not seeing myself anywhere”.19 His outsider status is emphasized with reference to racial difference: upon entering Germany, his car is searched more closely than those of others, regardless of European agreements the border guards claim not to know about.20 While such a European space appears to be dominated by forms of racism and xenophobia and thus provides few possibilities for identification, it cannot exist without its migrant Others, especially Africans. Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira has indeed proposed that the novel can be read in the context of Afro-European literature.21 As examples of contemporary migration, the novel includes such characters as Haya, the West Saharan prostitute who becomes one of the travellers for a short period, and the African migrants selling “compact discs and sunglasses” in front of the Louvre.22 As the novel claims, these young men “from places like Dakar and Conakry, from Lomé, Abidjan and Bamako” have no full access to the memorials of the European (colonialist) cultural tradition but are doomed to remain outside: “Paying to stand and gaze at old paintings comes low on the list of priorities when you are trying to eke out a living from the pavements”.23 This image of African refugees turning their back on the Louvre and selling toy cars made of sardine tins furthers the novel’s critique of the inequalities of neocolonialist capitalism. The promise of 19 Mahjoub, Travelling, 22–23. 20 See ibid., 10. 21 Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira, “A Straight Elliptical Wobble: Afro-European Transculturalism and Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns”, in Border-Crossings: Narrative and ­Demarcation in Postcolonial Literatures and Media, eds Russell West-Pavlov, Justus ­Makokha, and Jennifer Wawrzinek, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2012, 193. 22 Mahjoub, Travelling, 105. 23 Ibid., 105.

Transnational Europe In Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling With Djinns

165

Europe, it suggests, is not only economic, one “of a better life”: for many, including Yasin, it is a fantasy generated by popular media, a “Technicolor dream”.24 Regardless of its critique of Europe’s inability to deal with increased migration, the novel does not promote a simple thesis of blind acceptance of difference peculiar to some forms of cultural relativism. This is most evident in its representation of the role of Islam in the life of the narrator’s sister Yasmina and her husband Umar, the son of a major businessman. After her marriage Yasmina becomes a devout Muslim, whose beliefs become stronger upon the family’s relocation to Britain. When describing their family, the novel is embedded in debates about isolationism, paranoia, and anti-Western sentiment. Living in a housing estate near Canterbury, Kent, their life is described as being conducted in “a hermetically sealed microcosm to deflect the dilemmas of post-national, post-industrial existence; how to have your Squeezy Cheez Rings and frozen Macaroni Surprise! without becoming part of the society that produced them”.25 Even though they refuse to accept the views of Western media – there are no newspapers in the house apart from the free local paper entering the apartment through the letterbox, and the tv set is turned off during all current affairs broadcasts – their attempt to deny its existence is ambiguous. While enjoying the consumerism of Western modernity, they refuse its values and views and prefer alternative modes of belief and knowledge, combining religion and internet-based conspiracy theories. The novel describes their response to the moral decay they find evident in Western lifestyle by using diction that reverses the idea of Fortress Europe: So they dug themselves in deep. They lived with the curtains drawn all day. They built a wall of Prawn Flavoured Puffs and Toastypops around them and, literally, began to pray. Like modern-day Puritans terrified of the freedom they found in the New World, they needed to compensate, to make up for the lack of boundaries by hardening their own peripheral delineations. They were building a fort.26 The effect of the representation of Yasmina and Umar is not merely to explore the dangers of ghettoization and marginalization in contemporary Britain. As the novel stresses their increasing distance from the rest of their secular ­family, it is argued that religion functions as a newly found safe haven for them and provides them with transnational identities. The increasing importance of 24 25 26

Ibid., 70. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 280.

166

chapter 9

r­ eligion is clearly presented in the scene telling of Yasin’s father’s funeral, which is taken over by the funeral helpers from Umar’s mosque. “[T]he common men, the hordes, the salt of the Muslim earth, bulky and well fed, with curly beards and woolly glares, their peasant simpleness part of their essential credentials” are contrasted with Dad’s old friends, “the well-heeled lot Dad had known in Bayswater and Edgware Road, the exiled journalists from Baghdad and Damascus, the poets from Lebanon”.27 In this episode the novel pits religious bigotry against pluralism, and ironically shows how the representatives of the former oversee and desire to control the funeral of an Arab liberal who has been jailed for his attempts to promote plurality, democracy, and freedom of speech. As an old friend of his attempts to recite the Qur’an, the “­ well-padded men in Doc Marten boots and turbans”28 object and force the elderly literature professor away, claiming that the Qur’an is “for the living” – “Nobody else had ever heard this before”.29 When pressed, Umar defends his friends by saying that “[t]hey only mean it out of respect”, to which Yasin responds: “How about showing respect for his friends?”30 In contrasting the choices of the siblings with each other – religious Yasmina, wannabe rock star-cum-drug dealer Muk, and the wandering Arab ­Yasin – the novel distinguishes between an apparently false desire to pin down and fix one’s identity and an understanding promoting its mobile and changing character. Yasin identifies himself with the latter, as is evident in the Prologue of the novel: “I sometimes think I envy those people who know where they belong; writers who have a language and a history that is granted them with no catches, no hooks”.31 Rather than desiring fixedness, Yasin sees himself as a nomad, a constant traveller who lives in the space of in-betweenness, not in a geographically fixed home. Comparing himself to the protagonist of Thomas Berger’s novel, Little Big Man, who shuffles between Western and Native American cultures,32 Yasin’s identity is that of a migrant and a nomad, a trespasser in the world of nation-states: I belong to that nomad tribe, the great unwashed, those people born in the joins between continental shelves, in the unclaimed interstices between time zones, strung across latitudes. A tribe of no fixed locus, the 27 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 325. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 147.

Transnational Europe In Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling With Djinns

167

homeless, the stateless. I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to. My language is a bastard tongue of necessity, improvisation, bad grammar and continual misunderstandings … My nation is a random list of places on the map that I have passed through, upon which I have no claim. Some might say that I have been assimilated, but they would be wrong. Others would say I am alienated and ought to be better integrated by now, but that too would be to miss the point. This is the way of things.33 Rather than praising nomadism as a romanticized choice as promoted in postcolonial and postmodernist discourses, this passage supports an understanding of migrant identity as a continuous process peculiar to the diasporic experience. The ideas of homelessness and statelessness evoked pinpoint the migrant’s transnational and diasporic identity that differs from Yasmina’s attempt to locate herself in a community of believers claiming to possess the truth. For Yasin, identity is a process, and the genre of the road novel aims towards a change as depicted in the final chapters of the novel. Such a transformation is hinted at in the last sentences of the Prologue that evoke metaphors of movement and mobility: There was always time later, further on, up ahead, round the next bend. And that’s how most of us go through life, until something comes along to change that. And in my case it wasn’t so much a what as a who.34 This idea of transformation is in the novel linked to the notion of reconciliation: Yasin needs to link himself to his son and brother. The notion of constant movement is emphasized with the help of intertextuality to the extent that Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira describes the novel as “a transcultural artefact”.35 The key narrative explicitly employed is the myth of the Flying Dutchman telling of a captain doomed to roam the oceans until he meets a woman who is willing to die for him. To pinpoint the global mobility of culture, however, the novel replaces Wagner’s version with the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, starring Ava Gardner and filmed in Spain in the coastal town of Blanes (though renamed as Esperanza in the film) where Yasin’s brother Muk lives. As a further way of uncovering cultural contacts between the East and 33 34 35

Ibid., 4–5. Ibid., 5. Traseira, “A Straight Elliptical Wobble”, 197.

168

chapter 9

the West, the film quotes the poetry of Omar Khayyám,36 linking not only cultural traditions but also the high and the popular. The novel seeks to hybridize the allegedly uniform and Eurocentric cultural tradition or civilization by revising it historically. Here the role of Yasin is important: it is the task of this racialized stranger to reconstruct Europeanness by excavating and reconstituting the aesthetic and cultural histories and traditions once thought to be in the sole possession of “Europeans” – although he is literally cut off from Europe owing to his failed marriage with the Danish E ­ llen. In so doing, he shows the traces that other cultures have left in Europeanness, both synchronically and diachronically, and unveils its transnational and transcultural character. In this sense the novel displays similar processes as such other forms of minority writing ranging from Turkish German to ethnic American narratives that are increasingly examined in their global ­contexts.37 As Seyhan suggests, they “represent a conscious effort to transmit a linguistic and cultural heritage that is articulated through acts of personal and collective memory. In this way, writers become chroniclers of the histories of the displaced whose stories will otherwise go unrecorded”.38 It is through an examination of the historical process of global migration and displacement that we can understand why Yasin insists on the fact that his son has to learn to know what Europe is. While this may appear as an excuse for driving down South, and is also ironic owing to European racism and xenophobia, it is understandable in the context of revising the alleged histories of Europe and its role in colonialism. As he puts it: “I want him to learn about this place, this continent where so much of our fate has been forged, one way or another. Love or loathe it he would have to learn to deal with it, this thing we call Europe”.39 This reconstruction of European identity and realizing its historical formation is what various cultural critics from Jacques Derrida to Julia Kristeva have addressed in discussions of strangers, hospitality, and mutual recognition. If we all are strangers and migrants in this continent of shifting boundaries, Europeanness is constituted of difference rather than of unity. The aim of such a reconstitution of Europe is, as Ash Amin puts it, a political one in that

36 37

See Mahjoub, Travelling, 308. See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004”, American Quarterly, lvii (2005), 17–57; Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. 38 Seyhan, 12. 39 Mahjoub, Travelling, 22.

Transnational Europe In Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling With Djinns

169

in a multi-ethnic and multicultural Europe, a failure to give open publicity to the principle of empathy with the stranger, and all that it represents in shaping identities as well as ensuring cultural change, will play into the hands of ethno-nationalists and xenophobes … interested in perpetuating the fiction of homeland cultural identities in Europe.40 The reference to the role that Europe has played in the colonization of African spaces is central to Mahjoub’s novel: to understand Europe is to understand the intertwined histories between it and its Others and to recognize the various cultural and historical layers of Europe that are often forgotten and to see it as a transcultural construct. As Yasin puts it in a passage contrasting unrecorded histories and those written by colonizers: “My history is not given, but has to be taken, reclaimed, piece by solitary piece, snatched from among the pillars of centuries, the shelves of ivory scholarship. My flimsy words set against those lumbering tomes bound in leather and written in blood”.41 He also distinguishes between the two forms of historical knowledge available in and through colonial education and tells the reader how he and other schoolchildren learnt that “history consisted of foreign words like Verdun and the Treaty of Versailles, Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Dien Bien Phu”.42 While similar ideas of the limited role of small nations in the histories of Empire(s) have been presented in other postcolonial novels such as Caryl Phillips’ A State of Independence (1986),43 Mahjoub’s novel explicitly inserts other histories and historical figures such as Attila the Hun in Europe’s story of itself. The effect is that Europe’s claims for a historical sense of difference lose their basis: as the Other is a part of the Self, Europe’s hybrid character is revealed. Simultaneously, by unveiling the link between the historical Saracens and Moors on the one hand, and the contemporary Arabs and Muslims on the other, the novel seeks to call attention to the historical constitution of Arab identities. As Travelling with Djinns reveals the mutual dependence of Europe and its Others, it shows the traces left by cultural contacts and mixing: no identity is pure or natural. To emphasize such an idea, the novel uses the notion of mobility in an interesting way. While for many people migrants and refugees are

40 Amin, 4. 41 Mahjoub, Travelling, 5. 42 Ibid., 62. 43 See Kenneth Parker, “‘Black British’ Writers: (Very) Cross Currents in ‘British’ Culture”, in Postcolonialism and Cultural Resistance, eds Jopi Nyman and John A. Stotesbury, Joensuu: University of Joensuu, 1999, 24–38; Nyman, Home, 37–56.

170

chapter 9

contemporary phenomena, the novel suggests that they are a further link in a long chain of human mobility that has been essential to the making of Europe: From the earliest neolithic wanderers to the Mongol hordes, from the Huguenots to the Calvinists, pilgrims, refugees, gypsies. It is a history of railway tracks and roads. A history of transgression, of frontiers and border lines being crossed and recrossed. The Romans, the Visigoths, the Jews, Bosnians, Albanians, Kosovans, the blind, the sick, the old, the crippled. These are the people upon whose sacrifice the history of Europe is written, and our collective history is written in the course of those migrations.44 As a result, the novel shows that the exclusive character of Europeanness as a form of identity is questioned, as also Traseira suggests.45 Mahjoub’s novel seems to promote the recognition of the multiplicity of Europeans as it refuses to locate European identity in a shared cultural tradition and allegedly common values – the proponents of the latter view are easily caught in the trap of polarizations and debates seeking to determine who is not European and who are Europe’s Others. As Stefania Panebianco puts it: “In an era of globalization and fragmentation, the only way to cope with the clash of identities is to develop and spread a broader concept of European identity”.46 For Mahjoub, such a European identity appears to outweigh the more parochial sense of national identity preferred by border-patrolling nation-states. The historical project of defining Europeanness is taken further in allusions and discussions of artists and writers, both Western and non-Western, who enter from the margins to play a role in the redefinition of identity. In addition to Bertolt Brecht, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, and Alexandre Dumas, the most important voice mentioned belongs to the exiled Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. In a passage directed at the reader of story, Yasin suggests that writers such as Roth are able to provide the link between the present and the past, “connecting your life with that of the author, with another past, that other past which is not yours”.47 Read in the context of Yasin’s critique of colonial education and teaching of history, this suggests that in Roth’s narrative different­ 44 Mahjoub, Travelling, 173. 45 Traseira, “A Straight Elliptical Wobble”, 198. 46 Stefania Panebianco, “European Citizenship and European Identity: From Treaty Provisions to Public Opinion Attitudes”, in Who Are the Europeans Now?, ed. Edward MoxonBrowne, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 18. 47 Mahjoub, Travelling, 301.

Transnational Europe In Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling With Djinns

171

experiences of marginalization are able to recognize each other and “the other past” becomes accessible. Like Yasin, Roth is represented as an eternal wanderer who cannot be accommodated into the dominant narratives of his own time and place, a post-First World War Europe divided by ethnic and national hatred. As Yasin describes Roth’s vision presented in his description of Lyons, France, based on his travels in southern France in 1925: In the scene of a group of silk workers relaxing by the banks of the Rhône in Lyon, he saw a reflection of Europe’s long history made flesh. In the faces of the slim, dark women working in the factories he saw the features of the Roman legionaries who had arrived in these parts two thousand years earlier. He saw the living, breathing perpetuation of something he had imagined lost for ever. Evidence of a continuity to which he felt he belonged, in which there was no distinction made, there were no exclusions, banishments, exiles. A continuity from which, as a Jew, he was being expelled.48 While Yasin’s way of linking himself with Roth the writer makes the novel a metanarrative on the importance of writing and storytelling,49 its effects are more than psychological and artistic as they provide a further transnational and historical linkage between two of Europe’s others, the Arab and the Jew. In the context of the novel’s project of excavating European cultural history, this transnational coalition shows the role and importance of these – and other – minorities in the making of the continent and reveals its hybrid heritage. Conclusion Like the other novels by Mahjoub, Travelling with Djinns, as this chapter has shown, is involved in an ethico-political project of historicizing cultural encounters. They show that the contemporary is deeply rooted in past histories, and that the desired self-image promoted in today’s West is based on an exclusion of its Others and a suppression of unwelcome pasts. What the progression of his narratives reveals is that modern European identity is not monolithic but consists of various different strands. Rather than primordial and stable, it is changing and drifting, both synchronically and diachronically. The excavation­ 48 49

Ibid., 302. Cf. Joseph Roth, The White Cities: Reports from France 1925–39, trans. with an Introduction by Michael Hofmann, London: Granta, 2004, 77–84. See Mahjoub, Travelling, 302.

172

chapter 9

of histories, a metaphor that is particularly important in his The Carrier, comes to play an increasingly more central role in Mahjoub’s novels. By embedding personal narratives in the web of intercultural exchange, emphatically present in Travelling with Djinns and its mapping of European spaces, his fictions reveal the interdependence of Europe and its Others and show how their histories and identities are intertwined.

chapter 10

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes As the previous chapter shows, Mahjoub’s narratives seek construct a historical understanding of the hybrid roots and routes of modern European identity and its many-layered history. The issue of mobility as a characteristic of postcolonial European identity is central to The Drift Latitudes published in 2006.1 Spanning various phases and places in the history of twentieth-century Europe, this narrative focuses on the mysterious German refugee Ernst Frager, a machinist, inventor, and believer in technology, and the lives of his two daughters who do not know each other: while Rachel marries a Sudanese man and leaves Britain, Liverpool-born Jade, the daughter of Ernst Frager and the West Indian Miranda, searches for a sense of identity in contemporary Britain. Through Frager’s life, or lives, in Germany and his two families in Britain, the novel weaves human fates in various countries with each other and evokes a variety of cultural memories and silenced pasts. In this chapter I discuss the intertwined discourses of history, travel, and home as portrayed in The Drift Latitudes. I argue that the novel problematizes simplified understandings of globalization and migrant hybridity by showing that travel and migration are not merely features of globalized late modernity but characterize European identities historically. As a sign of this, the thematics of travel and migration are supported in the novel by locating the characters in transcultural frameworks such as the emerging transatlantic culture of jazz and the everyday mobility of various ordinary border-crossers. What the novel foregrounds is the notion of memory and the related need to tell the stories of those whom conventional history forgets, including refugees and migrants. Through its treatment of the various (and forgotten) pasts of migrants, it shows how European identities are in constant flux and how seemingly distant people and places, such as Liverpool and Sudan, are invisibly linked through silenced family connections, creating further imagined communities. In so doing the novel uncovers alternative accounts of European pasts, transforming the cultural memory of the continent. The concerns of The Drift Latitudes appear to continue, but also transform, what several critics have seen as central issues in Mahjoub’s earlier 1 Jamal Mahjoub, The Drift Latitudes, London: Chatto and Windus, 2006.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_014

174

chapter 10

novels usually characterized by the cross-cultural movement of his migrant protagonists. For example, Tina Steiner’s reading of the novels Wings of Dust (1994) and The Carrier emphasizes the role of translation and translators, characters who dwell in the space(s) between two cultures, as a way of producing new forms of knowledge.2 While such knowledge may be considered subversive by authorities, Mahjoub’s insistence on its dissemination, as seen in The Carrier in Rashid’s journeying to seventeenth-century Europe to learn more about the era’s great invention, the telescope, emphasizes transnational mobility.3 Mahjoub, in other words, appears to believe in the power of cultural hybridity or, as put by Steiner, in the fact that the “cross-pollination of Western and African/Islamic knowledges can be beneficial”.4 Other readings of Mahjoub’s fiction emphasize similar themes. Theo D’haen and I have separately discussed The Carrier’s images of Europe. While D’haen suggests that the novel appropriates the European genres of travel writing and the novel, and by challenging their stereotypical modes of representation it reconstructs Europe’s marginalized Others as active participants in modernity,5 my own reading of the novel locates it in the critical framework of hybridity and emphasizes the ways in which it challenges the nationalist and xenophobic discourses characterizing the relationship between the “host” and the “immigrant” in European nation-states.6 In Sten Pultz Moslund’s view, however, the novel’s central trope of telescope and the telescopic gaze resists traditional understandings of the migrants’ special position providing them with a particular “stereoscopic” or “double vision”.7 What Moslund argues is that the telescope, as an instrument based on lenses and the manipulation of vision, shows that all seeing, including that by the migrant, is discursively positioned, a finding that challenges the assumptions of what he refers to as dominant cosmopolitan hybridity discourse and argues for the recognition of multiple hybridities.8

2 Steiner, Translated, 67. 3 Jamal Mahjoub, The Carrier, London: Phoenix House, 1998. 4 Ibid., 79. 5 Theo D’haen, “Stranger in a Strange Land: Jamal Mahjoub’s The Carrier”, in Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, eds Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, 134. 6 Nyman, Home, 57–77. 7 Sten Pultz Moslund, “Dansk identitet i Jamal Mahjoub’s The Carrier: Migrantheltens hybridiserende blik”, Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, XXX/2 (2009), 189; see also Moslund, Migration. 8 Moslund, “Dansk”, 190–91.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes



175

Approaching Home – Asking for Directions

Mahjoub’s works, from The Carrier to The Drift Latitudes, like many other contemporary narratives of diaspora, rely on the tropes of travel and home to address questions of identity and its transformation. Home, as several scholars have shown, plays a major role in diasporic literatures, but its meaning has transformed from a secure site of being into a mobile and travelling concept. As Susheila Nasta puts it in her Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain: “Home, it has been said, is not necessarily where one belongs but the place where one starts from”.9 In the era of globalized modernity, this transforming role of home is particularly important. Rosemary Marangoly George has suggested that twentieth-century migrant writers explore the connection between identity and a place-based definition of home but eventually refuse to finalize such a closure: “Home in the immigrant genre is a fiction that one can move beyond or recreate at will. The association between an adequate self and a place to call home is held up to scrutiny and then let go”.10 In other words, the identity of the migrant is constructed through the experience of travel. Similarly, Rosemarie Buikema’s analysis of the writings of the Moroccan-Dutch author Abdelkader Benari suggests that the narrative critique of home does not emphasize a place; rather, the desire to reconstruct home is a way of coping with the loss of stories, cultural memories, and myths. What is created is a new sense of “homesickness”: “Homesickness, the desire for a home … is a longing to come home to the magic of stories, a longing for the feeling of community that emerges through the actual telling”.11 This suggests that postcolonial narratives of diaspora and migration rearticulate the notion of home and severe its links with a mythical geographical homeland. Rather, diasporic identity as “homesickness” is based on what the theorist Avtar Brah refers to as “homing desire” and defines as a way of negotiating between “the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ …, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins”.12 In Brah’s view, the notion of “homing desire” is not necessarily an attempt to re-enter 9 10 11

12

Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain, London: Routledge, 2002, 1; emphasis original. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and TwentiethCentury Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 200. Rosemarie Buikema, “‘A Poetics of Home’: On Narrative Voice and the Deconstruction of Home in Migrant Literature”, in Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, eds Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, 184. Brah, 192–93; emphasis original.

176

chapter 10

the point of departure, but it may be brought to life through participation in a shared culture.13 As I argue, it is this sense of home as a shared site of belonging that Mahjoub’s novel promotes through its representation of diasporic lives. Home, in other words, is not a static and unchanging site or a nostalgic retreat into the past. Nikos Papastergiadis has emphasized the ambiguous role of home in modernity: “The search for home is neither a nostalgic retreat to a familiar past nor a defensive reaction against the brutalities of the present. The meaning of home is now found in the future-oriented projects of constructing a sense of belonging in a context of change”.14 In the context of diasporic literature this “homing desire”, as Susheila Nasta suggests, also involves attempts to reconstruct home in other spaces and can be defined as “a desire to reinvent and rewrite home as much as a desire to come to terms with an exile from it. Diaspora is therefore as much settlement as displacement”.15 In my view, this indicates that fictions of diaspora are not mere nostalgic lamentations but actively redefine the migrant’s sense of self and home. Travel, then, is not opposed to home but is a means of seeking belonging and a way of emphasizing the multiple historical and contemporary dis/locations of the migrant subject. In other words, diasporic narratives of travel seek to relocate and reinscribe belonging in a changing world. The issues outlined above are particularly relevant for Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes. All of its three different narratives – those of Ernst Frager and his life, Jade’s search for her identity, and Rachel’s letters from Sudan to her half-sister – show how home is not bound to a place and that the experience of diaspora characterizes the identities represented in the novel. This search for identity and belonging is emphatically present in the novel, as seen in Jade’s search in particular, and its key characters are not infrequently shown to reflect on their life and its different phases. For example, Rachel’s letters tell of the various turns of her family life in Khartoum, her son’s death and husband’s estrangement, but also reveal how she reconstructs her identity by participating in a healing ritual with a group of Sudanese women.16 Similarly, Ernst and Jade refer explicitly to moments changing the direction of their life. While Jade, forced to face the ageing of her mother Miranda (whose name links the novel with Shakespeare’s The Tempest [1611]) and the changing situation at her workplace, is convinced that she was on the cusp of change, that everything in her life was about to collapse around her; work, her mother, these were the vital 13 14 15 16

Ibid., 193. Papastergiadis, 9. Nasta, 7–8. See Mahjoub, The Drift, 150–56.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

177

signs. She knew she was helpless to stop it. The only question was what would come next.17 In contrast, Ernst Frager, as indicated in his family name, asks questions concerning the direction of his life in situations that mark a new phase in his life: “There were key moments in his life, tangential notes, when he lost all sense of balance and found himself nudged in a new direction. Such nodes of transition were announced by a mixture of fear and childish excitement, his stomach tumbling over and over as if he was standing on the edge of a high cliff, trying to talk himself out of it and knowing he would jump anyway”.18 Furthermore, this power of transformative moments is supported by Rachel’s words in one of her letters to Jade: “Ever since I learned of your existence I have felt the way one might feel after driving for hours through the dark in the middle of nowhere, when suddenly there appears, dead ahead and far away in the distance, a tiny pinprick of life”.19 Rather than merely showing that identity is in flux and in constant movement, which would be a critical commonplace, it should be noticed that in Mahjoub’s novel these transformative moments are travels both in and across time and space. These different modes of travel, including Ernst’s relocation from Germany to Britain, Jade’s search of her father’s past, and Rachel’s disillusioned life in Sudan with her estranged husband, are all transnational and cross various national and cultural boundaries. What is particularly important is that through the fact that their stories are overlapping the characters are located in more than one narrative: the figure of the German refugee functions to link together the two daughters unaware of each other’s existence. This can be seen as a realization of the homing desire as articulated by Brah.20 In the novel the diasporan daughters, one black, the other one white, appear to be part of the same history. Thus the novel both problematizes their own narratives of origin and reinscribes hybridity into their identities. The moment of revelation is also one when a sense of belonging and community may emerge, as is evident in Jade’s thoughts: Everything in her life seemed to have been leading her up to this point. The accident, the falling arc, the dead man, the letters from Rachel. All of it suggested that she had reached a point of no return. Rachel’s letters provided a line of escape that led away from the chaos of the present into 17 18 19 20

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 100–01. Brah, 192–93.

178

chapter 10

the labyrinth of her past. It was a tempting offer. A necessary one, too. But it would not be easy. It made Jade aware of how much she had cut herself off, from her mother, from anything to do with herself, in the process of making herself into what she was today. There was a pleading note, a vulnerability in Rachel’s letters which set off a tremoring echo deep in Jade’s memory, a buried mirror that she cast away from herself long ago.21 The reference to a mirror image, meaning here also her hitherto unknown sister, emerges as a source of support found lacking by Jade in the beginning of the novel. The building accident, the “falling arc” that kills an illegal immigrant camping out at the building site and eventually leads Jade to lose her position at the architect company, is a result of lack of a mirror: “The arch which had collapsed would eventually have been countered by a twin on the opposite side. It supported itself, once it was in place”.22 This incident emphasizes the fact that the lack of community and belonging is evident in Jade’s personal story. Growing up as a mixed-race and fatherless child in Liverpool in the 1960s and 1970s, she has frequently found her identity problematic: Was it because as a child Jade had never really been sure if she was black or white. She knew less about what she was than what she was not. It wasn’t about the colour of your skin so much as about the way you thought. She asked her mother about it, but all she got out of Miranda was that she was herself, and that was all that ever mattered.23 The response, however, is not enough as Jade feels offended even by one of her favourite songs, Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”, the lyrics of which in Jade’s view transform black women into a mass of “colored girls” forced to utter meaningless words: “Dup de dup de dup, dedupdup dup de dup”.24 In later life Jade leaves Liverpool, marries and divorces the French photographer Etienne, and in her attempt to avoid the racial trap, aims to make a career as “an architect” rather than as “a black architect”.25 When she realizes that her career is coming to a halt as she is likely to be forced to leave her job, scapegoated for the accident, she bitterly reflects on the issue: 21 Mahjoub, The Drift, 118. 22 Ibid., 24. 23 Ibid., 61. 24 Ibid., 61 25 Ibid., 119.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

179

She got to her feet and walked over to the window. From the dome of St Paul’s to the Lloyd’s building, the ghosts of other architects, past and present, haunted the skyline; Christopher Wren, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Richard Seifert. Male architects draw the world, the women just fill in the shading. She was a woman and she was black, well, brown. What could she actually hope to achieve?26 Jade’s disappointment with the white-dominated corporate world is taken further when she seeks to hire a solicitor to defend her in case the company would sue her. Yet Arburgh’s analysis remains unable to help her. If Jade were to appeal to discrimination, her employers would be likely to bring to the open her old drink-and-drive conviction and label her an alcoholic who has neglected her tasks. To emphasize Jade’s displacement, the setting of the interchange is a traditional English-style restaurant described as “Old England; a place you could visit, but where she would never belong”.27 In a similar vein, Arburgh’s meal of choice, “shredded black pudding and Brussels sprouts covered in melted Stilton”, is contrasted with Jade’s lighter dishes.28 While once she had sure of her fixed position, seeing no need to dwell on her history, she is now ready to reflect on her racialized identity and relationship with Britain. This former position is evident in the following passage that describes her rationale for denying her migrant past as follows but also associates her with the Jewish philosopher and refugee Hannah Arendt: She found herself looking for precedents, role models, theories to explain her choices, discovering them part in an affinity with Hannah Arendt and her ideas of exile and the human condition. In order to survive, the exile had to move on, had to transcend all those things they had been brought up to believe were a part of them: home, religious destiny – Gemeinschaft.29 The collapse of the fixed identity and the revelation of the hidden past, however, challenge the formerly adopted perspective as the following section will show.

26 27 28 29

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 123. See also 22. Ibid., 119.

180

chapter 10

Mobile and Migrating Identities

The title of the novel, The Drift Latitudes, is a sign that its promoted mode of identity is a mobile one. The novel refers to the notion of drift on two particularly interesting occasions. The first reference connects the idea of drift with Jade, adding to her character by using an intertext, Wide Sargasso Sea (1964), Jean Rhys’ famous and “haunting novel”30 addressing the effects of colonialism and patriarchy through the fate of Bertha Mason, the first wife of Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester.31 Jade recognizes that this novel, telling of the fate of its creole protagonist, has been particularly important for her during the late teen years when it helped her work out her own in-between identity: “Was it ambiguity that drew her to Jean Rhys, the fact that the author seemed to be neither of this world nor of that?”32 The links between identity and change are further addressed by contrasting the chosen mode of mobility with mere drifting. In Mahjoub’s novel, the Sargasso sea is described as a part of the Caribbean where the lack of wind leaves the boats “stranded in a sea” where they “drift for weeks at a time”, which leads to “a kind of madness descending while they were trapped in motion, unable to move”.33 In the context of the novel’s general thematics it can be argued that it juxtaposes drifting lives with moments of revelation, preferring activity to passivity, and responsibility to indecisiveness. This becomes evident in the words Jade utters when she decides to hire the detective Arthur Quail to discover the identity of the illegal immigrant named Thursday who dies under a collapsing building. When asked to explain her reasons for this, she claims to have “a personal sense of … complicity” and asks whether it is “so unusual to feel responsible for the consequences of your actions?”34 The same interest in ethics is also evident in her teenage daughter Maya’s emerging ecological consciousness seen in her preference of potatoes over tuna steaks: Rosti. That’s made of potatoes. You don’t have to kill a potato to eat it. Nobody ever tells you about potatoes going extinct.35 30 31

Ibid., 61. For intertextuality in Rhys, see John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, London: Continuum, 2001, 72–101. 32 Mahjoub, The Drift, 61. 33 Ibid., 61. 34 Ibid., 103. 35 Ibid., 22.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

181

Finally, the notion of drift is further elaborated on in the final chapter of the novel. It contains a letter in which Rachel writes about the nineteenth-century colonial explorers’ attempts to reach the origins of the river Nile. The rainy season, however, transforms the rivers into flooded plains where explorers with their “waxed moustaches” seek to navigate the “maze” in order to “realise the foggy dream of a glorious empire”: Ships ran aground, fatally lodged on obstinate humps of silt banks that shift unpredictably. Flat-bottomed steamers drifted in circles for weeks. There were tales of anguish and even cannibalism. People on board went insane, driven mad by the sun and their inability to distinguish one channel from another in that watery labyrinth.36 Rather than drift, madness, and hopelessness, the novel promotes selfunderstanding. Yet this self-understanding is one coupled with an awareness of history, as seen in Jade’s decision to clarify the story of his father with the help of his only remaining friend, the dying Waldo Schmidt, and in Rachel’s attempt to connect with her newly found half-sister through her writing of letters. At another level the idea of drift is treated as an effect of colonial and postcolonial violence, as something that is rather imposed upon people than chosen. While the British colonialists of the nineteenth century sought to expand their rule over the world, the postcolonial state of Sudan fights against its own minorities in the name of politics masked as religion. As Rachel puts it in her first letter to Jade, she daily observes the powerless refugees moving silently past the houses “in sleepy suburban side street[s]”, groups of displaced people who no longer inhabit “their own landscape, with the cattle kraals, smoky dung fires, and grass huts of the unbound tracts from where they hail”.37 In so doing the dislocated are stripped of their agency and mode of life and transformed into powerless “figures” doomed to drift “through nothing towards nothing”.38 The similarity between the violent era of colonial conquest with the nationalist postcolonial state is explicitly stated in Mahjoub’s novel by drawing a parallel between the colonial past and the postcolonial present: “They are here because their place in the world was taken from them. Their homes and villages burned and bombed, the earth scorched back to the time before God cut

36 37 38

Ibid., 201. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 202.

182

chapter 10

open the sky with his axe, as they believe, to give birth to man”.39 Nomadism, then, while considered by several cultural critics a privileged mode of being – and travelling – in the postmodern world,40 is far from an idealized choice in The Drift Latitudes and represented as yet another way in which power objectifies underprivileged people and reduces them into passive “figures” in the landscape.

Haunting Memories

To counter views that confine refugees and other often undocumented people in the margins, as objects of media spectacles, claimed to be a mass, but with no voice to tell their stories, The Drift Latitudes argues for the importance of memory and history. As the epigraph of the first part of Mahjoub’s novel, a phrase from poet Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), puts it: “Time is the metre, memory the only plot”.41 This is also evident in the words exchanged between Jade and her mother in the first chapter of the novel: “That’s so people remember.” “Remember what?” “Remember not to forget is what.”42 The role of memory and the past is crucial in the novel. As Jade’s search for her – as well as her father’s – past shows, history affects the present in a manner that the novel discusses as a form of haunting. In fact, Waldo Schmidt, her late father’s only living friend, describes memory as “an odd thing” in the sense that “[f]acts remain buried in the mind like a ghostly shadow” but after many years they are suddenly able to “make themselves plain”.43 The novel includes several further references to ghosts, haunting, and the dead. These include Jade’s collection of animal skeletons,44 her act of hiring a private detective to find about the true identity of the dead immigrant, nicknamed Thursday, and the story of “Shelley’s Ghost”, an invisible visitor who is claimed to have once threatened the life of the famous poet in a North Wales inn. Similarly, the masks which 39 Ibid., 202. 40 For a critique of postmodern nomadism, see Caren Kaplan, Questions. 41 Ibid., 1. 42 Ibid., 8. 43 Ibid., 184. 44 See ibid., 23.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

183

hang on Jade’s bedroom wall and stare at her at night are also silent and ghostly reminders of different places and histories: “One wall was adorned with a collection of masks; porcelain white Kabuki shells, heavy wooden African masks from Cameroon, huge jagged headpieces from Sumatra. When she woke up at night it was as though she were surrounded by faces staring down at her”.45 However, the proper ghosts of this novel are those created by history but whom it wishes to forget – it is they, migrants of various kinds, whose stories must be remembered. In addition to the members of the Frager family, the novel pays particular attention to refugees as seen in the description of nomadic refugees mentioned in Rachel’s letter’s quoted above and in Ernst Frager’s impressions upon his return to post-Second World War Germany: The roads were clogged with wanderers. There were reputed to be twenty million refugees on the move: returning, leaving, trying to find their families, or just pulling their belongings in circles, on horse carts, trolleys, prams. Where were they going? Ernst wondered. What did they hope to find?46 Similarly, contemporary migrants such as the victims of economic globalization, are present everywhere but nobody is able to trace their journeys: They wash your windscreens at traffic lights. They stack the shelves at late-night supermarkets. They drive you home in minicabs …. It’s the state of the world.47 This passage echoes the role of illegal migrants in contemporary London as depicted in Stephen Frears’ 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things: We are the people you don’t see. We drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. We suck your cocks.48 What makes their presence haunting is that it disrupts dominant narratives and shows that what they claim to have suppressed may return and trouble their official truths. This is clearly evident in Rachel’s thoughts following her mother’s funeral, as she imagines histories of a particular kind, “revenant 45 46 47 48

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 31. Dirty Pretty Things, dir. Stephen Frears, Disney Home Entertainment, 2002.

184

chapter 10

histories, never concluded, the fruit of that nebulous, unresolved desire to make sense of it all”.49 As mentioned by both Brah and Nasta, diasporic identity relies on communal and shared memories that are linked with a particular place. Mahjoub’s novel, as revealed in the title of its first part, “Revenant Kin”, addresses the issue of belonging by using the idea of a dispersed family whose reunion cannot be hindered. While people such as Rachel’s brother would rather remain silent about their unpleasant kin (including a German father, a sister converted to Islam and living in Sudan, and a West Indian half-sister), these transnational family affairs cannot be evaded or escaped – revenant they return. What this means is that by hybridizing the English family the novel presents a critique of nationalism: its imaginings of new identities and new homes show the presence of multiplicity and hybridity in the apparently “pure” spaces of privileged national identities. As a result, the novel transgresses the formerly and allegedly monocultural spaces of the European nation-states to present a critique of all forms of alleged national and cultural essentialisms. As the novel puts it, “purity was an illusion. Everything is in perpetual contention; rising and falling, growing, dying”.50 Furthermore, in the world of Mahjoub’s novel hybridity is represented as the state of being in nature. This recognition of the lack of purity is evident in Ernst’s gazing at British nature where he sees “a rare example of mélange geology: a variety of rock fragments were swept together and embedded in a different bedrock”.51

Music of Diaspora

The realization of the multicultural character of (European) history and the need to voice alternative narratives of the past is a general characteristic of Mahjoub’s novels.52 As Geoffrey Nash has remarked of The Carrier in particular, its foregrounding of “a lost historical memory”, suppressed and silenced by the West, seeks to uncover the fact that once Muslim culture and civilization was at least equal to that of Europe.53 Similar issues play a significant role

49 Mahjoub, The Drift, 42; emphasis added. 50 Ibid., 177. 51 Ibid., 46. 52 See Nyman, “Europe”. 53 Geoffrey Nash, The Anglo-Arab Encounter: Fiction and Autobiography by Arab Writers in English, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007, 99.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

185

in The Drift Latitudes where they are not limited to the interchange between Europeans and Arabs but are explored in a more general framework of intercultural exchange. This becomes evident when Ernst Frager arrives at Liverpool for the first time in 1957 and remembers having read Herman Melville’s “entranced” 1839 description of the multilingual port: “The town writhed in a bubbling of foreign babble; the heated patois of Germans, Dutchmen, Icelanders and Danes, Chinese, Swedes, Spaniards, and of course the Irish, all falling over one another to be heard. One in two sailors was a foreigner”.54 While the image of Liverpool’s multiculturality in Melville’s novel as recalled by Frager is rather freely constructed, Mahjoub’s intertextual reference to Herman Melville’s Redburn (1849) deserves further commentary from the perspective of cultural interchange and hybridity. Redburn, indeed, narrates interesting encounters with sailors from all over the world, including the Indian seaman Dallabdoolmans: So instructive was his discourse, that when we parted, I had considerably added to my stock of knowledge. Indeed, it was a God-send to fall in with a fellow like this. He knows things you never dreamed of; his experiences are like a man from the moon – wholly strange, a new revelation.55 What links Mahjoub and Melville is the fact that the notion of travel functions for both writers as a way of encountering alterity, enabling the formation of a new identity. With reference to Melville, Timothy Marr has pointed that for Melville travel was “a potent means of expanding the provincial horizons of national aspiration”.56 Marr also points out that in his letters to his brother, written during the same journey which was to give birth to Redburn, Melville creates for himself an ethnic voice, writing in non-standard English and signing the letters with the racialized name “Tawney”.57 Liverpool, a city which is also associated with transatlantic slave trade, plays a significant role in Mahjoub’s novel as enabling the crossing of racial and cultural boundaries. Its historical narratives of race, including both those of slavery and post-Second World War immigration to Britain, emphasize the 54 Mahjoub, The Drift, 82. 55 Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage Being the Sailor-Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service, London: Penguin, 1986 [1849], 242. 56 Timothy Marr, “Melville’s Ethnic Conscriptions”, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, III/1 (2001), 9. 57 Ibid., 10–11.

186

chapter 10

dislocation of the migrant but also point to the possibility of their empowerment. This space, open for various transcultural encounters, comes to mark the beginning of the next phase in Frager’s life: “Here, finally, in this city, of all places, he had found the antidote to that vacuum inside him”.58 The “antidote” is his relationship with West Indian Miranda, “a hat check girl” who occasionally sings jazz at the Blue Nile club and dances with those “who made her laugh, or the ones who wore their loneliness like fog”.59 This club, described as “a place where people hung their normal lives in the cloakroom for a few hours of affordable glamour, complete with lacklustre upholstery and cracks in the plaster”, is also “an enchanted cave” and “[a] magic carpet”.60 It is run by its exotic owner Ismail Bilal, a former seaman with a “Nubian childhood”, now referred to as “the genie, the djinn, the big chocolate giant winking in the oil lamp”.61 Bilal, after hearing jazz for the first time at a New York club, identifies strongly with black music and wants to recreate a similar space in Liverpool. Much more important than the luxuries of champagne, velvet, and glamour62 is the music he responds to strongly: His heart beat in his throat. Men like him playing. Africans, and this was their music. He had never thought to find such a thing here, in the richest country in the world.63 The Blue Nile becomes a prime site of cultural interchange and hybridity, and its sounds are described as “a cacophony of places and styles from every corner of the planet”.64 The musical hybrids performed are of various kinds, mapping global space with various forms and genres of music: A profusion of musical innovations blew in through the door before blowing off, down the street, across the sea, some of them never to be seen or heard of again. Django Reinhardt meets Trini Lopez. Cajun crosses Texas honkytonk. Jamaican ska cut up by a soaring Ornette Coleman aspirant playing a kettle like a muted trumpet.65 58 Mahjoub, The Drift, 57. 59 Ibid., 84. 60 Ibid., 83. 61 Ibid., 83. 62 Ibid., 141. 63 Ibid., 142. 64 Ibid., 80. 65 Ibid., 81.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

187

The Blue Nile offers its clientele access to the emergent transatlantic culture of black music that permeates all social and ethnic groups. The local harbour workers, for instance, are shown to willingly enter the world of jazz: “Most of the time it was just plain old Dixieland waterfront jazz. Out-of-tune four-piece combos of machine fitters and stevedores, off-duty tug pilots who could manage a passable imitation of New Orleans syncopation”.66 While the club “wasn’t New York”, it is a nevertheless a magical place where “everyone looked good. Once the music began to flow you could be anything or anyone you wanted to be”.67 In other words, the club functions as a site of transformation allowing for the birth of new and hybrid identities as a result of cultural mixing. In its ambivalence and liminality its plays the role of what Homi K. Bhabha calls the Third Space, the site of the formation of hybrid identity, where it is possible to feel “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations”.68 The role of music, then, in the novel is to construct sites and spaces of transgression and boundary crossings. This is the case with Frager, who has first heard jazz in his German submarine stuck at the bottom of the North Sea in 1918 when Scott Joplin’s ragtime transformed “the oppressive atmosphere” with its “sheer verve” so that everybody was soon “bobbing their heads and tapping their feet in time”69 and comes later to associate music with transformation. Later Frager, while working as an interpreter in Germany in 1946 and encountering a ruthless Nazi scientist, comes to realize that a technological world view with a belief in the possibilities of progress by perfecting machines is no longer accessible to him. If he followed such a path, he would risk devoting his life to murder like his Prussian mirror, a “wasted man … a mirror of possibility”.70 In Mahjoub’s novel this crisis leading to his transformation from a man of science is set in a “cracked chapel” where a black American sergeant sings a spiritual with a “booming voice which made the old walls tremble”.71 In other words, black music comes to function as a counter-narrative of Western rationality and a semiotic and postcolonial critique of the symbolic and colonial order. To quote the novel: “But now he saw there was beauty in incompleteness, a sublime grace, a gritty, human kind of 66 Ibid., 80. 67 Ibid., 82. 68 Bhabha, The Location, 9: see also Kuortti and Nyman, “Introduction”, 1–18. 69 Mahjoub, The Drift, 94. 70 Ibid., 182. 71 Ibid., 182.

188

chapter 10

imperfection”,72 a beauty that language is unable to represent or grasp. This is what happens to Ernst Frager: unable to find the right words “to express what he felt at that moment” music takes over his mind, and this music is jazz, officially alien to the German territory: “Scott Joplin; the evenings in Berlin spent in the American zone listening to jazz; Sidney Bechet’s 1939 recording of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’”.73 Significantly, jazz, a genre originating from the African American experience, comes here to represent freedom unavailable in Nazi Germany – as historians of music have shown, jazz, although it was found repulsive by the Nazi propaganda machinery, was constantly present in Nazi Germany.74 In addition to discussing the Nazi attack on jazz and the racialization of the genre, Kater pays attention to the role of jazz clubs in pre-war Germany as sites of political opposition and the importance given to rhythm music which was preferred by the combat troops and thus played on the radio.75 In the novel, jazz tells of Frager’s desire to transgress the cultural boundaries of the ordered German – and European – existence. The novel also discusses the travels of music from a more general and postcolonial perspective by linking them with a variety of migrant and diasporic experiences. The performers at Bilal’s club are, like its owner, migrant contributors to cultural hybridity who are rooted in travel and mobility from one part of the world to another. Coming from places as diverse as Portugal, Buenos Aires, Piraeus, and Turku, Finland, they perform their fado, ragtime or zither music, and disappear: Who these musicians were and how they got there, where they went to, what ever became of them was part of the great untold mystery of the world, of the sea, of harbour life and finally of the Blue Nile. They came and they went, drawn to the club by recommendation, by rumour, by accident.76 Consequently music becomes a part of the hybridity that the dominant historical narratives seek to suppress. Global flows are evident in the musical genres referred to in the novel, including Portuguese fado and Greek rembetika. While the bouzouki sounds of Piraeus emerge as a result of the exodus of the Greeks 72 73 74

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 183. Michael H. Kater, “Forbidden Fruit? Jazz in the Third Reich”, American Historical Review, XCIV/1 (1989), 11–43. 75 Ibid., 27–30. 76 Mahjoub, The Drift, 81.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

189

leaving Minor Asia in the 1920s, the novel’s Finnish orchestra, which represents the popularity of the big band sound all over Europe at the time, is a further example of transcultural cultural exchange and local adaptation.77 As Paul Gilroy has argued, forms of music such as jazz and tango emerge from the cultures of the Black Atlantic with their roots in cultural contacts based on slavery. Rather than expressions of any authentic “Afrocentric” or other experience, they are expressions of “the flows, exchanges, and in-between elements that call the very desire to be centred into question”.78 Music, in Simon Featherstone’s view, plays a central role in this process: it “is both of the moment – an expression of voice, sound and body – and always on the move betwixt and between places, bodies and histories”.79 This idea is also voiced by Mahjoub’s Miranda: You can’t make music without pain, she said. You only have to listen to Billie Holiday to know that. It was the pain of leaving home. They took people from Africa to the New World and it was like a voyage between past and future. It was in that dark ditch of history, that silent beat, where jazz began. A moan of loss, crying back across leagues and centuries, trying to reach what they had left behind.80 In narrating music and its travels, Miranda’s role is emphasized. Not only does she provide a moment of self-transgression for Frager as a jazz singer, but it is through her mother that Jade connects with her history. Jade hears her West Indian mother, the ailing Miranda (a descendant of slaves) making sounds in her sleep: “Holding her close, she felt the sound coursing through Miranda’s body like a fever: a strange purling guttural chant, part spiritual, part blues, that might have been spoken in Wolof, Hausa, or Nubian”.81 Ironically, Miranda is suffering from dementia and losing her memory. Music, the novel argues, is a way of understanding the multifaceted experience of diasporic travel and global mobility, and this recognition may be of assistance in the reconstruction of identity. Its effect on the German Ernst Frager appears as an opportunity to transcend time and space, transgress the ordered reality, and reach a utopian space: 77 See ibid., 81. 78 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 190. 79 Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 35. 80 Mahjoub, The Drift, 157. 81 Ibid., 165.

190

chapter 10

The notes leapt from the soprano saxophone out into the unknown, bending and changing all that lay before them, lifting Ernst up, blowing him backwards into the future, down centuries, over ruined cities, carrying him out over the frozen valley, the clouded peaks, out to the blue ribbon of sky beyond.82 Similarly, the records Jade buys from a Soho record shop lead her to a further connection with her past and transform her long-held contention that jazz is artificial and merely an attempt for white boys to appropriate blackness, as was the case with a former boyfriend of hers at the University who treated her as “some kind of trophy”.83 The records she buys help her in her desire “to know it all. The whole story”.84 And this story is the story of diaspora and homesickness central to the reconstruction of the migrant subject, a story that that is both a cultural and personal search for meaning. The songs of Nina Simone, for instance, trigger a sense of recognition and comfort, linking her with her mother who used to sing them when she was a child, a fact that she had forgotten.85 In other words, black music is an integral part of the experience of the black diaspora, present in its pains but also able to provide access to a utopian world with more security. The link between music and utopia is also evident in one of the novel’s intertexts, Percy Shelley’s philosophical poem Queen Mab (1813), which Ernst Frager is shown to study: “He read the poem over and over, trying to decipher what it meant to him at this juncture of his life”.86 As Queen Mab is described by David Duff as a “revolutionary romance” based on the ideologies of the French Revolution and the thinking of William Godwin,87 its imagined future world based on equality and lack of fear resonates with postcolonial thinking. At the textual level it may be mentioned that when the Fairy reveals the utopian world to the human Spirit, the joyful moment as described by Shelley is accompanied with music: Then dulcet music swelled Concordant with the life-strings of the soul; 82 83 84 85 86 87

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 46. David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of the Genre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 58.

Travel, Diaspora, and Migration in The Drift Latitudes

191

It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there, Catching new life from transitory death.88 In Mahjoub’s novel, music becomes the narrative of diasporic experience rooted in pain and loss of history in a situation where it is the only remaining marker of identity: Gospel, blues, and jazz. It all came out of that feeling of loss. They lost their language, their history, so they had to make it up. That’s where it comes from, trying to make yourself understood. You don’t have great buildings and libraries, all you have is the story you tell. That’s who you are. It is in the telling of the tale.89 What is demanded from Jade should she wish to enter diasporic identity is to accept the irrationality of jazz, referred to by Miranda as “the dislocation of the soul”,90 and defined as “the music of displacement …. Music for people like you and me, the in-betweens”.91 As defined in Mahjoub’s novel, jazz resists European modernity and its order, and has often signified Otherness: The great European philosophers never understood jazz. Freud, Jung, Adorno, none of them saw what it meant. Why? Because it breaks all logic, breaks down the idea of progress because it breaks up linear notions of time. Time stands still, it moves in circles, it takes unpredictable leaps.92 Through jazz it is possible to understand the character of black diasporic identity, represented in the novel by combining the metaphors of jazz and the city. This is an identity consisting of different synchronic voices which belong together: The great cities, like jazz, she thought, were composed of thousands of discordant notes that come together at times to create harmony. The jazz of cities is the syncopated distillation of unexpected elements which

88 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 59. 89 Mahjoub, The Drift, 157. 90 Ibid., 157. 91 Ibid., 148. 92 Ibid., 148.

192

chapter 10

allows us to live together: none of it makes sense, except the sense we give it.93 Conclusion This chapter has argued that Mahjoub’s representations of European identities problematize nationalist discourses by showing the presence of silenced and forgotten networks and narratives as well as the importance of mobility and diverse forms of travel. In representing transnational and diasporic communities the novel reinscribes hybridity in spaces apparently void of it, voices alternative narratives of the past, and thus recasts the relationships between European nation-states and their non-European Others. For Mahjoub’s characters, Jade and Rachel in particular, this leads to a reconstruction of identity and the revaluation of belonging. Their imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson’s term,94 is one not limited by borders but a transnational one. While Rachel seeks connection with her father’s second family, Jade locates her identity in the transnational tradition of black diaspora through its music. By hybridizing the notion of the English family, the novel both critiques appeals to purity and, more significantly, recasts the notion of the hybrid family as a general European condition. The uncovering of historical memories and the related need to tell alternative stories of the past, stories that transform both the present and the future, is what The Drift Latitudes seeks to contribute to. Similarly, the novel’s various narratives of travel and their contribution to the hybridization and transformation of both culture and the characters reveal an insistence on the inevitability of change as a result of cultural interaction and communication. The novel’s stories of transforming European identities, supported with intertextual references to various writers, are ways of reconstructing and redefining home for diasporic people and linking the postcolonial text with its predecessors and the cultural tradition. In a world characterized by migration, as the life of Ernst Frager shows, home is not related to a fixed place or a mythic homeland/Vaterland but it is tied with the possibility to belong and may be realized in transnational and transcultural spaces and through various forms of culture from music to literature.

93 94

Ibid., 148. Anderson, 6–7.

chapter 11

Globalizing European Peripheries: The Transnational and the Translocal in Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue While Mahjoub’s works discussed above reveal hidden historical contexts between Europe and its Others, the work of Monica Ali emphasizes changes generated by globalization and the expansion of the European Union. As the increased mobility of transnational migration ranging from labourers to ERASMUS exchange students and from tourists to settlers shows, globalization affects the construction of European identities in ways that exceed and problematize the traditional colonizer/colonized opposition and other similar dualisms. What this means is that the identities of European nation-states are changing because of both global and intra-European flows of migration generating new cultural expressions. While postcolonial literary studies have tended to prioritize the entry and experiences of the formerly colonial migrants in the metropolis over other forms of mobility, the new challenges of cultural contact call for new ways of reading postcolonial narratives to account for the peculiarities of increased cultural contacts. It is the aim of this chapter to explore the impact of such everyday contacts and “vernacular cosmopolitanisms” through an analysis of their representation in Monica Ali’s novel Alentejo Blue published in 2006.1 While Ali is known primarily for her debute novel Brick Lane, a novel narrating Bangladeshi immigrant lives in East London, Alentejo Blue addresses different conditions of contemporary migration. In my analysis, I argue that this underrated novel set in rural Portugal deserves critical attention as it is an attempt to examine, through narratives of travel and stay, the problematics of migration and the transformed meanings of centre and periphery. Through a series of snapshots of European tourists, travellers, and their hosts in the small and remote Portuguese village of Mamarrosa, Alentejo Blue shows the presence of globalizing forces and the transnational in the locality, emphasizing that the global and the local are not oppositions but work in a parallel manner. Rather than simply representing globalization as threatening the alleged purity or tradition of a rural village with its premodern lifestyle, Ali’s novel, read in a transnational framework, uncovers its silenced histories and links it with the wider world in 1 Monica Ali, Alentejo Blue, London: Doubleday, 2006.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_015

194

chapter 11

order to counter dominant views of cultural contact. In so doing it shows how all identities, including those in European peripheries, are mobile and multiply constructed in relation to the global. In other words, Alentejo Blue, by showing how global flows affect the local in various ways, provides an alternative to views of globalization that emphasize its metropolitan nature and reveals how it is extends to everywhere.

Contextualizing Globalization

Contemporary cultural narratives of migration are embedded in the transnational processes of globalization which transform the ways in which national and other identities are lived through and imagined. As such, the processes of globalization are not entirely new as world system theorists and critics of colonial discourse have shown, but the nature of contemporary globalization is somewhat different from its earlier historical predecessors.2 While the links and nodes between different civilizations predate the conquests of European civilizations, transforming histories and creating cultural hybridities, the processes of today’s globalization, owing to digitization and the development of rapid communications technology, are experienced simultaneously in the different parts of the globe. Unsurprisingly, the social theorist Anthony Giddens describes globalization as an expression of an era characterized by “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa”.3 In her book A Sociology of Globalization (2007), the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that globalization involves two distinct modes. On the one hand the term denotes the emergence of global actors and institutions such as the World Trade Organization as well as that of new global processes including financial markets and the transformation of cosmopolitanism, while on the other hand it describes processes that at the current point in time are less evident at the global level but that are transforming the naturalized meanings of the national and the local.4 In Sassen’s view, processes such as the emergence of transnational activist networks and the replacement of national institutions and standards with international ones are examples of this:

2 Suman Gupta, Literature and Globalization, Cambridge: Polity, 2009, 10–11. 3 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1990, 64. 4 Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization, New York: w.w. Norton, 2007, 5.

Globalizing European Peripheries

195

Although localized in national – indeed subnational – settings, these processes are part of globalization in that they involve transboundary networks and entities connecting multiple local or “national” processes and actors, or the recurrence of particular issues or dynamics in a growing number of countries or localities.5 What is important in Sassen’s reading of globalization is that it involves a transformation in the relationship between the global and the local: issues and processes formerly understood as national may in her view be instances of the “localization of the global”.6 In other words, the nation-state is no longer a closed entity but the global is present in its processes, practices, and the daily life of its inhabitants, generating a variety of cross-border and transnational phenomena. It is this transformation in the role of the nation that characterizes contemporary globalization, to the extent that many theorists arguing for new modes of analysis describe studies focusing on merely one nation and country as examples of “methodological nationalism”.7 At the same time, however, in addition to nation, globalization changes the nature of the local, stripping it of its assumed isolation and allegedly peripheral status. Owing to increased transnational mobility that is not merely unidirectional, emigration, and new forms of communication technology, the nature of the locality also transforms and “is no longer the prime referent of our experiences”.8 While the transformed locality has been described by using such terms as “glocal” and “hybrid”, terms that address its socio-cultural peculiarities, in this chapter I prefer to address Ali’s representation of an apparently peripheral Portuguese village by using the term translocal to emphasize the role of locality. As proposed by James Clifford, this term is able to describe the contacts between cultures, contacts that in his view “begin with historical contact, with entanglement at intersecting regional, national, and transnational levels”.9 Following Clifford, I will argue that from the perspective of the village and the travels of its inhabitants this term is better able to account for its role in on-going identity construction. While the notions of the transnational and the diasporic would link Ali’s Mamarrosa with larger cross-border networks and communities, and the concept of glocalization would emphasize the 5 6 7 8

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 4. See Beck, 24–27. Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernity and Identity, London: Sage, 1995, 117. 9 Clifford, 7.

196

chapter 11

adaptation of ready-made global models by local people, the idea of the translocal conveys the transformed sense of life in a particular locality – here a village community – in the era of globalization characterized by increased travel and cultural contact. In other words, my argument is that Mamarrosa functions as intercultural space or a contact zone, as a locale where, to use Clifford’s terms, “the making and remaking of identities … takes place, along with the policed and transgressive intercultural frontiers of nations, peoples, locales”.10

The Translocal Alentejo

For many readers and critics, Monica Ali’s second novel was a disappointment. Readers familiar with her acclaimed first novel Brick Lane that explored global mobility, Bangladeshi migration, and life in multicultural London, a cosmopolitan world city inhabited by displaced Asian migrants, may have found the focus and thematics of Alentejo Blue unexpected, strange, and alienating. As one reviewer puts it in a review entitled “Go and Read Something Less Boring Instead”: “Having loved Brick Lane I was very eager to read this but it was a huge disappointment – so much so that I don’t normally write reviews for Amazon but I am compelled to say ‘save your money!’”11 Michael Perfect suggests that the novel “almost seems to have been specifically crafted to defy the expectations of those who assumed that Ali would write ‘another Brick Lane’”.12 Set in rural Portugal and consisting of individual chapters telling of particular characters, this “novel of vignettes” may also appear too loosely structured and lacking focus.13 Natasha Walter, reviewing the book for The Guardian, expresses a wish that Ali had written about something closer to her heart – or to her status as the chronicler of Bangladeshi immigrants in Tower Hamlets: “you can’t help wishing that Monica Ali had chosen to write about somewhere she knew better, or wanted to know better”.14 To quote Walter: 10 11

12 13 14

Ibid., 7. Corrinne Milsom-Mann, “Go and Read Something Less Boring Instead”, rev. of Alentejo Blue, by Monica Ali, Amazon.co.uk, 16 Oct 2006, available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. Michael Perfect, Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 129. Ibid., 129. Natasha Walter, “Continental Drift”, rev. of Alentejo Blue, by Monica Ali, The Guardian, online ed., 20 May 2006, available at: , accessed 10 Aug. 2016.

Globalizing European Peripheries

197

The further you go in Alentejo Blue, the further you seem to get from Brick Lane. While her first novel grew cumulatively, with characters who were gradually revealed through different situations, this novel is structurally piecemeal, a collection of vignettes with no forward narrative thrust at all.15 Yet, as I will argue, the choice of setting as Portugal, while apparently masking Ali’s interest in the effects of mobility and globalization and thus open to comments such as Walter’s, is beneficial to the novel as it enables Ali to transcend a more limited British perspective by allowing an examination of the effects of globalization. Admittedly though, the choice is also one emphasizing the exotic and the touristic, as can be seen in some readers’ reviews on the Amazon (uk) website, while others praise her ability to convey a view of Portugal that is not superficial or merely stereotypical.16 However, it can be argued that it is through its setting that Alentejo Blue writes against a dominant trend that locates globalization in cities or other blatantly hybridized spaces. Alentejo Blue consists of nine intertwined chapters each of which foregrounds a particular character or couple. The characters, who are at the same time individuals and types peculiar to globalization, range from traditional labourers to au pairs and include omnipresent British tourists as well as a somewhat stereotypical representation of an exilic writer in its character Harry Stanton. It can be argued that the presence of these characters in a remote village is indeed what makes the novel a transcultural and translocal one. As the German critic Sissy Helff has argued, the transcultural novel can be characterized through its use of one or more of the following three features: first, if the narrator and/or the narrative challenge(s) the collective identity of a particular community; second, if experiences of border crossing and transnational identities characterize the narrators’ lifeworld (Lebenswelt); and third, if traditional notions of “home” are disputed.17 Ali’s novel can be seen to apply these ideas in a variety of ways. While the village appears quiet and traditional, a local community with its peculiar patterns 15 16 17

Ibid. Amazon.co.uk, “Alentejo-Blue-Monica-Ali”, available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. Sissy Helff, “Shifting Perspectives: The Transcultural Novel”, in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, eds Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 83.

198

chapter 11

of interaction and social life, it is not without links to the wider world. This becomes evident when the following passage from the second chapter of novel describing a typical afternoon in Vasco’s bar/restaurant is examined closely. While it apparently portrays a pure, untouched local space, in reality the identities of its inhabitants are formed through various border crossings, intercultural encounters, and links with the globalized world, links that range from personal migration to the use of the internet.18 In other words, this means that the photographic image contained in the novel is lacking in depth, and to understand it the reader needs to locate its content, the image and the “memories” of the old men, in their proper historical context(s): The old men stood at the bar caressing their Macieiras and coughing up memories. In the black felt fedoras and black waistcoats, red handkerchiefs tied at the neck, they appeared to Stanton like postcards from the past, as picturesque as the crooked streets, the whitewashed houses, the doors and windows framed gaily in blue and yellow.19 In this passage the use of the touristic as a narrative strategy is a mask hiding unspoken histories of cultural contact and dislocation, and it shows how all identities are formed transculturally. By framing the traditional in the touristic, the novel contrasts an apparently national and folkloric past (extending to the present) with the allegedly modern values of the outside world – yet the national is always embedded in the transnational. At the same time the passage creates another false juxtaposition by contrasting an allegedly passive and objectified periphery with a supposedly active modernity with its representatives, British tourists and readers, gazing at a relic-like lifestyle. The bar, however, as the site where the men spend their time, tells another story. Rather than a site of a pure national past, it is an intercultural space hiding different narratives of globalization and border crossings as becomes evident in the people crowding it. For instance, its proprietor Vasco is a return migrant, who has spent twelve years abroad, a time known as his “legendary stint as a barman in Provincetown, Cape Cod, the United States of America”.20 In addition to revealing Vasco’s past, the scene foregrounds the intercultural thematic as all other characters introduced in detail are similarly part of the global and the local. These include the exilic British writer Stanton, his friend Dieter, a German builder who is part of contemporary seasonal intra-European migration, and 18 19 20

See Ali, Alentejo, 260. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 267.

Globalizing European Peripheries

199

Ruby Potts, the promiscuous 15-year-old daughter of the expatriate British Potts family living a disorderly and drunken life in the vicinity of the village. Hence the function of the characters of the novel is to contribute to its imagining of globalization and to link Mamarrosa with the wider world. In so doing the novel presents characters who reflect on their position and identity in the current situation. To use Helff’s words, they are examples of what she refers to as transcultural narration, “a process in which the narrative and the reader are constantly crossing and shifting boundaries between intercultural and transcultural spaces”.21 While this Portuguese village is apparently peripheral to contemporary globalization, the novel makes its links explicit in two ways, first, by showing how its inhabitants go out into the world, and, second, by showing how the foreigners, estrangeiros,22 enter the village and thus make it an intercultural space. The novel’s references extending beyond the nation include both those that emphasize Portugal’s connection with the wider world and often revolve around the nation’s formerly glorious Empire, and those bringing the world to the village. In the first case it is the restaurant owner Vasco in particular who plays an important role: migration is a part of his personal and family background. In addition to revealing Vasco’s tragic experiences in the United States, the novel mentions that several members of his family have left the village before him. While Uncle Humberto opted “for a new life in Mozambique, of metal mines and miscegenation”, Uncle Henrique desired “to fight the savages in Angola and save them from themselves and international communism” but never returned.23 The Portuguese Empire is, indeed, a thing of the past, and a comparison between Portugal and the United States as global empire-builders makes the former a laughing matter for Vasco: “‘… We had a big empire too’ – Vasco turned purple and began to wheeze, tears in his eyes. It dawned on Stanton that he was laughing. ‘Five hundred years ago’”.24 Similarly, in Vasco’s view the future belongs to Americans who will spread their ideologies and language all the world, destroying local values and practices: In America now romance is dead. The feminists killed it and the men are scared. If a man opens a door for a woman he will end up in court. Sex discrimination.

21 Helff, “Shifting”, 83. 22 Ali, Alentejo, 45. 23 Ibid., 77. 24 Ibid., 41.

200

chapter 11

“You think it could never happen here?” he said. “These crazy Americans? Let me tell you, in my opinion it is only a matter of time.” It’s the way the world is. Even the Alentejo cannot escape. The United States of America is the Superpower and it is not just a question of guns. He said to Bruno, “What language do you think your grandchildren will speak?” Bruno pushed up his cap and grunted. Bruno is not a great thinker. “English, my friend,” Vasco informed him. “With an American accent.”25 As Arjun Appadurai has argued, the different global flows are not limited to the mobility of human beings from one nation and culture to another (ethnoscape) but globalization also involves the transmission of ideoscapes (as testified in Vasco’s rendering of American “sex discrimination” in the passage above), financescapes, technoscapes, and mediascapes.26 Mediascapes in particular flow across borders and construct what Appadurai calls imagined worlds, linking different cultures with each other.27 Indeed, the inhabitants of the village are portrayed as consumers of globalized popular culture with shared values, watching Brazilian telenovelas,28 using Vodafone,29 and wearing either Manchester United shirts30 or shirts with “big Chinese letters, or Japanese, down the front”.31 Similarly, local popular music is rejected: “‘Mariza? You’re kidding. That’s what we’ll play when we break up’”,32 as Teresa’s boyfriend comments on her choice of music on their last night together. As a result of being linked with the wider world, Mamarrosa is at least partially losing its cultural specificity and entering the homogeneity of global culture. In today’s Mamarrosa, then, it is possible to find a barman reading a Las Vegas hotel brochure, dreaming that the flows of the mediascapes and ideoscapes will be followed with the flow of global capital (financescape) into the village. This shows that the village is fully embedded in the global network: “Listen,” said Vasco. “Treasures of the ages await at Hotel Luxor’s Giza Galleria. Located on the main level of the East Tower, enchanting fountains, 25 Ibid., 86. 26 Appadurai, 33. 27 Ibid., 33. 28 Ali, Alentejo, 190, 210. 29 Ibid., 137. 30 Ibid., 54. 31 Ibid., 185. 32 Ibid., 185.

Globalizing European Peripheries

201

beautifully sculpted statues and elegant stone walkways greet visitors when shopping Luxor-style at Giza Galleria.” He passed a fat hand over his mouth. “Only in America, yes?” Stanton conceded this to be so. “But maybe also in the future in the Alentejo. Nothing is impossible.”33

International Migrations

As a sign of participation in the global economy, the novel juxtaposes more traditional internal migration with international economic migration but reveals that the former is not without its international aspects. While contemporary work-related migration patterns are addressed through such characters as ­Dieter the German builder, Telma Ervanaria (who has spent 15 years in Paris), and Teresa, a young girl desiring a position as an au pair in London, their historical counterpart is addressed in the narrative of the 84-year-old labourer João and his friend and one-time lover Rui. This is not a mere juxtaposition but rather hints at continuity and transformation, emphasizing that the village has never existed in isolation but it has always functioned as a node in the networks of modernization and internationalization. In so doing the narrative challenges what Helff refers to as the community’s conventional collective identity.34 Other spaces are indeed represented as providing opportunities for learning and expanding one’s world view, as means of escaping the backwardness and oppressive politics of Salazar’s Portugal and learning the internationalist ideologies of solidarity: He had been in France after the war, with all the other illegals, working the construction sites. He learned to read and write. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” he said. “In France,” he said, “a man has rights. He has dignity. He has respect.”35 In other words, what the narrative voices is a view arguing that cultural contact and migration are part of the formation of European identities. This is confirmed in the dialogue between the novel’s group of bowling old men; it reveals

33 Ibid., 66. 34 Helff, “Shifting”, 83. 35 Ali, Alentejo, 17.

202

chapter 11

that for migrant labourers, European cities are not much different from the Portuguese capital, and that the process of migration is constantly restarted: “My granddaughter wants to go to Lisbon,” said José. “My son left London and went to Glasgow,” said Rui.36 In this context of migration the figure of the au pair, represented in the novel in the character of Teresa, provides a further example. According to the critic Bruce Robbins, who has studied its representations in diasporic writing by Jamaica Kincaid and Bharati Mukherjee, the au pair is often used in literary narratives as a marker of global modernity and upward social mobility, relocating a peripheral character in the metropolis and providing her with “universal civilization”.37 Robbins, however, also suggests that the au pair’s travel to the metropolis does not necessarily mean that “nation and race are merely skins to be shed in the interest of quicker acculturation” but that the au pair narrative may also function as an expression of “explosive, even unconscious anger” and resistance.38 Alentejo Blue appears to use the au pair narrative to address similar questions of global mobility but also shows seeds of resistance to global hegemony. While it is Teresa’s wish to leave the restrictive life in Mamarrosa – where she, “like a social worker”,39 is forced to take care of her widowed mother who spends most of her time in front of the television – for a better life in London, her decision is not unproblematic and is rooted in her family’s financial problems: ever since being forced to leave the school following the death of her father Teresa has worked as a shop assistant in the daytime and sold life insurances in the evenings.40 For Teresa, London, or her fantasy version of it, promises social mobility and a glamorous lifestyle. Its modern conveniences are clearly contrasted with the backwardness of the village: João had no electricity. When the sun went down he would go to bed. Teresa imagined herself on an aeroplane, a mile high in the sky; she thought of herself in London, coming out of a restaurant or nightclub; she saw herself on an escalator, travelling through a department store that reached nearly as high as the plane .… In London, though, she would 36 37

Ibid., 14. Bruce Robbins, “Upward Mobility in the Postcolonial Era: Kincaid, Mukherjee, and the Cosmopolitan Au Pair”, Modernism/Modernity, I/2 (1994), 137. 38 Ibid., 145. 39 Ali, Alentejo, 169. 40 Ibid., 131, 159.

Globalizing European Peripheries

203

have her own television. Her room would be modern, perhaps with fitted wardrobes. She was to have her own bathroom.41 Regardless of the pull of London, Teresa remains uneasy about the change and its effects on her own life and relationship with her boyfriend Antonio. This is seen in her inability to tell her family and friends that the letter of acceptance from the office has arrived, revealing an uneasiness partially stemming from her limited knowledge of English. In negotiating her identity, she decides that she will go to London “as a woman”,42 lose her virginity to Antonio, a decision aiming to liberate him from waiting for her: “It would be her gift to him. To make him free like that”.43 The chapter ends in Teresa and Antonio having sex but rather than orgastic pyrotechnics it is described in melancholic terms: “She kept her eyes open the whole time, watching the bamboo ceiling and counting the insects that fell”.44 What is more significant, however, is what Teresa, now high on a spliff and beer, has understood right before the intercourse. Upon reflecting on her own position as a potential migrant, she deconstructs the pull of the metropolis and realizes that the centre and the periphery are literally au pair, equal, as Robbins reminds us,45 rather than in a hierarchical relationship. The centre is not an object of fantasy and desire that will offer constant gratification. The following passage constructs global relationships as reciprocal, based on mutual exchange and a transnational movement of people going both directions: What was the point, though, really? Why was she going there? Those children with their Indian headdresses and their thoughtless expectation of love. Who would she be in London and who would be there to see? She would be there and the writer would be here, and the tourists would come or they wouldn’t, Marco Afonso Rodriguez went and was coming back, and Telma Ervanaria was in Paris and Vasco was in Provincetown, and Mãe was lost in Brazil and everyone was going round and round and it didn’t make one bit of difference as far as she could understand. They come here and I go there. Round and round. This bed, that bed, new bed, old bed. If the room would just hold still!46 41 Ibid., 145, 154. 42 Ibid., 147. 43 Ibid., 147. 44 Ibid., 191. 45 Robbins, 143. 46 Ali, Alentejo, 190.

204

chapter 11

In sum, the au pair narrative as used in Ali’s novel seeks to resist hegemonic narratives of globalization that promote unidirectional relationships between the centre and its alleged peripheries. Teresa’s realization, which significantly takes place on the same day when the village’s first internet café opens,47 is that the centre does not provide a fixed identity. Rather, as a migrant her identity is in flux, constantly negotiated, always between here and there, rather than strictly linked with one particular place. This indeterminacy of identity is also reflected in the words uttered by the young British boy Jay Potts. Displaced in a foreign country with his dysfunctional parents, he wonders: “Am I Portuguese now?”48 At first sight the character of Marco Afonso, a migrant who returns to Mamarrosa in the final chapter of the novel, also appears to criticize a traditional understanding of the centre-periphery relation and the alleged primacy of economic migration. While all of the inhabitants in the village believe that Marco has made a fortune abroad, either in hotel business, electrical appliances, or dry cleaning,49 he returns to the village practically empty-handed in a taxi, wearing a black cape and carrying no more than one bag. In the fantasies of the villagers, Marco Afonso is a messiah who will build either a 400-bed hotel or a centre for rural tourism,50 depending on whom the question is addressed to. In the view of the cynical writer Stanton, Marco with his aphoristic comments on the mind and “Awareness” is a fake hippie-cum-philosopher: “Stanton knew what Marco was. Some old hippie, fresh from an ashram where they chanted and indulged in free love”.51 As Marco turns out to have no plans for developing the village but prefers “to live in the present”,52 the promise of his return is emptied out in his privileging of individualism. In the end, if discussed by using the terms introduced by the sociologist Anthony D’Andrea, Marco appears to embody a particular condition generated by globalization and hypermobility, namely neo-nomadism: “neo-nomads migrate through sites of practice and experience in search of excitement and insight into themselves”.53 In Ali’s novel such self-centred travel resting on Marco’s alternative New Age subjectivity appears problematic and ethically unsound to the entire community, and by 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 262–63. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 287. Anthony D’Andrea, “Deciphering the Space and Scale of Global Nomadism: Subjectivity and Counterculture in a Global Age”, in Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, ed. Saskia Sassen, London: Routledge, 2007, 149.

Globalizing European Peripheries

205

the end of the novel some villagers decide to ask him to leave. Unsurprisingly, Marco has already left the village in the middle of the night, leaving behind a piece of paper with a short and mundane message: “peace”.54 Regardless of their particularities, all migrants and travellers in the novel, representing the presence of global migration and the significance of cultural contacts in the formation of identity, are examples of the migratory character of contemporary societies. The sociologist Ulrich Beck claims that the movement of migratory masses has transformed the experience of mobility in the West, and he defines this phenomenon as “cosmopolitanism from below”.55 This is a term referring to the experiences of ordinary, everyday border crossers rather than to those of a limited class, as is the case in the traditional use of the term cosmopolitanism. It is also argued that the migrant’s experience of travel, work, and stay abroad problematize the claims of nationalism and that the transnational migrant subject may have multiple alliances.56 As Beck writes: Migrants embody all gradations of both/and: they are native foreigners and foreign nationals whose social competences are not only indispensable but also enrich cultural and public life by making it more colourful, contradictory and conflictual. Migrants are what is analytically excluded by the national either/or.57 In my discussion of the presence of transnational networks and translocal identities in the novel I have emphasized the links of the traditional inhabitants of Mamarrosa with the global and shown how identity construction and transculturation take place in this locale. In addition to the transformation of the identities of its original inhabitants, Alentejo Blue also shows the presence of foreign nationals in Alentejo as its characters include both tourists and foreign nationals living in the village. The role of traditional tourists in the village, however, appears rather conventional since the foreign space is used for acting out (pre-)marital problems and finding one’s self. These processes are triggered by a foreign lifestyle and, in the case of the young British couple Huw and Sophie, the moribund elements of the Roman Catholic religion as seen in their responses to a local tomb, the Chapel of Bones, full of human bones and skulls.58 Similarly, the elderly tourist Eileen manages to challenge her

54 Ali, Alentejo, 298. 55 Beck, 103. 56 Ibid., 103–05. 57 Ibid., 104. 58 See Ali, Alentejo, 224–30.

206

chapter 11

husband’s patronizing and sulking behaviour, and the end of the chapter shows her sitting on a bench by the city square and telling him that “[i]t is my holiday .… And I’d like to sit here and do nothing”.59

The British Abroad

The novel’s most significant foreign nationals include the writer Stanton and the Potts family. The representation of latter is particularly interesting as it reverses more conventional modes of narrating British travellers and their intercultural encounters. The Potts family consists of an alcoholic father Michael (a.k.a. “China”), a “dishcloth” mother Chrissie,60 and their two teenage children, promiscuous Ruby and lonely Jay. Having arrived in Mamarrosa with hopes of setting down and building a house, the family has run out of money and lives in an unfinished house with a swimming pool-cum-mudpool in the outskirts of the village. The dismal living conditions of the family emphasize their decay: while shown sitting “on high-backed leather-padded chairs” in their living room,61 linking them with a more luxurious past, the present includes the corpse of a dead and stinking cow in their yard.62 The reversal, then, is more than a contemporary temperance or slum narrative but it constructs the Potts as third-world citizens rather than as British expatriates. As a result the family acquires various features of the non-Western Other. As a sign of this, they are repeatedly described as unwashed and wearing dirty clothes,63 a trope that also links them with Otherness and diminishes their status, as does Ruby’s uninhibited sexuality leading to pregnancy and abortion. Further, the village inhabitants find the Potts repulsive, frightening even: A man, one of the estrangeiros, came towards her [Teresa], ducking to clear the orange trees. The black and tan dog was with him. Would everyone in London be so tall? The man wore a filthy vest and he had not shaved. Teresa stepped back to let him pass and for a moment was covered in confusion.64 59 Ibid., 129. 60 Ibid., 39. 61 Ibid., 50. 62 Ibid., 48–49. 63 See ibid., 37, 46. 64 Ibid., 137.

Globalizing European Peripheries

207

My reading emphasizing the Potts’ role as Other is supported with the portrayal of their contribution to the village festa – or what “in England … would be called a car-boot sale”.65 The episode shows how people, both local and foreigners, try to sell “their junk”, this is, “useless possessions” including “wooden bowls, lidless teapots, broken furniture, mysterious plastic objects of indeterminate use”,66 all signs of poverty and the Potts’ entry into the fringes of modernity. The Potts’ contribution to the sales is described as follows: “Chrissie sat on the open boot of the Renault 4. On a blanket at her feet she had arranged a few pans with broken handles and some rusting agricultural equipment”,67 and on another occasion she sells peg dolls for two Euros.68 This Othering is taken further in Chrissie Potts’ words where she sees herself in a different light, understanding now that her own position amidst the Portuguese has been transformed into that of an Other: I was thinking about when you see the Asian kids translate for their mums. The mums wear saris or baggy coloured pyjamas or some times a big black bag that covers everything except their eyes, so you don’t really expect them to understand anything much. I was thinking I’m like that now. I’m the bloody foreigner.69 In the end the Potts family, however, integrates into the local community and reconstructs itself: China finds work with a local builder and Chrissie works with poor, conducting “voluntary work fit for a nun”.70 Their accommodation may be a sign of the fulfilment of homing desire, a form of reconstructing home by accepting its transformed character in the space of the Other. In contrast to the Potts, the exile writer Stanton occupies a different position. At one level he represents a satirical version of the modernist myth of an exile writer who, when cut off from his own culture, is allegedly able to provide in-depth reflections in his great masterpieces. In addition to – or instead of – trying to write his novel about the Romantic poet William Blake, Stanton spends considerable time on drinking and has affairs with both Chrissie and Ruby Potts. It is also clear that, rather than offering an enlightened perspective based on critical reflection on the intercultural space of Mamarrossa, Stanton’s 65 66 67 68 69 70

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46–47. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 204; emphasis added. Ibid., 271.

208

chapter 11

limited cultural crossings do not enrich his literary imagination. Unlike the Potts family, Stanton contemplates leaving as seen in his thoughts in the final chapter: Stanton went out and gazed at the North Star, which appeared unaccountably bright. He cupped the back of his head and thought it was time. He wanted to go somewhere cold and preferably Teutonic where writers met in cafés with notebooks and grievances and discourse flowed on the meaning of life and of death. He rather fancied a road trip. He hoped to make it as far as Prague.71 What the passage reveals is that Stanton’s exile in Portugal is a romanticized fantasy to be replaced with a similar one, a fabricated dream of Prague as the site of budding writers. Paradoxically, like Marco Afonso whom he despises, Stanton remains unable to contribute to any community, be they artistic or ­local, and thus occupies a similar nomadic position with no commitment. While crossing borders and acting amidst foreign cultures, these transcultural experiences generate little change in Stanton. In opting for Prague, Stanton reveals a traditional modernist idea privileging the metropolis as a site of creation. Unlike Mamarrosa, the metropolis offers an imagined community of authors and literary discourse; in such a paradigm, as the cultural critic Caren Kaplan has shown, the European peripheries are void and unable to generate creation and can never be sites of modernist cultural production themselves: that is, they provide the raw materials to be synthesized in the generative locations of the modern, Western metropolis or they offer opportunities for spatial exploration on the part of metropolitans in search of metaphysical displacement.72 In other words, by remaining a believer in modernist myths of creation and its division into the binary model of centre and periphery, Stanton is unable to attain a transcultural identity or what Homi K. Bhabha refers to as the Third Space.73 Unlike the non-cosmopolitan travellers and migrants from the periphery whose identities are revealed to be translocal, this representative of

71 Ibid., 297. 72 Caren Kaplan, Questions, 32. 73 Bhabha, The Location, 36.

Globalizing European Peripheries

209

the centre clings onto his preconceived values and “Teutonic” community.74 In contrast to Stanton’s inability to learn from his cultural border crossings, translocal or transcultural identity, while not guaranteeing happiness or providing relief from the pressures of globalization, is at least a shared identity helping people to cope with globalization through community. Conclusion This chapter has argued that the representation of migration in Alentejo Blue shows that a place defined as periphery is embedded in the wider world. The global is present in this village in both the networks of its traditional inhabitants and the various European migrants visiting and staying there. In so doing the novel not only exemplifies the significance of contemporary cosmopolitanism as a principle structuring everyday cultural contacts practically everywhere in the world but continues Ali’s explorations of the role of the transnational in the contemporary world. Referring to Ali’s first novel Brick Lane, Pirjo Ahokas has argued that its characters perform transnational identities and thus “challenge the initial binary of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ and prove conducive to the emergence of postmodern female subjectivities characterized by fluidity, multiplicity and heterogeneity”.75 Similarly, the fluidity and multiplicity of the identities and narratives of the inhabitants of Mamarrosa shows how the binaries of “home” and “abroad”, and, more specifically, those of “centre” and “periphery”, are problematized and transformed in contemporary Europe characterized by migration and stay abroad. Rather than a failure, or a novel with a limited local focus, Alentejo Blue can be described as a translocal narrative as it expands the meaning of the local through the various transnational networks in which its inhabitants participate. At the same time it emphasizes the role of the community and its importance for one’s identity.

74 Ali, Alentejo, 297. 75 Pirjo Ahokas, “Constructing a Transnational, Postmodern Female Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”, in Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Globalized World, eds Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglou, and Linda Manney, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2006, 165.

chapter 12

Cross-Cultural Kitchen: Britishness, Globalization, and New Migrants in Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen Whereas Alentejo Blue concentrates on imagining the cosmopolitanization of Europe, Ali’s other works show an interest in the redefinition of Britishness. While Brick Lane explores transnational migration and hybrid spaces in East London with particular reference to the experiences of a female immigrant,1 In the Kitchen (2008) is an attempt to hybridize Britishness and British identities by placing them in the context of globalization and its effects on Britain.2 In so doing it continues Ali’s project of recasting the vexed relationship between Britain and the rest of the world. As I show in this chapter, In the Kitchen imagines a transforming Britain that is affected by contemporary global flows and actors including multinational companies, human trafficking, and illegal immigrant workforce with its new emerging problems. By focusing on the crisis of its well-off, 42-year-old chef-protagonist Gabriel Lightfoot, which sparks off by the mysterious death of the Ukrainian night porter Yuri, the novel inserts Gabriel’s identity crisis into a global script where questions of loyalty and belonging are emphatically present. The novel shows how Gabriel, infatuated by Lena, an illegal immigrant from Belarus, comes to leave his long-term girlfriend Charlie. The crisis deepens when Gabriel is summoned home to Blantwistle, Lancashire, to face his father’s approaching death, his grandmother’s dementia, and his own long-standing neglect of his family. To show how globalization changes Britishness, the novel utilizes two settings, the multicultural kitchen of the London Imperial Hotel and Gabriel’s post-industrial Lancashire hometown, and their respective histories. Through this strategy the novel explores the vibrancy of the multiethnic metropolis, a contact zone with the restaurant kitchen as its microcosm, but also discusses the regionalism and traditionalism associated with the North to promote an ethical attitude and a sense of communal responsibility. In other words, the form of hybridity generated in Ali’s novel is less one of celebrating the transformation of Britain and Britishness than a more melancholic one that shows the inevitability of change in the era of globalization and transnational identities. As I argue, the novel probes the condition of Britain and presents an analysis 1 See Ahokas, 165–81; Upstone, British, 168–82. 2 Monica Ali, In the Kitchen, London: Doubleday, 2009.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004342064_016

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

211

of the legacy of Britishness that leads to a reassessment of the role of national identity. In so doing it forces its protagonist to solve an ethical crisis explicitly linked with the presence of the Other in contemporary Britain. This means that it can be seen as an example of what the sociologist Paul Gilroy has defined as Britain’s postcolonial melancholia: the British need to come to grips with the horrors of their imperial past and construct a new sense of Britishness from what he calls “the debris of their broken narcissism”.3

Framing the Transnational Novel

Globalization theorists have suggested that its transnational processes and flows transform the ways in which national and other identities are imagined and lived through. As I suggested in the previous chapter on the basis of globalization theorists such as Appadurai, cross-cultural flows and new forms of mobility bring different parts of the world in increasing contact with each other, often leading to local appropriations and hybrid forms of imported culture.4 What is important, however, is that these movements are no longer unidirectional, originating in the centre and transforming the periphery. As Appadurai puts it, this “new global cultural economy” is “a complex, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models”.5 As a result of such flows and the presence of ethnic and national minorities, such formerly stable ideas as national identity, uniting the inhabitants of the nation-state, are also bound to change. In the case of Britain, the demise of the Empire and the multiculturalization of Britain have generated a need to revise the once exclusive notion of Britishness in a more inclusive direction. In addition to the migration from the Commonwealth and the former Dominions since the 1950s, contemporary immigration from various parts of Europe has called into question migration policies and notions of citizenship that cannot be justified on a racial basis. Social theorist Bhikhu Parekh has argued for a need to recognize the diversity of contemporary Britain and the ways in which an inclusive understanding of Britishness may enrich the country culturally

3 Gilroy, After, 108. 4 See Appadurai, 33. As I have mentioned, Appadurai discusses such forms of mobility as the transmission of people from one nation and culture to another (ethnoscape), as well as the transmission of ideoscapes (ideologies), financescapes, technoscapes, and mediascapes (33). 5 Ibid., 32.

212

chapter 12

and politically as immigrants shape both Britishness and their own cultures.6 Parekh’s reconstructed Britishness can be described as a hybrid or hyphenated Britishness, a national identity that is located in global flows and mobility and allows for various ways of “being British”. These hybridized identities are results of cultural mixing and located between cultures and histories, as for instance Homi K. Bhabha has suggested. In Bhabha’s view, hybridity is formed in an intercultural space of in-betweenness and liminality. This “Third Space of enunciation” is the liminal space between the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized where migrants, refugees, and other (post)colonial subjects go through a process that recasts their fixed sense of identity.7 While this reconstruction of identity may be positive and empowering, its transgressive character and location in the liminal space of borders and boundaries may also, as Bhabha writes, pose potential dangers because it also generates a new, hybrid subjectivity: “‘Beyond’ signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary – the very fact of going beyond – are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the ‘present’”.8 Thus, to enter the Third Space generates a new sense of identity that may resemble the old one but is not quite the same. Bhabha describes this Third Space of enunciation by using the Freudian term of the uncanny, das Unheimliche, or the “unhomely”, and suggests that the construction of hybrid identity is linked with an “estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations”.9 This collapse of an old sense of identity can be compared with Paul Gilroy’s analysis of the condition of contemporary Britain as a culture of postimperial and postcolonial melancholia. Gilroy’s notion of melancholia as an ambivalent moral attitude towards oneself is based on the work of the German social psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, who studied the German response to Germany’s Nazi past after the Second World War.10 For Gilroy, Britishness is constructed in the context of the (unmourned) loss of Empire, and the related sense of its alleged superiority is a way of negotiating national identity in a situation where increasing immigration transforms a way of life

6

Bhikhu Parekh, “Being British”, in Britishness: Perspectives on the British Question, eds Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 37. 7 Bhabha, The Location, 37. 8 Ibid., 4. 9 Ibid., 9. 10 Gilroy, After, 107–08.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

213

and where immigrants are constant reminders of past glory.11 Significantly, Gilroy argues that this loss of Empire-based identity has not yet been fully mourned away in Britain, but the media, official discourses, and popular culture rely on a nationalist outlook where the British are victims rather than active agents.12 In short, for Gilroy the discursive reproduction of (post)imperial values and the fact that postimperial melancholia itself lives on are signs of the nation’s inability to face its past and thus, unmourned, prevent the formation of what he calls conviviality, a mode of harmonious and respectful co-living. The idea of conviviality, he writes, “refer[s] to the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain and in postcolonial cities elsewhere”.13 In Gilroy’s view, conviviality and diversity counter the values of residual nationalism with its preference for “closed, fixed, and reified identity”.14 My understanding of the reconstruction of Britishness in In the Kitchen takes into account the views presented by Bhabha and Gilroy. Whereas Bhabha’s hybridity is apt to describe the narrative progress and the protagonist’s acquisition of a new identity, Gilroy’s problematization of national identity clarifies Gabriel’s ambivalent relationship with his British past. To use Bhabha’s terms, the new world that Gabriel Lightfoot enters is one of unhomeliness: traditions no longer secure a sense of identity for its inhabitants. By narrating the transformation of the postcolonial subject and its positioning in-between cultures and traditions, and by reimagining identities and inscribing its subjects into new histories, In the Kitchen shows that contemporary globalization and its effects demand a reassessment of Britishness as suggested by Gilroy. When its protagonist is forced to abandon his stable social identity as a result of cross-cultural encounters haunting the new Britain, the novel’s vision of Britishness forces us to rethink the role of nation as a source of identification in a globalized world.

Hybrid Multicultural Spaces: Kitchen and the City

What distinguishes In the Kitchen from Brick Lane in particular is that Ali replaces the British Asian protagonist of her first novel with a white male main character, a solution that at the same time distances the more recent novel 11 12 13 14

Ibid., 110. See ibid., 112–16. Ibid., xi. Ibid., xi.

214

chapter 12

from the traditional novel of immigration and makes possible a revaluation of a changing Britishness. Gabriel hails from a working-class Lancashire family and is now running a restaurant at the Imperial Hotel in London to prove his skills to two businessmen willing to help him in setting up a restaurant of his own. His kitchen staff consists of workers from various parts of the world, including Victor from Moldova, Benny from Liberia, Suleiman from India, Nikolai from Russia, West Indian assistant chef Oona, Scottish porter-­cum-poet Ernie, the nameless dishwashers from Sudan and Somalia, and waitresses from Romania and Sweden. The novel describes this multicultural space, defined by Paganoni as “a multicultural microcosm”,15 as follows: Still, he looked at his kitchen and brimmed with something that he wouldn’t say was love. It wasn’t love but it was something, when he took in his brigade, a United Nations task force all bent to their work. Every corner of the earth was represented here. Hispanic, Asian, African, Baltic and most places in between. Oona had taken on a new dishwasher, from Somalia or somewhere pretty much like that. The other one was Mongolian and the third was from – where? – the Philippines? Gabe had worked in places where porters came as a job lot, the first getting along a cousin who recommended a brother-in-law who also brought his friend. Before you knew it there was a gang of them, and that only spelled trouble ahead. The room-service guy was fresh from Chile and Gabriel doubted that his English extended beyond fries and burgers and whatever else was on the menu. He’d fitted in all right. It was touching, really, to watch them all, every race, every colour, every creed.16 Gabriel himself is a good example of a particular type of contemporary migrant, a well-paid professional, whose career has included a series of jobs in various locations ranging from Brighton and Scarborough to France and Switzerland.17 Because of his past and profession Gabriel is a part of the transnational mobility of labour, which supports the importance given to cultural contact and change in the novel. Unlike many of his colleagues at the Jarvis, one of his first employers, Gabriel has sought to construct a professional culinary identity, which has taken him away from the confines of his early life in 15

Maria Cristina Paganoni, “Shifting Borderscapes of London in Monica Ali’s Narrative”, in Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making, eds Chiara Brambilla, Jussi Laine, James W. Scott, and Gianluca Bocchi, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, 206. 16 Ali, In, 99–100. 17 Ibid., 372.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

215

a closed Lancashire milltown with its dislike of Pakistani immigrants. Rather than “get[ting] shitfaced” every night with the other assistants, he has preferred to spend his evenings “test-grilling one-inch slices of steak and perfecting his soufflés”.18 The difference in their degree of professionalism has guided Gabriel’s interest in fine dining and led to a desire to learn as much as possible about French culinary culture: “Their reading material began with Penthouse and ended with Hustler while he ground his way through Le Guide Culinaire and Larousse”.19 As he puts it, “We’ve got chicken tikka masala [and] they’ve got decent food”.20 While sharing a history of migration with his workers, his stay abroad has transformed his experiences into social and culinary capital. The main setting of the novel, metropolitan London and its hybrid character, is approached through global mobility. The city’s diversity is narrated through its restaurants and the culinary cultures they represent. When Gabriel and his girlfriend Charlie are on the way to the latter’s apartment, they are shown to “drift … north, arm in arm, along the Edgware Road. The light was dying. Neon signs flickered into life, Beirut, Al-Ahram, Al-Dar, Café du Liban”.21 Similarly, Gabriel’s plan to open his own French restaurant in London is defined as a way of responding to the commodification of themed ethnic restaurants, which appear to be innumerable in contemporary London, underlining the fact that global flows have rendered ethnicity as practically mundane, a part of ordinary everyday life: Traditional French cuisine – precisely executed classics with a clean, modern interpretation. Believe me, in London these days, that could be called a theme. If you want Pacific Rim with a Mexican mole on the side you can just pop round the corner. To get a decent steak béarnaise you’ve got to go to the ends of the earth.22

Global Flows and Stories

In addition to its migrant chef, the personal histories of the kitchen staff are linked with various global flows. As I will show in this section, the novel foregrounds the notion of story and uses it in a variety of ways. In general, 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., 79. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 75.

216

chapter 12

the stories­of the multicultural crew reveal their particular experiences of globalization from below as instances of vernacular cosmopolitanism. The importance of the idea of the story is seen in Gabriel’s comment on the Somali dishwasher Salim: “He looks quite sad, Salim. I wonder what his story is”.23 The stories include, but are not limited to, Benny’s stories of African refugees and child soldiers, Suleiman’s story telling of the ambition and careerconsciousness­of this Indian chef, and the various stories of Eastern European migrants: former medical doctor Nikolai’s story of political dissidence, Lena’s story of forced prostitution, pimps, abuse, and closed rooms in Kilburn, Yuri’s story, silenced by his death and reconstructed from fragments and photograph, and the stories of Olek and other exploited workers at the farm owned by the brother of the hotel’s restaurant manager Gleeson. These narratives confirm what Michael Perfect finds peculiar to the role of multiculturalism as represented in this novel: it “warns against taking ethnic and cultural diversity as necessarily being indicative of a tolerant, fair or equal society. The Imperial’s kitchen is certainly a multi-ethnic and multicultural space, but is it one that relies on exploitation rather than on equality”.24 By foregrounding the act of storytelling and the notion of story, the novel locates the multicultural kitchen in the various globalized narratives and demands that the stories of migrants be listened to. If Gabriel wants to understand, he has to learn to reflect on the experiences of the less privileged migrants and to respond ethically to them, a dilemma which contributes to his nervous breakdown. An ethical response is not characteristic of Gabriel in the early stages of the story. In addition to silently objecting to the one minute’s silence to commemorate Yuri’s death as proposed by Nikolai (“Why now …. Why in the middle of service, when every minute counts?”25), his motives for listening to Benny’s story of his journeying to Britain are self-centred. Appropriately, in this case the ethical response is defined as a burden: Gabriel was grateful for this abbreviated history. On the one hand he was idly curious to hear Benny’s background, on the other he did not wish to be burdened with it. If he had to yell at Benny about something, or even give him the sack, he preferred not to know about any terrible things he might have been through. He was only keeping him talking to put off the inevitable: going home.26 23 Ibid., 116. 24 Perfect, 130. 25 Ali, In, 64. 26 Ibid., 119.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

217

The stories of migration, then, as they aim at transforming formerly unitary discourses and narratives, become agents of hybridity in two ways. First, they are examples of what Bhabha has referred to the cultural right to narrate,27 a concept clarified by David Huddart as the right to participate and intervene in the production of histories.28 This right, however, is shown to be problematic since not all stories are equal: “Do you know,” said Benny, “you can buy a national insurance number, you can buy a passport, an identity, and also you can buy a story. If you think your own story is not strong enough, if you worry that your own suffering is not sufficient to gain permission, you can buy a story and take it with you to this government office in Croydon. Somali stories can get a high price.” “I suppose,” said Gabe, “that everything is for sale.” “And if you tell your own story, you may not be believed. ‘Lack of credibility.’ That is the stamp they use. I know somebody that this happened to.”29 The second function of these stories is to challenge the dominant narrative of nation, to introduce counter-narratives inscribing the liminal experience of migrants, indigenous peoples, or ethnic minorities into the nation and thus to hybridize it. These people, indeed, are the inhabitants of the liminal space of the kitchen, as seen in Gabriel’s response to Charlie’s question “Who ends up in the kitchen”?30 He replies: “Misfits, … psychos, migrants, culinary artists, and people who just need a job”.31 In theoretical terms, this process of narrating an identity from the margins of the nation has been defined by Bhabha in the following manner: Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which “imagined communities” are given essentialist identities. For the political unity of the nation consists in a 27 28

See Bhabha, “On Writing Rights”, 162–83. David Huddart, “Hybridity and Cultural Rights: Inventing Global Citizenship”, in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, eds Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007, 33–34. 29 Ali, In, 117. 30 Ibid., 143. 31 Ibid., 143.

218

chapter 12

continual displacement of the anxiety of its irredeemably plural modern space – representing the nation’s modern territoriality is turned into the archaic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism. The difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One. The liminal point of this ideological displacement is the turning of the differentiated spatial boundary, the “outside,” into the authenticated “inward” time of Tradition.32 Indeed, this act of providing a counter-narrative to the nation is central to the function of the stories of migration in Ali’s novel. In the process they also make a claim on Gabriel, for whom the death of Yuri becomes a turning point, as the opening of the novel makes clear: “When he looked back, he felt that the death of the Ukrainian was the point at which things began to fall apart”.33 While Gabriel, “changed sufficiently by then”, thinks of the narrative of his experiences as “only a story” that is “not … to be trusted”,34 the novel nevertheless sets out to tell his version.

Gabriel’s Fall, or Forging a Hybrid Identity

While Gabriel’s breakdown can be seen as a psychological reaction to stress and insecurity, it can also be suggested that it is part of the way in which the novel hybridizes his identity. In this process his previous identification as a rational, goal-conscious, and business-oriented chef/restauranteur planning his future business and fantasizing about a future family life gives way to a different and more relational identity that does not see other people or the Other as mere competitors but recognizes the fact that they play a role in his life to an extent previously unknown to him.35 While Gabriel initially tries to explain the transformation as a response to stress, it can also be examined as an example of hybridization as defined in Bhabha’s theorization of the Third Space. In Bhabha’s view, it is in its passage through the Third Space of enunciation, of the production of a new cultural identity, that the subject experiences a transformation, the formation of a new cultural identity:

32 Bhabha, The Location, 149. 33 Ali, In, 7. 34 Ibid., 7. 35 See ibid., 72 and 102.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

219

The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable system of reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance.36 In the case of Gabriel, this new identity is addressed by showing how his increasing insecurity and self-questioning problematize his formerly rational identity. Rationality and free will are in fact explored in the novel through its references to astrology, the stars, and the fate, and their meaning in the life of the Indian chef Suleiman. Whereas his education and career have been meticulously planned by his family,37 the choice of a potential marriage partner is in Suleiman’s view dependent on the stars: “But as a way of making bride selection it [astrology] does appear to work as well as any system you have here”.38 The novel explores his change in ways that exemplify Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space. When showing that identities are changing rather than fixed, and new meanings replace former ones, the novel underlines how Gabriel is no longer able to rely on old forms of signification – what he used to know no longer carries meaning: Gabe held his pen over the page. His mind became fogged. Impossible to pick out a single thought. His wrists locked and though he wanted to write any old thing, to begin the process, he could not make a mark.39 In this process of constructing himself anew Gabriel replaces his attachment with his English girlfriend Charlie with a sexual relationship with the Belarusian prostitute Lena. The fact that Lena, an Other, plays a role in Gabriel’s transformation is evident when she guides Gabriel through the Third Space. The novel addresses the issue in two passages where the image of sexual intercourse is employed to deal with the themes of becoming and transformation. While the first example below reveals his increasing self-questioning, the second one, with its references to “branding” and “engraving”, underlines the problem of meaning-making, of signification, and is also suggestive of the British ambivalence involved in carving out a sense of identity under 36 Bhabha, The Location, 35. 37 Ali, In, 266–67. 38 Ibid., 347. 39 Ibid., 47.

220

chapter 12

the contemporary­conditions of globalization. While at one level the entire relationship with Lena can be seen as a symbolic way of dealing with the issue of the immigrant, as a way of relieving one’s guilt, as a method of compensation, or a mode of mourning, it also reveals emerging problems related to his transforming identity. To quote the novel: When he moved on top of her it was with a grace and ease he had not known he possessed. Her hard little fingers moved through his hair. Am I the kind of person who does this? He thought. Is this me, am I this type? And then there was only the movement, the heat, the wet, the rub, the glide, the ripples across his back, and he dissolved, no I, no me, no who, but only this, their bodies, and nothing more.40 In this coupling they would be made new; from this they would draw their strength. He needed this, to wipe the slate, and to brand his indelible mark. Sweat rolled off his brow and into his eyes. It made them sting. He buried himself. He needed this. To engrave himself so deeply that the others would be erased.41 The changing identity leads Gabriel toward existentialist questions that echo the words of T.S. Eliot: “What am I? he thought. What am I? …. What am I? What am I? A nobody? A nothing? A zero? Am I a hollow man?”42 This questioning is a sign of the splitting of his identity, which is narrated as a nervous breakdown with symptoms of irresponsible, bipolar behaviour, and a panic attack.43 This split is also shown with the help of conventional mirror imagery as Gabriel does not recognize himself: It wasn’t possible. There had to be some mistake. He tried again. Again the image confronted him. A lunatic stared out of the mirror with redrimmed eyes. His skin was grey, unshaven and flaked. He had a cut on his forehead and a green and purple bruise on his cheek. There was a wild look about him, his hair standing in tufts and clumps as if he had been pulling it out.44

40 41 42 43 44

Ibid., 123; emphasis original. Ibid., 154; emphasis added. Ibid., 372; emphasis added. Ibid., 298. Ibid., 383.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

221

This transformation into a marginal being, a “wild” Other, tells of the uncanniness of his situation and subsequent dislocation. The above examples show how the novel uses various elements of the Third Space that reveal its ambivalence, unhomeliness, and threatening nature. The sense of its unhomeliness or uncanniness increases as Gabriel has unexpected visions from the past that enter the present: for instance, he suddenly sees the rag-and-bone man who once brought his depressive mother home.45 On another occasion he uses another uncanny image as he thinks of himself as an automaton, a body merely obeying the orders of the subconscious: It was my thought. But where did it come from? It wasn’t my idea to think something stupid like that …. It just popped into my mind. People said that, didn’t they? But if he wasn’t responsible for his thoughts, then what was “he”? Was there a “he” that was separate from the bit of him that thought? He didn’t think so. How could he know?46 As well as separating Gabriel from his former self, the discovery of this alternative self shows that the old conceptions of centre and periphery no longer hold, demanding, once again, that he is in the process of leaving what Bhabha calls the Tradition.47 In other words, through Gabriel’s crisis the novel shows how the national narrative of Britishness is in a crisis generated by the presence of the Other through globalization. As Bhabha puts it: “it is only through a structure of splitting and displacement … that the architecture of the new historical subject emerges at the limits of representation itself”.48 Through splitting, a new Britishness becomes possible.

The Fall of Britain

In the case of Gabriel, the displacement he displays is both personal and cultural. In addition to telling of his transforming identity, it is linked with the crisis and transformation of Britishness, a major issue in Ali’s novel because it produces what Bhabha refers to as “the new historical subject”.49 While Gabriel has sought to distance himself from the ideological baggage of insular 45 46 47 48 49

Ibid., 131, see also 251. Ibid., 225; emphasis original. Cf. Bhabha, The Location, 35. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 217.

222

chapter 12

Englishness,­its racism and dislike of foreigners – as seen in his comments on some of the views put forward by his father and grandmother in particular – it comes to haunt him and forces him to negotiate his own location in this discourse. Consequently, it is through the story of Gabriel’s family and its Britishness that the novel addresses the contemporary condition of Britain – Perfect defines it “as a state-of-the-nation novel” but mentions that its analysis of the national crisis “falls flat”.50 The national condition is, however, frequently addressed by the novel. The gradual disappearance of traditional Britishness is seen, for instance, in the novel’s urban London setting and Gabriel’s surprise on seeing a true specimen of it on a train from London to the North. As the passage below makes clear, the national tradition is directly related to the Empire, colonization, and other stereotypical markers of the imagined and formerly dominant national identity: He’d found, so he thought, a haven at the end of the train when a woman boarded at Watford and quickly set about colonizing his space. She wore a tweed suit and good strong shoes and had an equally sturdy face. As she talked to him, the clink of fine china in her voice, Gabriel thought you don’t see many like her any more. She was empire-building stock, no doubt about it; she was Jam and Jerusalem, God and Golf, Gin Rummy and Croquet Lawn.51 Similarly, his father Ted, now dying of cancer, represents a different social class but is equally strongly rooted in an imaginary Britishness of the past. He is a former tackler, a cotton mill worker overlooking the weaving machines, who had worked all his life at Riley’s, one of the Lancashire cotton mills, until its closure. As the novel mentions that the last of the mills is now about to cease its operations, this demise of industrial Britain is sketched as the end of an era. Ted’s former mill is now a prime example of consumer culture: “Rileys Shopping Village”, complete with “Candleland, Gnomeland and Bubbleland”, sells “ladies’ fashions, ceramics, bakeware, handbags and accessories, crystal vases and personalized coffee mugs”.52 From Ted’s perspective, the transformation from the production phase to the service economy is a further sign of Britain’s demise. As he puts it while visiting the shopping village’s Hungry Tackler Café, a representative of commercialism and the commodification of history, “When we were the workshop of the world we sold to everywhere and we’d a healthy 50 Perfect, 136. 51 Ali, In, 152. 52 Ibid., 197.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

223

surplus, you see. But we’ve a huge deficit now. We’re not a trading nation, we’re a nation of consumers, that’s all”.53 What Ted and Nana, Gabriel’s grandmother suffering from senile dementia, claim is that Britain has lost its sense of community and national identity: Great Britain … no one says that any more. United Kingdom. We’ll we’re hardly that. It’s going to the dogs, Gabe. Going to the dogs .… We’ve lost the “Great”, Know what else we’ve lost? Britishness. People keep talking about it. That’s how you know it’s gone …54 In Ted’s view, the loss of national identity is also the loss of the way of life of his community: “there was a community – aye, turn yer nose up, that’s right – a community here and that’s been lost”.55 This discourse reflects the concerns of many Britons who have felt marginalized by the processes of Europeanization and globalization and was successfully activated by populist politicians in the period leading towards the Brexit vote in June 2016. Rather than a mere discussion of contrasting discourses and definitions of Britishness and its inclusiveness, the novel reflects on questions of loyalty, belonging, and trust in an increasingly individualistic contemporary society – the novel’s acknowledgements show that Ali is well read in contemporary literature on the subject, including the work of Richard Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman. To underline its communalist ethos, Ted, while hankering after the old days, is not shown as a racist but his friends include Mr Nazir, another aged worker with more than 20 years’ service with Rileys. What the old men share, quite naturally, is a dislike of the ways of the young. As Mr Nazir comments on his grandson: “Asif is difficult. Very difficult. Always telling me what is written in the Qur’an. The Qur’an says this, the Quran says that. I say, Asif, you are not the keeper of the light. This my religion too.” He shook his head. “These young people. Thinking they know it all. No humility and no respect, this is the problem. It’s the western values they pick up, wanting everything their way.” “This is it,” said Ted. “Yer not wrong there.”56

53 54 55 56

Ibid., 201. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 194; emphasis original.

224

chapter 12

As the connection between the two old men shows, Britishness is recast as a sense of loyalty and belonging, as an ethical attitude based on community and mutual respect rather than on imported values and self-centredness. As this sense of responsibility is missing from Gabriel’s life, to learn from his sister that the entire community is devoted to helping his father and grandmother, visiting them and cooking for them, is a surprise: “What had looked to him like two old people muddling through was in fact a carefully orchestrated plan. He’d had no more idea of it than a dinner presented with a beautiful plate, who knows nothing of what goes on below stairs”.57 The role of community in generating a sense of belonging and promoting the well-being of its members is in stark contrast with the view of the mp Fairweather, Gabriel’s potential source of funding, who is unable to grasp this dimension: … A core British value. Freedom, fairness, tolerance, plurality. …. Plurality. Our so-called British identity is like our economy, Gabriel, deregulated in the extreme. It’s a marketplace of ideas and values and cultures and none of them are privileged over the rest. Each one finds its own level depending on supply and demand.” Fairweather had gone into rapid-fire mode. “We talk about the multicultural model but it’s really nothing more than laissez-faire. I think that’s quite unique. Our national identity, in that way, is very distinct.58 Fairweather’s a neoliberalist “laissez-faire” definition of Britishness does not recognize any shared values or general principles in society, only individual actors. Rather than calling for ethical and social responsibility, this definition reveals a cynical attitude and its proponents merely attempt to relieve the political system of its responsibility. Reading the novel in a political context, Paganoni connects Fairweather’s opportunism with the politics of New Labour and their 1997 manifesto where value is defined by suggesting that “what counts is what works”.59 Ali’s novel, in other words, counters the principles of post-Thatcherite neoliberalism and argues of a more ethical attitude in social thinking. It is, indeed, because of this ethical demand that Gabriel enters the Third Space. His encounters with both his family and the victims of globalization such as Lena lead him towards an identity based on responsibility for the Other(s). It should also be mentioned that he is sent off to complete this task 57 58 59

Ibid., 176. Ibid., 281–82. Paganoni, 208.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

225

by his dead mother appearing to him in a dream: “Hurry up Gabe! Don’t miss it. Be quick. Don’t miss it this time!”60 To use the terms of Emmanuel Levinas, this ethical attitude can be described as a demand for the self to “respond to another”,61 a view defined in an anthology on ethics and postcoloniality as a need “to abandon the safety and stability of preconceived images of the other”.62 This is what Gabriel realizes upon accepting his transformed self: “He was glad of it. He wouldn’t miss the old Gabe, the miser, counting his love like money, hoarding and rationing, seeking out bargains”.63 What he has to accept is the story of the other, even though it may be incoherent and inconsistent, without making any claims: He wanted to believe her [Lena’s] story. It had to have order and neatness. It had to be credible. But life had not been reasonable to Lena. Life was random and cruel. And why should she, to please him, try to make sense out of it?64 Ali’s story of Gabriel’s ethical awakening takes the form of a narrative of katabasis, a story in which the protagonist enters or descends into another, a nether world. The motif of the lower world is repeatedly present in the novel: Gabriel has a recurring nightmare in which he descends into the basement of the Imperial Hotel and keeps on finding Yuri’s body. The basement is referred as “the catacombs” in both ordinary parlance,65 but more specifically in the dream: “He descends into the aquarium glow of the catacombs”.66 In Bent Sørensen’s view, the narrative of katabasis, or retreat, can be found in many quest stories, and its general aim is to narrate “the hero’s growth as a result of adversity and his overcoming thereof”.67 The following description of the katabasis by Holtsmark sheds further light on its functions and features: 60 Ali, In, 381. 61 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981, 47. 62 Tuomas Huttunen, Kaisa Ilmonen, Janne Korkka, and Elina Valovirta, “Introduction”, in Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation, eds Tuomas Huttunen, Kaisa Ilmonen, Janne Korkka, and Elina Valovirta, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, xiii. 63 Ali, In, 382. 64 Ibid., 383. 65 Ibid., 23. 66 Ibid., 128. See also 89, 279, and 381. 67 Bent Sørensen, “Katabasis in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, Orbis Litterarum, lx (2005), 17–18.

226

chapter 12

The entryway to the other world is often conceived as lying in caves or grottos or other openings in the earth’s crust into the nether regions [and] such natural topographical delimiters as rivers, bodies of water, or even mountain ranges may be the physical tokens of demarcation .… The lower world is generally dank and dark, and the journey usually takes place at dusk or during the night. The realm itself is inhabited by the wealthy king and queen of the dead and by the innumerable spirits of the dead, by monsters (e.g., Cerberus) and evil-doers (e.g., Tantalus). The usual purpose of the journey is to obtain spiritual and material wealth … or to rescue a friend or friends …. After his return the hero sometimes assumes roles of increased responsibility and leadership.68 In the Kitchen uses the conventions of the katabatic narrative in a different way to increase Gabriel’s ethical responsibility in a global context. The other world he enters by taking a minibus at Victoria Station when looking for Lena’s lost half-brother (or lover) Pasha is the parallel world of forced migration and indentured labour, populated by exploited and despaired Eastern European farmworkers living in the desolate conditions of an East Anglian farm. Thinking that the bus – which has formerly belonged to his hotel – is transporting hotel cleaners, Gabriel boards the minibus driven by a chauffeur speaking “in some Slavic language”, falls asleep,69 and wakes up in a different and uncanny world whose inhabitants consist of temporary and marginal drifters in Britain. The Ukrainian worker Olek is a good example. With no job in his home country, he has come to Britain in the hope of being able to save enough money to start his own business when he returned. The first job failed to materialize. He found work on a construction site but when he took time off after an injury someone else took his place. Then he worked in a meat-processing plant somewhere in the north, and when his pay packet came after two sixty-five-hour weeks there was only fortyfive pounds in it. He had not been told about the £150 “arrangement fee.” He made a fuss and was thrown out and for a while he dossed down in a park. Now his only ambition was to scrape together enough money to afford the journey home.70

68

Erling B. Holtsmark, “The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema”, in Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, ed. Martin M. Winkler, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 25–26. 69 Ali, In, 391. 70 Ibid., 402.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

227

The description of the Nut Tree Farm is a further example of the conventions of the katabasis. His room “rightly belong[ing] in the dark” is described as follows: “Despite the signs of habitation it seemed unlikely that any life form would flourish here, except perhaps the mould that bloomed in large patches along the walls”.71 As Gabriel refuses to speak up in order to conceal his identity, he is mistaken for a migrant named Danilo Hetman and constructed as an Other through an act of renaming. While the work in the onion fields proves to be a harsh experience, closeness to nature with its organic plants assists in the reconstruction of his self: At first Gabriel thought that he would not be able to bend his back sufficiently to continue. He managed to get to his knees but then seized up. The pain made him bite on his tongue. He clawed at the earth with his hands. He poured all that he had left, his entire being, into pulling up the next bunch and when he succeeded he felt a great sense of accomplishment, as if he had delivered not a handful of salad onions but something of great worth. He ignored the pain by focusing on the rough wooden handle of the fork when he picked it up, the way the tines glinted when the earth slid off, the crisp boldness of the green shoots, the coy lustre of the bulbs.72 The experiences at the farm transform Gabriel ethically and show that he learns to respond to the Other(s). In addition to the purifying powers of nature, the other workers teach him solidarity: “It was touching that Olek, a total stranger, had tried to help him, preventing him from getting into trouble by stepping out of line”.73 As a result, Gabriel becomes “relaxed and fresh” with a “pleasurably blank” mind.74 Further, “he exhaled long and hard and let go of everything. He didn’t need it any more”.75 The new Gabriel is able to confront the unethical exploiters, including Gleeson, the wealthy “king” of this lower world and the brother of Gabriel’s arrogant colleague who supplements his income by dealing in girls. With the help of Ivan, one of the kitchen workers, the restaurant manager promises Eastern European immigrant workers lucrative careers as singers but “sells them like meat, man, two dollars a kilo”, apparently

71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., 395. Ibid., 399. Ibid., 398. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 403

228

chapter 12

into prostitution.76 Together with his henchman Tyson (a Cerberos-like character), Gleeson the farm-owner exploits foreign workers unprotected by legislation. When a young Polish worker is not paid what he has been promised, he demands that they return his passport to him so that he could seek work somewhere else. However, he is told that they have not registered him and so he is “illegal now, can’t working nowhere”.77 The final chapters of the novel show how Gabriel takes ethical responsibility for migrant labour and his family in this quest narrative. He first challenges the farm owners, then confronts the ruthless restaurant manager, and finally attacks the unethical politician Fairweather, whom he suspects of being Lena’s abuser. While this act costs him his job, it gains him the respect of his crew. His last glimpse of them is that they had gathered at the nearest station, Victor, Nikolai, Suleiman, Benny, Albert and his assistant, Damian and the rest, only Ivan missing. “Six dockets up, six tables waiting. Back to work,” he called. “Yes, Chef,” they cried as one.78 It should be emphasized that at this point in the novel their acceptance of Gabriel shows the undoing of the former hierarchical master-servant relationship, as Gabriel has just been fired from his job. In other words, it tells of moral acceptance, a new phase in their relationship, and the possibility of forming a sense of community through transnational networks. Gabriel’s new identity based on his return from the nether world, which as a liminal space of transformation populated by migrants, is similar to the process that Bhabha’s unhomely Third Space describes. The return leads to the reconstruction of his identity with an ethical component, which can be seen as a characteristic of the katabatic narrative. Similarly, his subsequent relationship with his family shows signs of reconciliation: “Since he had returned to Blantwistle six days ago, he had talked endlessly to Jenny about what had happened to him, a little manically at first, but more calmly with each passing day and each retelling”.79 By “piec[ing] the story together, without leaving anything out”,80 a new relational identity is constructed, and Gabriel is shown to be able

76 77 78 79 80

Ibid., 364. Ibid., 405. Ibid., 416. Ibid., 421. Ibid., 421.

Cross-Cultural Kitchen

229

to mourn over his neglect over his mother and family in his past.81 This identity is based on a sense of community and his recognition of Others, including his neglected girlfriend Charlie, as the novel ends in their agreeing to meet each other over lunch, a potential sign of a new beginning. Conclusion I have argued that Gabriel Lightfoot’s crisis can be read as a form of reconstruction of his identity as delineated by Homi Bhabha. Read in the context of transnational labour and increased global migration, the novel can be seen to argue for the need to recognize and respond to the Other in new ways. This new identity is both relational and ethical. It is based on an acceptance of Others on their own terms and as themselves, and it recognizes the importance of community and transnational networks. For Gabriel, to attain such an identity requires a reassessment of the past and a process of mourning. Like in molecular gastronomy, to use the novel’s metaphors, the attainment of hybrid identity requires that the “protein … shake itself free of its internal bonds”,82 becoming something else in the process. The new Britishness of the novel is transnational and ethical: rather than promoting symbolic representations and essentialisms of nation and tradition as markers of identity, or describing yet another hyphenated identity to be reinstituted, the novel calls for the need to replace nationalisms with co-operation and mutual acceptance, with community and loyalty.83 In so doing it defines their lack as the condition of contemporary Britain that finds itself as a part of global flows transforming its social landscapes. Rather than a “non-identity”, as proposed by Fairweather in the novel,84 the new Britishness imagined in In the Kitchen is a joint and ethical product of the various people sharing the territory of Britain, and may function as an example of what Gilroy’s culture of conviviality can be in practice.

81 See ibid., 181. 82 Ibid., 378. 83 Cf. Paganoni, 209. 84 Ali, In, 281.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Abu-Jaber, Diana, The Language of Baklava, New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Ali, Monica, Alentejo Blue, London: Doubleday, 2006. Ali, Monica, In the Kitchen, London: Doubleday, 2009. Bashir-Khairi, Abdalla, “The Text Committee”, trans. Ibrahim Gafar, ed. Tom Cheesman, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 43–45. Beah, Ismael, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, London: Fourth Estate, 2007. Bowen, Alice Salomon, “Let’s Get Along”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 20. Bowen, Alice Salomon, “Friendship”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 20. Charles, Eric Ngalle, “My First Language”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 27–30. Charles, Eric Ngalle, “A Mountain and a Sea”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 90–91. Charles, Eric Ngalle, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, eds, Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003. Charles, Eric Ngalle, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, eds, Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004. Charles, Eric Ngalle, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, eds, Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005. F., Rebekah, “Black is …”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 23. Guémar, Soleïman Adel, “State of Emergency (Six Poems)”, in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 30–34. Guémar, Soleïman Adel, “The Poet’s Garden”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 78–82.

232

bibliography

Guémar, Soleïman Adel, “Exile”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 70. Guémar, Soleïman Adel, “Fire of Joy”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 65. Guémar, Soleïman Adel, “Illusions”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 67. Guémar, Soleïman Adel, “Known Places”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 67. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, Admiring Silence, London: Penguin, 1997 [1996]. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, By the Sea, London: Bloomsbury, 2002 [2001]. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, Desertion, New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, Pilgrims Way, London: Jonathan Cape, 1988. Hoffmann, Sylvie, comp., “Swansea Collage”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 74–81. Hoffmann, Sylvie, comp., “Swansea Collage”, in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 102–09. Jaffrey, Madhur, Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, London: Ebury Press, 2006 [2005]. Keita, Aliou, “Africa, Mother”, in Nobody’s Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004, 63. Kikamba, Simão, Going Home, Roggebaai: Kwela Books, 2005. Kongolo, Aimé, “The First Fear”, in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 39–41. Kpakio, Maxson Sahr, “I Feel like Nobody Here”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 68–69. Mahjoub, Jamal, The Carrier, London: Phoenix House, 1998. Mahjoub, Jamal, Travelling with Djinns, London: Chatto and Windus, 2003. Mahjoub, Jamal, The Drift Latitudes, London: Chatto and Windus, 2006. Mahjoub, Jamal, “Last Thoughts on the Medusa”, Wasafiri, XXIII/4 (2008), 69–71. Mbwembwe, William G., “I Guarantee”, in Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005, 28.

Bibliography

233

Melville, Herman, Redburn: His First Voyage Being the Sailor-Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service, London: Penguin, 1986 [1849]. Phillips, Caryl, A Distant Shore, London: Vintage, 2003. Phillips, Caryl, Crossing the River, London: Vintage, 1995 [1993]. Phillips, Caryl, Dancing in the Dark, London: Secker and Warburg, 2005. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.



Secondary Sources

Agamben, Giorgio, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Ahmed, Sara, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Sheller Mimi, ­“Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration”, in Uprootings/­ Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, eds Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, Oxford: Berg, 2003, 1–19. Ahokas, Pirjo, “Constructing a Transnational, Postmodern Female Identity in ­Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”, in Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Globalized World, eds Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglou, and Linda Manney, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2006, 165–81. Alexander, Jeffrey C., “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma”, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 1–30. Amazon.co.uk, “Alentejo-Blue-Monica-Ali”, available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. Amin, Ash, “Multi-Ethnicity and the Idea of Europe”, Theory, Culture and Society, XXI/2 (2004), 1–24. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Origins of Nationalism, rev. ed., London: Verso, 1991 [1983]. Anon., “Dedication”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 1. Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Asad, Talal, “Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?”, in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 209–27. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 1988.

234

bibliography

Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, London: Verso, 1995. Beck, Ulrich, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Bedingfield, Agnieszka, “Trans-Memory and Diaspora: Memories of Europe and Asia in American Immigrant Narratives”, in Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, eds William Boelhower, Rocío G. Davis, and Carmen Birkle, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2004, 333–46. Bewes, Timothy, “Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché in Caryl Phillips”, Cultural Critique, LXIII (2006), 33–60. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K., “On Writing Rights”, in Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1999, ed. Matthew J. Gibney, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 162–83. Bhabha, Homi K., “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, London: Routledge, 1990, 1–7. Boyd, William, “Babes in Arms”, rev. of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2007, online ed. . Accessed 9 Aug. 2009. Brah, Avtar, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge, 1996. Brambilla, Chiara, “Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept”, Geopolitics, XX/1 (2015), 1–14. Brancato, Sabrina, “Life Maps: Towards a Cartography of Refugee Experience”, Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies, III/2 (2008). Brock, Richard, “Framing Theory: Toward an Ekphrastic Postcolonial Methodology”, Cultural Critique, LXXVII (2011), 102–45. Brogan, Kathleen, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1998. Buikema, Rosemarie, “‘A Poetics of Home’: On Narrative Voice and the Deconstruction of Home in Migrant Literature”, in Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, eds Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, 177–87. Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter, London: Routledge, 1993. Camino, Linda, “Refugee Adolescents and Their Changing Identities”, in Reconstructing Lives, Recapturing Meaning: Refugee Identity, Gender, and Culture Change, eds Linda Camino and Ruth M. Krulfeld, Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1993, 29–56. Caruth, Cathy, “Introduction”, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, 3–12. Castano, Emanuele, “European Identity: A Social-Psychological Perspective”, in Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU, eds Richard Herrmann, Thomas Risse, and Marilynn B. Brewer, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, 40–58.

Bibliography

235

Chambers, Claire, “The Indian Ocean in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh”, Wasafiri, XXVI/2 (2011), 87–91. Chambers, Claire, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Charteris-Black, Jonathan, “Britain as a Container: Immigration Metaphors in the 2005 Election Campaign”, Discourse & Society, XVII (2006), 563–81. Cheesman, Tom, “Preface”, in Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees Writing in Wales, eds Eric Ngalle Charles, Tom Cheesman, and Sylvie Hoffman, Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003, 7–8. Cheng, Anne Anlin, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Chude-Sukei, Louis, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Clingman, Steven, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Creet, Julia, “Introduction: The Migration of Memory and Memories of Migration”, in Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, eds Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011, 1–26. Crothers, Lane, Globalization and American Popular Culture, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. “Dancing in the Dark: Caryl Phillips in Conversation with John McLeod, Leeds 2005”, Moving Worlds, VII/1 (2007), 103–14. D’Andrea, Anthony, “Deciphering the Space and Scale of Global Nomadism: Subjectivity and Counterculture in a Global Age”, in Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, ed. Saskia Sassen, London: Routledge, 2007, 139–53. Deer, Glenn, “Eating the Eurasian Text: Food, Sex, and the Audience in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God, and Juzo Itami’s Tampopo”, in Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, eds William Boelhower, Rocío G. Davis, and Carmen Birkle, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2004, 287–302. D’haen, Theo, “Stranger in a Strange Land: Jamal Mahjoub’s The Carrier”, in Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, eds Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, 123–35. Diner, Hasia R., Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Dirty Pretty Things, dir. Stephen Frears, Disney Home Entertainment, 2002. Dodgson-Katiyo, Pauline, “Asylum Stories: Constructing Zimbabwean Identities in the Diaspora”, in Neo-Colonial Mentalities in Contemporary Europe? Language and

236

bibliography

Discourse in the Construction of Identities, eds Guido Rings and Anne Ife, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 67–83. Duff, David, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of the Genre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Eagleton, Terry, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature, London: Chatto & Windus, 1970. Eckstein, Lars, Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains”, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, afterword by Judith Butler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 1–25. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian, eds, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, afterword by Judith Butler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Eng, David L. and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue of Racial Melancholia”, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, afterword by Judith Butler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 343–71. Fair, Jo Ellen and Lisa Parks, “Africa on Camera: Television News Coverage and Aerial Imagining of Rwandan Refugees”, Africa Today, XLVIII/2 (2001), 35–57. Farrier, David, “Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XLIII/3 (2008), 121–39. Farrier, David, Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary behind the Law, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Fasselt, Rebecca, “Ke nako (It Is Time) to Scrutinize Ubuntu: Reading “South African Hospitality’ towards African Immigrants in Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline”, paper presented at the 4th Global Conference: Multiculturalism, Conflict, and Belonging. Oxford, United Kingdom, 23–26 Sept. 2010, , accessed 12 Aug. 2016. Featherstone, Mike, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, London: Sage, 1995. Featherstone, Simon, Postcolonial Cultures, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Flockemann, Miki, Kudzayi Ngara, Wahseema Roberts, and Andrea Castle, “The Everyday Experience of Xenophobia: Performing The Crossing from Zimbabwe to South Africa”, Critical Arts, XXIV (2009), 245–59. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004”, American Quarterly, LVII (2005), 17–57. Forbes, Camille F., Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star, New York: Basic Civitas, 2008.

Bibliography

237

Frank, Søren, “Literature of Migration: A Conceptual Meditation”, in Migrations, Intercultural Identities and Border Regions (19th and 20th Centuries). Migration, identités interculturelles et espaces frontaliers (XIXe et XXe siècles), eds Elien Declerq, Walter Kusters, and Saartje Vanden Borr, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012, 15–28. Freud, Sigmund, “Mourning and Melancholia” [1917], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1957, 243–58. Gabaccia, Donna R., We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, London: Harvard University Press, 1998. George, Rosemary Marangoly, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Gikandi, Simon, “Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality”, in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, eds Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, London: Routledge, 2010, 21–35. Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004. Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1996 [1993]. Gilroy, Paul, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London: Routledge, 1998 [1987]. Glanville, Erin Goheen, “Rerouting Diaspora Theory with Canadian Refugee Fiction”, in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, eds Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, London: Routledge, 2010, 128–38. Glazer, Ilsa, rev. of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism, by David M. Rosen, Anthropological Quarterly, LXXIX/2 (2006), 373–94. Goeller, Alison D., “The Hungry Self: The Politics of Food in Italian American Women’s Autobiography”, in Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing, ed. Rosalia Baena, London: Routledge, 2007, 18–30. Gohrisch, Jana, “Cultural Exchange and the Representation of History in Postcolonial Literature”, European Journal of English Studies, X (2006), 231–47. Goring, Paul, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Domhnall Mitchell, Studying Literature: The Essential Companion, London, Arnold, 2001. Göttsche, Dirk, “Cross-Cultural Self-Assertion and Cultural Politics: African Migrants’ Writing in German since the 1990s”, German Life and Letters, LXIII/1 (2010), 54–70. Greenblatt, Stephen, “A Mobility Studies Manifesto”, in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, by Stephen Greenblatt with Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 250–53.

238

bibliography

Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity”, in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, eds Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 1–33. Griffiths, Gareth, “Narrative, Identity, and Social Practice in Tanzania: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Ironic Paradise”, in Engaging with Literature of Commitment, vol. 1: Africa in the World, eds Gordon Collier, Marc Delrez, Anne Fuchs, and Bénédicte Ledent, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, 309–18. Gupta, Suman, Literature and Globalization, Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, “Fear and Loathing”, The Guardian, 22 May, 2001, online ed., available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. Gurr, Andrew, Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1981. Hall, Stuart, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity”, in Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King, London: Macmillan, 1991, 19–39. Hall, Stuart, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question”, in Un/Settled Multiculturalism: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse, London: Zed Books, 2000, 209–41. Hand, Felicity, “Story-Telling as an Antidote to Disempowerment”, Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies, I/1 (2007). Hand, Felicity, “Untangling Stories and Healing Rifts: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea”, Research in African Literatures, XLI/22 (2010), 74–92. Helff, Sissy, “Illegal Diasporas and African Refugees in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XLIV (2009), 67–80. Helff, Sissy, “Memories of Migration: Tracing the Past through Movement in Film”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, VIII/1 (2015), 1–14. Helff, Sissy, “Refugee Life Narratives – The Disturbing Potential of a Genre and the Case of Mende Nazer”, in Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, eds Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff, and Daniela Merolla, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 331–45. Helff, Sissy, “Shifting Perspectives: The Transcultural Novel”, in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 75–89. Helff, Sissy, “‘The New Europeans’: The Image of the African Refugee in European Literature”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, I/2 (2008), 123–32. Hobson, Janell and R. Diane Bartlow, “Introduction: Representin’: Women, Hip-Hop, and Popular Music”, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, VIII/1 (2008), 1–14.

Bibliography

239

Hofmeyr, Isobel, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives”, Social Dynamics, XXXIII/2 (2007), 3–32. Holtsmark, Erling B., “The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema”, in Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, ed. Martin M. Winkler, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 23–50. van Houtum, Henk, “The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries”, Geopolitics, 10 (2005), 672–79. Huddart, David, “Hybridity and Cultural Rights: Inventing Global Citizenship”, in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, eds Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007, 19–42. Huggan, Graham, “Perspectives on Postcolonial Europe”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, XLIV/3 (2008), 241–49. Huntington, Samuel P., “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs, LXII/3 (1993), 22–49. Huttunen, Tuomas, Kaisa Ilmonen, Janne Korkka, and Elina Valovirta, “Introduction”, in Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation, eds Tuomas Huttunen, Kaisa Ilmonen, Janne Korkka, and Elina Valovirta, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, xi–xxii. Jay, Paul, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Kaplan, Caren, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects”, in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, eds Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, 115–38. Kaplan, Caren, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, London: Duke University Press, 1996. Kaplan, Sara Clarke, “Souls at the Crossroads, Africans on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic Melancholia”, Callaloo, XXX (2007), 511–26. Kater, Michael H., “Forbidden Fruit? Jazz in the Third Reich”, American Historical Review, XCIV/1 (1989), 11–43. Kilby, Jane, “The Writing of Trauma: Trauma Theory and the Liberty of Reading”, New Formations, XLVII (2002), 217–30. Kundnani, Arun, “In a Foreign Land: The New Popular Racism”, Race & Class, XLIII/2 (2001), 41–60. Kuortti, Joel and Jopi Nyman, “Introduction: Hybridity Today”, in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, eds Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007, 1–18. Kuortti, Joel and Jopi Nyman, eds, Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

240

bibliography

LaCapra, Dominick, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Lee, Erika, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924”, Journal of American Ethnic History, XXI/3 (2002), 36–62. Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981. Lipsitz, George, “Diasporic Noise: History, Hip Hop, and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sound”, in Popular Culture: A Reader, eds Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, London: Sage, 2005, 504–19. Loshitzky, Yosefa, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Mackey, Allison, “Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives”, Research in African Literatures, XLIV/4 (2013), 99–122. Marfleet, Phil, Refugees in a Global Era, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006. Marr, Timothy, “Melville’s Ethnic Conscriptions”, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, III/1 (2001), 5–29. Massey, Doreen, “The Conceptualization of Place”, in A Place in the World: Places, Cultures and Globalization, eds Doreen Massey and Pat Jess, Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1995, 45–85. McDowell, Linda, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Oxford: Polity, 1999. McLeod, John, “‘Between Two Waves’: Caryl Phillips and Black Britain”, Moving Worlds, VII/1 (2007), 9–19. McLeod, John, “British Freedoms: Caryl Phillips’s Transatlanticism and the Staging of Rough Crossings”, Atlantic Studies, VI (2009), 191–206. Milsom-Mann, Corrinne, “Go and Read Something Less Boring Instead”, rev. of Alentejo Blue, by Monica Ali, Amazon.co.uk, 16 Oct. 2006, available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. Mirmotahari, Emad, “From Black Britain to Black Internationalism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way”, English Studies in Africa, LVI/1 (2013), 17–27. Mitchell, W.J.T., Picture Theory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Moslund, Sten Pultz, “Dansk identitet i Jamal Mahjoub’s The Carrier: Migrantheltens hybridiserende blik”, Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, XXX/2 (2009), 165–93. Moslund, Sten Pultz, Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010. Moudouma, Sydoine Moudouma, “Intra- and Inter-Continental Migrations and Diaspora in Contemporary African Fiction”, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of English, University of Stellenbosch, 2012.

Bibliography

241

Nash, Geoffrey, The Anglo-Arab Encounter: Fiction and Autobiography by Arab Writers in English, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Nasta, Susheila, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain, London: Routledge, 2002. Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: The “East” in European Identity Formation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Newman, David, “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ‘Borderless’ World”, in Border Poetics De-limited, eds Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007, 27–57. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, London: James Currey, 1993. Nkosi, Lewis, Home and Exile and Other Selections, London: Longman, 1983. Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations, XXVI (1989), 7–24. Nyamnjoh, Francis B., Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa, London: Zed Books, 2011. Nyman, Jopi, Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Nyman, Jopi, “Europe and Its Others: The Novels of Jamal Mahjoub”, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture, ed. Nouri Gana, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 217–45. Olaussen, Maria, Forceful Creation in Harsh Terrain: Place and Identity in Three Novels by Bessie Head, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997. Olaussen, Maria, “The Submerged History of the Indian Ocean in Admiring Silence”, English Studies in Africa, LVI/1 (2013), 65–77. O’Meally, Robert and Geneviève Fabre, “Introduction”, in History and Memory in African-American Culture, eds Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 3–17. Paganoni, Maria Cristina, “Shifting Borderscapes of London in Monica Ali’s Narrative”, in Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making, eds Chiara Brambilla, Jussi Laine, James W. Scott, and Gianluca Bocchi, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, 205–23. Panebianco, Stefania, “European Citizenship and European Identity: From Treaty Provisions to Public Opinion Attitudes”, in Who Are the Europeans Now?, ed. Edward Moxon-Browne, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 19–38. Papastergiadis, Nikos, Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity, London: Rivers Oram, 1998. Parekh, Bhikhu, “Being British”, in Britishness: Perspectives on the British Question, eds Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 32–40. Parham, Marisa, Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture, New York: Routledge, 2009.

242

bibliography

Parker, Kenneth, “‘Black British’ Writers: (Very) Cross Currents in ‘British’ Culture”, in Postcolonialism and Cultural Resistance, eds Jopi Nyman and John A. Stotesbury, Joensuu: University of Joensuu, 1999, 24–38. Perfect, Michael, Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Phillips, Caryl, A New World Order: Selected Essays, New York: Vintage, 2002. Ponzanesi, Sandra and Daniela Merolla, “Introduction”, in Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, eds Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, 1–52. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992. Rajaram, Prem Kumar and Carl Grundy-Warr, “Introduction”, in Borderscapes: Human Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, eds Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, ix–xl. Rellstab, Daniel, “Refugees? No Refugees? Categorizations of Migrants in the Wake of the Arab Spring in Swiss Online News and Comments”, in Representations of War, Migration, and Refugehood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds Daniel Rellstab and Christiane Schlote, London: Routledge, 2015, 109–39. Rellstab, Daniel and Christiane Schlote, eds, Representations of War, Migration, and Refugehood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2015. Relph, Edward, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 2008 [1976]. Robbins, Bruce, “Upward Mobility in the Postcolonial Era: Kincaid, Mukherjee, and the Cosmopolitan Au Pair”, Modernism/Modernity, I/2 (1994), 133–51. Rogers, Reuel, “‘Black Like Who?’: Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans, and the Politics of Group Identity”, in Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York, ed. Nancy Foner, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 163–92. Roth, Joseph, The White Cities: Reports from France 1925–39, trans. with an introduction by Michael Hofmann, London: Granta, 2004. Rothfels, Nigel, “Immersed with Animals”, in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 199–223. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, London, Vintage, 1994 [1993]. Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995 [1978]. Said, Edward W., Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 [2000]. Sassen, Saskia, A Sociology of Globalization, New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Sbiri, Kamal, “Writing Refugee in the Era of Displacement: Reflections on Poetry”, Transnational Literature, IV/1 (2011), 1–11. Schimanski, Johan and Stephen Wolfe, “Entry Points: An Introduction”, in Border Poetics De-limited, eds Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007, 9–26.

Bibliography

243

Schulze-Engler, Frank, “Irritating Europe”, in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 669–91. Seamon, David and Jacob Sowers, “Place and Placeness (1976): Edward Relph”, in Key Texts in Human Geography, eds Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine, London: Sage, 2008, 43–51. Seyhan, Azade, Writing Outside the Nation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Sherman, Gabriel, “The Fog of Memoir: The Feud over the Truthfulness of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone”, Slate.com, 6 Mar. 2008, available at: , accessed 9 Aug. 2016. Simoes da Silva, Tony, “Paper(less) Selves: The Refugee in Contemporary Textual Culture”, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture, XXX/1 (2008), 58–72. Sisulu, Elinor, Bhekinkosi Moyo, and Nkosihathi Tshuma, “The Zimbabwean Community in South Africa”, in State of the Nation: South Africa 2007, eds Sakhela Buhlungu, John Daniel, Roger Southall, and Jessica Lutchman, Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007, 552–73. Smith, Sidonie, “Narrated Lives and the Contemporary Regime of Human Rights: Mobilizing Stories, Campaigns, Ethnicities”, in Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Globalized World, eds Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglou, and Linda Manney, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2007, 143–64. Smith, Sidonie, “Memory, Narrative, and the Discourses of Identity in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven”, in Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa, eds Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 37–60. Sørensen, Bent, “Katabasis in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, Orbis Litterarum, LX (2005), 16–25. Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat, “The Red Atlantic: Travelling Debates”, in Ethnic and Racial Identities in the Media, eds Eleftheria Arapoglou, Yiorgos Kalogeras, and Jopi Nyman, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 13–40. Steiner, Tina, Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature, Manchester: St. Jerome, 2009. Steiner, Tina, “Writing ‘Wider Worlds’: The Role of Relation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fiction”, Research in African Literatures, XLI/3 (2010), 124–35. Steiner, Tina and Maria Olaussen, “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah”, English Studies in Africa, LVI/1 (2013), 1–3. Stephens, Michelle, “African-American Modernisms”, in The Blackwell Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–50, ed. John T. Matthews, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 306–23.

244

bibliography

Stonebridge, Lyndsey, “‘That Which You Are Denying Us’: Refugees, Rights and Writing in Arendt”, in The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, eds Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, London: Routledge, 2016, 113–25. Strauss, Helene, “Cinema of Social Recuperation: Xenophobic Violence and Migrant Subjectivity in Contemporary South Africa”, Subjectivity, IV/2 (2011), 103–20. Thieme, John, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing back to the Canon, London: Continuum, 2001. Toivanen, Anna-Leena, “Failing Cosmopolitanism: Aborted Transnational Journeys in Novels by Monique Ilboudo, Sefi Atta and Aminata Sow Fall”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, LII/3 (2016), 359–71. Toremans, Tom, “Trauma: Theory – Reading (and) Literary Theory in the Wake of Trauma”, European Journal of English Studies, VII/3 (2003), 333–51. Traseira, Maria Jesus Cabarcos, “‘Between Diasporic Identity and Agency: Versions of the Pastoral in Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way and Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker”, in Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore, eds Jennifer Wawrzinek and J.K.S. Makokha, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011, 235–57. Traseira, Maria Jesus Cabarcos, “A Straight Elliptical Wobble: Afro-European Transculturalism and Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns”, in Border-Crossings: Narrative and Demarcation in Postcolonial Literatures and Media, eds Russell West-Pavlov, Justus Makokha, and Jennifer Wawrzinek, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2012, 187–200. Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Upstone, Sara, Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Upstone, Sara, British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, “World Refugee Survey 2009 – South Africa”, online, available at: , accessed 4 Aug. 2016. Vogel, Shane, “Jamaica on Broadway: The Popular Caribbean and Mock Transnational Performance”, Theatre Journal, X/1 (2010), 1–22. Walter, Natasha, “Continental Drift”, rev. of Alentejo Blue, by Monica Ali, The Guardian, online ed., 20 May 2006, available at: , accessed 10 August 2016. West, Harry G., “Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of FRELIMO’s ‘Female Detachment’”, Anthropological Quarterly, LXXIII/4 (2000), 180–94. Whitlock, Gillian, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography, London: Cassell, 2000.

Bibliography

245

Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Woolley, Agnes, Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the TwentyFirst Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. World Refugee Survey 2009: South Africa, available at: , accessed 18 Jun. 2014. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, “The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa”, Research in African Literatures, XXXVI/3 (2005), 1–22.

Index Abu-Jaber, Diana 7, 92, 93, 103–13 Abyssinia 142, 148 Achebe, Chinua 39 Adorno, Theodor 191 affects 1, 8, 59, 62, 68, 79, 91, 92 African American identity 93, 134–35, 141–42, 143, 150–51 African Americans 117, 139, 142, 143, 146–47, 150, 188 Afro-Europeans 86, 164 Agamben, Giorgio 12, 21–22, 53 Ahmed, Sara 35 Ahokas, Pirjo 209, 210n1 Alexander, Jeffrey 6n20 Ali, Monica 7, 155 Alentejo Blue 156–57, 193–209 Brick Lane 157, 193, 196, 209, 213 In the Kitchen 157, 210–29 Amin, Ash 160, 168–69 Anderson, Benedict 159–60, 192 Appadurai, Arjun 3, 63, 200, 211 Arendt, Hannah 52, 179 Asad, Talal 161 Ashcroft, Bill 108, 135n3 Ashley, Bernard 56 Attila the Hun 169 Augé, Marc 29 au pairs 197, 201–04 autobiography 1, 2, 7, 12, 13, 37–38, 40, 45, 56, 57, 67, 72, 75, 76, 92, 94–100, 184 Baldwin, James 179 Bartlow, R. Dianne 65 Bashir-Khairi, Abdalla 22–23 Bauman, Zygmunt 223 Beah, Ishmael 7, 13, 56–73 Bechet, Sidney 188 Beck, Ulrich 3–4, 51–52, 156, 195n7, 205 Bedingfield, Agnieszka 106–07 Belarus 210, 219 belonging 6, 11, 13, 29, 31, 42, 49, 52–54, 79, 80, 109, 112, 123, 125, 156, 158, 160, 164, 176–78, 183–84, 192, 210, 223–24 Benari, Abdelkader 175 Benjamin, Walter 170 Berger, Thomas 166

Bewes, Timothy 127 Bhabha, Homi K. 2, 5, 23–24, 129, 131, 157, 160, 162, 187, 208, 212, 213, 217–19, 221–22, 224–25, 228, 229 blackface 93, 134, 135, 140–47, 149, 150, 151 Blake, William 207 border-crossings 1, 3, 5–6, 43, 50, 51–52, 63, 74–88, 197–98, 205 borders 6, 13, 14, 20, 21, 37, 39, 41, 44, 45, 49–52, 53, 54, 55, 74–88, 135, 162–63, 164, 170, 173, 192, 195, 198, 200, 208–09, 212 borderscapes 6, 14, 74, 77, 79–80, 86–87, 88 Bowen, Alice Salomon 27 Boyd, William 72n72 Brah, Avtar 32, 111n72, 175–76, 177, 184 Brambilla, Chiara 6n21, 79, 86–87 Brancato, Sabrina 40 Brecht, Bertolt 170 Breytenbach, Breyten 39 Britishness 120, 126, 157, 210–14, 221–24, 229 Brock, Richard 84–85 Brogan, Kathleen 141 Brutus, Dennis 39 Buikema, Rosemarie 175 Bunyan, John 119 Butler, Judith 143 Camino, Linda 21 Caruth, Cathy 67–68 Castañeda, Claudia 35n75 Castano, Emanuele 161n9 Castle, Andrea 44n33 Chambers, Claire 4n14, 114n1, 135 Charles, Eric Ngalle 12–13, 15, 32–35 Charteris-Black, Jonathan 11n3 Chaucer, Geoffrey 81, 119 Cheesman, Tom 13, 15, 16 Cheng, Anne 93, 114, 117, 124, 125 Chude-Sokei, Claude 143 Clifford, James 3, 156, 195, 196 Clingman, Stephen 14, 74, 76–79, 81, 82, 83, 86, 88 Coca-Cola 102–03, 112 Coleman, Ornette 187 Conrad, Joseph 20

247

Index Cook, Will 148 cosmopolitanism 3, 51–52, 54, 193, 194, 205, 209, 216 Creet, Julia 91 cricket 131–32 Crothers, Lane 64–65 D’Andrea, Anthony 204 Dash, Julie 129 Deer, Glenn 104 Derrida, Jacques 168 D’haen, Theo 174 diaspora 1, 6, 31, 117, 118, 195 black 134–36, 138, 144, 148, 149, 151, 190 communities 2, 151, 162, 177, 192 theory 31 diasporic cultures 3, 6 identity 2, 4, 19, 20, 31, 32, 65, 80, 93, 111–12, 117, 118, 134, 144, 148, 156, 167, 176, 184, 190, 191 melancholia 118, 128–29 music 63, 184, 186–91, 192 writing 31, 32, 40, 162, 175, 202 Diner, Hasia R. 97 Dirty Pretty Things 37, 183 displacement 1, 2, 6–7, 11, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 29, 31, 37, 39–43, 54, 55, 56, 57–58, 64, 66, 72, 73, 76, 79, 83, 87, 110–11, 114, 118, 128, 129, 160, 168, 176, 179, 181, 191, 196, 204, 208, 218, 221 Dodgson-Katiyo, Pauline 38n5 DuBois, W.E.B. 146, 148 Duff, David 190 Dumas, Alexandre 170 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 148 Eagleton, Terry 19–20 Eckstein, Lars 136 ekphrasis 84–85, 88 Eliot, T.S. 20, 220 Eng, David 93, 114, 116–18, 121, 128 Europeanness 40, 86, 88, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160–63, 168, 170, 171, 173 exile 11, 16, 19–20, 21, 31, 32, 35, 39–40, 42, 45, 118–19, 126, 155, 158, 163–64, 166, 170–71, 176, 179, 207, 208

F., Rebekah 17, 27 Fabre, Geneviève 142 Fair, Jo Ellen 37 Farah, Nuruddin 40 Farrier, David 11, 15n2, 18, 121 Fasselt, Rebecca 44, 45 Featherstone, Mike 195 Featherstone, Simon 189 Filipovici, Zlata 57 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher 168n37 Flockemann, Miki 44, 45–46, 49 food 47, 53, 114, 123 American 105–06 British 100, 102, 123, 179 French 215 and memory 92, 94–113 Indian 98, 99, 101, 215 kabobs 104–05, 109 tinned 102 vegetarian 99, 100 See also spam Forbes, Camille F. 137n13 Fortier, Anne-Marie 35n75 Foster, Norman 179 Frank, Anne 58 Frank, Søren 4 Freud, Sigmund 92, 115–16, 119, 120, 132, 191, 212 Frears, Stephen 37, 183 Gabaccia, Donna R. 97n10 Gardner, Ava 167 George, Rosemary Marangoly 175 Géricault, Jean Louis Théodore 80–81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Gershwin, George 188 Ghomba, Leleh 71 Ghosh, Amitav 4, 135 Giddens, Anthony 194 Gikandi, Simon 4n12, 42–43, 45, 53–54 Gilroy, Paul 2n2, 5, 80, 118, 124, 157, 189, 211, 212–13, 229 Glanville, Erin Goheen 31, 49 Glazer, Ilsa 56n2 globalization 1, 6, 13, 14, 16, 35, 52, 53, 54, 56, 64, 72, 74, 81, 102, 112, 156–57, 162, 163, 170, 173, 183, 193–96, 197, 198–99, 200, 204–05, 210, 211, 213, 216, 220, 221, 223, 224 Godwin, William 190

248 Goeller, Alison D. 97 Gohrisch, Jana 135n4 Gothic 135, 141, 150 Göttsche, Dirk 38n5 Greenblatt, Stephen 3 Grewal, Inderpal 31n64 Griffiths, Gareth 108, 130n95, 135n3 Grundy-Warr, Carl 79 Guémar, Soleïman Adel 24–27, 32 Gupta, Suman 194n2 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 1, 7, 92 Admiring Silence 118–19 By the Sea 4, 37, 40, 119, 121, 128 Desertion 119 “Fear and Loathing” 18–19 Pilgrims Way 92–93, 114–33 Gurr, Andrew 20 Hacking, Ian 96 Hall, Stuart 157, 162 Han, Shinhee 117–18, 121 Hand, Felicity 92n, 128 haunting 141–43, 149, 150, 180, 182–84 Hay, Denys 159 Head, Bessie 45 Helff, Sissy 15n2, 37n4, 38n5, 40, 67, 197, 199, 201 Hirsch, Marianne 106 Hobson, Janell 65 Hoffmann, Sylvie 13, 15, 21n26, 28, 29n53, 30n59, 35n76 Hofmeyr, Isobel 3 Holiday, Billie 189 Holocaust 67, 106, 135 Holtsmark, Erling B. 225–26 van Houtum, Henk 78n21 Huddart, David 217 Huggan, Graham 155 Huntington, Samuel P. 161 Huttunen, Tuomas 225 hybrid Europeanness 156, 158, 163, 168–69, 171, 173, 174 hybrid identity 1, 4–5, 33, 77–78, 92, 94, 129, 133, 155–56, 162, 174, 177, 184, 187, 192, 210, 212, 218–229 hybridity 1, 2–3, 7, 74, 80, 113, 157, 162, 163, 184, 185, 186, 188, 192, 194, 195, 197, 210, 211, 213, 215, 217

Index hybridization 13, 100, 101, 192 hybrid narrative 98 Ilmonen, Kaisa 225 In Dahomey 142, 148 irony 48, 59, 125, 141, 166, 189 Jaffrey, Madhur 7, 92, 93, 94, 98–103, 112–13 Jakobson, Roman 77 Jane Eyre 180 Jay, Paul 168n37 jazz clubs 186–88 Johannesburg 39, 43, 48–49, 55 Joplin, Scott 187, 188 Joyce, James 20 Jung, Carl Gustav 191 Kaplan, Caren 19, 31, 95, 208 Kaplan, Sara Clarke 2n2, 114, 115n8, 118, 129 Karin, Kalan Kawa 16 katabasis 157, 225–28 Kater, Michael 74 Kazanjian, David 93, 114, 116–17, 128 Keita, Aliou 22 Keitetsi, China 56 Khayyám, Omar 168 Kikamba, Simão 7, 13, 37–55 Kincaid, Jamaica 202 Kilby, Jane 68 Kongolo, Aimé 22 Korkka, Janne 225 Kpakio, Maxson Sahr 18 Krieger, Murray 84 Kristeva, Julia 168 Kundnani, Arun 17–18 Kuortti, Joel 80n27, 187n68 LaCapra, Dominick 91–92 Lancashire 210, 214, 215, 222 Lee, Erika 140n26 Lefebvre, Henri 52 Levinas, Emmanuel 225 Liberia 18, 214 life writing. See autobiography. Lipsitz, George 63–64 Liverpool 156, 173, 178, 185–86 LL Cool J 65 London 53, 103, 142, 183, 193, 196, 201, 202–03, 206, 210, 214, 215, 222

249

Index Lopez, Trini 186 Loshitzky, Yosefa 75, 87 Louvre, The 14, 74, 80, 84, 86–87, 164 Mahjoub, Jamal 7, 13, 155 “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” 74–88 The Carrier 74, 158, 172, 174, 175, 184 The Drift Latitudes 74, 156, 163, 173–92 Travelling with Djinns 87, 155–56, 157–72 Wings of Dust 174 Mansfield, Katherine 20 de Man, Paul 68 Marfleet, Phil 16–17, 19, 40n17, 75n7 Mariza 200 Marley, Bob 70, 73 Marr, Timothy 185 Massey, Doreen 35n77 Mbwembwe, William 23 McDowell, Linda 11n1 McLeod, John 134, 136, 143 melancholia 2, 30, 92–93, 114–33, 203, 210, 211, 212–13 Melville, Herman 185 memoirs by migrants 13, 16, 56–73, 92 culinary 94–113 memory 1, 7, 16, 92, 118, 173 and dementia 189, 210, 223 and migration 80, 91, 95, 129, 134 and trans-memory 103, 106–10 and trauma 91, 116–17, 131, 149 as a means of reconstruction of identity 32, 40, 94–113, 127, 182–83 cultural memory 105, 136, 156, 163, 168, 173, 182, 184–85 sites of 91, 142–43 Merolla, Daniela 162 metaphor 41, 77, 145, 150, 162, 167, 172, 191, 229 metonymy 14, 74, 77, 78, 81, 82–83, 88, 100 Michaels, Denise Calvetti 97 migrants African 13, 14, 15–36, 74–88, 214, 216 Angolan in South Africa 56–73 Arab 103–13 Asian 196, 202, 214–15 British 198–99, 204, 206–08 Eastern European 210, 214, 216, 218, 219–20, 224–29

German 173, 177, 183–92, 198, 201 Portuguese 198–99, 200–03 representation in the media 11, 37, 44, 45 Sierra Leonean 37–55 West Indian 135–51, 173, 184, 186, 189, 202, 214 Zanzibari 114–33 Milsom-Mann, Corinne 196 mimicry 2, 102, 130–31 Mirmotahari, Emad 115n7 mirrors 108, 140–41, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 149, 178, 187, 220 Mitchell, W.J.T. 84 Mitscherlich, Alexander 212 Mitscherlich, Margarete 212 Morrison, Toni 117, 135 Moslund, Sten Pultz 1n, 174 Mouduma, Sydoine Moudouma 38–39, 50n64, 51 Moyo, Bhekinkosi 40–41 Mpe, Phaswne 49 Mukherjee, Bharati 20, 202 multiculturalism 216 multilingualism 32–33, 185 music 14, 31, 53, 60, 71, 72, 109, 112, 143, 156, 162, 184, 187–89, 190–91, 192 and mobility 187–90 as Otherness 191 as semiotic critique 187 blues 189, 191 cajun 186 fado 188, 200 Finnish big band 189 gospel 191 hip-hop 14, 62–66 jazz 2, 173, 186–89, 190, 191–92 musicals 142, 148 rap. See hip-hop. rembetika 188–89 ska 186 tango 2, 189 Texas honkytonk 186 zither 188 Naipaul, V.S. 20 Nash, Geoffrey 184 Nasta, Susheila 175, 176, 184 Naughty by Nature 65

250 Nazer, Mende 67 Neumann, Ivor B. 159 Newman, David 6n21, 75n6, 76 New York 57, 59, 66, 71–72, 143, 147, 186, 187 Ngara, Kudzayi 44n33 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 20, 40 Nkala, Jonathan 45, 46 Nkosi, Lewis 40 nomadism 14, 19, 111, 167, 182, 204–05 Nora, Pierre 142 Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 39, 44, 47, 48n55, 49 Nyman, Jopi 2n3, 37n4, 74n2, 80n27, 111n71, 135n4, 174n6, 184n52, 187n68 Ogilby, John 138–39 Olaussen, Maria 45, 124–25, 130n95 O’Meally, Robert 142 Omeros 182 Paganoni, Maria Cristina 214, 224 Pandora and the Flying Dutchman 167 Panebianco, Stefania 170 Papasterigiadis, Nikos 123 Parekh, Bhikhu 211–12 Parham, Marisa 141–42 Paris 82, 86, 201, 203 Parker, Kenneth 169n43 Parks, Lisa 37 Perfect, Michael 196, 216, 222 Phillips, Caryl 1, 7, 93 A Distant Shore 37, 75–76 A New World Order 136 A State of Independence 169 Cambridge 135, 136 Crossing the River 135–36, 145 Dancing in the Dark 92–93, 134–51 The Nature of Blood 135 Pinnock, Patricia Schonstein 45 poetry 12, 26, 31, 32–35, 168 Ponzanesi, Sandra 162 Portugal 157, 188, 193–209 Powell, Enoch 124 Pratt, Mary Louise 2 prostitution 164, 219 Rajaram, Prem Kumar 79 Rambo 66 Redburn 185 Reed, Lou 179

Index refugees 2, 7, 12–13, 15–19, 21, 27, 28–29, 31, 35, 37–38, 40–41, 43–55, 76, 100, 164, 169–70, 173, 181, 182–83, 212, 216 refugee writing 12–13, 15–36 Rellstab, Daniel 11, 15n1 Relph, Edward 28–30 Renan, Ernest 158–59 restaurants 28, 101, 179, 214, 215–16, 218, 227–28 Rheinhardt, Django 186 Rhys, Jean 180 Robbins, Bruce 202, 203 Roberts, Wahseema 44n33 Rogers, Reuel 139n23 Rogers, Richard 179 Rosen, David 62 Roth, Joseph 170–71 Rothfels, Nigel 138n15 “Rule Britannia” 130 Run-D.M.C. 65, 70 Rushdie, Salman 20, 135 Said, Edward W. 19, 31, 86, 158 Salazar, António de Oliveira 201 Sassen, Saskia 156, 194–95 Sbiri, Kamal 27–28 Schimanski, Johan 76 Schulze-Engler, Frank 5, 155 Seamon, David 29–30 Seifert, Richard 179 Sennett, Richard 223 Seyhan, Azade 5–6, 162–63, 168 Shakespeare, William 66, 102, 176 Shakur, Tupac 64, 65 Sheller, Mimi 35n75 Shelley, P.B. 182, 190–91 Sherman, Gabriel 57n3 Shohat, Ella 3 Sierra Leone 13, 56, 59, 62, 63, 71 Simoes da Silva, Tony 38, 42, 54 Simone, Nina 190 Sisulu, Elinor 40–41 slavery 1, 62, 67, 118, 128, 135–36, 142, 145, 150, 185, 189 Smith, Sidonie 57–58, 60, 95, 96 Sørensen, Bent 225 Sowers, Jacob 29–30 Soyinka, Wole 39 Spam 102

251

Index Spielberg, Stephen 136 Stam, Robert 3 Steiner, Tina 124–25, 128, 130n95, 174 Stephens, Michelle 143, 147 stereotype 12, 17, 18, 40, 124, 125, 126, 128, 134, 139–40, 143, 147, 148, 149, 150, 158 Stilton 179 Sudan 22, 30, 67, 74, 155–56, 158, 161, 163, 173, 176, 177, 181, 184, 214 Sugarhill Gang 63 Stonebridge, Lyndsey 12 Strauss, Helene 38, 44, 46n42, 52–53 The Raft of the Medusa 80, 84 Thieme, John 180n31 Tietäväinen, Ville 88 Tiffin, Helen 108, 135n3 Toivanen, Anna-Leena 51 Toremans, Tom 68 tourism 43, 87, 130, 193, 197–98, 203, 204, 205–06 transcultural encounters 186, 208 Europeanness 168–69 identity 79–80, 94, 198, 208–09 novel 197–99 space 192, 199 studies 2, 7 writing 4, 167 transculturation 2, 5, 74, 79, 92, 94, 158, 162, 173, 205 translocal 157, 193, 195–96, 197, 205, 208, 209 transnational and the national 79, 86, 151, 156, 194, 195, 198 Britishness 229 community 31, 32, 131, 135, 151, 162, 171, 192, 195 culture 3–4 Europe 7, 155, 156, 158, 163, 168 family 184 fiction 76–78, 82, 88 flows 62, 211 history 87, 156, 171 identity 4, 7, 14, 19, 31, 32, 34, 56, 61, 62–63, 65, 66, 72–73, 74–75, 79, 88, 93, 133, 144, 147–48, 150, 156, 165, 167, 197, 205, 209, 210

labour 4, 193, 197, 201–02, 214, 226, 228–29 literature 162–63, 211 mobility 174, 177, 193, 195, 203, 210, 211 networks 194, 195, 205, 209, 228, 229 space 4, 49, 55, 75, 81, 92, 93, 94, 130, 134, 138, 149, 192 transnationalism 80 Traseira, Maria Jesus Cabarcos 115n6, 164, 167, 170 trauma 1, 6, 12, 13, 14, 16, 25, 35, 53, 56, 66–73, 91, 92, 93, 96, 100, 106, 114–33, 134–35, 136, 140, 143, 145, 147, 150, 164 Tshuma, Nkosihathi 40–41 Turner, Victor 20–21 uncanny, the 21, 141–42, 143, 144, 150, 212, 221, 226 Upstone, Sara 41, 43, 50, 51, 210n1 U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants 38 Valovirta, Elina 225 Vogel, Shane 148 Wagner, Richard 167 Walcott, Derek 182 Wales 7, 12–13, 15, 32–35, 40, 76, 182 “Walk on the Wild Side” 179 Walker, George 136–38, 140, 146, 147, 148 Walter, Natasha 196–97 Washington, Booker T. 146 West, Harry 61–62 Whitlock, Gillian 95, 99 whiteness 117 Wide Sargasso Sea 180 Williams, Egbert (Bert) 93, 134–51 Williams, Raymond 114 Wolfe, Stephen 76 Woolley, Agnes 11n3, 15n2, 20 Wren, Christopher 179 Zeleza, Paul Tiaymbe 39n11 Zephaniah, Benjamin 37 Zimbabwe 22, 23, 38, 40–41, 45 zoos human 137–38