Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds [1 ed.] 9783030677534, 9783030677541, 3030677532

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Be/longing
Belonging: (Im)possible Worlds
Longing: (Im)possible Love
A Road Map
Chapter Summaries
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America and Europe
Ifemelu’s America
Obinze’s England
Textual Entanglements: Braiding and Blogging B(l)ack
Hair Textures
World Wide Web(s)
Returns and Romance: “It’s Just a Love Story”
Works Cited
Chapter 3: London Lovers: Zadie Smith
(Re)Writing the Heart of the Empire: Tactics and Traditions
Black London: City/Worlds
Black and Female Urban Spaces
The Affective Architecture of City and Text
Desire Lines Between NW and Nowhere
Between Intimacy and Distance I: Female Friendship in NW
Between Intimacy and Distance II: Female Friendship in Swing Time
“Daringly Imagine an Alternative City”
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi
Haunted House, Haunted Homeland: The Postcolonial Gothic
The Haunted House: Floor Plans and Foundations
Unlocking the Unwelcome House: The Home and the Unhomely in White Is for Witching
Textual Strategies of Narrating Home/Land
Queer Desire, Queer Belonging: A Vampire in Love
White Is for Witching’s Vampiric Ancestry
Wilful Consumption and Monstrous Encounters
Unhappy Endings and Impossible Communities
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel
Watery Failures, Watery Potentials: Transoceanic Poetics
“Her Body is a Flooding Home”: Transoceanic Refugee Geocorpographies in Warsan Shire’s Poetry
“Kala Pani, or Crossing the Dark Waters”: Shailja Patel’s Migritude and Indian Ocean Trajectories
Bridging Oceans
Travelling Texts: Performative Poetry Online and on Stage
Digital Diasporas and Dictaphones
Unfoldings: On Page, on Stage
Wording the Wound: Connective and Collective Love
Transoceanic Communities of Care
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”
Cobwebs
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING

Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing Making Love, Making Worlds Jennifer Leetsch

Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing

Series Editors Gina Wisker International Ctr for Higher Ed Mgmt University of Bath Cambridge, UK Denise deCaires Narain University of Sussex Brighton, UK Andrea Quaid Bard College Los Angeles, CA, USA

This monograph series aims to showcase late twentieth and twenty-first century work of contemporary women, trans and non-binary writers in literary criticism. The ‘women’ in our title advocates for work specifically on women’s writing in a world of cultural and critical production that can still too easily slide into patriarchal criteria for what constitutes ‘worthy’ literature. This vision for the series is avowedly feminist although we do not require submissions to identify as such and we actively encourage submissions that engage directly with different definitions of ‘feminism’. Our series does make the claim for a continuing imperative to promote work by women authors; it remains essential for our field to make space for this body of literary criticism. Further, our series makes a claim that serious inquiry on late twentieth and twenty-first century women’s writing contributes to a necessary, emerging and exciting research area in literary studies. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15978

Jennifer Leetsch

Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing Making Love, Making Worlds

Jennifer Leetsch Department of English Literature and British Cultural Studies University of Würzburg Würzburg, Germany

ISSN 2523-8140     ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing ISBN 978-3-030-67753-4    ISBN 978-3-030-67754-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © work by Lisa Kling, Image ID: 956618782 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This is a book about love, kinship and relationality—and it is here that I want to acknowledge some of the webs of relation and kin that have held me throughout the years. My greatest debt for the writing of this book is with Isabel Karremann, whose intellectual rigour, purposefulness and unfaltering belief in me has sustained me from the moment I sat in one of her seminars in Munich almost a decade ago. Without her this book would not exist. I want to express my heartfelt thanks to Zeno Ackermann for his intelligence, honesty and kindness, and for always finding the right words. My thanks also go to Tobias Döring for not only providing vital food for thought throughout my studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich but also serving as my external examiner. I am grateful to all the people with whom I had the pleasure of working with at Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg and who have so generously accompanied my process in research colloquia, in the hallways or at dinner tables with a much-needed glass of Franconian wine: Ina Bergmann, Elfi Bettinger, Carolin Biewer, Sladja Blažan, Annabella Fick, Uwe Hausmann, Stefan Hippler, Sabrina Hüttner, Barış Kabak, Patricia Kemmer, Florian Kläger, Sarah Knor, Dieter Koch, Matthias Krebs, Lisa Lehnen, Patrick Maiwald, Hannah Nelson-Teutsch, Ralph Pordzik, Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Katrin Horn, Johannes Schlegel (with, of course, Susanne and Greta), Daniel Schulze, MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, Andrea Stiebritz, Miriam Wallraven and Kathrin Zöller. Special thanks go also to the research assistants in the English and American Studies Departments: Isabel Eder, Sonja Fiedler, Molina Klingler, Paulina Kriesinger, Anna v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Frieda Kuhn, Sophie Renninger, Haykanush Sazhumyan, Caterina Seeger, Kristina Seit, Selina Stranz, Dina Youssef and Laura Werthmüller, and, above all, to our secretary, Elke Demant, without whom we would all be lost at sea. I am very thankful to all my students who have taught me as much as I taught them and whose love of literature has sustained me. I am incredibly grateful for the companionship of other early career researchers without whose solidarity, friendship and verve I would have been so much more alone and poorer in all regards: Anurima Chanda, Leila Essa, Cedric Essi, Christina Domene Moreno, Elena Furlanetto, Baldeep Grewal, Kate Harlin, Kathrin Härtl, Katharina Hiery, Valerie Kiendl, Gabriella Lambrecht, Lena Mattheis, Anna Sophia Messner, Frederike Middelhoff, Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Nele Pollatschek, Helene Roth, Julia Spahn, Veronika Schuchter, Hanna Teichler, Daria Tunca, Julian Wacker and Laura Zander. I want to thank my friends for listening to my fears and for unfailingly cheering me on, if they knew it or not: Johanna Bedenk, Sonja Bonneß, Sina Brückner-Amin, Matthias Hauer, Mathias Häusler, Melanie Hering, Tatjana Herold, Fabian Kober, Franziska Kunze, Stephan Lang, Annika Lange, Franziska Linhardt, Magdalena Mader, Danijel Matijevic, Maximilian and Kati Meckes, Johannes Pömsl, Lina Schaare, Nicole Scherl, Matthias Scherer, Susanne Schneider, Rebecca Seemann, Katharina Sprenger and Julia Weigl. All my thanks go to my two families: Anne, Stefanie and Uwe Leetsch, and Birgit, Pauline and Peter Westphal. I also want to express my heartfelt thanks to the rich and vibrant academic communities that have given me so much energy, generosity and support. Special mention must go to the Münster crowd who put on one of the first conferences I ever attended in 2015 and who I now regard as part of my academic family—thank you Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Kögler, Deborah Nyangulu, Mark Stein and Julian Wacker; and to the Oviedo crowd during the 16th Triennial EACLALS Conference in 2017 which gave me a much-needed push when I was stuck on my chapter on Zadie Smith—thank you Alberto Fernandez-Carbajal, Chelsea Haith, Sam Holland, John McLeod, Emma Parker, Beatriz Pérez, Amy Rushton, Veronika Schuchter, Hayley Toth and Laura Zander. Thank you also to Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff for so kindly inviting me to the LMU Center for Advanced Studies Munich to talk about Warsan Shire in 2017. My thinking on postcolonial, global matters would not be the same without my involvement in the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) / IGP

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(Indo-German Partnership in Higher Education)-­ funded programme “Literature in a Globalized World”. I thank Saugata Bhaduri and all the wonderful researchers and students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for their hospitality and their forever-­ inspiring critical engagement. I am especially grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for the ease with which this project was developed and guided throughout the publication process. I am indebted to the series editors of Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing for being so willing to take on this project. Particular thanks go to my anonymous readers, whose thoughtful comments were much appreciated, to Molly Beck and Rebecca Hinsley, who have been unfailingly insightful and encouraging as my commissioning editors, and to Md Saif and Hemalatha Arumugam who have skilfully guided me through the editing and production process. I am also immensely grateful to the journal editors and anonymous peer reviewers who gave an early career researcher the space to experiment with some of the preliminary ideas that would later form the chapters in this book: special thanks to Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke and the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, to Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi and the Journal of the African Literature Association, to Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium, to Hella Cohen and Sreyoshi Sarkar and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and to Jenni Ramone and The Literary Encyclopaedia. This book on love and all its struggles is dedicated to M., my first reader always.

Contents

1 Introduction: Be/longing  1 Belonging: (Im)possible Worlds   2 Longing: (Im)possible Love   6 Works Cited  18 2 Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 21 Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America and Europe  25 Textual Entanglements: Braiding and Blogging B(l)ack  44 Returns and Romance: “It’s Just a Love Story”  57 Works Cited  71 3 London Lovers: Zadie Smith 75 (Re)Writing the Heart of the Empire: Tactics and Traditions  78 The Affective Architecture of City and Text  93 Desire Lines Between NW and Nowhere 102 Works Cited 132 4 Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi137 Haunted House, Haunted Homeland: The Postcolonial Gothic 140 Textual Strategies of Narrating Home/Land 161 Queer Desire, Queer Belonging: A Vampire in Love 169 Works Cited 193 ix

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5 Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel199 Watery Failures, Watery Potentials: Transoceanic Poetics 204 Travelling Texts: Performative Poetry Online and on Stage 225 Wording the Wound: Connective and Collective Love 238 Works Cited 255 6 Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”261 Cobwebs 266 Works Cited 269 Index271

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Be/longing

Erotic encounters on the bustling streets of Lagos or London; romantic weekend getaways in the Nigerian countryside; unhappy lovers confined within a haunted house on the coast of Dover; non-normative families that emerge somewhere between the UK and the Caribbean; queer sexual awakenings mediated across the Indian Ocean; refugee love stories that span from East Africa to Europe via the Mediterranean … The literary texts this study considers conjoin two spheres that are rarely brought together in particularly fruitful ways: space and love. These two realms, however, may coalesce to rethink and reimagine conceptual paradigms that surround both love and space, longing and belonging. As will become clear throughout the chapters that make up this book, the results of such rethinkings and reimaginings are unexpected ways of charting geography and locality, unconventional ways of dealing with love and desire. In the contemporary novels, poems and performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire that I have selected for this study, the thinking-together of space and love comes to designate new possibilities of living in an ever-­ more mobile, globalised twenty-first-century world—a world generated by women “from everywhere and nowhere, women who struggle against imperial patriarchies, capitalist, normative, nationalist structures in place within and beyond their own communities” (Subramanian 2018, n. pag.). By dealing with geo-political issues such as neo-colonialism, refugee crises © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_1

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and diasporic displacement and by simultaneously depicting the vulnerable, private spheres of love and desire inhabited by mainly black, queer and female characters, these texts manage to wilfully renegotiate ostensible oppositions between public and private, global and intimate. One of my main contentions throughout this book will be that the texts I have chosen engage with innovative ways of writing into the centre of attention those that are usually excluded and muted: women “perched forever on various borderlines”, women “who can reorient the imperial gaze, the colonial gaze, the hierarchical gaze of even their lovers who participate in the old economy of rating women’s bodies and ontologies against one another, so that women are named authorial subjects, able to control their stories, and no longer remain in the shadow” (ibid.). What I have set out to do, then, is to draw out of the shadows and into the light the possible connectivities that arise when putting together love and space, to tease out the disruptions that become inherent when conjoining longing and belonging in literary texts and poetic performances from the African diaspora. I am thus placing two ostensibly disparate things into dialogue—however tense and fraught this dialogue may be. And what I hope will emerge when I probe this dialogue is the fact that the texts by black female writers chosen for this study show us new ways of writing the world not only as more inclusive, fluid or open but also as ultimately possessing the potential to create intimate and affiliative (ex) change: that the making of worlds, in short, comes to be deeply entangled with the making of love.

Belonging: (Im)possible Worlds The texts I have chosen for this study all stem from the context of the African diaspora—as wide-reaching, multi-faceted and hard to encompass as that is. As contemporary, diasporic novels, poems and performances, they each deal with a particular spatial set-up that is exemplarily attuned to notions of belonging, the politics and poetics of postcolonial place-­making and displacement in the twenty-first century, including new diasporic identity constructions such as the refugee, the returnee, the exile community, the immigrant, the guest worker and many more. While they all tackle their diasporic origins with ultimately differing strategies of constructing space and belonging, what lies at the heart of all their literary imaginings is the tension that exists between the oppositions of home and away, everywhere and nowhere. This tension creates a sense of multiple

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belongings that is carved out from an ambiguous and charged attachment to space. Working with a notion of place and spatial construction as always relational, always belonging to a network of social liaisons and affiliations (Massey 1993; Brah 1996), provides a productive lens to focus on postcolonial and diasporic narratives of identity and belonging, home and displacement. As will become clear throughout this book, emotions and senses are inevitably implicated in the production of place and spatial, political practices. This relation results in situated knowledges which reclaim and re-politicise, re-map and re-connect territories. As Smith et al. have noted, “[e]motions are […] intimately and inescapably caught up in the current re-writing of the earth, the production of new, transformed, geographies, and New World Orders, that affect us all, albeit in very different ways” (2009, 3). This is especially important in contexts of postcolonial and diasporic constructions of the world in which knowing how to reclaim space and place, how to build neighbourhoods and communities, becomes a mode of resistance and perhaps even survival. The texts by African diasporic women writers I have gathered in this study, even though they widely vary in their geographical and emotional set-ups, all share this desire to represent new ways of working across “the radically reconfigured spaces of the global present” (Davis 2013, 3). In putting to the forefront of their spatial imaginaries the aspects of love, desire and romance, they take part in a relational and affective writing of space. As Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner argue concerning interrelations of the intimate and the global, “[t]o disrupt traditional organizations of space, to forge productive dislocations, to reconfigure conventions of scale” should remain the goal of especially feminist rewritings of the world (2012, 1). Drawing on these arguments as well as on Smith et al. who foreground the same “re-writing of the earth” and the imagination of “transformed geographies” and “New World Orders” (2009, 3) through strategies of emotional geography, in the following I want to ask what it might look like to dare imagine alternative possibilities for living in this world. Both the production and imagination of space are inherently generative and transformational. In other words, literary imagination may bear the potential to actively write into existence other worlds, new locations. With this outset, I seek to further develop the project of thinkers who posit literature as a worldly force, as impacting the creation of the world. One of these thinkers is Pheng Cheah, a theorist of postcolonial literature and cosmopolitanism, who suggests that literature opens worlds.1 In his What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), he traces

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how contemporary fictional texts free up new possibilities for remaking the world by negotiating and ultimately resisting structures of capitalist globalisation: This book explores how the conceptualization of the world […] provides a normative basis for transforming the world made by capitalist globalization and how this normative understanding of the world leads to a radical rethinking of world literature as literature that is an active power in the making of worlds, that is, both a site of processes of worlding and an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes. (2016, 2)

His approach to postcolonial, diasporic literature is marked by a complex engagement with several philosophical strands.2 His most important contention, in my opinion, however, is his argument that literatures may “generate alternative cartographies that enable a postcolonial people or a collective group to foster relations of solidarity and build a shared world in which self-determination is achieved” (17–18). The world is thus formulated as verb and not as noun; and within the term “worlding”3 we might find alternatives to systems of oppression, to bring to life a sense of shared worlds and communal living. In the second half of his book, Cheah’s concept emerges most clearly. Here, he argues that “literature can play an important role in announcing the advent of new collective subjects and giving public phenomenality to their outgoing attempts to remake the world” (210). Embedded within his literary analyses, he formulates a conception of world literature as the literature of the world (double genitive). This refers to imaginings and stories of what it means to be part of a world that tracks and accounts for contemporary globalization and earlier historical narratives of worldhood. […] Such a literature is also one that seeks to be disseminated, read, and received around the world as to change it and the lives of people within it. More important, because it points to the opening of other worlds, such a literature is also a real and ongoing process of the world, a principle of change immanent to the world. (210, emphasis in original)

What follows from such thinking is the responsibility we need to take on to stay alert of potentially harmful processes of globalisation in a world shaped by an all-pervasive capitalist modernity which “occurs through the exercise of biopolitical, ideological, and repressive technologies” (209). The central question Cheah asks, and that we should ask ourselves in turn,

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is how we can animate, shape and think into existence other, alternative worlds. An answer can be found in forms of resistance and wilful intervention within literatures of the world: literature that belongs to the world and literature that changes the world through its imaginative and creative force. As Cheah remarks towards the end of his chapter on Nuruddin Farah’s novel Gifts (1992) and its storytelling powers in a Somalian context, literature’s vocation is to think the force of worlding, […] to enact the unending opening of a world as a condition for the emergence of new subjects in spite of capitalist globalization. Its non-utopian promise is that we can belong otherwise, in different ways, because quivering beneath the surface of the existing world are other worlds to come. (309)

Belonging otherwise, imagining other worlds—this is how we will be able to resist the dehumanising structures of oppression imposed by global capitalist modernity that is determined by forms of neo-colonialism and post-Empire. With these articulations, Cheah in fact references another philosopher of the world, the French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and his work in The Inoperative Community (1991), The Sense of the World (1997) and The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007).4 Nancy has similarly traced the tensions that arise from the opposition of a globalised world order and what he calls “mondialisation”, an “authentic world-­ forming” that advocates habitable, hospitable worlds—“a making of the world” (2007, 1; emphasis in original). For Nancy, the global “evokes the notion of a totality as a whole”, whereas mondialisation, “by keeping the horizon of a ‘world’ as a space of possible meaning for the whole of human relations […], gives a different indication than that of an enclosure in the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality” (28). What unites Cheah and Nancy, then—and what I want to take on as one of my guiding principles leading through this book—is the sense that we need to find ways of being in the world together. It is the responsibility of literature to imagine a new sense of existence that may arise from the material realities of fractured lives and disrupted belongings. Holding on to these notions of the transformative power of literature, in the following chapters I set out to examine poetic texts and medial performances that, through positioning themselves at the intersection of love and space, struggle to imagine possible worlds that are open, relational, liveable and hospitable. As Nancy would have it, “[t]o create the world means: immediately,

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without delay, reopening each possible struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injustice” (54–55; emphasis in original). As I will show, these texts by twenty-first-century black female authors actively engage in such a “struggle” by negotiating socio-political, affective and ethical issues from an ex-centric, non-­Eurocentric standpoint. They strive to imagine the making of the world from the perspective of a postcolonial African diaspora—and are thus not only exemplarily attuned to but also attempt to contest and ultimately transform the political, material and cultural conditions of their multi-­sited belongings.

Longing: (Im)possible Love When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other. —bell hooks, All About Love (2000, 93)

Throughout her decade-spanning work, the African American philosopher bell hooks has frequently addressed the idea of love as foundational for her thinking: as such, she has always construed love as something inherently relational. For hooks, love is the possibility to connect and to find oneself in that which is other, in the one who is other. It is an exchange that makes possible to see and recognise one another, however faulty that vision may be. In the following, and with the help of hooks, I will draw on a tradition of thinking about love from viewpoints such as radical black and feminist ones. These thinkers have shed light on how engagement with love can constitute both empowerment and oppression—a tension that is continuously worked out in the growing field of critical and feminist love studies which has developed in tandem with the affective turn (Clough and Halley 2007; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). In the introduction to their edited volume on feminist love, Ann Ferguson and Anna Jónasdóttir identify the field of “Love Studies” as a “new, expanding field of academic scholarship” that has been growing since the 1990s across many disciplines (2014, 1). In order to define this field, Ann Ferguson and Margaret E. Toye posit elsewhere that a distinctive feminist love studies questions the continual tendency within both traditional examinations of love and this new turn in contemporary love studies to take male, patriarchal, and heterosexist assumptions and

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models as the norm. Feminist Love Studies stresses the importance of developing alternate models and illuminates the contributions of feminist authors, including by reclaiming feminist historical work. (2017, 5; emphasis in original)

They conceive of love as “a possible important creative force, connecting energy or capacity—while not abandoning earlier feminist theory’s tendency to focus on harmful aspects of patriarchal, heterosexist, and colonial concepts of care and love” (5). They argue love has taken on an essential role in feminist thinking throughout its history and cursorily list these contributions: from the early thought of Mary Wollstonecraft to Emma Goldman; from Clara Zetkin to Simone de Beauvoir; from the works of Shulamith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson to Marxist feminists like Nancy Hartsock and Silvia Federici; from psychoanalytic feminists such as Nancy Chodorow to deconstructionists like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva or Hélène Cixous; and from black feminists like Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective and bell hooks to Latinx feminists like Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. To continue this project of honouring engagement with love off the beaten tracks, and to give prominence to rethinkings of love and affect through lenses that provide an alternative to a long white, male and Western tradition of defining love, I want to draw attention to specifically black feminist and queer critics who see love as deeply inscribed to, but at the same time harbouring the potential to overcome, systems of oppression. In such thinking, love is regarded as fraught with ghosts and histories, with the material, political implications tied up in it. When hooks in All About Love argues that “when we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation” and that “the choice to love is a choice to connect” (2000, 93), she attempts to conceptualise love as a force to bring forth social change and repair centuries of harmful subjugation of society’s others. Throughout her work, hooks has remained critically attuned to the violent, dehumanising conditions black people are confronted with. This orientation becomes quite evident in a range of her works. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, for example, she writes: “It struck me that for black people, the pain of learning that we cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identity” (1992, 3–4). Recognising how love may act as tool within these structures as an

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exclusionary force provides the possibility to re-formulate it and posit it as something that can tend to the rips and tears in the fabric of black selfhood. What hooks and many other thinkers of black radical love do, then, is to take into account love and its discontents, its normative and potentially harmful implications. Together with hooks, there are many contemporary thinkers who critique love as a tool for heteronormative, patriarchal and (neo)colonial power structures. Especially work stemming from the disciplines of postcolonial, gender, queer and affect studies has outlined how love has come to signify structural imbalances—and how it seeps into the complicated bound of gender and race. As Jennifer Nash succinctly points out, love “can be deployed to shore up heteronormativity, to re-­ energize dominant narratives of romance, and to advance claims to power” (2013, 19). Sarah Ahmed, in the same vein, gestures towards the often-­ insidious normative power love potentially holds. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, she excavates the structures and functions of powerful feelings such as love and hate, attraction and fear, desire and disgust and explains that while “love may be crucial to the pursuit of happiness, love also makes the subject vulnerable, exposed to, and dependent upon another, who in ‘not being myself’, threatens to take away the possibility of love” ([2004] 2014, 125). She shows how the work of love can also hold other, more insidious implications, for example, when “the choice of love-object is a sign of the love for the nation” (124) and love becomes sticky with other emotional economies, such as nation, gender or race. Paying attention to such interrelations, the scholar Keguro Macharia has argued that “policing love is central to establishing and sustaining claims about difference. This policing hierarchizes loving and lovability, imbuing dominant groups with the capacity to elicit, cultivate, and embody love while claiming that minoritized groups do not know how to love properly, if at all” (2015, 68). Macharia astutely points out how across different geographies and histories, “minoritized practices of labor, religion, and intimacy have been framed as examples of attenuated, corrupt, or perverse loving, or as demonstrating love’s absence altogether” (68). As historical examples for these harmful framing processes he reminds us to consider chattel slavery, which treated men and women as “breeders,” unable to form loving attachments to each other or to create loving families; indictments of queer individuals as randomly promiscuous, unable to sustain attachment or create homes for children; the state-sanctioned removal of Australian

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aboriginal children from their homes in the twentieth century, ostensibly to provide them with better structures of care; colonizing efforts to transform domestic life and intimate practices to resemble the Western, white heterosexual couple. (68)

Such examples show how the white bourgeois nuclear family, the epitome of goodness and pureness and integrity, has been utilised as a weapon against all those who do not fit such a narrow frame of how to love one another. Love is deeply implicated in the scripts of racial and gendered power relations. While often thought of as apolitical, an affective dimension into which you enter almost unwittingly, what Ahmed, Macharia and others have shown is that instead, love is inherently political and politicised. “Linked to broader structural violences faced particularly by women of colour globally” and embedded “within the constituent discourses of love—of desirability, emotional labour, support and commitment” (Gebrial 2017, n. pag.), who is allowed to love and how becomes a question of intent, power and agency. In believing in love’s possibilities and impossibilities, it is necessary to pay attention to such codes and often hidden structures. Advocating for love, as bell hooks so unashamedly does, means to engage in continuous political and ethical acts of questioning how these assumptions about love are perpetuated structurally and materially and to see love as an unequivocal chance to defy systems of power, to rupture everyday being. In her trilogy of works about love, All About Love: New Visions (2000), Salvation: Black People and Love (2001) and Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002), hooks formulates love as such an active and transformative practice: “[t]he word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet […] we would all love better if we used it as a verb” (2000, 4). She develops a love ethic that may function as an antidote to how love has often been instrumentalised. The three books in hooks’ love trilogy are essentially framed as self-help books and they indeed provide help to think a black self that is connected to the world and to communities of others. As she argues in “Love as the Practice of Freedom”, “without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism” ([1994] 2006, 243). In hooks, love emerges as a means to think through non-­ sovereign, dissident identity formations. She posits love as a site for a collective becoming-other, being-other, that can help to inform alternate

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socio-political imaginaries: “a love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change […]” as well as “a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as ultimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet” (2000, 87–88). This ethically framed politics of love reveals to us a long tradition of black feminist thought that is acutely invested in “crafting political communities constituted by heterogeneity and variety, rather than homogeneity and fixity”, that “engenders new publics, new forms of relationality, even if tenuous and fleeting, marked by forms of collective sentiment” (Nash 2013, 13; 14). Love can function as a tool to re-appropriate and to rebuild certain power relationships, and once we accept it as such an empowering strategy, it harbours the potential to destabilise restrictive orders. hooks and others have recognised the capacity of love as ultimately transformative of structures that underlie harmful processes of neo-liberal globalisation, racism, inequality and heteronormative restriction.5 Their radical love-politics entails not only a reparative practice of the self but also a communal, relational strategy for constructing political communities. Lauren Berlant, in her work on love, has stated that love has “been floated by so many as a solution—literally, a loosening or an unfastening, a dissolution—to the problem of social antagonism, or fractured community” (2011, 685). But if we posit love as a force which sets in motion “the work of normative negation that a revolutionary project must assume as its burden”, as Ahmed and Macharia have shown us, love must also entail something much messier and more untameable: “If love is force, though, it is a mess-making force, as its aim is to dissolve toxic sureties. There are no sureties on the other side of surety. Such a process does not clean up the world well” (685). What I find interesting, and fruitful, about these thoughts is the notion that if love is a force it not only repairs and restores but also has the potential to be unruly and destructive, to “make a mess” of the world.6 Berlant ascertains that her scepticism does not necessarily suggest that thinking of love as a powerful force is futile: “these arguments do not mean that love is a useless concept—its […] utility is that love allows one to want something, to want a world, amid the noise of the ambivalence and anxieties about having and losing” (2011, 687). What lies at the heart of Berlant’s criticism, then, and what I want to take up as one of the core guidelines for my discussions of African diasporic engagements with love- and world-makings is that love allows us to “want a world”, to imagine “the affective dimensions that it

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would take to (re)build a world” (ibid.)—however messy and untidy such a world might be. Taking the cue from these complex formulations of world and love traced throughout this introductory chapter, my book endeavours to trace the project undertaken by contemporary African diasporic literature to imagine a (re)building of the world. As texts which present love stories that are deeply entangled within twenty-first-century realities of migration and displacement, these novels, poems and performances make a mess of the toxic sureties that pervade processes of globalisation and neo-­ colonialism. The love stories offered by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire mark the ruptures that arise from collisions; they play with the tensions that emerge when gender and race, love and worlds converge. Attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting matters of geography and belonging in a time of global flows, migrant crises and refugee movements, these authors long for different, possible worlds. A Road Map Pheng Cheah proposes that the world should not be regarded as a noun but as a verb. bell hooks claims that love is usually defined as a noun, but that we should rather use it as a verb. Love and world, then, both employ the activity and forward movement of the verb instead of the settled stability of a noun. In conceptualising both worlding and loving as mobile, transformative and relational, I have established the frameworks I will work within in the following analyses of contemporary African diasporic texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi, Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel. My choice of texts—ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-­ known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the intricate, itinerant poems and performances of Patel and Shire—is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of thinking and feeling worlds. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian American, Caribbean, Nigerian British, Somali British and Kenyan American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary—an alternative to dominant

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constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels. To make visible the tensions and potentials that arise when these texts interlink world- and love-making, each chapter of this book is structured along three axes: space, textuality and love. With this tripartite structure, the book gives weight to the transformative, creative potential of the works discussed. In a first step, each chapter describes the space-building strategies of the literary works by examining notions of mobility, travel and diaspora; settlement, home and neighbourhood; cartography, mappings and architecture. This allows me to examine different literary world-­building, or mondialisation, strategies while also mining theoretical sediments as I make stops along the way to trace some of the most important developments in postcolonial and diasporic spatial theories of the last decades: the transnational (Adichie), the postcolonial metropolis (Smith), the postcolonial uncanny domestic (Oyeyemi) and the global blue humanities (Shire/Patel). The second part of each chapter teases out the affective textuality and embodied materiality of the novels, poems and performances. What takes precedence here are discussions of form, structure, genre and aesthetic patterns which link my thoughts about space and love in each chapter and which play into the rich and powerful potential of literature to be of and in the world—these interludes in each chapter allow me to fully and enthusiastically explore the potential of literary imagination to want a world, while revelling in all its messiness, ruptures and tensions that often run slant to canon and convention. The third part of each chapter activates the affective and relational dimensions of love, romance and desire negotiated in the texts. Here, the book fully delves into the makings of love as it explores the sometimes joyful, sometimes traumatic intimate experiences of the texts’ black, female characters in love: each chapter is dedicated to upholding not only the fraught histories and harmful implications at work within love but also the joyful, transformative potential that emerges when we witness black, queer women recognise new forms of sexual, intimate or platonic relationality and communality. The chapters are ordered not only according to this tripartite internal structure but also according to a larger macro-structure: to fully spell out the complex imaginings of love and worlds provided by the texts, the book will travel along certain spatial and affective scales. Concerning the spaces opened up by the literary texts, the book moves from global contexts to smaller spatial constructions, only to then expand them again in the last

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chapter. The second chapter (Adichie) looks at movements spanning nations and continents; the third chapter (Smith) examines the urban space of the postcolonial metropolis; the fourth chapter (Oyeyemi) probes constructions of the countryside and the interior space of the home and the fifth chapter (Shire/Patel) delineates the watery space of the ocean. Throughout my discussions, I will thus trace four complex spatial sites which are written from positions oscillating between the Global North and the Global South: encompassing the wide-reaching movements of the postcolonial African diaspora, the texts write the world from different geographical positions—Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia—all the while utilising multiple and often-intersecting spatial configurations. Regarding the constructions and imaginations of love, I will similarly attest to various and often differing dimensions opened up by the texts by applying a macro-structure to my discussions. The second chapter (Adichie) examines largely normative and heterosexual notions of romance and happy endings; the third chapter (Smith) moves on to trace unconventional familial and affiliative partnership constructions and open structures of homosocial relationality; the fourth chapter (Oyeyemi) looks at much more radical depictions of queer desire and the fifth chapter (Shire/ Patel) moves from the intimate couple form between lovers to include communal and collective notions of love and female solidarity. Throughout these chapters, I will not only interrogate notions of romance plots and narrative constructions of love but also the subversive, critical and potentially reparative engagement of the texts with female sexuality, desire and corporeality. By focusing on these literary, imaginative constructions of love and world-building and by tying them to the works’ material performances of their own textuality, my analyses will add a more complex dimension to the project of African diasporic imagination—critically testing notions of longing and belonging which revolve around the question of how to be part of the world, of how to write one’s longing into the world. Chapter Summaries I begin my analyses in Chap. 2 with an examination of Chimamanda Adichie’s third novel, Americanah (2013). Americanah connects Africa, America and Europe with each other, and I will argue that by expanding its scope beyond the notion of the nation, the text creates a relational world that exists in the gaps between the local and the global. These

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geographical relations are always closely connected to stories of love and desire which act as the driving forces behind Americanah’s diasporic movements. In analysing how it fashions its American, European and African spaces, I will show that Americanah emerges as a text that problematises its own spatial implications. I will extend my discussion of the novel’s transnational routes by examining its textual, textural entanglements in the second section of this chapter: the main linking devices the novel employs, hair and the internet, act as the starting points from which Ifemelu, the novel’s female protagonist, spins her story of belonging. Utilising theories of weaving and textuality, I will show how both the braiding process and the virtual space of the World Wide Web create connections across nations only to then lead the story back to Lagos, Nigeria. In the third part of this chapter, I will expound the notion that there lies subversive potential at the heart of Americanah’s love story as both its protagonists return to Nigeria from the years spent abroad elsewhere. Subverting the conventions of a “successful” migration narrative that includes processes of assimilation in the West, while seemingly conforming to the conventional structure of the romantic “happy ending”, the novel displays an innovative new way of imagining Africa and its diasporas— shedding light onto its own humanity and asking hard questions about the nature of love in a globalised, transnational world. The third chapter discusses Zadie Smith’s London trilogy, White Teeth (2000), NW (2012) and Swing Time (2016). Here, I maintain that the cityscape of the postcolonial metropolis London offers productive contestations of global and national world formations. In the first part of this chapter I will sketch a history of postcolonial London writing, with a special focus on the city post-Windrush in order to situate Smith’s London novels in their historical, socio-political and literary context. In this first part, I will discuss how Smith’s first London novel, White Teeth, inscribes itself into—and subverts—its literary precursors through its protagonist Irie’s affective, corporeal engagement with London and the Caribbean as well as through the alternative love and family structures she manufactures. The second part will examine NW with regard to its structural, performative textual rendering of the city. These examinations will be linked to the affective and relational encounters the text produces. The results are alternative and emotive “architextures” and cartographies that forge the city as an inherently shared communal space which, as such, offers ways of accessing migratory and diasporic urban identity and affiliations. The third part of this chapter will then shed light on the intimate

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relationships in both NW and Smith’s latest novel Swing Time in order to examine how city and love become entangled in a new understanding of postcolonial, diasporic together-ness. Queer disruptions of heteronormative romance (in NW) and ambivalent female friendships (in Swing Time) will bring forth different renderings of relationality, community and neighbourhood in the urban space. Chapter 4 explores Helen Oyeyemi’s novel White is for Witching (2009). With this chapter, the spatial scale further decreases as we move from transnational movements across the globe and the bustle of the postcolonial metropolis to the English countryside and the interior, domestic space of the house. The first section of this chapter will revolve around the layered constructions of space in White is for Witching. I will not only trace the literary histories of the haunted house on which Oyeyemi draws but also show how the house, the home and the homeland are destabilised by the peculiar unhomeliness of the novel’s postcolonial gothic engagement with space. As with my chapters on Adichie and Smith, the second section will look at how the novel performs its own textuality. Similar to the textual and textural transnational tactics employed by Americanah or the urban mappings performed by NW, Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is a text that self-consciously displays its own materiality and intertextuality. I will examine how the novel evolves from merely depicting a house that haunts to actually becoming a haunted/haunting text—through employing modes of non-linearity, circularity and fragmentation. The third section will then concern the novel’s constructions of love. I will look at the second gothic stock concept the novel proffers, the figure of the vampire and, closely connected, the desire for consuming the other. I will show how the novel sets up its very own queer vampiric love story and creates a narrative that turns on its head genre conventions as its two female protagonists fall in love. Revelling in the queer and the unhomely, Oyeyemi’s story proposes ways of longing and belonging elsewhere. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this study move from discussing passages between the continents of Africa, America and Europe to the enworlded spaces of the postcolonial metropolis to the countryside and the tension between domesticity and nation-building within the interior space of the house. The fifth chapter of this study will then once more expand these scales and dimensions as I discuss the water space of the ocean. In the fifth chapter, I turn to Warsan Shire’s poetry collections Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011), Our Men Do Not Belong to Us (2014) and Her Blue Body (2015) and Shailja Patel’s poetry-performance piece Migritude

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(2010). Moving towards the fluidity of poetry and away from the novel form, this final thematic chapter ventures to open up this study in terms of genre as well. As with my other chapters, I will employ a tripartite structure which examines configurations of space, textuality and love in Shire’s and Patel’s poetry. The first part of this chapter examines how the ocean figures as a spatial, political and poetic reservoir for the affective encounters in the works of Shire and Patel. Through mapping their writings within the intersecting networks of continents and oceans, I will show how in employing oceanic routes both poets reclaim histories and connections overwritten by the violent machinations of Empire. In the next part on form, genre and textuality, the space of the ocean will be supplemented by other quasi-spatial configurations—the digital space of the internet in Shire’s case and the performative space of the stage in Patel’s. Here, I will examine how the experimental poetic text formations of both writers mirror the movements of diaspora and displacement experienced by those inhabiting their poems. The figurations of love considered in this last chapter will both echo the different notions of love discussed hitherto and expand them to include more collective and connective models—my main focus point will be the recuperative, reparative work of love undertaken by both poets. Shire and Patel join the ranks of the other African diasporic authors discussed throughout this study as they take the female experience of displacement as a starting point for their explorations of love, desire and sexuality. I contend that these formations of cross-oceanic female community and empathetic kinship encompass and embody new forms of worldly affinity. By ending my explorations of how love and spatiality are intimately connected in the diasporic writings of contemporary women writers with a chapter on poetry, water spaces and trans-oceanic notions of collective love, I will show how these texts, together with the others I discuss throughout this study, manage to transform both love and space into verbs.

Notes 1. Cheah’s work references a long and extensive history of thinking (about) the world and about “world literature”. This term, much as the postcolonial, is a loaded term and draws on centuries of scholarly, philosophical engagement—beginning with Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and ending at contemporary discussions of global political, social and cultural formations. For a comprehensive overview of the field of world literature, see

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Damrosch, World Literature in Theory (2014), or the earlier Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000). For a more critical take on world literature, cf. Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013). 2. Taking postcolonial fictions of the Global South as his point of departure and drawing on a rich critical archive of continental philosophy and deconstruction—ranging from the idealist theorisations of Goethe and Hegel, via Marxism, to the phenomenologies developed by Heidegger and Arendt and arriving tentatively at Derridean ontological deconstruction—Cheah defines worlds as a “gathering and holding-together” (2016, 12). As Caroline Levine has argued, in Cheah’s thinking worlds come to mean “constellations of shared practices that connect us to others in an ongoing way […]. The particular world imposed by capitalist globalization is just one particularly destructive model of ‘the world’ that has eradicated many other meaningful frameworks for living created through rituals, labor, religious practices, and ethical bonds” (Levine 2016, n. pag.). 3. Cheah’s work on “worlding” needs to be contextualised within the frames already set up by other thinkers, such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Drawing on Said’s seminal work in Orientalism (1979), Spivak has utilised the term “worlding” to describe how European colonial powers constructed the geography of colonies; in her famous essay “The Rani of Sirmur” (1985), she intertwines discussions of othering and worlding to show how imperial Western powers attempted to structure the world in accordance with their own needs. Interesting to note in this context is also Spivak’s more recent engagement with the world, which finds expression in her theorisations of the planetary as, for example, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012) or Death of a Discipline (2003). 4. For discussions of Nancy and his work on community and communality, cf. Miller, Communities in Fiction (2015). For further background on Nancy’s influences regarding his philosophy of the world, cf. Gratton, Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense (2012). 5. I would be remiss to not also mention at this point similar arguments made by post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose work constitutes an important extension of hook’s call to love as resistance. In their theorisations of love as transformative political power, Hardt and Negri, even though they never acknowledge predecessors such as hooks and other black feminist thinkers, echo their attempts to place love into political discourse. Cf. their trio Empire (2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). 6. My arguments here, as well as throughout the book, revolve around the side-by-side of repair and injury. As such, they are fundamentally shaped by

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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s thinking of the “reparative”: reparative readings establish a critique of what Sedgwick has, in turn, called “paranoid reading”, a hermeneutic of aggravated suspicion and negative affect (1997, 2003). Instead, Sedgwick proposes a “less aggressive, less thesis-driven, less angst-­ ridden style of critique that would seek to repair the damage of homophobia and other forms of prejudice and violence rather than simply revealing allegedly new and ever more insidious forms of abuse in rather unlikely places” (Hanson 2011, n. pag.). What lies at the heart of Sedgwick’s thinking, then, is an integration of seemingly opposing principles. For Sedgwick, the potential to repair, heal and restore never loses sight of, indeed cannot exist without, what has been broken and the reasons for its broken-ness.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. [2004] 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Apter, Emily S. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. “A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 683–691. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Clough, Patricia and Jean Halley. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press. Damrosch, David, ed. 2014. World Literature in Theory. Malden: Blackwell. Davis, Emily S. 2013. Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferguson, Ann and Anna Jónasdóttir, eds. 2014. Love: A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Ferguson, Ann and Margaret E.  Toye, eds. 2017. “Feminist Love Studies  – Editors’ Introduction.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Special Issue: Feminist Love Studies 32 (1): 5–18. Gebrial, Dalia. 2017. “Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love.” Verso. Web. February 13, 2017. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-­decolonising-­ desire-­the-­politics-­of-­love. Gratton, Peter, ed. 2012. Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense. Ithaca: State University of New York Press. Hanson, Ellis. 2011. “The Future’s Eve: Reparative Reading after Sedgwick.” South Atlantic Quarterly 119 (1): 101–119.

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. ———. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End. ———. [1994] 2006. “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Collins. ———. 2001. Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: Morrow. ———. 2002. Communion: The Female Search for Love. New York: Morrow. Levine, Caroline. 2016. “How to Make Worlds.” Public Books. Web. January 11, 2016. https://www.publicbooks.org/how-­to-­make-­worlds/. Macharia, Keguro. 2015. “Love.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (1): 68–75. Massey, Doreen. 1993. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Eds. John Bird et  al. London and New York: Routledge, 59–69. Miller, J. Hillis. 2015. Communities in Fiction. New York: Fordham University Press. Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review. 1: 54–68. Nash, Jennifer C. 2013. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 11 (2): 1–24. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Ed. Peter Connor. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. ———. 1997. The Sense of the World. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Eds./Trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pedwell, Carolyn and Anne Whitehead. 2012. “Affecting Feminism.” Feminist Theory 13 (2): 115–129. Pratt, Geraldine and Victoria Rosner, eds. 2012. “Introduction.” The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time. New  York: Columbia University Press. 1–27. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1997. Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy. Durham: Duke University Press. 123–151. Smith, Mick, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi, eds. 2009. Emotion, Place and Culture. New York: Routledge.

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Spivak, Gayatri C. 1985. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory. 247–272. ———. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Subramanian, Shreerekha. 2018. “In the Wake of His Damage.” The Rumpus. Web. May 12, 2018. http://therumpus.net/2018/05/in-­the-­wake-­of-­his-­damage/.

CHAPTER 2

Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Always use the word Africa or Darkness or Safari in your title. […] Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. […] In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. […] Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation. —Binyavanga Wainaina, “How to Write About Africa” (2006, n. pag.)

In his satirical Granta piece, the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina sheds light not only on how the West writes about Africa but also on how it writes Africa into existence—how it produces a clearly demarcated space that can be consumed and understood along known parameters such as poverty, human rights and corruption, or simply its landscapes and fauna, disregarding the continent’s humans entirely. What Wainaina does here is not just criticising global literary marketing campaigns or one-dimensional novels about Africa by non-African writers, but he draws on how the violence of colonialism is carried over into other violent acts of muting: “Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed” (2006, n. pag.). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_2

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Achille Mbembe has similarly argued that Africa is seen by the West as “a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability, […] portrayed as a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed” (2001, 3). Mbembe’s and Wainaina’s conceptualisations of such a flattening representation of Africa by the West have been mirrored by other African and African diasporic writers over the years who have attempted to tackle the problem of an Africa turned into an empty, monolithic category. Taiye Selasi, a Ghanaian Nigerian writer living in the African diaspora, for example, claimed in a talk at Literaturfestival Berlin that “African literature doesn’t exist”: “By ‘African literature,’ I refer not to the body of written and oral texts produced by storytellers on and from the continent—but rather to the category. African Literature is an empty designation” (2013a, 1). She explains that “Africa” as a category is frequently used to “invent some monolithic Africa” (4), severely hampering its varied identities, languages and cultures. Selasi describes how a shrunken version of what it means to be “African” is produced by a restricted and restrictive Western imagination. This version of Africa is not supposed to overstep its bounds or to expand beyond its tightly controlled borders. In posing these problems, Selasi makes visible how writers of African descent, either domiciled in one of the continent’s countries or living elsewhere in the diaspora, are not supposed to spill over the edges. Instead, they are expected to perform a conventional version of their Africanness. When read in such a deadening way, Africa and literature from and about Africa may be allowed to encompass poverty, suffering, war and trauma, but certainly not the other things that make us human: friendship, humour and tenacity. As Somali American thinker Sofia Samatar writes, there is a reason that it is easy to read War and Peace and say well, yes, it’s about war, but really it’s about character. And not so easy to say the same thing about Half of a Yellow Sun, not easy to say this also is a love story, this is a story about passion. There are different ways of reading. We learn them, repeat them, pass them on. We learn to read Tolstoy for character. We learn to read Adichie for the history of the Biafran War. (2015, n. pag.)

We ascribe complexity to what we know and reversely try to put boundaries around the things we know nothing about. In constructing a single,

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seemingly comprehensive story, all the other smaller and more wilful stories are overwritten: “the assumption is that African novelists write only about the condition of African-ness. Never we mind the family dynamics, romantic catastrophes, intellectual musings—all of this humanity is secondary to the African-ness at hand” (2013a, 2013b, 8). While the West tries to be “morally correct”, to recognise the suffering and the hardships of a “third-world country”, it perpetuates damaging stereotypes while participating in the shrinkage of a culturally highly diverse and multi-­ faceted, multi-sited continent. And while attention is paid only to these one-dimensional narratives, “we let the larger story swallow the smaller ones, the human ones—in err” (9). A solution lies in being alert to the smaller stories, the different, the utterly human stories which might provide an alternative to the restricting ways Africa and its diasporas have traditionally been mediated and consumed. To come back to the theorisations of Pheng Cheah and Jean-Luc Nancy on worlding I engaged with in this book’s introduction, the telling of such stories—in our imagination and through literature—may enact the opening of a world, a habitable world that enables shared humanity (cf. Cheah 2016, 210; cf. Nancy 2007, 1). In this chapter, I argue that such an alternative opening can be found in Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie’s third novel. Americanah, published in 2013, tackles the big, comprehensive stories of corruption in Nigeria, racism in the US and Great Britain, the divide between poverty and wealth in both Africa and the West and the political implication of migration between continents. The novel also, however, achieves “a balance of stories” as it unsettles conventional and stereotypical binaries. Focussing on love, friendship, and family as well as on the cultural complexities of black female corporeality and hair, the text cleverly intertwines the personal with the political all the while jumping between disparate geographical spaces. With this, Adichie belongs to an ever-growing collective of contemporary writers who create African and African diasporic imaginaries that refuse to be pinned down to an “a-priori”, an already known and flattened designation of Africa—their Africa, “far from being single or transparent, is one which spans subjectivities and collectivities, coming to life in  locations as diverse as East Lost Angeles, Lagos, Croatia, London, Johannesburg, and speculative lands that do not exist anywhere in this world at all” (Krishnan 2014, 19). With Americanah, Adichie, who herself travels between continents as she divides her time between Nigeria and the US, has written a novel that resists the single story. I agree with Madhu Krishnan who states that here

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“Africa takes its roots in Nigeria and extends across the globe, taking hold in America and enlivening the continuities of transnational blackness” (20). Adichie has created an Africa that “is more than a space of military coups and postcolonial mismanagement; instead, it transforms into a human space, a space which defies a single description in favor of the contradictions and confusions of individual lives and unsettled collective becomings” (ibid.). While Adichie’s first two novels stay within the national framework of Nigeria, Americanah moves across borders. Her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), re-tells the Achebian Bildungsroman from a female point of view in contemporary Nigeria, and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) delineates the horrors of the Biafran War. Both engage with notions deeply inscribed into Nigeria’s colonial past, the country’s decolonisation and subsequent periods of troubled post-independent nation-­ building. Americanah is, as Adichie herself has boldly stated in a conversation with Zadie Smith, her “fuck you book” (2014a, 16:31), “a fuck you to another version of herself” (16:35). She says that “with Half of a Yellow Sun I was very dutiful. For so long I have been a dutiful daughter of literature. I’ve followed the rules … show don’t tell” (16:40). This figure of the respectful daughter calls up notions of obedience and of literary parents as authoritative figures but certainly also encourages notions of going against these traditions and parental influences. In refusing one-­ dimensional and one-directional “African” writing and in progressing and then transgressing Chinua Achebe’s analyses of Nigeria’s traumatic pasts, Adichie makes way for alternative ways of writing (about) Africa. As Yogita Goyal has stated, Americanah “challenges the association of Africa with trauma, torture and politics, bringing into view non-Afro-pessimist representations of Africa” (Goyal 2014, xiv). The taboo subjects that Selasi and Wainaina both had ironically outlined—love, education, family, intellect— appear as important components in the evolution of Americanah’s two protagonists. I argue that narratives of desire, (self-)care and romance take centre stage in a novel that can essentially be defined as a love story. This love story is complexly interwoven with reimagined geographies of diaspora which transverse not only spatial but even more so emotional boundaries. In this sense, the text carefully and creatively negotiates the thinking-together of love and space—a thinking-together that designates new possibilities of living in a global twenty-first century while astutely paying sustained attention to the lived realities of love, affect and trust. To show how Americanah’s love story follows along geographical, affective and textual routes of desire, in the following I will analyse the

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novel’s intricate interplay of longing and belonging. This chapter will, in a first section titled “Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America, and Europe”, outline Americanah’s constructions of spatiality while paying close attention to current discussions regarding the emergence of new transnational African diasporic writings. The main contention here will be that the novel’s geographical relations are always closely connected to stories of love and desire which act as the driving forces behind Americanah’s worldly movements. In the second section, titled “Textual Entanglements: Braiding and Blogging B(l)ack”, I will extend these discussions by examining the novel’s textual, textural enterprises: two of the main linking devices the novel employs, hair and the internet, act as Americanah’s affective and structural starting points from which Ifemelu, the novel’s female protagonist, spins her story of belonging. Expounding on such entanglements allows me to shed light on how this novel helps us ask questions about personal and communal forms of building possible and impossible worlds. Thirdly, in a section called “Returns and Romance: ‘It’s Just a Love Story’”, I will further deepen the notion that there lies critical potential at the heart of Americanah’s love story as both protagonists return to Nigeria from the years spent abroad in America and England, respectively. Undermining narrative conventions in African and African diasporic novels of the twenty-first century of “successful” migration stories of assimilation, upward social mobility and settling in the West, while seemingly conforming to the worn-out romantic trope of the happy ending, the novel’s insistence on love as an active (and critical) force partakes in a new writing about Africa—one that pays attention to its own humanity and asks questions about the nature of love in a globalised, transnational world: it is important to want a world, to allow ourselves to want a world and to imagine the affective dimensions that may rebuild a world from and within new messes.

Transnational Imaginaries: Between Africa, America and Europe Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelt of neglect. Baltimore

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smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell. —Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah (2013a, 3)

We first meet Ifemelu, one of the two protagonists of Americanah, when she has lived in America for 13 years; an immigrant from Nigeria who had come to America when she was only a teenager, she just finished a fellowship at Princeton University, runs a famous blog about race and politics and seems settled both professionally and personally in a relationship with a Yale professor—hers seems to be the epitome of a successful immigrant life. Already in these first lines, the novel gives us a taste of her journey across the US, hinting at her past geographical attachments: Philadelphia, New Haven, Baltimore and Brooklyn. For now, however, I want to focus on the first locus the novel offers us and how it complicates one-­dimensional imaginations of the world and its spaces from the outset. Everything in the first paragraph of the novel, which has been used as this chapter’s epigraph, seems to point at the ease with which Ifemelu has found her place in America: the “tranquil greenness”, the “calm and stately homes”, the “quiet abiding air of earned grace” and the lack of smell all seem to construe Princeton as a place where one can perhaps too easily feel at home (3). This stability is broken up straight away though: “She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty. But she did not like that she had to go to Trenton to braid her hair” (3). Ifemelu’s blackness at once takes centre stage and the novel points out how the affluent ease of Princeton is only available to a certain group of people. The insistence on Princeton’s cleanliness and odourlessness in Ifemelu’s narrative, and her own slant positioning to this space, makes Princeton recognisable and comprehensible as a system that is hermetically closed off, revealing initially invisible notions of white privilege and societal as well as cultural hierarchies at play in even the most educated, seemingly progressive university towns. The fact that Ifemelu must leave Princeton to go to the suburb Trenton to find a black hair salon destabilises Princeton and the certainty she ascribes to being allowed “into a hallowed American club”. This is juxtaposed with her inner emotional turmoil: There was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she

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could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. […] Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil. And, of course, there was also Obinze. (5)

In these first lines of the novel, we learn of Ifemelu’s desire to return to Nigeria—something that will only happen in the very last part of the book after we have been told most of her story. The mention of Obinze, Ifemelu’s high school boyfriend, seems to hint at larger things we as readers know nothing about as of yet and the novel will, in fact, from here on rotate around both their fates in alternating chapters. Their relationship and then later the absence of one marks one of the main engines for the plot to move forward and motivates the geographical travels undertaken by the two protagonists. When Ifemelu finally arrives in Trenton after taking the train from Princeton, the narrative sets up the hair salon as an alternative universe to the college town: Mariama African Hair Braiding. It was her first time at this salon—her regular one was closed because the owner had gone back to Cote d’Ivoire to get married—but it would look, she was sure, like all other African hair braiding salons she had known: they were in the part of the city that had graffiti, dank buildings, and no white people, they displayed bright signboards with names like Aisha and Fatima African Hair Braiding, they had radiators that were too hot in the winter and air conditioners that did not cool in the summer, and they were full of Francophone West African women braiders. (10)

Underlining the notion of intertwined familiarity and otherness that emerges from this description, Ifemelu goes on: “The conversations were loud and swift, in French or Wolof or Malinke, and when they spoke English to customers, it was broken, curious, as though they had not quite eased into the language itself before taking on a slangy Americanism. Words came out half-completed” (11). Opposing Princeton, which smells of nothing, the hair salon is painted as a dirty, noisy and smelly place where cultures and languages clash, revealing Ifemelu’s own learned classed assumptions. However, the novel is not content to rest on such easy notions of hierarchy: in its buoyant bustle, the salon offers an alternative to lifeless, odourless Princeton. With this opposition, Adichie undermines clear-cut narratives of a protagonist having arrived at a stable identity as an

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Americanised African immigrant. What is more, Americanah’s worlded and worldly ethics become evident within this space of the hair salon; it is not only a space that contrasts Princeton but also a collective space of black femininity which unites many different locales: Ifemelu from Nigeria, the braiders Mariama and Halima from Mali as well as Aisha from Senegal and customers from South Africa—they all enter into an uncomfortable companionship within the space of the salon. Stemming from completely different geographical, cultural, religious and class backgrounds, they nevertheless converge in this strictly female space. Mariama African Hair Braiding thus emerges as “a contested terrain where beauty constructions blend and clash with the interchange of knowledge and experiences between Black women of different origins and social status” (Cruz-­ Gutiérrez 2019, 69). In this way, as Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez has argued, the novel echoes bell hooks’ definition of the beauty salon in an article on “Straightening Our Hair” in Zeta Magazine as “a real space of black woman bonding through ritualized, shared experience. […] a space of consciousness raising, a space where black women shared life stories— hardship, trials, gossip” (1988, 34). This reveals an engagement with female black space that is never one-dimensional but always ambiguously multi-sited. The hair salon comes to act as one of the novel’s most important connective spaces and can be defined as the core of the movements the novel produces: “So here she was, on a day filled with the opulence of summer, about to braid her hair for the journey home” (9). In an of itself a space marked by multi-sited-ness, the salon also structurally causes the story to move across borders, to connect continents and nations. Throughout the course of the novel, whenever the narrative returns to the story’s present time in the hair salon, a significant temporal and geographical shift takes place. The first of these shifts occurs in the first chapter as Ifemelu sits in the salon, talking about Nollywood films, reluctantly advising her Senegalese braider Aisha regarding her two Igbo boyfriends and verbally sparring with a white customer about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Jean Toomer’s Cane—during all this, “feeling reckless”, she sends an e-mail to Obinze to inform him that she would be coming back to Nigeria (19). With this moment of reaching out and breaking years of silence, the perspective changes to Obinze who receives her e-mail, and the text transports the reader from East Coast America to West Africa. Following the first chapter, which circles around Ifemelu in Princeton and Trenton, with a chapter on Obinze, Ifemelu’s former boyfriend in Lagos, the text

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continues to refuse to focus on just one, stable locus. Moving from the hair salon which complicates Princeton, to the Nigerian city of Lagos, the novel does not give precedence to either. Regarding Adichie’s representation of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, Pankaj Mishra argues that “far from being an imaginary homeland, Lagos emerges in Americanah as one of the ‘developing’ world’s gritty megacities, complete with broken roads, chronic power outages, organic food-fetishists and Hello magazine clones” (2013, n. pag.). As we encounter Obinze stuck in Lagosian traffic, the city around him materialises as a three-dimensional place, swimming into focus between the grey gloom of rain, “the radio turned on low to the Pidgin English news on Wazobia FM” and the colourful CD covers pressed against his limousine’s window by a street hawker (23). In contrasting the experiences of the two protagonists in New Jersey and Nigeria, the novel amplifies the world-building parameters set up in the hair salon as they constantly shuttle between differently situated points of origin. Obinze, deeply immersed in American literature during his childhood and teenage years but, unlike Ifemelu, denied a visa to the US, went to England where he worked illegally only to be then deported back to Nigeria after a few years. Here, in the narrative present, Obinze “has made it” and counts among the wealthy elite of Lagos. Tracing his and his wife Kosi’s various social engagements, the novel carves out a complex image of Nigerian society. Mirroring Ifemelu’s multi-sited experience in the hair salon, Obinze describes a similarly hybrid situation: Mohammed, the gate-man, wiry in his dirty white caftan, flung open the gates, and raised a hand in greeting. Obinze looked at the tan colonnaded house. Inside was his furniture imported from Italy, his wife, his two-year-­ old daughter, Buchi, the nanny Christiana, his wife’s sister Chioma, who was on a forced holiday because university lecturers were on strike yet again, and the new house girl Marie, who had been brought from Benin Republic after his wife decided that Nigerian house girls were unsuitable. […] the kitchen would be fragrant with curry and thyme, and CNN would be on downstairs, while the television upstairs would be turned to Cartoon Network, and pervading it all would be the undisturbed air of well-being. (26)

This shows not only Obinze’s acquired wealth and his privileged position among Nigeria’s upper class but also the cultural complexity inherent to his life as many different worlds intermingle, from CNN to Benin Republic, from Italian furniture to the smell of curry. Like Ifemelu, however, Obinze quickly disrupts this sense of “well-being”—“he had begun […] to feel

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bloated from all he had acquired […] and would, from time to time, be overcome by the urge to prick everything with a pin, to deflate it all, to be free” (26). Obinze is slowly realising that even though everything seems perfect on the surface, he is deeply unhappy, both with his marriage and his professional life. This chapter ends with Obinze composing a reply to Ifemelu and stepping out on his veranda, breathing in Lagos’ hot night air, feeling “as if he could float, and all he needed to do was let himself go” (44). This ambiguous last sentence not only tethers him to his home in Lagos but also hints towards the restlessness his life in Nigeria is imbued with. With these two introductory chapters, then, the first part of the novel sets up a fundamental structure of not only moving between narrative perspectives but also moving between geographical locations: Nigeria, England and the US become spaces which are always infused with other worlds. This world-making can be described as a transnational act as it consciously fashions multiple points of contact between nations. Ifemelu’s American space is inherently linked to Obinze’s Nigerian one, much in the same way as Nigeria later in the narrative becomes linked to England which in turn connects to America. Americanah, with its oscillation between different spaces of belonging, promotes thinking beyond tidy entities of nations and categories. It not only escapes the narrow confines of national borders but indeed troubles narratives of national belonging. What is most interesting about Americanah’s transnational spatial practices is that it never gives precedence to the West over the Rest and that it pays attention to its African, European and American spaces with the same emphasis. As we have seen just from its first two chapters, the novel swings between spaces across the globe, but never denies itself a sense of locality, of being tied to a specific place of origin. This imaginative strategy is unusual for traditional African diasporic fiction, which has often focussed on the country of destination, but one which has become more and more pronounced in recent works. Together with a new canon of twenty-first-­ century African diasporic fiction such as Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011), Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013b), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016), Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) or Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), to name but a few examples, Americanah offers an intense sense of being located elsewhere whilst at the same time being placed within Africa. It engages in these localised emplacements without ever negating the movement

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between nations. This new wave of contemporary transnational literature, to which Adichie’s novel belongs to, refuses to be pinned down to one flat notion of what it means to be African, either on the continent or in Africa’s diaspora. Regarding this co-existence of local/global and centre/periphery in transnational imaginaries, Parker and Young posit that transnationalism is not a new term for internationalism or globalization or any other existing system. It marks a break with the old model of centre and periphery. Instead of emphasizing traditional national boundaries, transnationalism places importance on the “trans”: it marks movements across or beyond prescribed cultural and national spaces without privileging those spaces. It grows out of local sites of production but acknowledges that the local must have a conversation with the global. (2013, 1)

Echoing this, Sara Ahmed reminds us in Strange Encounters that “transnational journeys of subjects and others invite us to consider what it means to be at home, to inhabit a particular place, and might call us to question the relationship between identity, belonging, and home” (2000, 78). Americanah, focussing on geographical and affective movements between spaces and perspectives, can be regarded as a prime example of writing and understanding the world transnationally and excels in calling into question uncomplicated, one-sited notions of home and belonging both within and beyond the boundaries of the nation. In light of these transnational strategies of writing about contemporary African diasporic belonging, part two of Americanah returns to Ifemelu and the hair salon. The further the novel delves into the past, the clearer becomes its strategy of troubling and complicating stories about identity and nation. To do so, the hair salon is again utilised as a connective space and propels the narrative into Ifemelu’s childhood in Nigeria: “Your hair hard,” Aisha said. “It is not hard,” Ifemelu said firmly. “You are using the wrong comb”. And she pulled the comb from Aisha’s hand and put it down on the table. Ifemelu had grown up in the shadow of her mother’s hair. It was black-­ black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. (49)

Taking hair and its embodied, sensible realities as the structural and affective link between past and present which couples the experiences in hair

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salons in different countries, the narrative goes on to chronicle Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s childhood and how they meet and fall in love during secondary school in Lagos and then in Nsukka where they go to university in the late 1990s. Through delineating her mother’s almost fanatical Christian beliefs and describing her father as a “man full of blanched longings, a middle-brow civil servant who wanted a life different from what he had, who had longed for more education than he was able to get” (57), Ifemelu paints a picture of a family that places all its middle-class hopes on their only child and on a Nigerian nation that teeters between an uncertain future and an oppressive past. Ifemelu’s father seems tied to a trauma that he cannot overcome—he has become stuck within old colonial economies of value and power (58). In contrast, Ifemelu’s younger Aunty Uju, her closest confidante, is the first family member to openly criticise the nation: “You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption” (93). She is also the first to leave Nigeria. She becomes the mistress of a man called “The General”, a fictional version of one of Nigeria’s leaders during the military dictatorship (more specifically the Second Junta 1983–1999 under Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha), and has a child with him. When the General is killed in a military plane crash, she escapes to America with her son, Dike. This migration to the US foreshadows Ifemelu’s own travels but can also be read as exemplary of how the novel brings to light the intersections between histories of colonisation, postcolonial agency and new global and transnational flows of people; the multi-routed connections between the nation and the world. All of Ifemelu’s friends have either American or British passports or move there once their parents give up hope in the face of Nigeria’s political corruption. Especially for the younger generation, it is not the old colonial ruler Great Britain—as is the case with Ifemelu’s father—but America which is regarded the ultimate goal. This desire is expressed in the term “Americanah” which becomes a label, half-mocking and half-­ admiring, for those Nigerians who “have been to” America: “They roared with laughter, at that word ‘Americanah,’ wreathed in glee, the fourth syllable extended, and at the thought of Bisi, a girl in the form below them, who had come back from a short trip to America with odd affectations, pretending she no longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to every English word she spoke” (78). But later, when Ifemelu listens to her more privileged classmates, it becomes clear that underneath all the mockery lies an earnest wish to leave behind the hopelessness of their Nigerian

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homes: “‘American passport is the coolest thing,’ Kayode said. ‘I would exchange my British passport tomorrow’”; “‘I very nearly had one o,’ Obinze said. ‘I was eight months old when my parents took me to America’”; “‘I was on my mom’s until primary three, then my dad said we needed to get our own passports,’ Osahon said” (79). Once one of the most important routes for transatlantic slave trade, the passage to America is now seen as desirable—as an often-unattainable possibility for education and freedom. The crossing over is now a self-facilitated and a voluntary one. But despite the affirmative re-inscription of this route which had once been imbued with death and violence, the themes of homelessness, displacement and the struggle to forge belonging pervade Americanah. The novel powerfully evokes Africa’s colonial history by re-tracing the triangle of the transatlantic slave trade in connecting three nations with each other. In following Ifemelu to America and Obinze to England, the novel pays tribute to these legacies of colonialism and slavery as it not only reconnects Africa, America and Europe through its transnational and multi-routed travels but also probes the difficulties of contemporary and voluntary African migrants. The text not only creates new geographical imaginaries but also problematises existing frameworks, as Ifemelu and Obinze shed light on both the US’s and the UK’s fraught engagement with the other and the foreign. Both Ifemelu in America and Obinze in England offer a reconsideration of the relationship of black subjects to the West all the while upending the binary opposition between Africa and the rest. Ifemelu’s America Americanah produces highly complex interrelations between its characters and the worlds they inhabit. I will now continue to examine the space-­ building that Ifemelu engages in—a space-building that always lies close to the emotional and relational facets behind geographical displacement, thus recognising the novel as deeply dedicated to revealing how black diasporic women wrangle with the frames of the private, personal, intimate and vulnerable—all while bearing the marks of twenty-first-century diasporic displacement and political turmoil. When Ifemelu first comes to America as a teenager, full of hope and naivety, Brooklyn is connected to her aunt and cousin. As quoted at the beginning of the novel and this chapter, its smell of sun-warmed garbage evokes the long hot summer Ifemelu spends in New York. Again, it is a situation at the hair salon in the

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narrative present that triggers the narrative to move back in time and start Ifemelu’s story of American initiation: Ifemelu brushed away some sticky hair on her neck. The room was seething with heat. “Can we leave the door open?” she asked. Mariama opened the door, propped it with a chair. “This heat is really bad.” Each heat wave reminded Ifemelu of her first, the summer she arrived. It was summer in America, she knew this, but all her life she had thought of “overseas” as a cold place of wool coats and snow, and because America was “overseas,” and her illusions so strong they could not be fended off by reason, she bought the thickest sweater she could find in Tejuosho market for her trip. (126–127)

When Ifemelu arrives in New York, she feels suspended: “that first summer was Ifemelu’s summer of waiting; the real America, she felt, was just around the next corner she would turn” (136). Her time in Brooklyn is marked by disassociation as the America she encounters does not fit the image she had constructed back in Nigeria. When she moves to Philadelphia to start college, she lives in a small dingy flat with three American girls: “her roommates, Jackie, Elena, and Allison, looked almost interchangeable, all small-boned and slim-hipped, their chestnut hair ironed straight, their lacrosse sticks piled in the narrow hallway” (156). Just as Ifemelu describes it years later as having the musty scent of history, Philadelphia is indeed the place where her story starts. This inauguration of Ifemelu’s American history is one that is deeply ambiguous: She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who lived in exclamation points. […] People who did not scrub in the shower: their shampoos and conditioners and gels were cluttered in the bathroom, but there was not a single sponge, and this, the absence of a sponge, made them seem unreachable alien to her. (156–157)

This interplay of intimacy and alienation with the other girls’ beauty rituals is striking. The bathroom is a girly room that is not her own as its cultural codes and politics of hygiene remain separate from her. She cannot gain entry into that room and is excluded. She feels estranged and foreign to herself and thus Philadelphia is put in stark contrast to her life in Nigeria and especially her connection to Obinze, who tries to guide her through

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her new life via telephone: “The world was wrapped in gauze; she could see the shapes of things but not clearly enough, never enough. She told Obinze that there were things she should know how to do, but didn’t, details she should have corralled into her space but hadn’t. And he reminded her of how quickly she was adapting, his tone always calm, always consoling” (160–161). Despite her initial difficulties, however, Philadelphia is also the site demarcating her initiation into America— where she begins knowing and vocalising herself: “New words were falling out of her mouth. Columns of mist were dispersing” (167). She starts to make sense of her new home via the medium of language and literature as Obinze sends her reading recommendations per e-mail: “a cyber-café had just opened in Nsukka—he gave her a list of books. [Baldwin’s] The Fire Next Time was the first” (166). As she reads, “America’s mythologies began to take on meaning, America’s tribalisms—race, ideology, and region—became clear” (167). But the one thing that most of all creates a feeling of community and belonging is when she becomes a member of the ASA, the University of Pennsylvania’s African Students Association. The ASA meetings “were held in the basement of Wharton Hall, a harshly lit, windowless room, paper plates, pizza cartons, and soda bottles piled on a metal table, folding chairs arranged in a limp semicircle” (170). This room, though provisional, dirty and messy, is a room for communication and exchange, dialogue and affiliation. It provides an environment for critical thinking about what it means to be African in America and not African American: Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, Ghanaians, South Africans, Tanzanians, Zimbabweans, one Congolese, and one Guinean sat around eating, talking, fueling spirits, and their different accents formed meshes of solacing sounds. They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It’s so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa. And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again. Here, Ifemelu felt a gentle, swaying sense of renewal. Here, she did not have to explain herself. (170–171)

The temporary and transitional basement room creates a safe space—one where many different voices and disparate accents mesh. As Sara Ahmed argues in Strange Encounters, shared displacement can create a bond and communities are built through the “shared experience of not being fully

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at home”: “the process of estrangement is the condition for the emergence of a contested community, a community which ‘makes a place’ in the act of reaching out to the ‘out-of-place-ness’ of other migrant bodies” (2000, 94). As a tenuous link between American and African worlds, the ASA provides the possibility to forge a new, transnational home. The ASA basement, which smells of many things, thus constitutes a space of longing and belonging where a communal group identity is forged. This connection to the ASA as well as her connection back “home” to Nigeria and to Obinze is radically severed by Ifemelu when she undergoes a traumatising experience: searching for a way to pay her expenses and send money back home, she takes on a different name to work under a false security card. “At first, Ifemelu forgot that she was someone else” (159), but then she gets used to living invisibly, hiding her name and revoking her identity. When all attempts at finding a job remain unfruitful, however, she responds to a newspaper advertisement looking for a “female personal assistant for busy sports coach in Ardmore, communication and interpersonal skills required” (176)—this entails “helping him relax” (177) by letting him touch her while he masturbates. Initially she refuses to engage with him, but when she fails to pay yet another bill, she takes him up on his offer out of desperation and existential fear. The violation of her body precipitates a process of derealisation: “She wanted to shower, to scrub herself, but she could not bear the thought of touching her own body, and so she put on her nightdress, gingerly, to touch as little of herself as possible” (190). Falling into a deep depression after these distressing events, she also cuts herself off from anything else, her American life, her Nigerian family and, most of all, from Obinze: That night, it snowed, her first snow, and in the morning, she watched the world outside her window, the parked cars made lumpy, misshapen, by layered snow. She was bloodless, detached, floating in a world where darkness descended too soon […] Obinze called many times but she did not pick up her phone. She deleted his voice messages unheard and his e-mails unread, and she felt herself sinking, sinking quickly, and unable to pull herself up. […] Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. […] She no longer went to class. Her days were stilled by silence and snow. (191–192)

It is certainly no coincidence that in this moment of utter displacement and isolation in America, Ifemelu experiences her first snowfall. The coldness and whiteness seem to envelop her and make any connection to

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Nigeria impossible. Ifemelu’s inability to put into words what has happened to her and the denial of any form of communication with Obinze is mirrored by her engagement with place. Instead of partaking in processes of relationality and productive meaning making, she shuts herself off from any form of placed attachment—this is marked by her refusal to go outside and interact with the wintery city that sinks into snow. She is “detached” and “bloodless” and Philadelphia becomes what Marc Augé would call a non-place, a place of no “relation, only solitude” (1995, 103). The only thing that eventually shakes her out of her depression is when her friend Ginika forces her to take on a job as a babysitter. This rings in the second stage of Ifemelu’s life in America; she has now revoked all contact with her former boyfriend Obinze, whom she has completely cut off out of a deeply seated sense of shame and guilt: “With each month of silence that passed between them, she felt the silence itself calcify, and become a hard and hulking statue, impossible to defeat” (241). After a few months at her babysitter job, she meets enigmatic Curt, the uncle of her protegees. They date and she subsequently moves with him to Baltimore. Baltimore and her relationship to Curt initiate another phase in her American life—one which is once again signalled by a section of the novel that harks back to the hair salon in the present-time narration (229–235). Here, Ifemelu observes a white American girl coming to the salon to get her hair braided in what is described if not as cultural appropriation or outright racism then as plain ignorance. This foreshadows the struggle with her own notions of beauty and African hair during her relationship with Curt. Equating Baltimore with the smell of brine, the text points not only towards the city’s liminal geographical location at the coast as the second largest seaport in the Mid-Atlantic but also to a more abstract emotional geography that is Ifemelu’s identity as an African migrant in America. Upper-class white Curt seems to open up a new world for her, a comfortable space full of possibility: “A sense of contentment overwhelmed her. That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment, of ease. How quickly she had become used to their life, her passport filled with visa stamps, the solicitousness of flight attendants in first class cabins […] She had slipped out of her old skin” (246). Ifemelu not only experiences an opening up of the world (they go travelling, hiking, kayaking, camping and visit Europe) but also personally seems to find a new openness: “With Curt, she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares […] She

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was lighter and leaner” (241). Baltimore, situated on the coast at the border between sea and land, seems to denote a new sense of opportunity. The artificiality of these processes, however, is revealed when her carefully constructed new sense of self is suddenly disrupted by an event that punctures the safe bubble of her cosmopolitan life with Curt. One Saturday afternoon at the mall, she meets one of her childhood friends from Lagos, Kayode DaSilva: “They hugged, looked at each other, said all the things people said who had not seen each other in many years, both lapsing into their Nigerian voices and their Nigerian selves, louder, more heightened, adding ‘o’ to their sentences” (276). The superimposition of linguistic markers of “original” Nigerian voice and “newly acquired” American voice and the retreat into familiar speech patterns points to an intricate interplay of language and identity. That this happens at an American mall, of all places, only serves to stress this hybridity. The incident not only inserts Nigeria back into Ifemelu’s American space but also propels her out from her closed off world with Curt. Kayode says, “‘I love Maryland. I run into Nigerians at the grocery store and in the mall, everywhere. It’s like being back home. But I guess you know that already.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, even though she did not. Her Maryland was a small, circumscribed world of Curt’s American friends” (276). The two Marylands that are being opposed here make visible different structures of making worlds and making community—an opposition in which Ifemelu inhabits the side that stands for isolation and confinement. The lack of social structures, the absence of friendships and links back home, is overwritten by an even larger void, brought back to the surface by Kayode, who mentions that he is still in contact with Obinze, who is now living in England: A numbness spread swiftly through her. […] She had created the distance, ignoring him, changing her e-mail address and phone number, and yet she felt deeply betrayed by this news. Changes had been made in his life that she did not know about. He was in England. Only a few months ago, she and Curt had gone to England for the Glastonbury Festival, and later spent two days in London. Obinze might have been there. She might have run into him as she walked down Oxford Street. (277)

Struck by this blank space which suddenly threatens to topple her carefully built American home, Ifemelu tries to resuscitate the formerly severed link between her and Obinze and contacts him via mail. This reaching out via e-mail transports the text from America across the Atlantic to Europe.

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Obinze’s England As the novel deftly takes the meeting between Ifemelu and Kayode as a turning point to leave Ifemelu’s story and to venture into Obinze’s life, in the following I similarly want to concentrate on the counterpart to Ifemelu’s America, Obinze’s England, before returning to Nigeria with both of them. Thinking back to how Ifemelu describes her experience of England when she visited with Curt, it becomes clear that there could not be a more extreme contrast between her and Obinze’s experiences abroad: she visits the UK as a sheltered, upper-class tourist with a green card, goes to Glastonbury festival and shops in Central London, while he works as an illegal immigrant, cleans toilets and desperately tries to arrange a fake marriage in order to attain a visa: “In London, night came too soon, it hung in the morning air like a threat, and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk descended, and the Victorian buildings all wore a mournful air. In those first weeks, the cold startled Obinze with its weightless menace, drying his nostrils, deepening his anxieties, making him urinate too often” (281). Obinze’s England is a cold one and his precarious status as an illegal immigrant is mirrored by his spatial tactics: he seems to be always on the move, drifting from one tube station to another, walking the streets of London, sitting on the train, driving or working at a moving company. These continuous movements underline the helplessness and purposelessness of his life in England. Especially the tube station as an inherently metropolitan, transitory space signifies one important spatial aspect of London, the former heart of the Empire: the London tube with its labyrinthine branches and colourful lines transports bodies in and out of the city as it bridges different suburbs with various ethnic make-ups. It is almost always tube stations that figure as important players in Obinze’s fate: “It was at a tube station that he met the Angolans who would arrange his marriage” (281), “He met the girl, Cleotilde, a few days later at a shopping centre, in a McDonald’s whose windows looked out onto the dank entrance of a tube station” (282), and it is also at a tube station that he realises that he might develop feelings for this stranger woman whom he is supposed to marry (285). The stations serve as meeting points between different cultures; they seem like dreary, damp and grey versions of the contact zones Ifemelu had experienced in America. For Obinze, the tube stations do signify points of contact, but they also point towards the sheer vastness and arbitrariness of the city: “the word ‘underground’ made him think of doomed tunnels that fed into the earth and went on forever, ending nowhere”

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(307). These contact zones are only accessible to Obinze in a restricted, shadowy way. His life in London resembles a closed-off cage in which he has to deal with his anxieties and hardships alone: “He would walk fast on the pavement, tuned tightly into himself, hands deep in the coat his cousin had lent him […] [A]nd he would think: You can work, you are legal, you are visible, and you don’t even know how fortunate you are” (281). Obinze lives in London “invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch” (318), he seems a faint trace of himself without ever being seen or recognised. These processes of becoming un-named echo Sara Ahmed’s conceptualisations in her essay “Wiggle Room” of race as a restrictive room which stifles and makes small: You feel cramped, even nervous. To feel whiteness as oppressive is to be shaped by what you keep coming into contact with in such a way that you are restricted. I am speaking, here, of non-white people who inhabit white spaces, spaces that have become white through who as well as how bodies gather. […] You might experience yourself becoming tighter in response to a world that does not accommodate you. You have less room. Sometimes a world can be so tight that it is hard to breathe. (2014, n. pag.)

The restrictiveness with which Obinze experiences his surroundings can be traced through how he moves through London: he is “turned tightly into himself”, “nearly swallowed” by his surroundings (281). The only place which seems to give him room to breathe, at least for a short time, is a bookstore where he could “become Obinze again” (317). The bookstore marks another transnational node of connection and community in the novel, as he reads only contemporary American fiction there, hoping to “find a resonance, a shaping of his longings, a sense of the America that he had imagined himself part of. He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them” (317). He tries to become part of the America he had longed for in his childhood and perhaps also to reach (for) Ifemelu through literature. He consumes these novels to be able to insert himself into another (imaginary) world, but ultimately fails. That he cannot escape his reality in England becomes clear when the novel draws on the historical political situation of the time to flesh out Obinze’s status as an illegal immigrant. This tension is again played out in the ambivalent space of the London tube:

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He sat on the stained seat of the noisy train, opposite a woman reading the evening paper. Speak English at home, Blunkett tells immigrants. […] The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history. (320)

The medical discourse of infection employed here by this post-9/11 nationalistic rhetoric against a perceived reversed colonisation evokes racial anxieties of a nation which has lost some of its hegemony in a globalised, global world. The notion of immigration as a movement into the wrong direction is deeply entrenched in the utterances of David Blunkett, who became Britain’s Home Secretary in 2001, and one that Adichie uses to underline Obinze’s troubled existence below the radar of legal citizenship. This displacement plays out in a remarkable scene, when Obinze— again on a train—experiences a short episode of dissociation: “Later, on the train to Essex, he noticed that all the people around him were Nigerians, loud conversations in Yoruba and Pidgin filled the carriage, and for a moment he saw the unfettered non-white foreignness of this scene through the suspicious eyes of the white woman on the tube” (320). In pitting white and black perspectives against each other, the novel dislodges Obinze’s black outsider position in a white space as it makes him temporarily compliant with the white gaze onto his Nigerian expatriate compatriots. The shift in perspective and this short moment of being inside-out can be regarded as exemplary for his whole experience of London, one that is once removed from every community. As he is not legal, he cannot build lasting friendships with his work colleagues, and for the same reason his contact to his Nigerian friends in London is disrupted repeatedly. A deep raft of misunderstanding and apathy functions as a white noise which interrupts all his interpersonal connections. The only meaningful relationship Obinze seems to be able to hold up is with the girl he is introduced to by a pair of Angolan brothers he pays to arrange a fake marriage to be able to stay in the UK. Against all odds, Obinze and Cleotilde start developing feelings for each other, but the marriage never goes through. At the last second, he is arrested by official government workers and put into detention in Manchester before being

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transported to Dover and flown back to Nigeria: “He was led to a cell. It was small, with brown walls, and the metal bars, so thick his hand could not go around one, reminded him of the chimpanzee’s cage at Nsukka’s dismal, forgotten zoo” (344). Obinze decides not to fight the deportation process and so the lawyer assigned to him “was going to tick on a form that his client was willing to be removed. ‘Removed.’ That word made Obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath and mind. A thing” (345). His status as an unwanted, undesirable object completes Obinze’s failed attempts to make a home for himself in the UK. The allusion to Nsukka zoo plays out again when he is led through Manchester Airport and he imagines all people staring at him like a caged animal: “He hated the cold heaviness of the handcuffs, the mark he imagined they left on his wrists, the glint of the interlinking circles of metal that robbed him of his movement” (345). His restricted engagement with the city and with England thus reaches an unhappy climax when he is transferred from Manchester to Dover: Obinze had read about Dover in a newspaper. A former prison. It felt surreal, to be driven past the electronic gates, the high walls, the wires. His cell was smaller, colder, than the cell in Manchester […]. He felt suffocated in that cell, let out only to exercise and to eat, food that brought to mind a bowl of boiled worms. He could not eat; he felt his body slackening, his flesh disappearing. (349)

The psychological trauma of displacement and isolation is transported onto a bodily level, he can feel himself shrink and disappear: “he felt raw, skinned, the outer layers of himself stripped off” (347). The contrast between Ifemelu’s experience of Great Britain as an Americanised citizen with a green card visiting Glastonbury, and Obinze, who tries to make a living as an illegal guest worker in London but ultimately fails, could not be greater. The novel sets up this opposition to shed light on the complicity of a cosmopolitan elite moving across the globe and the shadowed lives of those living below the shiny surfaces. Subtly drawing out difference, privilege and power, Adichie not only celebrates transnational mobility but also calls attention the ugly underbelly of globalisation and the paradigms accompanying it, such as cultural assimilation or the ascendancy of neo-liberal capitalism as the worldwide economic model.

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Discussions of the potential of transnational literature have often highlighted the power imbalances inherent to diasporic, migratory experiences: on the one hand, there exist the “privileging experiences of postcolonial intellectuals, cosmopolitan escapism, and apolitical aestheticism” (Martinek 2013, 219), while on the other hand, we need to pose questions like Robert Young’s when he asks: “How can a migratory identity be celebrated in the refugee camps of Qetta, Jolazi, and elsewhere in Pakistan, […] in the West Bank, in the former Sangatee camp in France?” (2004, 53). I posit that Americanah draws attention to exactly this point of contradiction as the text pits Obinze’s failed journey against Ifemelu’s story of American success, constantly weighing these narratives against each other as they entangle in alternating chapters which jump across the globe. Adichie’s writing is a transnational writing which challenges compliance and complacence and which questions class and privilege.1 As John McLeod succinctly argues, “in its attention to the nodes and networks of transnational movement, transnationalism captures something of the continual movements and crossings between locations in ways, rather than focussing on a single, monumental passage of the migrant or the exile” (2001, 89; emphasis in original). In focusing on many different locations and networks, Americanah complicates the one-directional, one-­ dimensional notion of immigration and pays attention to the many layers of transnational movement. Obinze’s jarring experience in England and his deportation back to Nigeria is not a story we as readers suspect to be told after following around Ifemelu through her American Bildungs-­ narrative. Even less so do we expect Ifemelu herself to return to Nigeria after she has become so successful in the States. In focussing on these many-layered relocations across the world, the novel offers sites of contestation to all too narrowly defined notions of home. In doing so, it provides an alternative to what Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur describe as the “hegemonic homogenizing forces of globalisation” (2003, 7). Engaging in these often-discordant transnational imaginaries, Americanah rethinks the categories of nation and nationhood as it configures the relation between world citizen and a geographically definable space of belonging anew, for both its protagonists and readers. Adichie’s novel, then, animates, shapes and thinks into existence alternative worlds as it itself firmly, inextricably belongs to the world.

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Textual Entanglements: Braiding and Blogging B(l)ack The transnational dynamics the novel engages in would not be possible without the connection between the two lovers. Ifemelu and Obinze become separated early in the narrative and all subsequent chapters revolve around the absence of, and longing for, the other. This connectivity between the lovers, and between Africa, America and England, is established through a plethora of linking devices which transfer the geographical movements narrated within the story onto a meta-textual, textural level. In the discussions above it has become clear how Adichie’s novel creates a transnational narrative fabric that spans countries and continents: expanding a Barthesian notion of text as tissue,2 I propose that the novel should be read as incorporating different textures and different materials which are effected through continuous and generative interweavings. This process of weaving or interweaving is achieved in Americanah by textual, textural strategies that not only constitute structural links (across time and across space) but on a more abstract level lend a specific self-referential, performative quality to Americanah’s crossings. Two of the most intriguing linking devices are hair and the internet. Both not only connect different parts of the story but also engage in other ways of producing a text that is inherently relational and connective. The textural practices connected to hair, such as braiding and weaving, and those connected to the World Wide Web, such as linking and threading, are taken up by Americanah in order to self-referentially foreground the materiality of the novel and to make visible how it creates a complex web of affect and relationality which is woven together by many different threads. To further mobilise and stimulate my discussions on dis- and emplacements between Africa, America and Europe in section one of this chapter, in the following I will analyse these two linking devices to ascertain what kind of transnational textuality the novel performs and how it creates an intertwined net of geographical and affective encounters. Hair Textures Is Your Hair Still Political? tell me / when it starts to burn … —Audre Lorde, “A Question of Essence” ([1986] 1997, 410)

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In the hair salon, Ifemelu not only has her hair braided for her journey back home but also starts a braiding process that takes much longer—in the case of my Americanah edition, 588 pages. As Kathryn Schulz has stated, “Adichie, too, is braiding and weaving, and the longer she leaves Ifemelu in that dilapidated, overheated salon, the more clearly the strands of her story emerge” (2013, n. pag.). Just as the teenager Ifemelu had her hair braided in Nigeria for her trip to States, she repeats this braiding process years later to return: her braids literally frame the story of Americanah.3 Hair (and the locations it is combed through and plaited in, like the salon in Trenton) functions as a structural linking device between text passages, temporal levels and geographical spaces, but it also points towards the political issues linked to black hair. It opens up a space to think about how inherently interlinked notions of aesthetics and politics are. “Is your hair still political?/tell me/when it starts to burn”, asks Audre Lorde in her 1986 poem “A Question of Essence”, used as this section’s epigraph. About four years later during a trip to the Caribbean, as related in an essay reprinted in the collection I Am Your Sister (2009), Lorde is yet again confronted by her question as the style of her hair, natural locks, delays her from being allowed to board her flight (224). Because the woman behind the Immigration Control desk assumes she is Rastafarian, Lorde’s hair suddenly takes on an additional, undesirable meaning—one deeply entangled in diverse historical, socio-political, aesthetic and economic realities: “On this tiny island, I had found another example of Black people being used to testify against other Black people, using our enemies’ weapons against each other, judging each other on the color of our skin, the cut of our clothes, the styling of our hair” (227). As Durell M.  Callier and Kimberlee Pérez argue in their forum on “Still Political: Reflections on the Complex Histories, Negotiations, and Significations of Hair”: Within the repetitive and situated ongoing politics of hair, we locate hair’s communicative doing, its performativity, and its signification of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Hair is a powerful and meaningful performance of identity and, subsequently, of public relation. Often in its signifying, hair symbolizes acceptability, thereby confirming or disaffirming one’s belonging to social groups, communities, and particular codes of conduct. That hair—its texture, styling, and presence and absence—is private and personal while simultaneously hypervisible and public is one of its intriguing ironies. (2014, 391)

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A direct response to such questions and complexities, Americanah, similarly, shows how Ifemelu grapples with her appearance and how she slowly comes to understand the contested field of black femininity and beauty. During her relationship with Curt, her white American boyfriend, for example, she becomes freer and more mobile as she travels with him and profits from his financial privilege—at least at first. But the narrative also describes another process while she is with him: the process of trying to tame her hair to become more American, whiter, more acceptable. When Curt helps Ifemelu get a job interview at an advertising agency, both her Nigerian Aunt Uju and her African American friend Ruth advise her to straighten her hair in order to heighten her chances of actually getting the job. Here, hair relaxation can be read as rite of passage into an American corporate context: “I need to look professional for this interview, and professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls but never kinky” (252). Loosening the braids she used to wear, she regards the relaxation process as an adventure. Initially, she attempts to relax her hair at home by herself, but when this relaxer does not take, she goes to a hairdresser: “Ifemelu felt only a slight burning, at first, but as the hairdresser rinsed out the relaxer, Ifemelu’s head bent backwards against a plastic sink, needles of stinging pain shot up from different parts of her scalp, down to different parts of her body, back up to her head” (251). The end result seems to conform to the expectations: “Her hair was hanging down rather than standing up, straight and sleek, parted at the side and curving to a slight bob at her chin” (251). But, as she quickly notes, the “verve was gone. She did not recognize herself. She left the salon almost mournfully; while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a sense of loss” (251). This pervasive sense of loss is coupled with bodily discomfort: “Two days later, there were scabs on her scalp. Three days later, they oozed pus” (252). She gets the job. Black female hair comes to signify the insidious ways black female bodies are often violently subjected to social control mechanism (cf. Banks 2000; Dabiri 2020)—Americanah’s portrayal of Ifemelu’s hair journey sensitively attests to such dehumanising processes. The question of black (female) hair—small afros, big afros, straight weaves, kinky coils, cornrows, box braids, dreadlocks, twists, raucous curls and TWAs (teeny weeny afros) (cf. 262)—and its textural recalcitrance is taken up repeatedly during the novel. As Adichie says in an interview with

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the Guardian: “Hair is hair—yet also about larger questions: self-­ acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable” (Adichie 2013b, n. pag.). In his seminal article on “Black Hair/Style Politics”, Kobena Mercer concisely outlines these issues. He argues that we need to recognize hair-styling itself for what it is, a specifically cultural activity and practice. As such we require a historical perspective on how many different strands—economic, political, psychological—have been woven into the rich and complex texture of our nappy hair, such that issues of style are so highly charged as sensitive questions about our very ‘identity’. As part of our modes of appearance in the everyday world, the ways we shape and style hair may be seen as both individual expressions of the self and as embodiments of society’s norms, conventions and expectations. (1987, 34)

He goes on to argue that aesthetic and political strategies surrounding black hair can be read as “creative responses to the experience of oppression and dispossession. Black hair-styling may thus be evaluated as a popular art form articulating a variety of aesthetic ‘solutions’ to a range of ‘problems’ created by ideologies of race and racism” (34). Pointing out the histories of oppression tied up with black hair, he reiterates that hair was and still is “burdened with a range of ‘negative’ connotations” that divide between black and white, ugly and beautiful (35): “Good”, or European, hair is connected to textures such as soft, straight and shiny, whereas “bad” black hair takes on connotations of ugliness and impurity with textures described as tough, hard and woolly. Americanah echoes these issues as Ifemelu grapples with the meaning of her hair during her time in the US.4 Interestingly, the decisions she makes about her hair become entangled with decisions she makes about her private life, literally intertwining the personal with the political. When her hair starts to fall out, the text also centres around her fading attachment to Curt: “And then her hair began to fall out at the temples. She drenched it in rich, creamy conditioners, and sat under steamers until water droplets ran down her neck. Still, her hairline shifted further backwards each day” (257). This passage directly follows a section about Curt: “There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing” (257). Ifemelu’s burgeoning disenchantment with Curt coincides with the disintegration of her hair. Later, when she has found a way to be

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happy with her hair, Ifemelu also finds a way to express why her relationship to Curt did not work: “But it was also true that she had longed, with Curt, to hold emotions in her hand that she never could. She had not entirely believed herself while with him. […] She loved him, and the spirited easy life he gave her, and yet she often fought the urge to create rough edges, to squash his sunniness, even if just a little” (355). The smooth and perfect way of life offered to her by Curt, echoed in her sleeked and relaxed hair, seemed almost too smooth to be good to her—she misses the roughness and the edges, just like she misses the textures of her natural hair. It is important to note here how Ifemelu reconciles with her hair. She does so not through her relationship with Curt but through the guidance of her female friends and an online community of black women. Her friend Wambui offers her to help cut off the relaxed hair, arguing that it was not meant to be confined, controlled. But when the hair is cut, Ifemelu thinks of amputation, feels incomplete: “She looked unfinished […]. In the bathroom mirror, her hair startled her, dull and shrunken from sleep, like a mop of wool sitting on her head” (258, 259). She finds salvation in an online community called happilykinkynappy.com: They were done with pretending that their hair was what it was not, done with running from the rain and flinching from sweat. […] They complained about black magazines never having natural-haired women in their pages, about drugstore products so poisoned by mineral oil that they could not moisturize natural hair. They traded recipes. They sculpted for themselves a virtual world where their coily, kinky, nappy, woolly hair was normal. And Ifemelu fell into this world with a tumbling gratitude. (263)

The website gives her a sense of belonging: “Posting on the website was like giving testimony in church; the echoing roar of approval revived her” (264). The notion of giving testimony and “the echoing roar of approval” suggest the musical call-and-response dynamics found in African and African American gospel singing and further underline Ifemelu’s sense of new-found community. In seeking support via the internet and the blogosphere, Ifemelu learns to accept her hair. She releases her fractious hair and takes a step further in learning to be herself and to place herself in America: “On an unremarkable day in early spring—[…] she looked in the mirror, sank her fingers into her hair, dense and springy and glorious, and could not imagine it any other way. That simply, she fell in love with her hair”

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(264). What binds together the online space of happilykinkynappy.com and the hair salon is not just an engagement with the politics, aesthetics and embodiedness of hair but also a pervading and nurturing sense of female solidarity. Weaving together experiences of black womanhood from different parts of the world, these communities become transnational gatherings situated between home and away, familiarity and estrangement, roots and routes. As Tiffany M. Gill has shown, these online spaces of solidarity and care “allow black women, who rarely see images of people who look like them valorized in media, to create an alternative narrative of beauty” (2015, 76). This constitutes a fruitful continuation of the arguments by hooks I outlined in this book’s introduction: the love between women, enacted here in Adichie’s novel via a shared online space of exchange, speaks of a collective becoming-with-another (hooks 2000, 87–88), which then informs and revolutionises socio-political imaginaries—in such a love ethics, our lives emerge as connected to everyone else on the planet and speak of an intimate, global world order in which we should care for others. While structurally the braiding and weaving processes of Americanah can be read purely as enabling the text to jump between temporal levels and different geographical spaces, the braiding also generates a multiply interwoven web of community and meaning within the pages of the novel and outside for its readers. The notion of weaving, of course, evokes practices which are mostly coded as female. As Teemu Paavolainen argues, figures of thought of weaving and embroidery “suggest female-specific metaphors of thought, creativity, and collaboration, potentially subversive of patriarchal systems of technology and domination; for others, they only go to reinforce essentialist stereotypes of domestic womanhood and female submission” (2017, 173). Americanah refuses to conform to essentialised notions of either submissive womanhood or black and kinky hair as less beautiful. Instead, we are confronted with a text that is not only geographically flexible as it crosses between different worlds, but one that is embedded in openness, emotion and notions of female affiliation and collaboration. Through thinking with hair, Americanah generates a powerful enmeshment of different textures and textualities and Ifemelu not only finds a space of belonging within the communities of the salon and the blogosphere, but she also finds her own voice in order to criticise the superficiality and hypocrisy of American society.

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World Wide Web(s) Open Thread: For All the Zipped-Up Negroes […] Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe space. —Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah (2013a, 380)

The processes of weaving and braiding I have described above directly correspond to rhizomatic network metaphors frequently applied to the internet or the World Wide Web. As Guiomar Rovira Sancho contends in her article on online network communities and global activism, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari “proposed the botanical metaphor of the rhizome well before the existence of the Internet: a structure where every point can connect to all others, where there is no universal linguistic translator, only jargons and dialects” which is why it offers “only appropriation of meanings and creation of multiple meanings” (2013, n. pag.; referring to Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 13–18). A rhizome “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance” (1987, 25). Both rhizomatic and online structure is “open and eccentric: there are multiple entry points, there are no central elements of organization, and it does not respond to any model” (Sancho 2013, n.p.).5 Like Barthes’ notion of text as tissue and as continuously implicated in interlinked processes of meaning making, the virtual space of the internet continues to be de- and reconstructed through endless and open-ended textural mechanisms which can be metaphorically described as linking, weaving, pattering, threading and layering. In their article “Notes on Weavin’ Digital: T(h)inkers at the Loom”, Teshome H.  Gabriel and Fabian Wagmister argue for the conceptual connections between older practices of weaving and new digital media and the implication they have on the division between Western and Eurocentric though systems and Third World epistemologies. They posit that despite the newness often attributed to computer technology, much of its vocabulary, as well as that of the internet, draws on relational concepts borrowed from back-strap weaving. Terms such as texture, pattern, layering, links, nodes, sampling, net, network, web, web weaver, and threads belong to a lexicon employed in both weaving and computing. On a structural level, they both rely on the use of crossing, interweaving lines. Aesthetically and conceptually, too, there are similar cross-thread mechanisms at work. The origins of the computer have in fact always been connected to weaving:

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the first machines were merely extensions of looms, and computers the extensions of mechanised looms. ([1997] 2010, 335)

Mirroring my arguments concerning the connective and collective strategies of weaving and braiding hair offered in Americanah, Gabriel and Wagmister recognise the relational practices inherent to both weaving and online systems of interlinkages and interrelations: Weaving, as a practice, is a matter of linkage—a connectedness that extends the boundaries of the individual. This sense of open-ended connection and inter-relation is precisely what Western notions of technology, in their instrumentality and emphasis on the individual, tend to repudiate. Yet, as the metaphors of weaving indicate, computer technology also opens up the possibility of a digital weaving that acknowledges this sense of connection. (337)

Virtual online spaces and new digital technologies take on a similar role as hair and the hair salon in Americanah. The internet comes to designate border crossings and the movements between nations. However, like the flashbacks provoked by certain situations in the hair salon and the use of hair as a linking device, the internet not only interlinks geographical spaces or disparate time frames with each other but serves as one of the main connective and affective links between the novel’s characters and the diasporic communities they build across the globe. One example for these interlinkages would be the e-mails the lovers Ifemelu and Obinze send each other across the world: e-mails and the process of them being sent and received often double in the text (i.e., when Ifemelu sends one and pages later Obinze opens it) and thus create connections and ruptures across the narrative. At the beginning of the story, these e-mails link Ifemelu in America with Obinze in Nigeria. As Anna-Leena Toivanen argues in her article on the use of new technologies in contemporary African and African diasporic women’s fiction, e-mails “tie geographically distanced places closer together in a way that does not necessitate physical human travel, and that may, ideally, lead to […] a sense of being in the world informed by an awareness of the transnational and/ or the universal situated within a condition of local embeddedness” (2016, 136). After Ifemelu visits the tennis coach in Ardmore, however, e-mails go unread, are deleted. They become a marker for how an interpersonal connection is severed: “She no longer read the news on Nigeria.com

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because each headline, even the most unlikely ones, reminded her of Obinze. […] She still deleted his e-mails unread. […] Deleting his e-mails took a click, and after the first click, the others were easier because she could not imagine reading the second is she had not read the first” (196, 197). Furthering this sense of rupture, the e-mails sent later in the story between England and America are ignored and vanish: deleted data lost somewhere across the Atlantic. This trope of interrupted communication and emotional distance creates tension and serves to underline the characters’ displacement and the difficulty to make a home for themselves. The unwritten and unread e-mails are just as important as the written and read ones, and they serve as nodes in the transnational (world-wide) web of communication and silence Americanah constructs. The text revolves around these points and thus structurally expresses the longing both Ifemelu and Obinze feel for each other as well as for their homeland. When they finally re-establish their connection, it is via e-mail. The negative space of non-communication and deleted messages is replaced by an overabundance of language; while Ifemelu is preparing for her travels back to Nigeria and Obinze becomes estranged from his wife in Lagos, their e-mail exchanges foreshadow not only the physical reunion as they both move closer towards each other when Ifemelu physically flies back to Africa but also an affective, emotional closeness that slowly grows: “He began to write to her about his time in England, hoping that she would reply and then later looking forwards to the writing itself. He had never told himself his own story, never allowed himself to reflect on it […]. Writing her also became a way of writing himself” (461). Ifemelu’s answer confirms the newly established link between the two: “I have loved your e-mails about England and they have been so good for me, in so many ways, and I cannot thank you enough for writing them” (461). Communication with the other, and the writing of the self as a reparative process, become entangled and reconnect the spaces of America and Nigeria with each other. As these e-mails flow back and forth along the digital routes of cyberspace, they also unearth the rhizomatic, entangled roots of desire between the lovers which had been buried for so long. The e-mails are one way to describe the web woven by Americanah as it crosses the world. The notion of interconnection, multi-layered meanings and networks of alliance becomes even clearer when examining the blogs created by Ifemelu. The founding of her first blog continues themes that had come to the surface during Ifemelu’s hair transitioning process: “That evening, Ifemelu wrote a long e-mail to Wambui about […] the

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things she didn’t tell Curt, things unsaid and unfinished. It was a long e-mail, digging, questioning, unearthing. Wambui replied to say, ‘This is so raw and true. More people should read this. You should start a blog’” (366). She takes her friend’s advice and the first blog post she composes is a rewriting of the e-mail she had send Wambui, setting the stage for future blog posts which revolve around topics concerned with race, feminism and class. The blog becomes a space for her to be able to articulate herself: Blogs were new, unfamiliar to her. […]; she longed for other listeners, and she longed to hear stories of others. How many other people chose silence? How many other people had become black in America? How many had felt as though their world was wrapped in gauze? She broke up with Curt a few weeks after that, and she signed on to WordPress, and her blog was born. (366)

Her blog, at first titled Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-­ American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America, not only brings her success and financial security but also introduces Blaine into her life (they meet at a blogging convention). An African American professor of comparative politics at Yale, he will become her second boyfriend and they will stay together until she decides to move back to Nigeria. Given the way the novel strategically and continuously aligns questions pertaining to home, belonging and affect with each other, it comes as no surprise that Ifemelu’s very first post revolves around the importance of emotions and love: The simplest solution to the problem of race in America? Romantic love. Not friendship. Not the kind of safe, shallow love where the objective is that both people remain comfortable. But real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved. And because that real deep romantic love is so rare, and because American society is set up to make it even rarer between American Black and American White, the problem of race in America will never be solved. (366–367)

Hinting at her failed relationship with Curt and foreshadowing the reasons why her relationship to Blaine will also fail, this post intertwines themes of race and love, of politics and the personal. Other topics she writes about circle around mental illness and race (“On the Subject of Non-American Black Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse to Know”, 194), online dating as a black woman (“What’s Love Got to

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Do with It?”, 377), Beyoncé and Michelle Obama (“A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor”, 367) or different shades of whiteness and blackness (“Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Do WASPs Aspire To?”, 253; “On the Divisions Within the Membership of Non-American Blacks in America”, 255). The constant interplay of inclusion and exclusion materialises in the name and the titles of her blog entries, which oppose American Whites, American Blacks and non-American Blacks with each other in an often exaggerated, tongue-in-­ cheek way. Ifemelu uses her blog to create a space for herself to mediate her experiences as an African immigrant in the US. The blog serves as a means to negotiate her new home, the fraught relationship to questions of race and class, and as a way to communicate with others who feel the same way. It becomes not only an outlet, but a deeply emotional, affective space for her to grow. One blog entry which exemplarily points to this is the one I have used as this section’s epigraph: “Open Thread: For All the Zipped-Up Negroes: This is for the Zipped-Up Negroes, the upwardly mobile American and Non-American Blacks who don’t talk about Life Experiences That Have to Do Exclusively with Being Black. Because they want to keep everyone comfortable. Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe space” (380). An online thread, used as a feature in internet forums, bulletin boards or on blogs, is a possibility to facilitate ongoing discussions which are made up of reactions and answers—these can be arranged linearly or a-linearly, hierarchically and non-hierarchically. A software to visually aid grouped discussions, a thread can be regarded as an inherently relational way to construct dialogue and to establish a narrative told by many different voices in the same space. A thread of course is also a textural element, a string or ribbon, which again points towards the space of the internet as something that is woven out of different filaments and textures. The open thread set up by Ifemelu offers a space to unzip and to speak freely to those who are black in America and thus disrupts oppressive, racist structures in real life which hinder exchange or empowerment. Vis-à-vis her blog, Ifemelu becomes invested in crafting communities which are global and intimate, personal and political at the same time. As Camille Isaacs argues in her discussions of social media in Adichie and Bulawayo, “the multi-layered, synchronous, affective communication enabled by online communities allows for a complex, non-fixed diasporic subjectivity that is not limited to one geographical space or to the other, but rather present simultaneously in different places” (2016, 178).

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Ifemelu’s blog thus can be defined as a virtual network that produces relation and participation. Just as the engagement with Ifemelu’s hair draws attention to all kinds of textures (smooth, kinky) and thus to different structures (of oppression, of empowerment), Americanah’s use of cyberspace and new digital media as a way to criticise racism and misogyny also introduces different textures to the novel. Chronologically, the post about race and romantic love quoted above is the first blog post Ifemelu writes—but it is not the first blog post we encounter as we read the novel. From the beginning on, the blog entries are inserted into the main body of narrative. Sometimes they appear as just titles, sometimes as quotes integrated into the narrative and sometimes as whole posts which are then detached from the main body of the text. They function as either additional commentary or actively propel the plot forward. Because these blog inserts are not in line with the rest of the narrative, on first reading they tend to have a disruptive effect. Later, they align with the plot strands and act as important parts of Ifemelu’s American story—like the post on mental illness and depression mentioned above, which is inserted right after Ifemelu’s experience with the tennis coach in Ardmore: “Years later, she would blog about this” (194). These shifts “allow for a double take on many of the character’s experiences as black migrants in the US, so that the reader confronts the young Ifemelu’s sense of bewilderment and emotional pain together with the older Ifemelu’s more distanced elaboration of the same episodes and issues” (Guarracino 2014, 13). The novel thus incorporates online technologies as a medium for critical engagement with race and gender. Blogging assumes centre stage to negotiate and deconstruct stereotypes and creates multi-layered text, textural forms: “With its interweaving of creative writing and opinion making, novel and blog, Americanah […] offer[s] a poignant example of the mutation of narrative forms in the information age” (ibid.). Through the blog posts which are typographically set off from the rest of the text through a sans-serif font, the novel comments on the different media forms and textual expressions used within Americanah. The blog posts’ texture is different from how the rest of the narrative looks and feels and thus introduces an element that adds to the main narrative but constitutes an unruly interruption of it at the same time. Another play on text and textuality is linked to the blog’s name, Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. This title intertextually alludes to the genre of American slave narratives, with titles such as Charles

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Ball’s Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man (1836) or John Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855). Narratives by African slaves from North America became one of the main genres of African American literature throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Writers like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass or Harriet Ann Jacobs expressed their experiences by giving accounts of their lives as former slaves and were deeply entangled with the abolitionist movement, as becomes evident in Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) or Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). One of their functions was to draw a white readership into the lived experiences of black Americans (cf. Ernest 2014; Fisch 2007), and Ifemelu’s blog as a twenty-first-century intertextual continuation of these narratives both mirrors and subverts this as it creates an intricate interplay between empathy and an insistence on difference. It shuttles between positions of outsider and insider and comments on Ifemelu’s in-between position as African in America, and not an African American. Raceteenth is also a reference to Ralph Ellison’s novel Juneteenth. The term Juneteenth is a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth”: known today as Independence Day or Emancipation Day, it commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in 1865 in Texas, and more generally, the emancipation of enslaved African Americans throughout the US. Juneteenth was Ellison’s second novel after 1952’s The Invisible Man and remained unfinished; it was published posthumously in 1999 and offers a cacophonous choir of voices—juxtaposing African American vernaculars, Bible-Belt sermons and quasi-Joycean streams of consciousness which suggests “that the unfinished work might have used the rich, interpenetrating strands of American language to underscore the ways in which black and white experience overlap and blur, the ways in which individuals use language to both define and reinvent themselves” (Kakutani 1999, n. pag.). In consciously referencing these pre-texts and in echoing and diverting their historical contexts, Ifemelu’s blog entries create a connection between dissident voices that speak up about oppression and violence.6 Americanah interweaves various text forms such as e-mails or the differently formatted blog entries with Ifemelu and Obinze’s stories and consequently creates a texture of layers and links. Reading the novel as a fabric or tissue holding all these things together—from questions of black hair, self-love and beauty to activist online communities to slave narratives—I

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argue that it binds together disparate experiences across time and space and texts: simultaneously braiding hair and stories, weaving digital and intertextual webs and thus reaching towards a hopeful future in which love and affective connectivities shape new forms of community.

Returns and Romance: “It’s Just a Love Story” Don’t we all in the end write about love? All literature is about love. When men do it, it’s a political comment on human relations. When women do it, it’s just a love story. So, although I wanted to do much more than a love story, a part of me wants to push back against the idea that love stories are not important. I wanted to use a love story to talk about other things. But really in the end, it’s just a love story. —Chimamanda Adichie, Interview with The Guardian (2014b, n. pag.)

This chapter has revolved around the transnational spatial practices acted out in Americanah, as well as the textual, textural strategies it employs. I have shown how the novel not only literally travels between nation and continents and worlds, but that it can be read as an inherently connective and relational text that entails much more than just geographical displacement. In this last section, I want to gather all these threads together in order to discuss the novel’s intrinsic centrepiece: the love story. The most conventional of all narrative scaffoldings, the love story in Americanah constitutes the affective core around which everything else orbits, be it its geographical movements or its meta-textual, performative motions. In the first parts of the novel, the two protagonists migrated abroad and spent their time away from their African origins to explore new spaces and new homes—to more or less successful extent. These transnational travels were supplemented by other emotional travels. In the last parts of the novel, both Ifemelu and Obinze return to Nigeria—and return to each other. In the following, I will trace these returns and will draw together the conceptual spaces opened up in previous sections. I will focus on what happens to the transnational spatial imaginaries and the multi-layered textual structures of Americanah as Ifemelu not only returns to Lagos but also is reunited with her lover in what can only be called the ultimate narrative goal of every love story: a romantic happy ending. I will show how Americanah utilises the heteronormative formula of the happy ending and expands it beyond the confines of the text, to write something that is much more than a love story—but also, in the end, “just a love story” (Adichie 2014b, n. pag.).

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Ifemelu’s break-up with Curt in Baltimore concurs with her cutting her hair and finding confidence in her natural appearance—it is no coincidence, then, that her break-up with Blaine in New Haven falls together with closing her blog Raceteenth. Her online persona, the famous black American race blogger, had started to ring false as we learn at the beginning of the story: “She had written the final post only days ago, trailed by two-hundred and seventy-four comments so far. All those readers, growing month by month, linking and cross-posting, knowing so much more than she did; they had always frightened and exhilarated her” (5). Spelling out the estrangement process, Ifemelu goes on to explain that she “began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use. […] The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false” (6). Giving up her blog (financial security) and her relationship to Blaine (emotional stability), Ifemelu plans to go back to Nigeria, which has become where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil. And, of course, there was also Obinze. Her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself. (7–8)

Ifemelu uses metaphors of stasis and movement to justify her decision to go back and leave her American life behind; she feels as if “layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her” (8), her relationship to Blaine resembles “being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out” (9). Tranquillity and sitting still seem to designate the ideal goal of what any migrant might want to achieve: a sense of having arrived, of being able to securely settle down. But for Ifemelu, these feelings have come to designate restriction and suffocation and she longs to go back “home”. Princeton with its unsettling calmness and cleanliness, that last station in a long series of American spaces, seems to correspond to this discontent and she leaves it to go to Trenton to have her hair braided in Mariama’s salon—and then leaves America altogether in order to return to Nigeria. With this movement “back” and a disregard of what every successful migration story should entail, Americanah thus “challenges the conventions of the typical immigrant novel, where no alternative to life in America is entertained, as Ifemelu chooses to return home not under any kind of compulsion, but

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just because she wants to be in Lagos” (Goyal 2014, xii). With this, as I have argued above, Americanah belongs to a new wave of African diasporic novels that in their narrative and affective economies refuse to give priority to one world over another. These novels re-conceptualise notions of migration which are usually connected to the departure from an originary homeland and a destination someplace else—a clear-cut trajectory of leaving and arriving in the West. But in these new transnational texts, such clear-cut routes become less and less clear-cut. They are instead marked by an oscillation between different homes and homelands. Considering Ifemelu’s unusual return, Yogita Goyal has pointed out that many readers have expressed a “sense of disbelief that Ifemelu would choose to go back to Nigeria (and not under duress of any kind)” (2014, xii). Within the narrative itself, Ifemelu is confronted with the same bewildered reaction: “Everyone she had told she was moving back seemed surprised, expecting an explanation, and she said she was doing it because she wanted to, puzzled lines would appear on foreheads” (16). In a novel that focusses so explicitly on transnational movements and hybrid spatiality, the return to Africa seems to ring strangely static and stagnant. But instead of reading the return home as a closure, short coming or even failure, in my opinion it is much more productive to read it as a new paradigm in African diasporic fictions of the last decade that have dealt with transnational, transcultural imaginaries in a new and different way. In an essay on the motif of “home coming” in Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi and Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Amy Rushton has astutely remarked that these new forms of narrating Africa transnationally “have marked a move to stories concerning the return to Africa, thus emphasising the importance of the continent” and reaffirming “the idea of Africa as the locus of ‘home’” (2017, 46). Like in Ghana Must Go, where the return to Ghana and Nigeria takes up an important part of the novel, or in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing which swings between the Gold Coast and America, Americanah lends equal importance to home and away—and therefore radically disrupts these binary oppositions until home and away become entangled, interdependent and mutually inclusive. The novel thus achieves what Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall heralded in their 2004 article “Writing the World from an African Metropolis”: it produces an African space that is enlivened by its “fundamental connection to an elsewhere” (351) and takes seriously “the fact that Africa like, everywhere else, has its heres, its elsewheres, and its interstices. […] Indeed, historically, the continent has been and still is a

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space of flows, of flux, of translocation, with multiple nexuses of entry and exit points” (351). Adichie produces a complex portrayal of Ifemelu’s return to Africa and how she subsequently attempts to relocate herself. This becomes quite evident when looking at how Ifemelu deals with coming back to Lagos: At first, Lagos assaulted her; the sun-dazed haste, the yellow buses full of squashed limbs, the swearing hawkers racing after cars, the advertisements on hulking billboards (others scrawled on walls—PLUMBER CALL 080177777) and the heaps of rubbish that rose on the roadside like a taunt. Commerce thrummed too defiantly. And the air was dense with exaggeration, conversations full of overprotestations. One morning, a man’s body lay on Awolowo Road. Another morning, The Island flooded and cars became gasping boards. Here, she felt, anything could happen, a ripe tomato could burst out of solid stone. And so she had the dizzying sensation of falling, falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange familiar. (475)

If one reads this passage, the first paragraph of part seven, in direct contrast to the very first paragraph of the novel where Ifemelu describes Princeton, one could argue that the novel clearly constructs a binary opposition between orderly, clean and quiet West and hot, dirty and loud Africa—however, what lies between these passages is a whole world of travelling between disparate spaces, of fashioning home in the most unlikely of all places and of recognising the importance of community and relationality wherever one resides. It is then no surprise that Ifemelu’s Lagos also becomes a place imbued with multiple meanings, multiple belongings and an ever-complex interplay between roots and routes. Her engagement with space is at first marked by how long she has been gone: “She had grown up knowing all the bus stops and the side streets, understanding the cryptic codes of conductors and the body language of street hawkers. Now, she struggled to grasp the unspoken” (475). She has lost a sense of being able to name and struggles to re-familiarise herself with how her city is spelled: “Ifemelu stared out of the window, half listening, thinking how unpretty Lagos was, roads infested with potholes, houses springing up unplanned like weeds. Of her jumble of feelings, she recognized only confusion” (477). A sense of chaos and vibrancy prevails, expressed though images of wild weeds and potholes that spread throughout the metropolis. But Ifemelu also begins to fall into the “strange familiar”. This term refuses the well-worn opposition between the strange and

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the familiar and instead propagates their co-existence; as a site of convergence and collision, it gives room to multi-local, multi-territorialised belonging. As Kathryn Schulz has argued, “Adichie challenges the end point of the journey” (2013, n. pag.). Experiences and trajectories beyond national or territorial frames of identification, and the relations built along the way, constitute the true focus of the novel. Just like with the hair salon in Trenton, the ASA basement in Philadelphia, the online community of happilykinkynappy.com or her blog Raceteenth, being at home in Lagos means community and communality: “Ifemelu was laughing. She caught herself in mid-laughter, and looked around her, a ship in the greying distance, her friends in their sunglasses, […]. She thought: I’m really home. I’m home” (506). As the titular “Americanah”, the one who-has-been, Ifemelu re-makes her home in the strange familiar. The interplay between strangeness and familiarity, between home and away, has been written into the very structure of the story: in a truly transnational fashion, Americanah never attempts to erase these troubling oscillations but uses them to re-situate its migrant subjects and to sketch out a complex and complicated space of belonging. In the last parts of the novel, these differing parts finally come together as the protagonist returns home and reunites with her lover. The unusual narrative of Ifemelu’s return to Africa is thus combined with another, much more conventional narrative: the romantic love story between the two main characters. Before, the split between the two lovers had prompted the novel to cut across nations and continents—now their reunion underlines strategies of home building and particularly of coming home to Lagos. So while the novel on the one hand undermines the narrative conventions of migrant narratives, on the other hand it fully subscribes to another narrative convention: that of the love story. Consequently, it produces an interesting interplay between different narrative forms and formulas, undercutting one while validating another. Up to now, I have only described the separation of the lovers and the desire between them which has played out in various textual gaps and geographical interstices. However, to fully understand Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s reunion in Lagos and what that reunion does to the text, it is necessary to delineate the early stages of their relationship. From the moment they come to know each other, their love story acquiesces to some of the most common conventions and tropes of romance texts: “love at first sight” and “star-crossed lovers”. The former becomes quite evident when looking at their first encounter when they are still young and meet at the party of a mutual friend:

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Ifemelu thought Mills and Boon romances were silly, she and her friends sometimes enacted the stories, Ifemelu or Ranyinudo would play the man and Ginika or Priye would play the woman—the man would grab the woman, the woman would fight weakly, then collapse against him with shrill moans—and then they would all burst out laughing. But in the filling-up dance floor of Kayode’s party, she was jolted by a small truth in those romances. It was indeed true that because of a male, your stomach could tighten up and refuse to unknot itself, your body’s joints could unhinge, your limbs fail to move to music, and all effortless things suddenly become leaden. (69–70)

The “love at first sight” described here replaces superficial enactments of romantic (and sexual) love between friends and introduces a kernel of truth hidden beneath the garish covers of Mills and Boon romance novels. The love between Ifemelu and Obinze will not only cause knots in her stomach or unhinge her limbs, but also knot stories and spaces together and unhinge spatial and temporal orders within the structural fabric of Americanah. The romance between the two protagonists will write its own story, far surpassing the genre conventions of Mills and Boon. What follows this first meeting are accounts of how they become a couple and move in together when they attend university in Nsukka. The love between Ifemelu and Obinze needs of course to be seen as what it is: the kind of heterosexual love that falls within normalising, regulating structures of love and desire—but it is also one that brings ease and self-love: “She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size” (73). Even at these early stages of romantic cliché, the episodes between the lovers are interspersed with short narrative segments of Nigeria’s political situation, the university strikes, Ifemelu’s father’s job loss and her family’s ensuing poverty. Within the normative narrative frames of the heterosexual love story, then, Adichie also explores and complicates other narratives such as deportation, sexual trauma and political corruption at later stages of the novel. Love, even in its most simple and conventional form, carries with it ghosts and histories and, as I have shown via hooks, needs to be recognised as fraught with the material, political implications and structural imbalances tied up within it (hooks 2000, 93). In light of this complicated synergy, it is interesting to note how Adichie herself has repeatedly questioned the negative stereotypes connected to

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the genre of the love story: “So, although I wanted to do much more than a love story, a part of me wants to push back against the idea that love stories are not important. I wanted to use a love story to talk about other things. But really in the end, it’s just a love story” (2014b, n.p.). While Americanah is “just a love story”, then, Adichie is fully aware of the norms and conventions linked to the romance genre and attempts to subvert them. I would argue that she actively uses the frame of the love story to consciously unsettle or rile her readers as if to wilfully confront them with their own reading conventions. Regarding the much-contested happy ending of Americanah, she has said in an interview: But yeah, I love the love story, I wanted to do that very much. But it’s a love story that’s very much rooted in reality. It’s the kind of love story where your inability to get a visa gets in the way of love. I loved the ending, for example, which I hoped would annoy some people. It’s always a good thing to annoy some people. But here’s the thing: the ending is me thinking, “You know what? I want to have this lush, ridiculous thing happen, and it’s going to happen!” (2013c, n. pag.)

Before the lovers get to have their happy ending though, they first need to adhere to another classical trope of the romance narrative: “star-crossed lovers”, that is lovers who are “thwarted by bad luck or adverse circumstances (originally considered to be a result of malign planetary influence)” (“star-crossed”, OED). Before Ifemelu and Obinze get their “lush, ridiculous” happy ending, as Adichie would say, they have to be separated from each other—a separation which results in the transnational narrative fabric I have delineated in prior sections of this chapter. The trope of the thwarted lovers, then, is intertwined with a global narration about migration, deportation and geographical displacement, lending new shades of meaning to an age-old narrative convention and offering a different interpretation of how two lovers’ paths may cross and un-cross in the twenty-first century. When Ifemelu and Obinze finally meet again, their first encounter resumes the trope of love at first sight, years later and after countless displacements: “There was a moment, a caving of the blue sky, an inertia or stillness, when neither of them knew what to do, he walking towards her, she standing there squinting, and then he was upon her and they hugged” (528). Their reunion echoes Ifemelu’s experience of corporeal disorientation from their first meeting: “She was flustered, and the new shrillness in

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her voice annoyed her. He was looking at her, an open unabashed looking, and she would not hold his gaze. Her fingers were shaking of their own accord, which was bad enough, she did not need to stare into his eyes, both of them standing there, in the hot sun, in the fumes of traffic from Awolowo Road” (528). Ifemelu’s sense of the “strange familiar” she experiences on Lagos’ streets is echoed in how she perceives Obinze: “she had not forgotten, but merely remembered anew” (528). The strange familiar does not only define the geographical emplacement strategies enacted by Ifemelu in her new-old hometown but also the affective, corporeal engagement with her new-old lover: “He felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time” (541); “She remembered clearly the firmness of his embrace, and yet there was, also, a newness to their union: their bodies remembered and did not remember” (551); “There was an awakening even in her nails, in those parts of her body that had always been numb” (551). When Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, she returns to Obinze; by returning to Obinze, she also returns to Nigeria—her making sense of Lagos again directly corresponds to making sense of Obinze again. Despite Obinze’s marriage to another woman, they begin an affair: “she should be asking why he would not be with his wife and child, and she should initiate a conversation about what they were doing exactly, but they had a history, a connection thick as twine” (537–538). Fully self-conscious of its narrative frames, the novel announces that thus began the “days full of cliché” (553) in order to introduce the chapters revolving around their clandestine meetings, dinner dates all over Lagos and weekend trips to surrounding suburban hinterlands. Again, however, Adichie reclaims the well-worn conventions of the love story and renders them into something which holds generative potential. The lover’s new-found intimacy gives Ifemelu opportunity to finally begin the reparative process of healing trauma: the trauma of bodily violence caused by tennis coach in Ardmore and the consecutive trauma of spatial displacement and emotional dislocation. With Obinze, she is finally able to give voice to her experience of sex work that had caused her to close herself off not only from her American surroundings, but especially from Obinze and Nigeria: She told him small details about the man’s office that were still fresh in her mind, the stacks of sports magazines, the smell of damp, but when she got to the part where he took her to his rooms, she said simply: ‘I took off my clothes and did what he asked me to do. I couldn’t believe that I got wet. I

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hated him. I hated myself. I really hated myself. I felt like I had, I don’t know, betrayed myself.’ She paused. ‘And you.’ (542)

When Obinze listens and understands, she is finally able to work through her emotions. This time, she is not alone in a foreign country and belatedly, she experiences solace and compassion: “He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe” (543). This new silence has nothing to do with the silence that had propelled the story across nations and oceans but denotes connection and closeness. In truly dramatic, romantic fashion, this is not the final obstacle the lovers have to overcome. To achieve the desired, legitimate goal of their heterosexual and heteronormative love story, the happy ending, Obinze needs to leave his wife Kosi and because they have a daughter, this is not an easy decision. The readers follow the ensuing heartbreak in chapters that once again alternate between Ifemelu and Obinze. It takes a while for Obinze to arrive at his conclusion and in the meantime Ifemelu refuses to wait for him. She creates a second blog, called The Small Redemptions of Lagos, and quits her job at Zoe fashion magazine: “The pain of his absence did not decrease with time; it seemed instead to sink deeper each day, to roused in her even clearer memories. Still, she was at peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself fully into being” (586). Ifemelu has created her belonging on her own terms, spinning herself into being and having fully arrived in Nigeria: She wrote of a fashion show she had attended, how the model had twirled around in an ankara skirt, a vibrant swish of blues and greens, looking like a haughty butterfly. She wrote of the woman on the street corner in Victoria Island who joyously said, ‘Fine Aunty!’ when Ifemelu stopped to buy apples and oranges. She wrote about the views from her bedroom window: a white egret drooped on the compound wall, exhausted from heat. […] She wrote about the announcers on radio stations, with their accents so fake and funny. She wrote about the tendency of Nigerian women to give advice, sincere advice dense with sanctimony. She wrote about the waterlogged neighborhood crammed with zinc houses, their roofs like squashed hats, and of the young women who lived there, fashionable and savvy in tight jeans, their lives speckled stubbornly with hope. (585)

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These blog entries stand in stark contrast to her former American blog, Raceteenth—they combine politics with the intricacies of the everyday and seem to be filled with hope and warmth and shed light on Ifemelu’s Lagos in a much more intimate way. I agree with Guarracino when she argues that The Small Redemptions of Lagos offers a much more personal space for Ifemelu’s self-expression—“blogging has now taken on a more emotional and relational quality”, for example, when the blog “becomes a way to at least imaginarily keep in touch with Obinze” (Guarracino 2014, 20): “She wrote her blog posts wondering what he would make of them” (Americanah, 585). After months, Obinze comes back to her, and with this, the novel finally offers the happy ending it had worked towards from its first page: “And then, on a languorous Sunday evening, seven months since she had last seen him, there Obinze was, at the door of her flat. She stared at him. […] He was holding a long sheet of paper dense with writing” (587–588). He tells her everything she wants to hear; that he has left his wife, that he will still care for his daughter, that he will not give up one her: “I want this to happen. […] Ifem, I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give this a chance’” (588). The significance of this final narrative and emotional fulfilment lies in the fact that Ifemelu does not need it: she has found her voice, her belonging and her place in Lagos. But still Adichie interlinks these notions of belonging and longing, of being rooted geographically and of reaching out emotionally. In light of the novel’s continuous entanglements between space and affect, it is important to note with which phrase the novel closes, right after Obinze’s declaration. The final two words, uttered by Ifemelu to Obinze who stands before her, are “Come in” (588). In their inclusiveness and inward movement, they stand for integration and synthesis. “Come in” is meant not only in the spatial sense (please enter this house) but also in an affective, emotive and sensual sense (please come to me, join me). They indicate the crossing of a threshold and cannot be read as finite or stagnant at all. By coming in, Obinze will come home, Ifemelu will come home and the two will become each other’s home. The romantic happy ending is thus inherently linked to an act of final emplacement, creating a text that entangles the conventions of the love story with the unconventional story of migration and return. As a final argumentative step, I will now draw attention to how the text of Americanah moves beyond this first happy ending in order to produce a second happy ending. This second ending is connected to The Small Redemptions of Lagos, the blog that Ifemelu creates once she is back in Nigeria. This blog serves not only to show how she has arrived and has

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built her own belonging within the story. It is also a blog that exists online, beyond the fictional world of the novel; it can be accessed under the internet address https://www.chimamanda.com/ifemelus-­blog/. The fact that this blog has been brought into the real world should of course be understood as what it is: a marketing strategy employed during the promotion of the novel. The blog is linked to Adichie’s official homepage under the category “Ifemelu’s Blog” and managed by her publisher, Alfred A.  Knopf. The aesthetic of the “real-life” version of The Small Redemptions of Lagos directly corresponds to its fictional counterpart, the header image, for example, consists of a picture of an overgrown colonial compound—just like the one opposite Ifemelu’s house in Lagos in the novel (514). The blog can be read a meta-textual, self-referential continuation of the novel, creatively highlighting “the intersections between traditionally published literature and the growing field of writing in the digital sphere” (Guarracino 2014, 22). While I would fully subscribe to this reading, I also want to argue that this blog can be read in a different way and that its existence underlines the arguments I have made throughout this chapter. The blog features entries from August 27, 2014, to November 02, 2014. These entries are written by the first-person author-­ figure Ifemelu and feature topics which range from hair and skin care (collected under the category “The Aruidimma Centre”), fashion, lipstick, sanitary pads and vaginal hygiene (“Style”), to Nigerian politics and global matters such as Boko Haram, diseases like Ebola and the problems of African infrastructure (“Problem and Solution”). This alone can be read as a productive commentary on the discourses mentioned in the introductory section of this chapter, in which I have delineated how writers like Selasi and Wainaina have warned against flattened representations of Africa—the blog with its wildly diverse topics thus continues Americanah’s project to portray an African reality that refuses to be narrowed down to presubscribed notions perpetuated by Western readers. What can also be found on this blog, however, is a subcategory titled “Ifem & Ceiling”, the nicknames Ifemelu and Obinze use for each other throughout the book. These blog entries continue to write the love story beyond the first happy ending of the novel. With this, the novel pushes past its finished confines and moves beyond the boundaries of the printed text. The blog entries in the “Ifem & Ceiling” category write the love story into the future, beyond the “Come in” of the novel. They often depict small bonds and attachment points, written in the tongue-in-cheek way so typical for Ifemelu’s narrative voice: “So, we support the same Charity. We

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started supporting the same Charity at about the same time without, of course, knowing what the other was doing. #Lovenwantiti #truecompatibility #mostromanticcoincidenceever” (“Ifem & Ceiling 7”). They also describe the couple’s shared everyday life and are placed at a point in time when their relationship is more established: Ceiling and I have been spending a lot of time in Enugu. I love Enugu, the sense of restfulness; it has a certain ambition about it—the mall, the new roads—but it retains a small-town feel. Here, strangers still greet one another. And I love this house. […]. The compound walls are draped in purple bougainvillea. The yard is wide. It goes on forever, filled with trees and bushes that bloom spiky red flowers. […] Yesterday, after a brief rain, we sprayed OFF on our legs and arms, sat on that bench in the evening cool, and ate boiled corn and ube. Bliss. (“Ifem & Ceiling 1”)

With this, the blog not only moves away from Lagos but also moves away from the clichéd tropes and formulas of the romantic love story to describe a more settled relationship. Regarding this more grown-up sense of love, the entries also do not shy away from the conflicts and difficulties that come with such a relationship: Ceiling is different here in Enugu. He’s lighter, he jokes more, he is less silent. But I sometimes see his face fall and I know he’s missing [his daughter] Buchi. […] he wants to bring Buchi to Enugu for a week or two, before school starts. He called Kosi and before he could finish saying, “I want to come and pick Buchi…” Kosi hung up on him. Then his phone began to beep nonstop, text message after text message coming in. I read some of them. So you now want to bring your child to a house where you are living in sin with another woman and you have no shame, setting that kind of example blablabla. Ceiling deleted the texts and did not reply. He said, “She’s upset. I’ll call her later.” And I found myself getting very angry. Yes, I like that Ceiling is so polite and all but he is over-indulgent with Kosi and it pisses me the hell off. (“Ifem & Ceiling 2”)

Through these blog entries, Americanah’s love story moves out from its confines between the covers of the book and through its presence in the virtual space of the internet, reaches into the world. Thus, the blog outmanoeuvres not only the normative formula of the love story, the readerly desire (and the desire of the characters) for the happy ending but also its textual, textural frames of reference as it defies attempts at control and closure.

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What to make then, of this doubling of the happy ending within the love story offered by Americanah? The first version of the happy ending consists of the words “come in”, which denote extreme placed-ness: there is nothing more inclusive or intimate than “come in” as Ifemelu invites Obinze into the interior of her home. The second ending extends not only beyond the metropolis Lagos to Enugu’s hilly countryside but also beyond the last words of the novel. It thus constitutes an expansion, a writing forth of the love story through a blog that escapes the boundaries of the novel. With these complex and multi-routed depictions of love and desire, Americanah not only draws on what Wainaina had called taboo subjects when writing about Africa: “ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved)” (2006, n.p.). It also extends this taboo, plays with it, subverts it and celebrates it. As “just a love story”, it is much more at the same time—despite its focus on the intimacy of the love story, the novel can also be read as an ultimately open and connective text that reaches out into the world. With this, Americanah counteracts the harmful tendencies of what Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall have described as follows: Africa so often ends up epitomizing the intractable, the mute, the abject, or the other-worldly. So overdetermined is the nature of this sign that it sometimes seems almost impossible to crack, to throw it open to the full spectrum of meanings and implications that other places and other human experiences enjoy, provoke, and inhabit. The obstinacy with which scholars […] continue to describe Africa as an object apart from the world, or as a failed and incomplete example of something else, perpetually underplays the embeddedness in multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually speaks. (2004, 384; emphasis in original)

With Americanah, Adichie has created an Africa that is complex and necessarily, inevitably, part of the world—it is, in fact, literature of the world; one which, as Cheah and Nancy, respectively, have argued, not only spans the world but also changes it and the people within it. As such, “it points to the opening of […] worlds” and denotes “the real and ongoing process of the world, a principle of change immanent to the world” (Cheah 2016, 210; emphasis in original). With her novel, Adichie has “thrown the world open” and made it speak through compassionate and convivial portrayals of love, longing and belonging that insistently move along global, transnational routes and simultaneously take root in localised forms of community and relationality.

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Notes 1. One of the most striking examples for this is the Nigerpolitan Club—a club of expatriates Ifemelu joins when she returns to Nigeria. A tongue-in-cheek reference to the concept of Afropolitanism, this club can be understood as a group of elitist, bourgeois African returnees who complain about the lack of vegetarian restaurants in Lagos or yearn for American things such as “low-­ fat soy milk, NPR, fast internet” (519). In outlining this snobbism, Adichie implicitly tackles the figure of Afropolitan. This term, developed by Taiye Selasi (2005) and Achille Mbembe (2005, 2007, 2008), celebrates diasporic movement and revels in the multiplicity of African identity. It has also come to be harshly criticized as focusing only on a cosmopolitan African elite, completely disregarding the lesser privileged. While I see the merit in understanding Americanah within the framework of Afropolitan literature, I feel it too narrow a concept to encompass all its complexity. 2. In his The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes has suggested that “text means tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving” (1975, 64). One of the etymological origins for the word “text” to which Barthes refers here is the Latin textus: for tissue, texture or woven fabric (“text”, OED). 3. This framing reappears in some of the cover illustrations of Americanah’s hard- and soft-cover editions. The 2013 Anchor Books edition, for example, features four braids which wrap around the front and back cover, literally embracing the story within the pages. For examples from other editions, (i.e. Kenya and Brazil), see the author’s website. 4. The novel also applies this to the Nigerian spaces it narrates, not only when Ifemelu talks about her mother’s beautiful full hair which she then cuts off in a religious frenzy (49) but also when she accompanies her Aunty Uju to a hair salon in Lagos as a child: “It was here, at a Lagos salon, that the different ranks of imperial femaleness were best understood. […] Aunty Uju laughed and patted the silky hair extensions that fell to her shoulders: Chinese weave-on, the latest version, shiny and straight as straight could be; it never tangled” (93). The interplay of African and Western beauty ideals with the materiality of Asian hair points towards the transnational politics at work in these beauty rituals. For more on the global, economic entanglements of hair, cf. Tarlo (2016). 5. The comparison between rhizome and cyberspace has been prevalent in media and internet theory since at least the 1990s (cf. Wray 2006). For further reading, and a problematisation of the link between internet networks and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizomatic, cf. Coyne (2008).

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6. I am grateful for the comments made by my colleague Kate Harlin at the African Literature Association Annual Conference on “Africa and the World: Literature, Politics, and Global Geographies” at Yale University, New Haven (2017), during her talks on Adichie and our consecutive discussion for pointing out to me some of these correlations.

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———. 2013b. Ghana Must Go. London: Viking. “star-crossed, adj. [star, n. C5]” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. January 2018. www.oed.com/view/Entry/189081 Tarlo, Emma. 2016. Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair. London: Bloomsbury. “text, n2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. January 2018. www.oed. com/view/Entry/200003 Toivanen, Anna-Leena. 2016. “Emailing/Skyping Africa: New Technologies and Communication Gaps in Contemporary African Women’s Fiction.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47 (4): 135–161. Wainaina, Binyavanga. 2006. “How to Write About Africa.” Granta. The View from Africa. Web. January 19, 2006. https://granta.com/how-­to-­write-­ about-­africa/ Wray, Stefan. 2006. “Rhizomes, Nomads, and Resistant Internet Use.” Thing.net. Web. http://www.thing.net/%7Erdom/ecd/rhizomatic.html Young, Robert J.C. 2004. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

London Lovers: Zadie Smith

Dis great polluted space […] the music of the world is here. —Benjamin Zephaniah, “The London Breed” (2001, 84)

As we leave behind the lovers Ifemelu and Obinze and their happy ending with extends beyond the confines of the text into the world, we turn to yet another variant of thinking love through space and space through love, another set of coordinates of longing and belonging. This chapter examines literary representations of London and the desires and romances which roam its streets, sprawl through its communities. I take the city space as it is mediated in fiction as an active, living archive for manifold human relationships which play out on different planes—spatial, linguistic, economic, cultural, architectural and affective ones. Since cultural geographers like Henri Lefebvre (1974), Michel de Certeau ([1980] 1984) or Doreen Massey (1994, 2007) have suggested that space is politically and socially constructed, cities have undergone a reclassification process—they are not seen as static “maps” anymore, but as performed spaces that entangle behaviour, meaning, discourse, imagination and material conditions. Cities function as a catalyst for cultural and emotional practices; as “new globalized networks of affiliation and sentiment” (Keith 2003, 58), they produce neighbourhoods, communities and homes which figure as units of a relational, affective urban topography—and especially © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_3

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those who have to move by necessity, namely, those that move within diasporas, can take the city as a scaffold to creatively (de)construct their sense of emplacement and belonging. This chapter traces contested engagements with the global space of the city and the intimate and affective relationships between the protagonists in Zadie Smith’s London trilogy.1 Taking up the thoughts developed in this book’s introduction and tested in my discussion of Adichie’s novel, I want to expand further our understanding of how love, while so often presented as apolitical, is in fact deeply inscribed into our socio-political realities and woven into broader structural violences faced especially by black and brown women across the globe—by taking the postcolonial metropolis London, the former heart of the British Empire, as my object of analysis, I will shed light on continuous political and ethical acts of questioning how assumptions about love and intimacy are negotiated within the literary realm of Smith’s London novels and how it might be possible to approach love as an unequivocal chance to defy systems of power. As the British Caribbean poet and activist Benjamin Zephaniah states in the quote which functions as this chapter’s epigraph, London is a “polluted place”. In the poem from which this line is taken, “The London Breed” (2001, 84), he delineates the megalopolis as filled with contradictions, dirt and chaos; an “overcrowded place” (l. 17), but also full to the brim with the “music of the world” (l. 5). Polluted here is taken to be not necessarily a negative concept, but instead points towards a mélange, a productive impurity generated by those who “came to here from everywhere” (l. 7) and which might question nationalist notions of purity, traditional values such as unity. Here, London becomes a multi-threaded patchwork of over 2 million languages, fusing many different songs— “The people here united will / Create a kind of London breed” (l. 31, 32). What I want to focus on in the following is this “London breed”, composed not only by those perceived as unequivocally British, but also by those generally termed other or outsider. London has a multi-faceted history, and it is not only a place which as capital constituted the Empire, but also a place which destabilised these notions of centrality and origin. As Roger Luckhurst argues, “postcolonial London is […] understood as a site saturated with the iconography and geography of imperial power, but which has been transformed by the twin effects of the dismantlement of empire and successive waves of migration from former colonies” (2005, 295). In this postcolonial city, many different histories palimpsestically live next to and beneath each other. London is a city which has at its heart the

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tensions and productive re-inscriptions that are constitutive for a diasporic and postcolonial project of critique. Novels like Zadie Smith’s London trilogy take back a city which has been lost many times—they are texts that write against multi-layered processes, ones that have not just been happening since the Empire was erected and then dismantled but also more localised and recent processes like the neo-liberal, capitalist privatisation which has been quietly carrying on since the 1970s, with public spaces and interests sold off to private capital. Still, as I will argue, the city is constantly being re-claimed, re-mapped and re-appropriated by contemporary postcolonial literatures which resist both old and new colonialist tendencies. I maintain that the cityscape of the postcolonial metropolis London can offer contestations of (trans)national world formations, and I see the city space as a testing ground for fashioning and furnishing African diasporic identities. By turning to emotional geographies and urban emotions and by tracing engagements with affective structures of love, desire, affiliation and communality through Smith’s city imaginaries, I seek to fashion an understanding of specifically urban diasporic belonging in the twenty-first century. I will look at the ways in which emotions are taken out of place and re-emplaced in response to diasporic life trajectories and thus put both concepts of space and love under pressure. In the first section of this chapter, titled “(Re)Writing the Heart of the Empire: Tactics and Traditions”, I will sketch a history of postcolonial London writing, with a special focus on the city post-Windrush in order to be able to situate Smith’s London novels in their historical, socio-political and literary context. Because Zadie Smith so insistently foregrounds especially female urban experiences in her work, I want to draw a line to her literary foremothers and forefathers who also engaged in a project of recreating London according to multi-faceted power relations. Taking Sam Selvon’s seminal novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Grace Nichols’ The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984) as my foils, I will discuss how Smith’s first London novel, White Teeth, inscribes itself into—and subverts—its precursors through its protagonist Irie’s affective, corporeal engagement with London and the alternative love and family structures she manufactures. These comparative positionings will form the historical and theoretical background for the following discussions of NW and Swing Time. The second part of the chapter, “The Affective Architecture of City and Text”, will examine Smith’s second and most explicit London novel NW regarding its structural, performative textual rendering of the city. Here, I will focus on how the materiality of the narrative channels different strategies of organising

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the city, such as the employment of Google Maps, postcodes, public transport routes and circular and numerical structures. These will be linked to the affective and relational encounters the text produces. The results are alternative and emotive cartographies that forge the city as an inherently shared communal space which, as such, offers ways of accessing migratory and diasporic urban identity and affiliations. The third section of the chapter, titled “Desire Lines Between NW and Nowhere”, will then draw together above arguments to shed light on the sexual, romantic, intimate relationships in both NW and Smith’s latest novel Swing Time, to examine how city and love become entangled in a new understanding of postcolonial, diasporic togetherness. Queer disruptions of heteronormative romance (in NW) and ambivalent female friendships (in Swing Time) will bring forth different renderings of relationality, community and neighbourhood in the urban space. In this section, I will make fruitful the concepts of “desire lines” and “flâneuserie” to re-evaluate Smith’s London novels and to underline my argument that the novels constitute new ways of loving and being loved in a global twenty-first-century world.

(Re)Writing the Heart of the Empire: Tactics and Traditions London has never stood still and over time has changed its face so many times that one will lose count trying to list these changes. The city which stands on the River Thames in the south east of Great Britain is a changeling and there exist many different incarnations of it. It is marked by divergent histories of settlement and displacement, (re-)organisation, destruction and rebuilding—necessary measures, for example, after the Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, both events of great destructive force but at the same time enabling new developments in their aftermath, thus paving the way for the metropolis we know today. This continuous evolution is not only mirrored in the city’s material realities, its streets and architecture, but also in the imaginations linked to it. London, as “both a real city and a place of the imagination, a symbolic construct always already something other than that which its mere presence indicated, needed [and still needs] a writing necessary to its paradoxes and contradictions”, as Julian Wolfreys contends in Writing London (1998, 17). Many writers have tried to capture this shape-shifting figure: there is an entire literary canon dedicated to London writings from the early

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modern city comedies to today’s postmodern, postcolonial renderings of the city: “The city, […] was [and still is] fundamentally a textual place, a place of non-static intersections, weaves, interconnections, recurring traces and remarkings” (18). London writing is never just a mere representation of the city, but always a creative and imaginative production and performance of it. It is another form of cartography—one that does not pretend to reveal everything there is to know but one that intends to extend the city beyond its geographical boundaries (cf. 13). London is not an a priori, stable place but always constructed, fabricated and conceptualised. It is both place and continuously “taking place”, as Julian Wolfreys has convincingly argued: “[T]he city has meaning as unexpected event which takes place constantly. The city is reformed with each encounter” (4–5). What I want to pay attention to in the following is the “taking place”, indeed the worlding (to return to) Pheng Cheah’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking), of the global metropolis London and the political, social and imaginative possibilities attached to these rewritings of what once had been termed the centre of the Empire. By doing so, I hope to attest to how Smith’s texts wilfully re-negotiate oppositions between public and private, global and intimate, and show how world-making is also always the making of love, the creation of self- and other love. Black London: City/Worlds To be able to understand Zadie Smith’s London novels, it is of paramount importance to ask how the city is affected by and in turn affects discursive and material formations such as home and belonging. Postcolonial London writing represents the capital but at the same time re-figures and re-­ negotiates it. The metropolis turns into a worldly space where histories of colonialism, migration, travel, diaspora and resettlement converge. A by now famous passage on hybridity in White Teeth visualises this: This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. […]. Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into

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each other’s lives with reasonable comfort […], despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance. (2000, 326; emphasis in original)

What White Teeth suggest here is an uneasy and slippery contact zone which mediates cultural difference and cultural encounters; the novel portrays a city changed through the presence of others at its heart: “as Britain withdrew from most of its colonies, the city that once possessed the world began to contain a diasporic world that was increasingly taking possession of it” (Ball 2004, n. pag.). Within the affective framework of White Teeth, these converging histories are represented by the intimate links between three families from different cultural, ethnic, geographical backgrounds: the Iqbals—Samad and Alsana, first-generation Muslim Bangladeshi migrants to London, and their twin sons Magid and Millat; the family of the Englishman Archie Jones and his wife Clara Bowden (daughter of first-generation Jamaican migrants, the Windrush generation) and their daughter Irie; and the Chalfen family—Jewish Marcus and Irish Joyce and their sons. All three families inhabit places marked by multi-faceted origins and backgrounds of migration and travel. These spatial links to “elsewhere” are structurally performed by the novel’s three narrative excursions in its “Root Canal” chapters: one to India (the 1857 mutiny), one to the Caribbean (a 1907 earthquake) and one to Eastern Europe (the end of World War II in 1945). However, the novel not only makes visible Britain’s (and Europe’s) colonial relationships to the Caribbean, to Asia and to Africa but also reconfigures London—and in so doing re-­ contextualises its metropolitan world. London writings by authors like Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Gautam Malkani and many others2 critically reconfigure London as they understand it as a seat of power, the headquarter of the Government, the locus from where the Empire once forcibly unfolded. It can be regarded as the centrifugal point around which the world revolved, around which the rest of the world was imagined—at least from the point of view of the Western colonial powers. As these London rewritings show, however, and as Simon Gikandi has

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astutely noted, “Englishness was itself a product of the colonial culture that it seemed to have created elsewhere” (1996, x), since it drew its resources and energies from the colonies that supported it economically. Or, in the words of Alsana in White Teeth: “Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale!” (2000a, 236). Because of this, the seat of the empire was “less a place where England exert[ed] control than the place where England los[t] command of its own narrative of identity” (Baucom 1999, 3). One of the most striking examples for this loss of control can be found in a quintessential British space within White Teeth, the London pub O’Connell’s Pool House, which intermingles different cultural contexts so that the one-directional narrative of national identity is wholly broken down: owned by an Iraqi family, it is a combination of “reproductions of George Stubb’s racehorse paintings, the framed fragments of some foreign, Eastern script”, an “Irish flag and a map of the Arab Emirates knotted together and hung from wall to wall” (2000, 183). This description opens the chapter “Mitosis”—mitosis is a biological cell process where one cell divides into daughter cells. Drawing on this biological process, White Teeth shows how an essential British space is divvied up, twisting and turning notions of belonging and stranger-hood: “O’Connell’s is no place for strangers”, instead it becomes a meeting place for alternative families and affiliations (183). The capital as both centre and extension of the nation thus inadvertently destabilises the supposedly secure and solid demarcations of the latter, “city and nation are set at odds” (McLeod 2004, 19) in productive ways. One of the foundational literary examples describing this disturbance of power lines can be found in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), one of White Teeth’s literary precursors. Selvon, an Indian Trinidadian immigrant from the Caribbean, arrived in London in the 1950s, just a few years after what has come to be seen as an event initiating large-scale migrational movements from the former colonies to the heart of the empire: the arrival of the MV Empire Windrush at the Tilbury Docks in 1948 with its 492 West Indian passengers. There are certain points in history that can be taken as markers of how power relations between the Empire and its (former) colonies shifted fundamentally and how these shifts reformed not only the political landscape but also spatial, social and affective organisations. One of these notches in the course of history was the arrival of the Windrush—“a moment paradoxically made possible by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which was in turn largely catalysed by Indian Independence in 1947” (Murdoch 2012, 6). It ushered in

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post-war immigration to the former capital of the Empire, constituted by immigrants not only from the Caribbean but also from the African continent and South East Asia. With the Nationality Act, citizens from the Commonwealth countries were officially instated as British subjects and given full rights of entry and settlement in Britain. But suddenly these people, which had been an integral and essential part of the Empire’s fabric for so long, were “too close to home”, could not any longer be comfortably banned to the outskirts. Exemplary for the racism and xenophobia directed at the migrants is Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech (1968), which depicted immigrants as “invading hordes who, with their peculiar practices and origins and predilection for crime and moral turpitude, would never be able to assimilate” (quoted in Favell 2001, 105), invoking paranoid notions of “swamping” and “disease” and thus expressing a deep running anxiety and racialised fear of the unknown. These violent rhetorical strategies of othering would later be invoked by David Blunkett, who became Britain’s Home Secretary in 2001, creatively reimagined by Adichie in Americanah to underline her Nigerian protagonist’s troubled existence below the radar of legal citizenship in London. The “unknown”, which for so long had been a part of British identity, had now become visible and would eventually and against all odds “overtake, transform, and ultimately radicalise concepts of ‘Britishness’” (Murdoch 2012, 7). While the arrival of the Windrush cannot and should not stand for the whole history of migration to Britain, it can nevertheless be taken as a symbol for the reassessment of what it meant to belong in a postcolonial British society which allows hyphenated identities. While these large-scale immigration movements are often described as a “reinvasion of the centre or, in the words of the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, ‘colonizin / Englan in reverse’” (Ball 2004, 4; quoting Bennett [1957] 2012, 2726), it should be questioned if these terms are actually useful. They are certainly effective in order to try and reset hierarchical imbalances and righten the lopsided allocation of power, but I think it is more productive to speak about continuous and multi-directional interactions and interrelations; to not stay within a space of binaries and rigid oppositions, but instead to recognise mutual—if hurtful—dependencies and influences. Selvon’s seminal Black London text The Lonely Londoners can be regarded as a model and founding text, a foil against and with which all following postcolonial London texts can be made to work (McLeod 2004; Innes 2002). And just as the Windrush with its Caribbean

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passengers does not wholly represent migration and diaspora (from all over the globe), Selvon as a writer from the Caribbean cannot fully represent all Black London literature. Instead, I want to take The Lonely Londoners as an exemplary text for the imaginative, literary worlding of the metropolis which also characterises Zadie Smith’s London trilogy, an “authentic world-forming” that advocates habitable, hospitable worlds— “a making of the world” (Nancy 2007, 1; emphasis in original). Selvon’s worlding of the metropolis can be illustrated by two scenes from the novel, one passage from the very beginning and one passage that is situated towards the end of the text ([1956] 2006): One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train. (1) The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds, the falling leaves, sunlight on green grass, snow on the land, London particular. Oh what it is and where it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: ‘I walked on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Piccadilly Circus is my playground,’ to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world. (133–134)

Both passages are deeply inscribed in acts of spatial urban cartography. They trace movements between different versions of the city, between the “not-London-at-all” (1) to the “London particular” (133). In Selvon’s book, the foggy Dickensian London is at times replaced, at times supplemented, at times undermined by another London—a London of Notting Hill,3 of the port, of trains, of the transitory spaces of the diaspora. This other London opens the city up to the world. This opening-up also becomes clear in how Selvon’s characters re-name the architecture of the city and how routes are carefully reiterated, from Chepstow Road to Westbourne Grove to Waterloo, from Waterloo to Charing Cross to Piccadilly Circus—from margins to centre and the other way around. These acts of naming and placing circumscribe different versions of the city combined in one. As Susheila Nasta argues, this “represented a major step forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonization” (2006, x). What is more, the novel is steeped in the necessity to meet each other. Communities and relationships are built as London becomes a place

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of contact. The novel takes up the loneliness of its Londoners, as the bleak title suggests, and turns it into a narrative which humorously and tenderly encounters many different voices: The Lonely Londoners deliberately reinvents London as an affective place of encounters. Reimaginations of London such as by Selvon have generated modes of resistance that enable new ways of living in and dealing with the metropolitan space of London. I read Smith’s White Teeth and her subsequent London novels as continuations of this foundational Black London text as they perform similar acts of worlding. They reconfigure hurtful structures and architectures and engage in a “making of the world”. In White Teeth, this becomes apparent when following a particular bus route along London’s streets: And the 52 bus goes two ways. From the Willesden kaleidoscope, one can catch it south like the children; through Kensal Rise, to Portobello, to Knightsbridge, and watch the many colours shade off into the bright white lights of town; or you can get it north, as Samad did; Willesden, Dollis Hill, Harlesden, and watch with dread (if you are fearful like Samad, if all you have learnt from the city is to cross the road at the sight of dark-skinned men) as white fades to yellow fades to brown, and then Harlesden Clock comes into view, standing like Queen Victoria’s statue in Kingston—a tall white stone surrounded by black. (2000a, 164)

Tracing different shades of white, yellow, brown and black and subverting notions of city centre and imperial centre, the bus as a transitory space of travel slices not only through geographical London but also through many different materialisations of world orders, old and new histories—exemplified by the “white” Queen Victoria statue in “black” Kingston. As Rebecca Dyer contends, White Teeth’s London narrative “uses such monuments to Britain’s imperial age to draw attention to the wounds created by colonialism, and she undercuts official British history and memorialization through depictions of her character’s family histories, memories, and individual acts of resistance” (2004, 83).4 The novel’s linear and non-­linear narrations, its linguistic pirouettes (“And who does he think he is? Mr Churchillgee?” laughed Alsana scornfully. “Original whitecliffsdover piesnmah jellyeels royalvariety britishbulldog, heh” 2000, 231), its sometimes realist, sometimes magical-realist multi-generational family saga, its stories within stories and its histories within histories all these weave a complex spatial and temporal tale of London. White Teeth’s metropolis is so deeply inscribed into the history of the Empire and the history of the world, that

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it offers an enworlded version of the city that can never be easy or simple or clean. The very last sections of the novel make this abundantly clear: The final space. A big room, one of many in the Perret institute. […] a corporate place, a clean slate; white/chrome/pure/plain (this was the design brief) used for the meetings of people who want to meet somewhere neutral at the end of the twentieth century; […] in an emptiness, an uncontaminated cavity; the logical endpoint of a thousand years of spaces too crowded and bloody. This one is pared down, sterilized, made new every day by a Nigerian cleaning lady with an industrial Hoover and guarded through the night by Mr De Winter, a Polish night watchman […] a new British room, a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space. (517–519)

However hard one tries for an empty, neutral space, spatiality always remains relational, and as such attached to others, an “endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place” (514). The “final” neutral British space (a room in the Perret Institute situated in Central London facing Trafalgar Square, in which one of White Teeth’s chaotic endings will take place) is made clean and neutral by a Nigerian cleaning woman and is guarded by a Polish watchman: the “new British room” is a room which includes all the worldly others who have for a long time been forcefully excluded. Black and Female Urban Spaces To tell you de truth I don’t know really where I belaang Yes, divided to de ocean Divided to de bone Wherever I hang me knickers—that’s my home. —Grace Nichols, “Wherever I Hang” (1998, 3)

The “Final Space” in White Teeth can be taken as one of the prime examples for processes of worlding the metropolis through encounter and affiliation; these affiliations include the friendship between Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones (one of the main structural connective devices of the novel) or the supernatural link between the twins. It is interesting to note, however, that the final Central London space of the Perret Institute where the

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assumed ending takes place (Archie is shot, the mouse flees) is not the proper final space of the novel. On the last pages, Smith opens up other possible endings, other possible spaces—as she writes, “like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of a much longer story” (2000a, 540). In the following, I want to hone in on one of the novel’s central figures, Irie Jones, and her possible ending. Her relational and gendered engagement with the city constitutes both a continuation and subversion of city texts such as The Lonely Londoners, while her various emplacements and embodiments offer new approaches to think female urban space. To showcase an explicitly black and female engagement with the metropolitan urban space of London in White Teeth, I will investigate Irie Jones’ configurations of spaces and subjectivities in the metropole in conversation with one of her conceptual, creative foremothers, the fat black woman of Guyanese writer Grace Nichols’ poems. Together, the two women articulate modes and nodes of love, intimacy, belonging and affiliation which rewrite “the social order to include a vision of new relational possibilities which transgress ethnic, class and racial divisions as well as family ties”, to use the words of Barbara Harlow (1987, 142; quoted in McLeod 2004, 95). Irie is the daughter of “everyday Englishman” (2000a, 48) Archibald Jones and Clara Bowden, herself daughter of Hortense Bowden, a first-generation immigrant from Jamaica. Irie is introduced as a teenager, inhabiting a transitional and uncomfortable space. She feels ugly, excluded. Her changing relation to London is marked by the developing engagement with her own corporeality. In the first chapter dedicated to her, we meet her as follows: “Now, Irie Jones, aged fifteen, was big. The European proportions of Clara’s figure had skipped a generation, and she was landed instead with Hortense’s substantial Jamaican frame, loaded with pineapples, mangoes and guavas”; she is described as having weight, “big tits, big butt, big hips, big thighs, big teeth” (265). She believes that she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buck teeth and thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair, and to top it off mole-ish eyesight which in turn required bottle-top spectacles in a light shade of pink, […] And this belief in her ugliness, in her wrongness, had subdued her; she kept her smart-ass comments to herself these days, she kept her right hand on her stomach. She was all wrong. (268; emphasis in original)

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This “wrongness” is inherently connected to her body, and her body in turn is a materialisation of her origins as daughter of a white, English father and mixed-race, Jamaican mother: “There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land” (266). Her spatial and cultural displacement results in bodily displacement. This reads like a direct echo to another London woman 20 years earlier—a woman living in the poetry cycle The Fat Black Woman’s Poems by Grace Nichols. Nichols first poetry collection i is a long memoried woman (published in 1983) imagined the middle passage—the move from Africa to the Caribbean—and focused especially on the lives of women who collectively and individually experienced this trauma: “Child of the middle passage womb / push / daughter of a vengeful Chi / she came / into the new world / birth aching her pain / from one continent / to another” (1983, 6). With The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Nichols moves from the Caribbean to Britain, just as she herself, born in Guyana in 1950, moved to London in 1977. Together with writers such as Buchi Emecheta and Beryl Gilroy before her, she is regarded as an important precursor for contemporary Black British women writing today (cf. Scafe 2015). The poems in her collection can be seen as exemplary for the development of female Black London writing as they express a struggle inherent to all the works by postcolonial female writers in the metropolis, a struggle which is transformed to create “a dynamic and confident sense of London as a resistant space for black women” (McLeod 2004, 120). Emphasising the fat black woman’s corporeality, the poems not only redefine European standards of beauty, but also point out deeper-seated racial and gendered prejudices. She encounters similar restrictions as Irie. In “The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping”, the speaker meets a world which is not cut out for her as she searches for clothing that would fit her in the London streets: “Look at the frozen thin mannequins / fixing her with grin / and the pretty face sales gals / exchanging slimming glances / thinking she don’t notice” (1984, 11). She is, however, unaffected by the hostility of the thin white sale girls who stare at her and calmly returns the gaze as the poem ends flippantly and self-assuredly. The poem places her body within the predominantly hostile space of the metropolis which she opposes with a sense of being firmly placed, at home within her body. Similarly, “Invitation” reclaims the female black body in the face of negative stereotypes, invoking historical figures like Saartje Baartman (cf. DeCaires Narain 2004; Sandhu 2003) and racial stereotypes of black women like the “mammy”

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or “Jemima” figure, and counteracts these harmful negative evocations with non-Western images of beauty, sensuality, eroticism: “My breasts are huge exciting / amnions of watermelon / your hands can’t cup / my thighs are twin seals / fat slick pups” (Nichols 1984, 12). The fat black woman imagines the female body as strength and resistance, as she opens it to notions of self-assertive female desire and feminine rhythms. The difference to Irie is clear: it is obvious that the fat black woman defies her critics and feels at home both within her body and within the city. Irie’s process is much slower—to feel confident and at home, she first needs to encounter a number of different London spaces. One of the first locations she enters is a decidedly feminine urban space which is essential for many women of colour, the hair salon, where she tries to become whiter, more English, by attempting to have her hair straightened. Like in Adichie’s Americanah, the salon is a space marked by contentious community and lopsided power relations. In Smith, however, the salon offers a much more pronounced focus on the dangers and violations linked to black hair—here, hair is political, and has long started to burn, to paraphrase Audre Lorde’s poem: The female section of P.K.’s was a deathly thing. Here, the impossible desire for straightness and ‘movement’ fought daily with the stubborn determination of the African follicle; here ammonia, hot combs, clips, pins and simple fire had all been enlisted in the war and were doing their damnedest to beat each curly hair into submission. (2000a, 275)

The salon is a place of pain and suffering, blood and fainting. Irie needs to gain entry to it in order to transform her naturally curly hair into “[…] straight long black sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger-­ through-­able wind-blowable hair. With a fringe” (273). The result however, much like it was for Ifemelu, is “[D]ead. Dry. Splintered. Stiff. All the spring gone. Like the hair of a cadaver as the moisture seeps away” (276). The ammonia has made her scalp bleed and large chunks of her hair fall out. The solution is a weave, made from someone else’s hair.5 In the end, Irie’s own hair is damaged and hidden beneath straight dark red hair. She wants to show her “new” hair, her new self, to Millat, whom she is in love with. Instead, she encounters his lesbian cousin Neena with her girlfriend Maxine and Millat’s mother Alsana, who, in this moment, constitute an alternative family that gives her security—and sound, if harsh, feminist advice. Though she does not want to admit it, she listens to them

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and a few moments later “Irie stood, facing her own reflection, busy tearing out somebody else’s hair with her bare hands”, turning a little bit into the more confident, older fat black woman of Nichols’ poems. The group of women around Irie displace her desire to please Millat and enable her to engage in an act of self-acceptance, not self-destruction. Like in Americanah, it is a community of other brown and black women who are able to offer to our protagonist an alternative version of herself, of her future—one marked by self-love, female solidarity and the displacement of society’s desire for black women to conform. Another formative London space Irie encounters is the family home of the Chalfens: She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfishness. The purity of it. It didn’t occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, née Chalfenovsky) […]. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. (328; emphasis in original)

When she discovers the Chalfens’ extensive family tree, she is blinded by the insight that her own history is concealed from her: “a long list of parental hypocrisies and untruths […], secret histories, stories you never got told, history you never entirely uncovered, rumour you never unravelled, which would be fine if every day was not littered with clues, and suggestions” (379). This perceived lack of roots plays into one of the most important metaphors the book employs, namely, that of teeth (such as in the title’s white teeth, the chapter headings “Toothing Trouble”, “Root Canals”, “Molars” and “Canines: The Ripping Teeth”). Irie wants to become a dentist, to pull out teeth and pull out stories, too: to restore them and rewrite them. Teeth function both as narrative device and as historiographical metaphor—they become linked to place and placelessness. Irie finds out that her mother, Clara, has false teeth and this causes her to turn away from her mother towards her grandmother Hortense (and her mother Ambrosia), who seems to have stronger links to one part of her hybrid identity, the Caribbean. As she flees to her grandmother and moves in with her, she comes into contact with her Jamaican past and encounters old letters, photographs, pictures—and in discovering her grandmother’s past, she in turn starts reclaiming her own past as well:

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She laid claim to the past—her version of the past—aggressively, as if retrieving misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to her, her birth right, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found […] It just seemed tiring and unnecessary all of a sudden, that struggle to force something out of the recalcitrant English soil. Why bother, when there was now this other place? (400, 402; emphasis in original)

In moving into her grandmother’s house in Lambeth, she enters another stage of engaging with both the London space around her and her own history. As an alternative space to London, Jamaica becomes her imaginary “homeland” (402), “with no complications, [n]o fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs” (402). However, in the same vein, she emphasises the fact that “[…] homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings” (402; emphasis in original). Here, we can again detect parallels to Grace Nichols’ fat black woman. Geographically, the fat black woman inhabits another part of the triangle produced by the transatlantic slave trade and can be regarded as one of Irie’s historical, conceptual foremothers: she leaves the Caribbean to come to Britain just as Irie’s grandmother had. Irie, however, desires the reverse; she wants to go “back” to Jamaica. Both the fat black woman and Irie engage in specific and partly corresponding strategies of hybrid world-making within the metropolis: if Irie’s London is destabilised as she inserts into it her imaginary Caribbean homeland, the fat black woman’s London is similarly marked by slippages and tensions. The section “Back Home Contemplation” in The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, for example, merges two places, London and Guyana, the here and there, stating at the end of the poem that “of course / home is where the heart lies” (1984, 28), arguing for a relational and affiliative sense of belonging not necessarily tied to place. The fat black woman moves through the streets of London and transforms them through her presence, appropriating cultural stereotypes and localities at the same time. Reconfiguring the city and its climate, her experience with England oscillates meteorologically between the bleak London winter and the tropical climates of her home islands. Doing so, she creates an alternative space within the metropolis, a space that allows a worlded belonging. I contest that these positionings can be read as a productive mirror to how Irie as a

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twenty-first-century African diasporic subject fashions her own belongings in London and beyond. Both Nichols’ fat black woman and Smith’s Irie enact London as an affective migrational site. Throughout these poetic renderings and the connection between two black women, both London and Jamaica are made complicated and more expansive; they “represent key moments of resistance and affirmation, contesting the divisive, racialized resonances of empire even as they articulate the familiar form and patterns of their [possible] Caribbean homes” (Murdoch 2007, 588). I would, however, also argue that Smith’s novel goes a step further than Nichols’ poetry as it offers many different homes. This is made clear on the last pages, as the text provides Irie with yet another imaginary of love and the world: Irie, Joshua and Hortense sitting by a Caribbean sea (for Irie and Joshua become lovers in the end; you can only avoid your fate for so long), while Irie’s fatherless little girl writes affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat and Good Uncle Magid and feels free like Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of paternal strings? (2000a, 541)

Towards the end of the novel, Irie sleeps with both Magid and Millat within a short period of time—this not only constitutes Irie’s sexual awakening but also produces a generative, genealogical gap; Irie will never be able to determine the father of her baby: “Irie’s child can never be mapped exactly or spoken of with any certainty” (527). Brought up by Irie and Joshua with Magid and Millat as possible fathers, the baby represents a notion of family that is not necessarily constituted by blood relation but by affiliative and non-biological connections: it “not only connects the families but also, for all the tensions between (and within) them, ensures their continued connectedness in the future” (Perfect 2014, 82; emphasis in original). In spatial terms, moreover, this possible ending imagines a future placed outside of London, in the Caribbean, at the beach side. The narrative thus invests Irie with agency to create a space in the future. Both Hortense’s house and this possible ending function as two alternative spaces to the London inhabited by the characters: one is placed within London but dislocates the city through processes of memory and imagination and one is placed outside of the metropolis’ bounds. Just as Grace Nichols’ fat black woman builds herself a home through small acts of homing (like hanging up her knickers), her conceptual granddaughter Irie, as “a great-reinventor of herself, a great make-doer” (2000a,

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368), actively enacts another version of the world. She re-centres the world around her individual experience and foregrounds her own sensuality and sexuality, becoming a contemporary, updated version of Nichols’ self-assured, wilful fat black woman. Her unconventional family model fosters an alternative sense of being placed, enabling her to break through the geographical boundaries placed upon her. In allowing a simultaneity of placement and displacement, White Teeth writes against the invisibility of women in the city and resists a homogenous narrative of urban life: both Smith and Nichols unlock “the remarkable transformative potential of black women at large in London”, they “make room on their own terms and in opposition to the determinants of racial, chauvinist and other discourses which attempt to keep such women in their perceived place” (McLeod 2004, 124). Irie’s alternative version to the nuclear family and her kinship with the woman in Nichols’ poems, a female genealogy that spans across time and place, reconsider colonial and patriarchal power relationships; indeed, such forms of alternative familial love and kin harbour the potential to topple and then repair violent orders of (neo-)Empire. What is more, this intergenerational connection not only links two fictional women (one from a novel, one from a poem cycle) but also links Smith’s text to other, African diasporic literary predecessors: the kinship between Irie and the fat black woman extends to encompass also a kinship between literary works and a conversation between authors who might be separated by decades but who nevertheless generate a chorus singing into existence another London. As I have argued before, bell hooks and others have recognised the capacity of love as ultimately transformative of structures that underlie harmful processes of neo-liberal globalisation, racism, inequality and heteronormative restriction: a black love politics “constitutes a black feminist tradition deeply invested in […] crafting political communities constituted by heterogeneity and variety, rather than homogeneity and fixity”, and it “engenders new publics, new forms of relationality, even if tenuous and fleeting, marked by forms of collective sentiment” (Nash 2013, 13; 14). Such a radical love politics—one which ultimately comes to the forefront in White Teeth’s London and through its intertextual communities to other black city texts—entails not only a reparative practice of the self but also a communal, relational strategy for constructing ethicopolitical imaginaries through fiction.

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The Affective Architecture of City and Text The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. —Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind (2009, 41)

White Teeth is steeped in London’s architecture and uses its urban surroundings to negotiate the imperial pasts and postcolonial, migratory presents its characters move through—this ranges from Archie’s near suicide in the non-place Cricklewood to the children’s fluid movements around the city’s centres and peripheries, Samad’s extra-marital adventures in North London or Irie’s experiences with specific (gendered) urban interior spaces like the hair salon. Its London geographies are intimately interlinked with the novel’s characters and their interpersonal relationships. Yet whereas White Teeth, as demonstrated above, tentatively veers out into the world and leaves London to visit India, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean, NW, Smith’s fourth novel, is very firmly rooted in North-West London. It is Smith’s most explicit city novel and because of that I will take it as the paradigmatic example for how Smith’s London texts build a specific urban “architexture”6—a composite of urban architecture and text/texture or, more generally spoken, space and language. These architextures are deeply connected to and concurrent with the novel’s ethics and politics of love—it’s intimate, communal and affective imaginaries. My main aim in this section is to examine how these affective structures play together (in consonance or in discord) with the space of the urban as it is performed by Smith’s novel. The kind of London written, imagined and produced in NW traces one specific slice of the metropolis. As indicated by the novel’s title, the postcode for the North-West London area, the narrative is mainly set in Willesden and Kilburn, which are part of the borrow of Brent and situated between Wembley and Hampstead Heath. The novel’s characters— Nathan Bogle, Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie De Angelis (neé Keisha Blake) and Felix Cooper—all grew up together in Willesden on a (fictional) council estate called Caldwell. Generally, the novel offers a curious mixture of real London places, landmarks and local curiosities (such as the black Madonna at the Church of St. Mary), imagined locations such as Brayton school or bus routes which do not exist and half-real, half-­ fictional spaces like the housing project Caldwell with its five tower blocks,

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named after English philosophers (Smith, Hobbes, Bentham, Locke, Russell), which echo the names of real tower blocks in Kilburn (called Austen, Dickens and Fielding) (cf. Enright 2012). In the novel, NW is called “a small place” (Smith 2012, 97)—but the world brought to life through the text can be regarded as one possible microcosm of the metropolis. What is produced here is a London fashioned by community, neighbourhood and interlinked intimacies. In Smith’s work, London is literally constructed on the page. The novel as an urban text renders the experience of living in the metropolis into aesthetic form—topography and typography, space and language become intertwined in its architexture. As Wolfreys has argued, “‘London’ comes to be seen to be integral to the shaping of narrative, determining and mediating both the rhetoric which composes the narrative and the shape which the narrative eventually assumes” (1998, 11). The city is not just a “stage upon which the narrative is enacted” (12) but is embodied and materialised in the textual and structural set-up of the novel itself. The novel performs its urbanity; it writes and builds the city through experiences of walking, reading and mapping. The text is sometimes structured around London postcodes, such as in Felix’s part, “Guest”, which is divided into three chapters—NW6, WI (Oxford Street/Regent Street), and then NW6 again. This circularity captures movement on the public transport and the travels to and fro a Londoner has to undertake to get somewhere. Similarly, “Crossing” (a part of the novel dedicated to Natalie/Keisha) is structured along different routes across North-West London, from “Willesden Lane to Kilburn High Road”, “Shoot Up Hill to Fortune Green”, “Hampstead to Archway”, reaching “Hampstead Heath”, “The Corner of Hornsey Lane” and then “Hornsey Lane” (303–324, emphases in original). Readers follow Natalie and Nathan on their walk, tracing and interpreting the London neighbourhood together with the characters. Some segments are numerically arranged, like Natalie’s first section, “Host”, or Leah’s narrative, which is time and time again interrupted by the number 37. Sometimes the words change font size and spacing, or form into line breaks, calligrams or concrete poetry (28, 31, 36, 236, 315), thereby disrupting the unity of the visual surface of the page. This inventive textuality, rendered through experimental forms of typography and page layout, relocates representations of urban spatiality into the texture of the novel. The three narrators, Leah, Felix and Natalie, act not only as focalisers but also as localisers—their segments are characterised by different approaches to inhabiting their London worlds. In the

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following I will focus on two examples that show how the construction of and engagement with space in the novel enable readers to pursue yet another kind of mapping: one of relationships and kinship structures. Leah and Felix can be seen as distorted mirrors of each other: Irish English Leah is deeply implanted in NW, the Caldwell estate and Brayton school. When we meet her, she is placed “in a hammock, in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides” (3). She was born in the estate, can even see the room she was born in from her own backyard and still lives there even though her husband, an Algerian Guadeloupian hairdresser called Michel, desperately wants to move on, move up, move away. But “Leah is as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of city as other people are to their families, or their countries” (6). Through her fractured narration, we come to know that she is pregnant, but that she does not want the child, that she does not want the change this would entail: “For Leah, that way [motherhood] is not forward” (93). British Caribbean Felix, who belongs to NW as firmly as Leah (“Felix, man, you properly local”, 104; emphasis in original), can be read as one of the most mobile characters in the novel—he is the only character who leaves NW during narrative time; his mobility and fluidity is also expressed in the structure of the narrative itself, as he knows none of the other characters but nevertheless acts as connective tissue between all of them. His one-day arc on August 27, 2010 (a time frame which echoes modernist city texts like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses), radiates out from the North-West London council estate and travels across London via bus and tube, and each leg of his journey takes him to yet another encounter, be it a sociable or deadly one. Both Leah and Felix engage in what I would call affective, performative mappings of the city which question notions of control, stability and linearity. Felix’s interactions on London streets are marked by relational performances—they construct tentative urban conviviality and a transitory communality that oscillates between feelings of estrangement and placed-ness: Now Felix collided with a real live young man leaving a glass-walled video emporium, walking backwards through the double doors while waving goodbye to his friends still wrestling their joysticks. Felix touched the guy gently on the elbows, and the stranger, with equal care, reached back and held Felix where his waist met his back; they both laughed lightly and apologised, called each other ‘Boss’ before separating quickly, the stranger striding back towards Eros and Felix towards Soho. (138)

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A train barrelled past, knocking him into the seat he’d been heading for. After a moment the two trains seemed to cruise together. He looked out now at his counterpart, in the other train. Small woman, whom he would have judged Jewish without being able to articulate any very precise reason why: dark, pretty, smiling to herself, in a blue dress from the seventies—big collar, tiny white bird print. She was frowning at his T-shirt. Trying to figure it. He felt like it: he smiled! a broad smile that emphasized his dimples and revealed three gold teeth. The girl’s little dark face pulled tight like a net bag. Her train pulled ahead, then his did. (120)

These encounters are fleeting, but nevertheless intimate. Here, intimacy does not play out in the romantic or sexual ways it had in White Teeth or The Lonely Londoners, but in the small touches between strangers on London streets and the underground. As Salman Rushdie argued in his London novel, The Satanic Verses (1988): “The modern city is the locus classicus of impossible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus” (325). In the text of NW, it is not the bus but the Tube that functions as a crucial social space of encounters. These encounters constitute transitory moments: two pathways cross each other, briefly align and then separate. The London Tube becomes one of the most important fix points in Felix’s story, just like for Obinze in Americanah—Felix, however, takes a much more active part in the act of travelling and creating community (even if it is to his detriment). The map of the underground usually serves as orientation help for travellers, but in Felix’s case he re-signifies and re-interprets it to fit to his particular London experience. The alternative cartography he establishes can be put in conversation with the history of public transport in London which reaches back to the creation of Greater London and urban planning in the late nineteenth century. With the growing technological and industrial modernisations, railways came to link inner and outer city and thus produced connections between spaces hitherto thought of as separate (cf. McLeod 2006). By establishing these new lines of connection, new communities and relationalities emerged. The Tube came to be regarded as a point of reference with which to approach the unfurling city space, the first grammar available to Londoners to be able to make sense of the city. The famous Tube map invented by Harry Beck at the beginning of the twentieth century enabled Londoners to differently approach their metropolitan spatiality. This map, however, is far from a true representation of the city, it “eschewed any direct correlation with the layout of the city it

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conceptualised”, “straightening the curves of the river and plotting the cityscape onto a grid of horizontals, vertical, and diagonals” (Pike 2002, 104). It represents an abstract, aerial view of the city which tries to order, standardise and normalise it. Central London is given much more room, whereas the suburbs and outer peripheries of the city are reduced, distant. When Felix interacts with the Tube and its map, he questions these straightforward, simple oppositions between centre and margin. In fact, he rewrites the map according to his own needs: Felix inched deeper into the carriage. He gripped the safety rail. He considered the tube map. It did not express his reality. The centre was not ‘Oxford Circus’ but the bright lights of Kilburn High Road. ‘Wimbledon’ was the countryside, ‘Pimlico’ pure science fiction. He put his right index finger over Pimlico’s blue bar. It was nowhere. Who lived there? Who even passed through it? (165)

What Felix does here is to layer “his own de-centred Tube Map over the official one, questioning its ability to say what is London, what its centre, what its periphery” (Elkin 2015, n. pag.). He decentres the official centre and centres that which is usually regarded as periphery, consequently reworlding London in consonance with his own sense of direction and orientation. He resists the mathematical, straight lines, and he also resists the causality that is being narrated by the underground map. Whereas in the early and mid-twentieth century, black and diasporic people as workers on the Underground were hidden from the public eye below ground (cf. McLeod 2006), here Felix as second-generation immigrant child actively refashions London’s underground and overground structures. This productivity and the connections he encounters on the Tube are reverted on his last journey—turned into confrontation, aggression and, ultimately, his death. Whereas the Tube had functioned as a space of connectedness, both tying him to the town centre and tentatively tying him to another passenger, later it is his willingness to engage with the social, relational space of the Tube that will come to constitute his fatal mistake. By helping a pregnant woman get a seat, he signs his own death warrant: “‘Sorry, could you ask your friend to move his feet?’ Felix took out his earbuds. A white woman, hugely pregnant and sweating, stood over him. ‘I’d like to sit down?’ she said. Felix looked at his motionless ‘friend’ opposite, and thought it beast to speak to the other one” (167). Felix had been travelling alone, had established “a private space of his own, opening

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his legs wide and slouching” (165) when sitting down across from two young black men obviously on drugs, “pupils enormous” (165). At the very moment the woman asks him for help, he is brought into the public space of Tube etiquette, brought into the small community of the carriage. The woman assumes the three men must be connected because of their skin colour. She thus enforces a relationality based on physiognomic, essentialist reasons and Felix is put in a confrontational situation. He asks one of them to move his feet from the seat so that the woman can sit down. A tense fight ensues as both refuse and Felix gives up his own seat: “They were pulling into Kilburn Station. The carriage was silent, No one looked—or they looked so quickly their glances were undetectable” (166). In this instance, Felix “felt a great wave of approval, smothering and unwanted, directed towards him, and just as surely, contempt and disgust enveloping the two men and separating them, from Felix, from the rest of the carriage, from humanity” (168). A few moments after leaving the tube, and walking towards his home, Felix is accosted by the two and they stab him. The two men (one of whom is Nathan Bogle, the fourth NW character the novel revolves around, as we come to know later) kill him because he betrayed them by siding with the woman, obeying to another collective and dislocating their hierarchy in the public space of the tube7: As he got back up on his knees he heard one of them say: ‘Big man on the train. Ain’t the big man now.’ And instead of fear, a feeling of pity came over him; he remembered when being the big man was all that mattered. […] He turned once more towards the street. A breeze passed over the three of them, filling their hoods and sending clouds of sycamore leaves spinning to the pavement. A firm punch came to his side. Punch? The pain sliced to the left, deep and down. Warm liquid reversed up his throat. Over his lips. […] Down Willesden Lane a bus came rumbling; at the same moment in which Felix glimpsed the handle and the blade he saw the 98 reopen its doors to accept the last soul in sight—a young girl in a yellow summer dress. She ran with her ticket held high above her head like the proof of something, got there just in time, cried out: ‘Thank you!’ and let the doors fold neatly behind her. (171)

Here, in Felix’s last encounter, the text sheds light on the construction of a false sense of communality as put forth by the pregnant white woman: in pitying the two youths, Felix, who himself belongs to the poverty-ridden class in this corner of North-West London, refuses to attest to the

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othering of black men that happens so often and instead advocates unanimity and a readiness to help others. The image of the three young men’s hoodies filling with wind at the same time further underlines the fraught connections and ties between black London youth, even in a moment of great violence. What I find particularly interesting here is that Felix’s death, and the feelings of grief and anxiety accompanying it, is paralleled with the alive-ness of the girl in the yellow summer dress entering the bus, moving forward or onwards into the city night. In his moment of death, he does not exist as isolated and separate but is still connected to other city dwellers. His tragic death echoes through the novel’s other narrative layers and ultimately brings together the two estranged friends, Leah and Natalie. Felix thus structurally, meta-narratively, and diegetically proffers encounters and connection points. Another way of encountering the urban space of the postcolonial metropolis is offered by a second instance of alternative, affective mapping. In the following, I would like to draw attention to an opposition opened up by the novel regarding official cartographies of London and the relational, emotional and sensory resistance to these mappings. In Leah’s segment, “Visitation”, which traces her development and ends with an encounter with a girl called Shar who has consistently haunted her throughout, we follow her movements through London and are confronted with a tension between perceived and prescribed ways of living the postcolonial metropolis. Chapter 9 gives an account of one of her walks, which mirrors the way Google Maps leads us through streets: From A to B: A. Yates Lane, London NW8, UK B. Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK Walking directions to Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK Suggested routes A5 47 Mins 2.4 Miles A5 and Salusbury Rd 50 mins 2.5 Miles A404/Harrow Rd 58 mins 2.8 miles 1. Turn left on Yates Lane 40 feet 2. Head south-west towards Edgware Rd 315 feet […]

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Destination will be on the left Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, weather, or other events may cause conditions to differ from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly. You must obey all signs or notices regarding your route. (38, 39; emphasis in original)

The route suggested here very clearly moves from point to point, it lists distances, temporal frameworks and purportedly reaches a stable destination—but only if you “obey all signs”, if you strictly follow the instructions. Deictic signs and names are set in cursive, as if to mark their authority. Interesting here, however, is the side note that comes as a disclaimer to Google Maps: unexpected events may cause conditions to differ, interruptions may change the route dictated by Google Maps. In short, everyday life may disturb your clear-cut path. The next chapter is called “From A to B redux”. Written in the stream of consciousness style so typical for Leah’s narration, it offers another, alternative version of the Google Maps directions—deeply entrenched in the visceral, noisy, sticky London mess, the entrails of the metropolis: From A to B redux: Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only—quicker to walk! Escapees from St Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking, old lady wheeling herself in a wheelchair smoking, die-hard holding urine sack, body sack, smoking. […] Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World. […] I give you good price, good price. Leaflets, call abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted Jesus as your personal call plan? Everybody loves fried chicken. Everybody. Bank of Iraq, Bank of Egypt, Bank of Libya. […] Birdsong! Low-down dirty shopping arcade to mansion flats to an Englishman’s home is his castle. Open-top, soft-top, drive-by, hip hop. […] Tudor, Modernist, post-war, pre-war, stone pineapples, stone lions, stone eagles. Face east and dream of Regent’s Park, of St. John’s Wood. The Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians, the Americans: here united by the furnished penthouse, the private clinic. If we pay enough, if we squint, Kilburn need not exist. Free meals. English as a second language. […] Is it really only April? And they’re off! (40, 41; emphasis in original)

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Opposed to the clean and structured Google Map directions, this route does not disregard the life and flesh of London. It is conscious of the ethnic and economic multi-directions of the city. In its multi-locality, it draws attention to nationality, migrants, “calling home”, “facing east”, squinting at Kilburn. Redux means something revived, resuscitated—and the city is here actualised, brought to life. Leah’s walk and her sensory experience of it constitutes a remaking and restaging of the city space. The description of the route in its linguistic messiness, typographical crowdedness and organic chaos literally fills in the empty white blanks of the anaemic Google Map directions. In its focus on sense, perception and impression, NW’s affective spatiality and relational architecture of the city stands in stark contrast to a “neutral”, cartographic method. As a non-totalitarising version of the panoptic and “comprehensive” official map, Leah’s walk resists idealised, stylised and formalised (but essentially reductive) approaches to space. The novel instead produces the map of a worlded London that revokes the all-encompassing, dominant cartography of Google Maps or city planning. As such, the novel strives to animate, shape and think into existence other, alternative worlds. Its architextual, typographical wilfulness advocates forms of resistance and wilful intervention within literature: literature that belongs to the world and literature that changes the world through its imaginative and creative force. NW thus forges new and creative cartographies for migrants who are often prohibited from access to map-making processes. It illuminates the fact that within the planned city there is also a lived one. Leah’s walk “reads” between the lines and overwrites the directions offered by Google Maps. She enacts her own London space through sensory perception and embodied experience. The map of chapter 9 is not only replaced by the affective sensory mapping in chapter 10, but hints at yet another hidden meaning: when you actually go looking for the streets and routes described in the Google Map, it becomes clear that while Bartlett Street is located in South London (in Croydon—as far away from NW as you can get), Yates Lane does not even exist in London. The novel thus enacts another form of less obvious displacement, further undermining the authoritative map offered by Google. Following the Google Maps directions and instructions would literally lead nowhere, and the geographical relation as expressed by the miles and minutes cannot actually hold true, while the alternative map leads right through the heart of NW.  Smith’s London worlds interrogate the easy, smooth and cosmopolitan image of the global metropolis. Revealing a more fractured, localised sense of the city and as

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such questioning its neo-liberal, capitalist production of power structures, Smith’s London shifts according and responding to relational, affective structures: the sharing of space, the small touches between strangers and the personal sensory experiences linked to the urban space. The city becomes an inherently shared communal space which, as such, offers ways of accessing urban identity and affiliations. What is performed in/through NW is not only an affective mapping manufactured by the story’s characters, but also a text that in itself can be regarded as an affective mapping of London—generated by multi-directional journeys, local encounters and the small, fragile moments of contact and intersection.

Desire Lines Between NW and Nowhere In this chapter’s first section, I engaged with Zadie Smith’s now canonical first novel White Teeth, and its embeddedness in a genealogy of postcolonial London writing and scholarship, focussing on Irie Jones’ gendered, familial relations to the urban space of the metropolis. To do so, I have drawn on two of White Teeth’s literary precursors, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Grace Nichols’ The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, establishing a connective, comparative reading of Smith’s first novel in her London trilogy. I then moved on to NW, Smith’s most explicit London text, and showed how its sensory cartography produces a London marked by multi-­ locality, relational affects and encounters. In this third section I will continue my project of teasing out the possibilities and tensions that arise when putting love and space, longing and belonging, together. I will connect NW to Smith’s 2016 novel Swing Time in order to draw out further the interplay of world building and love and desire in Smith’s oeuvre. As these texts put to the forefront of their imaginaries love, desire and romance, they at once activate a relational and affective writing of city space and conceptualisations of love that are carefully attuned to the spaces of the global present. By refusing old and tired conventions of love and intimacy as private and secret, as relegated to the inside spaces of the home, and by instead engaging in productive and affective world-makings through the making of multitudinous loves, Smith is able to rearrange and dislocate the world of twenty-first-century London. Both NW and Swing Time have at their hearts the friendships between two women—these friendships are complicated and contentious and the love between Leah and Natalie in NW and between the narrator of Swing Time and her childhood best friend displace other, more conventional

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heteronormative relationships. The homosocial and tentatively queer dynamics between these women lay bare love’s tendencies to hurt and flatten. I argue that both texts draw our attention to how, as Sara Ahmed has argued, love can turn into “a sign of respectable femininity, and of maternal qualities narrated as the capacity to touch and be touched by others. The reproduction of femininity is tied up with the reproduction of the national ideal through the work of love” (Ahmed [2004] 2014, 124). Indeed, love in both NW and Swing Time emerges not only as carrying toxicity, hurt and discontent but also as one possible way to an alternative community. In NW, Natalie and Leah’s relationship is closely connected to the North-West corner of London they both grew up in. In my reading of the novel, I will consider how their spaces and desires overlap and overwrite each other, laying bare the potentiality of a queer love story hidden beneath a surface made from heteronormative marriages. In Swing Time, the spatial relations are more complicated, as London and its neighbourhoods are expanded to reach into the world. Here, it is just one of the two women who stays rooted to North-West London, whereas the other leaves and comes back. These structures of departure and return will be connected to the intensely intimate but problematic homosocial linkage between the two friends. In order to substantiate my arguments in this section, I will draw on two conceptual fields which link space and love: one is the concept of the female flâneuse who fashions her urban surroundings according to her own emotional, embodied needs (I will draw on this concept in my reading of NW); the other is the concept of desire lines or desire paths, a term usually employed to demarcate the beaten paths people fashion if they need to cross where there is no “official” road (I will draw on this in my discussions of Swing Time). Both terms, or tools, will allow me to properly mine the spatial and affective movements of the female protagonists in Smith’s novels. Reading together NW and Swing Time as London texts and also as significant examples of the connection between space and love, I want to tease out the possibilities they open up, the spaces and interstices they produce ex-centrically, along the outlines of this postcolonial city.

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Between Intimacy and Distance I: Female Friendship in NW NW’s central friendship between Leah and Natalie is the foundation on which the novel is built. Their complicated love for each other is woven throughout the novel, even though both women are estranged from each other when we enter the story. English Irish Leah has always stayed in NW (despite a short stint at university) and we meet her on the very first page locked in her backyard. Natalie De Angelis, who was born as a second-­ generation Jamaican English immigrant with the name Keisha Blake, is Leah’s counterpart—instead of settling, Natalie’s narrative is propelled forward and outwards by a deep-seated desire to transcend her working-­ class neighbourhood and to fashion herself as a successful lawyer; a feat she accomplishes deceptively easily. The women’s spatial and emotional set-­ ups could not be more different, yet their connection has them always come back to each other. Keisha/Natalie’s story begins in the third part of the novel and is narrated chronologically via small, numbered vignettes. The very first vignette describes the beginning of her and Leah’s friendship: she saves Leah from downing in their estate’s outdoor pool when they are children. This marks the beginning of the two girls’ friendship which constitutes not only a connection between two NW children but also a connection which crosses other, political divides. Keisha and Leah belong to two different immigrant groups, one African Caribbean and one Irish. The moment Keisha saves Leah’s life, she reconciles disparate groups which span the Caldwell estate. As Alberto Fernández Carbajal has pointed out, “Keisha’s act manages to disturb, at least momentarily, the suspicion between the African and Irish sectors of London’s migrant population” (2014, 5). Their burgeoning friendship not only displaces racial, ethnical boundaries and represents a multi-local, multi-directional London neighbourhood, but also comes to displace and unsettle other relationships and desires. This displacement opens the text to a queer reading and an alternative interpretation of female friendship and communality, displaying a resistance to the normativity of longing and belonging. Their relationship serves as an interruption of the text and all other relationships move around it—both women’s marriages, for instance: Leah is married to Michel (born to an illiterate Algerian mother and a father from Guadeloupe) and Keisha/Natalie is married to Frank (son of a rich Italian woman and a train guard from Trinidad). Both, however, defy the fixities that come attached to heteronormative sexuality in different ways—and this defiance

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is closely interlinked to their spatial engagements with London. In the following, I will trace how the novel both obscures and accentuates their queer love story through an engagement with spatial acts such as walking and through disruptions on the meta-textual level. Even though Leah describes her marriage to Michel as sexually active, she also hints towards other, non-heterosexual desires and earlier female lovers. The main struggle Leah engages with is her desire for everything to stay the same, dispended almost, and to escape Michel’s wish for children. They had married because it “pleased Pauline [Leah’s mother]” and “calmed the anxieties of Michel’s family” (23). But Leah does not want to take the next step—a step Michel describes as a “natural” and logical step. In doing so, she resists heteronormative notions of the nuclear family, the “certain, perfectly obvious destination […]. She does not want to arrive” (24). This resistance is supplemented by her expressions of fluid sexuality which her physical, sexually driven marriage cannot completely fulfil. Leah’s queer desires are connected to the number 37, which in both Leah’s and Natalie’s chapters poses an interruption to chronology, logic and sense-making processes. The number 37 first occurs in Leah’s segment when she encounters a girl called Shar who rings at her door and scams her out of 30£ for a fictitious hospital trip. Leah and Shar, even though they belong to quite different social strata within NW, went to Brayton school together. This establishes a connection that will haunt Leah throughout the remaining narrative. Leah feels attraction towards Shar, whose body she observes secretly: “She watches Shar’s buttock’s rise up and against her rolled-down jogging pants, and the little downy dip in her back, pronounced, sweaty in the heat. The tiny waist opening out into curves” (6). Later, she describes her in more overt terms: Drawn to the wrong details. […] Breasts small and tight to her body. […] A neat waist you want to hold. She is something beautiful in the sunshine, something between boy and girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all that. Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical. (42)

Shar, who lives on 37 Ridley Avenue, comes to serve as a trigger for Leah’s memories of past relationships which are always connected to the number 37. Significantly, “this information is conveyed not only in chapter 37, but also on page 37 [at least in the first edition of NW], which reveals that the number 37 functions not only as a street number, but also as a disturbance

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on both the diegetic and the extradiegetic level of narration” (Pirker 2016, 70). The 23 numbered chapters of Leah’s segment are interspersed four times by a chapter titled “37”, disrupting the narrative’s chronology and textuality. All the “37”-chapters revolve around female friendship and female attraction—each stands for a woman in Leah’s life and they mark moments of importance and tension. Every “37”-chapter is additionally linked to Shar, who appears and disappears around its edges in the chapters embracing it. They thus not only interrupt the ordered flow of numbered chapters but also the orderly flow of heteronormative relationality—they hint at queer unfixed desires at work within the text and unfulfilled longings which are never fully spelled out, bringing back to the surface Leah’s past erotic histories with unnamed lovers. The first time Leah’s chaptered segment is interrupted by the number 37 (between chapters 11 and 12), she has just seen Shar on NW’s streets— an event which causes her to think about a girl from her past: “Lying in bed next to a girl she loved, discussing the number 37. Dylan singing. The girl had the theory that 37 has a magic about it, we’re compelled towards it. […] Watch for 37, the girl said. […] She once was a true love of mine. Now that girl is married, too” (43). That the number 37 is a direct reference to Natalie, and that the girl Leah once loved and who is now married, is, indeed, Natalie, can be extracted from the fact that the chapter 37 is in turn completely excluded from Natalie’s chronologically numbered life narration (195). Here, the missing 37th chapter demarcates the moment in which Leah and Natalie stop being best friends when they are 16, and Natalie’s mother Marcia pushes her towards Rodney, a Caribbean boy from Church with whom Natalie would stay together throughout her last school and first university years: “In Keisha Blake’s break with Leah Hanwell we must admit that Marcia Blake spied an opportunity. The break coincided with the problem of sex, which anyway could no longer be ignored. […] Pushing Keisha Blake towards Rodney Banks was Mrs Blake’s elegant solution” (194). The break between the girls thus opens a space for a “normal” heterosexual relationship, approved by Natalie’s mother, who can be read as a gatekeeper for heteronormativity. We never fully understand what has caused the rupture between the two girls and the missing 37th chapter in Natalie’s segment thus demarcates an empty space which can be filled with interpretation and imagination. The following three “37”-chapters in Leah’s section confirm these interruptions and hidden desires. The second one, positioned between chapters 15 and 16, describes Leah’s third abortion in present time and

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the memories of her first two when she was younger: “Back then she was nineteen, the university nurse organised everything. She sat with a kind ex-lover in their summer skirts on the edge of the hospital beds, legs dangling, like little girls scolded” (59). Having an abortion and not continuing her and Michel’s possible familial future, she instead turns towards memories and thoughts about lesbian love: “One of the advantages of loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far beyond the call of duty” (60). She is aware that she does not fulfil society’s expectations and that she has become stuck in her relationship. In posing the question of normality and abnormality, Leah oscillates between dissidence and acquiescence. The third “37”-chapter, situated between chapters 17 and 18, brings Leah to the black Madonna of Willesden who asks her: “Did you hope for something else? Were you misinformed? Was there more to it than that? Or less? If we give it a different name will the weightless sensation disappear? […] Who are you? […] Could things have been differently arranged, in a different order, in a different place?” (76). The black Madonna is later paralleled to Natalie and thus acts as a sign of what could have been. The more 37s the text offers, the more we as readers become aware of Leah’s dissatisfaction and her growing awareness of the borders she has constructed around herself. The fourth and final “37”-chapter (set after chapter 23) is located at a local pharmacy where she is given the wrong packet of photographs, one which contains pictures of Shar. This is also the last chapter in Leah’s segment, which returns, again, to a woman—in this case to Shar, for whom she has been harbouring attraction throughout the whole arc and who had reawakened her queer desires and had prompted her memories of girls she had once loved and perhaps still loves. Whereas in the Leah segment there are allusions and hints towards her suppressed desires and her wilful resistance against normative structures, in Natalie’s sections these are much more hidden—in Leah’s part, the number 37 is constantly intercepted and misplaced, in Natalie’s it is completely silenced. This silencing directly corresponds to how throughout her life Natalie had attempted to hide her true identity, a fact that is indicated by her name change from Keisha to Natalie. She is much more adamant than Leah to subscribe to society’s expectations: with regard to motherhood, Leah’s greatest refusal, Natalie “had no intention of being made ridiculous by failing to do whatever was expected of her” (272). This assimilation to normative and hegemonic structures is given expression by what she calls “drag”, the pretence of performing: “Daughter

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drag, Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic” (282). Natalie’s different “drags” stand for disguises and the performances of roles she thinks she needs to perform—all inauthentic, lacking perhaps. One of the categories not included here is “friend” or “girlfriend”. Exactly because of this non-mention, I think that Natalie and Leah’s relationship lies also at the hidden heart of Natalie’s story. While she never directly alludes to Leah as one of her desires, she enacts other ways of disrupting the heteronormative family structures she finds herself in. Like Leah, Natalie harbours alternative desires and acts on them. Though she had allegedly left behind her London neighbourhood and the identity of Keisha Blake so closely tied to this corner of the metropolis, she nevertheless retains a link to both: with the online alias “KeishaNW” she signs up to an adult pornographic website (www.adultswatchingadult. com, 259; 266), where she offers herself for sexual encounters with other users—“on the website she was what everyone was looking for” (265), a “BF [Black Female] 18–35” (288). She becomes active on the website around the same time she gives birth, therefore living two realities at once: “Hidden behind the image of Spike [her son] was another window, of listings” (275). In the moment in which she enters into what is expected of her (motherhood, marriage, adulthood), she flees to chatrooms and alternative online worlds. Even though these sexual encounters almost always stay unconsummated, she nevertheless travels all over London to visit the people who respond to her listings. She goes to Finchley Road (vignette 174, Peach, peonies) where an old rich couple had invited her but then runs away after ringing their doorbell. She goes to Camden (vignette 176, Oblivion) where a skinny man and an Iranian girl, drug addicts in their earlier twenties, want a three-some with her—after she watches TV with them, she cannot bring herself to actually have sex with them. She goes to Primrose Hill (vignette 180, All the mod cons) to the house of a rich and beautiful African British couple who then become nervous and back out of the “date”. She goes to Wembley (vignette 182, Love in the ruins) where two shy young men wait for her and with one of whom she has sex while the other one masturbates. Inevitably, her husband Frank discovers her profile on the website. Natalie, who had tried to escape the stifling encasement of her marriage and kids and who had lived out her alternative desires in secret,

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experiences her whole world crashing down around her when she is exposed. But this violent interruption also poses a possibility: after fighting with Frank, Natalie leaves their shared home to wander the streets of NW.  This street-walking constitutes a turning point in the fabric of Natalie’s narrative. Through re-positioning herself in NW, she also manages to re-­position herself and her wilful desires. Natalie, whose displacement and detachment had influenced all her decisions, becomes re-attached both to NW and to Leah through acts of walking, through her flâneuserie. In recent years, the female version of the flâneur, the flâneuse, has become a conceptual feminist tool to think about as well as reshape narratives about women and urban spatiality, closely connected to questions of mobility and agency. The traditional topos of the flâneur has its origin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when both Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin in his uncompleted study The Arcades Project stylised him into the ultimate emblem of the male city walker. He is an obsessive wanderer, who observes the urban world around him: The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world. (Baudelaire [1863] 1964, 9)

While Baudelaire portrayed the flâneur as a dandy and a gentleman stroller of urban streets, Benjamin posited him as playing an important role in portraying, comprehending and defining the city (cf. Benjamin [1969] 1985, 35–66). To be at the centre and yet stay aloof and hidden in order to observe was one of the key concepts of flânerie. The flâneur, however, is not only a figure of skilled and suave urban observance and knowledge—“a figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention” (Elkin 2016a, 3)—but also a marker for the gendered social and political configurations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metropolitan life. As Deborah Longworth argues, “to loiter anonymously on the city streets of the nineteenth-century metropolis was an all but exclusively male luxury” (2015, n. pag). Women and their movements in public were connoted differently; they either needed male protection or were regarded

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as loose women.8 By contrast, the male flâneur “as the embodiment of the male gaze” (Wilson 1992, 98) could observe and consume these women, as well as control and order the city which was predominantly read as female, chaotic, sensual (cf. Dreyer and McDowall 2012, 32).9 The flâneuse poses a counterpart to this. Closely aligned to the long history of suppressed and hindered women walkers on city streets, the flâneuse sets out to righten the lopsided distribution of power, to resist the exclusion of women from urban spaces. In her seminal essay on “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity” (1985), Janet Wolff contended that “there is no question of inventing the flâneuse: the essential point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (45). Her initial statement that the flâneuse could not exist has since been revised and revoked: there is a growing body of feminist scholarship which traces the historical, social and imaginative possibilities of the female city walker. One of these critics is Lauren Elkin, who has uncovered the radical, creative potential of movement for the flâneuse. As she argues in her essay “Radical Flâneuserie”, [t]he flâneuse is someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind its facades, penetrating its secret courtyards. Rather than wandering aimlessly, like the flâneur, the most salient characteristic of the flâneuse is that she goes where she’s not supposed to. (2016b, n. pag.)

Elkin and others speak of the flâneuse’s right “to organize (or disorganize) space on [her] own terms” (2016a, 288). Whereas the topoi of flânerie had been observance, control and distance, I suggest that the flâneuse opens up other modes: not alienation but relationality and engagement with the urban space. Female walking cannot remain detached, invisible, anonymous—it is too deeply inscribed in gendered power relations, never neutral, and as such poses a powerful tool to interrogate the pull between private/public and wandering/settling; the flâneuse “goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women” (2016a, 22; emphasis in original). She offers alternative agencies and knowledges about the metropolis, she is “attuned to the creative potential of the city” (23), and thus generates a female convivial and connective flâneuserie. In the moment of trauma and crisis, Natalie, as a black and female city walker,10 takes to the streets of NW and experiences, as I will argue, her

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own empowering flâneuserie. As she leaves their family home, “Frank de Angelis asked his wife, Natalie Blake, where she was going. Where she thought she was going. Where the fuck she was going. ‘Nowhere,’ said Natalie Blake” (300). But this nowhere turns out to be her own affective and relational NW and, in the end, leads her to Leah. The second to last section of NW, called “Crossing”, details Natalie’s walk through her NW neighbourhood.11 On the first leg of her walk, “Willesden Lane to Kilburn High Road”, she tries to get as far away from her family home as possible, walks by Caldwell and begins to climb the hill that leads from Willesden to Highgate. On her route, she is interrupted by police cars which have blocked Albert Road. As we know, this is where Felix’s murder has taken place on the same day. Turning around, she attempts to find another route: Walking was what she did now, walking was what she was. She was nothing more or less than the phenomenon of walking. She had no name, no biography, no characteristics. They had all fled into paradox. Certain physical memories remained. She could feel the puffiness of her skin beneath her eyes and the fact that her throat was sore from shouting and yelping. She had a mark on her wrist where she had been gripped tightly. She put her hand into her hair and knew it to be wild and everywhere and that in the midst of an argument she had ripped a bit out at the right temple. She reached Caldwell’s boundary wall. (304)

It is interesting to note that Frank and Natalie’s fight, of which she bears the physical traces here, had been left out from the numbered vignettes in the section prior—we only see the before (vignette 184, Caught) and after (vignette 185 and the last one of this section, Onwards), the moment of aggression and rupture is not shown (299). This mirrors how Natalie’s Bildungsroman, which is how I would call these chronologically ordered vignettes, had also left out her break-up with Leah. This represents the perfection and order she had always wanted to project. The flâneuse section “Crossing”, however, marks the moment when she lets herself feel and move again. Reaching the boundary wall of the Caldwell estate, she tries to climb over it and in the process encounters Nathan Bogle, who seems fidgety and nervous (through many hints we come to know that he was one of Felix’s murderers). Together with Nathan, Natalie climbs the wall, crosses into Caldwell and continues her route across NW. This part of her walk is characterised by hopelessness as she tries to place herself and others in this slice of London, “due to a long process of neglect, almost as

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long as her life—she did not have the generative power to muster an alternative future” (307). The effort of trying to name both place and her relation to it exhausts her (208). They walk through the cemetery, smoking weed and then up “Shoot Up Hill to Fortune Green” (313). The further they walk, the more Natalie embeds herself into the city: “She couldn’t resist this display of the textures of the world; white stone, green turf, red rust, gray slate, brown shit. It was almost pleasant, strolling nowhere” (314). As Molly Slavin argues, Natalie “becomes part of the city, layering her map on top of the existing city geography rather than blazing through it unheeded” (2015, 108). Walking via “Hampstead to Archway” (215), they arrive at Hampstead Heath and then Hornsey Lane. Natalie says, “this is where I was heading”, and what she means by that is the bridge located there, a bridge where people kill themselves, “going nowhere” (322): The view was cross-hatched. St. Paul’s in one box. The Gherkin in another. Half a Tree. Half a car. Cupolas, spires. Squares, rectangles, half moon, stars. It was impossible to get any sense of the whole. From up here the bus lane was a red gash through the city. The tower blocks were the only thing she could see that made any sense, separated from each other, yet communicating. From this distance they had a logic, stone posts driven into an ancient field, waiting for something to be laid on top of them, a statue, perhaps, or a platform. (322–323)

This is where Natalie switches from “nowhere” to “NW”. From her position, she cannot entirely make sense of the whole, and the only thing anchoring her are the estate’s tower blocs: they have logic, they are placed in communication—with each other, with herself. She re-centres herself in NW, through her explorations of nowhere. Natalie’s gaze towards the city, from up north, can be characterised as a panoptic gaze trying to grasp Central London, observing the centre from her vantage point, but also as surrender, giving in to the fracturedness and layers the city offers. Dismantling hierarchies of urban space, she finally seems to be able to find her own place. Through her flâneuserie, she has arrived at a location where she suddenly finds and locates herself. As a black woman walking the city, she continues the concept of radical relational flâneuserie, incorporating migratory and diasporic identities which complexly inhabit not the centre but the peripheries of the postcolonial metropolis. Natalie, who

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throughout the novel pursues upward social mobility and is driven by the desire to leave behind the marker of her name and her origin, returns to her old neighbourhood. This return, however, does not constitute acquiescence or stasis, but a productive continuation of her search for an authentic engagement with her surroundings. This altered relation to the world of NW is underlined in a later scene, when she is on her way to Leah: The bus came. Natalie sat with her forehead rumbling on the glass. The Cock Tavern. McDonald’s. The old Woolworths. The betting shop. The State Empire. Willesden Lane. The cemetery. Whoever said these were fixed coordinates to which she had to be forever faithful? How could she play them false? Freedom was absolute and everywhere, constantly moving location. (334)

Natalie’s flâneuserie—her attempts to play false, to find freedom—lays the ground for her later encounter with Leah, which constitutes the novel’s ending—and, in my opinion, a final opening of the text towards alternative sexual affiliations and desires. The last scene of the novel does not constitute a happy ending like Adichie’s Americanah, nor does it offer an explicitly erotic, romantic (if open) ending like Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. Instead, it continues the interrogation of static family and partnership structures that had already been initiated by Smith’s first London novel, White Teeth. The very last segment of the novel is called “Visitation”. Narrated by Natalie, it links back to the very first part of the novel also called “Visitation” which had then be narrated by Leah. Natalie finds herself on her way to Leah’s house, after Michel calls her hysterically to tell her he has discovered Leah’s birth control pills which she had been hiding from him. When Natalie arrives, she joins Leah in her garden: “She tried to approach quietly with her kids, but they were dragging on her, both too hot and crying, slowing her down” (334). Michel takes them, so that Natalie can freely move into Leah’s direction. Michel, who had always wanted children, a desire thwarted by Leah, takes them from Natalie who offers them to him, so that she instead can comfort his wife. While the two women’s conversations and interactions never explicitly point towards materialised desires for each other, the novel still hints at a displacement or imbalance in the heteronormative set-ups of both their lives. As Alberto Fernández Carbajal has persuasively argued, “the centre of affective gravity in the novel’s closing shifts from a postcolonial disquisition of diasporic identities to Leah

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and Natalie’s renewed homosocial communion” (2014, 12). Their communality produces a complicated and uneasy togetherness, without husbands or children. They are brought together through the event that had functioned as one of the novel’s main connective nodes, Felix’s murder. On her walk with Nathan, Natalie had put one and one together and suspects Nathan of the murder: “‘I think I know what happened in Albert Road,’ said Natalie Blake. […] Through the glass doors they watched the children spinning on the lawn. Leah found the number online, Natalie dialled it. It was Keisha who did the talking” (337). On the last page of the novel, their “two heads pressed together over a handset” (337), they together call the police. Set apart from their partners and families, they re-develop their bond and form a new relational affiliation. Felix’s murder thus serves as a catalyst for both women’s collaborative, conspiratorial bonding. We never find out if Nathan actually did murder Felix—the text leaves this open and unresolved so that the reader can “piece it together outside the novel’s bounds” (Fernández Carbajal 2014, 13). Similarly, the newly formed connection between the two women is never fully spelled out; the text leaves them together in a tentative and unsettled stage of their relationship, but still firmly rooted in Leah’s garden—the opposite of nowhere. The novel thus produces an open ending which oscillates between queer and heterosexual desires, never fully deciding on one. In doing so, it imagines a possible shared future for Irish English Leah and British Caribbean Natalie. In my opinion, NW constitutes a continuation of the open but generative ending of White Teeth and offers the possibility of a queer reading which re-shuffles configurations of the heteronormative institution of marriage and of heterosexual partnerships. As Keguro Macharia has shown, “[l]ove names a condition and a possibility. Love does not transcend, efface, or mitigate inequality. Instead, it is one of the conditions through which inequality is lived” (2015, 72). Deeply informed by uncertainty, volatility and unstable, insecure desires, the two women’s friendship enables us and them to recognise at least some of the inequalities they have lived through, address the inequalities the novel negotiates via Felix’s death and points towards a future possibility, for love to act as an “index for the production of interpersonal and collective relationships, and to probe the political uses of heteronormative duty” (72). By tracing both Leah’s and Natalie’s embodied, enworlded engagements with their NW neighbourhoods, as well as the routes they inscribe into the postcolonial metropolis, and by then leaving the two them in a garden in the Caldwell estate, tenuously but

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intimately linked, Zadie Smith’s NW revolves around the contested question of how to be part of the world, of how to write one’s longing into the world. Between Intimacy and Distance II: Female Friendship in Swing Time Swing Time (2016a), Zadie Smith’s fifth novel, is initially rooted in the same part of North-West London as White Teeth and NW. It forms a continuation of her prior London texts and at the same time subverts and shifts the grounds upon which the other novels are built. Themes like love, affiliation, community, belonging and home are taken up once again, dusted off and rewritten. Like NW, Swing Time puts pronounced focus on North-West London, but like White Teeth, it also moves away from the space of the metropolis to travel to other parts of the world and therefore problematises the urban space of London even more than both predecessors. Whereas in White Teeth the historiographical movement back in time through the themes of teeth and root canals structures the novel, and in NW walking, public transport and cartography act as main practices to fashion the city and its relationships, in Swing Time, it is rhythmic, musical movements like dancing and swinging which can be regarded as the main structural elements of the text. As I will show, certain dance scenes act as important relational and affiliative nodes in a text that swings back and forth between different spaces, bodies and chronologies. The novel is divided into seven parts, framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The 14 chapters of part one, called “Early Days”, encompass the unnamed, autodiegetic narrator’s childhood and her burgeoning friendship with a girl called Tracey.12 Part two, “Early and Late”, oscillates between scenes from the narrator’s childhood and her early twenties in the 1990s when she works at YTV (a substitute for MTV) and is then employed by an international pop star called Aimee as a personal assistant. Part three is called “Intermission”; set in her late twenties, it traces the narrator’s time as a PA. Here, the novel sets up its main affective axis, an incident between the narrator and Tracey when they are 22 years old which irrevocably breaks their friendship (the reader is not told what this incident entails, that gap is only filled much later). The title of part four, “Middle Passage”, refers to multiple spatial and temporal displacements and thresholds, one of which is the narrator’s stay in the Gambia to do Aimee’s charity work. The narrative time of the narrator’s stays in Africa is consistently

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interspersed with memories of Tracey and the transitory period of their adolescence. Part five, “Night and Day”, and part six, “Day and Night”, continue to swing back and forth between the present and the past and between the spaces of London, New York and the Gambia. They recount important events and ruptures between the young women and the narrator’s time at university, but they also develop the narrator’s estrangement from Aimee. In the last, seventh part, called “Late Days”, the story describes the narrator’s last months working for Aimee before she is fired—the prologue, which is set in October 2008, had already hinted at this, but now the reader discovers why she has fallen from grace. The epilogue fully returns to 2008 London, and like White Teeth and NW, offers an open ending, attuned to possible, if uncertain, futures. In the following I will trace how the novel complicates its two main spatial dimensions, London and the Gambia, through the affective and relational desires its narrative is permeated with. To do so, I will look at the narrator’s embodied engagement with space and the women she encounters via a discussion of movements such as dance, swinging and walking along desire lines. The narrator’s life is entangled with the (her)stories of four women: her mother, her childhood friend Tracey, her employer Aimee and her friend Hawa. These women are connected to different spaces—her mother and Tracey belong to London, Aimee represents New York and Hawa lives in a rural village in the Gambia which the narrator visits multiple times in Aimee’s stead to do charity work. Like White Teeth, Swing Time complicates family relationships as the narrator’s family slowly breaks apart when she is growing up. Her father stays forever single and her mother finds a female partner. Like in NW, it is the intimate and problematic relationship between women which sets the stage for the novel’s engagement with both space and love. Mirroring NW, the story begins with a friendship between two young girls from Willesden, connected by a chance encounter—this time at a community centre ballet class, held at the local Estate’s church: If all of the Saturdays of 1982 can be thought of as one day, I met Tracey at ten a.m. on that Saturday, walking through the sandy gravel of a churchyard, each holding our mother’s hand. There were many other girls present but for obvious reasons we noticed each other, the similarities and the differences, as girls will. Our shade of brown was exactly the same—as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both—and our freckles gathered in the same areas, we were of the same height. (9)

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This moment marks the beginning of an intense and complicated friendship. The two girls are instantly drawn towards each other. As the only two mixed-race girls in the dance class and belonging to neighbouring housing estates, they form an alliance: “there was always this mutual awareness, an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying too deeply into relations with others” (16). Tracey’s father is African Caribbean (in and out of prison, even though Tracey claims he is away as a backup dancer for Michael Jackson), her mother white English (described as tacky, aggressive and over-­indulgent); the narrator’s father is white English (a small, docile man working for the Post Office) and her mother Jamaican-born (a harsh, politically minded feminist).13 These shared backgrounds in the diasporic spaces of North-West London divided by race and class are what bring the girls together in the dance class and school playground and what keep them together throughout their adolescence. Though their similarities bind them together, in a crucial way the two dancers are different: whereas the narrator loves music and dance and sings quite well, in the most important aspect she fails: she cannot dance. Tracey, however, possesses a natural talent for rhythm and movement: “Other girls had rhythm in their limbs, some had it in their hips or their little backsides”, as the narrator observes, but she had rhythm in individual ligaments, probably in individual cells. Every movement was as sharp and precise as any child could hope to make it, her body could align itself with any time signature, no matter how intricate. Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul. But no one sane could quarrel with her technique. I was—I am—in awe of Tracey’s technique. She knew the right time to do everything. (26)

Both girls are profoundly jealous of each other, a fact which serves as one of the main hinges of their emotional attachment. Their friendship seems obsessive, at times toxic. As Gibson argues regarding this female affiliation, Swing Time “savours the full palate of women’s intimacy: not solely sweet but briny, bitter, tart by turns. Friendship […] has often occupied the ground ceded by other interpersonal associations in Smith’s fiction. Her latest novel, however, explores friendship’s outer bounds” (2017, 137–138). Tracey constitutes the narrator’s compass, and she lets herself be stifled and oppressed by the energetic, egoistical other girl. She “speaks of Tracey in infatuation’s idiom, ‘besotted’ with her almost at once, and

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eagerly recounts each ‘cooling-off,’ slight, and hiatus their relationship endures” (138). Throughout the novel, the narrator will continue to swing back to Tracey in North-West London like a magnet drawn to iron—temporally, spatially, bodily and meta-textually as the chapters oscillate and alternate with each other. As Tracey continues with her training to become a professional dancer, our narrator finishes school and attends university in some unspecified coastal town; their relationship grows fraught as they move further and further away from each other. It finally fully breaks apart when Tracey, in a fit of malicious jealousy and anger, accuses the narrator’s father of improper sexual behaviour—something the narrator can never forgive. Still, Tracey remains a constant fix-point in the narrator’s mind, disregarding which part of the world she inhabits. Whereas in NW walking and cartography act as the novel’s main linking devices, here it is another form of movement, dance, which produces the story’s underlying mechanism. There is one particular dance scene I want to draw on to showcase the two girls’ particular embodied relationality— one which entails larger political questions of female black bodies’ agency and empowerment that pervade the whole novel. When the two girls are 10 years old, they are invited to Lily Bingham’s birthday party, a white middle-class affair where they are “the only black girls and aside from Lily knew nobody there. At once Tracey became hostile” (76). They go to the cinema and afterwards play at Lily’s house. The whole time, Tracey tries to make trouble: “‘That’s enough, now,’ Lily’s mother kept mumbling, but she couldn’t establish any authority, her own sense of embarrassment seemed to stop her” (77). A disquieting sense of racial divides between blackness and whiteness pervades the party, a sore spot which Tracey keeps prodding. She goes as far as stealing “two lacy camisoles taken from Mrs Bingham’s underwear drawer”, in order to “put on a show” (79): We put the record on, we rehearsed. I knew there was something wrong, that it wasn’t like any dance we’d done before, but I felt it was out of my hands. […] She [Lily] pressed the button that said ‘Record’, and by doing so put in motion a chain of cause and effect which, more than a quarter of a century later, has come to feel like fate, would be almost impossible not to consider as fate, but which—whatever you think of fate—can certainly and rationally be said to have had one practical consequence: there’s no need for me to describe the dance itself. But there were things not captured by the camera. As we reached the final chorus—the moment where I am astride

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Tracey, on that chair—this was also the moment that Lily Bingham’s mother […] opened her son’s bedroom door and saw us. That is why the footage stops as abruptly as it does. She froze at the threshold, still as Lot’s wife. Then she exploded. (80–81)

On the one hand, this scene showcases Tracey’s unruliness, her misbehaviour and the way she exploits her outsider status, pulling the narrator with her. They dance to an Aimee song, a white woman closely modelled after Madonna and the international popstar who will later become the narrator’s employer. The dance, however, also symbolises the rules and oppressive hierarchies imposed on black girls’ bodies. Regarded as uncouth and overtly sexual, their behaviour is read as improper and deviant in comparison to the other orderly, innocent white girls at the party. Examining the scene, it becomes apparent that the two black girls are doing nothing more than experiment with their bodies, rehearsing a dance scene from a provocative music video by a popstar they both love. Essentially, the shared dance creates a safe space of belonging for two girls who are different from the other girls at the party; a shared sense of home in an inhospitable London neighbourhood. The scene, however, will come back to haunt the narrator decades later towards the end of the novel, when she is fired by Aimee for having an (admittedly dispassionate) affair with Lamin, a Senegalese man working for Aimee in the Gambia.14 In the wake of the ensuing press drama, Tracey anonymously leaks the video tape of their dance, with the threatening message: “Now everyone knows who you really are” (5). The resurfaced tape of the dance sequence functions as a rupture, as a way of demeaning and shaming the black girl’s/woman’s body and her potential sexuality. Throughout the novel, the narrator traces the histories of various black dancers and the racial, gendered obstacles they encounter—from Michael Jackson to Jeni Le Gon and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (who are put in opposition to music hall minstrels or Fred Astaire in blackface).15 Questions of corporeality and movement become tied to freedom and power, the ability to move is connected to dancers who tried to dance across boundaries. Jeni Le Gon (1916–2012), one of the first African American women to establish a successful solo career in tap dancing and who becomes both our narrator’s and Tracey’s childhood obsession, exemplifies this. As Suzanne Scafe has explained,

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Le Gon was [Bill “Bojangles”] Robinson’s first African American dance partner in Hooray for Love (1935) but was consistently overlooked for parts in big productions such as Easter Parade (1948) or Broadway Melody (1936). In the latter, despite being used to choreograph the lead female role, she was dropped from the cast (Hill 2010, 124–5). In the novel, the girls watch Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937), where Le Gon performs solo alongside a blackface Eddie Cantor […]. In this film, as in many others, she was consigned, according to the cast list, to a “speciality spot”, defined as such because it could be neatly excised from the plot when the movie was played in the American South. (2019, 109)

In Swing Time, black dancing bodies are plucked out of time, their existence ruptured and disjointed, and are repositioned in turn through two young black girls who enthusiastically dance them back into the present, thus “demonstrating history’s repetitions, and mapping progress as recursive rather than linear” (111). In and through these historical black (and female) dancers, as Greenidge argues, “Smith suggests, exists another way—a way to play with time, to move with time, to recognize all of the incongruities and historical rhymes of the last century and this strange, destabilizing new one, and to respond by turning it all into a dance” (2017, 198). In a similar way, the continuous movement of dancing and swinging in Swing Time is connected to various spatial borders and temporal thresholds the narrator crosses. Her and Tracey’s shared dance at Lily Bingham’s 10th birthday party in Willesden, then, constitutes an element of the novel’s underlying deep structure, but also points to the subversive, disruptive power of the black female body in movement and accompanying discourses of shame and agency, connecting two black girls in North-West London to a worldly community of other black dancers. When we start reading Swing Time, we find the protagonist stranded in London, returned after working for Aimee with whom she had jetted around the world. Besides Tracey, Aimee is the other woman responsible for the narrator’s movement, here not of the dancing kind, but entailing travels all over the globe. Swing Time metronomically swings back and forth in time and space, and large portions of it leave England to either play in the States, on a plane, or in a rural village in the forever unnamed West-African country,16 where Aimee has set out to do charity work by opening a girls’ school. Tracing the narrator’s ties to different women, the novel zigzags across a quarter century, from the narrator’s first dance class at age 7 to the aforementioned career-ending scandal that takes place in

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2008. After this dramatic incident, the narrator is sent back to London, fallen from grace. Here, I want to focus on a London scene from the novel’s prologue, set right after the narrator has returned: I walked out into the city. It was a perfect autumnal afternoon, chill but bright, under certain trees there was a shedding of golden leaves. I walked past the cricket ground and the mosque, past Madame Tussauds, up Goodge Street and down Tottenham Court Road, through Trafalgar Square, and found myself finally in Embankment, and then crossing the bridge. I thought—as I often think as I cross that bridge—of two young men, students, who were walking over it very late one night when they were mugged and thrown over the railing, into the Thames. One lived and one died. […] Thinking of him, I kept to the right-hand side of the bridge, by the railway line, and avoided looking at the water. (2–3)

The spatial engagement with the centre of London seems uncertain, marked by an avoidance, a refusal. The bright golden autumn day of the glorious city centre (we are brought along the scenic route) is deeply problematised by the narrator’s thoughts of racial crime and death. This is very different from how she moved and danced in Willesden where she grew up with Tracey. It points towards a sense of instability and estrangement the narrator experiences, having just returned to her home city after years abroad but not feeling particularly at home, or grounded. This spatial, emotional displacement is symbolised by the way she moves across the bridge and engages with the space of the metropolis. She avoids looking and clings to the bannisters almost as if afraid of becoming unmoored and falling herself. In another of the novel’s sections, titled “Middle Passage”, the narrator’s fraught relationship to the idea of home becomes even clearer. The chapters collected under this section alternate her puberty in Willesden and the work she does in the rural Gambian village. The term “middle passage” marks both the transitory space of growing up, of growing out of girlhood into womanhood, but also pinpoints her arrival in Africa and her self-conscious search for the roots of her mother’s Caribbean heritage and the history of slavery that stretches across the ocean. This double movement parallels the urban space of London with her awkwardly felt displacement in the Gambia. As Suzanne Scafe has succinctly argued, “[a]ll black diasporic identifications are, in this novel, provisional, uncertain, and contradictory. The scenes set in the Gambia intersect those in

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London or New York and are used to trouble unexamined assumptions of an African, home, origin, roots, or claims to what Saidiya Hartman (2008) refers to as a singular ‘we’” (2019, 105). Here, spaces of belonging are simultaneously re- and displaced: city and village, land and ocean, centre and periphery. These contested and unstable belongings become painfully apparent when the narrator visits Kunta Kinteh, an island in the Gambian river from where the slave ships left to cross the Atlantic: I wanted to see at last, with my own eyes, the shore from which the ships had left, carrying their cargo of humans, destined for my mother’s island, and then on to the Americas and Britain, bearing the sugar and the cotton, before turning back again, a triangle that had produced—among its numberless consequences—my own existence. (177) All paths lead back here, my mother had always told me, but now I was here, in this storied corner of the continent, I experienced it not as an exceptional place. […] I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere. (316)

Experiencing the starting point of the slave trade’s middle passage across the Atlantic, the narrator cannot place herself inside her own history. Roots and routes which lead back in time are obstructed, complicated. This spatial and temporal displacement recalls the disruptive trauma of the middle passage. As Smith herself has noted in an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, “it just seemed to me that what was done to black people, historically, was to take them out of the time of their life. That’s what fundamentally happened. We had a life in one place and it would have continued and who knows what would have happened—nobody knows” (Smith 2016b, n. pag.). The only way the narrator of Swing Time can connect to the African country and the people living there is through encountering dance. There are two scenes which illuminate this relocation, both of body and in time. The first scene occurs when the narrator has just arrived in the Gambia, opening the “Middle Passage” section: The greatest dancer I ever saw was the kankurang. But in the moment I didn’t know who or what it was: a wildly swaying orange shape, of a man’s height but without a man’s face, covered in many swishing, overlapping leaves. Like a tree in the blaze of a New York fall that uproots itself and now dances down the street. A large gang of boys trailed behind it in the red

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dust, and a phalanx of women, with palm leaves in their hands—their mothers, I assumed. […] Whatever was coming towards us was dancing to rhythms reggae never approaches. Beats so fast, so complex, that you had to think about them—or see them expressed through the body of a dancer—to understand what you were hearing. […] There was only the present moment, only the dance. (163, 164)

The euphoria, the entanglement of the people dancing on the streets, displaces the narrator’s worries and sense of un-belonging. “I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life” (165). She learns that the kankurang comes for the boys, a dancer who acts as transitory figure, “a threshold, between youth and maturity, wards off evil spirits and is the guarantor of order and justice and continuity between and within his people. He is a guide who leads the young through their difficult middle passage” (166). The middle passage from youth to adulthood is paralleled with the narrator’s own middle passage (“I wondered about the girls. Who comes for the girls?” 166) as well as her search for her mother’s ancestors’ middle passage. The second connective dance scene happens much later in time, when she has been to the Gambia several times. This is set towards the end of the novel, when there is a dance in the Gambian village’s centre and all non-Africans are invited to join the dance and music circle: Eight drumming women later, even Mary-Beth had attempted a dance and it was my turn. I had a mother pulling each arm, dragging me up. […] I still had no idea about dance, only instincts. I watched them for a minute, the two women, as they danced at me, teasing me, and I listened carefully to the multiple beats, and knew that what they were doing I, too, could do. I stood between them and matched them step for step. The kids went crazy. There were so many voices screaming at me I stopped being able to hear the drums, and the only way I could carry on was to respond to the movements of the women themselves, who never lost the beat, who heard it through everything. (417)

This scene is diametrically opposed to the first Gambian dance performed by the kankurang. Here, she does not observe a masculine ritual danced by men and boys—instead she joins a circle of female dancers and connects to them and their corporeality through dancing herself. Her friend Hawa afterwards tells her that “even though you are a white girl, you dance like you are a black” (417). The narrator’s very first dance together with

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Tracey in London at Lily Bingham’s birthday party had underlined her difference to the other white girls. Here, she is initially thought of as similarly other, as white and European, but the dance initiates a tentative transition, a makeshift movement towards belonging elsewhere. Through these two dances, one she observes and one she performs, she experiences a “different kind of history from [her] mother’s, the kind that is barely written down—that is felt” (101). These embodied dance scenes are continuously replaced by visceral memories of her and Tracey’s friendship. Tracey, who instead of becoming the successful dancer she always hoped to be, ends up living in the same council estate they grew up in, with no job and four children. Tracey is thus forever linked to that part of North-West London. She roots the narrator to London, binds her to the community and neighbourhood, and this connection fashions the novel’s anatomy, its flesh and bones. After she has been fired from her job as Aimee’s assistant, the narrator returns to London. Here, she discovers that her mother had to go to the hospice as she slowly loses her battle with cancer. She also discovers that Tracey had sent abusive emails to her mother, who at the time acted as the local council’s representative in Willesden. Having come back, after all this time—and after all the swinging back and forth the text has generated between the 2008 prologue and the 2008 epilogue—we now encounter a changed engagement with London’s urban space. I argue that there are two equally important endings to Swing Time, both connected to the city and to the affective, interpersonal relations it is saturated with: I was settling into the idea that I wasn’t going anywhere, there was no hurry any longer, I would not be on the next plane. […] Everything that afternoon felt wide open to me, a kind of shock, I didn’t know what was happening in the next few days or even the next few hours—a new feeling. […] Afterwards, he wanted to get on the tube, at Waterloo, it was the best stop for me, too, but instead I left him and chose the bridge. Ignoring both barriers, walking straight down the centre, over the river, until I reached the other side. (450)

This bridge scene, the last paragraph before the epilogue begins, demarcates a radical shift in how the narrator moves through the city. Whereas in the first bridge scene in the prologue the narrator was plagued by an instability, an inability to ground herself, here she leaves her male companion at the Tube station and walks straight down the centre of the bridge,

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ignoring the barriers until she has crossed to the other side. This crossing can be described as a self-empowered act of movement, of certainty—and its straight-forwardness poses a complete antithesis to the movements of swinging on which the novel had hitherto been built. This, for me, constitutes the first ending of the novel: a changed engagement with the urbanity of London which she only now can fully grasp after having spent time away, swinging back and forth, in New York and in the Gambia. The second ending is closely tied to Tracey and a similar form of movement: The next day, I took a morning walk around the barren perimeter of Tiverton Rec, the wind whipping through the caged fence, carrying away sticks thrown wide for dogs, and found myself walking on, in the opposite direction from the flat and past the station that would have taken me to the hospice. My mother died at twelve minutes past ten, just as I turned into Willesden Lane […] Tracey’s tower came into view, above the horse chestnuts, and with it reality. […] Impatient, I left the path and crossed diagonally through the grass, heading for the covered walkway. She was right above me, on her balcony, in a dressing gown and slippers, her hands in the air, turning, turning, her children around her, everybody dancing. (453)

This is the very last scene of the novel, and it offers a complex interweaving of affect and space: instead of walking through the centre of London like before, the narrator has returned “home”, to Willesden in NorthWest London. Again, what we find here is a straight line, crossing diagonally through space. The destination is not the other bank of the river, however, but Tracey. This form of walking, this impatient crossing through grass where there is no “official” road, is called “desire line” or “desire path”. A term usually employed in urban planning discourse, it defines paths which emerge when shortcuts are being fashioned regardless of formal pathways: “the term ‘desire line’ originates from the field of urban planning and has been around for almost a hundred years. A desire line normally refers to a worn path showing where people naturally walk” (Myhill 2004, n. pag.): Desire lines, also known as cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails), can be found all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine lawns and worming through forest undergrowth. They appear anywhere people want to walk, where no formal paths have been provided. (Sometimes they even appear despite the existence of formal paths, out of what seems to

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be sheer mulishness—or, perhaps, cowishness.) Some view them as evidence of pedestrians’ inability or unwillingness to do what they’re told; in the words of one academic journal, they ‘record collective disobedience.’ Others believe that they reveal the inherent flaws in a city’s design—the places where paths ought to have been built, rather than where they were built. For this reason, desire lines infuriate some landscape architects and enrapture others.” (Moor 2017, n. pag.)

Desire lines record a “collective disobedience” as they cut through space and make a path where there was none before. Penetrating beyond official routes, cemented streets and designated roads, desire lines defy authority and embark on off-limit areas: just like desire often veers off the trodden paths. In Sara Ahmed’s words: “[people] deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow. Deviation leaves its own marks on the ground, which can help generate alternative lines, which cross the ground in unexpected ways. Such lines are indeed traces of desire” (2006, 20). Like Natalie/ Keisha, who climbs over a wall to enter Caldwell estate and who cuts right through the heart of NW, the narrator in Swing Time “leaves the path”. Instead of obeying to societal rules (going to see her dying mother in hospital), she seeks her desire in another form of affiliation and connection. Even though the two women have been long estranged, and their relationship is irrevocably broken, Tracey is still what the narrator most longs for. Depicted on her balcony, in midst of her children, she turns and dances. Ending with the last word “dancing” and the light and carefree image of a woman in her morning gown with her hands in the air, the text finally reveals what had always formed its emotional core: Tracey. The narrator’s mother’s statement, “you know where you came from and where you’re going” (31), which has echoed hollowly throughout the entirety of the novel, is given new meaning here. Whilst I would argue that the narrator still does not know where she is from and where she is going, she has ultimately come a lot closer to finding out where some of her roots lie and where her future routes might take her. Movements of dancing, swinging and wilfully walked desire lines connect here to particular female embodied engagements with spaces and affects. The love that interlinks the narrator with Tracey and which had, throughout the novel, propelled the text forward is here uneasily spelled out, materialised. The city of London acts as both starting point and point of return for this love and marks a complicated belonging, a problematic and haunted belonging, but belonging nonetheless.

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I want to return here to Lauren Berlant, who in her work on love, as I have shown in this book’s introduction, queries the usefulness and validity of thinking with and through love. As she argues, love has “been floated by so many as a solution—literally, a loosening or an unfastening, a dissolution—to the problem of social antagonism, or fractured community” (2011, 685). If we think love as a force which propels us forward along uncharted desire lines, love also contains something messy: “If love is force, though, it is a mess-making force […]. Such a process does not clean up the world well” (685). Love is a force that not only repairs and restores but also has the potential to be unruly and potentially destructive, to “make a mess” of the world. Berlant ascertains that her scepticism does not necessarily suggest that thinking of love as a powerful force is futile: “these arguments do not mean that love is a useless concept—its […] utility is that love allows one to want something, to want a world, amid the noise of the ambivalence and anxieties about having and losing” (687). What lies at the heart of Berlant’s criticism, and what also lies at the heart of Zadie Smith’s articulations of love and friendship in Swing Time’s world-makings and its protagonist’s desire (lines), is that love allows us to “want a world”, to imagine “the affective dimensions that it would take to (re)build a world” (ibid.)—however messy and untidy such a world might be. Like NW, Swing Time ends in the estates, with a fraught, frail connection between two female second-generation immigrants who have found an arduous sense of affiliation in their city. Like White Teeth, Swing Time is initially very firmly rooted in the urban metropolitan space of North-­ West London, but from there spins out into the world. These parallels and differences to Smith’s earlier novels shed light on the fact that Swing Time has London as only one possible centre and from there connects translocally to other places in the world, deliberately confusing boundaries of the local in an effort to capture the increasingly complicated nature of African diasporic identities, both place-based and mobile, rooted and uprooted. Through the narrator’s intimate and tactile connection to her friend Tracey, Swing Time’s London becomes an open and relational space of connections and community—London-but-not-quite-London, a space which imagines multi-routed homes and points towards the productive potential of negotiating nationhood and neighbourhood.

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“Daringly Imagine an Alternative City” The affective and emotional geographies that Zadie Smith’s London novels perform make visible how such literary cities have the potential to productively and creatively reimagine the world. They “re-place” their city spaces in performative acts of worlding: Smith’s texts produce stories of community and connection, however troubled, that splay out over NorthWest London and into the rest of the world, both delineating what it means to live in a global metropolis such as London and simultaneously rewriting the former heart of the empire according to fractious yet fertile identity conceptions. As Paul Gilroy argued in his 1999 opening address for the London: Postcolonial City conference, we need “to inquire into the possibility of moving beyond and beneath the old colonial drama into more forward-looking and assertive stances” (68). He calls for a “new position”, a “dissenting place”, in order to form “novel ways of comprehending and figuring our humanity and of making, and writing London’s history” (68). In Smith’s novels, the city is enacted as a space that has at its heart multiple and intersecting narratives of desire, love and friendship; as such, they respond to Gilroy’s call for re-figuring humanity, attempting to rebuild from the ground up a “nation divided by accents and postcodes” (Smith 2009, 251). Novels like White Teeth, NW and Swing Time intervene, critique, contest—they register the city, and especially London, as a site of struggle for power, for self-empowerment and for the right to belong. John McLeod formulates postcolonial London novels as “a way of regarding the metropolitan culture as it foregrounds the subaltern agency and activities of those who have struggled to settle owing to the architecture of power which creates mappings of the city in terms of officious ‘place’” (2004, 15). By prioritising notions of agency and activity and by positing postcolonial London writings as a strategy of cultural, discursive and imaginative production, McLeod outlines the reconfigurations of a struggle that is experienced by those other to the centre. Postcolonial London writings like Smith’s London trilogy can “cursive in which divisive tensions are effectively re-sited, and progressive, transformative kinds of social and cultural relationships are imagined” (16; emphasis added). These fictions are motors of change and bring to light a new way of understanding the city, as non-English but all-the-more-English. Offering dissent and resistance, they write against hegemonic structures, not only within the city but also within the world—via everyday practices of

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space-­making, of community-building, of creating relational interpersonal connections. In this chapter, I have focused on the novels’ affective cores which consist of different creative resistances and productive defiances of and in love: In White Teeth, Irie Jones gradually fashions her own embodied and enworlded London which is paralleled by the possible space of Jamaica as she forms an alternative family that does not conform to normative romantic conventions. NW has at its heart the queer relationship between two women which is brought to the surface by their multi-directional affective encounters and their routes through the city. Swing Time features a friendship that acts as the centre of a story that swings back and forth between different time frames and the spaces of London and West-Africa—an intimate friendship that in its intensity re-directs the world of its narrator. As Henri Lefebvre has argued in “The Right to the City” in Writings on Cities, the urban and its many cultural performances are marked by “simultaneity and encounter”, and as this “place of encounters, focus of communication and information, the urban becomes what is always was: place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution of normalities and constraints, the moment of play and the unpredictable” (1996, 129; emphasis in original). In Smith’s London trilogy, the city as ultimate space of desire and encounter is turned into a tool to negotiate global, diasporic worlds—and to imagine possible worlds that are open, unpredictable, relational, liveable and hospitable.

Notes 1. Smith’s London trilogy is formed by her first novel White Teeth (2000), by NW (2012) and by her fifth novel, the London-but-not-quite-London novel Swing Time (2016). Because the middle novel, NW, deals with the postcolonial metropolis London in the most explicit way, it will constitute one of this chapter’s main focal points, but I will constantly draw parallels to its younger and older siblings. 2. For an overview of the modern history of Black London writing—from Jean Rhys’ early London texts in the 1930s to the first Windrush generation writers like Selvon, Lammings, and Gilroy via Chaudhury, Ghose, or Markandaya, to Desai, Aidoo, Emecheta, Ghosh, Kureishi, Bandele, Evaristo, Syal, Adebayo and so on—see Murdoch, Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film (2012); Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003); or Okokon, Black Londoners 1880–1990 (1998).

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3. Notting Hill in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the main areas where immigrants from the Caribbean settled and bore no resemblance to today’s posh West London panache—the only remnant of that time is the now commercialised Notting Hill Carnival, an event originally meant to celebrate difference and Caribbean culture. 4. Smith herself is very conscious of the many palimpsestic historical layers that London’s architecture and monuments display; of Trafalgar Square she says in an interview for Tate: The Art Magazine: “Trafalgar Square is this ­wonderful tiny version of what we were. It’s so elegiac to me to stand there and see South Africa House and all these places we once owned and now we only have streets. Jamaica Street, Jewry Street—you can see that everywhere. The sun never used to set on us and it rises and sets in one day on the square. It’s so humbling. If you are facing Nelson, there’s a Henry Havelock statue on the left. You never notice him. This man was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indian people. His most famous crime was forcing a group of people in a village to lick up a square metre of blood of their relatives he’d killed. On the back of the statue it says something about Englishmen never forgetting, but Trafalgar Square is a monument to our ability to forget everything about our history” (2000b, 41). 5. Irie’s weave is the product of another interesting encounter the novel’s London spaces proffer—an encounter constituting both economical exchange and shared female solidarity. Her hairdresser sends her to a shop next door, owned by an Indian woman, who sells natural hair weaves. When Irie enters, a South Asian girl desperately attempts to sell her own hair—and Irie ends up with it, because it is the shade of dark brown/red sleek hair she desires. Again, I’d like to reference Emma Tarlo’s Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair (2016) for more context. 6. I am borrowing this term from Henri Lefebvre’s work in The Production of Space, where he posits that “it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-­ textures’, to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space” ([1974] 2003, 118). 7. As Lauren Elkin points out, “significantly, this [Felix’s murder] happens at a bus stop, in an echo of the 1993 knifing of Stephen Lawrence, in South London” (2015, n. pag.), thus producing a historical connection to other black victims on London’s streets. 8. As Lauren Elkin argues, “before the twentieth century, women did not have the freedom to wander idly through the streets of Paris. The only women with the freedom to circulate (and a limited freedom at that) were the streetwalkers and ragpickers; Baudelaire’s mysterious and alluring passante, immortalized in his poem ‘To a (Female) Passer-By’, is assumed to have been a woman of the night. Even the word flâneuse doesn’t techni-

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cally exist in French, except, according to an 1877 dictionary entry, to designate a kind of lounge chair” (2016b, n. pag.). 9. For more extensive and layered discussion on the interrelation of gender and male and female city walkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see, for example, Dreyer and McDowall (2012); D’Souza and McDonough (2006); Parsons (2000). 10. One scholar who has examined the relationship between flânerie/flâneuserie and postcolonial, diasporic identities is Isabel Carrera Suárez in her 2015 essay “The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism”— while certainly constituting an important first step towards a theorization of postcolonial flâneuserie, the article only skims the surface of this field in its exploration of texts by Simone Lazaroo, Hsu-Ming Teo and Dionne Brand. Another, more productive exploration is Jenni Ramone’s article on “Sweet-­Talker, Street-Walker: Speaking Desire on the London Street in Postcolonial Diaspora Writing by Women” (2012). Cf. also Ortega, “The Black Flâneuse: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca’” (2007). 11. Just like there exist many online cartography projects which trace the London routes of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or James Joyce’s Ulysses through Dublin, there are also a few projects that have produced a Google Map of Natalie/Keisha’s walk (cf. Toth 2016). As we have seen above, however, these maps cannot fully grasp the emotional, affective dimension of walking through the city. 12. This is the first novel Smith has written from a homodiegetic first-person point of view. Swing Time constructs a memoir-like text, which self-­ reflexively “channels the propulsive, addictive, discursive mode of the novel-­memoir hybrid that has lately been in fashion” (Schwartz 2016, n. pag.). Through narratorial hints, it becomes clear that the text is presented as being constructed, ostensibly written as we read it: “It strikes me now that if I want to watch this same clip—as I did a few minutes ago, just before writing this—[…]” (56). This leads to an often unsettling reading experience, as the narrative oscillates between the intimacy of a first-person account and the narrator’s often cool and distanced approach to her own story. 13. For an astute and engaging reading of the relationship between the narrator and her Black feminist activist mother, see Scafe 2019. 14. It is important to note here that while the narrator seems to be heterosexual, she mentions men in general, and her relationships to them in particular, only very fleetingly. Her mind and her body are only ever really engaged in relation to other women, be it Aimee, Tracey, her mother or Hawa. Cf. a scene in the novel in which the narrator goes on a date with a man and they watch a West End musical play—once Tracey enters the

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stage, she completely ignores him, to the point where he becomes angry and aggressive and leaves (353–362): “and the longer I spoke the clearer I saw and understood […]—that only one thing had happened in London, really: I’d seen Tracey. After so many years of not seeing Tracey I had seen her” (144). 15. George Stevens’ 1936 musical comedy film Swing Time, which features Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, gives the novel its title: towards the beginning of the storyline, the narrator re-watches it; her beloved childhood memory of it is jarred when she realises that Astaire dances in blackface. Swing Time the novel thus not only engages in the act of temporally and spatially swinging back and forth but also in morally swinging between multiple, antagonistic stances on blackness, racial oppression and empowerment. 16. The text never names the country, but through geographical hints, the readers can trace and map the Gambia. In leaving it nameless, the novel points towards the hypocrisy of Aimee’s charity work—where African countries remain interchangeable and are only used in order to advance Aimee’s own reputation.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. [2004] 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ball, John Clement. 2004. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bartholomew Ortega, Kirsten. 2007. “The Black Flâneuse: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca.’” Journal of Modern Literature 30 (4): 139–155. Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Baudelaire, Charles. [1863] 1964. “The Painter of Modern Life.” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. New  York: Da Capo Press. Benjamin, Walter. [1969] 1985. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso. 9–106. Bennett, Louise. [1957] 2012. “Colonization in Reverse.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed, vol. 7. The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. NY: Norton. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. “A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 683–691.

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Carrera Suárez, Isabel. 2015. “The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetic of Pedestrianism: Writing the Post-Diasporic.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 17 (6): 853–865. D’Souza, Aruna and Tom McDonough. 2006. The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press. De Certeau, Michel. [1980] 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. DeCaires Narain, Denise. 2004. Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style. New York: Routledge. Dreyer, Elfriede and Estelle McDowall. 2012. “Imagining the Flaneur as a Woman.” Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research 38 (1): 30–44. Dyer, Rebecca. 2004. “Generations of Black Londoners: Echoes of 1950s Caribbean Migrants’ Voices in Victor Headley’s Yardie and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Obsidian 5 (2): 81–102. Elkin, Lauren. 2015. “‘Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure’: Class Mobility and Public Transport in Zadie Smith’s NW.” Études Britanniques Contemporaines. 49. Web. December 01, 2015. http:// journals.openedition.org/ebc/2679 ———. 2016a. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. London: Vintage. ———. 2016b. “Radical Flâneuserie: Reimagining the Aimlessly Wandering Woman.” The Paris Review. Web. August 25, 2016. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog /2016/08/25/radical-flaneuserie/ Enright, Anne. “Mind the Gap.” The New York Times. Web. September 21, 2012. h t t p : / / w w w. n y t i m e s . c o m / 2 0 1 2 / 0 9 / 2 3 / b o o k s / r e v i e w / n w -­b y -­ zadie-­smith.html Favell, Adrian. 2001. Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain. New York: Palgrave. Fernández Carbajal, Alberto. 2014. “On being queer and postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith’s NW through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 1–16. Gibson, Lindsey Gale. 2017. “Kinetic Joy.” Dissent. 137–141. Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1999. “A London sumting dis…” Critical Quarterly 41 (3): 57–69. Greenidge, Kaitlyn. 2017. “Shaken Out of Time.” Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion 93 (1): 196–199. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Hill, Constance V. 2010. Tap Dancing in America: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Innes, C.L. 2002. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keith, Michael. 2003. “Postcolonial London and the Allure of the Cosmopolitan City.” AA Files 49: 57–67. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. “The Right to the City.” Writings on Cites. Eds./Trans. Leonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 2003. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Longworth, Deborah. 2015. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. “Literary London: Post-, Ex-, Trans-, Neo?” ESC 32 (2–3): 293–305. Macharia, Keguro. 2015. “Love.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (1): 68–75. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2007. World City. Cambridge: Polity. McLeod, John. 2004. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London & New York: Routledge. ———. 2006. “Orphia in the Underground: Postcolonial London Transport.” Transport(s) in the British Empire and Commonwealth. Eds. Michèle Lurdos and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Montpellier: Publications de L’Université Paul-­ Valéry. 389–405. Moor, Robert. 2017. “Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire.” The New  Yorker. Web. February 20, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/ annals-­of-­technology/tracing-­and-­erasing-­new-­yorks-­lines-­of-­desire Murdoch, H. Adlai. 2007. “‘All Skin’ Teeth Is Not Grin’: Performing Caribbean Diasporic Identity in a Postcolonial Metropolitan Frame.” Callaloo 30 (2): 575–593. ———. 2012. Creolizing the Metropole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Myhill, Carl. 2004. “Commercial Success by Looking for Desire Lines.” Computer Human Interaction. APCHI 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3101. Eds. Masood Masoodian, Steve Jones and Bill Rogers. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. Nash, Jennifer C. 2013. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 11 (2): 1–24. Nasta, Susheila. 2006. “Introduction.” The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin. v–xvii. Nichols, Grace. 1983. i is a long memoried woman. London: Caribbean Cultural International. ———. 1984. The Fat Black Woman’s Poems. London: Virago. ———. 1998. “Wherever I Hang.” Kunapipi XX (1): 3.

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Okokon, Susan. 1998. Black Londoners 1880–1990. Stroud: Sutton Publis. Ortega, Kirsten Bartholomew. 2007. “The Black Flâneuse: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca.’” Journal of Modern Literature 30 (4): 139–155. Parsons, Deborah. 2000. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perfect, Michael. 2014. Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pike, David. 2002. “Modernist Space and the Transformation of Underground London.” Imagined Londons. Ed. Pamela K. Gilbert. Albany: State University of New York Press. 101–119. Pirker, Eva Ulrike. 2016. “Approaching Space: Zadie Smith’s North London Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (1): 64–76. Ramone, Jenni. 2012. “Sweet Talker, Street-Walker: Speaking Desire on the London Street in Postcolonial Diaspora Writing by Women.” Sexuality and Contemporary Literature. Eds. Joel Gwynne and Angelia Poon. Amherst: Cambria Press. Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2003. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: Harper Collins. Scafe, Suzanne. 2015. “Unsettling the Centre: Black British Fiction”. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970–Present. Vol. 10. Ed. Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 214–228. ———. 2019. “Gendered, Post-Diasporic Mobilities and the Politics of Blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016).” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies: A Journal of Caribbean Perspectives on Gender and Feminism 13: 93–120. Schwartz, Alexandra. 2016. “Zadie Smith’s Memory Tricks.” The New  Yorker. Web. November 14, 2016. ­http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/14/zadie-smiths-memory-tricks Selvon, Samuel. [1956] 2006. The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin. Slavin, Molly. 2015. “Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s NW.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 48 (1): 97–119. Smith, Zadie. 2000a. White Teeth. London: Penguin. ———. 2000b. “Capital Gains.” Interview with Philip Dodd. Tate: The Art Magazine. Tate Modern. Special Issue. 21: 36–42. ———. 2009. Changing My Mind. London: Penguin. ———. 2012. NW. London: Penguin. ———. 2016a. Swing Time. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2016b. “The Pieces of Zadie Smith.” Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides. The New York Times Style Magazine. Web. October 17, 2016. https://www. nytimes.com/ 2016 /10/17/ t-magazine/zadie-smith-swing-time-jeffrey-­­ eugenides.html

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Toth, Hayley. 2016. “Making Home in the City: A Spatial Analysis of Representations of London in Contemporary Fiction.” Google Maps. Web. goo.gl/Ab5Ins Wilson, Elizabeth. 1992. “The Invisible Flâneur.” New Left Review 191: 90–110. Wolff, Janet. 1985. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory Culture Society 2 (3): 37–46. Wolfreys, Julian. 1998. Writing London, Volume 1: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zephaniah, Benjamin. 2001. “The London Breed.” Too Black, Too Strong. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books.

CHAPTER 4

Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi

White is for Witching has a sharp personality, and I think it’s in a way an unlikeable book, because it talks about racism and eating disorders and hauntings. It’s a book that doesn’t want to be read, in some way. —Helen Oyeyemi, “The Professionally Haunted Life of Helen Oyeyemi” (2014b, n. pag.)

Helen Oyeyemi is, as Kate Webb has pointed out, “one of our most adept demythologizers, teasing out the loose ends of old stories to see what room there may be for new interpretations” (2014, n. pag.). All her stories play with genre conventions and reconstruct the foundations of both Western and African storytelling by subverting fairy tales, folk tales and mythology. Concerning these rewritings, Oyeyemi herself has said in an interview with Hazlitt: “I’m here to mess up all the good fairy tales” (2014a, n. pag.). In her plays, short stories and novels, Oyeyemi takes narrative foils to then twist them into something unfamiliar—gleefully toying with traditions and norms. Her work not only unsettles genre and storytelling conventions but is, just like the novels by Chimamanda Adichie and Zadie Smith discussed in previous chapters, especially attuned to the complexities of African diasporic belonging as it flickers between different geographical spaces and affective positionings. In all of her works, be it her first novel which she wrote while still at school, her plays which were © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_4

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performed when she was studying at Cambridge or her more recent short story collections, Oyeyemi irreverently engages in mess-making: turning upside-down known, worn stories in order to reposition them in a twenty-­ first century marked by hybridity and mobility. As Buckley and Ilott argue, her works can be positioned “at the margins of histories, locations, and genres” and as such defamiliarise “the mundane through richly symbolic, intertextual and haunting narratives that work to undermine rather than confirm accepted ways of knowing or being” (2017, 1). Oyeyemi’s writing engages in practices of re-mixing, re-interpreting and re-locating the world—a world which under her pen turns both more unrecognisable and more accessible as it is carefully, meticulously prised open. I would argue that these practices are nowhere more visible than in Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is for Witching (2009a). Here, some of the most prevalent narrative foils of Gothic literature, Yoruba mythology, European fairy tales and Caribbean folklore are intertwined. This mixture is then turned into a fragmented narrative of longing and belonging in contemporary Britain: a love story between the novel’s two female protagonists, black Ore and white Miranda. White is for Witching is a difficult text—as Oyeyemi notes in the interview excerpt I have used for this chapter’s epigraph, it is “an unlikeable book” that “doesn’t want to be read” (2014b, n. pag.): it revolves around motifs of death, ghosts, eating disorder and mental illness and addresses in a frank manner discourses around racism, xenophobia, nationalism and the harm they can do. The novel is narrated from alternating perspectives and twists around the fate of one of its protagonist, Miranda Silver, in a splintered, non-linear way. Miranda suffers from a disorder called “pica”, an eating disorder characterised by the desire for non-nutritive substances, such as paper, hair, stones, paint, metal, plastic, glass—or, in Miranda’s case, chalk (“pika”, OED). Coincidentally, the story is set on the coast of South East England, near the city of Dover. The English countryside and its coastline constitute an important foundation for the tensions the novels work with and the white chalk cliffs of Dover will become one of the central motifs for the story. The other crucial spatial component the novel sets up is the interior space of the Silver family home, the haunted house on 29 Barton Road at the edges of Dover: a malevolent, sentient structure that harbours racist sentiments and attempts to destroy everyone it perceives as “other”. With this chapter, then, the spatial scale of this book further decreases as we move from transnational movements across the globe (Adichie) and the bustle of the postcolonial metropolis (Smith) to the English

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countryside and the interior, domestic space of the house. This move allows me to illuminate yet another facet of love- and world-making, and to draw out of the shadows and into the light the possible connectivities that arise when putting together the two, and to tease out the (productive) disruptions that emerge when literary texts and poetic performances from the African diaspora merge their love stories with geographical, spatial set-ups of our contemporary political world. As I will show, by rewriting the essentially gothic trope of the haunted house and connecting it to the white cliffs of Dover, White is for Witching plays with notions of both “home” and “homeland”. Significantly, this revision of the haunted house narrative is closely connected to another gothic topos: the vampire. The vampire and adjacent themes of consumption, deviant sexuality and subversive desire are folded into the queer love story the novel tells. What Oyeyemi does, however, is to add to the Western concept of vampiric desire the African Caribbean folklore character of the soucouyant. In then distorting both figures, Oyeyemi radically unsettles distinctions between self and other. In Miranda, the white protagonist of White is for Witching who is ultimately bound to the haunted house, vampire and soucouyant figure merge into one—producing different kinds of appetite: for chalk, for blood, for women. Throughout this chapter, I will argue that Miranda’s desire for Ore, and Ore’s reciprocal desire for Miranda, generates a love story that ultimately revises the racist, exclusionary tendencies of the nation as embodied by the haunted house. Love, here, much as it did in Adichie’s and Smith’s text, comes to signify a transformative, productive site for rerouting potentially harmful structures of colonial and neo-­ colonial oppression and restriction. The queer love between the two girls turns into, as Chela Sandoval would say in concert with bell hooks, “another kind of love, a synchronic process that punctures through traditional, older narratives of love, that ruptures everyday being” (2000, 142), and one that moves us beyond what is safe and known. The following analyses will again utilise a tripartite format to trace the entanglements of world- and love-making in a novel that propels its gothic antecedents into the postcolonial space of contemporary Britain. The first section of this chapter, titled “Haunted House, Haunted Homeland: The Postcolonial Gothic”, will revolve around the layered constructions of space in White is for Witching. I will trace the histories of the haunted house on which Oyeyemi draws by paying special attention to the literary precursors that most explicitly inform Oyeyemi’s revisions. In my discussions of White is for Witching’s haunted house, 29 Barton Road, I will

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draw on Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which makes and un-makes the home and which I will re-evaluate by taking into account its postcolonial continuations via Homi Bhabha’s notion of the worldly “unhomely”. These re-evaluations show how the house, the home and the homeland are destabilised by the peculiar unhomeliness of the novel’s postcolonial gothic engagement with space. The second section, titled “Textual Strategies of Narrating Home/land”, will look at how the novel performs its own textuality. Similar to the textual and textural transnational tactics employed by Americanah or the urban mappings performed by Zadie Smith’s London novels, Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is a text that self-­ consciously displays its own materiality and intertextuality. I will examine how the novel evolves from merely depicting a house that haunts to actually becoming a haunted/haunting text through employing modes of non-linearity, circularity and fragmentation. The third section, titled “Queer Desire, Queer Belonging: A Vampire in Love”, will engage with the novel’s imaginaries of love. Here, I will probe and mine the second gothic stock concept the novel puts forth, the figure of the vampire and, closely connected, the desire for consuming the other. Drawing on the literary archives Oyeyemi works with, I will show how the novel sets up its very own queer vampiric love story—a love story that refuses to adhere to old world orders and instead advocates for the potential of a new world that refuses to participate in the persecution of difference. In being made queer and being made unhomely, both love and world, respectively, breach their restrictive boundaries in a novel that tries its hardest to long for worlds and desires elsewhere.

Haunted House, Haunted Homeland: The Postcolonial Gothic Habitation is in itself a form of haunting, whether that’s a tribe that settles on a particular piece of land, a family in a home or the mind in the body. […] But our structures can make monsters of us. We’re all ghosts in the societal machine, moving through the world carrying with us ancestors, linguistic frameworks and the results of decisions made by governments long before we were born. —Helen Oyeyemi, “Helen Oyeyemi on Haunted House Novels” (2012, n. pag.)

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Oyeyemi is a writer who expertly draws together wildly differing storytelling conventions and cultural figurations. With White is for Witching, she has created a convoluted and ultimately fragmented rewriting of some of gothic literature’s most important narrative themes. She adds to these Western frames of reference stories stemming from Nigerian Yoruba culture, African Caribbean mythology and the contemporary political realities of diasporic Britain. Regarding this hybrid form of mixing, her novel can be classified as belonging to the genre of postcolonial gothic. As Tabish Khair posits, “the gothic and the postcolonial are obviously linked by a common preoccupation with the Other, and aspects of Otherness” (2015, 3). Scholars of the postcolonial gothic have, in fact, argued that from its very beginnings on, the gothic has invariably been imbued with the hierarchies of Empire and imperialism. The gothic is, at its heart, about the frightening other that cannot be understood and is so frightening precisely because of that: The gothic, at least in its literary form, shakes up and problematises tired ways of perceiving and expressing normality by disrupting the everyday world of residual compliance. It disturbs, upsets, ironises and parodises our deeply held beliefs and our safe but constraining narratives of, among others, progress, identity, power, family, safety and love. (Wisker 2016, 2)

In a similar vein, Julie Hakim Azzam demonstrates that the gothic is the narrative mode by “which Britain frightened itself about cultural degeneration, the loss of racial or cultural purity, the racial other, sexual subversion and the threat that colonial-era usurpation and violence might one day ‘return’” (2007, v). By the end of the eighteenth century, “gothic writers were quick to realise that Britain’s growing empire could provide a vast source of frightening ‘others’ who would, as replacements for the villainous Italian antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe, bring freshness and variety to the genre” (Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 229). With the inclusion of these others, “a new sort of darkness of race, landscape, erotic desire and despair—enters the Gothic genre” (ibid.), both stabilising and destabilising the expanding nation. From the very start, then, the gothic was implicated in the colonial project of building nation and empire Postcolonial writers, such as Jean Rhys or Jamaica Kincaid, have since powerfully questioned these hegemonic origins of the genre and its implications in questions of selfhood, nationhood and belonging. The postcolonial gothic literatures that were

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and are still being created let those others which have always been a part of the gothic finally articulate themselves. It could even be argued that the postcolonial and the gothic are mutually dependent, since “they […] are haunted by the ghosts of those who were hidden and silenced in the colonial and imperial past” (Wisker 2007, 402), each writing the other. Postcolonial variations of the gothic, such as White is for Witching, thus take up a narrative form that pays attention to how borders are shored up and how distinction between home and not-home are maintained. In re-­ evaluating the gothic terrain and its thematic markers, White is for Witching responds to politics concerned with nationality, security and legitimacy. In contrast to many other postcolonial gothic fictions, however, Oyeyemi’s novel does not locate the postcolonial gothic abroad—it writes it into the foundations of Great Britain, locates it at the geographical point of the border (the coastline of Dover) and sets it within the domestic space of the house, the haunted home of the nation. Adding to this book’s archive of worlded, worldly spaces imagined by African diasporic women authors yet another node or variant, in the following I will examine an array of some of the novel’s most important precursor stories of haunted houses to then delve into an analysis of how the space of the haunted house in White is for Witching destabilises its gothic origins. In paying attention to these strategies of destabilisation, I aim to position Oyeyemi’s novel as an example of how new, hybrid forms of writing can combine the gothic and the postcolonial in order to haunt exclusionary constructs of home and of homeland to give way to other, alternative forms of worldand love-making. The Haunted House: Floor Plans and Foundations Julie Hakim Azzam notes that “British gothic has always been interested in architecture, homes, and other spaces and dwellings such as haunted houses, torture chambers, jail cells, courthouses, abbeys, monasteries, and decrepit castles” (Azzam 2007, 3–4). This becomes evident when looking at one of the first gothic fictions produced in the second half of the eighteenth century: in 1764, Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first novel to bear the subtitle “A Gothic Story”. The novel blends realistic storytelling elements with the supernatural. It relates the history of Manfred, the prince of Otranto, who strives to secure the eponymous castle for his descendants in the face of a mysterious curse. The novel’s main spatial setting, the castle and all its secret sub-spaces, would

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set the stage for many elements that were to become stock characteristics of gothic fiction—the past invading the present, the dark times of the middle ages penetrating eighteenth-century assertions of ratio, enlightenment and progress. Regarding the historical time frame of the beginnings of the gothic genre, Fred Botting argues that the middle of the eighteenth century saw the ascendancy of “reason, science, commerce and bourgeois values” and the transformation of “patterns of knowledge (empiricism rather than religion), production (commerce and manufacture rather than agriculture), social organisation (city rather than country) and political power (representative democracy rather than monarchy)” (2014, 3). Emerging as a reaction to these developments, gothic texts wilfully retain “traces of instability where further disorientations, ambivalence and dislocations can arise” (3). The gothic is inherently unstable and fluid and is marked by tensions and transgressions; it brings to light, in the words of Jack Halberstam, “a peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse” (1995, 23). This notion of dislocation and collapse can directly be applied to depictions of space, setting and architecture in these fictions. Spaces that are beyond “reason, law and civilised authority” (ibid.) act as stand-ins for irrational fears and societal anxieties. The topographies of old and disorderly castle ruins, dissolving family mansions, dark and dank dungeons, hidden corridors and wild and hostile naturescapes become blueprints for these anxieties, displaying “an unease and instability in the imagined unity of self, home or society, hauntings that suggest loss or guilt or threat” (3). The depictions of the space of the castle in Walpole’s novel makes this quite clear: The place is described as a “long labyrinth of darkness” (Walpole [1764] 2004, 61) in which “now and then some blasts of wind […] shook the doors she [Isabella] had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed” (ibid.). Walpole’s castle needs to be read as the architectural mirror of its heroine’s plights, her terrors and confusion playing out in dark labyrinthine underground spaces that are set apart from the conventions and moral codes of society outside. It also hints at the very structure of the gothic novel itself which interweaves light and dark, reason and irrationality, morality and perversion, sanity and superstition. As Sue Chaplin has argued, the gothic and its spaces “respond in certain diverse yet recognisable ways to the conflicts and anxieties of its historical moment”, which is “characterised especially by its capacity to represent individual and societal traumas” (2011, 4). These fictions thus

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offer a productive way of formulating an experience of profound dislocation, alienation and despair. As the gothic moves into the nineteenth century, there is also a shift in the depiction of gothic spaces: “Instead of castles in foreign lands, the Gothic came to England and lingers in the streets and homes, decreasing the distance between the reader and events of the texts and making the texts more unnerving” (Smith 2007, 4). Not only does the geographical setting move to Britain, the interior space also moves “closer to home”. The castle, by definition the seat of nobility, gradually gives way to the house as a site where “fears and anxieties returned in the present. These anxieties varied according to diverse changes: political revolution, industrialisation, urbanisation, shifts in sexual and domestic organisation, and scientific discovery” (Botting 2014, 2). The haunted house stands for notions of unrest and disquiet on a seemingly smaller, more domestic and familial scale. It conjoins, as Botting puts it, “ideas of home and prison, protection and fear” (4). One of the most famous examples for this particular linkage of the familiar and the unfamiliar is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) which constitutes one of the key sources for Oyeyemi’s haunted house story. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is not only about the fall of a dynasty but also about the quintessential haunted house narrative. Its narrator encounters a typically gothic space, reminiscent of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: “bleak walls”, “vacant eye-like windows”, “rank sedges” and “decayed trees” ([1839] 1982, 134). The interior of the house, entered “through many dark and intricate passages” (136), displays a similarly dark atmosphere: the dwelling not only incorporates the typical spatial properties of gothic fiction but also encompasses the psychological anxieties and the sense of dislocation so paradigmatic of the genre. The home is perceived as haunted, as unfamiliar. At the end of the story, the feeling of unfamiliarity climaxes in the destruction of the house, via a crack that literally breaks apart the architectural home of family, the family itself, and renders illegible any sense of familiarity. The feeling of the home-ly which morphs into the un-home-ly evokes the concept of the uncanny, as developed by Freud in his essay on “The Uncanny”. Freud’s definition of the uncanny, because it is the negation of the word for “home” (un-heimlich), inscribes the home as “site and/or source of terror” (Michlin 2012, n. pag.). The uncanny is not merely frightening, though, but “goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Freud [1919] 2003, 124). It is all that was intended “to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open” (132). The

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idea of the home as comforting is turned upside down by the gothic topography of the haunted house. As Julian Wolfreys remarks, haunting “displaces us in those places where we feel most secure, most notably in our homes, in the domestic scene. Indeed, haunting is nothing other than the destabilization of the domestic scene, as that place where we apparently confirm our identity, our sense of being, where we feel most at home with ourselves” (2002, 5). The nightmarish haunted house as gothic setting is terrifying exactly because the home/house is supposed to be safe and secure. In an essay published in La Clé des Langues, from which this section’s epigraph is taken, Helen Oyeyemi has articulated her own interest in the topos of the haunted house. In the essay, she draws attention to how the home, the homely and the unhomely become interwoven. She uses two texts which revolve around female inhabitants of a house to trace the way the home can constitute a haunting that entails more than the geographical location of the house itself—a haunting that stems from cultural displacements. Oyeyemi is, firstly, interested in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, which features Eleanor Vance, a young woman who herself seems to become haunted— not only by the horror house but also by society around her, which is uncannily distilled into the dark interior of the home. As Oyeyemi notes, our structures can make monsters of us. We’re all ghosts in the societal machine, moving through the world carrying with us ancestors, linguistic frameworks and the results of decisions made by governments long before we were born. […] No wonder we so often frighten each other, no wonder we sometimes look into the eyes of people we’ve ‘known’ for decades and see an abyss. (2012, n. pag.)

In Oyeyemi’s interpretation of Jackson’s novel, Hill House, which, “not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within” ([1959] 1987, 1), is filled to its roof with the hauntings that arise from restrictive historical, political and social structures: “hauntings are inevitable, insofar as the past is potent and present wherever human beings live or have lived” (Oyeyemi 2012, n. pag.). The second fictional woman Oyeyemi examines in this essay is Laura Fairlie in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860). Again, she draws the connection from how the spatial trope of the haunted house connects to other, deeper-seated societal hauntings. In Oyeyemi’s words, Collins

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causes Laura Fairlie to vanish from her own home and be replaced with someone else who looks like her and is assumed to be her because she lives at Limmeridge House and… who is Laura Fairlie, if not the woman who lives at Limmeridge House? The true Laura languishes in an insane asylum, doubtful of her own identity, with no one to help or believe her. Home is her anchor, but also her prison. (ibid.)

In using the example of two women (three, if we count in Laura’s double, Anne Catherick) who are haunted by their surroundings, and in turn come to embody these hauntings, Oyeyemi shows how the intimate space of the home needs to be taken into account within broader ideological frames of sexuality and gender. Concerning these links between femininity, gender and the domestic in stories of haunted houses, Andrew Hock Soon Ng has argued that such fictions expose the patriarchal structure embedded within the domicile, which, as such, becomes symbolic of entrapment and subjugation. What constitutes the private space in many traditional Gothic narratives […] is tantamount to the limitation of freedom and agency afforded to the female subject as she is confined to the house apparently in order to protect her innocence but is, in truth, fundamentally meant to subordinate her to male dominance and control. (2015, 4)

This notion of subordination and the possibilities to refute such oppression take shape in two other haunted house fictions which I posit as important foils for Oyeyemi’s novel and which I will trace in the following, before turning to my analysis of White is for Witching. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) features a female protagonist entangled with the discourses of femininity in the late nineteenth century and appropriates the gothic mode to narrate her descent into “madness”. Here, female trauma is inevitably interwoven with space and the interior of the house can be seen as one of the decisive factors in the events that unfold: at the beginning of the unnamed protagonist’s illness/story, she and her husband move into a stereotypical gothic space. The narrative self-reflectively points towards the traditions of gothic femininity and the symbolisation of enclosed spaces (Perkins Gilman [1892] 1993, 98). The protagonist, similar to Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, is confined to the upper part of the house, an unused nursery. Of note here are the parallels drawn between space, femininity and motherhood as well as the alignment of domesticity and

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imprisonment. As Anne Williams has argued, “the madwoman […] dwells within the house itself” and is as such dangerous and thus needs to be controlled (1995, 8). The concept of the gothic space of the haunted house here is turned into a metaphor for the woman haunted by patriarchy and official medical discourse, an imprisoning ideology that defines her as mad: “The old, patriarchal gothic space that at the beginning of the narrative harks back to the eighteenth-century gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe (ancestral hall, hereditary estate) becomes in Gilman’s fin de siècle female gothic a site of trauma in which the medical man replaces the aristocratic tyrant as the persecutor of women” (Chaplin 2011, 221). But in a narrative slant, the trauma turns upon the traumatiser via the materialisation of the “madwoman in the attic”. As Perkins Gilman’s protagonist becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper of her room, the story destabilises its narrative of female discipline when she becomes the woman in the wallpaper, when she herself becomes the walls surrounding her and one with the house—an ultimately rebellious act that will be echoed in White is for Witching. Interestingly, the ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper” consists of the woman’s husband fainting at the sight of her, appropriating the pathological behaviour usually ascribed to “hysterical” women at the time. The ending turns around the contemporary medical, psychiatric discourse and offers a text forever haunted by the creeping, crawling woman-in-the-walls. This connection between trauma and space within the home is also negotiated in a twentieth-century haunted house narrative: Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). This novel is another crucial precursor for Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching as it intertwines notions of gender and race, national trauma and belonging, within the hostile space of the haunted home. Beloved re-remembers the trauma of slavery by creating the possessed house on 124 Bluestone Road as a living, breathing character. Echoing Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Morrison’s house is not simply haunted, but seemingly haunts itself: “The first thing we learn about the modern Haunted House is that it is alive. It is not just inhabited by some ghostly presence, as Otranto was: rather, the force that lurks in it is part of the house itself […] The house in modern terror fiction is not a haunted but a haunting house” (Aguirre 1990, 190; emphasis in original). In Beloved, Sethe, a former slave, had to kill her first-born daughter in order to escape her slave masters. This dead daughter returns as a ghost to haunt her in her new family home. As Andrew Smith has noted, “ghosts are never just ghosts; they provide us with an insight into what haunts our

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culture” (2007, 153). The female ghost which takes possession of the house in Morrison’s novel probes deeply into the violent history of slavery in the United States: “Beloved pictures American history as a haunted house, from which slavery’s legacy of grief and horror cannot be exorcised” (Goddu 2007, 63–64). The novel depicts a house that entraps not only its protagonists but also an unspeakable past—the house is established as a location of trauma where memory and identity converge and Beloved’s ghost acts as a materialisation of this. Morrison also opens up the possibility to overcome this trauma by expelling the poltergeist from the house in a collective ritual enacted by the black community surrounding Sethe: while “the succubus of the dead baby’s ghost is a lived presence of the harmful, corrosive internalisation of response to the experience of slavery[, h]er exorcism opens up the opportunity for recovering of both community and selfhood” (Wisker 2016, 91). Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Toni Morrison feature women who refuse to be put in their place, within the interior of the house and within the societal structures trying to tame them. These texts attempt to envision what happens when what is hidden surfaces, when restrictive and violent histories re-emerge. In doing so, both texts, just as their successor White is for Witching, creatively imagine alternative worlds that give room to voices usually muted. As Oyeyemi notes in her essay on haunted houses, “after all, this is how us ghosts operate; inhabiting, haunting, endlessly imagining other homes and other hauntings” (2012, n. pag.). Oyeyemi’s own imagining of other homes and other hauntings in White is for Witching is deeply indebted not only to the Eurocentric gothic narrative traditions I have traced above by way of Walpole and Poe but also to those versions of the haunted house which encompass complex notions of gender and race as offered by Perkins Gilman and Morrison. Unlocking the Unwelcome House: The Home and the Unhomely in White Is for Witching Must the novel be a house? What kind of narrative can house unfree people? Is the novel a house where the unhomely can live? —Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home” (1992, 142)

The motif of the haunted house has been complicated by many narratives following its inception in gothic fiction in the eighteenth century. These texts demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct and convert the

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foundations of this trope and to make the house more spacious to accommodate different kinds of hauntings. The haunted, haunting house functions to make visible distorted and continually changing states of being at home and of feeling unhomely. Oyeyemi’s haunted house in White is for Witching continues the project of extending the history of this topos and places it firmly into the tradition of postcolonial, feminist rewritings of the gothic; as she has said in an interview, “I think the story’s … very knowing … As I was writing it, it very much knew about itself, especially with the element of the house. It knew about other stories that had come before it, that were like it” (Oyeyemi 2009b, n. pag.). By re-evaluating the topos, Oyeyemi has written a novel that is deeply connected to its gothic literary predecessors but at the same time addresses contemporary, postcolonial questions pertaining to global dynamics of exclusion and inclusion. I would argue, in fact, that Oyeyemi dismantles the haunted house narrative and builds it up again, brick by brick, but with shifted, altered foundations. In White is for Witching, the haunted house on 29 Barton Road is not only an architectural structure but gains its own distinctive voice and personality—it acts as one of the novel’s autodiegetic narrators and is imbued with a volatile and hostile consciousness. The novel’s haunted house is introduced as the Silver family home— the Silver family consists of Lily and Luc, the parents, and Miranda and Elliot, their teenage twins. 29 Barton Road is an old house on the coast near Dover that belonged to Lily’s grandmother. From the very start, it is clear that the architecture of 29 Barton Road plays on characteristically gothic elements, reminiscent of Walpole or Poe: “From the outside the windows didn’t look as if they could be opened, they didn’t look as if they were there to let air or light in”, and on the inside the house consists of “the dusty marble mantelpiece” and a floor “so crazily checked that none could walk in a straight line in there”, it contains a “steep winding staircase with the gnarled banister” as well as trapdoors and hidden shelters (17–18). The house is also geographically embedded into an unmistakably gothic context, situated next to a forgotten graveyard with unnamed graves (17). As the Silver family makes the transition from city (London) to country (Dover), Luc opens the house as a guest house. As a Bed and Breakfast, the house represents a very conventional English space. At the same time, it precariously balances the line between opposites: it is a hybrid space in-between family home and public sphere, a home away from home. Inside-outside, home-other, these are the main axes around which the postcolonial gothic text of White is for Witching revolves via the home

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turned hostile. When Lily, the twins’ mother and heiress of the house, dies on a photography mission in Port-au-Prince in Haiti when Eliot and Miranda are 16, the haunted house awakens. With this awakening, the guest house turns out to be the opposite of hospitable. As Derrida has noted in Of Hospitality, “the Latin ‘hostis’ means ‘guest’ but also ‘enemy’”—and “hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home” (2000, 157). The house is haunted by the ghosts of Lily’s maternal family line (her mother Jennifer, her grandmother Anna) and thus brought to life takes on a distinct voice and personality which in turn haunts its own inhabitants. Miranda, the last living female Silver family member, is slowly turned into a monster, a sort of stand-in or vessel for the house and its ghosts, and she is forced to carry out the house’s violent will as it tries to expel and kill everyone it perceives as other, non-white and non-English. Regarding these linkages between inside and outside which are implicated in the politics of home and belonging, Rosemary Marangoly George reminds us that “homes and nations are defined in the stances of confrontation with what is considered ‘not-home,’ with the foreign, with distance. Thus, for instance, it is in the heyday of British imperialism that England gets defined as ‘Home’ in opposition to ‘The Empire’ which belongs to the English but is not England” (1996, 4). Accentuating the house both as home and as not-home, as interior space and representative of the nation, the novel unveils an inherently transgressive, unhomely moment. The haunted house in White is for Witching becomes a place where different notions of identity and belonging collide, jostle and displace each other. To make these implications clearer, at this point I want to refer to Homi Bhabha’s continuation of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, both in his essay on “The World and the Home” (1992) and in his seminal work The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha transfers Freud’s uncanny to the English signifier of “unhomely” to point towards the specific condition of the one who moves, the one who is not at home: the migrant. For Bhabha, unhomeliness becomes “the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations”, “the ‘unhomely’ is a paradigmatic colonial and post-colonial condition” ([1994] 2004, 13). The unhomely becomes a way of being in the world and of experiencing the world. In adding to Freud’s psychoanalytical project, Bhabha expands the term to apply to distinctly diasporic identificatory processes—much as White is for Witching expands the eighteenth-century gothic trope of the haunted house to address specific contemporary discourses and unspoken histories of migration, diaspora and forced relocation and exclusion. In “The World and the

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Home”, Bhabha suggests that “the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (1992, 141). When the interior, private and domestic space of 29 Barton Road in White is for Witching turns into a monstrous space that haunts, tortures and violates its “foreign” visitors, the novel opens up a conversation about processes of othering and of selfing as the home/familiar and the unhomely/unfamiliar are continuously pitted against each other. Whereas classical haunted house texts often resolve these tensions, however, White is for Witching does not and produces a more flexible negotiation of these oppositions. The novel shows how resistance against the deathly, deadening violence enacted by the haunted house becomes possible: a resistance performed not only by the text’s African diasporic black female characters but also by the white protagonist who is technically complicit in the house’s violence. Bhabha has argued that “[i]n the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible” (1992, 141), and this chapter shows how Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching runs along the same fault lines and makes visible and possible other worlds, other loves. The house’s development into a haunting space is closely connected to the female genealogies of the Silver women. Chronologically speaking, the first of these women is Anna Good, Miranda’s great-grandmother, and she is responsible for the creation of the house—this becomes evident in a passage narrated by the house itself where it describes its awakening: One evening she pattered around inside me, […], and she dragged all my windows open […]. I cried and cried for an hour or so, unable to bear the sound of my voice, so shrill and pleading, but unable to stop the will of the wind wheeling through me, cold in my insides. […] Anna Good, you are long gone now, except when I resurrect you to play in my puppet show […] I will tell you the truth because you are no trouble to me at all. Indeed, you are a mother of mine, you gave me a kind of life, mine, the kind of alive that I am. (23–24)

This process of giving life, of birthing the hostile haunted house, is initiated when Anna’s husband Andrew is killed in the Second World War. Anna’s consequential grief and trauma create the haunted house, prod it awake: “Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven

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itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware” (118). Anna is described as the embodiment of the pure, white English female subject, materialised in the figure of Britannia: White was a colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected her feeling that she was not clean. […] At school, her gymnastics class had been filmed for a programme on British sports and pastimes, and she’d been picked to wear a bronze-coloured helmet and a white gown and a blue sash and sit at the top of a chariot built of the other girl’s bodies. She was Britannia. […] Anna never thought she would have a granddaughter who didn’t know what Britannia meant; Lily said that patriotism was embarrassing and dangerous. […] She couldn’t believe her ears. How had Britannia become embarrassing and dangerous? It was the incomers. They had twisted it so that anything they were not part of was bad. (115–116)

Anna, who is clad in white as Mother Britain and literally rides on top of other women’s bodies, embodies the nation’s ideals of white supremacy and purity. Anna’s initial patriotism is turned into xenophobia when her husband never returns home from the war: “‘I hate them,’ she said. ‘Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty … dirty killers. He should have stayed here with me’” (118). In the figure of Anna Good, or the Good Lady as she is called throughout the novel, Oyeyemi turns the angel in the house, the mother of the nation, into a monstrous being that in turn creates the haunted space of 29 Barton Road which tries to protect her (and the continued existence of the family line): I [29 Barton Road] curved myself into a deep cup, a safe container for her. I did not let her take any harm to herself, I did not let her open the attic window to jump. […] She had bought some rat poison the week before, and though she did not turn to that, I shook the pellets so that they fell deep into my recesses. Just in case. She was pregnant, you see. It was two Silvers at stake. My poor Anna Good, my good lady. (118)

With the house’s transformation as a result of Anna’s phobia, Oyeyemi plays with how women were (and still are) constructed as the keepers and breeders of the nation. In her work on the representation of race and whiteness, Radhika Mohanram claims that what made the British woman the innermost, the purest, was precisely that she was also the boundary, the space of dilution, making the outer into the

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inner. At the very moment the British woman played the role of the essential and constitutive of Britishness, she undermined it by showing her potential/ ability to contaminate it. Thus, contamination was at the very heart, the very core of white Britishness. (2007, 34; emphasis in original)

Anna’s fear of not being pure enough, and the house’s consecutive disgust by everything not white, results in the house acting as a gatekeeper for this unattainable ideal of whiteness for future generations of Silver women. The past haunts the present—the event of Andrew’s death and the hate it arouses in Anna for everyone non-English comes to inhabit the present of Miranda’s world. The house’s monstrosity travels along the female line of the Silver family, eventually to be broken down by Miranda and Ore’s love. Before that, however, the house attempts to govern every movement of its female inhabitants, tightly controlling and disciplining them. Miranda’s twin brother Eliot says of their grandmother Jennifer, that she “was pretty, an indifferent student (we’d seen her photographs and report cards bound with pink ribbon), and she’d run off with someone dashing and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s dad had been” (71). From the house we learn the truth: Jennifer Silver lived quite long. She didn’t die until 1994. A reason why Lily never felt motherless was that her mother was there with her, a door and a curtain away. […]. Jennifer really meant to abandon her daughter, and how could I allow that? Jennifer was going to walk away from Anna and Lily in broad daylight. […] I opened up for her. That is to say, I unlocked a door in her bedroom that she had not seen before […] When she was safely down the new passageway, I closed the door behind her. […] Don’t feel sorry for Jennifer. Why should you? She lived long and relatively well, and she was kept safe from those fears and doubt peculiar to her times. She was safe from the war that sickened what it touched from miles away […] the pictures of Phnom Penh burning. (83–85)

The house takes up the role of the keeper of order, of keeping together the family as it will not let Jennifer leave with someone “foreign”. This passage, which the house narrates itself, shows how it changes and twists its own interior spaces to create a hostile environment. Miranda’s mother Lily, however, escapes the ordering principle of the house—much as Miranda later will also attempt to: she not only marries French Luc Dufresne but also travels around the world as a photographer until she meets her tragic end in Haiti: “The twins were sixteen and a half when

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their mother died. She was shot in Port-au-Prince; gunfire sprayed into the queue at a voting station. […] Stupid, stupid; Lily had been warned not to go to Haiti. I had warned her. Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?” (8). Ultimately, the house loses its tight grip on the women it houses because they strive to seek their homes elsewhere, in places “that are not for them”. These examples show not only how the house changes its architecture and acts like a living, sentient being but also how it attempts to manipulate the lives and stories of its inhabitants. Some have to be kept out, some have to be kept in and some are only allowed limited access to the interior space that is the home. Especially foreign guest and employees are tortured and then expelled. The house haunts in altering its architectural structure, forcing away some and then later capturing and literally ingesting others: “We are on the inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have anyone else. It’s Luc that keeps letting people in. To keep himself company, probably, because he knows he is not welcome (if he doesn’t know this he is very stupid). They shouldn’t be allowed in though, those others, so eventually I make them leave” (118). One of the characters who repeatedly attempts to resist the house’s violence is the housekeeper Sade. The Nigerian Yoruba immigrant with ritual scars on her face is the one who keeps the house; “as far as it can be kept”, she says (209). Even though she is black and the house repeatedly tries to choke, mutilate and kill her, she carves out her own space inside of it within the feminine, maternal space of the kitchen and consequently saves those non-white guests the house attempts to hunt down. She is both inside and outside and tries to keep the house in check through her Yoruba magic. One of these instances of “trying to keep the house” occurs when it tries to kill her with a poisoned apple, a clear reference to “Snow White”, toxic femininity and Westernised beauty ideals. When the house attempts to feed the apple to Sade, she first tries to refuse the food by pretending to be dead: “The African woman looked at the apple and (this had not at all been accounted for) her heart stopped beating. It was some sort of trick, for I was certain that the woman was still alive” (138–139). Then, however, Sade bites into the apple so that the other black house guests held hostage by the house can escape. As a means of resistance, Sade counters the house’s insidious magic with her own. As Helen Cousin’s suggests, Sade is “associated with the novel’s title, through the witchery known as aje, a type of benevolent Yoruba witchcraft with aspects symbolic of maternal protection, and for whom ‘the hue of spiritual

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transcendence is white’” (Cousins 2012, 50; quoting Washington 2005, 29). Recognising this, the house tries to rally against her: “Juju is not enough to protect you. Everything you have I will turn against you. I’ll turn sugar bitter for you. I’ll take your very shield and crack it on your head. White is for witching, so ti gbo? White is for witching, Sade goodbye” (175; emphasis in original). But in the end, Sade’s form of white (as in benevolent) witching will help defeat the house’s horror. The climax of the houses’ vicious hauntings occurs when Ore visits Dover to see her girlfriend Miranda: from the very beginning on, Ore (British-Nigerian, but adopted by a white British family) experiences the Silver family home as not-home, as strange and frighteningly bewildering (206). She is unable to orient herself in the inner spaces of 29 Barton Road. Whereas the house depresses its floors for Miranda and makes angles of descent to help her walk, it hinders Ore wherever she attempts to go: I walked out of the bathroom door and, I don’t know how, found myself still in the bathroom. […]. But when I tried to pass through the door again I was in the bathroom again, and my neck cricked, as if I’d turned my head to fast. I tried one more time, and came through into the passageway, which was meant to be arranged into an L […]. But the doors had changed positions. […] None of the doors would open. The stairs were still there, and I inched down them carefully, one by one, afraid that they would change too, unsure where they would take me. (216–217)

When Ore asks Sade if there is something wrong with the house, she simply replies: “It is a monster” (212) and tells her to go home. Later, back in her rooms, Ore takes a shower and when she dries herself with a white towel, where it touches her skin it is stained a dark black: The towel girl in the mirror was drying herself with—I frowned and looked at my towel. Where it had touched me it was striped with black liquid, as dense as paint. (don’t scream) there were shreds of hard skin in it. There was hair suspended in it. ‘The black’s coming off,’ someone outside the bathroom door commented. Then they whistled ‘Rule, Britannia’ and laughed. Bri-tons never-never-never shall be slaves. My skin stung. (214; emphasis in original)

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In forcing Ore to shed her skin, to rub off her blackness, the house and its ghosts replicate an imperial violence that is inextricably bound to a physiognomic schema which clearly categorises and devalues human beings regarding their appearance. As the house attempts to ultimately other her, it reveals its ideological stance which regards “Ore’s difference and identity [as] inextricably connected to her skin and the action of erasing her skin is seen as the negation of her being. […] This is the drama that the white matriarchs re-enact by identifying Ore according to a ‘racial epidermal schema’ that taxonomizes human bodies according to the colour of their skin” (Stephanou 2014, 1253). Ore as the black Other is marked as different, foreign and toxic to a British identity constructed as “pure”. This also shows when the house first learns of her and Miranda’s relationship: ‘I’m in love,’ Miranda whispered, once she was hidden. We saw who she meant. The squashed nose, the pillow lips, fist-sized breasts, the reek of fluids from the seam between her legs. The skin. The skin. (is it all right to say how much I like this the way our skin looks together) Anna was shocked. Jennifer was shocked. Lily was impassive. Disgusting. These are the things that happen while you’re not looking, when you’re not keeping careful watch. When clear water moves unseen, a taint creeps into it—moss, or algae, salt, even. It becomes foul, undrinkable. It joins the sea. (194)

The house and its ghosts make unmistakably clear that Ore is not welcome here, ultimately attempting to murder her. The way the house positions Ore as “foul” and “reeking” here can be linked to arguments Sara Ahmed has made in Strange Encounters, where she suggests that “the economy of xenophobia—the production of the stranger’s body as an impossible and phobic object—involves, not just reading the stranger’s body as dirt and filth, but the re-forming of the contours of the body-at-­home” (2000, 54). However, identity is not only “skin deep” (Stephanou 2014, 1253), and the house’s attempts to unhome Ore in ridding her of her skin fail. Several attempts to kill her are made, by the house, its ghosts and also by Miranda (who at this point has almost yielded to the house’s powers), but Ore manages to escape after an odyssey of horror through the house which has turned itself into a labyrinth: it is the Yoruba housekeeper Sade who

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helps to save Ore, their shared status as not-white establishing a point of connection: Outside the room, the floor had gone (where is the floor?) I fell down […] Below someone threw their hands out and white flew from their fingertips. Someone red and silver, the spirit in the flame. I bounced. I couldn’t see anything. Then I could, through white squares. I was in a net. Tens of feet of white cotton bunched around me. I was crying like a newborn. (230–231)

The white net of cloth that Sade had been knitting earlier in the novel (120) catches Ore and enables her to leave Dover forever. It is no coincidence that Sade’s magic talisman that saves Ore is white—as the title of the novel indicated, white is for witching, and here Yoruba witching counters the racism of the haunted house. In the end, it is the two black main characters of the novel who rally against the restrictive norms proposed by the house. Throughout the entire novel, Ore refuses not only to be othered by the house but also to be “homed” by others. Adopted by a white British working-­class family because her biological mother suffered from post-­ natal depression, she refuses to be defined as either or, as being at home or not-at-home: “I may be adopted, but I know exactly who I am” (157). At Cambridge, the age-old British institution of education and elitism, Ore places herself while also recognising that she cannot be fully placed, that she cannot simply blend into her surroundings: Walls and windows forbade me. They pulled at me and said, You don’t belong here. Again and again, over textbooks and plates of mush in Hall, I gritted my teeth and said, Yes I do. Everyone else seems to blend into the architecture. (157, emphasis in original)

During the course of the novel, we learn of her other un/homing strategies: she fights against her white cousins’ racism, fuelled by BNP pamphlets and an openly nationalistic rhetoric (201), but she also declines the attempts of a fellow Nigerian-British student to invite her to the Nigeria Society in Cambridge (149). When she struggles against the house, and against Miranda, she forces herself to not give in: “I concentrated on making myself colourfast, on not changing under her tongue. I know what I

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look like. The Ore I signed onto paper in the letters of my name, the idea of a girl that I woke into each morning” (228–229). As Bhabha has noted in his work on the unhomely, “to be unhomed is not to be homeless” ([1994] 2004, 13). In wilful acts of self-identification, Ore chooses her home on her own terms and escapes clear-cut spatial designations. I agree with Stephanou who posits Ore’s identificatory processes as “not fixed, but mobile, transgressing boundaries, never taking on fully the limitations of either a Nigerian or British identity, always creating interconnections” (2014, 1249–1250). In doing so, she also changes the order of the world she inhabits: as Bhabha would say, “the unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world” (141). Renegotiating its spaces of Englishness, White is for Witching produces its diasporic Black British character not as the subject of a nation state but as an individual and self-empowered agent which seeks belonging in a place that is both world and home. The antithesis to Ore is Miranda’s relationship to the home, she is treated with obsessive tenderness: “I [29 Barton Road] would save Miranda even if I had to break her” (194). Miranda’s position as the last of the Silver women is only underlined by the fact that Miranda’s birthyear, 1982, is also the year of the Falklands War. As Amy K. King points out, this war can be described as “Britain’s last-ditch effort to hang on to its empire” (2013, 63). The connection to this historical event explains the house’s increasing desperation to “save” her/the Empire. But because Miranda is disobedient, because she loves whom she is not supposed to, the house finally so completely binds her to itself that she is literally integrated into the space of the house, being eaten into the walls and beneath the floorboards, disappearing into the innards of the building and the earth it is built upon: “It was in trapdoor-room that she fell, and the house caught her” (239). Miranda must stay inside for Ore to be able to leave— this constitutes both the ending of the novel and its beginning. The very first words of the novel consist of Ore’s narration: “Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath her mother’s house. Her throat is blocked with a slice of apple (to stop her speaking words that may betray her) / her ears are filled with earth / (to keep her from hearing sounds that will confuse her) / her eyes are closed” (1). This account is supplemented by the house’s own: Miranda is at home (homesick, home sick)

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Miranda can’t come in today Miranda has a condition called pica she has eaten a great deal of chalk—she really can’t help herself—she has been very ill—Miranda has pica she can’t come in today, she is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster she has pica she is stretched out inside a wall […] She has wronged me I will not allow her to live try a different way: (3–4; emphases in original)

Miranda is punished for her love for someone deemed other and “dirty” by the house. She is disciplined by being ingested into the house, becoming one with its chalky, earthly foundations on the white cliffs of Dover. The guest house as the beginning, ending and centre of the story is thus caught up within the paradox of welcome and deathly rejection, a home becoming the most hostile space possible. In the novel, the policing of the home’s borders turns into the securing of worldly, national borders. It is no coincidence that the novel is set in Kent, in the town of Dover. From the very start, Dover and its white chalk cliffs point towards the novel’s main concerns: borders and their transgression, the insidious desire to maintain and guard the shores of England. As Bhabha has observed, the “‘deep’ nation” is “crafted in chalk and limestone”, attempting to maintain a “forever England” ([1994] 2004, 243). Dover, however, is geographically positioned as a vulnerable liminal space between land and sea, its chalky cliffs acting as the door to England, and it serves one of the main arrival points for immigrants (those “others” that have to be kept out). By entangling this specific setting of countryside and coastlines of Great Britain with the Bed and Breakfast hostel-tuned-­hostile, the novel consciously refers to the fact that prior to the establishment of “detention centres” in the UK, many local rooming houses and hotels in seaside towns like Dover were utilised by the government to house asylum seekers awaiting processing. This unavoidably led to tensions and was taken up accordingly by right-wing nationalist movements. As Les Back argues, it is the small provincial towns on the [British] coast like Margate, Dover and Hastings that have become the centre of concern about illegal immigration and asylum. These towns which occupy a special location in the national imaginary […] have become the new frontier for the defenders of exclusive national culture and ‘rights for whites’. (2006, 35)

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This role of Dover is also negotiated within the story, when Sade the housekeeper, herself a Nigerian immigrant and proud of her passport, talks of Dover as a key to a door that is locked: “Didn’t they call Dover the key to England […] Key to a locked gate, throughout both world wars, and even before. It’s still fighting” (107). Another allusion to Dover’s role as fortress and gatekeeper is made when the lyrics of Vera Lynn’s 1942 World War II song “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” waft through the novel to haunt Miranda (194); a patriotic song meant to welcome back those fighting for England in the war. Ironically, though, bluebirds are non-migratory birds not native to the UK; a fact that sheds light on the hypocrisy of British nationalism (Hislop 2007). The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at work within the gothic haunted house on the white cliffs of Dover show how White is for Witching’s spatial and ideological structures are mirrored on a broader scale in postcolonial discourses of the twenty-first century and its migrant “crisis”. As Sarah Ilott argues, the guest house which imprisons and tortures those perceived as foreign reflects “Britain’s duplicitous stances on immigration and asylum”, and with that the Silver household becomes “a microcosm for British border politics” (2015, 61–62). In other words, [t]he Kentish setting of White is for Witching is used to reflect a broader cultural malaise associated with xenophobic fears of a threat to the national body politic in terms of intrusion of the racial Other. It allows for the exploration of the interconnected political and theoretical questions of hospitality, the foreigner, and the border that are central constructions of Britishness. (Buckley and Ilott 2017, 6)

What is more, the novel in my opinion also successfully subverts these politics of the border. White is for Witching not only “does the business of the nation” (Strehle 2008, 1) but also produces national and diasporic subjects which inherently destabilise the boundaries of homeland and empire. The house as home turning unhomely becomes an interior space which holds the exterior, a space where critical discourses about nationhood and belonging emerge and jostle against each other. In giving room to these crosscurrents, White is for Witching and its fictional haunted house criticises and “effectively unsettles home and homeland” (3). By featuring black and white female characters who fight against the house’s monstrous, deadly intentions, the novel offers the possibility of Bhabha’s unhomely—of bringing the world into the home and the home into the world.

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Textual Strategies of Narrating Home/Land Words are the raw materials for building a house. Words are a homeland. —Mahmoud Darwish, “What is Lost” ([2006] 2011, 15)

As has become quite obvious, Helen Oyeyemi’s novel haunts both home and homeland. In the following, I want to focus on yet another aspect which expresses such unhomely hauntings in a different way: the materiality of text itself. The text of White is for Witching is haunted by many ghosts. Some of these are ghosts intertextual in nature, whereas others consist of formal, typographical anomalies. What all these ghosts have in common is that they mirror the unruly interior space of 29 Barton Road, creating an unstable text that seemingly haunts its readers. These ghosts, however, can also be read as materialisations that are attuned to the entanglements and affiliations created by specifically female voices and feminist, postcolonial approaches to genre and textuality. Like I did in my analyses of Adichie’s Americanah and Zadie Smith’s London novels, such an exploration enables me to mine the rich and powerful potential of literature to be of and in the world and allows me to thoroughly explore the potential of Oyeyemi’s literary imagination to want a world, while revelling in all its messiness, ruptures and tensions that often run slant to canon and convention. Taking the cue from this section’s opening epigraph by Mahmoud Darwish, I want to examine the meta-fictional, generic, narratological and typographical tactics the novel employs to show how it generates a text that offers alternatives to both home and homeland as represented by 29 Barton Road—alternatives rooted in an inherently relational desire. As the novel’s white and black female characters, who strip themselves of the restrictive, harmful constraints of the house, show, words and imagination can rebuild houses and worlds. White is for Witching continues the project of writing homely and unhomely belonging anew, its narration both validating and undermining entities of nation and home. It is a novel that sheds light on how the dissolution of borders and their consecutive re-­ drawing offers a counterproposal to the harmful and violent homeland the house represents. In the following, I examine in how far the text of the novel performs its own displacements through housing ghosts of cultural, literary references that haunt the main body of the text; how it unsettles and crosses cultural boundaries through its disruptive narrative and typographical form and how through these crossings, productive potential of creating new worlds arises.

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In a first step, I want to hunt a few of the intertextual ghosts that pervade Oyeyemi’s novel. I have already spent some time on the conceptual archives of gothic fictions in my discussions on the haunted house formula, and I will return to the novel’s literary predecessors in my analyses of the queer vampire love story at the heart of White is for Witching, but for now I want to concentrate on some of the other explicit cultural allusions to be found within the narration itself. These allusions are most often employed as either ironic, self-reflexive nods to the web of cultural references influencing the novel or they hint at the construction of specifically female and postcolonial versions of the gothic. Combining ghostly echoes and allusions which initially seem disparate, but which come to gain deeper meaning on closer inspection, the text engages in continuous efforts to re-mix and re-shuffle, for example, when alluding to black musical traditions via Ella Fitzgerald. Her song “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” is played by Miranda at the beginning of the narrative. Fitzgerald’s song is based on an old nursery rhyme which she “extended and embellished […] into a jazz piece that was her breakthrough hit with the Chick Webb Orchestra in 1938. It has since become a jazz standard” (Baldin and Studwell 2000, 35). In the novel, the song is first and foremost connected to Miranda’s illness and her slow descend into madness. It appears in the section where we meet Miranda who has just discharged herself from the clinic and has returned home: She checked Lily’s watch. It was midnight in Haiti. The ticking of the watch grew very loud; she wished it would not tick so loudly. She fumbled across the room to put on a CD, but she had taken it out and put it back in, pressed play three times before she realized there was nothing wrong with it, it played every time she pressed the button. There was Ella Fitzgerald, whispering a tisket a tasket. She gritted her teeth. She needed the sound of the watch stopped; she couldn’t hear the music for the sound of the watch. (34)

Fighting against succumbing to the house’s influence, Miranda tries to suppress the memory of her dead mother—as represented by the sounds of the watch—with the help of Fitzgerald’s song. Later on, when Miranda has gone to Cambridge and has escaped the house at least for a short while, the song is connected to her and Ore’s love story: Ore was so stark in her mind that Miranda bypassed her name; she didn’t so much think of Ore as think her. […] Ore had a gap between her front teeth

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and wore her jumpers too big so that the neck slipped down on one side and bared her shoulder and the strap of her vest. Now Ore had kissed her. She had tasted Ore’s mouth. A tisket, a tasket … momentarily, she wondered what the goodlady would have to say about that. (170; emphasis in original)

“A-Tisket, A-Tasket” takes on differing meanings, but seems to be inherently linked to Miranda’s emotional struggles and affective encounters with other women. In this context, it is interesting to look at the song’s origins as a nursery rhyme. According to Brewster, the rhyme originated in the Americas: “A-tisket a-tasket / A green and yellow basket / I wrote a letter to my love / And on the way I dropped it, / I dropped it, I dropped it, / And on the way I dropped it. / A little boy he picked it up / And put it in his pocket” (1976, 82). In some variants, the second line is replaced by “I lost my yellow basket”. In other variants, the last lines consist of “A little girl picked it up / And put it in her pocket” (ibid.). In nineteenth-century England, rhymes used in the same game showcased slightly different expressions: I lost my supper, last night, / And the night before, / And if I do this night, / I never will no more. / I sent a letter to my love, / I carried water in my glove, / And by the way I dropped it, I did so, I did so: / I had a little dog that said bow-wow! / I had a little cat that said meow-meow! / Shan’t bite you, shan’t bite you, / Shall bite you. / I dropt it, I dropt it, / And by the way I lost it. (cf. Northall 1892, 364)

This English version clearly runs parallel to the novel’s representation of Miranda’s mental state and eating disorder with the lines “I lost my supper” and “And by the way I lost it” (ibid.). It also hints towards her vampiric desires with the sentences “Shan’t bite you, shan’t bite you, / Shall bite you” (ibid.). Oyeyemi thus connects these old nursery rhymes with the jazz version sung by Ella Fitzgerald which almost imperceptibly weaves throughout the novel and accompanies Miranda’s story in ghostly echoes. Fitzgerald’s version focusses on the girl that finds the basket (and the love letters that are being sent) which in turn foreshadows Miranda and Ore’s complicated love story. With these complex layerings, White is for Witching uses Western convention of storytelling, canon and rhyme to then connect them to a black artist within the frame of Miranda and Ore’s love story. Via Ella Fitzgerald’s classic, then, the text is opened up to other trajectories and cultural connections outside of the narrow space of England and English homes.

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Another ghost that weaves together different cultural contexts is the epigraph positioned at the beginning of the novel. As Genette argues, paratexts are “more than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold, or […] a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (1997, 1–2). It is “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction” (1, emphasis in original). In White is for Witching, this position of the threshold, between outside and inside of the text/house, is inhabited by four lines from a sonnet written by the African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, titled “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” ([1945] 2005): I hold my honey and I store my bread In little jars and cabinets of my will. I label clearly, and each latch and lid I bid, Be firm till I return from Hell. (1587)

This poem is part of a series of 12 “soldier sonnets”, titled “Gay Chaps at the Bar”. These sonnets focus on letters Brooks received from her brother and other soldiers telling her “what’s going on at the front” during World War II (Brooks 1970, 10). As Duncan points out, in these poems Brooks manages to shed light on the turmoil black American soldiers have felt— patriotically defending a nation that at the same time was imbued with racial segregation (cf. 2010). The sonnet “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” acts as “paranormal paratext”, as Bianca Tredennick fittingly notes (2015, 171). It is consciously left incomplete, so that the following text body of the novel supplies the missing fifth and sixth lines, which are: “I am very hungry. I am incomplete. / And none can tell me when I may dine again” (Brooks [1945] 2005, 1587). As Tredennick argues, “what is present in the text, then, is the spectral trace of what is absent, those marginalized lines that are really the central ones” (2015, 172). The metaphors of food and hunger employed by Brooks foreshadow Miranda’s pica as well as the vampire/soucouyant story line in conjunction with the notions of consumption, sex and desire in Miranda and Ore’s love story. The novel answers to Brooks as it fills in the gap left by the incomplete sonnet at its threshold. The epigraph, then, can be regarded as a ghostly spectre haunting the main body of the text. At the same time, the poem—in describing the specific historical situation, trauma and anguish of African American men leaving for and then returning from

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war—provides a counterpart analogous to the story of Miranda’s grandmother, Anna Silver, who loses her husband in the same war and imbues the house with her subsequent trauma-turned-racism. The ghostly epigraph as paratext which is situated at points of thresholds then engages in processes of transition and transaction, as Genette would have it: the very first words of the novel already open up the text to counter-arguments and expand its geographical terrain to encompass experiences other than white British ones. After the epigraph, a frame narrative introduces the main characters narrating the text: Ore, Eliot, 29 Barton Road and Miranda. This introduction is posited before the main plot of the novel begins and consists of a quasi-theatrical staging of an interplay of questions and answers. This whole section remains unintelligible up until the point the readers have finished the novel and return to the beginning. The effect of these questions is inherently unsettling as it hints at the interlinked fates of the Silver women who have been ingested or controlled by the house and who in turn rebelled and paid with their deaths. These questions are answered in differing and overlapping ways by three of the novel’s characters: Ore, Eliot and 29 Barton Road, who are all first-person narrators. These answers can be read as conflicting, antithetic and offering multiple solutions at once which, in turn, only leads to more questions. This frame narrative then functions as an exposition that points towards “the very porous borders of this novel, where the text seems always excessive and uncanny, overrunning the boundaries that are meant to define and confine it” (Tredennick 2015, 173). Having finished White is for Witching, “readers must re-read the opening after turning the final page in order to place that question-and-answer section where it chronologically belongs” (175); beginning and end become interchangeable and upset linear chronological reading habits. Any notion of closure evoked by Ore’s last words in the novel, “Now I have said all that I know” (232), is misleading as her closing statement is belied by the very first words of the novel on page one. The beginning uncannily metamorphoses into the ending, and the other way around—creating a haunted text that goes in circles. These textual strategies pose questions pertaining to reliability and narrative authority. Throughout the novel, readers are confronted with abrupt switches from one perspective to another, when narrators interrupt and contradict each other—often mid-sentence. These shifts are sometimes signalled only by a line break and sometimes not signalled at all. In this way, 29 Barton Road haunts on yet another level: as one of three

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first-person narrators, its voice is woven through the story as it alternates with Ore, Elliot and Miranda. As Juliann Fleenor argues regarding narrative instability and complexity in gothic fiction, “the narrative structure is usually one of multiple narrators. Epistolary novels or narrations within narrations are used […]. The struggle with the absolute is so threatening that even the narration must be questionable” (1983, 12). This is a marker not only for the gothic but also for the postmodern, as Bianca Tredennick suggests, “where such protean forms merge into self-referentiality, self-­ consciousness, and metafiction” (2015, 168). With the house as one of its main narrators, White is for Witching undermines the human stories it tells and manages to radically unsettle narrative conventions within the space of the haunted house/text. Many gothic fictions incorporate prefaces and assurances by often unreliable narrators who assert the authenticity and authority of the presented narrative. These editorial and authorial fictions are either embedded into the paratext or can be found woven into the main text of the story. In displaying the same structural slippages, White is for Witching continues the tradition of the inherently monstrous narrative strategies of the gothic which showcased “what other forms of writing often conceal: untrustworthiness, a slippery relationship to the truth” (Chaplin 2011, 182). This unsettling slipperiness is paradigmatically exemplified by the ending of White is for Witching when the house asks: “Who do you believe? Well? Is it the black girl? Or Eliot? Or me? Our talk depends upon the fact that you weren’t there and you don’t know what happened. At the very least I hope you take Eliot with a pinch of salt. He is a terrible liar” (226). White is for Witching disorients its readers who themselves then turn into gothic victims “racing through various textual labyrinths in search of a ‘truth’ that never quite comes into view” (Chaplin 2011, 195), haunted by the ghosts of xenophobia. As a postcolonial gothic text that ultimately attempts to exorcise the racist haunted house, the novel excels in making the house’s ghosts all-­ pervasive and almost uncontainable. It essentially transgresses the boundaries of the text to speak directly to the reader: “I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home […]—I tell where you are. Don’t turn to look back at me. I am only tangible when you don’t look” (73). The monstrous interior of the home unsettles boundaries and threatens stability, linearity and familiarity. The haunting, disorientating nature of the text also reveals itself in how the novel’s typography and layout on the page play with these shifting

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foundations: this is signalled by switches in font, line breaks or unconventional formats. The way in which the letters are arranged on the page mirrors the fluid architecture of 29 Barton Street, and in leaving spaces blank and showcasing ruptures within the page layout, the typography reflects the interrupted and subverted spaces of the story. One example along which these disruptions can be traced are the “bridge words” Oyeyemi employs throughout the novel—these bridge words consist of single words, which stand alone and which link disparate sections, locations and dimensions with each other. These words act “as textual points in which the narratives converge” and they are “suggestive of the text’s motifs of transition, time, and racial difference” in that they “generate moments of temporal and spatial indeterminacy in which events on either side of the textual ‘bridge’ are forced to collide” (Din-Kariuki 2017, 65). The employment of these linking words can be regarded as a meta-textual, meta-­spatial intervention, produced by a text that resists any form of interpretative closure. Similar to the postmodern haunted house novel House of Leaves by Mark Z.  Danielewski (2000), White is for Witching mirrors its house’s movements on meta-textual levels: “Just as the house indefinitely expands, deconstructs and reconstructs itself, without its exterior dimensions changing at all, so the text keeps expanding and deconstructing itself” (Michlin 2012, n. pag.). In House of Leaves, there is a discrepancy between inside and outside and the house starts to grow and to arrange its rooms all on its own, an explicit parallel to the way the house in White is for Witching behaves. In House of Leaves, the “layout on the page suddenly matches the meaning of the text, in calligrammatic style” (ibid.). For instance, a narrowing corridor is materialised by increasingly small “blocks” or tunnels of words in the middle of an otherwise blank page, the words themselves “squeezed out of shape” (Michlin 2012, n. pag.; Danielewski 2000, 433–460). Similarly, in White is for Witching the page layout indicates shifts in space and narration. Blanks and stand-alone words link from one room to another, from one narrator to another. One of these shifts can be found in a passage which showcases one of the house’s first attacks on whom it perceives as “other”: She [Miranda] lay down and didn’t want to shut her eyes. With curtains drawn it could almost be night. But she heard someone talking to Luc downstairs, she heard the clatter of cutlery, she heard the whirr of the lift

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broke down that night, No one knew what time. The timing became important when Azwer and Ezma couldn’t find their older daughter in the morning. (35)

As the lift stops between the flights of the house to incarcerate the young girl Deme, the daughter of the Azerbaijani gardener who helps Luc with the Bed and Breakfast, the story also temporarily becomes stuck between different levels of narration. “The effect of this startling device is to visually and formally mimic the house’s monstrous architecture, as Oyeyemi’s ‘the lift’ bridges the space between the real and the monstrous. […] ‘The lift’, floating in the middle of the page, is suggestive of being lost in the interstices, like an elevator caught between floors” (Tredennick 2015, 178). This narrative device visually mimics the haunted house’s architecture that changes at will, but often also signals the switch between different narrators. The trope of the haunted house and the ghostly (inter) textuality of its manifestation on the page speak of the performative nature of White is for Witching’s narrative, shedding light on silences, gaps and erasures. As Monica Michlin argues, “the haunted house motif has become prevalent in contemporary postmodern narratives staging the ‘haunted self’ of survivors of trauma”, playing on “circularity and repetition, blanks and blackouts, fragmentation and incoherence” (2012, n. pag.). The haunted house in Oyeyemi becomes such a signifier of “cultural haunting” (Brogan 1998, 4), of a national and colonial trauma that seeks its way outside. In displaying a text that haunts just as it alters its architecture and evokes many different ghosts, White is for Witching transports trauma onto the page: It was strange on the Western Heights, you could see both town and sea, one seeming to hold the other back with its split brick and glass. On the Heights you were high and not at all secure, you felt as if you could fall at any moment […] Miranda had known the address of the detention centre before she had come, she knew that the place was called the Citadel, but she had forgotten that it actually looked like a citadel. She had re-imagined the building as white and similar to a hospital. But now she understood that that would have been silly. A building of this size would not blend on the Western Heights if it was white was the colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected her feeling that she was not clean. (115)

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Here, the bridge word “white” complicates self/other binaries as it links two incompatible dimensions together, destabilising these opposition in an in-between space which complicates centre and margin, inside (house, Anna) and outside (cliffs, immigrants) not only on a thematic but also on a typographical level. As Brenda Cooper points out, this particular linkage points towards the different notions of home and unhome the novel oscillates between: “we see it [the word “white”] act as a portal between the harsh, contemporary political realities of race where illegal immigrants are housed in detention centres, and the terrifying psychological realities of Miranda’s haunting by her weird, gothic, and ghostly ancestors” (2014, 85). Significantly, in this instance the word white, despite its harmful implications, still enables communication, connection and transaction. In performatively displaying its own “raw” materiality, then, the text of White is for Witching exemplarily brings into the open hidden trauma—and in revealing these hauntings, it paves the way for imagining other homes, other lands and other worlds.

Queer Desire, Queer Belonging: A Vampire in Love To the jaded eye, all vampires seem alike, but they are wonderful in their versatility. Some come to life in moonlight, others are killed by the sun; some pierce with their eyes, others with fangs; some are reactionary, others are rebels; but all are disturbingly close to the mortals they prey on. I can think of no other monsters who are so receptive. Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they should be. […] They inhere in our most intimate relationships; they are also hideous invaders of the normal. —Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995, 6)

By examining one of White is for Witching’s gothic key tropes, the haunted house as unhomely home, I have shown how the novel offers alternative ways of performing home, nation and empire. It is now time to fully turn to my second category of analysis, love, and to the second gothic element the novel puts forth: the vampire. The figure of the vampire as a monster from the gothic repository, and especially the hybrid vampire as narrated by Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, combines different discourses and ideas. It is an inherently liminal figure: as undead, it is always already positioned between life and death, therefore managing to shed light on society’s processes of drawing borders and delineating what is orderly and

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appropriate and what is not. As Gina Wisker argues, “vampires are the ultimate Gothic creatures, a living dead contradiction to vehicle the angst, desires and fears of whatever time, place and cultural context produces them. […] Their liminality is a cultural index of unease, dis-ease and apprehension” (2016, 157). It is no surprise then that the vampire is often used as a metaphor of (reverse) colonialism, invasion and usurpation: the vampire can function as a signpost for negotiations of race, of self and other, of a threatening difference that needs to be contained. Vampires, however, are positioned not only as exotically other but often as erotically other as well: in fact, as bloodsuckers and cannibalistic figures, they raise questions about consumption and disintegration, about seduction and desire—“they project what we desire and what disgusts us” (ibid.). An erotic and transgressive spectre, the vampire manages to disturb heteronormative stabilities to coax into existence alternative schemes of longing—a strategy of particular interest in relation to the love story between Ore and Miranda. Imagined as both sexually and racially other, narratives of these vampiric monsters serve as a rich sourcebook from which the narrative of White is for Witching gathers its particular diasporic approach. The following arguments will outline the vampiric archive Oyeyemi draws upon. To illuminate the novel’s palimpsestic process of rewriting the vampire, I will examine the origins of the vampire as well as its non-Western variations, especially the African Caribbean folklore of the soucouyant, which plays an important role in White is for Witching. Like the haunted house, the figure of the vampire is renegotiated by the narrative to serve as a focal point around which the text is able to build a critique which is influenced by a diasporic understanding of the world. Whereas the novel piles up different ideas of space and spatiality around the haunted house, through the vampire figure it can reconsider concepts of hegemonic and heteronormative love and desire, creating an ultimately other, queer sort of belonging. The vampire in White is for Witching is embodied by Miranda, who falls in love with Ore. Adding to an already multi-layered vampire archive, Oyeyemi complicates her narrative further as she focuses on the love story between the two protagonists. The vampiric monster as we traditionally know it destroys its object of desire by draining their blood; in other words, feeding on the living essence of its victim is what constitutes the vampire. While these processes of destruction and death are not completely banned from the novel, they are partially substituted by a renegotiation of vampiric relationality and requited desire. In the novel, vampire

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and gothic heroine, which are both unstable categories, fall in love and become intertwined; the borders between them are blurred in a reparative reiteration of harmful, (neo)colonial and violently nationalistic discourses. Ore and Miranda’s love story radically questions the patterns of repelling the fearful other, instead offering up a different narrative of being-­ together: as bell hooks argued in All About Love, “when we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation” and that “the choice to love is a choice to connect” (2000, 93). In hooks’ thinking, and, as I will show, in Oyeyemi’s work, love is conceptualised as a direct challenge, a force to bring forth social change and repair centuries of harmful subjugation of society’s others. To make clearer White is for Witching’s contribution to the vampiric archive and the way it uses this gothic monster to scrutinise heteronormative and Eurocentric practices of world- and of love-making, in the following I endeavour to sketch the European and non-European origins of the figure of the vampire. These are, firstly, grounded in a particular nationalistic and colonialist background and, secondly, shore up assumption about gender, sexuality and partnership through the principle of consumption, which entails both gastronomical consumption as well as erotic, sexual consumption. The discourses surrounding race and sexuality, and more specifically those pertaining to Englishness and queerness, will serve as the basis for the main argumentative strands my discussion of Ore and Miranda’s love story will revolve around. Two very canonically white and Western texts, the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) and the novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu (1872), will be used as starting points for my analysis. Especially because they are deeply embedded into the traditional Eurocentric canon of vampire texts and inscribed into Europe’s cultural understanding of this particular trope, it is important to question them, adapt and utilise their readings in contrast to other versions and other truths. In adding to her novel the African Caribbean concept of the soucouyant, a skin-shedding, soul-eating monster inhabiting the former margins of the colonies, Oyeyemi unsettles the European and Anglo-American gothic origins of the vampire figure. The soucouyant acts as a subversive factor disturbing the Western canonical texts upon which White is for Witching is partially build, confirming Jack Halberstam’s argument that gothic texts (and even more so postcolonial gothic texts) mark transgressions and turn inside-out norms, rules and orders (cf. Skin Shows, 1995).

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White Is for Witching’s Vampiric Ancestry Since its beginnings, Gothic fiction has constantly reinvented itself according to the historical conditions it finds itself in, “morphing and mutating itself into new and disparate incarnations as the context requires”, as Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien remark (2015, 1). Regarding the canonical Western catalogue of gothic narratives, in Great Britain the gothic and its league of monsters return towards the end of the nineteenth century, addressing yet new and different societal anxieties. As Botting notes, “it was in the context of Victorian science, society and culture that their [the monsters’] fictional power was possible, associated with anxieties about the stability of the social and domestic order and the effects of economic and scientific rationality” (2014, 88). Especially the deviant, degenerate nature of humanity itself served as the main impetus for a newly flourishing gothic literature in the wake of Victorianism with its “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality […] respectable by day and pleasure-seeking by night” (89). The discourses of medicine, physiology, criminology, neurology and psychiatry strove to discipline by introducing regulatory and pathologising mechanisms into society but in fact only heightened anxieties pertaining to depravity and cultural degeneration. Jack Halberstam explains that the “[g]othic infiltrates the Victorian novel as a symptomatic moment in which boundaries between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself”, it is “a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (1995, 2). Just like the gothic trope of the haunted house, the figure of the vampire in gothic fictions not only is present to evoke terror but also has deeper societal meanings that emerge when looking closer at its construction: the vampire who drinks human blood and its close relative, the cannibal who eats human flesh, are highly evocative fantasies and as such have always been used to delineate historically specific fears, anxieties and subversions, crossing “the boundaries that separated the healthy and respectable domestic life of the Victorian middle classes from the nocturnal worlds of moral corruption and sexual depravity” (Botting 2014, 90). As Höglund and Khair note in their introduction to Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood, “[t]he vampire has always been a traveller” (2013, 1). As traveller and shape shifter, the vampire stands for

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concepts related to movement, such as migration and invasion. The figure of the vampire is imbued with the fear of pollution from without, and its origins in European imagination are often “explained as fears of the Plague, [and] thought, since the Middle Ages, to have emanated from the East. Dracula’s principal companions and alternative forms—rats, wolves and bats—were associated with disease” (Botting 2014, 95). The vampire, like no other gothic monster, marks the terrors of racial encounter so prevalent in the gothic. John Stagg’s “The Vampyre” (1810), John Polidori’s Byronian The Vampyre (1819) or James Malcom Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845–1847), some of the first vampiric figures appearing in fiction, have marked the beginnings of imagining the vampire in Western thought, but no other vampire has shaped our understanding of the threatening, sensual monster more than Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dracula is characterised as a mysterious, outlandish and “Eastern” type of monster that originates in the gothic elsewhere-setting of Transylvania, a place where “oriental” Ottoman, Slavic and Balkan influences merge together, and that poses a grave threat to the Western world as it makes its way into Great Britain. With this narrative, Stoker reflects prevalent Victorian fears of the foreign other who penetrates not only England’s borders but also its bodies. But there is more to this than the mere fear of invasion: in “the marauding, invasive Other, British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms” (Arata 1990, 623), and England is made alien to itself. At a time when British world power and global influence declined, the Empire saw itself confronted with its own (failed) colonial strategies. This decline was marked by “the loss of overseas markets for British goods, […] the increasing unrest in British colonies and possessions, the growing domestic uneasiness over the morality of imperialism” (622). This all combined “erode[d] Victorian confidence in the inevitability of British progress and hegemony” (ibid.). In its attempts to stabilise its increasingly unstable national identity, the Empire tried to repel the other in order to fortify Britishness within. Yet in admitting otherness, the Empire itself becomes other. It lies in the innate meaning of the word monster (from Latin “monstrum”, “portent, prodigy, monstrous creature” and the base of “monere”, “to warn”, cf. “monster” OED) to expose that which should remain hidden. The monster, thus, becomes a potent device to reveal exactly those power structures which created monstrosity in the first place. As China Miéville has succinctly argued in his “Theses on Monsters”, “[e]pochs throw up the monsters

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they need. History can be written of monsters, and in them” (2012, n. pag.). Stoker’s Dracula offers a paradigmatic example of the unnatural and monstrous exotic other which threatens to overthrow and consume the self/the nation, exposing the insecurity and xenophobia at work in Victorian society. Interestingly, as Elleke Boehmer astutely notes in “Empire’s Vampires”, the spatiality of the text of Stoker’s Dracula negotiates these fears and anxieties also on a meta-level: in producing “a manyleaved narrative reportage, Stoker’s novel attempts finally to allay its concerns about excessive expansion by structurally boxing in the at-first strangely ubiquitous Count” (2013, vii–viii). It is no wonder, then, that the ending of Dracula strives to see the excessive vampire expelled, killed, pushed out of the narrative and ultimately punished for his unrightful penetration of British borders/bodies. Here, the similarities to White is for Witching’s discussions of national space-building strategies and discourses of belonging and expulsion become abundantly clear. As we have repeatedly seen in gothic and post-gothic texts, the other has to be banned from the story’s centre. Underlining this, Christopher Craft has argued that a gothic text “first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruption that he/she/it brings” (1984, 107). This act of banishment, however, sometimes remains unsuccessful like in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the monstrous creature lurks at the centre of the story and then emerges through layers of narrative levels to finally, in the end, escape its textual prison on a floating sheet of ice and disappear into the dark. Neither does Dracula manage to completely contain its monster(s)—its monstrosity lives forth through the female characters who, even though either killed or redeemed, leave behind a feeling of disorder and unease. Dracula articulates anxieties pertaining not only to space, nation and home but also to gender and sexuality. The story negotiates new constructs of masculinity and femininity, such as the figure of the “New Woman” or the figure of the “homosexual” which became more prominent during the late nineteenth century in public discourse (cf. Richardson and Willis, 2002). It is a novel that is not only scared of geographical invasion but also of the instability of gender norms. It overtly links sexual transgression to monstrosity and vampirism; a connection that becomes clear when examining Dracula’s three brides. Lucy Westenra, one of the two female (and English) protagonists, “once bitten, becomes openly voluptuous and frank about her sexual desires” (Horner and

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Zlosnik 2014, 63); the act of preying on little children on Hampstead Heath during the night constitutes an absolute antithesis to ideal Victorian womanhood and as such aggressively contradicts the demure, chaste and obedient femininity of the angel in the house: “Finally, only a stake through the heart, with all the phallic connotations that carries, can render her dead, rather than undead, and restore her to the quiet passivity far more appropriate to Victorian ideas of femininity” (63). Mina Murray Harker, the second female character in Dracula, is both a prototype of the loyal and pure Victorian wife-to-be and of the New Woman. She is a schoolteacher who asserts her voice through writing and collecting the journals, letters and newspaper clippings the epistolary novel is constructed of. When she is bitten (in a quasi-romantic, sexual act enforced by the Count), she is turned into a liminal being, flickering between vampiric and human states and (in)voluntarily acts as mediator between monstrosity and normality. Finally, when Dracula is killed at the end of the novel, Mina is freed from his curse and is able to re-enter society as the angel in the house, seemingly redeeming herself in giving birth to a son, seven years after the events. But a permanent mark on her forehead remains as a reminder of her former transgressions which are thus forever engraved onto her body (Stoker [1897] 1997, 317; 326). With these negotiations of (transgressive, dangerous, perverse) gender and sexuality in connection to vampirism, Dracula cites another vampiric text: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella Carmilla was in many ways a precedent text for Dracula, though Stoker changed the vampire’s place of origin as well as its sex. Carmilla was first published as a serial in the literary magazine The Dark Blue (1871–1872). Le Fanu’s monster is a female vampire who embodies various aspects of cultural difference, her vampiric threat portrayed as implicitly sexual: “the shape-shifting Carmilla/ Mircalla/Millarca tries to seduce Laura, a virginal 27-year-old who lives in an Austrian Schloss with her widowed father” (Horner and Zlosnik 2014, 65). The novella is “generally accepted as the first lesbian vampire story in prose fiction” (ibid.) and therefore another crucial source text for White is for Witching’s queer love story. Carmilla’s vampiric seduction condenses various contemporary anxieties concerning unregulated female sexuality and especially female homoeroticism. The vampire’s beauty is corrupt, and her appearance, actions and speech are often strange and incomprehensible to her victim. Carmilla is constructed in terms of not only irresistible erotic power but also profound cultural otherness:

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Sometimes […] my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again […] breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-­ powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; […], leaving me trembling. […] [S]he would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek. Her agitations and her language were unintelligible to me. (Le Fanu [1872] 2004, 90; 104)

Carmilla the vampire seduces innocent Laura, her femininity perceived as dark and animal-like, which is only underlined by her ability to turn into a large black cat. Her threatening otherness is only reinforced by her “unnatural” desire for other women. But instead of being able to explore this alternative desire further, just like the women in Dracula Carmilla is ultimately subjected to male patriarchal dominance and killed in order to save Laura who then returns to her now “cleansed” domestic space of femininity: “Laura’s susceptibility to Carmilla’s disturbing charms is finally interrupted by the reassertion of a male order of meaning and sexual differentiation” (Botting 2014, 94). While critics like Fred Botting describe these attempts of banning the monster from the text/from society, other scholars have re-read the novella in order to explore more multi-faceted and disruptive cultural constructions of gender and same-sex desire which escape the text’s boundaries and position it as an important foil for many queer vampire narratives to come. Paulina Palmer’s analysis of Gothic lesbian fictions, and predominantly of Carmilla, for example, leads her to conclude that their authors “portray the lesbian vampire as a signifier of an alternative economy of sexual pleasure which is more emotionally intense and fulfilling than its heterosexual counterpart” (2007, 203; see also 1999). In a more recent exploration, Gina Wisker has shown that the figure of the vampire as “archetypal seducer, villain, a seductively voracious and devouring femivore has been reappropriated, reconfigured and rescripted” (2016, 158). Naming female writers such as “Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Rice, Pat Califia, Jeanne Kalogridis, Jewelle Gomez, Sherry Gottlieb and a host of others”, Wisker sheds light on how the vampire has been rewritten by twentieth-­ century and contemporary women writers to serve as a vehicle to “challenge the conventions of horror, of female victims and sexually voracious monsters” and how they “revive and reinterpret the vampire to their own

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radical ends” (ibid.). Instead of constructing their female characters as weak, vulnerable, gullible and latently corrupted as has been done in historical, traditional vampire fictions like Dracula or Carmilla, these new approaches enact and celebrate often queer female vampire stories that “represent the celebration of sexual energies, the challenging of conventional constraints, roles and agency” (163). Keeping in mind these feminist, queer reimaginations of the vampire, I will now turn to White is for Witching’s particular re-embodiment of the female vampire and its queer love story. Wilful Consumption and Monstrous Encounters Both Dracula and Carmilla constitute important narrative foils upon which White is for Witching builds its own vampiric love story. It takes its cues from these familiar and canonical tales of consumption, expulsion and desire, but subverts known narratives as it deftly switches around the connotations heaped around the vampire. White is for Witching does not just simply reverse the story of a dark and exotic (female) other who preys on the white English virginal maiden but plays with the gaps opened up by this reversal. If in Dracula and Carmilla the reader is—at least ostensibly—left with a tidy solution, with everything in its “proper” place, in White is for Witching no such security can be achieved. This textual, narratological and ideological insecurity stems mostly from the love story between Ore and Miranda. In the following I will examine the construction of this love story and how it plays into discourses of vampiric relationality and affect, of sexual as well as gastronomical desire, hunger and consumption. Ultimately, as I will show, the love story between the two girls makes visible, and thus graspable, understandable and manageable, the dangerous paradoxes inherent to love. To return to Sara Ahmed, who in her writing about the complexities of love as they relate to human experience, has explained: while “love may be crucial to the pursuit of happiness, love also makes the subject vulnerable, exposed to, and dependent upon another, who in ‘not being myself’, threatens to take away the possibility of love” ([2004] 2014, 125). In Ore and Miranda’s love story, these dangers and threats are negotiated, carefully examined and, in the end, wilfully challenged. Vampiric subjectivity in White is for Witching is embodied by Miranda who becomes an amalgam of many familiar European vampire figures. Throughout the course of the novel, the pica she has inherited from her

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great-grandmother, grandmother and mother turns into something darker—a desire for human flesh and blood. Her initial consumption of chalk, the earthly foundations of the white cliffs of Dover which signify English purity, turns into the desire to pray on those perceived as other, those who should be kept out. We see this in a dream-like episode, where Miranda joins her naked female ancestors whose lips have been sewn shut sitting around a table: They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom. Miranda could see their tongues writhing. […] The long table was made of pearl, or very clean bone, and it was crowded with plates and dishes. […] Miranda knew exactly what was on the table because she and Lily joined hands and walked up and down its length, looking for something, anything that Miranda might like to eat. Food steamed and sizzled and swam in juices and sauces hot and cold and rich and sweet, there were even sticks of chalk and strips of plastic, but all they did was make Miranda hungrier for what was not there, so hungry that she released her mother’s hand and held her own throat and gagged. Her hunger hardened her stomach, grew new teeth inside her. (126–127)

Miranda’s pica, the desire to eat something that is not food such as chalk or plastic, is turned into the desire for something entirely perverse—“She knew, but she couldn’t say it” (127): the flesh and blood of other humans. Her vampiric transformation becomes even clearer later on in the narrative, when she literally grows fangs: “There was a cloud on the moon, and two slick punctures in her lips. […] When she opened her mouth her teeth lifted, then sliced her bottom lip again. […] What am I?” (236). But even though we see different vampiric precursors assembled in Miranda, the novel cannot be pinned down as a conventional vampire tale. The reason for that is not only that it refuses to accept the conventional patterns that come with vampire stories but also that it adds a non-Western concept to its repertoire of bloodsucking figures: the soucouyant. This African Caribbean vampire figure manages to both combine and critique the love/ world-making strategies employed by the two white Eurocentric fictions delineated above. It serves as a tactic to speak to and against the European concept of the vampire and consequently provides the foundations for Ore and Miranda’s love story. In my characterisation of the soucouyant, I rely on the research of Meredith M.  Gadsby in Sucking Salt (2006) and Giselle Liza Anatol in

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Things that Fly in the Night (2015), who have both examined this figure in depth and with great acuity: the soucouyant is a Caribbean shape shifter, a “succubus, or female spirit [who] sheds her skin at night and flies about sucking the blood of children and careless travellers” (Gadsby 2006, 67). It is a creature that “could be found in a variety of cultures: Jamaicans and Gyanese might call her Old Hige or simply a hag; in Suriname, one could be drained by an asema; Haitians sometimes refer to volant or loogaroo; a St. Lucian might tell you about gens-gagée” (Anatol 2015, x; emphases in original). Genealogically, it can be defined as “a construction based on both Victorian-era vampire mythology […] and on pre-existing Akan [an ethnic group in Ghana] folklore of the obayfo” (Gadsby 2006, 67). The soucouyant is a hybrid monster, a gothic immigrant which travelled aboard slave ships from Africa via the Caribbean into the collective imagination of those colonised and those that colonised. It is not only a traditional fairy tale character similar to the Western concept of the witch or vampire but also “a fitting metaphor for the workings of (neo-)colonialism that condemn the poor and dispossessed” (Rudd 2010, 51). Its diasporic trajectory points towards a literally “life-draining” colonial past and the tortuous European exploitation/consumption of the slaves. Joan Dayan sees the construction of this particular female monster as a “surfeit or remnant of an institution that turned humans into things, beats or mongrels” (1998, 258). The soucouyant originated in lore and oral traditions which vocalised but also violated female monster figures. Like the monstrous mermaid figure Mami Wata, the soucouyant’s fate was often fabricated as a punitive measure in order to put rebellious and transgressive female figures in their places and to function as a control mechanism for unruly sexualities. The soucouyant flies at night to hunt her prey, but to do that she has to rid herself of her worldly skin, hatching from it as a ball of fire to inhabit the night as a dispossessed spirit and to invade the homes of those whose soul/blood she wants to suck. When the sun rises, the soucouyant, like the vampire, needs to return into her skin which she has hidden to lead her human life during the day. As Anatol argues with regard to the gender troubles the soucouyant evokes, [u]nlike the “good” woman who marries, is faithful, bears and nurtures children, and anchors the domestic space, the soucouyant of conventional tales is a woman who satiates her individual physical needs (including the sexual desires associated with bloodsucking). She is all the more frightening

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for completely abandoning her physical body, rather than embracing its alleged limitations (physical weakness) and purposes (childbirth). She is not just a potential source of danger to individual subjects; she is an active agent in society’s destruction. (2009, n. pag.)

Echoing the containing tactics of the other two vampire texts discussed above, the female monster figure is tortured and finally killed, for the world order to return to its normal state. In Ore’s words in White is for Witching, the story goes like this: “Find her skin and treat it with pepper and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her power, and if she is unable to re-enter her body by sunrise, she cannot live. Kill the soucouyant, that unnatural old lady, and then all shall be as it should” (147–148). Or, as Gadsby observes, “the woman is robbed of her sensuality and sexuality via the violence done to her skin” (2006, 68). But numerous re-interpretations and reiterations of the soucouyant myth offer yet another position: the policing of sexuality and race is met with a narrative of resistance. In “Transforming the Skin-Shedding Soucouyant”, Giselle Anatol argues that the soucouyant can be read as a form of female agency in Caribbean literature (2000). Like Mami Wata, who lures male suitors under water, the soucouyant asserts herself against male dominance, figuring as a “symbol of female sexual identity and independence […] challenging patriarchal control of women’s bodies” (Gadsby 2006, 66). Because of that, she has to be punished by being poisoned with salt—salt that also stands for the salt water the African slaves travelled through to meet their fates as subjugated, objectified beings. Taking into account these interdependencies of race and gender, White is for Witching suggests yet another rewriting of the soucouyant to shed light on its recalcitrant potential as a shifting signifier. The novel offers various and not necessarily overlapping approaches, employing both European vampiric figures and African Caribbean soucouyant folklore to interrogate national identity and gender norms. As readers, we encounter the idea of the soucouyant first and foremost intertextually. Our first confrontation with her is through Ore’s engagement with “her favourite story” (147): “As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn’t decide if she was a monster” (148). Ore’s knowledge and understanding of this monster figure are informed by an ambiguous stance that recognises an “old woman whose only interaction with other people was consumption. The soucouyant who is not content with her self. She is

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a double danger—there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?” (155). Significantly, when Ore searches for titles on the soucouyant in the Cambridge library, she finds not books but Miranda, the vampire-­ soucouyant of White is for Witching: “After a listless half-hour flipping through critical essays on Dracula, I went in search of the likeliest looking soucouyant-related titles that came up on the computer. I found Miranda at a desk beside a staircase in one of the wings” (155). Adding yet another layer to the novel’s self-conscious reflection of its own textuality/fictionality, Miranda’s name, a reference to Prospero’s daughter in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, hints also at a “structuring myth for writing on and from the Caribbean” (Stephanou 2014, 1246). In alluding to The Tempest, the text also alludes to its unruly cannibal-monster Caliban and his absent witch-­ mother Sycorax, using the trope of otherness and monstrosity as an anchor for criticising the colonial project.1 But simultaneously, the name used for Miranda and used by Miranda to describe (her own) monstrosity is not the proper name of soucouyant but another, very English name: the “goodlady”—derived from Anna Good, the contorted angel of the (haunted) house. Miranda is both European vampire and Caribbean soucouyant. The first instance she awakes as a monster and haunts Dover is at the stroke of midnight as indicated by her dead mother’s watch which still runs on Haitian time (34). The novel thus interweaves the African Caribbean folktale as embodied by white Miranda (explicitly hinting at Western appropriations of black femininity) with Ore whose skin comes off but who also carries salt and pepper with her to keep 29 Barton Road’s evil energies at bay. The epidermal violation Ore undergoes in the haunted house mirrors the aspect of skin shedding and subsequently the violence done to her skin in the original lore of the female and racially other soucouyant monster figure. At the same time, she is the one who ultimately manages to defeat soucouyant-vampire Miranda: I’m not brave. I remembered the salt I had in both pockets, and the pepper of the wickedest kind wrapped in plastic. I coated my hands in salt. I crumbled pepper in my palms. I stepped into the lift and, expecting to touch nothing, I tore at the little girl’s face until Miranda’s came through. Miranda struck at me, spitting and hissing. I said, ‘Oh God, oh my God, sorry, I’m sorry, oh my God,’ over and over, but kept her pinned against the back of the lift, both my hands around her throat. […] Kill the soucouyant, salt and pepper. (228–229)

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In rubbing salt and pepper all over herself and over Miranda, she in turn sheds Miranda’s first layer of skin, so that beneath the soucouyant the girl appears. But there is yet another layer and yet another girl beneath: Miranda was in the corner with her arms folded around her knees. […] I didn’t speak to her. If I was going to help her I shouldn’t speak to her. I knelt beside her and rested my hands on her head. She tensed, and I cracked her open like a bad nut with a glutinous shell. She split, and cleanly, from head to toe. There was another girl inside her, the girl from the photograph, all long straight hair and pretty pearlescence. This other girl wailed, ‘No no, why did you do this? Put me back in.’ She gathered the halves of her shed skin and tried to fit them back together across herself. (229–230)

In this way, the novel constantly rephrases both positive and negative incarnations of the soucouyant—the powerful witch who transgresses her bodily boundaries competes with the constrictions of a vampiric corporeality which is bound to skin or to coffins. The strength of the text and also the confusion it evokes lie in Oyeyemi’s tactic of employing various differing plot strands, in laying different myths and tales over each other, in having discourses overwrite and superimpose each other. While both the soucouyant and the vampire have at their heart consumption and the desire to suck life, they stem from completely different cultural contexts. Yet, they are united within the figure of Miranda, whose whiteness and whose witching fluctuate constantly. As white soucouyant-vampire Miranda and Black British Ore fall in love, processes of killing, destruction, suffering and othering are made queer as the two female protagonists find connection points—by touching skin to skin, by sharing their bodies and by their sharing meals. As I have shown above, in the African Caribbean diaspora the figure of the vampire serves to stage “the nightmarish consumption of the bodies of the colonized and to interrogate the relations of consumption between white and black bodies” (Stephanou 2014, 1245). White is for Witching transfers these power relations to a contemporary British society where the soucouyant “crosses borders, linking memories of a colonial past to a present which still struggles to shed its white supremacist ideology and which still revolves around unnatural consumption” (ibid.). In focussing on a love story and on articulations of female queer desire, the novel manages to renegotiate these processes of othering. Miranda is a female vampire figure who inhabits a space characterised by its complex queer affects and subjectivities. She breaks with the limits of traditional Western constructs of

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femininity, thus resisting one of the foundational texts the novel works with, the lesbian novella Carmilla. In retelling and partially refusing Carmilla’s structural set-up (the expulsion of the queer female vampire from the text), White is for Witching renegotiates the specific nineteenth-­ century sexology embraced by the novella and also by Stoker’s Dracula, namely, the framing of lesbians as “being possessed by a monstrous sexuality that led inevitably to madness and/or death” (Gray 2015, 133). The lovers Ore and Miranda radically upset the formula of European gothic genre structures and stereotypes that have become buried under endless reiterations of the Dracula or Carmilla narrative, which submits its female figures to patriarchal control mechanisms. What I find interesting in this context of rewriting is Helen Cousin’s suggestion that once Ore and Miranda become lovers, they “step into gothic roles” (2012, 54). They then overturn these gothic roles, instead producing a postcolonial gothic love story that wriggles free of suffocating racial and gender-normative stereotypes: “In Ore as female victim […] blackness and Englishness become conjoined. However, Ore is not only the female victim to Miranda’s sexual predation; the text later establishes Ore as a gothic hero [sic]—a role also typically taken by an English character” (ibid.). This installs Ore as an English “insider” in terms of the archetypes of gothic. By insisting on her blackness, any attempts of restoring an Englishness that excludes the non-white are refuted. Miranda, who early on in their relationship is described by Ore as “one of those Gothic victims, the child woman who is too pretty and good for this world and ends up dying of tuberculosis or grief—a sweet heart-shaped face and a river of blue-black hair” (162), is turned into her own photo negative, and Ore, the black female character traditionally ascribed to be the monstrous perpetrator, turns out to be the English heroine of the story. This reversal, however, is further complicated by the fact that “victim” and “vampire” fall in love, therefore destabilising conventional routes of narration and of consumption. Ore is neither sexualised as exotic nor depicted as dangerous dark other, and while white Miranda incorporates racist monstrosity, she simultaneously shows a wilful resistance to it. The text plays with different sorts of desire and allure as different kinds of appetites are mingled. When Ore and Miranda meet in Cambridge, Miranda has stepped away from the house and its harmful influence. The section of Ore and Miranda’s love story in the second half of the novel goes almost uninterrupted by the house’s voice and instead focuses on the two girls and their growing entanglement (143–192). It is important to

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note here that it is Ore who identifies as lesbian and who consciously and self-assertively describes her desires: she thinks back to her first romantic and sexual experiences with her school friend Cat (153), and the novel also shows her being interested in Tijuana, another girl from Dover, before she meets Miranda (159). When Miranda and Ore spend more time together, it is Ore who first thinks about kissing her (163). Before they do, though, they share a meal during one of their nightly walks: We knelt down on our coats, nibbling olives—now I remember there were olives—then sat cross-legged for the sandwiches and pie, then lay down with the chocolate and the apples. I’d never been so hungry […] We were both very rude. We lay facing each other, eating like mad, each stuffing cheese fast and hard, as if to prevent the other from getting more than their share. (164)

This passage is interesting because it is Ore who says she is hungry and because Miranda is willingly eating proper food when she usually only ingests plastic and chalk. Their shared meal implies an act of community, the blurring of boundaries between vampire and victim already noticeable: “Rather than rejecting the Other in an act of Kristevan abjection that would serve to delineate her sense of self, Miri’s relationship with Ore is described almost entirely in terms of consumption, prioritising incorporation over distinction” (Ilott 2015, 65). As Ilott has noted, Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran claim that “appetite can function as a form of voice” (2003, 26) and I would argue that Miranda and Ore’s shared act of eating not only foreshadows their sexual and romantic relationship but speaks of the potential of food as a shifting ground between reparative counter-­ discourse and harmful processes of “absorption, assimilation, incorporation, erasure, eating up the other” (Githire 2010, 858). As Githire states in “The Empire Bites Back”, the trope of food can operate “as a tool for cultural resistance and the articulation of diasporic identity” (858). However, eating and not-eating in postcolonial texts (as in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions) can also point towards violence. Conscious of these potentially violent discourses, White is for Witching highlights the connection between Miranda’s eating disorder (her desire for chalk) and vampirism (her desire for blood) and interweaves discussions of forceful inclusion and exclusion with corporeal sensuality and longing. It is no coincidence that Miranda, when she first meets Ore when they both interview for a place at Cambridge, has brought with her onyx to nibble on:

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Miranda’s first interview was an hour and a half after Eliot’s, so she wandered in and out of the entrances to the college’s stone stairwells. […] She had a pocketful of onyx chips (properties of onyx: it helps you hold your emotions steady; side effects of onyx: it is the sooty hand that strangles all your feelings out of you) and she used her teeth to carve tiny, acrid flakes of onyx onto her tongue. […] She collided with another girl on her way back into the waiting area outside the interview room. They both held their heads and moaned. […] The girl was black, all long legs and platform trainers, clad in grey school uniform. Her head was covered with tiny plaits that had coloured elastic bands tied around the ends, and her eyes were dark and large like drops of rich ink. (51)

Onyx is believed to have the healing property, as Katie Burton points out, to “remove spirit possession” and “supports going on alone” (2017, 81; referencing Stein 2008, 146) and thus points towards Miranda’s “desire to expel the goodlady from within herself” (2017, 81). This, then, foreshadows potentially reparative habits of consumption employed by Miranda and Ore together later on in the novel. In offering up these different kinds of appetites and desires, Oyeyemi joins contemporary diasporic women writers such as Lindsey Collen, Ntozake Shange, Andrea Levy or Toni Morrison whose “use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and related tropes frame and critique continuing relations of domination and control” (Githire 2014, 1). Hunger and gastronomical consumption mirror the erotic desire Miranda and Ore feel for each other. While at first Ore seems to be the active one, pursuing the relationship, it is Miranda who starts draining and consuming her once they bring their relationship to a more visceral, erotic level. Ore realises that she grows thinner and more tired, finding “spiky new angles” on her hips, “eating and eating in [her] room with the doors closed, crisps and chocolate and sausage rolls in the hours when Miranda’s lectures overlapped with [her] free time” (185). Looking at one of the passages when the two girls share one bed, it becomes clear, however, how Miranda struggles with the conflicting desires she finds within herself: Miranda had lain by Ore, smelling her, running her nose over the other girl’s body, turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss whenever Ore stirred, laying a trail of glossy red lip prints. Ore’s smell was raw and fungal as it tangled in the hair between her legs. It turned into a blandly sweet smell, like milk, at her navel, melted into spice in the creases of her elbows, then

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cocoa at her neck. Miranda had needed Ore open. Her head had spun with the desire to taste. She lay her head against Ore’s chest and heard Ore’s heart. The beat was ponderous. Like an oyster, living quietly in its serving-­ dish shell. This heart barely moved. Miranda could have taken it, she knew she could. Ore would hardly have felt it. […] Then came the recoil— would I really? and she’d bitten her own wrist, to test the idea of Ore not feeling a thing. Beneath her teeth the skin of her wrist bulged, trying to move the veins away from the pressure, trying to protect them. (191)

Here, Miranda’s growing vampiric longings become both more pronounced and at the same time more controlled by her—she consciously reflects her desires and tries to act against them: “Behave yourself, she wrote. Eat. […] Manage your consumption” (191), and “Ore is not food. I think I am a monster” (192). As Miranda ponders consuming Ore, “turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss” (191), she calls her thoughts into question and instead turns the violence against herself: “would I really? and she’d bitten her own wrist” (191). Miranda hovers between bite and kiss, signified by the glossy red lipstick and/or blood marks she leaves on Ore’s skin. She is always about to cross a border, but actually never leaves the in-between of skin on skin, never bites Ore. What could be violent, murderous, greedy and sinister is turned around by Miranda herself who constantly hesitates to do what she really wants to do. With this indecisiveness and the will to protect Ore, she goes against bell hooks’ assumption in “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” “that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (1992, 39). Instead, love and desire become transgressive, “acting as a critical intervention challenging and subverting racist domination, inviting and enabling critical resistance […] countering the terrorizing force of the status quo that makes identity fixed, static, a condition of containment and death” (22). Miranda subverts the vampire story in not having it reach its bloody and deadly ending, giving way instead to alternative modes of affirmation and affiliation. Appetite actually turns into a love story—a queer love story, in which consumption is expanded to not only mean the violent and exploitative consumption of the other’s blood to live, but a deliberate rehabilitation of formerly harmful dynamics. Through these ethics of love and compassion, White is for Witching offers alternative appetites: kisses instead of bloody bites; cheese, chips and chocolate instead of chalk.

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Queer scholars like Sara Ahmed and Keguro Macharia have repeatedly described love in terms of stickiness—as messy, leaky, slippery and gluey (cf. Ahmed [2004] 2014). This is interesting insofar as these attributes characterise love as managing to both hold and let go. It amasses affects, emotions, bodies and other entanglements which “stick together” (Macharia 2015, 72) but it also displays fluidity and openness: “Love names a condition and a possibility” (ibid.), creating an alternative hierarchy of self and other. Its elasticity unfurls the potential to negotiate: “[l]ove does not transcend, efface, or mitigate inequality. Instead, it is one of the conditions through which inequality is lived”, always keeping open “the possibility of a radical politics” (ibid.). As seen in my discussion of Miranda and Ore’s intimate meeting points, it becomes clear that they are marked by communality, by skin-on-skin encounters and gastronomical entanglements: “I kissed her, and she kissed me back and we were like that until we gasped for air and laughed at each other, her eyelashes scraping my cheek so when I blinked they felt like my own. […] Is it all right to say how much I like this? The way our skin looks together” (167). By shedding light on unity and difference at the same time, the text does not attempt to “transcend” inequality but rather brings it into a space for discussion; it unpacks patterns of knowing and being in the world via a queer love story. Queer is always what is at odds with the regular and dominant, it works vis-à-vis the normative. Sara Ahmed has defined it as “odd, strange, unseemly, disturbed, disturbing. […] an oblique or slant-­ wise relation to a straight world” (2016, n. pag.). Queerness, and especially queer love, makes “room for bodies that do not obey commands; that do not move in straight lines; that lose their balance” (ibid.). Mirroring this, White is for Witching’s two queer female bodies lose their balance once they return to the haunted house: “In her bed, we pulled her covers up to our chins and lay quietly, careful not to bump each other with the sharp parts of ourselves, the elbows and the knees, until our bodies had warmed each other. […] As we kissed I became aware of something leaving me” (213). This passage where part of Ore’s “soul” is being sucked by soucouyant Miranda delineates the disturbing connection between the two girls, the toxic potential of their relationship. Later in the night, they both sleepwalk and almost kill each other, Ore trying to defend herself with a kitchen knife and Miranda-as-vampire attacking her with scissors. Their queer relationality veers into deathly terrain, but as soon as they recognise each other they pull back: “We touched each other’s faces in the dark, trying to be sure” (217). I argue that even though the house now

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seeks to control Miranda/kill Ore, their love for each other can be read as resistance. For in the end, Miranda kills herself so that Ore can be free— ultimately undermining the architecture of both White is for Witching’s un/homely space and its vampiric Ur-texts. Queer love here serves as a methodology to unpack normative, harmful iterations of power structures, such as represented by the nationalist, racist house. Love can facilitate a formation of practices which understand “aslant” strategies for imagining self and other. White soucouyant-vampire Miranda and Black British Ore radically unsettle the roles traditionally ascribed to them through their shared desire for each other, thus re-ordering their narratives. Ore and Miranda’s disobedience acts against the violent and traumatic family line the house tries to enforce. Miranda’s turning towards Ore means turning away from the house’s wishes for a “pure” genealogy, therefore going against the notion of an “untainted” English nuclear family. With her death, she not only interrupts family structures that focus on reproduction but also the house’s tyrannical rule. As Jack Halberstam makes clear in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation. […] Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. (2–3)

In unmaking the home as offered by the house, Miranda and Ore’s love story struggles against the ordering structures the house tries to implement. The house represents the paranoid nation state and its delusional ideas of pureness, stability and norm. Ore and Miranda act against this, refusing to accept the house’s limitations, its control over their futures: “She was just some girl crying because something stood between her and another girl and said, no. The goodlady said it couldn’t be. How did she dare?” (233). Miranda and Ore’s queer love fights against the straight line of matrilineal succession of monstrous women prying on others (Good Anna, Jennifer, Lily), refuting the idea of an essential mother land: “Miranda Silver was not, could not be herself plus all her mothers” (233). Miranda exchanges the destructive family defined by maternal origins for another kind of female community, a queer love. This romantic and erotic companionship interrupts the notion of women exploiting others and of women acting as guardians for the home/the nation and instead pursues an alternative model of female desire. It is interesting, then, that Miranda

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kills herself with the watch batteries Ore had given her to keep her mother Lily’s watch running—literally halting the temporal order of normativity, cutting the tether to a violent dominating chronology (237). This mirrors the way Halberstam critiques what he calls “reproductive temporality”, instead proposing “queer time” and “alternative temporalities”, where “futures can be imagined according to logistics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction” (2005, 4). Miranda “goes down” against the good lady who is the house who is herself, choosing her death “as the only way to fight the soucouyant” (1). She dies incorporated into the house without having bitten Ore or having continued the female Silver family line—in other words: without having fulfilled her role as vampire, without having fulfilled her role as a woman. Love and desire become a space of disobedience. Unhappy Endings and Impossible Communities “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.” I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?” “From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.” “You don’t want her to be happy and good?” “I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.” —Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching (2009a, 169)

In keeping with Halberstam’s call for queer failures, the novel fails to provide a happy ending. The consequences of this “failure” are twofold: firstly, it critically undermines the fundamental formulaic architecture of the love story, and secondly, it poses an ambiguous interruption to the novel’s vampiric source texts. As a postcolonial, diasporic text, White is for Witching not only refuses to conform to the staple of writing normative love but also alludes to the potentially hurtful dynamics of love between “coloniser” and “colonised” (displayed in both Dracula and Carmilla). As discussed in Chap. 2, in Adichie’s Americanah one happy ending displaces another happy ending: the (heterosexual) relationship of Ifemelu and Obinze and their reunion in Lagos, Nigeria, undercuts ossified conceptions of “leaving” and of “coming home” in postcolonial identity narrations. Zadie Smith’s London trilogy, discussed in Chap. 3, tentatively

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tests out the limits and promises of a homosocial, homoerotic love that runs counter to norms and conventions, as all three novels end on a hopeful if tenuous note. In White is for Witching, the failure of a queer happy ending (in itself queer) radically reconsiders such notions. Ore and Miranda’s longings, especially because they are not fulfilled or concluded in any way, constitute a different belonging. Miranda’s decision to surrender herself defeats the house and simultaneously enables Ore to escape, she is “the girl who gets away”; Ore escapes the house and she escapes the text, she “runs off the page altogether” and therefore achieves an open ending full of potential and possibility. The black female character who was supposed to die, supposed to be consumed by the white vampire, turns out to be the heroine of the postcolonial gothic novel. She is able to emerge from the text as a new hybrid form of heroine. She is not a casualty but a survivor with agency and desires. An example for Ore’s agential independence can be found in her self-­ assertiveness against Miranda-the-vampire who has replaced Miranda-the-­ lover in the final pages of the novel—an important passage I want to quote here again: “I concentrated on making myself colourfast, on not changing under her tongue. I know what I look like. The Ore I signed onto paper in the letters of my name, the idea of a girl that I woke into each morning. Arms, stay with me. Stomach, hold your inner twists” (229). This is a crucial statement, because Ore does everything in her power to stay in control of her body and her movements, refusing to be changed by Miranda or the monstrous house. Miranda, in turn, functions as a signpost, pointing the way to an alternative path: she vanishes (into the house/ the text) so that something new can emerge. Both Miranda’s and Ore’s femininity in this context becomes closely tied to—but ultimately resists— nationalistic discourses as it constantly oscillates between autonomy and dependency. As Gayatri Gopinath has observed, femininity and womanhood are often used “as primary markers of an essential, inviolable communal identity or tradition” (2003, 138). In her work, she illuminates the different possibilities of how gender constructs may reveal the ways in which “the nation is constructed in terms of familial and domestic metaphors, where ‘the woman’ is enshrined as both the symbolic centre and boundary marker of the nation as ‘home’ and ‘family’” (138). Applied to the non-happy ending of the novel, Miranda is being domesticated—in the most literal sense of the word, she is internalised by the house. She returns to the inner, domestic space of often restricted femininity. On the one hand, she is punished for her transgressions, but on the other hand,

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because she has chosen her ending herself, she displays agency and self-­ control against all odds. As she writes in her last postcard to Ore: “I’m sorry for everything. I am going down against her [the goodlady]” (234, emphases in original). Because of this self-sacrifice, Ore can free herself of the house, can become home-less. And in this homelessness lies power. As Homi Bhabha has argued in his article “Halfway House” in which he takes a poem by Toni Morrison called “Whose House is This?” (1992) as his jumping off point, “[h]ome may not be where the heart is, nor even the hearth. Home may be a place of estrangement that becomes the necessary space of engagement; it may represent a desire for accommodation marked by an attitude of deep ambivalence toward one’s location. Home may be a mode of living made into a metaphor of survival” (1997, 11). For Ore, neither the heart nor the hearth offer the belonging she ultimately desires and she consequently has to find another home-in-the-world. Through Ore and Miranda’s queer desires, then, home is destroyed as it is taken away from the house and comes to signify a more open fluid diasporic space of communality. Significant in this process is one of the other female companionships the novel offers: the friendship between Sade the housekeeper and Ore, which I have until now only briefly touched upon but which adds another layer to White is for Witching’s articulation of alternative world- and love-making strategies. While Ore and Miranda occupy the queer romantic, erotic end of the spectrum of love, Ore and Sade enter into an almost mother-daughter-like relationship or, better perhaps, sisterhood. Sade not only provides Ore with the means to defeat the soucouyant when she gives her copious amounts of salt and the hottest pepper (212–213) but also helps her to finally escape the haunted house. As a black house-keeper she is resented by 29 Barton Road and it repeatedly tries to kill her, as I have outlined above. But she survives, too, and after Ore flees, she hands in her resignation; in the note she leaves for Luc she advises him that he “should stop trying to keep this place open, that it just won’t work. That it’s … ill-favoured” (234). As I have shown, Sade helps Ore escape by witching in white—she knits a net out of white wool to catch Ore when she falls and prevents her from being swallowed up by the house. Sade’s Yoruba magic lets her appear in fire red and silver almost like another benevolent form of the soucouyant, “the spirit in the flame” (231), while the white net bunches around Ore to catch her like an embrace:

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When I opened my eyes, I was in the room that had nothing in it but the white fireplace. I saw, through gauze, a figure walking towards me. […]. Sade. I didn’t move. With my eyes I told her that I might not survive this after all. ‘Oh, lazy,’ she said. She put a hand to my forehead, rumpling the net against it, then she put a hand to my chest, then she put a hand to my stomach. I sat up, still in the net. It was knotted at the top, but I couldn’t see how. I sat in a huge white bag, like a stork’s delivery. Sade looked at me through the net. […] ‘Stand up and it will unravel. Goodbye.’ (231)

The net Sade has woven, in what can be described as an inherently female strategy that denotes connectivity and relationality, enables the other black woman to escape the house. In its final pages, the novel thus wilfully questions conceptions of origin or roots and instead points to other ways of “making” community: The forming of a community through the shared experience of not being fully at home—of having inhabited another space—presupposes an absence of a shared terrain: the forming of communities makes apparent the lack of a common identity that would allow its form to take one form. But this lack becomes reinscribed as the pre-condition of an act of making. (Ahmed 2000, 94; emphasis in original)

With the question “Do you think I belong to you?” which Sade asks of Ore, the text makes abundantly clear that traditional ways of belonging to each other, of longing for each other, are futile. Instead, we need to find other, alternative homes; we need to recognise diasporic home as “a space of differences rather than home-as-sameness” (Fortier 2003, 132). Figurations and imaginations of love and a shared world can usefully be brought to bear upon one another in order to interrogate constructions of national and diasporic identities from positions of canonical and ethnic marginality. I have argued that the novel White is for Witching as a postcolonial gothic text re-signifies worlds and love by different means. The monstrous space of the gothic haunted house is made problematic through uncanny and unhomely negotiations of home and home/land. Nation and its discontents are mediated through a multi-layered and multi-routed narrative that haunts its own structures. In its queerness, the monstrous love between vampire-soucouyant Miranda and Black British Ore functions as an instrument to interrogate the desire for consuming the other romantically, sexually and gastronomically. Ultimately, the queer love story with its monstrous spatial set-up of the haunted house and its

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diasporic vampiric monstrosity as put forth by the novel inhabits the potential of meaning-making. As Jack Halberstam and China Miéville have remarked, “monsters are meaning machines” (Halberstam 1995, 21): Monsters demand decoding, but to be worthy of their own monstrosity, they avoid final capitulation to that demand. Monsters mean something, and/but they mean everything, and/but they are themselves and irreducible. They are too concretely fanged, toothed, scaled, fire-breathing, on the one hand, and too doorlike, polysemic, fecund, rebuking of closure, on the other, merely to signify, let alone to signify one thing. (Miéville 2012, 1)

Instead of seeing “the negative of human” be replaced by “the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual”, as Halberstam has argued in Skin Shows (21), White is for Witching has its gothic monsters (both the haunted house and Miranda) encounter love. These encounters enable the novel to give way to meaning-making processes of interpretation, translation and transmission. As a consequence, it continuously moves in-between the tension of longing and belonging, creating a postcolonial, diasporic text that seeks possible, inhabitable worlds elsewhere.

Note 1. With this, White is for Witching steps into a long row of postcolonial rewritings of the play, such as Frantz Fanon with Black Skin, White Masks (1952), George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry volume Islands (1969), Aimé Cesaire’s A Tempest: Adaptions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by a Negro Theatre (1969) or Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992). There is even a tiny self-conscious nod to the early modern play as it comes up in one of Miranda’s university courses (168). In fact, both girls echo Shakespearean women: Ore was originally supposed to be called Rose which, with her surname Lind (148), would have conjured As You Like It’s Rosalind, one of Shakespeare’s most wilful heroines who transcends her textual confines in the play’s epilogue.

Works Cited Aguirre, Manuel. 1990. The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality. London and New York: Routledge.

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———. [2004] 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2016. “Queer Fragility.” Feminist Killjoy. Web. April 22, 2016. https:// feministkilljoys.com/2016/04/21/queer-­fragility/ Anatol, Giselle Liza. 2000. “Transforming the Skin-Shedding Soucouyant: Using Folklore to Reclaim Female Agency in the Caribbean.” Small Axe 7: 44–59. ———. 2009. “Vampires from the Caribbean: The Soucouyant.” The Gothic Imagination. Web. December 04, 2009. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/guestblog/vampires-­from-­the-­caribbean-­the-­soucouyant/ ———. 2015. The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Arata, Stephen D. 1990. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33 (4): 621–645. Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Azzam, Julie Hakim. 2007. The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh. Back, Les. 2006. “The Problem of the Immigration Line: State Racism and Bare Life.” Race and State. Eds. Alana Lentin and Ronit Lentin. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. 32–52. Baldin, Mark and William Emmet Studwell. 2000. The Big Band Reader: Songs Favored by Swing Era Orchestras and Other Popular Ensembles  – Resources in Music History. New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1992. “The World and the Home.” Social Text 31/32: 141–153. ———. [1994] 2004. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. “Halfway House.” Artforum International 35 (9): 11–13. Boehmer, Elleke. 2013. “Empire’s Vampires.” Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood. Ed. Höglund, Johan and Tabish Khair. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. vii–ix. Botting, Fred. 2014. Gothic. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Brewster, Paul G. 1976. “Children’s Games and Rhymes.” Children’s Games Throughout the Year (Studies in Play and Games). Ed. Leslie H.  Daiken. Manchester: Ayer Publishing. Brogan, Kathleen. 1998. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Brooks, Gwendolyn. [1945] 2005. “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. Eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ———. 1970. “An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.” Interview with George Stavros. Contemporary Literature 11 (1): 1–20.

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Buckley, Chloé and Sarah Ilott, eds. 2017. “Introduction.” Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Eds. Chloé Buckley and Sarah Ilott. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 1–22. Burton, Katie. 2017. “‘Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?’: (De)constructing Borders in White is for Witching and The Opposite House.” Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Eds. Chloé Buckley and Sarah Ilott. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 74–92. Chaplin, Sue. 2011. Gothic Literature. London: York Press. Cooper, Brenda. 2014. “Black Boxes & Glass Jars: Classification in the Hunt for Africa-Centred Knowledge.” Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields & Worlds. Eds. Brenda Cooper and Robert Morrell. Woodbridge: James Currey. Cousins, Helen. 2012. “Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba Gothic: White is for Witching.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47 (1): 47–58. Craft, Christopher. 1984. “Kiss me with those red lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8: 107–33. Danielewski, Mark Z. 2000. House of Leaves. New York: Random House. Darwish, Mahmoud. [2006] 2011. “What Is Lost.” In the Presence of Absence. Trans. Sinan Antoon. New York. Archipelago. Dayan, Joan. 1998. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Din-Kariuki, Natalya. 2017. “‘Nobody ever warned me about mirrors:’ Doubling, Mimesis, and Narrative Form in Helen Oyeyemi’s Fiction.” Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Eds. Chloé Buckley and Sarah Ilott. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 59–73. Duncan, Bryan. 2010. “‘And I doubt all’: Allegiance and Ambivalence in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Gay Chaps at the Bar.’” Journal of Modern Literature 34 (1): 36–57. Fleenor, Juliann E. 1983. The Female Gothic. Montréal: Eden Press. Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2003. “Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment.” Uprootings / Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Eds. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller. Oxford and New York: Berg. Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin. Gadsby, Meredith M. 2006. Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Githire, Njeri. 2010. “The Empire Bites Back: Food Politics and the Making of a Nation in Andrea Levy’s Works.” Callaloo 33 (3): 857–873. ———. 2014. Cannibal Writers: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Goddu, Teresa. 2007. “American Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Ed. Emma McEvoy and Catherine Spooner. London: Routledge. 63–72. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2003. “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion.” Uprootings / Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Eds. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller. Oxford and New York: Berg. Gray, Emily. 2015. “Writing ‘Lesbian, Gay-Type Lovers’: Buffy, Postmodern Gothic and Interruptions to the Lesbian Cliché.” New Directions in 21st Century Gothic: The Gothic Compass. Eds. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien. New York and London: Routledge. 132–145. Halberstam, Jack [Judith]. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Heller, Tamar and Patricia Moran, eds. 2003. Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hislop, Ian. 2007. “Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.” BBC Radio 4. Web. April 05, 2007. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076lp0 Hock Soon Ng, Andrew. 2015. Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Höglund, Johan and Tabish Khair, eds. 2013. Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. hooks, bell. 1992. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End. 21–39. ———. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Collins. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. 2014. “Gothic Configurations of Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 55–70. Ilott, Sarah. 2015. New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, Shirley. [1959] 1987. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin. Khair, Tabish. 2015. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. King, Amy K. 2013. “The Spectral Queerness of White Supremacy: Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching.” The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities. Eds. Lisa Kröger and Melanie Anderson. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 59–74.

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Le Fanu, Sheridan. [1872] 2004. Carmilla. Three Vampire Tales. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Macharia, Keguro. 2015. “Love.” Critical Ethnic Studies. 1:1, 68–75. Marangoly George, Rosemary. 1996. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michlin, Monica. 2012. “The Haunted House in Contemporary Filmic and Literary Gothic Narratives of Trauma.” Transatlantica: American Studies Journal. Web. May 03, 2013. http://journals.openedition.org/ transatlantica/5933 Miéville, China. 2012. “Theses on Monsters.” Conjunctions. 59. Special Issue: Colloquy. Web. Fall 2012. http://www.conjunctions.com/print/article/ china-­mieville-­c59 Mohanram, Radhika. 2007. Imperial White: Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. “monster, n., adv., and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. December 2015. www.oed.com/view/Entry/121738 Northall, G.  F. 1892. English Folk-Rhymes: A Collection of Traditional Verses Relating to Places and Persons, Customs, Superstitions, Etc. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Oyeyemi, Helen. 2009a. White is for Witching. London: Picador. ———. 2009b. “Book of the Week: White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi.” Interview with Claire Armitstead. The Guardian. Web. June 19, 2009. http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2009/jun/18/ helen-­oyeyemi-­white-­is-­for-­witching ———. 2012. “Helen Oyeyemi on Haunted House Novels.” La Clé des Langues. Web. August 28, 2012. http://cle.ens-­lyon.fr/anglais/helen-­oyeyemi-­on-­ haunted-­house-­novels-­157115.kjsp ———. 2014a. “‘I Do Not Outline’: An Interview with Helen Oyeyemi.” Interview with Emily Pohl-Weary. Hazlitt. Web. April 01, 2014. https:// hazlitt.net/feature/i-­do-­not-­outline-­interview-­helen-­oyeyemi ———. 2014b. “The Professionally Haunted Life of Helen Oyeyemi.” Interview with Annalisa Quinn. NPR Books. Web. March 07, 2014. https://www. npr.org/2014/03/07/282065410/the-­p rofessionally-­h aunted-­l ife-­o f-­ helen-­oyeyemi Palmer, Paulina. 1999. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. London and New York: Cassell. ———. 2007. “The Lesbian Vampire: Transgressive Sexuality.” Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature. Ed. Ruth Bienenstock Anolik. Jefferson and London: McFarland. 203–232. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2002. “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E.  Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 229–258.

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Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. [1892] 1993. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna and Donna Lee Brien, eds. 2015. New Directions in 21st-­ Century Gothic: The Gothic Compass. New York and London: Routledge. “pika, n.2” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. June 2016. www.oed. com/view/Entry/143319 Poe, Edgar Allen. [1839] 1982. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Richardson, Angelique and Chris Willis, eds. 2002. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rudd, Alison. 2010. Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Andrew. 2007. “Hauntings.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Emma McEvoy and Catherine Spooner. London: Routledge. Stein, Diane. 2008. Gemstones A to Z: A Handy Reference to Healing Crystals. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Stephanou, Aspasia. 2014. “Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching and the Discourse of Consumption.” Callaloo 37 (5): 1245–1259. Stoker, Bram. [1897] 1997. Dracula. Norton Critical Edition. Eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York and London: Norton & Company. Strehle, Susan. 2008. Transnational Women’s Fiction: Unsettling Home and Homeland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tredennick, Bianca. 2015. “‘I think I am a monster’: Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching and the Postmodern Gothic.” Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siècle to the Millennium. Eds. Sharla Hutchinson and Rebecca A.  Brown. Jefferson: McFarland. 168–186. Walpole, Horace. [1764] 2004. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin. Washington, Teresa N. 2005. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Webb, Kate. 2014. “Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird  – TLS”. Nothing Is Lost. Web. March 31, 2014. https://katewebb.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/ helen-­oyeyemi-­boy-­snow-­bird-­tls/ Williams, Anne. 1995. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University Press of Chicago. Wisker, Gina. 2007. “Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic.” Pedagogy 7 (3): 401–425. ———. 2016. Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfreys, Julian. 2002. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. London: Palgrave.

CHAPTER 5

Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel

I had no nation now but the imagination. —Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” ([1979] 1986, 350)

This book has moved from discussing passages between the continents of Africa, America and Europe in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah to the enworlded spaces of the postcolonial metropolis in Zadie Smith’s London trilogy to the countryside and the tension between domesticity and nation-­ building within the interior space of the house in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. Paying tribute to these movements and scales, this chapter will once more reach out, extend the scale and expand my arguments to encompass innovative textures of worlds and love in the works of two contemporary African diasporic poets, Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel. This expansion plays out on different planes: I will move to the wide-open, fluid water space of the ocean, discuss worldly trajectories of travelling texts and trace the notion of connective and collective love and care in both poets’ works. With this chapter and one more rendition of imagining love as powerful feminist tool I hope to add to a twenty-first-century project of engaging with literature across the world: to show how black diasporic women authors wrangle with the frames of the private, personal, intimate and vulnerable—all while bearing the marks of twenty-first-­ century diasporic displacement and political turmoil and to recognise the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_5

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capacity of love as ultimately transformative of structures that underlie harmful processes of neo-liberal globalisation, racism, inequality and heteronormative restriction. A radical love-ethics as expressed by writers like Adichie, Smith, Oyeyemi, and, too, by Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel, entails not only a reparative practice of the self but a communal, relational strategy for constructing political communities. Shire and Patel, while speaking from different positions and producing texts that stylistically and aesthetically differ greatly from one another, stem from similar geographical backgrounds. Both writers are from East Africa, both writers have migrated to the West—Warsan Shire was born in Kenya to Somali parents and grew up in the UK before moving to the US; Shailja Patel was born and raised in Kenya as a third-generation South Asian African by parents with Indian Gujarati heritage and was educated in the UK and the US. Even though their cultural backstories are written from different locations (one from India, one from Somalia) and their diasporic movements do not necessarily overlap (as a student in the 1990s, Patel spent some time in York before moving to California, whereas Shire grew up in London from 1989 onwards and has recently moved to Los Angeles), their writings nevertheless share a common core. Both poets give voice to those displaced by the effects of colonialism and Empire, unflinchingly showing the entangled histories of war, slavery and indenture: the forced removal from homes, the destruction of nations and the flight across oceans. The predominantly female voices Patel and Shire imagine in their poetry talk of physical and psychological wounds that are very much alike. These wounds bear witness to being made vulnerable and being made inhuman, and they can be read as a testimony to how black women are oftentimes being placed outside moral codes of empathy and care. In reading both poets alongside each other, this chapter establishes another node in the net of contemporary African diasporic women writers who engage with the violent and traumatic heritage of colonialism. Having discussed contact zones which originated from West Africa (Adichie, Oyeyemi) and the Caribbean (Smith), East Africa becomes another position in my explorations, constituting a different point of departure from where the writers speak and towards where they look. Somalia and Kenya are situated at the Horn of Africa and on the Swahili coast; both are part of the African coastline of the Indian Ocean—a littoral and liminal position which connects them not only inwards to other African countries but also outwards across the sea to South East Asia (Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan),

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to Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia and via the Red Sea to Egypt and the Mediterranean. These points of contact towards West and East, North and South, make for a different set-up of positionalities and relationalities. Just like in the works of the other authors I have discussed so far, it is not merely the one-directional trajectory from one (African) country of origin to the (Western) destination, but the multiple flows between the two, which are of importance in Shire’s and Patel’s writings. Crediting the multiple dependencies and exchanges that arise from Kenya and Somalia’s location on the East African coast in their poetic works, both Shire and Patel trace the movements of women who are or have been implicated in the violent structures of colonialism and neo-imperialism—but they also uncover the multi-layered tactics of resistance against oppression employed by these same women who give voice to their trauma, who do not hesitate to lay bare their wounds. These acts of witnessing and confession create new lines of allegiance, while at the same time attending to the complexities of history and politics. Turning away from the novel form towards the fluidity of contemporary, experimental poetry, this thematic chapter also endeavours to open up my study in terms of genre. By incorporating textual structures which are non-linear, shorter and more fragmented, the experience of violent displacement and mass migration is simultaneously worded and worlded, brought into existence by language. Warsan Shire’s work can be classified as narrative prose-poetry, published in three poetry chapbooks called Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011), Our Men Do Not Belong to Us (2014) and Her Blue Body (2015). These poems of witness move in circles around non-traditional female genealogies and burrow for the partially destroyed roots of family trees. Shailja Patel’s Migritude (2010) can best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it is a conglomeration of poetry, pictures, letters and female historiography which in its entirety constitutes the textualised materialisation of a spoken-word theatre and dance performance. By adopting poetic forms that push at their boundaries in order to give voice to the trauma of diaspora and displacement, both Shire and Patel depart from conventional narrative forms and disrupt genre classifications. Through the medium of poetry, they cast doubt on sharply drawn boundaries of self and other, centres and peripheries. As Shabine, the narrator of Derek Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight”, remarks in the epigraph I have chosen for this chapter, poetic imagination may serve as a creative and generative replacement of territorially restricted belonging. Echoing Shabine’s struggles when he states, “either I am

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nobody, or I’m a nation” (Walcott [1979] 1986, 346)—an opposition he resolves through creativity, language and poetry—Shire’s and Patel’s poetic works provide a similar solution: they imagine alternatives to the failed state of war-ridden Somalia and to the violent histories of expulsion and violence in Kenya. By regarding Shire’s and Patel’s work as “poetry that reconceives and remaps widely disparate geo-cultural spaces and histories in relation to one another” (Ramazani 2007, 200), this chapter seeks to draw out affiliations which, just like Shabine’s maritime travels, stretch out across the water into the world. As with my other chapters, I am employing a tripartite structure which examines configurations of space, textuality and love in Shire’s and Patel’s poetry. To illuminate the two poets’ differences and convergences, both writing into the world from East African positionings, I will read their works as entangled accounts of diaspora, trauma and female resistance. Having already discussed transcontinental shifts, urban encounters and haunted houses, the last figuration of space to be examined here is constituted by the watery space of the ocean. While neither poet employs the aquatic space of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, they sail along other, less exposed watery passages, which are, however, no less fraught with the politics of survival. In Patel’s work, the crossing from South Asia to East Africa via the Indian Ocean constitutes one of the most important trajectories, whereas in Shire the watery spaces of the Northern Indian Ocean (the Arabian and Red Seas) and the Mediterranean Sea carry and swallow Somali refugees on their way to Europe. These different oceanic spaces stand for death and trauma as well as for generative new beginnings and the fluid possibilities of diaspora. The first section of this chapter will examine how the sea figures as a spatial, political and poetic reservoir for the affective encounters in the works of Shire and Patel. Through mapping their writings within the intersecting networks of continents and oceans, I show how in employing oceanic routes, both poets reclaim histories and connections overwritten by the violent machinations of Empire. Engaging with scholarship on the complexities of the Indian Ocean and the refugee corpo- and cartographies of the Mediterranean, I will delineate the multi-­ layered transoceanic poetics Shire and Patel create. In the next section on form, genre and textuality, the space of the ocean will be supplemented by other quasi-spatial configurations—the digital space of the internet in Shire’s case and the performative space of the stage in Patel’s. Here, I examine how the experimental poetic formations of both writers mirror the movements of migration and displacement

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experienced by those inhabiting their poems. Warsan Shire chronicles family histories and female genealogies through recording stories on her Dictaphone. Turning them into poetry—and thus following Somali poetry traditions—and then publishing them mainly online, she enables these histories to take new diasporic roots in cyberspace. Shailja Patel’s Migritude was originally a stage show, which performatively lives forth in a text that has not only travelled through the world itself, but which incorporates these journeys meta-textually. In giving space to broken voices, to non-­ linear and fragmented stories and to the interrupted routes of those fleeing from violence, both Shire and Patel create experimental texts that literally and metaphorically travel the globe. The figurations of love considered in this chapter will both echo the different notions of love discussed hitherto and expand them to include more collective and connective models. In Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, the heteronormative, heterosexual romance between a man and a woman takes centre stage. Zadie Smith’s London novels showcase non-heteronormative family constructions (White Teeth), concealed homoerotic desires between two women (NW) and obsessive female friendships (Swing Time). Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching has at its heart fully spelled-out erotic desires between the two female protagonists of a queer love story. In Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s poetry, all these differing formations of love re-appear. My main focus point, however, will be the recuperative, reparative work of love undertaken by both poets. Speaking from positions of trauma (both directly experienced and indirectly transmitted) and mediating this trauma through storytelling, their poetic texts create what I will term ethical communities of care which not only reconstruct female suffering but also generate reparation. Both Shire and Patel take the female experience of displacement as a starting point for their explorations of love, desire and sexuality. Their poems contain love stories that delineate the intimate, if often destructive love between partners, as well as the more wide-reaching love between generations of families; both poets, for example, lend special importance to primarily female family relations such as between mother and daughter. But when Shire talks about sisterhoods that arise from the shared experience of female genital mutilation, or when Patel describes the tenuous connection between women who are survivors of rape, love also comes to mean something more collective. Bearing witness to (her)stories of sexual violence which leaves its traces in, on and through bodies, they give words and worlds to trauma and thus produce a collective, communal and deeply

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complicated notion of love that moves across the water. I contend that these formations of cross-oceanic female community and empathetic kinship encompass what Achille Mbembe has called a “vast network of affinities” (2001, 16)—affinities that throughout this book I have repeatedly brought to light. By ending my explorations of how love-making and world-making are intimately connected in the diasporic writings of contemporary women writers with a chapter on poetry, water spaces and transoceanic notions of collective love, I hope to not set a full stop to what I have discussed so far, but to continue this discussion and let it escape, flow, spiral outwards—just as both poets open up worlds through their narratives.

Watery Failures, Watery Potentials: Transoceanic Poetics Whenever a fleet of ships gave chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to lighten the boat by throwing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls and chains […] Navigating the green splendour of the sea […] still brings to mind, coming to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these deeps, with their punctuation of scarcely corroded balls […] The entire ocean makes one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange. —Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997, 6; 8)

As the Martinique philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant posits, the experience of the “abyss” of the ocean, caused by the Atlantic slave trade and the thousands of deaths in its wake, not only elicits pain and suffering but also harbours the tentative beginnings of exchange and relation. When he speaks of the depths of the sea which reveal the violent histories of slavery, he argues that the ocean is not silent or opaque but that it wilfully resists from below those ordering principles implemented by structures of colonialism and oppression mapped onto its surface. The ocean is not aqua nullius, yet to be charted and deciphered, but has for a long time been imbued with histories of empire and suffering: in Glissant’s oeuvre, aquatic surfaces (slave ships) and submarine spaces (“these balls and chains gone green”) form a web of transformative relationalities which makes possible the creative and generative enunciation of a liveable Antillean

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space. The ocean as an enabling site of so many exchanges becomes a deeply connective, affective space that in its watery fluidity diffracts simple categorisation. Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued that the sea is conceptually linked to human origins and exploring these fluid histories offers an alternative to the rigid ethnic genealogies of colonialism and nationalism. In other words, the ocean’s perpetual movement is radically decentering […]. Focusing on seascape rather than landscape as the fluid space of historical production allows us to complicate the nation-state, which encodes a rigid hierarchy of race, class, gender, religion and ethnicity for its representative subjects. (2007, 21)

Both Glissant and DeLoughrey answer to and develop further Paul Gilroy’s contestations in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), which is now regarded as one of the most important theoretical approaches to what is called the Middle Passage—the transitory Atlantic water space between Africa, Europe and the Americas and Caribbean islands. Developing work done by C.L.R.  James (1992), Marcus Rediker (1987) and James Clifford (1988) before him, Gilroy argued for the “shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges” in which “the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy and citizenship—provides a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity and historical memory” (1993, 16). Gilroy was one of the first scholars to conceptualise the ocean as a space imbued with meaning and as such created an important intervention in discourses about the relations emerging from colonialism. He formulated a new paradigm that posits a counter-culture to Eurocentric notions of modernity, rationality and progress, whilst implicating Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America into the processes of these modern, capitalist world systems. He argued for the black Atlantic as a “unit of analysis”, producing “an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (15). The traumatic diasporic experience across the Atlantic waters brought death and sorrow, yes, but also an emergence of transnational and intercultural voices which arose despite the terrors of colonialism and the commodification of human beings. Looking at the emergence of a specifically black culture via an engagement with the works of musicians, artists and writers, Gilroy not only explored the full dimensions and depths of the slave trade, but also brought to light the potential of resistance, the manifold voices talking

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and singing back to their slavery past, to the Middle Passage, to the transit across the ocean as well as to notions of originary homelands.1 While the ocean serves as an agent of colonial violence, it may also contain stories of resistance and empowerment. Without negating enforced dispersals and traumatic losses, the watery space of the ocean offers “new forms of solidarity and affective kinship” (Klein and Mackenthun 2004, 2). Such kinship and solidarity form the core of my discussions throughout this chapter, and it is with a conception of oceanic space as connective and transitory that I will trace Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s work as it stretches across the ocean. As Shire and Patel both write from and through their positions on the East African coast, the Atlantic waters of the Middle Passage—while they function as important historical and cultural scaffolding for contemporary African diasporic writing—are transposed by the aquatic universe of the Indian Ocean with its different regional shores and multi-directional waterways. Turning away from the overarching spectre of the African American, Caribbean and African British Atlantic diaspora of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and moving to another watery space of contact, means to explore the complexities of African diaspora even further than this book has done so far. By mapping diasporic movements from the postcolony into the world from a different vantage point, Patel’s and Shire’s works pluralise simple East-West or South-North relations. Such pluralisation has been at the heart of the engagement with the Indian Ocean for centuries. The trade system that crossed it linked Africa to multiple coastlines and continents from the thirteenth century onwards, long before the enforced movements brought about by slavery and later indentured labour. The Indian Ocean composes a vital space of encounters between Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East—crossings which, unlike those Atlantic routes deeply imbued with violence and death, were historically composed of both free and forced migration, of both voluntary trade and slavery (cf. Jayasuriya and Pankhurst 2003, 7). As Isabel Hofmeyr argues, “the Indian Ocean—home to the world’s oldest transoceanic long-distance trading system—folds together old diasporas […] with a range of Western imperial formations, including those of Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States” (2010, 722). As a thoroughly worldly space, the Indian Ocean obliges us to extend our axes of investigation. It requires us to relativize the Atlantic, which has become normative, especially in slavery and African Diaspora Studies. […] At every turn the Indian Ocean complicates binaries,

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moving us away from the simplicities of the resistant local and the dominating global and toward a historically deep archive of competing universalisms. (722)

Like Hofmeyr, many scholars have conceived the Indian Ocean as a political and cultural network (Kearney 2004; Pearson 2003; Vergès 2003; McPherson 1993; Toussaint 1966). This is echoed in literary and poetic writings about this global oceanic space, ranging from South Asian authors such as, most prominently, Amitav Ghosh, to writers in the African Asian diaspora like M.  G. Vassanji, to East and South African writing by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nadifa Mohamed, Mia Couto, Praba Moodley, Nuruddin Farah, Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o or Aziz Hassim and to island literature, written by authors like Lindsey Collen, Khal Torabully or Ananda Devi from Mauritius. What I will focus on in the following, however, are the poetic renditions of two specifically located transoceanic trajectories— one reaching from India to Kenya and the other from Somalia to the Mediterranean. Shailja Patel thematises the crossing over the Indian Ocean from India to East Africa and finally to Europe and the US, whereas in Warsan Shire the East African diaspora connects via the Northern Indian Ocean (Arabian Sea, Red Sea) first to Northern Africa and the Middle East and then from there via the Mediterranean to (Southern) Europe. In both poets’ works, what I term watery failures and watery potentials feature in important, if very different ways. While Shire’s poems are steeped in water, and more specifically the ocean imagery of traumatic refugee itineraries, Patel’s work is marked by the ocean in a more abstract sense. Her poetry is also informed by an oceanic passage, but instead of transcribing this into metaphors and storytelling, her text itself constitutes a passage between South East Asia and Africa, weaving a material connection across the water. “Her Body is a Flooding Home”: Transoceanic Refugee Geocorpographies in Warsan Shire’s Poetry Warsan Shire published her first poetry chapbook Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth with flipped eye publishing in 2011; this debut was followed by a second collection called Our Men Do Not Belong To Us (2014) and another chapbook called Her Blue Body in 2015, which consists of work originating from her time as the first Young Poet Laureate for London. Her work has also been published in Wasafiri, Magma, Poetry Review and in the anthology The Salt Book of Younger Poets. Her first full

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collection, to be titled Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, is expected in 2022. Born in Kenya to Somali parents, but having grown up in London, her work tries to contain the messiness of diasporic belonging while oscillating seamlessly between verse and prose-poetry. Her mostly female, black and Muslim speakers forever struggle to find a home—but that does not stop them from trying, again and again. Raised by immigrants and refugees in Harlesden in North-West London, Shire calls herself a “build up” of many different things—“cultures, countries, languages”—“writing about here [England], writing about Somalia” (Shire 2013a, n. pag.). Her particular diasporic experience is marked by an uncanny shuttling between home and away: “The mundane is made strange, and vice versa: watching my mum listening to old Somali songs on an iPad; having conversations where she tells me ‘I don’t want to be buried here, I’d rather you take my body home,’ and then me googling the link ‘taking a dead body abroad’” (ibid.). Shire’s solution is to not settle on either end of the scale, but to consciously strive for the in-­ between: “I was always trying to build towards making home in the in-­ between, or the otherness, or the elsewhere—the third space that people talk about—trying to feel comfortable in the fact that you are constantly exiled from all the cultures and all the countries that you think you belong to” (ibid.). Shire is a skilled cartographer not only of geographical displacement but also of bodily trauma, mapping out the effects of the Somali civil war that is part of her life: I’m from Somalia where there has been a war going on for my entire life. I grew up with a lot of horror in the backdrop—a lot of terrible things that have happened to people who are really close to me, and to my country, and to my parents; so it’s in the home and it’s even in you, it’s on your skin and it’s in your memories and your childhood. And my relatives and my friends and my mother’s friends have experienced things that you can’t imagine, and they’ve put on this jacket of resiliency and a dark humour. (Ibid.)

Her work can best be described as a mixture of East African storytelling, quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age memoir, testimonial and confessional poetry, documentary and fragmentary family genealogy. Writing across temporal, spatial and corporeal boundaries, Shire’s voices emerge as vulnerable yet strong, as haunted yet grounded; they interweave stories of contemporary diasporic womanhood with the memories of generations of female migrants moving between Africa and Europe. Their national,

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international and transnational trajectories open up new spaces for negotiating reparative forms of worlding and homing. The poems, which circle around trauma and processes of healing that trauma, are written in prose style; they rarely rhyme, and they materialise on the page as “graphic story-poems” (Taylor 2015, 379). They are multi-­ placed and multi-voiced, taking root in Somalia, Kenya and Great Britain only to then take off along dispersed routes to other places, such as Russia or Italy, thereby also tracing Somalia’s colonial past. In almost all of Shire’s poems, the experience of migration and diaspora figures in various ways, with geographical displacement almost always playing out on and in the female body. These traumatic interlinkages become most clearly spelled out when Shire’s poems move within or around the watery spaces of the ocean. One of Shire’s most widely read prose-poems is called “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)”. In 2015 and 2016, the poem went viral and was used by media outlets to critically draw attention to the rising hostility towards “foreigners” connected to the so-called refugee crisis which has been increasingly medialised over the last years. The poem was and is still being used as an antidote to the growing representation of refugees as spectacle and threat, as it gives voice to those refugee subjects made silent and inhuman by Western paranoia and xenophobia. It begins with the following often quoted sentences: Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? […] No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. (Shire 2011a, 24–27, l.1–7)

The poem traces the story of its speaker from an unspecified East African country2 and her escape route via other African countries, across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, to Europe with its deportation centres: “They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket” (l.12–14). In mapping the desert, the ocean and the European city, the poem does not propose a clear-cut trajectory— the very end of the poem takes up the metaphor from the beginning with the lines: “I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing […] and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side” (l. 23–24, l.

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40–41). It is certainly no coincidence that Shire opens and closes the poem with this image of the shark which signifies the deathly danger of the watery passage from Somalia to Europe via the Gulf of Aden, a waterway which connects the Arabian and then the Red Sea of the Northern Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal. By repeating this metaphor, the ocean passage is used to turn around teleological directionality: the refugee has tried to escape, but has somehow landed back at the beginning—a movement made even more poignant by the knowledge that parts of today’s territory of Somalia had once been an Italian colony; the image of Somali refugees arriving in Rome “with no jacket”, then, draws attention to the colonial power structures from which the Somali civil war originated. Utilising this circularity, the narrator who presumably takes up stories heard at the deportation centre, speaks of death, rape, shame and trauma— and the ocean figures as the epitome of these refuge experiences as an affective space filled with fear and hope simultaneously: “I hope the journey meant more than miles / because all of my children are in the water. I thought the sea was safer / than the land” (l. 14–16). Shire extends the water imagery even further in a later version of “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)”, called simply “Home”, which was published online: […] you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the sea is safer than the land […] and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans. (2017, 00:43–00:50; 02:03–02:20)3

Via the metaphor of home as the mouth of a shark, Shire imbues the traumatic watery passage on boats across the world with life, however dangerous, tenuous and fragile it may be. This is also underlined by the fact that “home” is turned into a personification, chasing, haunting and commanding those who flee. What follows is similarly made graspable as a space of trauma and of hope through the materialised transoceanic passage which

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is first physically experienced (“crawl”, “wade”) as well as then communally narrated by the survivors (through the conversations at the deportation centre). In giving voice to these forced transoceanic trajectories, Shire offers a re-mapping of the globe through diasporic movements. Rewriting the world order proposed by Western governments, Shire’s poetry endeavours to cross borders and open up pathways that have been closed off to those undesirable from a Western perspective. Shedding light on the ocean routes across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, the poems point towards the dehumanising hierarchies at work in our era of global capitalism: “Look at all these borders, / foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate” (l.18–19). For refugees, water becomes a deadly space as boats are stopped or sunk, borders protected, nations secured. This is especially relevant in a Europe marked by resurgent nationalism and Euro-­ scepticism which goes hand in hand with stricter, and oftentimes deadly, border controls. Shire exemplifies this in “Conversations About Home” when she parallels the trauma of the ocean passage with the experiences of those who survive and reach the coast but who consequently have lost their language and identity: “I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue, or another language. […] I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget” (l. 7–11). The official document of belonging, the passport—and, closely connected to that, the name, the language and the identity of the passport bearer—are destroyed in an act of wilful self-effacement. Shire’s poetic rendition lays bare not only the trauma of forceful displacement but also “the absurdities of documentation that have such unquestioned legitimacy in the Western architecture of border and boundary, admission and exclusion” (Zakaria 2016, n. pag.; cf. also Mbembe 2017, 22). Having crossed the ocean, the refugees and asylum-seekers are denied subject-hood. Checkpoints, border controls, and deportation centres pinpoint towards other, larger structures of nation-building such as the production and control of outsiders and the international global politics of discipline and capital they are embedded in; they figure as “a series of spatiolegal and spatiotemporal manoeuvres” which “draw and redraw lines in the sea, producing spaces of exception in the form of migration exclusion zones, offshore holding areas, temporally agile borders and other geographies of shifting sovereignty designed to block transnational subaltern bodies on the move” (Perera 2013, 25). The ocean and its

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shorelines—here both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea—are utilised as an extension for these disciplinary and deathly tactics. As Iain Chambers argues, the Mediterranean which had once been a body of water that provided the principal gateway between Europe, Asia, and Africa, establishing many of the premises and practices of occidental modernity, has been shut down. Any reopening depends on European largesse or, rather, on European needs and the revival of a mare nostrum. Sedimented in this sea, sustained, as though in solution, are histories, intertwined narrations that have increasingly been veiled behind the homogenous screen of occidental conceit. (2010, 679; emphasis in original)

Referring to the fact that today the Mediterranean is coded very differently, he points out how “legal passage on its waters, restricted to military, mercantile, and tourist traffic, usually moves along the latitudes, while south-north traffic, when not composed of authorized foodstuffs for the European Union, is largely illegal” (678). However, despite all Western efforts to fashion the historically open and multi-directional space of the Mediterranean into a barricaded space, poetry like Shire’s defies any attempts to hermetically seal off certain areas and creates connections through voicing the horrors of civil war and human suffering which does not stop at the geographical or imagined borders between Europe and Africa. Through creating poetry that bears witness to the failures and possibilities of transoceanic trajectories across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, Shire enacts new spatial and affective materialities, which generate “embodied countergeographies and relations” (Perera 2013, 59). These oceanic countergeographies are always closely connected to corporeality and physical intimacies. Hinted at already in the gendered violence so vividly described in “Conversations About Home”, in Shire’s poetry it is especially the female body which is used as a way to articulate the trauma of displacement. The poem “My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want to Be Touched” (2011a, 30), for example, connects the refugee’s transoceanic passage with female suffering by using imagery repeatedly referring to water: My wife is a ship docking from war. The doctor maps out her body in ink, holding up her breast with two fingers, explains what needs to be removed, that maybe we can keep the nipple. Her body is a flooding home.

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We are afraid. We want to know what the water will take away from us. (l. 1–7)

Through images of ships docking from war and of drowning, the watery in-between space of the dangerous passage between countries is transferred onto the cancer-ridden female body. The physicality of exile is embodied by graphic inscriptions on the female body that reveal a particular cartography of dislocation: “I think of all the images she must carry in her body, / how the memory hardens into a tumour” (l. 24–25). In “Ugly” (2011a, 31) this intimate relationality between body, trauma and space becomes even clearer. Here, a girl “carries whole cities in her belly. / As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her. / She was splintered wood and sea water. / She reminded them of the war” (l. 1–6). The speaker asks the girl’s mother “Why did you not warn her, / hold her like a rotting boat?” (l. 15–16) and warns that if she is covered in continents if her teeth are small colonies, if her stomach is an island if her thighs are borders? What man wants to lie down and watch the world burn in his bedroom? Your daughter’s face is a small riot, her hands are a civil war, a refugee camp behind each ear. (l. 18–28)

Through the stylistic device of reverse personification, chremamorphism, the girl’s body becomes a conglomeration of the civil war, the flight across the ocean and the horrors of colonialism: her body is continent, colony, island, city, boat and water all at once. These oceanic refugee “geocorpographies”, a term coined by Joseph Pugliese, “bring into focus the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of race, war and empire” (2007, 1). But despite or perhaps even because of this, as the very last line of the poem indicates, the girl becomes a citizen of the world, an enworlded subject: “But God, / doesn’t she wear / the world well” (l. 30–32). This shows that the female body acts as a carrier of trauma. Porous but simultaneously resilient, female corporeality becomes a fabric woven by colonial histories, by

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stories of rape, intrusion and dislocation—but at the same time, it indicates a degree of self-­empowerment and self-actualisation as the girl wears the world like clothes on her body. The ocean in these poems not only is a contested space, utilised to secure and reinstate nation-state borders and demarcations, to exert even more control and undermine human rights in the seemingly unchartered territories of the ocean, but also offers transformative potential. In “Grandfather’s Hands” (2011a), a poem about generations worth of displacements, this becomes even more evident as the ocean is corporeally materialised, written on the body, in an act of reparative re-interpretation. The traumatic space of the oceanic passage is not only re-lived but also creatively re-named: Your grandmother […] circled an island into his palm and told him which parts they would share, which part they would leave alone. […] She wet a finger to draw where the ocean would be on his wrist, kissed him there, named the ocean after herself. […] Your grandparents often found themselves in dark rooms, mapping out each other’s bodies, claiming whole countries with their mouths. (11, l. 1, 3–8, 19–23)

The salt water of the sea is replaced by human fluids; spit is used to draw countries and borders on each other’s bodies. In the case of Somali refugees, who are stateless people, the physical geography of an originary homeland becomes inaccessible and even impossible, the desire to belong is inscribed onto the body. The mapping of bodies through sensuality and ownership becomes simultaneously a claiming of an imaginary geography, of home and be/longing. The ocean which is the connection between Somalia and elsewhere constitutes an empty or negative space of trauma which is then reconfigured through tender acts of touch and renaming, thus giving voice to the refugee experience of flight and insularity. As Perera argues, “despite being the site of dire warnings and ‘wishful sinking’ stories”, the ocean is

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a space in which other ontologies, geographies, poetics and politics are mobilised, set in play, enacted and resignified […]. Through motley, evolving tactics […] refugees re-world the oceans, seascapes and border geographies through which they move, engendering new expressive, creative and communicative forms in response to previously unimaginable terrors and blockages. (Perera 2013, 66; emphasis added)

Via her transoceanic poetics, Warsan Shire offers an alternative story of fleeing home and shows how those made meaningless by Western nation-­ states and colonial ideologies “[rechart] the geographies of nation and citizenship through which they move”, how they “[inscribe] new corpo-­ graphies across the invisible lines in the sea” (67). Refugee narratives inevitably escape the ordering principles of nation-state and border control, rupturing the confines drawn around them to reach out across the water and into the world. Without negating the sea as space of violent rupture, Shire’s poetry similarly imbues what has always been seen as a space of death and termination with alternative meaning, invested with possibilities and potential, if fraught, futures. As my analysis of especially female experiences of refuge (in “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)”), female resistance to the trauma of refuge (in “Ugly”) and female rewriting and re-signifying of refugee trajectories (in “Grandfather’s Hands”) has shown, Shire’s poetry constitutes the ocean not only as a deathly space but also as generative, as it offers up the possibilities of passage and movement, however violent and dangerous they may be. The poems which trace the itineraries of their Somali characters across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean shed light on the reparative potential of water, and with their focus on relationality and affect privilege “a politics of coalition-building, solidarity and resistance among groups connected by historical and contemporary experiences of confinement and terror at sea” (Perera 2013, 55). Through intimate corporeal acts, through tentative connectivity and through affiliation networks, Shire’s female voices reconfigure the ocean space through their transoceanic trajectories. Indeed, in these poems, spatial imaginaries are activated to advocate for an ethicopolitically minded practice of living in the world.

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“Kala Pani, or Crossing the Dark Waters”: Shailja Patel’s Migritude and Indian Ocean Trajectories In Shailja Patel’s work, the ocean does not figure as an almost visceral spectre, like it does in Warsan Shire’s poetry. It is, however, just as deeply interwoven with corporeal materialities and interpersonal relationships. Migritude is a text that could not exist without the Indian Ocean and the complex networks and multi-directional travel routes it implies. The text encompasses the Indian Ocean as a transitory place, it traces the history of South Asian migration across the ocean and describes the treatment of migratory Indians in Kenya, to then follow their routes to Europe and the US. Shailja Patel grew up in Kenya as the daughter of second-generation West-Indian Gujarati migrants at a time of political upheaval during the rule of Daniel Toroitich arap Moi (1978–2002), a decade after Kenya’s independence in 1963, and a few years after Idi Amin, “the villain of her childhood” (Patel, 78), had seized power in Kenya’s neighbouring country Uganda and expelled Uganda’s 80,000 Asians in 1971. She wrote Migritude as a spoken-word one-woman theatre show, to be performed on stage. At the heart of the show lies a suitcase full of saris that Patel inherited from her mother and that form the fundamental fabric of Migritude—“through them, she reveals an inheritance of emotions, of histories bound up in journeys from India to Kenya to the United States. The sari, a piece of cloth, binds continents and families” (iii–iv). I will come back to this later in the chapter, but for now I want to concentrate on the 2010 Kaya Press edition of the book that arose from the show, the materialised text of Migritude—“an experimental mix of autobiography, history, poetry, testimony, letters, and drawings based on a theatrical performance by the same name” (Kulbaga 2016, 76). It is not only the story of Patel’s own diasporic movements across the world intertwined with her family’s transoceanic migration stories which go back many generations and visit many places (moving from Gujarat to Nairobi; from Nairobi to London; from London to San Francisco and then back to Nairobi) but also one possible narrative of the South Asian diaspora in general: it is “political history told through personal story” (Patel, 128). In that sense, as Vijay Prashad argues in his foreword to Migritude, “Speaking of Saris”, “three cross-continental migrations shape her story: the early 20th century march of South Asians to East Africa; the mass expulsion and emigration of East African Indians to the Global North from the 1970s onwards; and finally, Shailja’s own emigration out of Kenya—first to the United

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Kingdom and, eventually, to California” (iii). Migritude is divided into four parts. The first one is eponymously called “Migritude” and constitutes the core of the book—it consists of a prelude and poems divided chronologically and geographically into two chapters, the first under the heading “Nairobi, Kenya (1972–1989)” and the second under the heading “United Kingdom & United States (1990–2004)”. This is followed by “Notes” and a section called “What came out of the suitcase”. The second part of the book is titled “Shadow Book” and repeats all headings, subheadings and poem titles from the first part. Far from being a mere repetition, however, this part consists of meta-textual reflections on the process of creating of the performance and on the storytelling of Migritude. It is a personalised, autobiographical commentary on the social, political and personal circumstances which form the background of the poems. (On the table of contents page, this “shadow book” is marked by a reversal of the black and white print.) The third part is called “The Making and Other Poems” and consists of nine more poems which spin the themes of “Migritude” further. The fourth part titled “The Journey” consists of a Migritude timeline, as well as two interviews with Patel. The term “migritude” was coined by Patel as a conglomeration of the words “migrant” and “attitude”, to give voice to women and migrants “who speak unapologetically, fiercely, lyrically, for themselves” (143). With this self-fashioning, she counters dominant narratives which mute the trauma of those East African and African Asian subjects forcibly displaced under the rule of Idi Amin in Uganda, confined to labour camps, raped by colonial intruders in Kenya or killed in the US “war on terror”. The word also evokes two other concepts which try to counter oppressive master narratives in the same vein: Négritude and Coolitude. Négritude was an anti-colonialist, anti-racist movement and an activist as well as theoretical framework for black self-empowerment. It was developed by Francophone thinkers in the black diaspora during the first decades of the twentieth century, such as the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire or Léopold Sédar Senghor. Giving evidence to the violent but also empowering properties of language, Négritude appropriated the derogatory terms “niger” and “nègre” which were used as racist denominations for people of African descent. The terms were deliberately taken back, revalorised and reimagined as a resistance strategy.4 Migritude is, however, not only indebted to Négritude but also to another concept‚ called Coolitude, which is deeply inscribed into the Indian Ocean passage as it draws on the existence of the “coolies”, (mainly

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Indian) Asian indentured workers shipped to Africa and the Caribbean. It was put forward by the Mauritian poet and cultural theorist Khal Torabully in the 1980s: it is the “ethical, poetic, and poetologic attempt to formulate a vision for the future, which, relying on the principle of including those who have been excluded from history and its futures, reflects and revises historical and current processes of globalisation” (Ette 2017, 112). Giving voice to the historically muted, the concept reconfigures a term of abuse, turning it against those using it violently as a tactic of linguistic as well as cultural self-affirmation and empowerment. Torabully created a “poetics of global migration” (13) which is voiced in his 1992 poetry collection and founding text of Coolitude, Cale d’Etoiles—Coolitude: Coolitude, setting the first stone of my memory of all memory, my language of all languages, my part of the unknown, laid down by many bodies and many stories in my genes and on my islands. […] It is the song of my love for the ocean and for travel, the Odyssey still unwritten by my sea-faring people […] and my deckhands will speak for those who erased the borders to expand the land of mankind. (Torabully 1992, 7; emphasis in original)

The routes of migrant workers and indentured labourers create a web that spans across oceans and continents, connecting India, China and Oceania to African and European shores. For him, the coolie is “the one who is without the text of his/her voyage” (ibid., 71) and ultimately the one who needs to write the story of his/her passage or crossing. Taking up this definition, Isabel Hofmeyr posits that “the central motif of Coolitude is the voyage, which becomes the site of trauma and loss” (2007, 9). The ocean crossing enables ways of making legible the erased experiences of indenture. In the light of such shuttling between legibility and intelligibility, Véronique Bragard has argued that Coolitude relies on the nightmare transoceanic journey of Coolies, as both a historical migration and a metonymy of cultural encounters. The crossing of the Kala Pani [‘black water’] constitutes the first movement of a series of abusive and culturally stifling situations. By making the crossing central, Coolitude avoids any essentialism and connection with an idealized Mother India, which is clearly left behind. (1998, 104; emphasis in original)

Kala pani means dark or black waters and refers to the religious restriction of crossing the sea in Hindu Indian culture, especially for high-caste Hindus (cf. DeLoughrey 2011, 71). This taboo arises from the notion

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that by leaving the shores of the subcontinent, one would be cut off from the regenerating and healing waters of the Ganges, therefore ending one’s reincarnation cycle. For the majority of Indians who made these journeys, then, this crossing also meant the breaking of family and social ties: “as a term it powerfully encodes the dissolution and even negation of identity beyond national soil or […] motherland” (71). The coolies’ water passage thus is marked by trauma, disappearance, disconnection and isolation, but as Torabully argues, Coolitude also “posits an encounter, an exchange of histories, of poetics or visions of the world, between those of African descent and of Indian descent, without excluding other sources” (Carter and Torabully 2002, 150). I argue that Shailja Patel’s performance and the text of Migritude is deeply indebted to these non-essentialist records of crossing the water and of transoceanic routes, unquestionably continuing the themes of not only Glissant’s Poetics of Relation but also the interconnective notion of the ocean as a lived and storied world found in Shire’s poetry. The oceanic space in Patel does not figure through stylistic devices, metaphors and poetic imageries such as they proliferate in Shire’s poems, but it is similarly inscribed onto and into the female body. Describing the violence women experience when crossing, settling and fleeing, she states: “Our bodies are our first homes. If we are not safe in our bodies, we are always homeless” (2014, n. pag.). In Migritude, the female traveller across the seas, so often made invisible, rewrites herself into visibility. When reading Patel, however, it becomes clear that it is not the cutting of family ties so prevalent in notions of the kala pani taboo which is at the forefront of her writing and thinking, but the renewed knotting and weaving of these relationalities across the ocean, across countries, times and histories. The trauma of the oceanic passage as well as the trauma of arrival on the African coast is made visible by female voices who generate connection and relation through embodied encounters: But Mummy, look. I am forging a ship of glittering songs to sail your jewels in, staking a masthead of verbs from which to fly your saris! This work that filigrees and inlays all your legacies, that snakes across borders, dodges visa controls, this is my intention. (“Born to a Law”, 62)

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Migritude is a “tapestry of poetry, history, politics, packed into a suitcase, embedded in [Patel’s] body, rolled out into the theatre. An accounting of Empire enacted on the bodies of women” (96). This accounting takes two routes which both trace the transoceanic, transcontinental routes of Migritude’s women, be they the diasporic East African Asians of Patel’s generation, or the Indian grandparents and elders who made the journey across the Indian Ocean. One route is an intertextual and multi-­lingual one: the book is wrought with Gujarati proverbs which are displayed in their original language and then translated: “Raat thodi ne vesh jaja, the proverb I grew up on. The night is short and our garments change. Meaning: Don’t put down roots. Don’t get too comfortable. By dawn, we may be on the move, forced to reinvent ourselves in order to survive” (10, emphasis in original). Indian language and literature as such reach across the ocean and connect to the lived realities of the Indian East African diaspora. It transforms the East African home and makes it more porous, more inclusive of varied identity constructs and multi-placed concepts of belonging. The poem “Dreaming in Gujarati”, for example, delineates not only the violence but also the power inherent to multi-lingual existences: Listen: my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty-rich as saag paneer coastal Swahili laced with Arabic he speaks Gujarati solid ancestral pride. Five languages, five different worlds […]. (52)

Yet, Patel also describes English which has given her “words that don’t exist in Gujarati”, such as “Self-expression / Individual / Lesbian” (51, emphasis in original). Oscillating between mother tongue and other tongue, she positions herself as a woman who does not fit into one language—and pays tribute to the complex and queer struggle of feminine survival, all while armed with a “shaved head, combat boots” (51). The

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proverbs and other Gujarati expressions scattered throughout Migritude and their immediate translations point towards how the transoceanic crossing has not completely resulted in isolation and loss but instead proliferates in a multi-lingual and multi-directional belonging that bridges India and Africa. The other route which hints at the transoceanic trajectories across the Indian Ocean is fashioned along paratextual pathways, using illustrations and graphic art to keep alive the connection across the kala pani. They add visual layers of meaning to the already multi-nodal text of Migritude. The most obvious of these visual graphic markers of the transoceanic passage can be found in the reproduction of seascape etchings, tellingly positioned at the beginning of “Part I: Nairobi, Kenya 1972–1989” (9) and “Part II: United Kingdom and United States 1990–2004” (31) as visual chapter introductions: the first image shows two shorelines with a large body of water between them, which I interpret as the Indian Ocean. Across the water, two figures are stood opposite each other, looking at each other. Linking to the linguistic and literary interconnectivity described above, the picture is subtitled with the already mentioned Gujarati proverb “Raat thodi ne vesg jaja. The night is short and our garments change” (9, emphasis in original), expressing the unsettling experience of (forced) migration across oceans and continents. This picture of the sea thus introduces Patel’s ruminations on various experiences of migritude and bears witness to the trauma (and potential relational possibilities) of kala pani. The second picture found at the beginning of Part II shows an open water space. Instead of the link between two countries (India and Kenya) implied in the first picture which introduces the Kenyan part, the second part moves to the UK and the US. The picture of the open ocean, without any geographical markers such as shorelines and without the inclusion of human bodies, implies a much more open and fluid concept of diaspora— one which has moved from the perceived safety of a grounded geographical belonging and the fixity of coast lines into a wide-open space of travel and migration. This second water passage then leaves the one-way directionality of kala pani or the Middle Passage behind and promises multi-­ routed possibility and futurity: this is again underlined by the Gujarati proverb below the picture which says: “Jagia tyanthi savar. Whenever you wake up, that’s when your morning begins” (31). Less discernible than these pictures are the other graphical allusions referring to the transoceanic crossing. Referencing not only the personal migration story of Patel and her family but also the century-long diasporic

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trade routes across the Indian Ocean, the ambi and its graphic representations become the literal fabric holding together text, narrative and belonging. The “Prelude” describes the history of ambi, the Punjab word for “mango” which also denotes the teardrop-shaped motif used in fabric weaving, now more commonly known as paisley: It began as a teardrop in Babylon. […] The boteh. Stylized rendition of the date-palm shoot, tree of life, fertility symbol. It danced through Celtic art, until the heavy feet of Roman legionaries tramped over the Alps. Then it fled the rage of Mars and Jupiter, dove underground as the Empire rose. Some historians claim it travelled to Mughal courts from Victorian England […]. But a legend in Kashmir calls it the footprint of the goddess Parvati. (4)

This poetic description of the etymological and mythical origins of the ambi is mirrored by a historical timeline at the end of the book which starts with the sixth-century BCE records of the “earliest depiction of the boteh / ambi / paisley motif in Central Asia”, followed by the 800–1500 “flourishing Indian Ocean Trade between inland African Kingdoms, East African Coast, Arabian Peninsulas, India, and SE Asia”, in turn followed by the advent of colonialism in 1600, when the “British East India Company awarded charter trade to India” (129). With the help of the ambi pattern, Patel describes not only transcultural exchange and transoceanic trade, but also the horrors of the Empire. She delineates how the British shut down fabric production in Iraq and India, selling the cloth on their own market for much higher profit “weighed with an 80% duty”, and how they “hunted down the terrified weavers, chopped off their index fingers and thumbs” in order to “force India to buy British cloth” (5). Never content with one-sided narratives, Patel also describes how ambi became paisley, demonstrating how the British Empire annexed the Vale of Kashmir and sold it to the Maharaj Gulab Singh for one million pounds, who in turn agreed to “present annually to the British Government” not only 1 horse, 12 shawl of goats, but also 3 pairs of Cashmere shawls (6). Kashmiri shawls, patterned with ambi, were then taken to Britain where they were regarded as luxury good, weaving “their way through the dreams of Victorian wives like the footprint of a goddess no one dared to imagine” (6). This account is paralleled with a description of the poor working conditions faced by the weavers in the Scottish village Paisley, who “to keep their index fingers and thumbs” “learned how to churn out imitation ambi, on imitation Kashmiri shawls” (6–7).

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Tracing these developments and showing how Kashmiri became cashmere, mosuleen muslin and ambi paisley (and how a hundred years later, “chai became a beverage invented in California”, 7), Patel makes visible how history is erased and then re-materialised, how it travels across the ocean and across continents, only to then arrive at the very saris Patel constructs her own show out of. The “material and affective legacy of the sari” (Kulbaga 2016, 76) as a traditionally female garment brings to light the experiences of those usually muted: the saris evoke the trade routes of Empires, but also the specifically gendered stories connected to displacement and diaspora, “the voices of women from within the bootprint of Empire” (Patel, 95). The woven, ambi-patterned fabric of the saris can be read as a symbol of the oceanic passage as they voyage across the Indian Ocean from India to Africa to Europe and America, and as they are continuously connected to female narratives throughout the book: “The saris in Migritude as word materialised—yes. They are the circulation of global capital, of histories erased. And in the making of the show, I also experienced them as generative—tellers of stories, texts in themselves, palimpsests of art, weaving, culture, trade, Empire” (2015, n. pag.). As argued above, then, Migritude is not steeped in ocean imagery and spatiality as much as Shire’s poems are, but itself constitutes a passage between South East Asia and Africa, a connection between India and Kenya made possible by the transoceanic trajectory of kala pani. The sea is engaged with in a meta-textual way, the text itself recreating the connective and relational properties of the watery space of the Indian Ocean. This becomes perhaps most evident when looking at how the text is described by Patel herself, evoking notions of oceans and shores. About the conceptual set-up of the Shadow Book she says: “Any piece of writing is necessarily the gestalt of a sea of ideas, influences and encounters. This Shadow Book is a collection of shells and seaweed from the shoreline. It makes no attempt to be a comprehensive narrative of the making of Migritude” (74). Whereas Migritude is the ocean, the Shadow Book is shells and seaweed from the shoreline (the surplus of the ocean), which conceptually frames the water. Embedding the poems in Migritude within a global history of Empire, textile trade and the multi-directional network of the Indian Ocean, Shailja Patel creates textual and material encounters which span across the water and imagine a world alternative to all-encompassing, accumulative structures of capitalist globalisation, ultimately “disrupting and resisting the calculations of globalization” (Cheah 2016, 9).

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Bridging Oceans As the analysis of a selection of poems and textual fragments from Shailja Patel’s Migritude and Warsan Shire’s poetry collections has shown, through focusing on the failures and potential of water spaces alike, both poets create a distinctive transoceanic poetic that sheds light on systems of diaspora and refuge and on the networks of national and global institutions that regulate the movement of people. Harking back to my discussion of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, I argue that the works of both poets, even though originating from different cultural and political places on the East African coast, share an intimate engagement with women and their multi-directional, relational transoceanic trajectories. In reading them together and in highlighting the interconnections that span across the water body of the Indian Ocean, I suggest that even though the poets’ East African positionings cannot be equated, they nevertheless share an oceanic poetics that is marked by affective encounters and the voicing of specifically female trauma. This takes shape along the refugee trajectories from the Horn of Africa across the Northern Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean in Shire, and in the crossing of the dark waters from India to East Africa in Patel. Through excavating colonial histories and neo-colonial realities in the water, they intricately interweave the materiality of the ocean with their poetic work. By engaging in this activity that can be likened to dredging, they rewrite the ocean which is commonly regarded as a male domain: In western imaginaries from Homer to Conrad, the sea is overwhelmingly the domain of masculine endeavour. […] The ocean is the vast, capricious, unknowable element upon which men cast themselves. […] [It] signifies as a borderless domain wherein the cast-away and the sailor, as white, heroic, masculinised figures, exemplify and assert the moral attributes of imperial racial virtue, to end by making for themselves new homes and new worlds, at the end of their voyaging. (Perera 2013, 60)

By decidedly not casting the ocean as borderless, but instead shedding light on the harmful construction and then the reparative re-casting of these borders, both poets build their own waterways, below and above the waves. As Peter Hulme has pointed out, “the heroic sailor or lone Crusoe figure of colonial discourse, as adventurer or castaway, obscures the historical figures of entire communities who were rendered cast away, dispersed and dispossesses by colonial violence” (Hulme 2004, 187–201).

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Through their poetry, Shire and Patel write the “obscure” and dispossessed female diasporic subject back into the oceanic narrative and resist the normative and oppressive attempts to dehumanise those fleeing unliveable homelands or navigating new shores, as they inscribe national and personal histories into the water space of the oceanic passage. In giving voice to the historical and contemporary experiences of specifically feminine transoceanic migration and refuge, their work produces a counter-­ space to dissolution, displacements and dispersal. Like the novels by Adichie, Smith and Oyeyemi discussed in previous chapters, which, to varying degrees, temperatures and success, engaged in similar work, this shows the potential inherent to shared futures in a globalised world and acts as a harbinger of new possibilities and agency. Bridging oceans, while never disregarding the deathly and traumatic in-between water space, both poets tie their diasporic female voices back to lost homelands and simultaneously sail them towards new worlds.

Travelling Texts: Performative Poetry Online and on Stage Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel both activate the space of the ocean to articulate specifically gendered, relational experiences of refuge and diaspora. The deeply traumatic event of crossing the water is interwoven with the struggle for emancipation, citizenship and identity and gives room to a generative enunciation of a more liveable world. The ocean offers alternative stories of survival and arrival. In the following, I will show how these various transoceanic encounters can be further expanded when examining how Shire’s poems and Patel’s Migritude travel across the world and create spaces that function as direct extensions of their watery beginnings. I endeavour to shed light on how the transoceanic politics and poetics examined above can be utilised to understand the creation, reception and dissemination of both poets’ works across the globe. Thinking further the intimate encounters arising from their transoceanic trajectories, I argue that the nature of how their texts travel can be discussed in the same terms of interactivity and connectiveness. Much as I did in my chapters on Adichie, Smith and Oyeyemi, in this section I will look at the genre traditions both poets’ works are indebted to, and at the alternative, performative worlds their poetry generates online and on stage through transmedial processes.

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Digital Diasporas and Dictaphones Warsan Shire’s poetry has been published widely, in anthologies on contemporary African poetry, in academic journals rooted in postcolonial and diaspora studies such as Wasafiri and in Shire’s own chapbooks published by flipped eye. The place where her poetry is most widely shared and read, however, is the internet. Not only is Shire herself active on various social media platforms such as Twitter or Tumblr and publishes fragments of her poetry there herself but even more so do her many followers spread her work through hashtags, shares and reposts. In the twenty-first century, the internet has become a space for young poets to reach a global, connected audience—one that is on the one hand exceptionally attuned to their subject matters (in Shire’s case young women of colour), and on the other hand one that is generated by the digital equivalent of “word-of-mouth”, that is, links, shares, likes and various algorithms. The internet constitutes a space of reaction and response that is much more open and fluid than traditional means of publishing and disseminating literary works. The openness and connectivity inherent to the digital space of the internet is especially interesting when talking about work like Shire’s which touches upon trauma, suffering and the horrors of war, displacement and violence. The watery spaces of connection and the transoceanic bridges built within her narratives of refuge, escape and survival travel along digital routes that are similarly marked by interconnectivity and a notion of sharing, voicing and speaking out. The following discussions place Shire’s contemporary diasporic poetry in relation to Somalia’s long-standing poetry tradition and examine the ways her poetry takes up these oral traditions and how it works around and with them to create something new that reaches across genres and generations. Following from there, I will show how the online spaces through which her texts travel constitute a world that overlaps with the transoceanic routes narrated in her poems. Somalia has always been a “nation of poets”, not least because of the “extensive use of verse in social intercourse” (Johnson 1993, 1383). Poetry in Somalia remains not within the realm of arts separated from socio-political realities, it has always been a tool for expressing social problems and political dissent: “Somali poetic tradition employs poetry for discussing politics, expressing love, sending secret messages, conducting family and clan business, and bantering between the sexes” (ibid.; cf. also Andrzejewski 2011). As the scholar Said Samatar explains, a Somali poet is expected to play a role in supporting his clan, “to defend their rights in

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clan disputes, to defend their honour and prestige against the attacks of rival poets, to immortalize their fame and to act on the whole as a spokesman for them” (1982, 56). In a society that is made up of mainly nomadic people and that is still characterised by a predominantly oral culture, poetry is utilised as an archive for memory and history. It functions as one of the most important media not only to transmit and archive knowledge but also to instigate change and to transfigure the world. Somali poetry is intricately classified and categorised: the buraanbur as a specific female verse form, for example, pertains to spaces traditionally connoted as feminine such as the domestic sphere, childbirth and child rearing or marital affairs, but is also used as a powerful enunciative medium to criticise politics and social issues. Among the more contemporary forms of Somali poetry counts the heello, which has become more widely used post-independence: it is recited by both men and women and “[m]odelled first on Indian, then European song modes, it is lyric in nature and accompanied by European musical instruments” (Johnson 1993, 1383). The topics found in the heello are “similar to those assigned to the gabay, along with many others considered too frivolous for classical verse. The heello is complex in structure; hence its composition tends to be similar to that of the gabay. Diffusion is accomplished by means of radio and tape recorder as well as oral memory” (ibid.). Generally, in post-independence Somalia, cassettes and other means of recording and transmitting voices have played a major role in disseminating poetry—channelling the performative oral traditions of Somalia into new modern experiences. Taking up this notion of communication via radio and tape recordings, Afrax argues that today new configurations of oral traditions proliferate as more modern technological means are increasingly being utilised: “the dominant method of transmission used by post-independence Somali poets is one that may be seen as located somewhere between orality and writing, in the sense that orality, writing and modern technology are blended, with a gradual increase in the use of writing” (2013, 278). Contemporary Somali poetry, then, is a hybrid conglomeration of traditional forms of orality and orature and modern communication such as recordings, radio, writing and new technologies. Both the traditional female verse form of the buraanbur and the strategy of archiving and disseminating information through either direct oral memory or through indirect oral and written transmission can be fruitfully applied to Shire’s contemporary poetry. Her work expands these important strands of Somali poetry tradition to apply them to a diasporic world of

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displacement and global communities. In various interviews, Shire has stated that she uses updated strategies of oral transmission to create her poetry: “Most of the poems I write where the character is named are based on a real person. But I won’t use their real names unless they want me to. And my family […] tell me, ‘I have a new story for you’, and I’ll get my Dictaphone and record it, so I can stay as true as possible to the story before I make it into a poem” (Shire 2013a, n. pag.). By using her Dictaphone and recording the stories her family and extended family members tell her, she preserves layers of memory and cultural legacy: “it’s being able to tell the stories of those people, especially refugees and immigrants, that otherwise wouldn’t be told, or they’ll be told really inaccurately. And I don’t want to write victims, or martyrs, or vacuous stereotypes” (ibid.). Taking up the stories others tell her, and mediating them through her own voice and poetic renditions, she not only follows in the footsteps of traditional oral Somali poets but also refashions them into a more modern collection of remembrance and preservation: “It’s always been evident to me from a very young age that the voices of the community I come from are fragmented, subdued in different ways. […] I love the idea of being able to take on another person’s voice and being able to share something” (ibid.). That she consciously engages with traditional Somali forms of transmitting stories becomes clear when she talks about her family’s tactics of sharing stories, poetry and experiences in the diaspora: When my mum first moved I remember she’d get these cassettes in the post, which were letters read aloud. “How are you?” “Yes, I’m okay.” But there’d also be loads and loads of poems. […] My mum and dad had so many tapes, and they still do. In my family, if you sent a cassette to somebody it would be, like, praising them […]. Poetry is so integral to Somali culture that it’s not high culture. My mum still writes little poems on the back of bus tickets. You don’t have to be literate, even. (Shire 2013b, n. pag.)

Having grown up as the daughter of Somali refugees in the UK, and having experienced these different forms of diasporic communication via recordings and tape cassettes, Shire pays tribute to the oral forms of poetic performance so important to Somali culture, but she also updates them, intertwines them with her own media and forms of expression: some of her poetry, for example, can only be accessed via the online music platform Bandcamp, where she has uploaded some poems as voice recordings (this digital album is called warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being

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lonely), 2012b). Half oral, half written, half memory, half fiction, Shire’s trans-media poetry constitutes a continuation of Somali traditions as she transmits her own and her family’s voices and enables them to reach a broader audience: Them being able to tell me, and then me writing it, it’s cathartic, being able to share their stories […]. Sometimes I’m telling other people’s stories to remove stigma and taboo, so that they don’t have to feel ashamed; sometimes you use yourself as an example. […] These are other people’s memories that I’m paying tribute to, and celebrating, making sure they are archived, a part of history. (Shire 2013a, n. pag.)

Addressing topics like forced and voluntary exile and refuge, she not only acts as a spokesperson for her own clan but also criticises, just as Somali poet-politicians would, her society’s norms and rules and the mechanics of othering and oppression. Positioned in-between Europe, the US and East Africa, her poetic recitations speak for the Somali diaspora in a loud and clear voice. This outspokenness about formerly taboo topics concerning not only the refugee crisis but also specifically female suffering, sexual violence and trauma mirrors the subversive resistance politics embedded in the tradition of the buraanbur. As outlined above, the buraanbur is a classical Somali verse form spoken or sung by women. It is not only concerned with the traditionally female sphere of the family and the domestic but has also been used to express political dissent (cf. Jama 1994). As Jama points out, however, traditionally women’s poetry would not be recited by male speakers: “women perform their poetry before their female family members, relatives, or friends, who may memorize it and recite it, probably to other female friends” (192).5 As women were not allowed to travel alone, and thus could not disseminate their own poetry throughout the country, it ran the risk of disappearing as it could not enter national memory via oral transmission. This has changed only with the use of media such as cassettes and other means of recording stories: “women artists have benefited from alternative modes of publication, some of which have not been available in the past. Among these are circulation through audio tape and radio transmission, as well as public performances to large audiences (made available due to the circumstances of the civil war and the resultant refugee situation)” (187). As a powerful medium used by women throughout Somalia and Greater Somalia, the buraanbur has since acted as a tool

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to share specifically female experiences and as modus of resistance against colonial and patriarchal oppression simultaneously. The buraanbur verses “convey messages in which people express their daily problems, desires, and aspirations, grievances, and protests against any form of oppression and subjugation. […] Poems […] were powerful instruments in mobilizing constituencies against the colonial authorities” (Hasan et  al. 1995, 175). Especially throughout the struggle for independence and during the following oppressive regime of Siad Barre, female voices rose to the forefront of political activism. What is interesting about the buraanbur is that it is a form of poetry spoken by women for women, but never in an isolating way or with a simple one-directionality in mind. The buraanbur is always orientated towards building a community: it is addressed to fellow women but also outwards and beyond that circle to encompass the wider world (cf. Hasan et al. 1995, 174). Warsan Shire’s poetry constitutes, I argue, a contemporary continuation of the buraanbur, interactively sharing female experiences of diaspora and displacement with other women. For example, Shire’s poem “The Birth Name” belongs to her most widely shared pieces online. Originally posted on Shire’s Tumblr, it has since been deleted, but lives forth through thousands of re-shares and traces in digital archives and on blogs; it reads: “Give your daughters difficult names / Give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue / My name makes you want to tell me the truth / My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right” (2011b). Speaking to other displaced women with equally “difficult names” who then transmit the poem further, Shire knits a web of encounters that stretches across the (virtual) world. Even though the original poem does not exist anymore, it has created solidarity amongst those who only trust each other to not mispronounce their names. The community in this case has moved beyond the borders of nations and has spread across the globe, intimately connected through the online space of the internet and social media. Andoni Alonso and Pedro J.  Oiarzabal argue that the internet “is becoming the new harbour for contemporary immigrants. For many, the Internet is the first window or point of informational entry into their new destination, prior to physical arrival, as well as a new interactive link back to their homelands” (2010, 2). Referring to Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, they show that cyberspace, “the communal space digitally created by the interconnection of millions of computerized machines and people” (ibid.), has become

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the virtual home for many diverse and dispersed communities across the globe. It is another space to reconnect with fellow natives around the world as well as with those remaining at home. It is a new space of hopes, desires, dreams, frustrations, and beginnings. (Ibid.)

As I have suggested above, Warsan Shire’s poetry can be situated in a space that lies in-between oral forms of communication and written poetry, one that on the one hand conserves Somali poetry traditions and on the other hand radically revises them. The voices that arise from various states of refuge, flight and displacement are given another connective and enunciative platform as they are published mainly online by Shire. Her online and offline work which falls across different media (sound, music, photography, print) not simply imagines a (national) community, but actively and collectively takes part in constructing a community through exchange and connection in a networked medium that is generally not centrally controlled or disseminated from above.6 This notion of connectivity and community building takes up the notion of the “connective migrant” developed by Dana Diminescu, who argues that the old-fashioned definition of the migrant based on different forms of rupture considered to be fundamental and radical runs into trouble. Alternatively, another organizing principle emerges: mobility and connectivity provide a set of variables for defining the 21st-century migrant. […] Yesterday the motto was: immigrate and cut your roots; today it would be: circulate and keep in touch. This evolution seems to mark a new era in the history of migrations: the age of the connected migrant. (2008, 568)

While not negating the violent displacements experienced by many migratory, diasporic subjects, Diminescu points towards a new connective paradigm emerging in a twenty-first century that is characterised by innovative information technologies, new ways to connect between home and host lands, and advanced forms of communication that allow for “keeping in touch” in more intimate and circulatory ways through an everyday “culture of bonds” (567). I argue, then, that the epitome of the connected migrant living in a connected diaspora can be found in Shire’s work as it creates new worlds that incorporate many different geographical contexts, facilitating an exchange that actively crosses political borders. Underlining this, Victoria Bernal has argued that “diasporas online may invent new forms of citizenship, community and political practices” (2005, 669). In

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recording and re-medialising her family’s stories about the trauma of war and dislocation and in voicing the transoceanic refugee trajectories towards Europe in her poetry, Shire not only refers to the violent material histories of uprooting and oppression, but by transmitting them to online spaces and by making them available to the digital diaspora, her poetry generates spaces of participation and emancipation which themselves contribute to new forms of belonging which cross continents and oceans. Unfoldings: On Page, on Stage Just as Warsan Shire’s poems create connections—geographically by recreating refugee trajectories across the ocean, virtually by transporting her Somali family’s oral testimonies into the online spaces of the digital diaspora—Shailja Patel’s Migritude expands the kala pani, the transoceanic passage over the Indian Ocean, and travels across the world. Whereas in above discussions of Shire’s poetry as a communal digital space I have focussed on traditional oral poetry traditions and their transmission via newly emerging media, in the following I will focus on processes of community building which are enacted via performance, via visual strategies and via the physicality of Patel’s stage show. Migritude can be regarded as a text that not only words watery travels, but that through its textile, material indebtedness to the violent histories of colonisation produces alternative spaces that further the notion of transoceanic connectivity and encounter. The book version of Migritude can be seen as a self-referential text, as a narrated materialisation of the crossing over the Indian Ocean. Patel herself has said about the Kaya edition that it “was a demanding exercise in finding the form to fit the content, which was originally created for theatre” (2015, n. pag.). In creating a book “that embedded the performance script into a larger multi-part narrative”, she has transformed her stage performance to fit between the covers of a book, one that is replete with visual and paratextual layers (ibid.). In her initial one-woman show, Patel carried a suitcase full of saris and stories across the world—and the book contains the textualisd version of that, playing intricately with its theatrical origins through the “paratextual apparatus” (Bady 2014, n. pag.) by including, for example, the Shadow Book. Migritude the book produces an essentially performative text that takes recourse to the actual performance of the show. I now want to reverse this approach and examine the original spoken-word stage show which constitutes the living, but ultimately absent, heart of Migritude.

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Migritude premiered in 2006 as “a 90-minute theatre show complete with set, choreography, dance, soundscape, and visuals” in Berkeley, California (Vadde 2016, 223). It has since travelled across the world, with Patel giving performances in Italy, Zanzibar, Austria, Sweden and Kenya, among other places. With these global trajectories, the travelling show hints at the circulation processes and migratory multi-directionality contained within its performance as Patel unpacks a suitcase full of saris to address her own personal stories of Asian East African belonging, while simultaneously tracing the historical legacies of colonialism. Just as the textualised version of Migritude cannot be pinned down as it exceeds generic boundaries, the stage show cannot be likened to traditional theatre. Stemming from a background of slam poetry herself, Patel describes the show as “part of an evolving form. It’s text-based, not quite poetry, not traditional staged theatre linked by narrator, but we also have a dancer who collaborated on the work. I’m drawing on all these different genres” (Patel 2006, n. pag.). What brings the story of Migritude to life is the physicality and materiality of the actor’s and dancer’s bodies—the performativity of the migrant body on stage makes graspable how memory and history are mediated through bodies. To this end, Patel has worked with the dancer Parijat Desai (founder of the dance company PDDC), who “creatively bridges movements from bharatanatyam, yoga, jazz, modern dance, and martial arts with her study of the histories of colonization and global interconnections” (Katrak 2011, 181). According to contemporary dance scholar Katrak, Desai’s “inventive choreography brings together Indian and Western dance vocabularies, aesthetics, and cultures, and conveys them using music and visual art” (184). Patel herself says of this collaboration: “Working with her, I caught a tiny glimpse of the vocabulary of dance. How the distance of arm from torso, the amount of energy in a leg, are physical text that the audience reads without even knowing that they’re reading it” (86). The materiality of the body on the stage and of the affective embodied experience connected to that can also be found in Patel’s description of moving on the stage, how she experiences rhythm and how energy is transmitted: Parijat’s feet open the performance of Migritude. When the show begins, I’m lying on the stage. I can feel the vibrations—the force and precision of her footwork—under my body. The feet of the goddess, drumming the world into being. A fellow artist, Robert Karimi, called it the rhythm that set

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out heartbeats for the rest of the show. Da-DAH-da-da-da-DAH-da-da-da-­ DAH! Four beats of the ankle bells. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink. Da-DAH-da-­ da-da-DAH-da-da-da-DAH! The end of the footbeats is my cue to open my eyes and begin. (75, 76; emphasis in original)

The possibilities of that corporeal performance, the embodied voice and the materialised body map the terrain covered by the story of centuries of displacement and migration. In Patel’s show, performativity can be seen as a strategy of not only survival but also connection and community, of not only claiming voice but also claiming voice together. The stage here acts as a physical site of cultural production and identity construction but also as a site for the interaction with a life audience, creating an intimate encounter: “Theatre is relationship. A body in front of other bodies. Unfiltered, unedited, unmanipulated. In real time. If I screw up on stage, everyone participates in the moment” (85). In the following I will outline the physical, material and visual methods employed in the stage show Migritude which point towards the relational potential inherent to the performance of the female diasporic body on stage. Next to the genre-crossing combination of poetry, theatre and dance, the most important aspect of Migritude’s stage show are the saris. I have already examined how the narration of the saris and their woven ambi-­ patterned fabric hint at the colonial and postcolonial effects and affects of Empire and how they represent the Indian Ocean trade and the global routes of colonialism. I will now extend this discussion to incorporate the saris’ affective materiality on stage where Shailja Patel physically engages with the cloth of the sari to construct her show, where, in other words, she literally unfolds her tales by unfolding the saris from the trousseau given to her by her mother. The physical presence of the cloths on stage build the foundation for how they are described in the textualised version as visceral, almost palpable objects. In the chapter “What Came Out of the Suitcase” these detailed and tactile descriptions of the 17 saris (which correspond to the 17 parts of the show/book) focus not only on shades of colour but also on the textures, patterns, the saris’ geographical origins and the specificities of their making. When used on stage, the material of the saris partakes in telling the various different stories of Migritude— influencing movement, emotion and engagement between performer and audience. The actions performed with these materials are folding and unfolding, wrapping and unwrapping, hanging, snapping and gathering. One of such

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instances of embodied affective use can be found during the first part of the show, “Idi Amin”, which delineates Amin’s violent expulsion of Asians from Uganda during the 1970s, an event which influenced Patel’s life in neighbouring Kenya. Patel interweaves this history with the story of how women would hide their family’s treasures within the folds of their saris, “respected because they wore and guarded the family’s wealth” (11). She then interlinks this with an account of how during the expulsion soldiers would drag off a woman from her husband and child, now no longer protected by her dress or her jewellery. Straight after, Patel describes how secret documents declassified in 2001 show that the West funded Amin’s military coup which “overthrew Uganda’s democratically elected government” because apparently, as British Foreign Office documents state, he was regarded as “a man we can do business with” (11, emphasis in original). In the show, Patel configures these overlappings through performing with and through the sari cloth: “When I reveal that Britain, Israel, and the US sponsored Amin’s coup, I’m unwrapping the sari I put on at the start of the piece. I gather it in folds as it comes off my body. Shake the folds together with a snap. Hang the sari firmly on a bar as I say, ‘A man we can do business with’” (78–79; emphasis in original). Through playing with the sari, she materialises the violent history of oppression of Asians in East Africa. She unwraps it from her body, undressing herself to represent a woman’s vulnerability; she gathers it in folds just as the man on the train gathers his child on his arms as his wife is taken away; she shakes the folds together with a snap as if to echo the sudden violence and then she hangs it firmly on a bar when she repeats the phrases from the British documents to signal the end of the sari, the death of the woman, the fate of the Asians expelled from their homes. In self-assertively taking control over the fabric of the sari, Patel reorganises how history is told, affectively and empathically from a diasporic female African Asian perspective. As can be seen not only from my analysis but also from the only video that exists of one of Migritude’s performances, the story Patel is telling is continuously expressed through the movement of fabric in the performance. She packs and unpacks the saris into and from her red suitcase, the ultimate epitome of travel (Patel 2007, 00:10–00:50, 03:29–03:38). Snatching and tossing, folding and unfolding the clothes (01:58–03:00, 05:55–06:18), she reconstructs and deconstructs personal and political histories of displacement and migration. In chapter 10, “The Sky Has Not Changed Colour” (2010, 44–48), which revolves around Maasai rape victims of British soldiers in military training camps in Kenya through

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alternating poetry with survivor testimonies, she at first wanted to “turn her back to the audience while speaking of the violation” (88) but then developed a choreography with the dancer Parijat Desai: Parijat and I enter lying flat on our backs, pushing ourselves across the stage with our feet while pulling a length of black cloth with us. The black cloth becomes a river, a demarcation of space and time […] The fabric had to be folded just so at the start in order to unfold evenly into a long line. […] At May the redness overtake them, I pick up the river cloth and begin to loop it around my elbow and shoulder. Pull the energy tighter and tighter, bind the curse into its vortex. (88–89; emphasis in original)

Trailing, pulling and looping the black cloth, Patel constructs a narrative that runs parallel to the survivor testimonies narrated in the scene, and by finally bringing body and cloth together, she not only expresses the corporeal violence of sexual violation but also speaks a curse against the assailants in a powerful performance of anger and retribution. In the same scene, this physical mediation of story becomes evident in yet another example. She describes the stereotyping Western perception of African cultures, like the Maasai culture: “They are the noble savages, staring out from coffee table books. Africa Adorned. The Last Nomads. Backdrops and extras for Vogue fashion shoots. Stock ingredients for tourist brochures. The Maasai are a global brand” (45). During the performance, she rips out pages from a tourist photo book of the Maasai and hands them to the audience (89). She physically rips apart the vacuous stereotypes represented in the glossy coffee table book while describing the rapes of Maasai women by British soldiers, with over 650 allegations covering 35 years, from 1965 to 2001. Patel’s strategy here does not merely break the fourth wall, it implicates the audience into what she has been showing them. By letting the materiality of the saris and the ripped pages spill over the stage into the space of the audience, she not only articulates a warning and a critique but also creatively engages in an act of sharing. This sharing of history, memories and stories transcends the stage and moves into the room inhabited by the audience who then no longer merely consume the performance but themselves become part of it. This is perhaps most evident when looking at the end of the show:

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In the finale of the show, the audience has finally earned the right to see the saris in all their splendour. Because they’ve engaged with the violence and violation beneath. Sat through the unbearable and absorbed it. Listened to the voices of women from within the bootprint of Empire. They’ve paid for the experience of beauty, sensuality—and they understand the cost. I open the suitcase fully, shake out the twin set of khangas from Zanzibar—black and white, with ambi patterns—and spread them on the floor. Unpack the saris onto them, one by one. Show off the borders and embroidery. I toss the bright green georgette in the air—one of my favourite moments in the show. Trace the silver zari on the heavy chocolate silk. Hold the softest sandalwood Mysore silk to my face and inhale. Wrap the turquoise blue around me. (95–96)

The audience is finally allowed to see the complete set of saris, whereas before they had only gotten bits and pieces. Generously spreading the saris across the stage floor and thus sharing them with the audience, Patel not only constructs a personal connection between herself and the people in the room but also creates a textile connection that reaches from the weavers whose hands were chopped off in nineteenth-century India, to the survivors of rape in twentieth-century Kenya, and into the present. Sharing both material and histories with the audience, Patel engages in an act of community building. Describing her performances as “interactive co-­ creation of the stage” (86), she points towards the fact that the themes she engages with are not static, self-contained or one-directional. With Migritude, then, she has initiated the formation of an intimate community, not only within the small theatre where the initial Berkeley performance was staged but also all over the world. This notion of interaction, connectivity and conversation is not only privy to the performances but also echoed in the multi-modal text of the book. As Aarthi Vadde argues, these additions extend “the idea of collaboration […] wherein many participate in the ‘journey’ of the work by entering into it at different points in its life, from conception to performance to translation. Those who enter into its life also crucially extend that life, making the model for the production of Migritude more evolutionary than stationary” (2016, 225). The materiality of the text Migritude in its Kaya Press edition with its paratextual, visual and intermedial layers constitutes a continuation of the affective embodied materiality of the stage show which is replete with dance, movement and the multi-layered, multi-coloured cloth of the saris. Both text and stage performance taken together, intertwined as they are as

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different medialisations of the same story, create a migritudinal, migratory poetics which extends the transoceanic kala pani passage and the trade routes across the Indian Ocean to reach around the world, following Patel’s own diasporic movements as well as the text’s routes through different media. What I hope has become clear in the discussions of the aesthetic, formal, textual and generic crossings generated by Shire’s and Patel’s works is that their poetry is a travelling one—one that incorporates movement but one that also enacts this movement. The texts seem to continually transform, develop and disseminate along digital or performative paths. In both Shire and Patel, we are confronted with re-mediations which continue the transoceanic passages contained within the narratives of diaspora, migration and refuge. The ocean as ultimate connective medium made of water returns in texts that themselves connect via various media and medialisations across the world. Through conjoining different media and different textualities as well as through extending their works beyond their generic conventions, both poets articulate the fraught intimacies between Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe in a worldly, world-making space decidedly marked by notions of communality and conviviality.

Wording the Wound: Connective and Collective Love Not everyone is okay with living like an open wound. But the thing about open wounds is that, well, you aren’t ignoring it. You’re healing; the fresh air can get to it. It’s honest. You aren’t hiding who you are. You aren’t rotting. People can give you advice on how to heal without scarring badly. But on the other hand there are some people who’ll feel uncomfortable around you. Some will even point and laugh. But we all have wounds. Warsan Shire, Interview with Well & Often (2012a, n. pag.) I amplify and valorise the care economies that sustain and repair the bodies on the street, suture the wounds and regenerate the worlds destroyed by warfare. —Shailja Patel, Interview with Wasafiri (2015, n. pag.)

I have ended my analyses of the ocean space and the quasi-spatial configurations of the internet and the stage with the contention that connectivity, collectivity and community lie at the forefront of Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s work. I will now further develop these ideas and align them

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with my examinations of the multi-layered formations of love and desire discussed throughout this book. In every chapter, I related world-making strategies to the structures of love and desire in order to productively trouble both concepts. In Adichie’s Americanah, the transnational romance story between Ifemelu and Obinze moved back and forth between Africa, America and Europe to then not only arrive in Lagos but also at a happy (if conventional) ending, while Zadie Smith’s postcolonial London gave space to affective urban relationships such as non-­ heteronormative families and tentative, contested homosexual/homo-­ social female friendships, whereas in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching the haunted house not only contained dangerous stories about the nation but also the wilful, foundation-shattering queer love story between Miranda and Ore. Such connections between love- and world-making return in Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s poetry as they both speak out about the specifically female experiences of displacement that can only be approached through notions of the relational, the empathetic and the affective. Both articulate the need for a deeply human interconnectedness posited against the horrors and suffering caused by geographical and corporeal dislocations and ruptures. In the following, I will connect the sexual, romantic and familial encounters depicted in both poet’s work to my discussions in prior chapters and argue for a new mode of transoceanic love: one that is marked by a more interconnective, reparative approach. To outline this connective notion of love at work in both poet’s ocean-­ crossing works, I will utilise tools offered by cultural trauma studies and resultant notions of “bearing witness” and practices of “taking care”. The very principle lying at the heart of discourses about trauma is the recognition that trauma “is manifested in the impossibility of knowing and communicating the traumatic event or experience” (Ganteau and Onega 2014, 2). As Ruth Leys states, “trauma was originally the term for a surgical wound, conceived on the model of a rupture of the skin or protective envelope of the body resulting in a catastrophic global reaction in the entire organism” (2000, 19). Trauma not only denotes a rupturing of surface or outer layer but also has more far-reaching and widespread implications, ultimately disrupting any logical narration of the self and the world around it. The after-effects of this initial wound reverberate both into the present and future while rendering ungraspable the past event, and often result in loops of traumatic repetition and repression. This inability to recognise what has happened is initially mirrored in the inability to narrativise the traumatic event; but as cultural trauma studies

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have shown, “literary and cultural texts have increasingly become privileged spaces for the representation of individual and collective traumas […], arguably providing a means of transforming traumatic memories into narrative memories” (Andermahr and Pellicer-Ortín 2013, 2). The potential inherent to trauma narratives lies in the fact that they paradoxically and perplexingly give voice to something that cannot stay below the surface, that breaks out of its silent encasement and ruptures the skin. Or, in the words of Leslie Jamison in her essay collection The Empathy Exams: “Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries” (2014, 5). Trauma is neither silent nor confined. It crosses boundaries and makes itself heard and acknowledged. To narrativise trauma means to work through it—to acknowledge both the collective trauma which “often correlates with moments of historical crisis (in our age, the two world wars, the Holocaust, the horrors of colonisation and its aftermath, the spectre of terrorism)” and the less overt “individual and structural traumas associated with patriarchal ideology, unmitigated capitalism and globalisation” (Ganteau and Onega 2014, 1). I am interested in exactly this activity of giving words (and worlds) to experiences of trauma which, I argue, happens in comparable ways in the poems by Shire and Patel. Through engaging in intimate as well as collective processes of witnessing and listening, they turn into language often unspoken histories and unarticulated memories. As I have shown throughout this chapter, such acts of articulation may take many different forms: recording voices on Dictaphones, folding and unfolding cloth on a stage and engaging with the pasts and presents of East African countries via transoceanic channels of communication. Literature has come to be “one of the privileged loci of testimony, being endowed with the power of saying/complementing what other types of narratives, including history, cannot say” (3). My contention for the following discussion is that in saying what cannot be said, a process of reparation and regeneration is initiated—one that is deeply embedded in the poetic and affective work done by Patel and Shire. As can be seen in the epigraphs I have used for this subchapter, both poets actively engage in the work of giving words to trauma: Shire speaks of the open wound which needs to be exposed in order for it to heal, Patel of attending to violated bodies and stitching up wounds. Exemplary for these acts of reparation through witnessing is the way both poets reiterate sexual trauma and the mutilation of especially female bodies, paying attention to the various wounds caused by harmful gendered and racialised practices. Shire’s poem “Mermaids” (2015a, 13), for example, deals with female genital mutilation and its cultural, religious implications. This topic

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gives rise to an articulation of the intimate and complicated relation between femininity and violence: Sometimes it’s tucked into itself, sewn up    like the lips of a prisoner. After the procedure, the girl learns how to walk again, mermaid with new legs soft knees buckling under new sinless body. Daughter is synonymous with traitor, the father says, If your mother survived it, you can.    Cut, cut, cut. But Mother, did you truly survive it? The carving, the warm blade against your inner thigh. Silencing the devil’s tongue between your legs. On an episode of America’s Next Top Model the contestants huddle around Amina after her confession touching her arm with concern     for her pleasure Asking questions: Can you even feel anything down there? The camera zooms in on a Georgia O’Keefe painting. […] (13, 14; emphases in original)

Interweaving the depiction of violent patriarchal family structures with a critique of Western perception of “Africa”, Shire creates a multi-layered picture of contemporary Somali society—she also, however, pays painstaking attention to the trauma of the corporeal act of genital mutilation itself (“Cut, cut, cut. […] The carving, the warm blade against / your inner thigh”)7 and how the girl lives with it afterwards: “How to walk again, mermaid with new legs”. What is of utmost importance here, I think, are the last two lines of Shire’s poem: Two girls lie in bed beside each other holding mirrors under the mouths of their skirts,    comparing wounds. (14)

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These lines make two girls out of the solitary one, creating an interpersonal connection and underlining the importance of female solidarity and empathy. Comparing wounds, two girls who have experienced the same trauma, learn to look at each other and at themselves through mirrors. They shed the shameful shroud of silence, which is symbolised by the lifting of their skirts, literally articulating their wounds by opening “the mouths of their skirts”. They share with each other their mutilated bodies and consequently also strategies to deal with these new bodies—through a feminine support system. Paying attention to their wounds, the girls enter a process of healing. In Migritude, Shailja Patel similarly bears witness to the wounds caused by the violence brought upon women’s bodies. I have already outlined some of these acts of affective, ethical witnessing above, but this process of not hiding the open wound becomes perhaps even clearer in one of the first poems in the book, called “History Lesson” (15), which juxtaposes the official national and implicitly nationalist history of Kenya taught in school against the unofficial oral testimonies (or herstories) of female rape survivors considered too shameful to be included into the history books: Less than twenty years before I was born, there was a gulag in my country, I knew nothing of it until 2006. This is the history I learned in school (Standard Three to Standard Five, Hospital Hill Primary School, Nairobi) […] This is the history we didn’t learn. […] This is the history we read. […] This is the history we didn’t read. Oral testimonies from women who survived the camps. The white officers had no shame. They would rape women in full view of everyone. Swing women by the hair. Put women in sacks, douse in paraffin, set alight. They burned us with cigarette butts. Forced us to walk on hot coals. They put cayenne pepper and water in our vaginas. Petrol and water in our vaginas. Forced in with a bottle pushed by a boot. (15–18; emphases in original)

Like Shire, Patel does not shy away from the embodied realities of sexual violence against women—their suffering gives voice to the trauma of rape and mutilation. Again, the cloth of the sari is utilised to make visible this trauma: “The crimson sari shaped the choreography of this piece. Told me it wanted to be knotted for the oral testimonies of the women in the

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camps. Each knot a dead child. When I lay the knotted sari in a circle, then gather it up in my arms, it feels like a part of my own body. I hang it on the bar on the stage: a glowing rope of knots, a testament to children killed by Empire” (80). Like Shire, who does not isolate the girl in “Mermaids” but creates sisterhood, Patel initiates solidarity in materially connecting individual oral testimonies through the cloth of the blood-red sari (“each knot a dead child”) which first becomes a circle and then part of her own body. Both poets create testimonies—testimonies of the wounds women have to endure, caused by both black and white men. But in uncovering the wound, they also let fresh air get to it and prevent it from rotting. While being conscious of the important work of bearing witness to the difficult overlaps between sexualised and racialised violence both poets so intricately engage in, I also want to argue that Shire and Patel extend the female experiences they both describe beyond an attention to wounds, violence and hurt, to more positively connoted female sexualities and female desires. Both poets portray the female body, which continuously resists attempts to make it unreadable through sexual violence and instead pronounces its own agency. This embodied resistance is materialised in the texts through the depiction of female characters who wilfully engage in self-empowered erotic acts of love and desire. Trauma does not become the one defining element of the girls and women depicted in the poems; reparation may also take shape in acts of self-love and erotic love, brought to light and into language in many different ways throughout Shire’s and Patel’s work. That being said, however, there is also another strategy connected to female sexuality and desire to be found in both poets—one that differs greatly from the way love was being imagined in the novels discussed throughout the previous chapters of this book. The laying bare, suturing and then healing of wounds is frequently impelled by outright rejections of sexual, erotic and often heteronormative love. At a 2014 event at the Southbank Centre Festival of Love (part of the biennial Poetry International Festival, which was set up by Ted Hughes in 1967) where poets presented the world’s 50 best love poems, Shire tellingly read her poem “For women who are difficult to love” (Knowles 2014, n. pag.): you are a horse running alone and he tries to tame you compares you to an impossible highway

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to a burning house […] you dizzy him, you are unbearable […] and you tried to change didn’t you? closed your mouth more tried to be softer prettier less volatile, less awake […] and if he wants to leave then let him leave you are terrifying and strange and beautiful something not everyone knows how to love. (2012b, 6, 00:00–01:56)

Here, a woman is spun into being who is volatile and terrifying, who does not fit within normative understandings of femininity and who rejects romance. Another woman who similarly rattles the cage of the desirable female subject through acts of refusal and resistance can be found in Shire’s poem “House” (2015a), where the female body becomes a maze for male lovers to lose themselves in, to be locked in and never let out again: Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen of lust, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men—they come with keys, and sometimes, the men—they come with hammers. Nin soo joog laga waayo, soo jiifso aa laga helaa,8 I said Stop, I said No and he did not listen. (19, emphasis in original)

Following what is clearly an account of sexual violence and coercion, Shire describes what may happen to these men who do not listen, in a powerful reversal of the practice of female genital mutilation (carried out by men on helpless women): “Perhaps she has a plan, perhaps she takes him back to hers / only for him to wake up hours later in a bathtub full of ice, / with a dry mouth, looking down at his new, neat procedure” (19). The speaker of the poem goes on to liken her body to a building that traps men: The bigger my body is, the more locked rooms there are, the more men come with keys. Anwar didn’t push it all the way in, I still think about what he could have opened up inside of me. Basil came and hesitated at the door for three years. Johnny with the blue eyes came with a bag of tools he had used on other women: one hairpin, a bottle of bleach, a switchblade and a

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jar of Vaseline. Yusuf called out God’s name through the keyhole and no one answered. Some begged, some climbed the side of my body looking for a window, some said they were on their way and did not come. […] I should tell you about my first love who found a trapdoor under my left breast nine years ago, fell in and hasn’t been seen since. Every now and then I feel something crawling up my thigh. He should make himself known. I’d probably let him out. I hope he hasn’t bumped in to [sic] the others, the missing boys from small towns, with pleasant mothers, who did bad things and got lost in the maze of my hair. I treat them well enough, a slice of bread, if they’re lucky a piece of fruit. Except for Johnny with the blue eyes, who picked my locks and crawled in. Silly boy chained to the basement of my fears, I play music to drown him out. (20)

While “House” can be read as a metaphor for sex and sexual violence, it also clearly denotes the female body as both fortress that cannot be entered and a maze in which to get lost and starve to death—forceful and dangerous imageries which reject any notion of submissiveness and passivity. Through these intricate depictions of fractious female bodies, Shire produces corporealities that resist the trauma and silencing which so often seems to be the only possibility for Somali women. As Pratt and Rosner argue, “the body, injured imaginatively and actually, testifies to historical violence, but it is also a site to resist coercive and deforming forces and a place for self-actualization or, at the least, a place from which to negotiate with social norms” (2012, 10). Shire’s poems focus on women’s relationship to their own and other female bodies without necessarily including romance or erotic love and sometimes even outright rejecting them: “At parties I point to my body and say This is where love comes to die. Welcome, come in, make yourself at home. Everyone laughs; they think I’m joking” (“The House”, 21; emphasis in original). The body is where love itself comes to die, thus denoting an autonomy from restrictive forms of desire and sexuality that demand obedience and pliancy. In Shailja Patel’s poetry, sexuality is not as overtly discussed as in Shire, but we can nevertheless find similar attempts to define female agency and to articulate sovereignty from traditional and essentialist concepts of love and romance: in fact, the very reason for why Migritude even exists can be traced to Patel’s refusal to conform to heteronormative conventions of love and marriage. The trousseau of saris and jewellery, which constitutes the foundation for Migritude, is bequeathed to her when her mother realises that she will never marry. In the poem “Born to a Law”, Patel

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defines the meaning of her trousseau: “Trousseau. / The wealth a woman takes / when she leaves the home of her parents. / Etymology: Old French. / From trousse—/ bundle—and trousser—/ to tie up” (61). Instead of being tied up in the bond of marriage and moving into the home of a husband, she has moved out into the world. As Kulbaga argues, “in Migritude, the sari comes to evoke a number of associations: normative patriarchal constructions of women and marriage; maternal investment in a daughter’s nonnormative life path; a queer feminist aesthetic and politics” (2016, 77). Patel’s non-normative sexuality is only hinted at in the text, for example, in “Dreaming in Gujarati” when one of the words Gujarati cannot give her is “lesbian” (51) and she turns away from the idea of motherhood and reproduction (“The children in my dreams / speak Gujarati / turn their trusting faces to the sun / say to me / care for us nurture us / in my dreams I shudder and I run”, 50; emphasis in original) or when her mother talks about her “sexual experimentation and adventures” (60) in one of the sections narrated by her. What can be said for certain, however, is that Patel not only traces female resistances but that she herself, through the act of performing and writing Migritude, gives voice to her own autobiographical struggle for emancipation and freedom. In “Swore I’d Never Wear Clothes I Couldn’t Run or Fight In”, she reconfigures what for her constitutes first and foremost the restrictive meaning of the sari to include other versions of femininity as well: As a child, I knew of women strangled in their saris. Women doused in paraffin and burned in their saris. Saris made you vulnerable. A walking target. Saris made you weak. No one told me about women who went into battle—in their saris. Worked the fields—in their saris. Why didn’t anyone tell me about women who laboured on construction sites in their saris? (21)

The saris not only stand for weakness and vulnerability but can also be read as resistance, denoting a persistent and resilient strength as they wrap around women who disobediently evade restrictive gendered norms in order to run, battle and work. Patel’s resistance to normative concepts of romance and desire can also be traced in her reaction to another gift she

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receives from her mother, the mangal sutra. A kind of necklace which is usually tied around the bride’s neck by the groom at Hindu weddings is given to her instead by her mother. In one of her letters included in Migritude, Patel’s mother explains her actions: Yes, I know, a mangal sutra necklace is normally given to a woman by her husband. However, both your sisters, Shruti and Sneha, each have a mangal sutra now. You know we have always treated all three of you equally. Since you have stubbornly refused to get married, it seems your mangal sutra has to come from your mother instead of your husband! (59–60)

Recognising the fact that her daughter Shailja refuses to integrate into heteronormative structures such as marriage, her mother gives her the mangal sutra herself, thus consciously displacing male influence and reconfiguring it through alternative female connections. Patel herself says of the mangal sutra tradition and her mother’s actions: “As a teenage feminist, I put mangal sutras in the same category as wedding rings: a symbol of bondage, something that branded a woman as chattel. Moveable property. When my mother gave me one, I was stunned. It meant: Your chosen path is no less serious, no less worthy of ceremonial recognition, than your sisters’ marriages” (92, 93; emphasis in original). Here, the ultimate symbol of heterosexual marriage is turned around, “queered”, and denotes now not the intimate connection between husband and wife, but the equally intimate female connection between mother and daughter, pointing towards familial, relational support and a showcasing of empathy. Patel continues: I couldn’t have imagined breaking the rule that mangal sutras were only for married women. That they could only be given to a woman by her husband. In this act, my mother showed me up as the traditionalist. Appointed herself the revolutionary. Her gift showed me that […] the mangal sutra could be a blueprint for a creative life. An activist life. My life. Intention. Declaration. Execution. (93)

While heterosexual love is not directly displaced by homosexual love (like in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching or, to a lesser extent, in Zadie Smith’s London novels), a queer replacement takes place nevertheless— exploring mother-daughter relationships and familial love, which then evolves to include other women as well: “Part of what Migritude brings out is what it means to be a woman in an empire, what happens to mothers

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and daughters, and then my own journey, how I came into my own body, to my relationship to femininity, to saris, what it means to be a woman in the world” (2006, n. pag.). I agree with Kulbaga, who states that the mangal sutra as well as the trousseau of saris evoke “a feminist archive of value earned other-wise, through careful attention to material histories and legacies and through the labour (poetic, psychic, familial) of world-­ reconstruction after violence” (2016, 77). The possibly queer resignification of restrictive and normative sexuality goes hand in hand with a self-assured constitution of female self-hood and female relationality in order to counter gendered and racialised violence. Patel herself says of this reparative potential: “I’m thinking deeply about writing that imagines and nurtures ethical life—life-affirming writing, writing against the splitting and dehumanisation that surrounds us” (2015, n. pag.). Patel not only articulates the overcoming of violence and trauma but even more so points towards the power inherent to empathetic and sympathetic female relationships proliferating throughout the pages of Migritude. These structures of affect that decidedly focus not on romantic or erotic love can also be found in Shire who similarly traces love that is not confined to only two people, but that spreads through families and family-like communities. As Kameelah Janan Rasheed states, Shire’s “poetry carries the energy of multiple women, the depth of many generations, and the weight of many lives lived” (Shire 2012a, n. pag.). This becomes most apparent in the poem “Tea with Our Grandmothers” (2011a) in which Shire follows multi-branched female family genealogies: The morning your habooba died I thought of my ayeeyo, the woman I was named after, Warsan Baraka, skin dark like tamarind flesh who died grinding cardamom […] Or my mother’s mother, Noura with the honeyed laugh, who broke cinnamon barks between her palms, […] with broken Swahili and stubborn Italian […] and Doris, the mother of your English rose, named after the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys the Welsh in your blood, from the land

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of Cymry, your grandmother who dreams of clotted cream in her tea through the swell of diabetes […] then your habooba Al Sura, […], with three lines on each cheek, a tally of surviving the woman who cooled your tea pouring it […], until the steam would rise like a ghost. (33)

This poem traces not only the feelings between two lovers united in mourning, but through an act of relational remembrance pursues whole generations of female family members: the grandmothers Warsan, Noura, Doris and Al Sura are intricately interwoven through a play with metaphors and images of tea—honey, cardamom, clotted cream, cinnamon, cooling the tea. This produces a tenuous connection to other spaces (Sudan, Somalia, Wales) and other times, crossing generational and geographical borders. Shire herself argues that her poetry works as “genealogy, preserving the names of the women came before me [sic]. To connect, honour, to confront. It differs with each family member, with my grandmother I would record our conversations, to serve as witness to her life, to sit at her feet in reverence” (2015b, n. pag.). This notion of family-­ building and of deeply affective, affectionate love is mirrored in the titles of both her poetry collections: Her Blue Body references one of Shire’s best friends, Yosra El-Essawy, who died of cancer and to whose memory a lot of the poems in the pamphlet are implicitly dedicated, and Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth is a direct translation from a Somali proverb in which the children assume that they are much wiser than their parents (Shire 2016, n. pag.). The very idea of a daughter teaching her mother how to give birth indicates a chronology turned on its head, and, as I would argue, hints at strategies of care and empathy that escape usual ordering principles whilst possibly repairing generational and inherited trauma. Regarding the relationship to her parents, and especially her mother, Shire has said: “Her experience with having me and her introduction into womanhood and motherhood […] and the themes of adolescence and sisterhood and being a woman […]; the poems are around that” (ibid.). Significantly, the mother-daughter relationship is invoked from the very beginning with the collection’s epigraph which quotes Audre Lorde:

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“Mother, loosen my tongue or adorn me with a lighter burden”. The poem from which this line is taken is titled “Call” and can be read as exemplary of both Shire’s and Patel’s construction of cross-generational, cross-­ oceanic female archives of memory, solidarity and love. In “Call”, Lorde evokes a number of different women, mythical and historical: “Aido Hwedo”,9 “she who scrubs the Capitol toilets”, “gnarled Harriet”, “the young guerrilla”, “Thandi Modise—winged girl of Soweto”, “fire-­ tongued Oya Seboulisa Mawu Afrekete”, “Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer / Assata Shakur and Yaa Asanteva / my mother and Winnie Mandela / are singing in my throat” ([1986] 2000, 1015–1017). All these different women, deities and political activists are summoned while “on worn kitchen stools and tables / we are piecing our weapons together / scraps of different histories” (1015). As Sagri Dhairyam argues, the poem as a collective chorus of voices calls up “representations of lost histories, of nameless victims to oppression, of material and specific divinities” in order to rewrite “aporias of discourse that allow oppression to be repeated in different contexts” (1992, 247). The poem asserts Lorde’s membership in a community of struggle and black female power which stretches from past to modern times and which traces the legacies of women activists through matrilineal orders. In using this as her epigraph for Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth, Shire “loosens her tongue” and consciously places herself and her poetry in Audre Lorde’s tradition of female solidarity—continually foregrounding female desire, female connectedness and female world rebuilding. Transoceanic Communities of Care The work by Shire and Patel is filled with a plethora of female relationships: mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, friends and cousins; a more explicit and encompassing continuation of the communities and kinship structures I discussed in Adichie, Smith and Oyeyemi, these women as imagined by Shire and Patel constitute a female community that not only extends across generations and across disparate spaces but also extends traditional notions of love as being restricted to couples or isolated twosomes. Creating multi-perspectival, multi-tonal layers of affect, the poems in Migritude and the collections by Shire evoke a sense of a compassionate commonality and community. In this last section, I want to argue that Shire and Patel engage in something that I term “taking care”; an affective and ethical strategy of looking out for each other across oceans.

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Drawing on Geraldine Pratt’s and Victoria Rosner’s work on the interconnectedness of the global and the intimate, I want to assess the work of reparation undertaken by both Shire and Patel as a worlded, diasporic feminist practice of creating communities of care. Notions of care first came to the forefront of feminist discourse when a so-called ethics of care was developed as a specifically feminist methodology in the second half of the twentieth century. It foregrounds practices of empathy and compassion in interpersonal relationships, as conceptualised amongst others by American ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982). While accused of conforming to binary gender oppositions and relegating women to the restricted spaces of carers, the ideas put forth by Gilligan have been taken on and developed into a more critical ethics of relationality by intersectional and queer feminists, emphasising an ethics “rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness” (Noddings 1984, 2). Pratt and Rosner have rightly argued that often, and especially when it comes to specifically female engagement with intimacy and global processes of displacement, “we tend to associate care with proximity, and we have few conceptual tools for imagining geographies of care beyond the familial or national community” (2012, 12). I posit that the poems by the two East African writers provide exactly those tools for imagining love and care that reaches across borders—be they borders of the nuclear family, the nation-state or even boundaries of continents demarcated by shore- and coastlines. In wording the wound, in even wilfully and often aggressively wielding the wound, the poems act as healing agents for the trauma of exile and suffering. They make possible the thinking of a global collective solidarity. Of course, one could argue that the naive “fantasy of an unearned global sisterhood is well and truly dead” (17) in a neo-liberal globalised world that is still marked by immense power hierarchies and the suffering of those on the wrong end of that hierarchy. But, as Pratt and Rosner rightly go on to explain, “aspirations to global solidarity and universal norms are not [dead], and they involve new ways of thinking of both the global and the intimate” (ibid.). The vulnerability and suffering witnessed and then turned into poetry by Shire and Patel does exactly that. It creates an awareness and an inherently ethical engagement with death, wounds and violation as it shows women fighting against oppression and caring for each other. The love described and generated in Shire and Patel’s works does different things—for one, it takes up the empowering and reparative notions of erotic and romantic entanglements described in the African diasporic novels I have analysed throughout this book, but it also expands

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these to include other, more collective and connective models of love. What I have repeatedly found in my readings are bonds of affection and affiliation that are not purely sexual or erotic nor merely familial but that in their inclusive intimacy repair trauma as they spin transoceanic communities of care. These communities of care that arise from witnessing trauma and wounds gesture towards notions of an ethical engagement with others. They showcase a “commitment to building rather than assuming solidarity” (Pratt and Rosner, 2012, 18), a building (and rebuilding) that comes to light in poetic works that reconstruct the troubled trajectories of migrants and refugees in a world of colonialism and globalisation. They articulate responsibility by focussing on feminist acts of care that are deeply rooted in discourses of repair and regeneration: “unlike the sentimentalized models of [colonial] parental care and protection sanctioned by the neoliberal state”, these acts of care “prioritize those most violently affected by both state power and the interarticulation of bio- and geo-politics: migrants, women and queers of color, black and brown bodies considered disposable and erased or made to disappear” (Kulbaga 2016, 77–78). This parallels what Judith Butler has recently argued for in her work on precarious, ungrievable lives and a global ethics of political and personal obligations. In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? she states that ungrievable lives are “those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are lost and destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed” (2010, xix). An ungrievable life “is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” (38). Thinking about resultant notions of who counts a human and whose lives count as lives, she arrives at the conclusion that “those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (25). But in the telling of stories that revolve around these lives usually made unreadable and ungrievable may lie the potential to win back the ability to grieve and mourn for those made other to us. When we engage with affects such as grief, rage, love and passion as they are worded in stories of suffering, we may find a way to community and empathy: these stories “tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly” (Undoing Gender 2004, 20). In my opinion, the

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connection between voicing trauma and the creation of empathy and systems of care and solidarity lies at the forefront of Warsan Shire’s and Shailja Patel’s poetry. The auto/fictional collaborative testimonies provided in their poems not only create communities within the poetic works but through their collaborative character but also open themselves up to the reader, providing access to traumatic histories and ultimately producing to possibility of an ethical engagement across cultures. The stories told in Migritude and Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body make possible an empathetic engagement with cultural differences, across national boundaries. Empathy, of course, is “the affective act of seeing from another’s perspective and imaginatively experiencing her thoughts, emotions and predicaments” (Pedwell 2016, 5) and consequently related to a capacity to acknowledge others humanely and ethically. Importantly however, as Leslie Jamison shows regarding its etymology, it also “comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query” (2014, 6). As I have argued throughout this chapter, border crossing is the foundational principle of Shire’s and Patel’s poetry. Expressing a plurality of geographical, historical and emotional alignments, the poems replace Western-dominated world orders as they take off from the liminal space of the East African coast line to then spread across the ocean, along refugee itineraries through the Northern Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean or directly across the kala pani to Asia and back again, constantly intermingling departure and arrival. By focussing on the watery routes of the Indian Ocean, the poems thus deeply unsettle the territorial logic of nation-states and belonging. Shire’s and Patel’s transoceanic routes assuredly rewrite the ocean as an open space of possibility, imagining shared and liveable futures. The poems can also aesthetically, formally and generically be regarded as works of border crossing, as they are deeply collaborative. As open and participatory archives of memory, they are not written by one person but consist of a communal conglomeration of different perspectives and stories. They are mobile texts which move through multiple spaces and exist in multiple media formats: on stage, as digital album, as printed text or as Tumblr post. The vivid (after)lives of the texts themselves points towards the establishment of circuits of interconnectedness and interdependency. Through travelling with these diasporic, migritudinal texts, we as readers are being implicated, become part of the communities of care opened up

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by Shire and Patel. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has declared in Feminism Without Borders, “in these very fragmented times it is both very difficult to build these alliances and also never more important to do so” (2003, 250). Through engaging with the poetic imaginations of these two poets, we are invited to cross borders and enter into a relational space of solidarity—a generous and participatory invitation that reaches across the ocean and in doing so attests to the importance of transnational, transoceanic coalitions which transcend divisions of race, class and gender.

Notes 1. For all its invaluable insights, Gilroy’s concept has also rightfully been criticised for disregarding Africa as the point of origin for these migratory movements, for universalising and oversimplifying the experience of the Middle Passage and for not looking beyond the Anglo-centric, African American world (Zeleza 2005). While attuned to the complexities of race and class, it also fails to pay attention to its own gender hierarchies and androcentrism. 2. Shire herself has described the origin points of the poem in an interview with The Guardian. According to the article by Bausells and Shearlaw, she wrote it “after spending time with a group of young refugees who had fled troubled homelands including Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan. The group gave a ‘warm’ welcome to Shire in their makeshift home at the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome, she explains, describing the conditions as cold and cramped. The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof. The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: ‘I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way’” (Bausells and Shearlaw 2015, n. pag.). 3. As there is no definite version of “Home” available online, I am using a voice recording of Shire herself reading the poem, incorporated into a YouTube video, as my reference (Shire 2017). 4. Patel herself says about her indebtedness to Négritude poets: “When I coined the term I was looking for a word that would draw from the legacy and traditions of Négritude that reclaimed and celebrated African cultures, black cultures around the world as powerful and central in their own right. […] I wanted to claim that same power for migrant cultures” (Patel 2013, n. pag.). 5. In an interview, Warsan Shire was asked the following about the gendered specificities of the buraanbur: “Somalis are famed for their poetry. Buraanbur is a huge part of our dhaqan, and is always done by women. Do you have any thoughts on why the poetry of Somali women has largely stayed in the

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arena of buraanbur, or has not received the same level of canonization that many male poets have received?” She just drily answered: “Patriarchy” (2015b, n. pag.). 6. Still, we should avoid idealistic notions of ultimate borderlessness and infinite connectivity online. The internet is not a land of unlimited possibility; it is subject to systems of control, censorship and oppression just as the non-­ virtual world. In addition, the internet, or better the access to it, points towards systems of privilege, wealth, development and economic neo-­ colonial oppression where many countries in the Global South do not yet have access to the Internet: “Digital connectedness does not come as a utopian alternative to histories of dislocation, rejection and expulsion. Digital technologies have allowed people to stay connected in cheaper and faster ways, but it has also created new divides linked not only to questions of access, literacy and competence in using new media technologies but also to the medium-specific affordances that they allow. Furthermore, the use of digital technologies has created new forms of surveillance, bordering and monitoring access […]” (Leurs and Ponzanesi 2014, 7). 7. It is important to note that the attention paid to the corporeal act of violence and pain, the “cutting”, is also displayed in how the poem is organised on the page. The words “Cut, cut, cut”, for example, stand alone and thus graphically draw attention to themselves as they cut across the page and create rupture. 8. A Somali proverb which may be roughly translated as “He who does not hear the word ‘Stop’ will hear the words ‘Lie down’”, that is, those who will not listen to warnings will get themselves into trouble (cf. Kapchits 2002, 26). 9. According to Lorde’s own note, Aido Hwedo is “the Rainbow serpent, a representation of all ancient deities who must be worshipped but whose names and faces have been lost in time” ([1986] 2000, 1015).

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Bady, Aaron. 2014. “Performance in Shailja Patel’s ‘Migritude’”. The New Inquiry. Web. March 28, 2014. https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/ performance-­in-­shailja-­patels-­migritude/. Bausells, Marta and Maeve Shearlaw. 2015. “Poets speak out for refugees: ‘No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark.’” The Guardian. Web. September 16, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/16/ poets-­speak-­out-­for-­refugees-­. Bernal, Victoria. 2005. “Eritrea On-Line: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and the Public Sphere.” Journal of the American Ethnological Society 32 (4): 660–675. Bragard, Véronique. 1998. “Gendered Voyages into Coolitude: The Shaping of the Indo-Caribbean Woman’s Literary Consciousness.” Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing 20 (1): 99–111. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. ———. 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Carter, Marina and Khal Torabully. 2002. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Anthem Press. Chambers, Iain. 2010. “Maritime Criticism and Theoretical Shipwrecks.” PMLA 125 (3): 678–684. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2007. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ———. 2011. “On Kala Pani and Transoceanic Fluids.” New Literatures Review 47–48: 71–90. Dhairyam, Sagri. 1992. “‘Artifacts for Survival’: Remapping the Contours of Poetry with Audre Lorde.” Feminist Studies 18 (2): 229–256. Diminescu, Dana. 2008. “The Connected Migrant: An Epistemological Manifesto.” Social Sciences Information 47 (4): 565–579. Ette, Ottmar. 2017. “Khal Torabully. ‘Coolies’ and Corals, or Living in Transarchipelagic Worlds.” Journal of the African Literature Association 11 (1): 112–119. Ganteau, Jean Michel and Susana Onega, eds. 2014. Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form. London and New  York: Routledge. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Transl. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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Hasan, Dahabo Farah, Amina H. Adan and Amina Mohamoud Warsame. 1995. “Somalia: Poetry as Resistance against Colonialism and Patriarchy.” Subversive Women: Women’s Movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Ed. Saskia Wieringa. London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd. 165–182. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2007. “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South  – Literary and Cultural Perspectives.” Social Dynamics 33 (2): 3–32. ———. 2010. “Universalizing the Indian Ocean.” PMLA 125 (3): 721–729. Hulme, Peter. 2004. “Cast Away: The Uttermost Parts of the Earth.” Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. Ed. Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun. London: Routledge. 187–201. Jama, Zainab Mohamed. 1994. “Silent Voices: The Role of Somali Women’s Poetry in Social and Political Life.” Oral Tradition 9 (1): 185–202. James, C.L.R. 1992. “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student.” The C.L.R. James Reader. Ed. Anna Grimshaw. Cambridge: Blackwell. 390–404. Jamison, Leslie. 2014. The Empathy Exams. London: Granta. Jayasuriya, Shihan de S. and Richard Pankhurst, eds. 2003. The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Trenton: Africa World Press. Johnson, John William. 1993. “Somali Poetry”. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Kapchits, Georgi. 2002. To know something for sure, one would even part with a she-­ camel. Somali Proverbs: A Study in Popularity. Moscow: The Way. Katrak, Ketu H. 2011. Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kearney, Milo. 2004. The Indian Ocean in World History. London: Routledge. Klein, Bernhard and Gesa Mackenthun, eds. 2004. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge. Knowles, Kitty. 2014. “Poetry International Festival 2014: Actors and poets gather to celebrate the glory of love.” The Independent. Web. July 19, 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/books/news/poetry-­ international-­festival-­2014-­actors-­and-­poets-­gather-­to-­celebrate-­the-­glory-­of-­ love-­9616922.html. Kulbaga, Theresa A. 2016. “Sari Suasion: Migrant Economies of Care in Shailja Patel’s Migritude.” Prose Studies 38 (1): 74–92. Leurs, Koen and Sandra Ponzanesi. 2014. “On Digital Crossings in Europe.” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture. 5 (1): 3–22. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lorde, Audre. [1986] 2000. “Call.” The Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1015–1017. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Identity, Culture and Politics 2 (1): 1–39.

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———. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press. McPherson, Kenneth. 1993. The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Patel, Shailja, 2006. “History unfolds / Migritude Performer Shailja Patel uses saris and letters to explore politics, personal identity.” Interview with Reyhan Harmanci. SFGate. Web. November 30, 2006. http://www.sfgate.com/thingstodo/article/History-­unfolds-­Migritude-­Performer-­Shailja-­2483793.php. ———, 2007. “KQED Spark – Shailja Patel.” KQED. Web. March 2007. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdNMxKzOSpw. ———, 2010. Migritude. New York: Kaya Press. ———, 2013. “Kenya: Migritude – a Revelation of Migrant Mysticism.” Interview with Khainga O’Okwemba. AllAfrica. Web. May 30, 2013. http://allafrica. com/stories/201305310461.html. ———, 2015. “Emmanuel Iduma Interviews Shailja Patel.”. Wasafiri. Web. February 17, 2015. http://www.wasafiri.org/article/emmanuel-­iduma-­ interviews-­shailja-­patel/. Pearson, M.N. 2003. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge. Pedwell, Carolyn. 2016. “Decolonising Empathy: Thinking Affect Transnationally.” Samyukta: A Journal of Women’s Studies XVI (1): 27–49. Perera, Suvendrini. 2013. “Oceanic Corpo-Graphies, Refugee Bodies and the Making and Unmaking of Waters.” Feminist Review 103: 58–79. Pratt, Geraldine and Victoria Rosner, eds. 2012. “Introduction.” The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time. New  York: Columbia University Press. 1–27. Pugliese, Joseph. 2007. “Geocorpographies of Torture.” ACRAWSA 3 (1): 1–18. Ramazani, Jahan. 2007. “Black British Poetry and the Translocal.” The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry. Ed. Neil Corcoran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 200–214. Rediker, Marcus. 1987. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Samatar, Said S. 1982. Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayyid Mahammad Abdille Hasan. Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press. Shire, Warsan. 2011a. Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. London: flipped eye publishing. ———. 2011b. “The Birth Name.” warsanshire.tumblr.com. Web. February 25, 2011. https://warsanshire.tumblr.com/post/3498791126/the-­birth-­name.

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———. 2012a. “To Be Vulnerable and Fearless: An Interview with Writer Warsan Shire.” Interview with Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Well & Often. Web. November 2012. http://wellandoftenpress.com/reader/ to-­be-­vulnerable-­and-­fearless-­an-­interview-­with-­writer-­warsan-­shire/#. ———. 2012b. warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely). Digital Album. Bandcamp. Web. February 14, 2012. https://warsanshire. bandcamp.com/. ———. 2013a. “Q&A: Poet, writer and educator Warsan Shire.” Interview with Katie Reid. Africa in Words. Web. June 21, 2013. https://africainwords. com/2013/06/21/qa-­poet-­writer-­and-­educator-­warsan-­shire/. ———. 2013b. “Warsan Shire Has Beef with Iambic Pentameter.” Interview with Anupta Mistry. Hazlitt. Web. September 04, 2013. https://hazlitt.net/feature/warsan-­shire-­has-­beef-­iambic-­pentameter. ———. 2014. Our Men Do Not Belong to Us. New York: Slapering Hol Press. ———. 2015a. Her Blue Body. London: flipped eye publishing. ———. 2015b. “Araweelo Abroad x Warsan Shire.” Interview with Ifrah Ahmed. Araweelo Abroad. Issue 2. Web. http://www.araweeloabroad.com/issue­02/2015/4/2/araweelo-­abroad-­x-­warsan-­shire. ———. 2016. “Poet Warsan Shire: Love Who You Are” Interview with Aliecia Brissett. Urbanology Magazine. Web. N. d. http://urbanologymag.com/ poet-­warsan-­shire-­love-­who-­you-­are/. ———. 2017. “Home.” Voice Recording. YouTube. Web. March 13, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI9D92Xiygo. Taylor, John. 2015. “Poetry Today: Discovering New African Poets.” The Antioch Review 73 (2): 372–380. Torabully, Khal. 1992. Cale d’Etoile – Coolitude. La Réunion: Edition Azalées. Toussaint, Auguste. 1966. History of the Indian Ocean. Trans. June Guicharnaud. London: Routledge. Vadde, Aarthi. 2016. Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016. New York: Columbia University Press. Verges, Francoise, 2003. “Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11 (1): 241–57. Walcott, Derek. [1979] 1986. Collected Poems 1948–1984. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Zakaria, Rafia. 2016. “Warsan Shire: the Somali-British poet quoted by Beyoncé in Lemonade.” The Guardian. Web. April 27, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/27/ warsan-­shire-­young-­poet-­laureate-­beyonce-­lemonade-­london. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. 2005. “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic.” African Affairs 104 (414): 35–68.

CHAPTER 6

Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”

Freedom and love are doing words. They are we-forming, we-sustaining words. Their conjoined impulse is toward making collective living more possible and more pleasurable. —Keguro Macharia, “Political Vernaculars: Freedom and Love” (2016, n. pag.)

I am writing this conclusion at a time when the US Government under Donald Trump interns what it perceives as illegal immigrants at the US/ Mexican border and separates small children from their families, incarcerates them in cages and has no reasonable strategy in place to ever reunite these children with their parents—unless the parents claim their criminal status as illegal under the conservative party’s “zero tolerance” border policy to be then swiftly deported back to where they came from. I am writing this at a time when in Europe the borders are being more and more forcibly closed off against those seeking asylum and safety—just now the German government is grasping at straws to placate the growing xenophobia and ultra-right-wing voices raising up throughout the nation, and Italy and Malta fight over which respective port should receive a cargo ship, paradoxically named Lifeline, with exhausted, traumatised and sick refugees on board which has been denied entry for days. The political landscape worldwide, of which these are just two instances, is deeply © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_6

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influenced by spatial thinking about borders and boundaries, a thinking imbued with paranoia, hate and rigid mindsets of exclusion and inclusion. As Gloria E. Anzaldúa has argued in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, borders are violence. They constitute the place where violence is enacted, where worlds clash against each other: The […] border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country— a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. (1987, 3; emphasis in original)

Anzaldúa’s remarks from the late 1980s offer a fitting starting point to the conclusion of this project, returning us full circle to a twenty-first-century political, cultural and social climate that reveals deep-seated anxieties about boundaries, anxieties that surface through the language of contagion and purity with its dark undercurrents of fear of that which is other. But what happens when, against all odds, the crossing of these borders is imagined? When the logics of the border are subverted and turned upside down? What happens when we extend empathy, and love, towards those constructed as forbidden and dangerous? When we create “lifelines” that hold? In my concluding remarks, then, I would like to revisit the question I first posited in my introduction, when I asked what (im)possible worlds and (im)possible loves might look like. Throughout this study, both space and love, longing and belonging, have emerged as verbs, not nouns— “doing words” as Keguro Macharia so fittingly notes in his discussions of the political vernaculars of love and freedom in a recent The New Inquiry essay (2016, n. pag.; emphasis in original). The spaces constructed and the loves materialised in the texts by contemporary African diasporic women writers discussed here have opened up possible and still unexplored new pathways, they have wilfully engaged in processes of imagining be/ longing-­together, being-with-another. As has become clear throughout my chapters, all five authors creatively intertwine notions of world-making with depictions of love, intimacy, romance and desire. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, the two protagonists’ transnational, transcontinental routes

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across the world interlink with their love stories and un/fulfilled desires. Tracing different forms of black relationality, romance and the structures of the happy ending, in this chapter I have inserted my work into discussions of new developments of African and African diasporic literatures that overcome the binary of home/away and portray new forms of writing about displacement. With Americanah, as I have shown, Adichie has created a story about love and space that generates an open and freer version of Africa that does not subscribe to a “single story” (cf. Adichie 2009). Constituting one of the first instances in scholarship to read Zadie Smith’s three London novels together, my third chapter illuminated different facets of Smith’s African Caribbean urban realities. In my discussion of White Teeth (2000), NW (2012) and Swing Time (2016), I have utilised a comparative approach to connect gendered post-Windrush constructions of London’s cityscapes with strategies of affective and relational cartographies and mappings. Connecting city and love and then reading Smith’s novels in that way has proved fruitful as it has offered new approaches to a diasporic urban imaginary that is deeply imbued with structures of encounter, neighbourhood and community—be it Felix’s death in NW which brings together Leah and Keisha or the unnamed narrator of Swing Time who dances her way back to her home and her childhood friend Tracey in North West London. With my fourth chapter on Helen Oyeyemi, a slightly lesser known but no less exiting Black British author, the discussions moved from the heteronormative relationships depicted in Adichie and the hidden homosocial desires of Smith’s works to the fully spelled-­ out queer romance of Miranda and Ore in Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is for Witching (2009). Set in the countryside and on the coastline of England, the text’s most important spatial element is the haunted house which tries to expel everyone perceived as non-English. In an experimental postcolonial gothic text that rewrites conventional narrative foils of European literature from an African diasporic perspective, Oyeyemi counters, as I have shown, notions of nation and home with a story about queer love. While in the first four chapters I have traced terrestrial spatial formations connected to the transnational and transcontinental, the urban, the domestic interior space of the home and the chalky cliffs of Dover, with my fifth chapter I turned to water and the space of the ocean imagined by the Somali British poet Warsan Shire and the Indian Kenyan writer Shailja Patel. In their poems and performances, water serves as a connective and relational fabric that links people, histories and memories together. What also becomes more fluid is love, as communities of care and familial and

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relational connections are established across the water to repair the trauma of diaspora and displacement. The texts which we have encountered throughout this study, then, portray the inextricable entanglements between space and love offered by a diverse body of black female writers who link across the globe to Nigeria, Jamaica, India, America, Somalia, Great Britain and Kenya. Their imaginaries of longing and belonging, which delineate the oppressive dynamics as well as the resistant revisionings of space while also, importantly, writing about love, intimacy, desire and romance, collectively constitute a heterogeneous body of texts which tell no single story but instead bear witness to the different geographical and affective border crossings that happen when combining these two spheres. While these texts frequently tell a dark tale of violence, hostility and conflict, they simultaneously emphasize the vital creative potential of diasporic literature: from Adichie’s blogs to Shire’s Dictaphones, from Patel’s material and embodied performances on stage to Oyeyemi’s haunted text on paper, from Smith’s multi-tonal London street slang to Adichie’s Pidgin English. Above all, however, I have shown that despite the trauma, violence and negation present in the texts, what always stubbornly re-emerges are reparative modes of love, alliance and kinship. In my introduction, I outlined the project of a black politics of love which I hope to have supplemented with a black poetics of love and be/longing throughout this study. As Jennifer Nash has argued in her article on “Practising Love”, the politics and practices of love cannot remain separate from imaginations, creativity and the visionary—the work that literature can do, needs to do and so often does: Black feminist love-politics […] recogniz[es] that changing the grammar of our contemporary political moment will not remove us from the script that is always already in place. Instead, love-politics practitioners dream of a yet unwritten future; they imagine a world ordered by love, by a radical embrace of difference, by a set of subjects who work on/against themselves to work for each other. This dreaming, of course, does not suspend labor; black feminist love-politics practitioners have always been attached to the idea that the radical future requires certain kinds of very hard work, pushing beyond our investments in selfhood and sameness, and reaching towards collectivities and possibilities. […] It is a critical response to the violence of the ordinary and the persistence of inequality that insist on a politics of the visionary. (2011, 18; emphasis added)

The literary texts that I have analysed throughout this study then help to write and to imagine a shareable, liveable future. By focusing on the

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intimate, the erotic and the romantic, they make “collective living more possible and more pleasurable”, to come back to this coda’s epigraph (Macharia 2016, n. pag.). The texts all provide strategies of “we-forming” and “we-sustaining” (ibid.), as they focus on love, relationality and empathy. Employing a method of reading together and reading counter to each other the metaphors and materialities of space and love, I have shown how the African diasporic authors formulate both as sites of political and ethical consciousness, as artistic archives of resistance—and ultimately offer a possible solution for living in a diasporic world. Throughout my discussions I have utilized a triadic structure to probe each text according to its specific geographical, affective and structural literary set-up. In doing so, I have given room to each text to unfold and grow through detailed analysis and examination. I have connected my findings with each other without ever losing sight of the specific cultural and political contexts behind the novels, poems and performances. This reading strategy has opened up a space for connection internally within the works, for connecting out into the world beyond the textual frames and for a connection between the differently situated authors, painting a complex, often divergent, but ultimately connective picture of contemporary African diasporic cultural literary production. It is as important to note, however, that this study can contribute only a small part to analyses of the vast and ever-expanding universe of twenty-first-century African diasporic literature as many more works are being published daily, either within the conventional and “official” frames of international or local publishing or through alternative methods—be that independent publishing, online media, poetry slams or oral transmission. It goes without saying, then, that this study, with its focus on five authors from albeit different cultural and geographical contexts, nevertheless remains skimming only the surface of the material available. Still, I hope to have painted a multi-­ layered picture and to have pointed towards some possible ways of approaching these texts. My interdisciplinary and comparative methodology which productively interlinks spatial and affective thinking may function as a useful tool to apply to other contemporary texts and media that revolve around questions of home and displacement. I also want to acknowledge at this point my own limitations as a white Western researcher who brings with herself the capacities for blind spots and for lacking the knowledge and perspective of certain material experiences—I am thankful for everything these texts have taught me and how they have enabled me to reposition myself in the world.

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Cobwebs To keep in line not only with the epigraph chosen for this concluding section but also with the bigger and overarching premise of this study, as a last step I would now like to open up my study even further and give at least a little room to alternative connectivities and collectives. For one, all the authors discussed here not only write fictional stories but are all active in fields adjacent to literature and culture. They thus expertly connect their fictional, imaginary worlds with the very act of producing and literally enacting new worlds by creating communities through practices that are both “we-forming” and “we-sustaining”. Chimamanda Adichie, for example, frequently speaks publicly about gender, black feminism and the necessities of intersectionality in international contexts. Besides her famous TED Talks and the recently published Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017), she spoke at a conference on human rights at the London Chatham House Conference in June 2018, one of the most prestigious and respected conferences on international politics attended by government representatives, businesses and NGOs alike. What Adichie does, then, is to draw together story-telling with policy-­making, lending equal importance to both. Similarly, Zadie Smith is not only an author of novels and short stories but has become equally well-regarded through her succinct cultural and political analyses in the essays which can be found in the collections Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018) as well as in the think pieces she publishes with national and international newspapers. Even while living in New York for most of the time, she has stayed deeply connected to her North-West London roots—in 2012, for example, she wrote an article for The New Review of Books titled “The North West London Blues” in which she sharply criticised the Willesden Green council for their plans to shut their local library centre and bookshop in order to build luxury flats there instead, engaging in the necessary community work needed to preserve meeting points and places of exchange in an otherwise anonymous metropolitan thicket. Helen Oyeyemi, admittedly the most elusive of all these authors and rarely seen in public, is nevertheless an expert in creating global communities. She travels through the world and seems to arrive at the unlikeliest of places: to volunteer in Paarl, a village outside Cape Town, at a centre for children born with HIV; to teach writing at the University of Kentucky or to live in Prague from where she dispatches digital travelogues via Lenny Letter (a weekly online feminist newsletter run by Lena

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Dunham and Jenni Konner), in which she draws geographical comparisons between European cities, connecting South London with Grenoble with Budapest (cf. Oyeyemi 2016). Shailja Patel, in contrast, is incredibly visible and very vocal about the non-literary work she does; she is a playwright and poet but also a political activist fighting against racism, fascism and for human rights as she currently divides her life between Nairobi and Johannesburg. She is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition that works for an equitable democracy in Kenya and spreads her activism not only through these institutionalised channels or news outlets like BBC, NPR and Al-Jazeera but also online via her twitter and blog, combining art and activism at global intersections. Similarly, Warsan Shire has engaged with these “we-sustaining” and “we-­ forming” practices both poetically and politically through her writing, through teaching poetry workshops all over the globe and online and through her work with refugees in Europe and the US, all the while using her voice to amplify the importance of such work after her ascent to global fame after the popstar Beyoncé had used her poems in her visual album Lemonade (2016) which intertwined intersectional feminism, trauma and race in an African American context. What I want to say with this seemingly haphazard collection of small (her)stories is that the work of love and care is not only prevalent within these author’s fictional worlds but reaches into the world along other routes which are not more but as important as imagination. From each of these authors and their works, then, it is possible to depart along new pathways to connect to other innovative and truly exciting projects and I want to take this coda as an opportunity to trace some of them. From Adichie and the writing workshops she runs in Nigeria to give young and unexperienced writers a chance, I could jump to Brittle Paper, an ever-growing online platform run by Ainehi Edoro which gives space and traction to innovative African and African diasporic literature. As Edoro posits on the blog, her objective is to help build a literary scene through book reviews and literary discussions in various different formats as well as through news items and other commentaries: “[w]e monitor how African authors interact with each other and with readers. We pay attention to literary spats, literary celebrity lifestyle, news about the publishing industry, the book market, and festivals. We look out for ways in which African literature intersects with local and global cultural currents” (2018, n. pag.). Most importantly, Brittle Paper also publishes original new work, thus providing a communal and collective open-access platform

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for aspiring writers to share their work with the world. From Zadie Smith’s writing and her discussions of African Caribbean Britishness, I could open the door to new engagement with the Windrush generation and its heritage: the literary magazine Wasafiri in collaboration with the British Library, for example, published a special issue on “Windrush Women”. As Wasafiri’s editor Susheila Nasta argues in the preface, “[c]oinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the docking of SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury in June 1948, this issue shows us how the many global intersections of Britain’s mixed cultural past continue to reverberate in today’s migrant present” (2018, 1). This becomes all the more necessary in times after the Brexit referendum in Great Britain and with regard to the Windrush scandal in the last years. Bringing together old and new African diasporic voices across generations in this case turns into vital archival work to bear witness to history that repeats itself and to sustain community in the face of all that. In a similar vein, I could turn from Helen Oyeyemi’s writing on borders and home/land to a new publication that traces possible solutions that lie in the affiliative and relational. The poetry anthology Wretched Strangers, published by JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky with Boiler House Press, has assembled a collection of contemporary poets to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to the UK’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers showcases writing from around the globe, emphasising the diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry: “While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi Karim’s words” (Lehóczky and Welsch 2018, n. pag.). In light of this hopeful notion of “shared foreignness”, I could delineate how Warsan Shire started out as a spoken word artist, reciting her poems at local community centres while growing up in London’s suburbs during her teenage years. As the first Young Poet Laureate of London, she has drawn attention to the city’s poetry organisations and grass-roots movements that focus on bringing black poetry to the streets and into the neighbourhood. In spring 2018 at the Critical Negotiations in Black British Literature and the Arts conference at Goldsmiths University, I saw one of these grass-­ roots collaborations perform an emboldened mixture of poetry, dance, rap and theatre: the poetry collective Voices That Shake! is a project that brings together young people, artists and campaigners such as Selina Nwulu, another Young Poet Laureate of London, to develop creative responses to social injustice. Similarly, the Octavia Poetry Collective, founded by Rachel

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Long with members such as Belinda Zhawi and many others, comes together to create a safe creative community for female writers of colour to change the conversation and to fully write themselves into being. In June 2018, the collective acted as one the Africa Writes festival patrons in order to “showcase and celebrate the words, the art, the song of womxn from Africa and the diaspora” (Africa Writes 2018, n. pag.). Finally, if I wanted to use Shailja Patel’s multi-routed/rooted Migritude as a starting point to venture along other roads, I would perhaps find a text that was originally published in 2007 but which has recently won Man Booker prize: Olga Tokarczuk’s Flight, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, is a novel of linked fragments, from the seventeenth century to the present day, connected by themes of travel, migration, human anatomy and love. It is not an African diasporic text but it features the same narratives of crossing geographical and affective borders, in the process completely and utterly dismantling them. A travel-companion perfectly attuned to this century’s displacements and diasporas, it continues the themes discussed throughout this study and carries them into different cultural contexts. From each of these projects it is possible, then, to connect to yet other collaborations, communities and collectives. Every literary text discussed throughout this study constitutes a mere thread in an intricate and complex cobweb of contemporary African diasporic literature and art that grows and blooms all across the world. Imagining love and worlds together, as these texts do, gives room to manifold be/longings that reach into a future that is just about to be written.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. “The Danger of a Single Story”. TED Talks. Web. July 2009. www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a _single_story. Africa Writes. 2018. “Meet the headliners – Africa Writes 2018.” Africa Writes. Web. http://africawrites.org/blog/meet-­the-­headliners-­africa-­writes-­2018/. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Edoro, Ainehi. 2018. “About.” Brittle Paper. Web. 2018. https://brittlepaper. com/about/. Lehóczky, Ágnes and JT Welsch, eds. 2018. Wretched Strangers. Norwich: Boiler House Press.

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Macharia, Keguro. 2016. “Political Vernaculars: Freedom and Love.” The New Inquiry. Web. March 14, 2016. https://thenewinquiry.com/ political-­vernaculars-­freedom-­and-­love/. Nash, Jennifer C. 2011. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 11 (2): 1–24. Nasta, Susheila. 2018. “Editorial.” Wasafiri 33 (2): 1–2. Oyeyemi, Helen. 2016. “Maybe Something, Maybe Nothing: A Prague Travelogue.” Lenny Letter. Web. March 02, 2016. https://www.lennyletter. com/story/maybe-­something-­maybe-­nothing-­a-­prague-­travelogue.

Index1

A Achebe, Chinua, 24, 28 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1, 11–13, 15, 21–69, 76, 82, 88, 113, 137–139, 161, 189, 199, 200, 203, 225, 239, 250, 262–264, 266, 267 Americanah, 11, 13–15, 23–26, 28–31, 33, 43–47, 49–52, 55–59, 61–63, 66–69, 70n1, 70n3, 82, 88, 89, 96, 113, 140, 161, 189, 199, 203, 239, 262, 263 Half of a Yellow Sun, 22, 24 Purple Hibiscus, 24 Affect affective dimension of the world, 10, 25, 127 affective mapping, 99, 102 affective textuality, 12 affective turn, 6

affect studies, 8 Affiliation, 3, 14, 35, 49, 75, 77, 78, 81, 85, 86, 102, 113–115, 117, 126, 161, 186, 202, 215, 252 African diaspora, 2, 6, 13, 22, 139, 206 African literature, 22, 267 Afropolitanism, 70n1 Ahmed, Sara, 8–10, 31, 35, 40, 103, 126, 156, 177, 187, 192 Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8 “Queer Fragility,” 187 Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 126 Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, 31, 35, 156 “Wiggle Room,” 40 Aje, 154 Ambi, 222, 223, 234, 237 Anatol, Giselle Liza, 178–180 Angel in the house, 152, 175

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Leetsch, Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1

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INDEX

Anzaldúa, Gloria E., 7, 262 Arata, Stephen D., 173 Architexture, 14, 93, 94 Astaire, Fred, 119, 132n15 Auerbach, Nina, 169 Augé, Mark, 37 non-place, 37 Azzam, Julie Hakim, 141, 142 B Ball, Charles, 55 Barthes, Roland, 50, 70n2 Baudelaire, Charles, 109, 130n8 Beauty, 28, 34, 37, 46, 49, 56, 70n4, 87, 88, 154, 175, 237 Bed and Breakfast, 149, 159, 168 Benjamin, Walter, 109 Bennett, Louise, 82 Berlant, Lauren, 10, 127 Beyoncé, 267 Bhabha, Homi, 140, 150, 151, 158–160, 191 “Halfway House,” 191 Location of Culture, The, 150 “The World and the Home,” 150 Black Atlantic, 204–206 Blackface, 119, 120, 132n15 Blogging, 25, 44–57, 66 Blood blood relation, 91 consumption of, 186 Blunkett, David, 41, 82 Body black and female, 46, 87, 88, 118, 120 body politic, 160 dead body, 208 on stage, 233, 234 and trauma, 42, 64, 208, 213 Boehmer, Elleke, 174 Border border crossing, 51, 253

borderland, 262 borderlessness, 26, 255n6 border politics, 160 Botting, Fred, 143, 144, 172, 173, 176 Brah, Avtar, 3 Britannia, 152, 155 British Nationality Act, 81 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 131n10, 164 Brown, John, 56 Bulawayo, NoViolet, 30, 54 We Need New Names, 30 Buraanbur, 227, 229, 230, 254–255n5 Butler, Judith, 252 C Caliban, 181 Capitalism, 42, 211, 240 Care communities of, 203, 250–254, 263 economies of, 238 ethics of care, 251 self-care, 24 Caribbean British Caribbean, 76 Caribbean folklore, 138, 139, 170 Cartography, 4, 12, 14, 78, 79, 83, 96, 99, 101, 102, 115, 118, 131n11, 202, 208, 213, 263 Chalk, 138, 139, 159, 178, 184, 186 Chaplin, Sue, 143, 147, 166 Chatrooms, 108 Cheah, Pheng, 3–5, 11, 16n1, 17n2, 17n3, 23, 69, 79, 223 City literary construction of, 128 mapping of, 94, 95, 128 metropolis, 79, 84, 91, 109 Cloth, 157, 216, 222, 234–237, 240, 242, 243 materiality of, 234, 237

 INDEX 

Cole, Teju, 30 Open City, 30 Collins, Wilkie, 145 Woman in White, The, 145 Commonwealth, 82 Community communal, 4, 10, 13, 14, 25, 36, 78, 92, 93, 102, 190, 200, 203, 230, 232, 253, 267 community making, 38, 192 Connective migrant, 231 Consumption gastronomical consumption, 171, 185 gastronomical desire, 177 Contact zone, 39, 40, 80, 200 Contemporary African diasporic fiction, 51 Coolitude, 217–219 Corporeality, 13, 23, 86, 87, 119, 123, 182, 212, 213, 245 Cosmopolitanism, 3 Countryside, 1, 13, 15, 69, 97, 138, 139, 159, 199, 263 Cultural geography, 3, 75 Cyberspace, 52, 55, 70n5, 203, 230 D Dance, 62, 115–120, 122–124, 126, 132n15, 201, 233, 234, 237, 263, 268 dancing, 115, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126 Danielewski, Mark Z., 167 House of Leaves, 167 De Certeau, Michel, 75 Deleuze, Gilles, 50, 70n5 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 205, 218 Derrida, Jacques, 150 Of Hospitality, 150 Desai, Parijat, 129n2, 233, 236

273

Desire, 1–3, 8, 12–16, 21–69, 75, 77, 88–90, 102–109, 113, 114, 116, 125–129, 130n5, 138–141, 159, 161, 163, 164, 169–193, 203, 214, 230, 231, 239, 243, 245, 246, 250, 262–264 desire lines, 78, 102–103, 116, 125–127 Detention centre, 159, 168, 169 Diaspora, 2, 6, 12–14, 16, 22–24, 31, 76, 79, 83, 139, 150, 182, 201, 202, 206, 207, 209, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223–232, 238, 264, 269 Digital diaspora, 226–232 Diminescu, Dana, 231 Displacement, 2, 3, 11, 16, 33, 35, 36, 41, 42, 52, 57, 63, 64, 78, 87, 89, 92, 101, 104, 109, 113, 115, 121, 122, 145, 151, 161, 199, 201–203, 208, 209, 211, 214, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230, 231, 234, 235, 239, 251, 263–265, 269 Domestic gender and the domestic, 146 Douglass, Frederick, 56 Dover, 1, 42, 138, 139, 142, 149, 155, 157–160, 178, 181, 184, 263 Drag, 107, 108, 235 E East Africa, 1, 200, 202, 207, 216, 224, 229, 235 Eating disorder, 138, 163, 184 Eating the other, 186 Elkin, Lauren, 97, 109, 110, 130n7, 130n8 Ellison, Ralph, 56 Juneteenth, 56

274 

INDEX

Embodiment, 47, 86, 110, 152 Emezi, Akwaeke, 30 Freshwater, 30 Emotion, 3, 48, 49, 53, 65, 77, 185, 187, 216, 234, 253 Emotional geography, 3, 37, 77, 128 Empathy, 56, 200, 242, 247, 249, 251–253, 262, 265 Empire, 16, 39, 76–79, 81, 84, 128, 141, 158, 160, 169, 173, 200, 202, 204, 213, 220, 222, 223, 234, 237, 243, 247 British Empire, 76, 222 Emplacement, 30, 44, 64, 66, 76, 86 Eurocentric, 50, 148, 171, 178, 205 Europe, 1, 13, 15, 25–38, 44, 80, 171, 199, 202, 205–212, 216, 223, 229, 232, 238, 239, 254n2, 261, 267 Evaristo, Bernardine, 80, 129n2 Exile, 2, 43, 213, 229, 251 F Fairy tales, 137, 138, 179 Falklands Wars, 158 Family alternative family, 81, 88, 129 non-biological family, 91 nuclear family, 9, 92, 105, 188, 251 Female genealogy, 92, 151, 201, 203 Female solidarity, 13, 49, 89, 130n5, 242, 250 Ferguson, Ann, 6 Fitzgerald, Ella, 162, 163 Flâneuse, flâneuserie black flâneuse, 110, 131n10 flâneur, 109, 110 Radical Flâneuserie, 110 Folklore, 138, 139, 170, 179, 180 Food, 42, 154, 164, 178, 184–186

metaphors of, 164, 185 Freud, Sigmund, 140, 144, 150 Friendship, 15, 22, 23, 38, 41, 53, 78, 85, 102, 104–129, 191, 203, 239 female friendship, 15, 78, 104–129, 203, 239 G Gadsby, Meredith M., 178–180 Gambia, the, 115, 116, 119, 121–123, 125, 132n16 Genette, Gerard, 164, 165 Geocorpographies, 207–215 Ghost, 7, 62, 138, 140, 142, 145, 147, 148, 150, 156, 161, 162, 164, 166, 168 Gikandi, Simon, 80 Gilroy, Paul, 128, 202, 205, 206, 224, 254n1 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, 202, 205, 206, 224 “A London sumting dis...,” 128 Glissant, Édouard, 204, 205, 219, 224 Poetics of Relation, 204, 219, 224 Global globalisation, 4, 5, 10, 11, 17n2, 31, 42, 43, 92, 200, 218, 223, 240, 252 Global South, 13, 17n2, 255n6 Google Maps, 78, 99–101, 131n11 Gopinath, Gayatri, 190 Gothic feminist rewriting of, 149 gothic fiction, 142–144, 148, 162, 166, 172 gothic heroine, 171 gothic lesbian fiction, 176 gothic narrative, 146, 148, 172

 INDEX 

gothic novel, 143, 190 gothic topography, 145 Guattari, Félix, 50, 70n5 Gujarati proverbs, 220, 221 Gulf of Aden, 209, 210 Guyana, 87, 90 Gyasi, Yaa, 30, 59 Homegoing, 30, 59 H Hair aesthetics of, 45, 47, 49 black hair, 26, 45, 47, 56, 88 hair salon, 26–29, 31–33, 37, 45, 49, 51, 61, 70n4, 88, 93 as political, 23, 45, 47, 88 weave, 46, 88, 130n5 Haiti, 150, 153, 154, 162 Halberstam, Jack, 143, 171, 172, 188, 189, 193 Queer Art of Failure, The, 188 Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, 171, 193 Happy ending, 13, 14, 25, 57, 63, 65–69, 75, 113, 189, 190, 263 Hardt, Michael, 17n5 Haunted house cultural haunting, 168 haunted text, 15, 140, 165, 264 haunting, 15, 138, 140, 143, 145–149, 151, 155, 161, 164, 166, 169, 210 Healing, 64, 185, 209, 219, 238, 242, 243, 251 Herstory, 242 Heteronormativity, 8, 106 Historiography, 201 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 206, 207, 218 Home and belonging, 31, 79, 110, 150

275

Homosocial, 13, 103, 114, 190, 263 hooks, bell, 6–11, 17n5, 28, 49, 62, 92, 139, 171, 186 All About Love: New Visions, 6, 7, 9, 171 Black Looks: Race and Representation, 7 Communion: The Female Search for Love, 9 “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” 186 “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” 9 Salvation: Black People and Love, 9 “Straightening Our Hair,” 28 Horn of Africa, 200, 224 Hunger, 164, 177, 178, 185 I Idi Amin, 216, 217, 235 Illegal immigrant, 39, 40, 169, 261 Ilott, Sarah, 138, 160, 184 Immigration, 41, 43, 82, 159, 160, 253 immigrant novel, 58 Imperial power, 76 India, 80, 86, 93, 200, 207, 216, 218, 221–224, 237, 264 Indian Ocean histories of, 206, 216, 224 Indian ocean trade, 222, 234 Internet, 14, 16, 25, 44, 48, 50, 51, 54, 67, 68, 70n1, 70n5, 202, 226, 230, 238, 255n6 internet community, 230, 238 Intertextuality, 15, 140 Intimacy, 8, 34, 64, 69, 76, 86, 94, 96, 102, 104–129, 131n12, 212, 238, 251, 252, 262, 264 Italy, 29, 209, 233, 261

276 

INDEX

J Jackson, Shirley, 145, 147 Haunting of Hill House, The, 145, 147 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 56 Jamaica, 86, 90, 91, 129, 130n4, 141, 264 Jónasdóttir, Anna, 6 K Kala pani, 219, 221, 223, 232, 238, 253 Kankurang, 122, 123 Kenya, 70n3, 200–202, 207–209, 216, 217, 221, 223, 233, 235, 237, 242, 264, 267 Khair, Tabish, 141, 172 Kilburn, 93, 94, 100, 101 Kinship, 16, 92, 95, 204, 206, 250, 264 Krishnan, Madhu, 23 Kristeva, Julia, 7 Kunta Kinteh, 122 Kureishi, Hanif, 80, 129n2 L Lagos, 1, 14, 23, 28–30, 32, 38, 52, 57, 59–61, 64–69, 70n1, 70n4, 189, 239 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 171, 175, 176 Carmilla, 171, 175–177, 183, 189 Le Gon, Jeni, 119, 120 Lefebvre, Henri, 75, 129, 130n6 Levy, Andrea, 80, 185 Liminality, 170 Literary imagination, 3, 12, 161 transformative power of literature, 5 Localiser, 94 London

Black London, 79–85, 87, 99 postcolonial London, 14, 76, 77, 79, 82, 102, 128, 239 London Tube, 39, 40, 96 Longworth, Deborah, 109 Lorde, Audre, 7, 45, 88, 249, 250, 255n9 “Call,” 250 “Is Your Hair Still Political,” 45 “A Question of Essence,” 45 Love black love, 92 conventions of, 3, 64, 66, 102, 176, 245 discontents of, 8 ethics of, 186 feminist love, 6, 7, 264 at first sight, 61–63 as a force, 7, 10, 127 love ethic, 9, 10, 49 love making, 12, 142 poetics of, 264 politics of, 10, 93, 264 as resistance, 17n5 as a tool, 8, 10 Love story, 1, 11, 14, 15, 22, 24, 25, 57–69, 103, 105, 138–140, 162–164, 170, 171, 175, 177, 178, 182, 183, 186–189, 192, 203, 239, 263 Love studies critical love studies, 6 feminist love studies, 6, 7 Lynn, Vera, 160 “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover,” 160 M Maasai, 235, 236 Madwoman in the attic, 147 Malkani, Gautam, 80

 INDEX 

Mami Wata, 179, 180 Mare nostrum, 212 Marriage, 30, 39, 41, 64, 103–105, 108, 114, 189, 245–247 Massey, Doreen, 3, 75 Materiality, 12, 15, 44, 70n4, 77, 140, 161, 169, 212, 216, 224, 233, 234, 236, 237, 265 Mbembe, Achille, 22, 59, 69, 70n1, 204, 211 Mbue, Imbolo, 30 Behold the Dreamers, 30 McLeod, John, 43, 81, 82, 86, 87, 92, 96, 97, 128 Mediterranean, 1, 201, 202, 207, 209–212, 215, 224, 253 Memory, 65, 84, 91, 105, 107, 111, 116, 124, 132n15, 148, 162, 182, 205, 208, 213, 218, 227–229, 233, 236, 240, 249, 250, 253, 263 Mercer, Kobena, 47 Metafiction, 166 Middle Passage, 115, 121, 122, 205, 206, 221, 254n1 Miéville, China, 173, 193 Migrant crisis, 160 Migration, 11, 14, 23, 25, 32, 41, 58, 59, 63, 66, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 150, 173, 201, 202, 206, 209, 211, 216, 218, 221, 225, 231, 234, 235, 238, 269 Mills and Boon, 62 Modernity, 4, 5, 205, 212 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 254 Mondialisation, 5, 12 Monster, 140, 145, 150, 155, 169–176, 179–181, 186, 193 monstrosity, 153, 173–175, 181, 183, 193 Morrison, Toni, 147, 148, 185, 191

277

Beloved, 147, 148 Motherhood, 95, 107, 108, 146, 246, 249 Mother tongue, 220 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 5, 17n4, 23, 69, 79, 83 The Creation of the World or Globalization, 5 The Inoperative Community, 5 The Sense of the World, 5 Narrative authority, 165 Narrative instability, 166 Nash, Jennifer, 8, 10, 92, 264 Nationalism, 138, 160, 205, 211 Negri, Antonio, 17n5 Négritude, 217, 254n4 New digital media, 50, 55 New Woman, 174, 175 Nichols, Grace, 77, 86–92, 102 Fat Black Woman Poems, The, 77, 87, 90, 102 i is a long memoried woman, 87 Nigeria, 14, 23–32, 34, 36–39, 42, 43, 45, 51–53, 57–59, 64–66, 70n1, 189, 264, 267 Nigerian politics, 67 Normativity, 104, 189 heteronormativity, 8, 106 Nursery rhyme, 162, 163 Nurture, 179, 246, 248 Nuttall, Sarah, 59, 69 O Ocean, 13, 15, 16, 65, 121, 122, 199, 200, 202, 204–207, 209–211, 213–216, 218–221, 223–225, 232, 238, 239, 250, 253, 254, 263

278 

INDEX

Online community, 48, 54, 56, 61 Orality, 227 Other consuming the, 15, 140, 192 othering, 17n3, 82, 99, 151, 182, 229 Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo, 59 Dust, 59 Oyeyemi, Helen Olajumoke, 1, 11–13, 15, 113, 137–193, 199, 200, 203, 225, 239, 247, 250, 263, 264, 266–268 White is for Witching, 15, 113, 138–142, 146–148, 161–177, 180–184, 186–193, 193n1, 199, 203, 239, 247, 263 P Palmer, Paulina, 176 Paratext, 164–166 Patel, Shailja, 1, 11–13, 15, 16, 199–254, 263, 264, 267, 269 Migritude, 15, 201, 203, 216–225, 232–235, 237, 242, 245–248, 250, 253, 269 Patriarchal, 6–8, 49, 92, 146, 147, 176, 180, 183, 230, 240, 241, 246 Perera, Suvendrini, 211, 212, 214, 215, 224 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte, 146–148 Yellow Wallpaper, The, 146, 147 Pica, 138, 164, 177, 178 Poe, Edgar Allan, 144, 148, 149 Polidori, John, 173 Vampyre, The, 173 Poltergeist, 148 Postcolonial, 2–4, 6, 8, 12–15, 16n1, 17n2, 24, 32, 43, 76–79, 82, 87,

93, 99, 102, 103, 112–114, 128, 129n1, 131n10, 138–160, 162, 166, 171, 183, 184, 189, 190, 192, 193, 193n1, 199, 226, 234, 239, 263 postcolonial studies, 226 Postcolonial gothic, 15, 140–160, 166, 171, 183, 190, 192, 263 Postmodern, 79, 166–168 Powell, Enoch, 82 “Rivers of Blood,” 82 Power, 4, 5, 8–10, 17n3, 17n5, 29, 32, 42, 43, 76, 77, 80–82, 88, 92, 102, 110, 112, 119, 120, 128, 141, 143, 156, 172, 173, 175, 180, 182, 188, 190, 191, 210, 216, 220, 240, 248, 250–252, 254n4 Pratt, Geraldine, 3, 245, 251, 252 Public transport, 78, 94, 96, 115 Pugliese, Joseph, 213 Q Queer queer desire, 13, 105, 107, 169–193 queer love, 103, 105, 139, 175, 177, 186–188, 192, 203, 239, 263 queer reading, 104, 114 queer time, 189 R Racism, 9, 10, 23, 37, 47, 55, 82, 92, 138, 157, 200, 267 racial stereotypes, 87 Radcliffe, Ann, 141, 147 Red Sea, 201, 202, 207, 210

 INDEX 

Refuge, 224–226, 229, 231, 238 Refugee, 1, 2, 11, 43, 202, 207–215, 224, 228, 229, 232, 252, 253, 267 refugee crisis, 1, 209, 229 Relationality, 10, 12, 13, 15, 37, 44, 60, 69, 78, 92, 96, 98, 106, 110, 118, 170, 177, 187, 192, 201, 204, 213, 215, 219, 248, 251, 263, 265 relational, 3, 5, 6, 10–14, 33, 44, 50, 51, 54, 57, 66, 75, 78, 85, 86, 90–92, 95, 97, 99, 101, 102, 111, 112, 114–116, 127, 129, 161, 200, 221, 223–225, 234, 239, 247, 249, 254, 263, 264, 268 Reparative repair, 7, 10, 17–18n6, 92, 127, 171, 238, 252, 264 reparation, 203, 240, 243, 251 Representation, 22, 24, 29, 67, 75, 79, 94, 96, 152, 163, 209, 222, 240, 250, 255n9 of Africa, 22, 24, 67 Return, 14, 25, 27, 28, 31, 43, 45, 57–69, 70n1, 87, 103, 107, 113, 116, 124, 126, 127, 141, 147, 152, 162, 165, 172, 176, 177, 179, 180, 187, 190, 238, 239 narratives of, 14, 28, 31, 43, 165, 172, 238 Rhizome, 50, 70n5 Robinson, Bill ‘Bojangles,’ 119, 120 Romance romance genre, 63 romance novel, 62 Rosner, Victoria, 3, 245, 251, 252 Rushdie, Salman, 80, 96

279

Satanic Verses, The, 96 Rymer, James Malcom, 173 Varney the Vampire, 173 S Salt, 156, 166, 180–182, 191, 214 Samatar, Sofia, 22 Sari, 216, 219, 223, 232–237, 242, 243, 245, 246, 248 Scafe, Suzanne, 87, 119 Sedgwick, Eve, 18n6 Selasi, Taiye, 22, 24, 30, 59, 67, 70n1 Ghana Must Go, 30, 59 Self-care, 24 Selvon, Sam, 77, 81–84, 102, 129n2 Lonely Londoners, The, 77, 81–84, 86, 96, 102 Sexuality, 13, 16, 45, 92, 104, 105, 119, 139, 146, 171, 174, 175, 179, 180, 183, 203, 243, 245, 246, 248 heterosexual, 9, 13, 62, 65, 106, 114, 131n14, 176, 189, 193, 203, 247 homosexual, 174, 247 Shakespeare, William, 181, 193n1 As You Like It, 193n1 postcolonial Shakespeare, 193n1 Tempest, The, 181 Shame, 37, 68, 120, 210, 242 Shared humanity, 23 Shire, Warsan, 1, 11–13, 15, 16, 199–254, 263, 264, 267, 268 “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre),” 209–212, 215 “For women who are difficult to love,” 243 “Grandfather’s Hands,” 214, 215

280 

INDEX

Shire, Warsan (Cont.) Her Blue Body, 15, 201, 207, 249, 253 “House,” 244, 245 “Mermaids,” 240, 243 “My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want to be Touched,” 212 Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, 15, 201, 207, 249, 250, 253 “Ugly,” 213, 215 Single story, 23, 263, 264 Sisterhood, 191, 203, 243, 249, 251 Skin, 37, 45, 62, 67, 98, 111, 155, 156, 179–182, 186, 187, 208, 239, 240, 248 Slam poetry, 233, 265 Slavery, 8, 33, 56, 121, 147, 148, 200, 204, 206 slave narrative, 55, 56 Smith, Zadie, 1, 11–15, 24, 75–129, 137–140, 161, 189, 199, 200, 203, 225, 239, 247, 250, 263, 264, 266, 268 NW, 14, 15, 77, 78, 93, 96, 98, 101–129, 129n1, 203, 263 Swing Time, 14, 15, 77, 78, 102, 103, 115–129, 129n1, 203, 263 White Teeth, 14, 77, 79–81, 84–86, 92, 93, 96, 102, 113–116, 127–129, 129n1, 203, 263 Solidarity, 4, 13, 49, 89, 130n5, 206, 215, 230, 243, 250–254 Somalia Somali civil war, 208, 210 Somali poetry, 203, 227, 231 Soucouyant, 139, 164, 170, 171, 178–182, 187, 189, 191

South East Asia, 82, 200, 207, 223 Space, 1, 3, 15, 21, 24, 26, 28, 30, 33, 39, 75, 77, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 137, 139, 142, 146, 147, 151, 176, 179, 190, 199, 262 Antillean space, 204–205 deadly space, 211, 215 digital space, 226, 232 English space, 149, 158, 163 gothic space, 144, 146 maternal space, 154 oceanic space, 206, 219, 225 safe space, 119 space of connectedness, 97 space of disobedience, 189 space of encounters, 96 submarine space, 204 transitory space, 84 urban space, 79, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 110, 112, 121, 127 Stagg, John, 173 “The Vampyre,” 173 Stoker, Bram, 171, 173–175, 183 Dracula, 171, 174–177, 181, 183, 189 Storytelling, 5, 137, 141, 142, 163, 203, 207, 208, 217 Strange familiar, 60, 61, 64 T Tarlo, Emma, 130n5 Technology, 4, 49–51, 55, 172, 227, 231, 255n6 digital technology, 51, 255n6 Testimony, 48, 200, 216, 232, 236, 240, 242, 243, 253 Texture, 44–50, 54–56, 70n2, 93, 94, 112, 199, 234

 INDEX 

Theatre, 201, 216, 220, 232–234, 237, 268 Third World, 50, 262 Torabully, Khal, 207, 218, 219 Transatlantic slave trade, 33, 90 Translocal, 127 Transnational, 12, 14, 15, 24–38, 44, 49, 51, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63, 69, 70n4, 138, 140, 205, 209, 211, 239, 254, 262, 263 Trauma colonial trauma, 168 cultural trauma studies, 239 national trauma, 147, 168 sexual trauma, 62, 240 trauma studies, 239 traumatic event, 225, 239 Tredennick, Bianca, 164–166, 168 Trousseau, 234, 245, 246, 248 Tube, The London Tube, The, 39, 40, 96 tube station, 39, 124 underground, 39, 97 Tubman, Harriet, 56 Tumblr, 226, 230, 253 Typography/typographical, 94, 101, 161, 166, 167, 169 U Uganda, 216, 217, 235 Uncanny, 12, 140, 144, 150, 165, 192, 208 Ungrievable lives, 252 Unhomely, 15, 140, 145, 148–161 Unreliable narration, 166 Urban experience, 77 planning, 96, 125 subjectivity, 86

281

V Vampire lesbian vampire, 175, 176 queer vampire, 11, 162, 176 vampire in love, 169–193 Victorian novel, 172 Vulnerability/vulnerable, 2, 8, 33, 159, 177, 199, 200, 208, 235, 246, 251 W Wainaina, Binyavanga, 21, 22, 24, 30, 67, 69 “How to Write About Africa,” 21 One Day I Will Write About This Place, 30 Walcott, Derek, 201 Walking, 63, 94, 95, 98, 105, 109–112, 115, 116, 118, 121, 124, 125, 131n11, 192, 246 street walking, 39, 109 Walpole, Horace, 141–144, 148, 149 The Castle of Otranto, 142 Weaving, 14, 44, 45, 49–51, 57, 207, 219, 222, 223 Windrush, 80–82, 129n2, 268 MV Empire Windrush, 81 Wisker, Gina, 141, 142, 148, 170, 176 Witness, 12, 200, 201, 203, 212, 221, 242, 243, 249, 264, 268 Wolff, Janet, 110 Wolfreys, Julian, 78, 79, 94, 145 World feminist rewriting of, 3 habitable world, 23 hospitable worlds, 5, 23, 83 making of, 2, 4–6, 83, 84, 262

282 

INDEX

World (Cont.) opening of, 4, 5, 23, 37, 69, 199–254 world forming, 14, 77 worldhood, 4 worlding, 4, 5, 11, 17n3, 23, 79, 83–85, 128, 209 world literature, 4, 5, 16–17n1 worldly force, 3 world making, 10, 12, 30, 38, 79, 90, 102, 127, 139, 142, 171, 178, 191, 204, 238, 239 World literature, 4, 5, 16–17n1

Wound, 84, 200, 201, 238–254, 262 wielding the, 251 Y Yoruba Yoruba mythology, 138 Yoruba witchcraft, 154 Z Zephaniah, Benjamin, 76 “The London Breed,” 76